Hitler's British Slaves (6 page)

Then came salvation. The arrival of Red Cross parcels in late 1940 changed the world for the prisoners. The food parcels, each in a cardboard box about the size of a shoebox, were designed to give supplementary food for the prisoners. Using charitable donations, branches of the Red Cross from around the Empire purchased tinned foodstuffs and basic necessities such as soap, toothpaste and toilet paper. They also contained one luxury – cigarettes. These were then packaged together to provide a box considered enough for one prisoner per week. Although the contents varied, the basics were tinned butter, cheese, fish, apple puddings, jam, margarine, curried mutton, peas, corned beef and condensed milk, sugar, as well as packets of tea, sugar and cocoa. Some parcels were more popular than others, with Canadian parcels being particularly favoured for the quality of the foods contained within, whilst American parcels were prized for their ever-popular brands of cigarettes. Such was the high standard of the Canadian parcels that the Canadian military believed they played a vital role in the high morale maintained by the ‘Canucks’ in the Stalags and at work camps. Canadian reports on returning POWs suggested the quality of their parcels meant they were better able to withstand the mental rigours of captivity than their British, New Zealand or Australian counterparts who
often felt forgotten by their governments when they looked at the contents of their parcels. It was little wonder since some British parcels included bizarre provisions such as pots of Coleman’s mustard for which the POWs could find little use, apart from using them to make cold compresses.

Regardless of nationality, the parcels were sent by sea to neutral Portugal, from where they were transported by railway to Switzerland. Vast stores were accumulated in Red Cross warehouses then sent by train and truck to be distributed around Stalags throughout the Reich. Once within the Stalags the parcels were put into stores under the control of senior NCOs among the prisoners whose task was to ensure their fair and consistent distribution. It was a thankless task. If they thought stocks were running short and cut the distribution to one parcel between two they were accused of cheating the prisoners. If they continued with one per man, per week, then ran out they were often accused of having stolen the rest of the parcels.

Whatever the truth in such accusations one thing was certain, suddenly they had enough food to survive. No longer were they slowly starving to death. Instead they began to recover. Energy returned to their muscles courtesy of the sugar and chocolate within the hallowed boxes. Fat returned to cover their muscles, the old spring returned to their steps and once more they stood proud – soldiers rather than starving drudges. Yet as they slowly recovered their health, and became strong enough to face work without fear of collapsing at the slightest exertion, their minds remained fixed on one important thing. They were at the mercy of the Germans, the Red Cross may have been their saviour but the Germans retained the power to prevent the distribution of parcels. With this in the back of their minds, the very real fear of starvation hung over the prisoners for every day of their lives
in the Stalags – even as late as 1942 some prisoners noted how their daily rations were little more than soup made from mushrooms floating in hot water.

The provision of food was not the only role played by the Red Cross. From their offices in Switzerland they kept in regular contact with both London and Berlin with regard to the welfare of prisoners. Their representatives made regular visits both to the Stalags and to work camps and compiled reports on conditions, in particular channelling complaints back to the War Office in London. Through these means the British were able to protest about conditions and sometimes the combined weight of government indignation and Red Cross pressure ensured the Germans would actually make changes. Yet their work did not stop there. They also provided a framework for clothing parcels to be sent to prisoners from their families and for spare uniforms to be provided by the British army. Sports equipment, books and costumes for camp theatres – all came courtesy of the Red Cross. Yet it was for the food parcels they would always be remembered.

The misery of poor rations was not the only burden prisoners would endure and living conditions within the Stalags were seldom anything more than barely tolerable. Some camps were better than others but even the best offered little comfort. Not all of the Stalags were the traditional hutted POW camps later portrayed in films. Some consisted of solid, if rather dilapidated buildings such as the stables of former cavalry barracks. Others saw prisoners sleeping in tents as the Wehrmacht struggled to build enough accommodation for the vast influx of POWs.

By 1942 many of the POW camps were overcrowded and unhealthy. At Lamsdorf, which had appeared a well-organised and tidy camp when the first of the post-Dunkirk prisoners arrived back in 1940, the camp had to be closed to visitors
after an outbreak of typhus – little wonder in a camp where POWs slept 128 men to a room. By late 1943 there were almost 13,000 POWs living in quarters that the Red Cross believed should house no more than 6,000 men. After the influx of prisoners in the aftermath of the surrender of Italy the newcomers were forced to share straw mattresses on the cold floor of huts and it was believed that over 1,500 of them were without a blanket. Among the worst camps was Stalag XXb at Marienburg which housed a total of 25,000 men, 10,000 of them British. Within the camp all the ground was mud where thousands of men stood for up to 2 hours a day as the Germans carried out innumerable intolerable roll calls. The single room barracks were dark, the gloomy atmosphere heightened by damp laundry hanging in room after room as the inmates desperately searched for space to dry their clothes. The three-tier bunks were crowded closely together with the men in the lowest level sleeping close to the ground.

These conditions were replicated at camps throughout the Reich. One common feature experienced by POWs was discomfort at night. The insanitary conditions in most of the Stalags ensured they were a breeding ground for all manner of insects. POWs may have been deloused before entering the camps but the insects always seemed to reappear. The prisoners were plagued by fleas, lice, cockroaches and bed bugs, all combining to make their lives a misery. Such was the proliferation of bed bugs that prisoners dismantled their beds and passed each piece of the frame through a flame in a desperate attempt to eradicate the bugs. It worked for a short time but just days later they would be back. By night, prisoners in the lower bunks could feel the bugs falling from the bunk above as the man above moved in his sleep. It was awful for them to feel the bugs landing on their faces, a feeling reinforced by the terrible smell of bugs when they were crushed by the men
trying to sleep. They were also supposed to sleep on straw filled palliases but insects living in the straw made them impractical. They tried filling them with sawdust but the dust merely escaped through holes in the fabric. So they resorted to sleeping on bare boards. Long hours were spent sitting on bunks searching the seams of their clothing for insects, squashing them between finger and thumbnails, searching each other’s hair for bugs – only to restart the next day.

It was not only fleas, lice and bed bugs that tormented the prisoners in their beds at night – there were other creatures roaming freely within many of the Stalags. As one inmate at Stalag XXb recalled:

You’d feel something touching your leg and you’d turn to the bloke next to you and say ‘Do you mind? Keep your fucking leg out of the way.’ He’d say ‘It ain’t me’. You’d look down and there’d be a rat on you. They were all over the camp. There was rubbish all over the place. Not that much food got thrown away, but what did the rats had.
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Covers had to be kept over the latrines to try to keep rats from climbing out from the open pits and the prisoners were constantly aware of the vermin that scuttled across the piles of excrement beneath them as they sat down to empty their bowels. There was little they could do to prevent the infestations of rats.

Though heated by small stoves there was seldom enough fuel to keep the stoves burning at night; at Stalag VIIIb the daily ration in the middle years of the war was just 25kgs of coal per hut, per day. This was supposed to heat a room for over one hundred men. Unsurprisingly the prisoners awoke cold and damp day after day, month after month. Even the heat of summer hardly penetrated the damp atmosphere, the
foetid air heavy with the sickly aroma rising from the buckets they were forced to use as toilets during the night. At Marienburg no recreation rooms were available and each barrack room of 75 bunks provided tables and chairs for less than a third of that number. At night those without seats were forced into their bunks purely by lack of space. Even the men with a seat at a table could not relax with a meal. For all the food they received in Red Cross parcels there were no facilities for cooking. Not that it mattered too much, in June 1942 13,000 Canadian parcels destined for the camp were reported to have gone missing. Indeed, one detachment from the camp reported receiving no parcels between November 1941 and March 1942. Yet these were the lucky ones. Almost half the prisoners at Stalag XXb lived a semi subterranean existence in turf roofed earthen huts with just one small window for light. From a distance the shelters appeared as folds in the land rather than homes for soldiers.

For the inhabitants of these huts even when they returned above ground there was plenty more misery for them to endure. The toilets in the camp were open pits with bare boards above them where the men squatted to empty their bowels. By early 1942 one of two toilet huts had been abandoned since the conditions had deteriorated so much as to make it unusable. The Red Cross reported:

The latrines are also most inadequate. A hutment of old boards has been constructed over a cement trench, through which a current of water passes at regular intervals. The seats are merely a very narrow plank which runs the length of the trench and a vertical partition separates the men using the latrines. They are extremely dirty and can be smelt from a long distance away.
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There were no showers for the prisoners, instead the whole camp shared one washroom of stone troughs, each with a single cold tap. By June of 1942 most inmates reported they had not had a hot shower in many months and only those on work details where showers were available had been able to wash properly. An even worse fate befell prisoners at Stalag XIA who found their camp was built on such flat ground there was nowhere for the latrines to drain away to. The only solution was to dig long ditches to act as overspill areas, which soon left a disgusting smell hanging over the camp. It was little wonder the Red Cross requested the number of inhabitants in the camp should be cut by 50 per cent.

In such barely tolerable conditions POWs across Germany settled down to a routine of mind numbing boredom. In a pattern followed at camps throughout the Reich one prisoner noted his daily routine at Stalag XXIa. They rose at 6.30 a.m. for a breakfast of coffee. After the 8 a.m.
Appell
, or roll call, they washed in the very basic ablutions facilities, then spent the morning sitting around chatting about food, or walking around the perimeter fence. At 12.30 they were issued with soup and spent the rest of the afternoon anxiously awaiting the 5 p.m. daily issue of bread, which they sliced with the edge of their POW identity disc since no knives were allowed in the camp. After that they had the evening roll call and retired to their beds. And so it went on, day after day after day.

At first there was little scope for recreation. In the period before the arrival of Red Cross parcels few had sufficient spirit to do anything except lie on their bunks scratching at insect bites, reading any available books or dreaming of meals to be consumed in the future. Alternatively they used what little reserves of energy they had to walk ceaselessly around inside
the perimeter wire chatting idly to their mates, their ragged uniforms hanging limply from their malnourished frames.

Of course, not all among the new prisoners were able to take their place immediately within the Stalag system. The nature of defeat on the battlefield resulted in many among the POWs needing extensive hospital treatment. It was a strange experience for them, first the enemy had tried to kill them and now they were desperately trying to keep them alive and return them to health. Not only that but many lay in hospital wards beside the very men whom they had previously faced on the battlefields. Side by side they shared the attentions of doctors and nurses who, in general, remained dedicated to the treatment of the wounded regardless of nationality. Bryan Willoughby, captured in the streets of Arnhem, was among those to benefit from the attentions of his captors:

We were moved to the St Elizabeth’s hospital. It was so crowded. One of the nurses came along and said ‘Would you like a drink?’ I said ‘Yes, please.’ She offered me punch or something else. I said ‘punch will be fine’ she came along with a mug and it was bloody lethal. It was great. What was worrying me was my back injury. I was in great pain and couldn’t breathe properly. I don’t know if there was any real damage, I got one of the chaps to take a few bits of metal out. That evening a German ambulance came along and took us out. I got in the front with the driver. We hadn’t got very far and the driver got his Luger out. He didn’t point it at me but was showing it off. Then I realised he was trying to sell it to me! He put it away and got out his waterbottle. The ambulance was hurtling from side to side and the bottle was half full of the most lethal booze I’d ever tasted. I thought the only sensible thing to do was not let him have any more so I finished it off.
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Upon arrival at Appledorn hospital he was taken by stretcher to the ward where he stayed for a week:

We’d had injections at the café, at St Elizabeth’s hospital, and again at Appledorn. I think I had about ten times more than I should have done. And I couldn’t care less. They looked after us. The food was great, the beds were more comfortable than any I’d been in for years. Then we moved to Enschede, where I had my operations. There were four or five Brits among the Germans. We were all chatting, we were all fed up. The German and British soldiers were just the same when it comes to a situation like that – telling crude jokes here and there. After the operation I woke up in the corridor in a bed with a frame over it. In the ward we were amongst the Germans, all mixed. The German soldiers would come in and sit on the bed and have a chat. One of the airborne fellows was a regimental type, he said ‘No fraternising’ but we didn’t take any notice.
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