Hitler's British Slaves (7 page)

After recovering from their treatment the wounded men were released from hospital and once more thrown back into the system where few would experience the same standards of care that they had known in hospital.

Even after they had regained their health, and leisure activities had begun, few could escape the sense of claustrophobia that prevailed. Most did their best to ignore their problems, and did their utmost to rise above reality. Bryan Willoughby was among those who tried his utmost to remain optimistic during his imprisonment, despite the knowledge that his wounds posed a very serious threat to his health and future wellbeing: ‘I can honestly say I was too interested in the situation to despair about it. It was something new, a new part of war for me. I wouldn’t say I was relishing it, but I was too
busy taking it all in and seeing what was going on around me to be worried about anything else. I just took it as a new experience. That was my feeling all the time.’
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Despite such optimism most within the Stalags felt they were cut off from the real world. Some among them retreated into a mental shell, spending their days sullen and silent, ignoring their fellow prisoners, their hearts gripped by despair and their thoughts unspoken. Even the most optimistic men realised that somewhere, far away, a war was being fought – but they were not in it. Somewhere children were growing up or wives growing lonely – but they did not see it. Somewhere the world was still turning – but they could not feel it. Instead they were cocooned into a world of roll calls, hanging around, meals, more hanging around, more roll calls and sleep. Tied into this routine they craved contact with outsiders and the chance to see what lay beyond the barbed wire – in short, an opportunity to experience life again in whatever form it might take.

With boredom clawing at their minds it was little wonder many prisoners were desperate to find any way out of POW camps. But it would not be the ingenuity and intrigue of escape committees that offered them the chance. Instead the break in the monotony came courtesy of Article 27 of the Geneva Convention which stated that all able-bodied prisoners below the rank of corporal were obliged to work. The Convention made clear such work should offer no military benefit to the host nation, but for many of the captive labour force this made little difference. It soon became clear they had little choice, as prisoners they would merely have to do as they were told.

The system for employing POWs outside the camps was relatively simple. They were in effect the property of the camp commandant and could be loaned out to any firm bearing the
necessary credentials. There were three types of work detail they might expect to be sent on. The first were the Landwirtschaft Arbeitskommandos or farm details. Next came the Gewerbe Arbeitskommandos where the men toiled in industrial concerns. The third possibility were the
Bau und Arbeitsbataillons
– or Building and Work battalions These were pioneer units which were not administered by individual Stalags but which were available to be transferred around the Reich wherever men were needed for heavy building work, commonly referred to as ‘pick and shovel’ duties. The German authorities kept lists of the types of work POWs could be asked to undertake, including general agricultural work, forestry, agricultural development, mining, railway construction, shunting and loading, construction of hydrogenation plants, cellulose or artificial wool factories, building of roads or housing, construction of dams, quarrying, brick making and peat production. Most importantly the official list concluded with the sweeping statement ‘any other work of national importance’.
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In time the assessment of ‘national importance’ would have a dangerously wide brief.

Any employer wishing to use prisoners could get a form from the local labour office granting them a permit to utilise captured labour. The labour office of the local POW camp could then be approached and a contract drawn up between the employer and the commandant. This contract meant the prisoners would never in the future be able to make individual claims against the company concerned. All detachments were supposed to be of around 20 men but in practice many were much larger. Groups of less than ten men were only permitted if they could be lodged with other prisoners in their locality and if sufficient guards were available. Within each detachment a ‘Man of Confidence’ was elected. Usually an NCO who had volunteered for a work detachment, this was
the individual responsible for the well-being of the prisoners and whose task it was to liaise between the POWs and their captors.

The lodging of the POWs was the responsibility of the employer, although the government compensated them for the expense of preparing accommodation. All lodgings needed windows to be covered with grates, a fence around the camp area, safety locks on the doors, lighting, heating, drinking water, washing facilities and toilets. Within their lodgings the prisoners were entitled to one straw mattress, a pillow, two woollen blankets, one towel, a wooden stool, a bowl, a spoon and a drinking cup. Additionally, lodgings should also provide tables and racks for clothes.

However, not all working parties were lodged in outside facilities. At Stalags near to major towns the men were transported to work on a daily basis, returning to the main camps at the end of their shifts. For those remaining in the main camps the return of the working men was a great bonus since they seldom arrived without some form of contraband concealed about them.

For meals the prisoners were to be given the same rations as civilian workers with supplementary food for those engaged in heavy work. They would also have to work the same hours as the local labour force with the proviso that they receive at least one full day without work each week. In return for their labour they would receive 60 per cent of the German wage for the job, minus a reduction for board and lodging. Some were shocked to hear they would have deductions made for income tax. At one work camp prisoners were even forced to pay for the transit of their own mail and parcels from the Stalag to their place of work.

However the payment of wages was not the great benefit it might have been. Whilst the Reichsmark was becoming
Europe’s dominant currency, spent and traded throughout the ever expanding Third Reich, the prisoners were given no access to its purchasing power. Instead payments were made in ‘
Lagergeld
’ – camp money – that had no value in the outside world. The prisoners laughed about it, this was monopoly money, OK for use in a game but of no real value. All it could be used for was making purchases in the canteens and shops set up for prisoners, enterprises that offered little to the men except beer, lemonade or the occasional supply of razor blades. It was little wonder many of the prisoners shaved little more than once a week since a single pack of razors could cost as much as a month’s wages. A few canteens had fresh vegetables for sale, but only if they were lucky. Where canteens were not available they were forced to rely on local shops, where one prisoner would be escorted by guards or would give his parole in order to go shopping. Ignoring the rules stating the prisoners should be allowed to spend their wages, many shopkeepers failed to accept the ‘
lagergeld
’ offered by the prisoners, regardless of assurances they would be reimbursed by the Stalag commandants.

An indication of how poorly the prisoners were paid is shown by the price of the beer on sale to them in camp canteens. For 30 pfennigs they could buy half a litre of beer. Yet their daily wage was just 70 pfennigs, or the price of two pints of beer. Translated into modern terms they were working as much as 12 hours a day for a wage of just £5. Frustratingly for men whose clothes grew filthy during the course of their labours, and who often had few spare clothes to use outside work hours, the cost of having their uniforms laundered was prohibitive since almost two days’ wages were needed to pay for a weekly wash. Nor could the POWs always benefit from the wages they earned. Men at Bau und Arbeitsbattaillon No 21 found they could earn supplementary wages of up to 2
reichsmarks a day. However they received no more than 70 pfennigs each day since any surplus was retained to pay for camp improvements.

Yet in many ways these were the lucky ones since not all prisoners ever received the full allotment of cash. Rules were introduced to decree that any man not working a full day would not receive his full wage. The short working day could be a result of many factors – poor weather, accidents in workplaces, or simply that a factory had little work to do. This may have been a respite from their labours but it hit their pockets. At a wage of just 30 or 50 pfennigs a day their somewhat limited purchasing power was further reduced.

Even on the 70 pfennigs a day wage rate they were not rich, especially since the Germans made them pay for many facilities that the prisoners might have expected would be provided for free. At one work camp men wishing to play football were forced to hire a pitch from their employers. The rate was so high it cost more than the combined daily wages of the entire 661-man detachment to afford a single game of football. Yet these were not the most unfortunate of prisoners. Thousands toiled for five long years for their captors yet never received a penny in wages.

For all the failings of the system there were some commandants who adhered strictly to the rules, even if this led to some bizarre situations. Bill Sykes who had parachuted into Normandy on the early hours of D-Day, found the Geneva Convention was sometimes enforced a little too stringently:

During my stay as a guest of the German government I never experienced any degree of psychological or physical abuse tantamount to extreme brutality, except perhaps for the initial day of our capture when we were ordered to strip naked and placed in front of what appeared to be a firing squad. The Germans that I came into contact with in my particular case always strictly adhered to the Geneva Convention – so much so that during one period of our incarceration, the Germans found that there was a stipulation somewhere in the convention that all prisoners must be deloused on, or at, three monthly intervals – seeing that we hadn’t been deloused for some considerable period of time and the huts that we occupied were louse infested, we were then deloused three consecutive days in a row in order to conform to the Geneva Convention rules. It was a time consuming procedure where you entered a four or five chamber structure. The first chamber was the disrobing chamber where all clothing, including boots, belts, and other apparel were placed in wire baskets and fed on a conveyor belt through a very hot duct. The second chamber was the body delousing chamber where buckets of disinfectant and large brushes, handled by German employees, distributed a very caustic substance onto all locations containing hair – head, underarms, and genitals. I can assure you that the brushing of the substance on the genital area was not a pleasant experience and the genitalia didn’t like it either and tried their best to escape by receding into the body cavity. The third chamber was the washhouse where very strong jets of water, located close to the ceiling structure, sprayed extremely hot, near scalding, water on the unfortunate participants below in this cleansing exercise. The fourth chamber was the drying chamber where a large four/six foot cold air fan, placed in one corner of the chamber, did its best to blow all and sundry into a state of blue coloured inanimate objects. The last chamber was the hurry up and dress chamber, and seeing that all British uniform trousers had brass buttons on the inside for the attachment of ‘braces soldier’ in order to keep one’s trousers up, you can imagine the discomfort that extremely hot brass buttons can do to the adjacent body skin.
¹³

As the new prisoners became aware they would have to work they spent hours sitting around talking about what their employment might be. Although few desired to work for the enemy most were realistic and simply hoped the work would not be too tough. Farmers hoped for agricultural work and civilian miners, though seldom welcoming a return to the coalface, at least knew what to expect. Former cavalrymen from the regiments still mounted during the inter-war years yearned for the opportunity to once more work with horses. It was a difficult time for the prisoners, as they discussed the relative merits of Stalags and work camps: ‘The conversation did touch on the subject of either staying in Stalag and be bored to death, or go out to a working camp and be worked to death … We didn’t really have much choice, work it was to be.’
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Not all among the prisoners were without a choice. Some of the men wounded before capture were given papers showing them as exempt from labour, however some among them chose to join work parties rather than languish behind the fences of the Stalags. Bryan Willoughby was initially sent from hospital to the
lazaret
at Stalag VIIa in Moosburg. Whilst recuperating from the wounds he had sustained at Arnhem he realised the Stalag was somewhere he wanted to get away from:

We arrived at VIIa, Moosburg, and life changed. It was tough. I was put in the lazaret – the hospital – and I stayed there until the end of February. The food was very, very scarce. The lads in the main compound were able to get out on working parties and there was a system of rackets where they exchanged Red Cross cigarettes for bread. I thought if I could get out of hospital I can get into that very quickly. You couldn’t trade in the hospital because everything was counted. But eventually the German doctor came round and I persuaded him to let me out. He said ‘
Nix Arbeit
’, no work. He gave me a piece of paper saying I was exempt. So I got into the main compound and the first thing I did was to sign up for a working party.
¹⁵

Although NCOs above the rank of lance corporal were officially exempt from work the issue forced a dilemma for many among them. They knew how life within Stalags would offer less personal freedom than on work details. It was easy to recognise how labour would keep both their minds and bodies active and that men on work details had a greater access to comforts such as food and women. Another question vexed the NCOs. Was it more responsible to refuse to work and thus offer no assistance to the enemy or should they volunteer to go on work details to offer leadership and guidance to their men? The answer to this moral dilemma was a personal decision that no outsider could fully understand or criticise. It was little wonder that many elected to join working parties only to leave once they discovered the labour could be intensely hard or deadly dull.