The Cooler King

by Patrick Bishop

  The change at the top made little difference to the appearance of the camp, as the guards remained largely the same. Everyone knew, though, that escaping had become a far more dangerous activity. Enthusiasm for further attempts fell away. In East Compound, the number of those willing to get involved shrivelled to a small core of diehards. Inevitably Bill was one of them. So too were Aidan Crawley and Joe Kayll, a Battle of Britain veteran who had been one of the organizers of the Wooden Horse scheme. Together with a few others, they made up the escape committee. As it was, events in the outside world intervened, further reducing the chances of any major undertaking.

  On 6 June the prisoners monitoring the secret radio ran around East Compound to announce the news that everyone had been dreaming of. The Allies were ashore in Normandy. The end of the war was finally in sight. That night they got drunk on hooch distilled from raisins and potato peelings. Henceforth the preoccupations of the kriegies shifted dramatically and irrevocably. Now even hard line escapologists were wondering if there was any point in carrying on.

  The new mood was demonstrated when two men who had spent weeks digging a blitz tunnel from East Compound announced to the escape committee that they had decided not to use it. It seemed to Bill a great waste of effort and opportunity. Aidan Crawley, who had been selected as a future Labour parliamentary candidate and was anxious to get home to start his political career, felt the same way. Bill and Crawley were joined by a ‘spectacularly mad but very brave New Zealander’.19

  When word got around the compound that an escape bid was imminent, wrote Bill, ‘some of the more timid prisoners became very indignant. They did not much mind us risking our own lives, but they were convinced that there would be reprisals on those still in the camp.’ He asked them to consider that ‘if the brave ordinary French people who had risked their lives to help me and so many others had thought that way, they would all have collaborated meekly in return for a quiet life.’ What they were doing was, he admitted, ‘less a tactic and more a simple statement of defiance – an unwillingness to crawl in the face of oppression’. The other prisoners were unconvinced. They ‘took their worries to the commanding officer and he gently but firmly ordered us not to go’.

  Bill felt a certain relief. He could now fall in with the new mood of the camp. The scent of real life was in the air again. Men began to talk – albeit not too confidently, in order to shield themselves from devastating disappointment – of when liberation might come. This year, perhaps. Next year, surely. Lectures and study courses were crammed with kriegies preparing themselves for civilian life, and the debates and mock parliaments ceased to be theoretical and became noisy forums in which the future of post-war Britain was thrashed out by men who wanted fervently to be there to help shape it. And in between times they waited: for the Russians to arrive from the east or the British and Americans from the west. Or for the Gestapo to decide to shoot them all if their efforts to use them as hostages in bargaining with the victors came to nothing.

  FOURTEEN

  The New Year of 1945 opened on a dispiriting note. The defeat of Germany was taking far longer than the prisoners had hoped. In the West the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes showed there was still plenty of fight left in Hitler’s forces. In the East, the Red Army appeared to be pausing until the Spring thaw before resuming its attack. The news – or lack of it – made what was the coldest winter of the war even harder to endure. The camp was blanketed in snow and at nights the temperature plunged to twenty degrees below zero. To compound the prisoners’ misery Red Cross deliveries were drying up and each man now received only half the contents of a parcel each week.

  Then, suddenly, came a surge of good tidings. Red Cross parcels began to arrive in torrents. More importantly, the Red Army was on the march again and soon the rumble of artillery could be heard in the distance. After resuming their attacks, Soviet forces advanced a hundred miles in five days. On Sunday, 21 January Russian tanks crossed the River Oder at Steinau, just forty-five miles from Sagan. The details from each BBC news bulletin rippled through compounds and the prisoners rushed to maps in the libraries to see how far they were from liberation.

  The great question was how would the Germans react? Would they stand and fight? Would they flee, abandoning their prisoners? Or would they take the kriegies with them? Though the prisoners did not know it, their captors had longstanding orders concerning their fate in the event of enemy encroachment. On 19 July the previous year Adolf Hitler had ordered ‘preparations for moving prisoners to the rear’ if their camps looked like being overrun by the Russians. This directive meant that the last act of the war would hold much more suffering and peril for the prisoners than anything they had endured so far, as the Germans herded them on a series of desperate treks through a chaotic landscape.1

  For the moment the kriegies had only rumour to go on and the compound commanders gave orders to prepare for all contingencies. There was no point in hoarding the Red Cross parcels and everyone got their allocation. They would need all their strength for whatever lay ahead. Even the most lethargic were caught up in the excitement of events and joined those striving to get fit in preparation for the next – undoubtedly challenging – phase of the story. ‘The circuits of the compounds were crowded…with prisoners walking in the snow to harden their feet,’ Aidan Crawley remembered. ‘The thought that men who had been spectators for so long might once again begin to take part in events was wonderfully stimulating.’2 In anticipation of a move, some of the more prudent began nailing together Red Cross packing cases and bed boards, to make sledges to transport their supplies over frozen ground, and to fashion knapsacks out of kitbags.

  Work parties were formed which would go into action if the camp turned into a battle zone. There were trench-digging teams, first-aiders and firefighters. ‘Commando’ units were charged with taking over local power stations and waterworks when the time came. In East Compound, Bill Ash and members of the escape committee decided that if the SS contingent in the camp decided to wipe them all out, they would storm the Kommandantur, grab weapons and at least take a few of the enemy with them.

  The German front was collapsing. Outside the camp gates a flood of civilian refugees coursed westwards, the lucky ones on carts, the rest walking, laden down with whatever they could carry. The prisoners heard of a train of open trucks which had arrived from Breslau filled with children who had been separated from their parents. After a night in the open some of them had frozen to death.

  The camp guards waited their turn to be swallowed up in the chaos of the endgame. They were on two hours’ notice to move, but whether to march east to confront the Russians or retreat westwards they did not know. A handful of the camp’s officers and NCOs volunteered to join an airborne unit and disappeared. The rest, all hope of victory extinguished, wanted only for the war to be over with quickly. Their power was ebbing away and it was impossible not to relish the sight. ‘Pleasantest of all’, wrote Aidan Crawley, ‘was the feeling that control was slipping from German hands… it was still necessary to obey them, but moral authority lay within and not without the wire. It was the Germans who were harassed and worried. It was the Germans who were uncertain of their future.’3

  When the Russians were only thirty miles away, some of the camp’s senior staff went to the commandant and asked if they should move their families. They were told to stay put and get on with their jobs. As no orders had come from the German high command concerning the prisoners, the commandant was as much in the dark as anyone.

  It was not until Saturday, 27 January that a signal arrived from Berlin. At 2 p.m., the senior British officer in East Compound was told confidentially by the German major in charge that the prisoners would be staying put. Six hours later, the order from Berlin was revised. The camp was being evacuated, after all, and there was no time to lose. The cultural life in the camp was flourishing now, and even the climactic events of the previous few days had not disrupted it. The North Compound theatre was packed with kr
iegies watching a dress rehearsal of The Wind and the Rain, a London stage hit from the 1930s, when the adjutant announced that everyone was to pack up and be ready to move in an hour’s time. The same announcement was echoing all around the camp. Robert Kee returned to his barrack to find ‘the chaos was terrifying. Food, clothes, books and cigarettes were scattered thickly over the floor, the table and the beds.’ Those who had not had the foresight to make a knapsack or sledge were desperately trying to knock one together with whatever came to hand. ‘Carefully built shelves, bookcases and lockers, the pride of their owners for years and guarded with strict jealousy, had been torn off the walls… Hammond was almost in tears trying to make himself a rucksack at the last moment. Michael was building a sledge out of a bookcase and part of the table, hammering nails in with a flat piece of iron…’4

  Stalag Luft III now housed more than 10,000 prisoners. Moving them westwards was going to be an enormous job. In order to create a manageable column, departure times were staggered, with the Americans in South Compound slated to leave first, at nine that night. In the haste and confusion it was ten o’clock before the first contingent marched through the gates.

  The East Compound prisoners would be the last to leave. The calculations that had obsessed them all for years suddenly became meaningless. Food – the presence and absence of it – had dominated their lives, shaping their moods and their attitudes to those around them. Friendships had shattered over a spoonful of jam or a slice of spam. Now there was an absurd abundance of it. ‘Every stove in the camp was going full blast,’ Bill remembered. ‘We could only take what we could carry and every scrap of food, carefully hoarded for weeks or even years, was now being wolfed down.’5

  The camp kitchens had just been issued with a rare ration of fresh meat. All this was distributed and the smell of roast joints, a delicacy which prisoners experienced once every two months, pervaded every barrack,’ Crawley remembered.6 The kriegies gorged until their shrunken stomachs could take no more. Tables in the huts were stacked with a cornucopia of canned food and cigarette boxes, free for anyone who wished to take them. The tragedy was that they would have to leave most of it behind.

  The prisoners would also have to abandon things that had meant much to them. In the years of captivity they had built up small hoards of possessions that had enormous personal significance. There were sketches, paintings and carvings, manuscripts of novels, plays and poems. There were favourite books and photographs of loved ones. They were the heart of the home that every kriegie had made for himself in his corner of the barracks and now he had to make painful choices about what to take and what to leave.

  Survival might depend on what you had loaded onto your sledge or crammed into your knapsack or pockets – forty pounds was the recommended maximum weight. If the prisoners had left quickly, the choice would have been swift and there would be no opportunity for regrets. As it was, the initial panic subsided and the departure times had kept slipping, giving the men time to reflect. The loads on the sledges climbed higher and higher.

  Rumour had it that a Wehrmacht armoured unit was due to take over and the prisoners were determined that they would destroy what they could not carry. ‘The incinerators were soon alight and piles of old clothes, furniture and anything else that might add to the comfort of the incoming Germans were burned steadily through the night,’ wrote Crawley.7 A barrack in North Compound was set on fire just as the last men departed. The sense of waste was enormous. For bookish prisoners like Bill it was painful to think of the million or so volumes left behind, gifts from his friends in Geneva and the YMCA. The smokers had to say goodbye to 2.5 million cigarettes stored in East and North compounds. The knowledge that they were abandoning some 23,000 Red Cross parcels afflicted everyone. Each prisoner was given one to bring with him, and encouraged to rifle through others to take what he fancied. They discarded the tins of milk, cheese, butter and meat, in search of the chocolate, coffee and cigarettes which had the highest barter value.

  The parcel store was next to the area where the sixty or so Russian prisoners were penned. Bill had befriended one of them, an airman called Artum, whose dignity in the face of the Germans’ cruelty had touched him. When, at about six in the morning they finally got the order to move out, he saw Artum waiting with the other Russians at the wire to wish them goodbye and good luck. Bill ‘grabbed a tin of Klim milk and lobbed it into their compound’. The rest of the kriegies joined him and ‘soon it was raining food on the delighted Russians. Cheese, butter and bully beef poured from the sky as the over-laden guards tried to shove us along.’8 Even before the prisoners were clear of the camp the German women who worked in the censorship office checking parcels and letters, as well as local civilians, had descended to scavenge among the prisoners’ leavings.

  It was 6 a.m. and still dark when the East Compound prisoners, muffled in layer upon layer of clothes and masked in balaclava helmets, set off at the back of the 10,000-strong column. The skies were clear and the temperature had sunk to twelve below zero. The fields around were thick with snow and it seemed unlikely that in their desperate situation the German authorities would have been able, even if they wished it, to make any proper provision for them along the route to wherever it was they were going. At the beginning, according to Crawley, ‘nobody cared very much.’ They were ‘outside the wire and the mere prospect of moving each day to some unknown destination gave a new purpose to life.’9

  The prisoners were in five columns with the South Compound prisoners at the head. In order to make room for those who followed, the Americans were forced to march nearly thirty miles before they bedded down for the night. By that time, the last man in the last British column was twenty miles behind. They headed south from Sagan then west. They had set off in good order, which soon broke down as, despite the efforts of the guards, the marchers settled into groups that moved at a pace dictated by the speed of their sledges or the weight of their packs. The sledges came in all shapes and sizes. The largest, when fully laden, needed three or more men to haul them. But the packed snow beneath their feet made the walking easy and the sledges skated gaily along. The biggest obstacle to progress was the groups of German refugees fleeing the Soviet advance, whose horse-drawn wagons got caught up in the column, slowing everyone down.

  The countryside looked wonderful as the dawn came up. Rime glittered like diamonds on the twigs of the trees and the blazing white fields contrasted beautifully with the deep, clean blue of the sky. It seemed to Robert Kee ‘as if we were walking through some pantomime set on an enormous stage. The sledge flowed smoothly behind us. The cold air nipped our cheeks and noses, and yet we were snug inside our balaclavas. I was suddenly completely happy.’10

  Before long the landscape began to lose its allure. The lack of cloud cover kept the temperature well below freezing. There were frequent blizzards, whipped up by bitter winds. After an hour or two every kriegie looked like a walking snowman. Whenever they stopped, boots and clothing froze solid and fingers, toes and every exposed inch of flesh were vulnerable to frostbite. Bread was transformed into crystalline, inedible blocks. When Bill extracted a canteen from inside his jacket and poured a cup of water it turned to ice before he could drink it.

  They were supposed to stop for the night at a village called Halbau (Polish, Iłowa), south-west of Sagan on the main Berlin–Warsaw road. When they arrived, the Germans changed their mind and said they would now be billeted at Freiwaldau (Gozdnica), five miles further down the road. But the two halls available were too small to accommodate everyone. They waited in the numbing cold for an hour while the Germans tried to find larger premises. Some of the prisoners sought shelter in the village houses. Then shouts sounded down the main street. SS men and the local police were going door to door, ordering the kriegies out. Impending nemesis from the East had done nothing to dampen the zeal of the local Burgomeister, a Nazi diehard who had sought the help of the local security forces to prevent the prisoners from ‘contaminating’ his village. The pr
isoners were told they were moving on to the next village, Lieppa (Lipna), four or five miles away, where there was a large barn where they could spend the night.

  The next few hours were the worst of the day. When on the move, the warmth of the prisoners’ exertions kept their clothes and packs from freezing. When they stopped for any length of time, everything turned to ice. They marched now, wrote Crawley, ‘with bent backs, taking it in turns to haul on the sledge ropes, or, if they were carrying packs, stopping every now and then to jerk the load higher on to their shoulders or bending double to let the pack lie horizontally and give a rest to their muscles.’11 The only encouragement came from the sound of the Russian guns booming in the east. Rumours flew up and down the column: the Red Army was only twenty miles to the north – they would overtake the prisoners the following day. Sagan had already been overrun. For once, such predictions were no longer just wishful thinking. They were plausible, even likely.

  It was dark when they reached Lieppa. When they found the barn it was only big enough for six hundred men. Bill was among the lucky ones. He found a gap on the dirty, straw-covered floor between the bodies of his comrades and collapsed into a deep sleep. The others huddled outside while the Germans tried to find another refuge. The temperature had plunged to twenty below. Clothes, packs and boots became petrified with ice and some began to notice the first symptoms of frostbite. There was a real danger of them all freezing to death. The German officers seemed to have lost interest in the welfare of their charges. It was left to the kriegies’ affectionate adversary Hermann Glemnitz to sort out shelter for all but fifty of the prisoners, who spent the night huddled together against a farmyard wall, covered in straw.