The Cooler King

by Patrick Bishop

  They mustered in the morning at eight o’clock. The column had to wait for an hour while the guards made futile attempts to count the men. It was another bright, bitterly cold day. The road they were taking led to the north-west, deeper into the heart of Germany. The first miles passed easily. Every hour, the guards stopped the column for a short rest. Spirits were rising again. It seemed to Robert Kee that ‘we were enjoying something close to freedom and whatever else might happen, it seemed certain that… the old life we had hated so long had been smashed forever.’12

  The comfort these thoughts provided began to fade as cold and fatigue set in. The feeling of impending liberty affected everyone. The guards were under orders to shoot anyone who tried to escape, but no one, not even Bill, felt tempted to. Why should they, when they were marching towards their countrymen advancing from the west? Even if they did, however, the guards were unlikely to do much to stop them. ‘With a biting wind blowing the snow into their faces they usually marched with their heads down and their eyes on the feet of the man in front of them, caring nothing for what went on around them,’ wrote Crawley.13 A number of them were elderly. Their kit was carried on wagons that creaked along at the back of the column, but some found even the weight of their guns too much for them. One asked a kriegie to carry his submachine gun for him. Others put their weapons on the sledges, only to have them thrown into a ditch as soon as their backs were turned.

  Tolstoy’s War and Peace was a popular book with the prisoners. Crawley was one of many who felt he was reliving the retreat from Moscow of the Grande Armée: ‘Soldiers, prisoners and civilians were intermingled, all were suffering the same hardships, and all were engaged in the struggle for survival.’ Hundreds of thousands of human beings, soldier and civilian, were suffering the same ordeal all along the length of the Soviet advance. The prisoners of Stalag Luft III were just another stream in the vast confluence of refugees flowing westwards. All distinctions were obliterated by the crust of snow that covered them all. They clanked and jangled as they walked, weighed down with kettles and pans. Anyone looking on, wrote Crawley, would find it ‘difficult to recognize the bent and bedraggled figures as those of military men’.

  The prisoners travelled in ones or twos, hunched over to make a smaller target for the wind, hauling the sledges behind them. Rope had been in short supply and they had to make do with knotted strips cut from sheets and blankets, which were always breaking, forcing them to stop for repairs. This provoked the guards into occasional bouts of aggression. Bill remembered a party who had stopped to repack the Red Cross parcels on their sledge and were sampling some of the contents when ‘one of the more vicious guards stormed up with two Alsatian… dogs straining at the leash. He yelled at the prisoners to get going but they continued to take their time, munching and packing, as if they were having a bizarre picnic at the edge of hell.’ The guard then set the dogs on the picnickers only to see them trot over to the kriegies ‘wagging their tails and begging for some food. They were rewarded for their disloyalty with corned beef and chocolate and settled in for a feast while their handler roared, yelled and hopped up and down to no avail.’14

  Orderly progress was impossible, despite the efforts of the more zealous guards.

  The Germans were now undergoing the ordeal they had inflicted on so many in Poland, Belgium, Holland, France and Russia in the heady early years when they were the masters driving the weak and helpless before them. In the case of the civilians, the prisoners’ satisfaction at the thought that it was their turn to suffer was tempered with pity. Crawley watched the lines of wagons moving with agonizing slowness towards a haven that seemed always to melt away before they could reach it, and found it ‘a pathetic sight. Old men and women dressed in black and muffled up to the eyes sat motionless on the front seat without speaking; children and pregnant mothers lay among the mattresses and furniture in the back; behind, tied to the wagons with ropes, came the two or three loose horses the family had been able to bring along. The elder boys and girls walked.’15 Many of them had already travelled more than a thousand miles from the steppes of the Ukraine. They had no connection with the villagers whose lands they were passing through except their ethnicity, and ‘wherever they went they were unwelcome’.

  The places they sought shelter in were already crammed with refugees from the cities, which had been under regular heavy bombardment by the Allied air forces for nearly four years. When no room was available they were forced to circle their wagons in the market square, where fires were lit and the meagre supplies of food distributed, and in the morning they were on their way again.

  There was no hostility between prisoners and refugees. Instead they often felt a sense of shared misfortune that brought them together. Crawley recalled how, ‘as each column of wagons passed, prisoners would get up and sit beside the old couple who were driving the horse or clamber into the back and play with the children, enjoying the luxury of being carried for half a mile on a mattress. The refugees were too poor to do barter, but the prisoners gave them chocolate and anything else they could spare.’

  With the Germans they encountered along the route it was a different story. They were farming folk whose crops and livestock had helped to insulate them from the hardship suffered in the towns. What they could not get were luxuries: coffee, chocolate, cigarettes, and most of all soap. At this stage the prisoners had plenty of everything. The rates were soon established – though those at the back of the column would complain that those up front had set the price too high: twenty to fifty cigarettes or a tin of coffee for an outsize loaf of bread, five cigarettes for a pound of potatoes, thirty for a litre of beer and ten for a single egg or a pound of onions. Unless there was an officer around, the guards usually did not interfere. Bill was standing at the side of the road negotiating with a farmer over the purchase of a loaf of bread when an officer passed, and a guard who until then had been taking no notice of the transaction now rushed over to shoo the farmer away. Once the officer was gone, though, the guard called the farmer back and the deal was concluded. He then ‘accepted a hunk of bread for his role as middleman – a tiny gesture proving that the world we had all known was crumbling around us’.16

  Sometimes the locals resisted these interventions. One couple was handing out cups of watery soup to the passing kriegies. They would take no payment except for some bars of soap. An officer noticed what was happening and came over to order them to stop. The husband cowered but the woman replied sharply that her son was a prisoner of war in England. In his letters home he said that the English were treating him well and she was going to do the same in return. The officer contented himself with kicking over the soup pot, now all but empty. Not long before, such defiance might have cost the woman her life.

  It took courage to fraternize. The places they passed through had their own Nazis whose fanaticism was undimmed, and SS troops sometimes appeared along the route. On several occasions the columns were harangued by Hitler loyalists who denounced them as child murderers who had destroyed German cities, but the civilians seemed to take little notice and were indifferent or hostile to what was said to the prisoners.

  As the day progressed the number of frostbite cases climbed, afflicting prisoners and guards alike. The worst cases were left behind to await help in whatever shelter was available. There was another danger lurking. At the frequent halts there was a great temptation to settle into the snow and doze off. To give in to it could be fatal. From time to time, prisoners noticed that someone was missing and search parties were sent to find the dropout and rouse him from a sleep that might otherwise have ended in death.

  They stopped that night at Muskau, after a twenty-mile march. It was a handsome spa town, built around a domed palace that was the home of the Arnim family. The master of the house, General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim had replaced Rommel as army commander in North Africa and was now a prisoner of the British. His brother was in residence when the kriegies arrived and was hospitable and friendly.

 
The town was still run along feudal lines and Nazi influence was limited. The column from the East Compound was met by the mayor who arranged for billets so that everyone was housed within a couple of hours. Many were put up in the well-appointed stables of the big house. The others settled into a laundry, a pottery and a French prisoner-of-war camp a few miles outside the town. For some, the trek had been an ordeal too many. Prisoners collapsed in the snow and had to be carried inside. One guard had a frostbitten leg that had turned gangrenous. An Australian prisoner called Digby Young, a medical student before the war, carried out an emergency operation with the only instruments and anaesthetic available – some kitchen knives and a bottle of alcohol – and saved the man’s life.

  Muskau was awash with prisoners. Waiting to be housed was no hardship. The people of the town, from the lord of the manor down, were remarkably friendly. The bakeries worked overtime producing bread for everyone. Some prisoners were able to take a hot bath. Fear of the future dissolved all differences and the hosts sought reassurance from their guests. ‘The Germans as a whole were longing for the end of the war,’ wrote Crawley. They ‘were terrified of the Russians, and the British prisoners were asked anxiously how the Russians were likely to behave and whether the civilians should join the flood of refugees or stay where they were.’17 Arnim was under no illusions about the catastrophe awaiting him. The house was full of fine furniture and paintings which he was sure would be seized or destroyed by the conquerors. So it turned out, when the Russians eventually rolled in, ten weeks later.

  Bill Ash and the East Compound party arrived in Muskau on the afternoon of Wednesday 31 January and were billeted in a large glass-factory in the town. The brick halls of the works were dominated by large furnaces which had to be kept white hot to produce the molten glass. On arrival the prisoners lay gratefully along the padded sides of the furnaces luxuriating in the heat. There were still better things to come. The factory was manned by French prisoners of war who rustled up hot soup.

  Over the next hours they enjoyed their good fortune, breaking out the remains of their Red Cross parcels and items obtained by barter en route and cooking them on the steel doors of the kilns. They took the chance to dry out their clothes and every hot surface was covered with steaming garments.

  The camp radio experts had brought at least one of the clandestine sets with them. In a corner of the factory they set up their equipment and rigged an aerial to listen in to the BBC news. There was disappointingly little new information about their sector of the front. Bill fell off to sleep to the familiar sound of kriegies speculating about what would happen next.

  When he woke the factory was transformed. Prisoners were snatching up their possessions and getting ready to leave. They were saying goodbye to their snug haven and moving on. Bill went to the place by the kiln where he had left his boots to dry. When he pulled them on, the extreme heat had caused the soles to start coming away from the uppers. He bound them together as best he could with strips of torn-up cloth. Then, as so often, the sudden urgency evaporated. The mass of prisoners was to be broken up and sent off in different directions. Everyone would have to stay put until the plans were finalized.

  Overnight the weather had changed. A fine drizzle was falling and the snow that only the previous evening had seemed a permanent feature of the landscape was disappearing before their eyes. The thaw had not been expected for another month. Like the Russians, it had come early. That afternoon the division was announced. All the prisoners from North Compound and half of East Compound were to march that evening for Spremburg, a sizeable town seventeen miles away, where trains would take them to Bremen the following day. The rest of East Compound, together with prisoners from the Stalag Luft III satellite camp of Belaria, would follow later and then be put on trains for Nuremburg. While they waited to depart, discussion raged about which was the better option. Bremen was nearer the Allied Front, but with the Russians advancing so rapidly, the Nuremberg contingent might stand a better chance of early liberation. Some men agitated to transfer from their allotted group and were allowed to do so. Then came the time for farewells. Men who for years had shared the same confinement, endured equal hardships and despaired and laughed together were parting, perhaps for ever.

  Bill was in the first column to leave. It was dark when they set off out of town, once more heading north and east. The snow in the streets had turned to black slush. The sledges that had been their salvation now became a liability, bumping over the cobbles, then the mud and stones of the open road. One after another, sledges were abandoned. A few groups pulling larger sledges struggled on for some hours, unwilling to jettison their extra food parcels, before giving up.

  The column arrived at a village called Grunstein at 6 a.m. on the morning of 2 February. They grabbed some sleep in barns for a few hours before setting off again. Bill remembered seeing German troops heading for the front and a column of Russian prisoners whose appearance made him realize again how comparatively fortunate he and his comrades were. ‘They were all skeleton thin, their brave, sunken eyes burning out of skull-like faces covered in full, ragged beards,’ he wrote. Their SS guards herded them as if they were wild animals, urging them along with whips and rifle blows. One of the kriegies threw a tin of cigarettes into their midst, another some chocolate, and soon the Russians were deluged with Red Cross goodies. One packet of cigarettes fell short and when a prisoner darted out to get it an SS guard began smashing him with his rifle. ‘A collective roar went up from our side of the road and several hundred Allied prisoners stopped and moved a few dangerous inches towards the Russian column,’ he remembered.18 SS fingers tightened on triggers. Then the realization struck them that though they had the guns, they did not have the numbers, and if they opened fire they stood to be torn to pieces. The guard was pulled away by his colleagues. The Russian picked up his cigarettes and got back into line, throwing a blood-stained smile and a look of thanks at the kriegies before the columns moved off in opposite directions.

  They reached Spremburg, a sizeable town on the river Spree, in the early afternoon, and marched down to the railway yards. An hour later they were loaded onto cattle trucks. As usual no one told them where they would be taken to next. Throughout the long march, elation at the prospect that they would soon be liberated was tempered with the thought that at any moment they might be shot out of hand. Perhaps it would be the result of a demented order from on high, perhaps simply because they were an inconvenience and were deemed to have no further value. As they clambered into the trucks, the prospect that they were being carried off to a place of execution seemed all too plausible.

  The train wheezed out of the sidings. The guards had crammed them in so tightly that it was impossible to stretch out on the dung-encrusted floor and sleep. As they rumbled down the track, the sound of coughing and retching filled the trucks. Bill was suffering too. He was racked with nausea and a feverish heat was starting to grip his body. The only food available was what they had brought with them, and supplies of water soon ran out. At one of the frequent halts they managed to drain some warm, muddy water from one of the steam-engine cisterns.

  It was twenty-four hours before they reached their destination. They arrived at a small town called Tarmstedt, about fifteen miles north-east of Bremen, at 5.30 on the afternoon of Sunday, 4 February. By the time Bill staggered down from the truck he was burning with fever and his skin and the whites of his eyes had turned an alarming yellow. He knew what the symptoms meant. He was going down with jaundice, a common condition in the camps.

  As the prisoners milled around in the sidings they learned why they had been taken to Tarmstedt. It was close to a prisoner-of-war camp called Marlag und Milag Nord, near the village of Westertimke, which until shortly before had been occupied by men from the Royal Navy and Mercantile Marine. The organization seemed to be better here than at any point along the route. Before they set off, German medical staff moved through the crowd, assessing the condition of the kriegies. Bill recalled how ‘
a medic took one look at me and ordered me to remain, along with other prisoners who were too sick to travel.’19

  There was just enough time to say goodbye to Paddy and a few of his other friends. It was a terrible wrench. Ghastly though the journey had been, they had all been in it together, sustaining each other with the same black humour that had got them through the worst times in the camps. They parted with the ritual that had been spoken at the exit to a freshly broken tunnel, wishing each other good luck and God speed and looking forward to a rendezvous at some London watering hole. Before, the prospect of a drink in Blighty had seemed little more than fantasy. Now it was tantalizingly real. All they had to do was stay alive.

  FIFTEEN

  All over Germany’s shrinking territory prisoners were on the move. Since the beginning of the year, more than 80,000 Allied POWs had been evacuated from their camps and sent off on nightmarish odysseys across Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia. The experience of the Stalag Luft III columns was just one chapter in an epic of suffering. When it was over the names they gave to their ordeals told the story: the Long March, the Black March, the Death March.

  Illness had brought Bill Ash’s wanderings to a halt. The account he left behind of his last days in captivity is rather sketchy. He described how after he was taken off the train at Tarmstedt he was moved with the other sick prisoners to ‘an encampment somewhere outside Bremen’ and dumped in tented sick quarters ‘with no facilities, teeming with men suffering from dysentery, gangrene, malnutrition, frostbite’ or, like him, jaundice.1 The report of his interview with IS9 on his return to Britain gives his last location as ‘Milag Marlag Nord [Westertimke]’, the camp for Royal Navy and merchant seamen where the rest of the Stalag Luft III prisoners were taken.2 The camp hospital was situated between the two main compounds, which were wired off and separate from each other. He makes no mention of seeing his old comrades in the months before liberation, even though they would have been only a few hundred yards away.