The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  The NCO ordered the POWs to get up and push a vehicle. Since they did not understand German, they did not move, nor did they respond when he repeated the order in French. The enraged and apparently drunk NCO stormed off, only to return a few moments later with two other soldiers and Obersturmführer Güteman. By then, even though four of the POWs had stood up, Güteman went up to the man who was still sitting, James Young, who had been shot down earlier in the day, pulled him to his feet and began punching him in the face, causing his nose to bleed.

  In the meantime, perhaps having realized what their captors wanted, one of the Allied soldiers started walking toward the gate. He was shot in the back. Seeing this, another prisoner started running toward a hillock beyond the gate. He too was shot in the back. A third prisoner managed to get through the gate before he was felled by a rifle shot. The NCO then went up to Young, screaming at him and shaking him by the collar, while another SS man slunk behind Young. Following a signal from Güteman, this second SS man fired directly into Young’s back. The fifth prisoner was shot as he tried to crawl away.

  According to a certain Stabsgefreiter named Maier, who defected to the Allies on 27 August, Güteman ordered that the two POWs who had not been killed outright be given the coup de grâce. Young was “finished off” with a shot to his chest. In an attempt to cover up this war crime, Güteman ordered that the men be buried nearby and prepared a report saying that the Canadian and others had been “shot while trying to escape,” which he ordered Maier to sign.

  30 AUGUST 1944, STALAG XX-A, TORUN, POLAND

  IAN MACDONALD FINDS IT HARDER TO REMAIN OPTIMISTIC DESPITE THE GOOD WAR NEWS

  From the camp’s jungle telegraph, Ian MacDonald knew that in just the past week, Romania had switched sides, that Paris, Toulon and Marseilles had been liberated and that the Red Army was at the gates of Warsaw. But, for the dutiful son, who had drawn so much strength from his family’s letters, and who continued to be concerned about the finances back in Lourdes, Nova Scotia, and about his brother on HMCS Ottawa, the months without letters weighed heavily on him.

  The reason he had not received any parcels recently was purely administrative; his parents had the wrong POW number. But that didn’t make the lack of word from them any less painful for MacDonald. With the end of the war almost in sight, perversely, instead of each passing day being felt as one day closer to the end of his indeterminate sentence, it seemed as if each further day of imprisonment bore the weight of every other day he had been locked away—and that the days to come would bear an even heavier burden. In a letter home, after listing two upcoming birthdays that he hoped to make it back for, he mentioned his father’s, which was in late December, and then wrote, as if to buck himself up, “I prefer to be optimistic.”

  4 SEPTEMBER 1944, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  GEORGE SHAKER BEGINS A DIARY

  The first few entries in George Shaker’s “wartime log,” a slightly larger than 8½-by-11-inch diary bound in dark beige canvas and supplied by the Canadian YMCA, seem oddly like filler. However, the detailed lists of Canadian, British, New Zealand, American and Argentinian Red Cross parcels underline how important they were to their survival. When the Detaining Power bothered to respond to complaints about the adulterated black bread and weak soup provided, the Germans pointed to the calories and nutrients contained in a one-pound tin of Maple Leaf butter (Canadian), a 12-ounce tin of fish or bacon (British), a one-pound tin of cheese (New Zealand), half a pound of chocolate (American) or a one-pound tin of Irish stew (Argentinian) as making up the difference. These supplies helped keep Shaker from falling below 100 pounds, two-thirds of what he weighed when captured in early 1941, and they made all the difference for Paul Gallant and the Canadian officers and ratings in Marlag Nord, on the other side of the camp’s wire, after 4 September when, because the RCN men refused a work order, they were put on half rations.

  On 4 September, the men from the A.D. Huff had no choice but to follow a work order. Had they not, their meagre possessions and, more importantly, their stock of Red Cross food would have been contaminated by the gas used to fumigate the barracks. The gas was so poisonous that they had to spend the night on the floor of another building, which, they regretted on that surprisingly cold September night, did not have a stove.

  Shaker’s diary entries make no reference to religion. Its importance to him, however, is evident from the sketch of Stella Maris on page 9. To the right and left of the Cross that rises from the altar are the signatures of the eight priests and brothers who had been imprisoned at Milag und Marlag Nord since 1941.

  5 SEPTEMBER 1944, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  LES RELIGIEUX ARE ALLOWED A RELIGIOUS RETREAT

  In German, the word could be translated as Rückzug, which describes what their armies were doing on both the Eastern and Western Fronts.

  For the Oblates, une retraite had a very different meaning. In the letter published in L’Apostolat in December 1944, Brother Roland Cournoyer credits the “sweetness of Providence” for the extraordinary privilege that the Kommandant of Milag und Marlag Nord bestowed on the Oblates. Perhaps in recognition for their work (and perhaps also in an attempt to curry favour) the Nazi officers agreed to allow Cournoyer, Brother Parent and Fathers Pâquet, Barsalou and Charbonneau to join Father Bergeron in a religious retreat. According to Father André Dubois, who knew les religieux, “in the situation they were in, separated from their superiors and often from each other, this opportunity for spiritual renewal was extremely important. At the retreat, in addition to celebrating mass together, they would have spent time in silent meditation and prayer.”

  Their meals too were likely also religious events, for instead of eating to the buzz of barracks talk, there would have been either silence or the stately words of a devotional reading. “By pulling back from their day-to-day life in the camps and concentrating on these observances, despite their great distance from Canada, the fathers and brothers were renewing their ties to their community,” says Dubois.

  EARLY SEPTEMBER 1944, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION GAMP, WEIMAR, GERMANY

  HARVIE AND MOST OF THE OTHER ALLIED AIRMEN ARE SENT TO BLOCK 58

  After weeks sleeping on the ground without any cover during unseasonably cool and wet nights, Harvie, who had turned 21 on 3 September, and most of the other airmen were shepherded into Block 58; one who wasn’t was Carter-Edwards, already so sick with pneumonia, pleurisy and grippe that he had no choice but to risk going to the infirmary. The large, windowless, wooden, barnlike structure would have beggared all description. Six hundred men were crammed into a space designed for a third of that. The smell was overwhelming. There was no place to wash; in any event, the bombing raid had destroyed the camp’s water-pumping system.

  At Fresnes Prison, each man had had a narrow bunk. In Buchenwald, the blocks were filled with row upon row of wooden shelves fouled with men’s waste; the shelves lacked paillasses and were so narrow that the men had to sleep on their sides. Rather than breathe into each other’s faces, and to provide a modicum of privacy, they lay “on the same side at the same time.” Changing sides required not only everyone’s agreement but also a volunteer to act as “the unlocking key” by working his way out and climbing to the floor so that the other men could turn over, and then shimmying his way back in.217

  In September 1944, Buchenwald, designed for some 20,000 prisoners, held upward of 84,000 men, women and children, the largest single group being Russians but also including thousands of Roma, French, Poles, Slovenes, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, the Allied airmen and SOE agents. The desperate thousands were housed in the same appalling conditions the Allied airmen now lived in and were fed the same inadequate food—and had been for years; ironically, the SOE prisoners were fed marginally better rations. The hours on the Appellplatz were an especial torment for these desperately weak men, many of whom collapsed, some in death, while their tormentors tallied up the numbers. Other numbers were tallied up too: those
who died working in the quarry; in the infirmary; of having committed suicide by throwing themselves on the electrified fence; of “natural causes”; or by execution in a room with a floor painted red so that the accumulation of blood would not discomfit SS men assigned there, and which was conveniently placed beneath the crematorium. On Sundays, the ropes of the gallows in the centre of the Appellplatz rarely hung limply.

  The politics of Buchenwald was entirely different from the politics of the POW camps, where military order existed under the Senior British Officer or senior Allied officer and the camp’s Man of Confidence, who served as the liaison with the German authorities. As at other concentration camps, huts were ruled by Kapos appointed by the SS. He ensured that the inmates appeared on the Appellplatz and were assigned work details, which included picking up the daily dead and small food ration. The Kapo of Block 58 had a private room with a single bed, bedding, a writing table and books and magazines he could read while sitting on a real chair, beside which stood an electric lamp. Whatever injustice the airmen may felt about the Kapo’s perks, the most important one being that he did not have to eat the swill they did. What mattered more was that he was considered a good Kapo, because he didn’t beat or otherwise mistreat either the airmen or the hundreds of Roma under his charge.

  Fear and degradation suffused the camp. The broad avenues between the rows of barracks were designed not so the inmates could march eight abreast comfortably, though they could, but so SS machine guns could sweep the lane clear. In the Russian compound, which the Germans patrolled heavily, the SS beat starving POWs with clubs, rifle butts, bullwhips and the sharp end of their jackboots; earlier in the war, to drown out the sound of shooting of 10,000, Himmler’s men forced others to sing loudly, though presumably not the “Buchenwald Song” or the more famous “Peat Bog Soldiers,” with its haunting lyrics: “Up and down the guards are pacing, / No one, no one can get through. / Flight would mean a sure death facing, / Guns and barbed wire greet our view. / We are the peat bog soldiers, / We’re marching with our spades to the bog.”218

  EARLY SEPTEMBER 1944, AN

  GEORGE REID WORKS UNDERGROUND

  George Reid knew, thanks to a family story from what he’d grown up calling the Great War, that the elevator was taking him and 20 other Canadian POWs into a salt mine, where they joined Russian murderers, other criminals and women as slave labourers. The mine, however, was not destined to produce salt. Rather, it had been hollowed out to house one of the armament or aircraft factories that Armaments Minister Albert Speer had ordered to be built in such mines so that they were safe from Allied bombers. Although conditions were marginally better than those endured by the Canadians who laboured in the coal mines in Japan, the weakened men did most of the work with shovels and 16-pound sledgehammers.

  By September 1944, control of POW labour had passed into Himmler’s hands and the institutionally ruthless Speer organized the labour; thus, this Arbeitskommando bore no resemblance to the brewery and graphite mine Andrew Carswell passed through. For 12 hours a day, six days a week, Reid and the other slave labourers worked filling huge mine cars, with top openings of six by six feet—260 cars per day for each work gang, no matter whether there were 5 or 20 men in the gang. The Germans never provided enough food: only a bowl of soup and a piece of bread each day, its thinning from one and a quarter inches to near one-half inch being a measure of the shrinking Reich. The water ration was so small that torturous thirst caused by the salt dust often caused the slave labourers to faint.

  10 SEPTEMBER 1944, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, WEIMAR, GERMANY219

  EXECUTION OF FRANK PICKERSGILL, KENNETH MACALISTER, ROMEO SABOURIN AND 13 OTHER SOE AGENTS

  The sentence of “Tod” did not surprise Pickersgill, Macalister, Sabourin or the other 13 SOE agents who, after hearing it, were quickly marched to the Zellenbau, a whitewashed one-story building that, on either side of a centre aisle, had cells no larger than small horse stalls. Toward the front of the cellblock were larger rooms, one an office, another a torture chamber equipped with whips, cudgels, chains and electrical equipment that could be attached to the testicles. Each man was savagely beaten, and forced to stand at attention with their faces against the open peepholes in the heavy steel doors for hours on end.

  Near 5 p.m. on 10 September, they were forced to drag their bruised and battered bodies across the camp. A hundred or so yards after they passed the main gate, they made a slight left turn and entered a fenced-in area in the middle of which sat a low building with a gabled roof that vaguely resembled a smokehouse. They walked around the building to a narrow flight of concrete stairs leading to the basement, to a room they may never have heard the name of but of which, after they’d finished limping down the steps and their eyes had adjusted to the dim light of one or two bare bulbs, they could have no doubt about its purpose. Lining the walls of the Leichenkeller (corpse cellar) about eight feet from the floor and each separated by about four feet were dozens of large meat hooks.

  SS-Scharführer Walter Warnsädt was anxious to squeeze the last quantum of suffering he could from these broken men. Instead of tying their hands behind their back with their wrists crossed, they were tied with the arms parallel, which has the effect of slowly dislocating shoulders, the pain being only increased by the deep breaths taken by the petrified men watching their comrades die.

  By design, despite their last request, they did not die cleanly and honourably. Instead, Warnsädt’s men slipped nooses made of thick piano wire around each man’s neck and, after throwing the other end of the wire over a meat hook, hauled the man up to its level before tying off the wire. This was not hanging but the medieval practice of death by suspension, an agonizingly slow death by strangulation as the wire slowly crushed the carotid artery and jugular vein. It was death extended by the involuntary jerks of the body, for each, momentarily, relieved the pressure on the artery and vein, thus allowing blood to once again flow and the brain to revive—only to again feel the pain of the noose—and the mind to clear enough to register the terror of suffocation. It was the destruction of the men’s bodies in the most intimate form.

  As they slowly strangled and jerked, in Warnsädt’s men’s eyes, the SOE agents would have turned into mere simulacrums of men, into something akin to puppets with faces blue not from paint but from cyanosis. Long before they died, their bodies would have begun to stink from the involuntarily voiding of urine and feces, which were easily washed down the oversized drain in the middle of the Leichenkeller. The desecrated bodies were loaded into the electric lift that brought them upstairs, where, as tens of thousands had been (and thousands more would be), they were placed on a metal platen that slid into the coke-fired ovens adapted for the SS by a well-known bread-oven manufacturer that still has its factory in nearby Erfurt.220

  24 SEPTEMBER 1944, STALAG VII-B, MEMMINGEN, GERMANY

  FATHER BOULANGER’S CRI DE CœUR

  Father Boulanger’s letter to Father Eugene Marcotte on 24 September shows that he would have benefited greatly from joining the retreat earlier in the month, for his cri de cœur comes close to tipping over into bitterness: “Canadians,” by which he meant French Canadians, “don’t care about religion!” How could this be, given their sufferings on the beaches of Dieppe? Even the English Catholics (most of whom were of Irish background) were less foul-mouthed than the Fusiliers Mont-Royal, a reference to the fact French-Canadian swear words are liturgical, hostie taking the place of “fuck” and tabernac for “shit.”

  Boulanger’s observation that “war is not a school for virtue” is hardly original. The additional observation that, for young men, “neither is two or three years of inaction” points to a problem with morale that became more pronounced the closer the end of the war appeared. Just a week earlier from the relatively salubrious confines of his POW camp in Austria, Father Juneau wrote, “This long captivity is dangerous! It is here that man reveals his true self. Life in the barracks is sometimes at an extremely low level—but the priest
must be the counterweight.”

  28 SEPTEMBER 1944, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  FATHER BARSALOU HIDES A FORBIDDEN MESSAGE IN A DISCUSSION ABOUT TOMATOES

  The failure at Arnhem, immortalized in the phrase “A bridge too far,” and stiffening of resistance on the Eastern Front meant that the predictions made after the Allies secured Normandy that the war would be over by Christmas had turned to dust. There were scattered cases of the Germans surrendering, but most Soldaten fought on.221 Though the Nazi high command knew that Speer’s armaments production miracle had passed its apogee and, even more ominously, that the Reich’s supply of gasoline and aviation fuel had dropped to critical levels, the state’s organs remained as radical as ever. After severely torturing 60-year-old Joseph Müller, on 11 September the regime beheaded the teacher, who had told a joke in which a mortally wounded Luftwaffe officer asked to place a picture of Hitler on his left and one of Göring on his right so that “now I can die like Jesus.”222

  The day-to-day business of the POW camps did, however, continue. On 28 September, the guards at Milag Nord spent part of their day searching for alcohol stills and tunnels. A few earned themselves commendations for finding a complete crystal radio and parts of another, both likely being plants.