The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  A short time later, an SS doctor came to examine the men camped in a field outside Mellingen. Shocked at their condition, he ordered 48 of the sickest, accompanied by Father Desnoyers, who would act as their interpreter, to a lazaretto (a hospital that treats contagious diseases) in nearby Bad Sulza. Over the next few days, 18 of these men died, while the column that had been marching for more than a month continued deeper into Germany. By the time it reached Weimar a few weeks later, of the 4,000 men who marched away from Lamsdorf, more than 1,200 had died and most remained unburied.

  MID-MARCH 1945, DUDERSTAT, LOWER SAXONY, GERMANY

  POOLTON TRADES HIS FATHER’S RING TO SURVIVE

  It is a measure of how arduous the conditions on the Hunger Marches were (and the healing power of a dry place to sleep) that, even though rations continued to be inadequate, Carswell’s health improved after he arrived at Stalag XI-B at Fallingbostel. The stories other recently captured airmen told of advances by the American, British and Canadian armies, of the almost nightly progresses of bomber streams, and of the sight of short-range aircraft making strafing runs were also tonics.

  Thanks to intrepid truck drivers (among them several Canadians who feared strafing by Allied fighter bombers less than they did starvation), Red Cross supplies continued to arrive at several camps, including Stalag VII-A (Mossburg) and Stalag XI-B. At Milag Nord, though one of the best-supplied camps, the meat ration dropped from 1.25 ounces per man per day in January to 1 ounce in mid-March. The potato ration fell from almost 14 ounces to 6.6 ounces per man. The despised German bread loaf shrank from just over 11 ounces per day to be shared among six men to just under 7.8 ounces to be shared among eight men.

  At Stalag IX-C, where Prouse had not seen a Red Cross parcel in months, the bread ration fell to one 4½-pound loaf per day for nine men, or 220 grams (8 ounces) or one piece of hard, dry, sawdust-filled German black bread. By the end of March, the 200 men who suffered along with Poolton as they were marched into the Harz Mountains north of Weimar were eating rotten turnips and sugar beets revealed by the melting snows. In a brick factory in Duderstat, Poolton fell to his lowest point, trading the ring his father had worn in the First World War and that he had hidden from the victors at Dieppe for a quarter of a loaf of bread, which briefly relieved his and his buddies’ hunger pangs.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  April–May 1945

  Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

  — MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

  1 APRIL 1945, IN A BARN NEAR SPANGENBERG, GERMANY

  FATHER DESNOYERS SAYS MASS IN A BARN

  The clandestine radio confirmed what Father Desnoyers surmised after the Germans handed out Red Cross parcels and hustled the POWs back onto a road heading east: the Allies had jumped the Rhine and were closing in on Oflag IX-A/Z, near Bad Sulza. While the deep snows of January had been replaced by shoots of green, every mile remained some 2,500 steps, each one part of a 60-mile forced march deeper into the ever-shrinking Reich. The hungry remnants of Hitler’s Volk—women, many now widows; men too decrepit or boys too young to be dragooned into ersatz battalions; and children whose sallow skin and thin and tired bodies resembled the Kriegies’—clogged the roads.

  On 1 April in a nondescript barn where he and the other POWs spent the night, the German guards allowed Desnoyers to set up the altar that weighed down his backpack. Had they been in a proper church, though the priest’s Latin would have meant nothing to them, the older guards would have recognized the Lumen Christi, which was one of the few Catholic acts retained by the Lutheran Church. However, instead of the “Light of Christ” growing ever stronger as the fire of paschal candles lit others, on this Easter Sunday morning, hundreds of spiderwebs shimmered by the light produced by an old three-inch candle. Beneath the words that celebrated the Crucified’s triumph over death rumbled the sound of guns. Those that were coming closer belonged to General Patton’s army, which three days later, on 4 April, would free and feed the prisoners, a modern-day version of the miracle commemorated in Psalm 78, that day’s reading, recalling the gift of manna from heaven.

  6–9 APRIL 1945, ON A FIELD NEAR WEIMAR, GERMANY

  ROBERT PROUSE MANAGES TO MAINTAIN PROPRIETY

  The Polish women prisoners were in even more desperate shape than the POWs who would, over the space of four days, march over 60 miles. The Kriegies were footsore and bent from the weight of their rucksacks or backpacks. But they were wearing greatcoats, tunics and pants. The women, herded by baton-wielding “large man-like Nazi women guards,” wore rags.255 The blisters on Robert Prouse’s feet testified to the leather of his infantry boots (and the years since his last route march), while the burlap wound around the women’s feet testified to their desperation. Prouse was so terribly hungry that, on the night of 6 April, he snuck out of the encampment and to a nearby house, where he traded cigarettes and cocoa for food. When he returned, he saw that even as the time of their Hobbesian state grew short, the guards remained brutish, pushing the women away from the wire and gathering up the food and cigarettes and soap (these last two amounting to currency) that the POWs had thrown to the women, who offered the only thing they still had for food, a “Jig-a-Jig.”

  The food Prouse bartered for at the farm did not fill his stomach for long. For the next day, like many who’d been reduced to drinking ditch water, he was racked by violent spasms of vomiting and diarrhea. Some found the strength to make their way out of the barn before soiling themselves; most were too weak and lay in their own filth. Prouse belonged to the former group and used the pages of the novel The Robe to try to maintain his propriety.

  On the 8th, the guards prodded the desperate column of sick men deeper into the Reich. Allied planes were not absent from the sky for long, their strength a counterpoint to the ever-weakening state of the now dehydrated men who had not kept anything down in days. Late in the afternoon, the sickest, Prouse included, were detached from the column and marched another painful three miles to the main camp at Bad Sulza. The Scottish medics forced Prouse to vomit up the last remnants of the feces-contaminated water he had drunk from the ditches. The next day, a revived and cleaned Prouse felt almost guilty when he saw the conditions of the Russian POWs in the neighbouring compound. He had landed at Dieppe weighing more than 175 pounds; now he weighed 130, much more than many Russian POWs.

  EARLY APRIL 1945, STALAG III-A, AT A RAIL YARD BETWEEN LUCKENWALDE AND BERLIN, GERMANY

  KINGSLEY BROWN HEARS A NURSERY RHYME

  His joy at having gone to a mass conducted in front of an altar built of “old bits of lumber and wooden boxes” draped with a clean white sheet by a Polish Catholic priest would not have sat well with the author of the only reading material Kingsley Brown could find at Stalag III-A. The Nazi overlords at the subcamp to which Brown and several others from Stalag Luft III were sent (the remainder were sent to Milag und Marlag Nord) would certainly not have approved of the thoughts expressed in the beat-up copy of Aereopagitica, John Milton’s 1644 pamphlet that argues for the “Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing,” that is, against censorship.256

  The move from Stalag III-A raised the spectre of being held as hostages but it improved their living conditions. Instead of sleeping three men to a shelf on a three-decked bunk, Brown and the others slept on the floor of the boxcars. In an effort to delay the impending transfer, Brown and his companions aped crippled men well enough to fool the Germans. Depending on where he looked, from the railroad enclosure Brown could see the last spasms of the war—in the acrobatics of the P-47 fighter bombers swooping low to attack emplacements, or in the song “Baa Baa Black Sheep” sung by the 10-year-old schoolgirls who stopped by the fence and which embodied the promise of peace.

  8–10 APRIL 1945, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  THE EVACUATION OF NAVAL PERSONNEL AND LES RELIGIEUX

  The Allied officers considered the order for the naval and air force prisoners to undertake a forced march to Lübeck 25 miles to the east
to be “criminal.” Harry Hurwitz recalls that the officers warned Kommandant Schmidt that, since the air forces were strafing everything that moved, the roads were too dangerous. But even the threat that Schmidt would have to answer to Allied authorities if any of the POWs were killed on the road failed to move him. And so, on the morning of 9 August, a large number of the 6,000 naval ratings and officers took matters into their own hands. Some, thinking they would be better off entirely on their own, disappeared under the wire. Others, including Paul Gallant and Stuart Kettles, hid among the merchant sailors, who were to remain in the camp.

  The order to evacuate the main camp, where John Harvie, Edward Carter-Edwards and most of the other Stalag Luft III Kriegies had been for about ten weeks, was issued late in the afternoon on 9 April; Harvie’s barracks cleared the gate near 9 p.m. The night was uncomfortable chilly and damp, so despite wearing a greatcoat and army boots, since the line of men was moving slowly, Harvie found himself swinging his arms and stomping his feet to warm up. Harvie was not much cheered by the sound of what he took to be a Mosquito fighter bomber. How could the pilot know that hundreds of feet below him was a column of defenceless Allied airmen? After two ominously close crumps of exploding bombs, the German guards thought better of marching through the night and led the men back into the camp. Any record of Schmidt’s reaction has been lost, but he could not have been happy about this or news that even though the march began again near dawn, it made little progress. Following the “Go Slow” order issued by the Senior British Officer, RCAF Group Captain Lawrence Wray (who had been shot down on 3 May 1944), to keep them near the camp, the men ambled along slowly and stopped to openly barter with civilians. They started their hourly breaks early and “when it was time to continue, studiously ignoring the postens’ shouts of “‘Raus! Raus!’”257

  EARLY APRIL 1945, CENTRAL GERMANY

  SAPPER RUSS BURROWS AND PRIVATE PAT IRELAND HAVE SOME HOME COOKING

  The order for some of the prisoners to evacuate the camp near Fallingbostel on 8 April meant that Ian MacDonald and thousands of other POWs, including hundreds who had survived Dieppe, would now join tens of thousands of POWs and millions of civilians and German troops already fleeing west on the soggy roads of Germany, away from the Red Army.

  The first 12 miles all but broke many men, who were buttressed by others, perhaps bolstered by a turnip or potato picked up while crossing a field. MacDonald remembers the Germans distributing a little cheese and the reviled Brot, and behaviour that shifted from intimidating to something approaching ingratiating. The juicy sugar beet MacDonald picked up from a field and ate caused a blister that blocked his throat; he would have died of asphyxiation had he not shoved two fingers down his throat fast and far enough to break the blister. The beating from a guard who used his rifle as a club after catching Andrew Cox stealing several bags of oats hurt all the more since the 100-pound Canadian “had very little flesh to cushion” the blows.258

  A few days into the march, the Germans distributed Red Cross parcels. These, together with Pat Ireland’s woodcraft skills honed in Alberta’s Peace River District, emboldened Ireland, Russ Burrows and a British POW to slip away from the march that in the sleet and rain had become so arduous that the German guards had to be relieved often. To get the energy to keep going and fight off chills, they quickly dug through their Red Cross parcels.

  “We were getting pretty hungry,” recalls Burrows, “when one morning I was woken by a screeching metal sound. I crept around the tree and saw a woman at a well getting some water.”

  Ireland’s trained eye had kept them hidden and running parallel to the autobahn; now Burrows cashed in the many hours he had spent learning German. When he stepped from behind a tree, Burrows knew it was not only the fact that he was dirty that caused the fright he saw in the woman’s eyes; he was a man, obviously an escaped prisoner, and she was alone and belonged to what they both knew was soon to be a defeated people—and history spoke loudly of the “rights” claimed by soldiers. “She was terrified,” he recounts, “so I quickly and softly I said ‘Guten Morgen’ and told her I was hungry. After she motioned and told me to come with her, I told her there were two other men with me.”

  Although Burrows trusted her, as they approached the house, he became leery. She led them around the side of the building to a door that led into the kitchen. They had been prisoners for three and a half years, and had eaten a thousand pieces of sour, German black bread. Now, before them in a heavy black frying pan, a hausfrau who, he would later learn, had lost a son in the war and did not know where her husband or other two sons were, broke eggs into a bowl, grated potatoes and proceeded to fry up potato pancakes.

  11 APRIL 1945, IN A WOOD NEAR FALLINGBOSTEL, GERMANY

  MACDONALD ESCAPES FROM THE MARCH

  Like Harry Hurwitz and his buddy, who took advantage of the confusion at Milag und Marlag Nord after the order for the forced march was issued to slip under the wire and make a run for the Allied lines, and George Reid, who had escaped with a few other men from a field near Fallingbostel, MacDonald and his crewmate Walter Reed were now on the run. They escaped from the thousands marching from Fallingbostel during the night by hiding in a clump of bushes.

  Figuring that he would appear less threatening to anyone they approached for help were he shaved, before they set out toward the west the next morning, Reed opened his kit and set up a metal mirror on a branch. Before he could take the first swipe, a soldier some distance away, likely having seen the glint of sun coming from the bushes, fired at them. “Wally grabbed the mirror and we both started running as fast as we could,” recalls MacDonald.

  11 APRIL 1945, BAD SULZA, NEAR WEIMAR, GERMANY

  ROBERT PROUSE SEES MORE DEATH

  His liberators were close. So close, actually, that until he saw the plane that peeled off from the squadron and dove toward the train tracks that ran beside Bad Sulza wiggle its wing, Robert Prouse thought that he’d become a friendly-fire casualty.

  Early on the 11th, with General Patton’s army a scant five miles away, the German guards sought again to march their prisoners away. They started in the Russian compound. When shouting, fixed bayonets and painful blows failed to move the starving Russians, the Germans squeezed their triggers and lunged their bayonets forward. As the surviving Russians were marched away, the guards entered Prouse’s compound.

  Prouse believed the threat that the Allied POWs would be shot if they did not immediately begin marching. But, like his comrades, he refused to move. The ominous silence that reigned for a few moments was broken by the sound of tanks. Prouse and his comrades all but liberated themselves, for by the time the American Sherman tanks clanked into view at 5:05 p.m., the Germans, reacting to the men’s “thunderous cheer,” had turned tail and run through the gate.259 An American tank trooper took one look at the rags cladding Prouse’s thinned body, stripped off his battle jacket and handed it to the now free man.

  12 APRIL 1945, DITFURT, NORTH-CENTRAL GERMANY

  JACK POOLTON IS LIBERATED

  The word from the guards was not surprising: another town where there would be no bread. The weather was warmer, so the march, now more of a shuffle, of exhausted men across a blasted and picked-clean landscape was easier than the winter Hunger Marches had been. The rations, a small piece of black bread every four days, did terrible things to the men’s digestion and to their sense of propriety.

  The British soldier who broke the Kriegies’ code of honour by stealing another man’s scant ration was distressing enough. More horrifying was the rough justice meted out by the troops who beat the Tommy to a bloody pulp before officers moved him to the barn where Jack Poolton was. Terrified by the men in his barn now also turning on the soldier, Poolton stepped forward and shouted, “Stop! Don’t anyone lay a hand on him. He has had enough…. You’ve all been tempted to steal at some time, but never had the guts.”260

  Days later, Poolton offered his RAF sweater to a German soldier in exchange for bread, only to stay hungry
, as the representative of the Reich that had marched him halfway across central Europe and forced him to sleep in fields and dirty barns refused to make a deal because the sweater was “lousy.” Later, he hopped the low wall enclosing the field where the Germans were keeping them for the night and found a granary.

  On 12 April, the crowing of the cock at 6 a.m. all but merged with the POW who called out from the barnyard, “There’s a Jeep out there. There’s a Jeep out there!” The Americans were clearly surprised to find the POWs, for within a few moments they radioed back to regimental headquarters: “Do not fire on this town. I repeat, do not fire on this town. There are Yanks and Tommies here.”

  MID-APRIL 1945, ON A ROAD LEADING TO LÜBECK, GERMANY

  FATHER BERGERON KNOWS THAT BECAUSE OF HIS REDEEMER, HE LIVETH

  Fathers Goudreau and Bergeron could have stayed with the merchant seamen in Milag Nord. They believed, however, that their place was with the men on the road where death from the American and British planes or German shells stalked the columns of terrified men being marched toward Lübeck and, more importantly, across the Elbe River, which would then form one more obstacle between them and the advancing forces of their liberation. The news that President Franklin Roosevelt had died on 12 April saddened the POWs even as the green fields they marched past seemed to promise their freedom.