by Sean Longden
It is hardly surprising that many shared one overriding emotion – the desire to be free. Although only a relatively small number of prisoners ever successfully escaped from German POW camps, the exploits of the escapers became fabled during the post-war period. The courageous exploits highlighted in books and films like The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story and The Great Escape showed a world in which escape was both possible and was the desire of all prisoners. Nothing could have been further from the truth. A vast majority of escape attempts were failures. Prisoners dug tunnels that were discovered or collapsed upon them. They tried cutting through the wire, only to be spotted by the guards, or tried sneaking out of camps hidden in sewage trucks or rubbish bins. Legend even has one prisoner attempting to escape by dressing up as the guard dog used by the Germans.
The reality was that escape never entered the minds of most prisoners. Working prisoners couldn’t be bothered digging escape tunnels since they had little energy left by the end of their shifts. Prisoners on work details on farms or in forests could have just walked away without anyone noticing, but knew they had little chance of getting away to safety. One group of men simply walked away from a working party on a farm – after all no one watched over them as they worked – and made their way to Danzig in hope of stowing away on board a ship heading to Sweden. When they arrived they found other prisoners working on the docks under guard. Realizing there was no way out, the escapers left Danzig and walked back to their workcamp. When Les Allan escaped from a workcamp he spent three days on the run and soon found himself utterly lost in the Polish countryside. When he was recaptured he discovered that, despite being on the run for three days, he had been going around in circles and was no more than a handful of miles away from the camp.
There was another good reason not to bother escaping. Lance-Corporal Green, who had been captured at La Bassée in May 1940, reported the treatment after he was discovered escaping from a working party: ‘Having been escorted back to the camp, I was taken down to the punishment cells, stripped and beaten with a rubber truncheon into insensibility. I was kept there for twenty-six days with one meal a day of bread and water. For the first twelve days I lost my memory.’3
Despite the dangers, and the knowledge that failure was seemingly inevitable, escape activity continued throughout the war. After days, weeks, months then years of seeing the same faces day upon day – sharing the same stale air, the same stale old conversations and trapped in a timewarp in which every day still seemed to be 1940 – it became imperative for some men to escape. Yes, it was their duty to break free but it became increasingly important as a means of mental escape. Many turned to tunnelling or devising plans for getting out of the oflags in the knowledge that they would soon be captured, but admitted that every day outside the wire would be their own personal victory.
Some of the most famous wartime escapers were men who had been captured in France with the BEF. Airey Neave, who later became a Conservative MP and was assassinated by the INLA, was wounded at Calais in May 1940 while serving a searchlight battery who had been detailed to help defend the port. Captured when the town fell, Neave was transferred to Germany, where he became a serial escaper. In January 1942 he became the first British soldier to escape from the fabled Colditz Castle via a trap door in the floor of the castle’s theatre, then made his way across Germany, through France and Spain, finally arriving in Gibraltar.
Another BEF officer who escaped from Colditz was Captain Patrick Reid, who was captured in France on 27 May 1940. He was initially held at Oflag 7C at Laufen but was transferred to Colditz following an unsuccessful escape attempt. While in the castle he served as the escape officer and himself eventually made a successful escape to Switzerland in October 1942. He later became the most famous of the Colditz escapers after penning the book The Colditz Story and acting as an adviser on both film and television adaptations of his work. In the 1970s he even helped design the popular board game ‘Escape from Colditz’.
Although the escape routes that became most publicized were to Switzerland or to Gibraltar via France and Spain, some escapers took a different strategy. Despite the massing of German troops in the east in advance of Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the Soviet Union – some POWs escaped eastwards. In July 1941 Sir Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador to Moscow, reported that fourteen escaped British POWs had been handed over to his care by the Soviet authorities. One of the reasons that these escape routes never received great attention was because the British and the Russians decided that no publicity should be given to the matter, with Cripps requesting that the censor did not allow any mention of the subject in the British press.
The passage of troops into the Soviet Union did not always go smoothly and one Briton was shot and wounded by border guards. Another Briton spent months in detention in Moscow. Corporal James Allan was a military policeman who had been taken prisoner while in a military hospital in Boulogne, having been wounded in the head near Lille on 18 May 1940. He escaped from Thorn after joining a working party in the company of his mates Gunner Clark and Lance-Corporal Green. In September 1940 the working party had been digging up unexploded bombs when the three men made their escape. After separation from his two comrades, Allan made his way into the Soviet Union with the assistance of the Polish underground. Clark and Green were first to cross into Soviet territory, soon being arrested and sent to a Moscow prison.
James Allan later described his adventures:
I crossed the river Bug in a boat, while Polish scouts kept a watch for any German patrol. I climbed over the barbed-wire fence into Russia and handed myself over to the authorities within five minutes of crossing the frontier. I was searched very thoroughly and everything was taken away from me. I was put in a small cell for one night. I was then taken to another place and stayed there for ten days in company with Polish prisoners. Then I was sent to Bialystock prison where I stayed for about a month together with several Polish soldiers. The food was terrible and the conditions were extremely bad. There was no room to lie down in the cell at night. I then went to Minsk where conditions were just as bad.4
From Minsk, Corporal Allan was transferred to a prison in Moscow where conditions were better and he was in the company of four other British escapers. Although they were all pleased to be together with fellow Britons, they had to go on a hunger strike for five days to win permission to speak to the prison governor about conditions. However, when the others were transferred to an internment camp near Smolensk, Allan was left behind. A group of French escapers who later arrived at the internment camp contacted the British embassy and reported that Allan was still being held in cell 97 at Butirka prison. While there he was beaten up by guards and interrogated on suspicion of being a spy. Although he had no information of use to the Soviets they kept pressing him for information on the British Secret Service. During some interrogations he was forced, at gunpoint, to sign documents which he was unable to read. He remained in solitary confinement for nine weeks, facing more beatings from the guards.
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Allan was transferred to another prison and began to receive improved treatment. He was given cigarettes, was allowed all the food he could eat and his clothes were laundered. Just as he thought life was getting better he was sent back to his original prison and put back into solitary confinement for a further three weeks. Eventually, after more interrogations, he was given a haircut, allowed to bathe, and was told he was free to go. The men who released him simply said he should go to the British embassy. When he told them he had no idea how to find the embassy, the men agreed to give him a lift.
While some prisoners were attempting to continue the war by escaping, there was a handful who turned their attention to assisting the Germans. Some were men who were genuinely politically inspired and believed in the Nazi cause. Others were men who had been compromised by the Germans, agreeing to betray their comrades after being given extra rations. These traitors played a dangerous game, know
ing that if they were discovered they would be lucky to survive. While held at Thorn, Fred Coster became aware of the existence of traitors among the prisoners:
The SS raided the camp and they found everything we had hidden – the tunnel, the escape kit. So we knew we had a mole and wanted to find out who. We thought it was someone on the escape committee. So the chaps running the committee gave every man a different piece of information. Then we had another raid and the Germans went to a particular place. So that showed who had given them the information. That bloke didn’t survive, he was bumped off. I quite agreed with it. When the latrines were drained they found his body in there. I don’t know who actually killed the traitor – and don’t want to know – but I’m glad they did it.
The Germans attempted to capitalize on the hopelessness felt by prisoners. Attempts were even made to create an SS unit of British soldiers. Originally called the Legion of St George and later known as the British Free Corps, recruitment to this organization was attempted by sending renegade Englishmen into POW camps to encourage POWs to join the Nazis in their crusade against Bolshevism. Their attempts were largely unsuccessful, as Fred Coster remembered: ‘We had one incident where we were told to line up. Out in front came this Englishman, but he was marching like a German. He was wearing a German uniform. He was there to tell us to join the German army. He said if anybody wanted to join they should step forward. I remember one chap stepped forward! I looked round and he was yanked back into line by the blokes around him. I don’t think he knew what he was doing – he probably just thought he’d get extra food.’
Those few who did betray their country and join the SS tended to be pre-war members of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. These included Francis MacLardy, a pharmacist from Liverpool, who was captured at Wormhoudt in Belgium while serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps. From there he had spent time in Thorn and also in Stalag 21D where he worked in the camp hospital. While there he volunteered to join the SS. Others were less enthused by the politics of the Nazi regime and were trapped into joining. One of the favoured methods was sexual entrapment, which was used against Private John Welch of the Durham Light Infantry who had been captured in Belgium in 1940. After he was caught having sex with a German woman on a working party at a sawmill, he was told he would have to join the Germans or face execution. Welch agreed and later worked to convert other British soldiers to the Nazi cause. Another convert was Hugh Cowie, a private in the Gordon Highlanders who had been captured at St Valery. He elected to join the Free Corps after being caught with a clandestine radio set while at a working party on a Silesian farm. By turning traitor he was able to avoid a court martial.
As the prisoners began to settle down into a life of captivity, not all of the prisoners who befriended Germans were behaving treacherously. The soldiers on arbeitskommandos were inevitably drawn into relationships with German civilians. In the workplace this could involve civilian workers sharing food and cigarettes with the men they worked alongside. However, in the small rural communities where some prisoners were employed, the relationships went much deeper. The remote villages seemed cut off from the rest of the world and consequently many prisoners slipped into village life. Once the guards had accepted they were not planning to run away, many prisoners discovered an unexpected freedom. They used this freedom to do much more than just go walking in the countryside or swimming in rivers. With so many German men away at the front, their wives yearned for the company of young men. In such circumstances it was inevitable that relationships would blossom. Despite the dangers to both prisoners and the women, who could face imprisonment for their actions, after three years of enforced male company the lure of a willing female was difficult to resist. Almost three years after the defeat at St Valery, Gordon Barber was eager to develop his friendship with a local woman:
Some of us used to get our ends away . . . I’d got in with a married woman, Frieda, she was about thirty-five or forty . . . You’ve got to remember we’d been out there for over three years. We were working and we were fit. We were all about twenty-three or twenty-four and the young women – in their thirties and forties – liked us. The governor of this big state farm used to make us go and help with their smallholdings. One Sunday I had to take the boar down to her sow. That was a bit funny. I remember watching the boar have a little bit. I could speak quite a lot of German by that time. I said, ‘Good job we’re not like that!’ She said, ‘What are you like?’ That was the opening. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman. But nothing happened that day. But then on my birthday, February 26th 1943, she promised me some cake. I was doing the painting in her bedroom, then she came in and put her arms around my neck. And that was the start of a beautiful friendship.
The Red Cross parcels that began to arrive from late 1940 onwards became the most important thing in stalag life. Every time there was news that parcels had arrived, a buzz would go round a camp. Men who had done little but mope and moan for weeks on end would suddenly start chatting excitedly about the delights that awaited them. Men who had hardly raised themselves from their bunks were discovered playing endless card games, gambling over the precious boiled sweets that came in the parcels. Everything in the parcels was like a treat, whether it was raisins, soap or cigarettes. Even mustard offered the bonus of adding flavour to the dishwater-dull soups. Fruit jam with real pips replaced German jam that seemed to be thickened with sawdust. The smell of bacon emanated from huts where previously only the smell of dirty laundry and old socks had filled the air. Biscuits made a welcome change from the heavy black bread issued each day by the Germans. What a difference it made to consume sticky rich tinned treacle or savour the aroma of real coffee after weeks of surviving on thin vegetable stews and ersatz coffee made from acorns. The rations offered by the Germans were perhaps enough to keep them alive – just – but they were insufficient to offer any quality of life. Quite simply the Red Cross foodstuffs were a mental and physical lifesaver.
As the war progressed, the supply of Red Cross parcels grew to have another importance. With the German war effort faltering, shortages began to appear across the Reich, leaving the guards desperate for commodities such as soap, coffee and cigarettes. Luckily for the prisoners these were three commodities they did have some access to. Those prisoners who received Red Cross parcels were able to trade these items for whatever they desired. Graham King described how the system operated:
Schiller was a staunch member of the Nazi Party and was a Brownshirt. For all that, he was very friendly and I soon had him operating a black-market enterprise with me. He was addicted to English cigarettes (verboten). English Red Cross parcels were coming through regularly and certain types of parcels addressed to individuals could be sent. All food was a bulk issue but clothing, books, records, tobacco and cigarette parcels could be sent to individuals. I even had a portable, wind-up gramophone sent out. Cigarettes, tea, chocolate (used to make up weight of 5 Kgms of clothing parcels) were the Euros of the POW camps. German Reichgeld and Lagergeld had very little purchasing power. However, chocolate, coffee, tea and soap were useful items of barter but cigarettes were at the top because they could be used singly or in multiples. The good Doktor could obtain a flash type of cigarette lighter, which became a ‘must have’ among the POW community. The Herr Doktor swapped one lighter, which cost 7.50Rms, for a tin of fifty cigarettes and I sold them on at fifty per cent profit.
Of course, trade was not the only method the prisoners used for improving their lifestyle. Theft from the enemy became an everyday part of stalag life, as Graham King later recalled:
Many of the POWs worked on local smallholdings, many poultry farms. During the egg-laying season the Germans were surprised to experience an immense shortage of fresh eggs. Of course, they were being smuggled into the camps where we experienced a glut. Eggs were so plentiful they became an embarrassment and were used in all kinds of ways. Fresh raw egg stirred up in tea with sugar and KLIM milk were a guarantee of erotic dreams and, like Ambrosia cream rice,
was much in demand . . . Eggs were smuggled into the camp by using the excellent design of the British battledress, which was a baggy blouse and trousers. The trousers were secured at the ankles by either gaiters or puttees. The eggs were gently packed into the air gaps and the smuggler marched into camp. The record number of eggs smuggled into the camp in this manner by one man, on one trip, was two hundred.
At Stalag 8B Ernie Grainger saw the effects of the diet on prisoners: ‘The main problem was stomach disorders. People were so starving, when they got Red Cross parcels they just ate the lot. Then they got perforated stomachs and duodenal ulcers. It caused us to get lots of haemorrhage cases.’
The lack of medical care led to all manner of unexpected infections and strange deaths. At one stalag hospital a post-mortem was carried out on a soldier who had died of a mysterious condition. A pus-filled tumour was found on his brain. There were signs of inflammation leading down from the tumour to the source of the infection – a decayed tooth. He had been killed by tooth decay.
While such extremes were fortunately rare, disease still became a constant companion for the POWs. During the first year of captivity the medical staff at the stalags had done their utmost to prevent the spread of disease and infection. Despite their efforts there was little they could do with the sickest of the prisoners. During 1940 the Germans put nothing in place for the treatment of men who contracted tuberculosis. Instead the men just lay in their beds at the stalag hospitals, hoping to recover. At Stalags 20A and 20B there were deaths among the TB patients, resulting in some being transferred to Stalag 3A. However, although some treatment was available, the food was inadequate and men continued to die for lack of care.
Fortunately for the ailing prisoners, someone did care about their fate. In early 1941 the Swiss intervened and insisted that 150 TB patients be transferred to the hospital at Stalag 4A. There they were housed four to a room, had access to hot and cold running water and could stroll in a park. To cope with the numbers of TB patients a second facility was opened for them at Winterberg. Then, when the hospital at Stalag 4A was closed to patients, 130 men from the BEF were transferred to a sanatorium at Königswartha that had previously been a hospital for infectious diseases. Despite its history, the facilities were of a poor standard. Some men were in stone buildings, others in wooden huts, and once again they were sleeping in two-tier bunks with no flushing toilets, just latrines over cesspits. The conditions resulted in the death rate rising again. Treatment of TB only improved in 1942 when mass radiography for suspected cases became available. Even then it could take up to nine months to find a hospital bed for a TB patient.