by Bill Jones
At the end of every day, guards and prisoners ambled back together, a single warm mass of men. And then months later, when the harvest was in, they shared bottles of brown ale between the hayricks and rubbed pollen from their dripping noses. That August, there’d even been a few local girls, spilling away from the victory celebrations to plant kisses on eager mouths, and sometimes much more. Everywhere, the dividing lines were melting, and with them were going the lunacy and the hate. No one talked about the war much. Mostly, all they talked about was home.
But of them all, Hartmann said the least.
He’d left Camp 21 the same day.
After a few hours shivering in a cell, he’d been smuggled south; just him and two silent guards, switching from train to train, until the snow gradually gave way to the joyless moors of northern England.
Before he left, they’d offered him a new name, but he’d said no. Max Hartmann was who he was. Hartmann would do just fine. If people asked him what he’d done, he would tell them.
But when the last train finally stopped he was no longer a black. By some act of bureaucratic magic, he’d been reclassified. Now he was a ‘friend of peace’ – a zero-risk prisoner – and the few companions he found asked him nothing and volunteered less.
All of them, he guessed, were carrying secrets of one size or another.
As summer approached, the fields bounced with new-born lambs and every morning began with birdsong. Horse-drawn wagons dragged mountains of wet meadow grass along lanes buzzing with insects, and wild poppies taller than a man blazed defiantly among the golden stalks.
Every night – still exultant after their labours – the men played games until dusk: learning cricket with the guards when it was fine, rehearsing plays and musical cabaret when it was not. For the most part, Hartmann was content merely to watch. Whenever possible – as he always had done – he preferred his own company to that of others. It was a relief for him not to have his solitude questioned; and, when he could find it, the silence of his new life was a perpetual joy.
On a whim, he had taken up painting, finding a talent which the prison staff was happy to encourage, and by early spring his pictures ringed the inside of the prisoners’ canteen.
Whenever he was asked for a portrait, Hartmann declined.
Around the camp, he painted only the flowers which the men cultivated in beds thick with night stocks and lupin. Away from it – sketching quickly while the others ate their lunch – he filled his pages with clouds. Portraits required eye contact, and, for reasons he fully understood, no one seemed to look at each other for too long any more.
In August, he allowed his birthday to pass unnoticed.
In September, there were fires on the moorland which rose to the north in a wide purple band. Every day for a week, the men were bussed up to the heather, armed with brushes to beat down the snaking lines of flame. Stretched out across the blackened fell, prisoners and farmers had stood shoulder to shoulder, struggling on until the last flicker was extinguished.
When it was over, they’d all shaken hands and embraced, chalky grins in sooty faces.
Then one day in late October, he was told not to report for work the next day. There was a visitor coming. They’d need some time together alone. Without even asking, he knew who it was.
‘You look well,’ she said.
It was a warm morning – an unexpected summer encore – and they’d chosen to sit on a wooden bench looking out across the stubbled fields.
‘Is everything all right?’
Alongside her, Hartmann felt filthy. He looked at his hands. The palms were scored with dirt.
‘I love it here. Thank you. I paint now.’
‘Yes, I heard. No problems? No questions?’
He knew what she meant. ‘The war’s finished. No one talks about that any more.’
A breeze stirred, dislodging the first weakened leaves of the season.
‘Listen. I’ve come with some news.’
Hartmann felt himself freeze.
‘They were hanged. Yesterday morning.’
‘Koenig?’
‘All five of them.’
Somewhere out of sight, a wagon loaded with squealing pigs was heading to the weekly market.
‘You should have been here a few months ago,’ he said. ‘The flowers were amazing.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. We’d have found them without you.’
For the first time, Hartmann looked at her properly. ‘And Sieber?’
‘Nothing. No one ever admitted to anything.’
Soon they would be needing wood for the stoves, Hartmann thought. For weeks, the prisoners had been stacking it undercover, seasoned and ready for the winter.
‘Are you staying nearby? Is this the last time we meet?’
‘No to the first question. Train back to London this evening.’
‘And the second question?’
‘Yes. This is the last time.’
Of course. He knew that. She had only ever been doing her job.
‘Koenig asked me to pass on a message.’
‘Really?’
‘He said he was sorry.’
Hartmann might think about that later. But not now. And maybe not ever. ‘Did they find your boyfriend?’
‘No news, sadly. I don’t suppose there will be now.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I was happy for you, though.’
Hartmann smiled, and she leaned sideways to kiss him on the cheek.
‘At last.’ He laughed. ‘The ice melts.’
‘You really do look well. More like your age at last.’
‘They sent me a photograph. Would you like to see it?’
‘I’d love to.’
He reached into the inside pocket of his tunic.
With luck he’d be home by Christmas.
The three of them. Together at last.
Author’s Note
A few years ago, the newspapers – and the television – got wind of a magical story.
A former member of the 12th SS Panzer Division had left £430,000 to the Scottish village of Comrie where he was imprisoned during, and after, the war. His name was Heinrich Steinmeyer. He’d been a self-confessed Nazi fanatic, and five years of his life had been spent behind the wires of Black Camp 21.
Steinmeyer had been lucky. Steinmeyer had got home, albeit a different person, softened by his time amid the Perthshire hills.
Sadly Wolfgang Rosterg never did. His remains were taken to the Cannock Chase German Military Cemetery, together with 2,797 other POWs, airmen and submariners whose lives ended on or around these shores during the last war.
He can be found there still, surrounded by whispering birch trees in Plot 4, Row 15, sharing his final resting place with Willy Thormann, a forty-three-year-old Oberleutnant whose body was found hanging from a tree outside Camp 21 just a few weeks before the events in this book transpired.
The whereabouts of Goltz, Bruling, Mertens, Zuhlsdorff and Koenig, however, are much less certain.
After a military trial lasting several months, they were executed on the same day at Pentonville Prison in October 1945 by the state executioner Albert Pierrepoint, thereby entering the record books as the largest number of men ever put to death in England for the same crime. Their bodies were interred within the grounds of the prison and to the best of my knowledge, they were never repatriated.
Many things intrigued me about their story and led to the writing of this book. To begin with, very few people are aware of the scale of the German POW presence in Britain between 1944 and 1947. Nor are people aware of the tensions – and recurring violence – that erupted in so many of the 600 ad hoc camps thrown up to accommodate such an overwhelming flood of men. Sadly, given the paucity of oral testimony, it is likely much of this history has been lost for ever.
Most of the camps themselves disappeared as quickly as they had first arrived. In September 1946, there were still over 400,000 German prisoners stuck in Britain. But just two years later, the
only ones who remained were the dead ones – or the ones who’d fallen in love with local girls. Nissen huts not reclaimed as barns or pigsties were quickly flattened by the weather or by bulldozers. Virtually all the fascinating graffiti, murals and hidden tunnels which the German prisoners had created were gone.
However, the Devizes plot and the murder at Camp 21 achieved a sufficient degree of notoriety for a few records to be kept. Highly censored accounts of the men’s trial, together with the official investigations into the so-called ‘March on London’ mean that we have names, dates and horrific first-hand testimony. There have also been two non-fiction accounts of these events.
The first – The March on London by Charles Whiting – is best forgotten. The second – For Führer and Fatherland by Roderick de Normann – is a far more sober account which draws on those public records which are available, together with detailed witness testimony from the few who were sought out at the time to give their stories.
Common to both books are the holes and gaps which can never be filled. For obvious reasons, almost every aspect of the case was shrouded in official secrecy and no merit whatsoever was seen in publicising the glaring weaknesses in camp security which led to these incidents . . . and many others. Such information as did get out was carefully managed and doctored to minimise public anxiety.
However, the key scaffolding of my story is grounded in absolute and unchallenged fact. During late 1944, a large group of SS prisoners attempted to break out of Devizes POW camp using stolen munitions, in the vague expectation of making some headway towards London. Details of the plot were leaked, and the conspirators – who had indeed checked out local airfields and munitions stores – achieved little more than a very boisterous riot which was silenced (as in this book) by paras wielding machine guns.
Within a few hours of that episode, the ringleaders were sent for interrogation in London and from there to Comrie in Scotland, the setting for what became known as Black Camp 21. Tragically their number included one Wolfgang Rosterg, an intriguing polyglot whose presence in Scotland remains a matter of no little mystery.
What we can be sure of is that he was much older than the undisputed conspirators; that he took (at best) a doubtful view of Hitler’s war, and (at worst) an openly sceptical one which would certainly have contributed to his unpopularity; and that his skill in languages granted him privileged access to senior German and British officers in both Devizes and Comrie.
Whether he was an active mole will forever remain unknown. What is certain, however, is that his professional experience would have made him an attractive recruit, and that British military intelligence were actively engaged in the ‘turning’ of German prisoners whenever, and wherever, they could.
The London Cage was central to this tactic, and the character of Colonel Alexander Scotland was central to its operations throughout the period in question. For insights into what went on there, I am especially thankful for Ian Cobain’s book Cruel Britannia as Scotland’s own post-war memoir was so massively censored that we will never know the full extent (or legality) of the interrogation techniques used in what is now part of the Russian Embassy.
So who had betrayed the Devizes plot?
The absolute truth is, we will never know. And quite possibly, it was not one single person. The cabal of SS hardliners behind it was so riven with self-seeking fantasists that the information could have seeped out anywhere, and (according to de Normann’s book) American intelligence had caught wind of the Devizes planning long before it happened. However, in the accounts of Rosterg’s murder hearing, I was intrigued to see that seven men had been charged initially and that the cases against two of them quickly faded. Were they informants? What deal had been struck to save them from the noose? Or was the evidence against them simply not persuasive enough?
Using fiction to explore this story seemed to me to offer a real and exciting way of plumbing the holes behind all these questions. For one thing, I could start the narrative back in the chaos that followed the D-Day landings in June 1944, enabling me to trace the very real trajectories of thousands of Germans after their capture that summer. For another, I could ascribe character and motive to real people who, because they died so young, can only ever exist now in just one dimension. And since I was keen to write a book about the nature of friendship, the story seemed horribly well suited.
But please note: this is fiction, and scrupulous readers may well take issue with the liberties that have been taken. The italicised letters and memoranda, for instance, are based on actual contemporary documents and interviews, but are, in most cases, composite representations and not word-for-word originals. If there are factual errors in here (although obviously I hope there are none) I apologise. Great pains have been taken to ensure authenticity throughout, but military historians with a fine-tooth comb may think otherwise.
Hartmann, of course, is my single biggest invention, although the trajectory of his life is real in every detail. From Vienna to Yorkshire via Normandy and the Russian front is the exact same journey undertaken by many thousands of young German men.
Far and away the biggest license has been taken with the five men who went to the scaffold. What little information is known about Rosterg’s killers would scarcely cover the back of an envelope, and, initially, this dearth of fact made me hesitate before telling this story in a fictional form. My only clue to their characters – and it was a substantial one – lay in the violence they brought to bear on the tragic, helpless figure of Rosterg. Whoever they were – and they were all scarily young – they were deemed to have been sufficiently dangerous by the British authorities to be sent north to Camp 21. Misguided they may have been, but innocent they were not, and although we can never know, I sincerely hope that my unflinching portrayal of them is a fair one.
In any case, it is Rosterg who exerts the biggest pull on our curiosity and although more is known about him than the others, he still floats through the facts in a tantalising and ambiguous way.
According to some reports, he was a deserter and a collaborator. However, neither of those things is likely to be true. Rosterg was significantly older than his fellow-prisoners; he was well travelled; and his job – which de Normann claims linked him to the manufacturers of Zyklon B – marked him as an outsider. When you factor in an air of cosmopolitan self-importance, it suddenly becomes easy to imagine him being dangerously vulnerable to the paranoia of his fellow-prisoners.
However, no speculation is required about the circumstances of his death. For sheer horror, the official account of his murder has few parallels in prison history, and there is something about his resting place that craves our empathy. If readers find the descriptions in this book upsetting, then they should steer clear of the official accounts. Rosterg’s death was an act of sustained savagery which led to a relentless search for the perpetrators. Camp omerta ensured that it would be several weeks before the culprits’ names were leaked and the early arrests triggered in my book by Hartmann’s disclosures are this writer’s act of necessary licence.
I have drawn wisdom from a number of excellent books which deal with this period in our history. Some I have already mentioned. D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor is a masterpiece, as is his Stalingrad. Several books have looked at POW camps in Britain, in particular Prisoner of War Camps in Britain During the Second World War by Jon and Diane Sutherland; Churchill’s Unexpected Guests: Prisoners of War in Britain in World War II by Sophie Jackson; and Camp 165 Watten: Scotland’s Most Secretive Prisoner of War Camp by Valerie Campbell. Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying is another truly extraordinary book which draws together transcripts of interviews secretly recorded during interrogation at the London Cage and elsewhere. Compiled by Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, it provides the authentic voice of the German soldier, and it helped me in my bid to understand how they talked to each other . . . and how they talked to their British captors.
A few other key people have helped me to complete this bo
ok. My agent Mark Stanton who (wisely) sent me back to the drawing board so often, I lost count. Alison Rae, the managing editor at Polygon, who, bizarrely, turned out to have a family connection to the village of Comrie. Nancy Webber, whose enthusiasm for the manuscript as a reader was followed by the painstaking diligence she showed in her copy-edit of the final text. And at the camp itself, Fiona Davidson, who was kind enough to take me around the site on two memorable occasions. Finally – and they’ll know why I’m thanking them – honourable mentions for Freddy Markham, Margot Jones, Brian Dorling, Martin Plant, Fay Markham, along with my sons Sam and Alex – every one of whom will be glad if I never mention this story again.
Last of all, I wonder sometimes if this was a story I was destined to write.
Camp 21 is still uniquely intact – sitting serene in its bowl of hills, a sea of rusty orange roofs, almost exactly as it was when Rosterg was killed there.
In early June 1968, as a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, I spent a week at the place when it was still open for cadet groups from all over the country. To us (and thousands of others like me) it was known simply as Cultybraggan Camp, and during the long spring evenings we would gather around a transistor radio to listen to the new Rolling Stones record ‘Jumping Jack Flash’, and it is for this reason that I can date it so precisely.
We slept in bunks in one of the Nissen huts, although not the one where Rosterg was killed, as that had been knocked down some years before. No one shared with us the story of what had happened there. But we all still felt the ghosts, and when the week was up, none of us was sorry to leave.
Now I know why.