Arbeitskommando
The transfer from the Italian Campo PG73 to Germany probably saved my life though it certainly didn’t seem so at the time. We were crowded into cattle trucks and freight wagons, just like ‘the transports’ to the Concentration Camps. In those wagons, with just a couple of brief breaks for exercise, we stayed until we reached our destination deep in Germany.
It was late summer and in Italy it had still been comfortably warm. We hadn’t been travelling many hours though before the air began to chill and the train slowed down with frequent stops. We were going up into the mountains. I think that it must have been on or near the Brenner Pass that the train stopped with a jerk. We heard rifle shots and a commotion outside our wagon. Its doors opened and furious German guards, cursing and brandishing their rifles bundled a further dozen or so prisoners in with us. The doors slammed and the train moved away again.
We learned from the newcomers that in their wagon some of the more enterprising inmates had managed to lift two or three of the floorboards. Whenever the train stopped two or three prisoners would drop through and lie down between the rails. When the train moved on over their heads they would get up and make for the woods that surrounded the track.
At the last stop one of the guards had spotted what was going on. A prisoner, realizing they had been discovered, got onto his feet and fled, making a bid for freedom. The guards had fired at him – but had missed! Prisoners remaining in the wagon had been herded out and distributed among the other wagons.
Did any of those who escaped get clean away? I never discovered whether they did or not. It was a chilly night and they certainly weren’t dressed for the cold. On the other hand we were up in the mountains in the Italian/Austrian/Yugoslav border area. It was quite possible that Italian Anti-Fascist Partisans or Tito’s Partisans from Yugoslavia had been keeping an eye on the train. I certainly hope so.
The train steamed on – and on – for two nights and part of two days. It was just possible to get a glimpse of the world beyond the track through the ventilator high in the side of the wagon. We took turns to see whatever was to be seen.. We were eager to know where we were. I was having my turn as we crawled through a station. I spotted a board with MÄNNER printed on it in big letters and exclaimed excitedly that ‘We’ve just passed through a place called Männer’, only to be told by someone who understood a little German that this word was the equivalent of the GENTLEMEN sign that you might see on any English station. Thus I learnt my first German word!
Eventually the train slowed down and came to a halt. The doors opened ‘Alleman austehen!’ came the order and we climbed out to survey our surroundings.
We saw barbed wire fences with high guard towers at regular intervals. There were wooden huts and one or two more permanent looking buildings. There was a well-guarded entrance gate. Grey-uniformed soldiers could be seen going purposefully about their business. It was how we had always imagined Concentration Camps to be. The next few hours did nothing to dispel that impression.
Guards wielding their rifle butts as clubs hurried us through the gateway into a reception area. ‘Everybody strip!’ came the order from an English speaking Feldwebel or sergeant, ‘All clothes must be burnt’. They had evidently discovered that we were louse infested.
Naked except for the identity discs round our necks, we were each handed a piece of soap and were ushered into an enormous shower chamber. Warm water squirted down from jets in the ceiling and we gave ourselves a very welcome shower. We rinsed ourselves and then continued to stand under the jets as warm air gushed down to dry us off. It was only after the war when, back in England, I learned all about the Nazi death camps, that I realized how easily that shower room could have been converted into a gas chamber!
Still naked we were photographed and finger-printed (could those photographs still be filed in some German archive!), given immunisation injections, and medically examined. Our names, army ranks, ages, home addresses and former occupations were duly noted. ‘Other rank’ prisoners like myself had to work, and the main purpose of the medical examination was – I have little doubt – to decide how much hard work they could reasonably get out of us.
Our eyes and ears were inspected. Our arm and leg muscles were squeezed. We were carefully observed as we were made to walk up and down. It was all uncomfortably like everybody’s idea of a slave market with our medical examiners working for potential buyers! Most of us were passed for ‘Schwerarbeit’ (heavy work). We were, at long last, given new clean underclothes and British uniforms (but with a large red triangle painted on the back of the jackets), presumably provided by the Red Cross. It was a great relief to wear British uniform again after the louse infested and totally inadequate Italian Army uniforms we had been wearing.
We were shown into barrack rooms where we were to live until summoned to join an Arbeitskommando or working unit. In the meantime we were free to explore the Stalag (short for Kreigsgefangenerstammlager or Prisoner of War Camp) in which we found ourselves. We were, so we learned, in Stalag IVb at Mühlberg in Saxony, not very far from Leipzig. A wide roadway divided the camp into two compounds. In one of them were the ‘western’, British, Colonial and USA prisoners while the other house Soviet prisoners.
We could see them, skeletal figures, behind the wire on the other side of the roadway. The Soviet Union was not a signatory of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POW and it was obvious that their conditions were far worse than ours. Two stories current on our side of the wire may or may not have been true but they seemed quite probable.
It was said that when a Soviet prisoner died, as happened fairly frequently, his mates would support his body between them when they were counted so that they could continue to draw his meagre rations. It was also said that the Germans had let fierce guard dogs loose in the Soviet compound at night to prevent prisoners being out of their huts after dark. The Russians had managed to kill the dogs – and had eaten them!
Our rations, black bread, margarine, swede soup, were perhaps just a little better than those we had had in Italy (after all, they wanted us to be fit enough to work!). Most important though, we learned that Red Cross Parcels were received regularly and distributed promptly.
Not that we stayed there long enough to receive one. On the third (or was it the fourth?) morning I was wakened by a guard while it was still dark and told to get dressed and to be ready to move. This was really where my good luck began though, once again, I certainly didn’t realize that at the time.
Thirty of us were selected (I have no idea by what means) and, in the cold light of dawn, we clambered with two guards onto a passenger train. This was luxury travel for us after our previous experience of cattle trucks and goods vans. A compartment had been reserved for us. We could actually sit down in something approaching comfort and peer through real windows at the countryside through which the train was passing.
After a while we found ourselves passing through the suburbs and into the centre of a substantial city. The train slowed down and stopped. A notice board on the station announced DRESDEN. We had all heard of Dresden of course.
One of the guards, who spoke a little English said, ‘Here vee change trains. Efferybody out!’ We piled out onto the platform and made our way to another platform where a train, and another reserved carriage, awaited us.
Gordon Meadows, one of our number, had been a fellow member of ‘B’ Troop of the 67th Medium Regiment’s 231st Battery. Unlike me he had taken advantage of German lessons that some fellow-prisoners had organised back in Italy. He asked in halting German where we were going. The reply sounded like ‘Tsittow’. The guard wrote it down, ‘Zittau’. None of us had ever heard of it. What work would we be doing? ‘Loading and unloading railway wagons’, came the reply.
The nature of the countryside began to change. All we had previously seen had been a level plain closely resembling our own native East Anglia. Now though, hills – or possibly mountains – could be seen in the distance.
At last we reached our destination. It was late afternoon. We marched through the streets of Zittau for the first time. It was, we noted, a smallish town (I later learned that the population was about 30,000) with cobbled streets and squares and many buildings that dated from the 19th century or earlier.
We were the first British prisoners that the town had seen and we were watched with some curiosity. We were curious too. There were elderly German men with enormous moustaches, puffing at huge pipes and no doubt mentally comparing us with Brits whom they may have encountered in World War I. There were a few German women standing in their doorways eyeing us up and down. I think that we were all glad that we were wearing new British uniform and looking reasonably smart.
We were also surprised at the number of men and women, obviously not Germans, who greeted us with shy waves and friendly smiles. They were shabbily dressed, often wearing padded jackets, and the women and girls mostly wore headscarves. On their shoulders or in some cases on the left breast they all had a small label marked OST. They were Ostarbeiters, ‘slave workers’ who had been conscripted in Russia and the Ukraine and brought to Germany to supply the deficiencies in the labour market.
We halted in a large cobbled square in what appeared to be the centre of the town. It was the ‘Platz der S.A.’ in an area called Neustadt. The square was dominated by an enormous building called the Salzhaus, a building with several storeys above which was a huge ‘mansard’ roof which itself contained yet more storeys! The entrance to our new home was into a building on one side of the square quite near the Salzhaus.
The building was what remained of the old Town Theatre, the greater part of which had been destroyed by fire. Our guards lived on the ground floor while on the floor above we had a day room and a dormitory. The day room was furnished with a long table and wooden benches and had an old-fashioned solid fuel cooking range. There were hangers for our coats and also wooden-soled slippers (Holzpantofeln) that we were told we must always put on directly we entered. My memory is a little shaky on this point but I think that natural lighting was supplied via a skylight.
Our dormitory had fifteen double bunks (one up and one down) with each bunk provided with two blankets and a filled straw palliasse. Opening from it was a communal washroom and a separate biggish bathroom containing a sit-down bath and a w.c. Windows were double glazed and, of course, barred. In the middle of the dormitory was a ‘tortoise stove’ with a flue-pipe passing through the ceiling.
Compared with our previous accommodation both in Italy and in Germany it was positively palatial! It seems that the go-ahead Zittau town council had invested in 30 British prisoners capable of heavy work to help ease the town’s manual labour shortages. They were responsible for our accommodation and they paid for our rations. So, once again I became involved with local government – this time at the lowest possible level!
Our home was known as ‘the Neustadt Lager’. We learned that we were Arbeitskommando 1153 and that, although we had been processed in Stalag IVb we were now officially an outpost of Stalag IVa. To this day I haven’t the faintest idea of where Stalag IVa was!
It was from this base that, every day we went out to work. This was very hard and exhausting, for up to ten hours a day and with only one rest day in three weeks. It was mostly on Zittau’s railway sidings, unloading and sacking coal, scrap metal, flour, sugar, potatoes and other vegetables from the railway trucks and, sometimes, delivering them to customers. We also, when available, did any general labouring jobs that needed brawn rather than brains – street sweeping, grocery deliveries with a hand cart, digging graves in Zittau cemetery, working in a bakery, an opencast coalmine, an iron foundry and so on.
We went out in parties of two or three, sometimes with one of the guards but more often with a German civilian wearing a yellow ‘eagle and swastika’ armband and sworn in as a ‘special constable’.
It would have been easy enough to escape from Zittau but almost impossible to get much further. The nearest neutral country was hundreds of miles away. The fighting front? Well the eastern front was certainly near enough to us during the final few months of the war but I’d have said that the chances of an escaping prisoner getting unscathed through both the German and the Soviet front lines were nil!
Besides, we were too exhausted at the end of a ten hour working day to plan and execute a successful escape bid. That option was open to ‘officers and gentlemen’ confined in an Offlag with nothing to do all day and ‘other rank’ orderlies to help them do it – but not to us!
At first, when we spoke no German and were thoroughly out of condition, the regime nearly killed us. However the rations were better than in Italy (I found black bread and ersatz coffee to be tolerable, though ersatz ‘tea’ was awful), the Red Cross parcels arrived regularly and - well, we were often working where the food was, weren't we? We were rarely hungry. Nor were we cold. Our rooms were double glazed, we had two efficient solid-fuel stoves and we worked regularly loading and unloading coal trucks! We regularly brought coal brickettes back to the lager and, to make sure of the guards’ compliance, we brought some back for them too.
It was surprising how soon we recovered our fitness, and how soon we picked up enough pidgin German to converse with our guards, the German civilians and the other POWs and civilian slave workers (Russians, Ukrainians, Jugoslavs, Poles, French, Dutch) with whom we came into contact. One guard, spotting two of us in animated discussion with a Soviet POW enquired what language we were speaking. He was astonished to learn that it was German – or rather Gefangenerdeutsch (POW German) – totally ungrammatical German interspersed with Russian, French and English phrases.
Our guards weren’t too bad either. They were neither the sadistic bullies nor the half-witted ‘goons’ of fiction. A couple of them were really likeable and I’ve often thought of them and hoped that they got home safely at the end. They knew that they’d got safe and cushy jobs – and there weren’t too many of those in Germany in 1944 and early 1945! There is too, a certain cameraderie among the very lowest ranks even of opposing armies. Many of us suspected that it was officers and NCOs, whatever uniform they might be wearing, who were our real enemies!
I have thought since that one reason why our lives as POWs in Germany were so much more tolerable than those of virtually every other POW to whom I have ever spoken was the fact that we were a very small working Arbeitskommando, miles from any Stalag and with only shadowy connections with the one to which we were officially connected. Our guards were former front-line soldiers from the Eastern Front whom wounds or ill-health now prevented from undertaking anything more strenuous than keeping an eye on POWs.
Not one of them had ambitions for promotion that might have encouraged him to demonstrate to his superiors his keenness, efficiency and hatred of ‘the enemy’. Anyway, there were no superiors to impress. We didn’t see an officer for months on end. In charge of us was Unteroffizier Kurt Laudenbacher. His rank was the equivalent of a British army corporal or (in the artillery) bombardier.
He shouted at us a lot. We used to call him ‘Alleman’ because of the frequency that he would shout ‘Alleman raus’ (everybody up) or ‘Alleman saubermachen’ (everybody get on with cleaning) but he had essentially an easygoing nature. He was always prepared to listen to what we had to say and do what he could about it. He was in early middle age and, as he once confided in me, before the war he had worked in a brewery.
We were paid for our work. Needless to say once the cost of our accommodation and food had been deducted, there wasn’t much left – but there was something. When we first arrived in Zittau we were paid in ‘Lagergeld’, ‘Mickey Mouse’ paper money that could only be spent in a shop or a canteen in a POW Stalag. We pointed out that in our position this so-called pay was totally useless. He agreed, took the matter up with the Lager authorities and we were henceforth paid in real Reichmarks and Pfennigs. We may well have been the only prisoners in Germany with real money in our pockets!
Alleman had a sense of humour too. We were the only people in Zittau capable of doing heavy work. The fit Germans had all been called up and the Ostarbeiters simply weren’t fed well enough to do the hard work of which we were capable. We were in heavy demand. One morning a foreman turned up from a Felt Factory (Filzfabrik) where we often worked. His boss had told him that he had to take six British prisoners back with him. ‘I’ve only got two to spare’, said Allyman. The foreman, who was clearly scared of his boss, wasn’t inclined to take no for an answer.
‘But my boss says I must bring six’, he pleaded (in German of course). Allyman wagged his finger at him; ‘You tell your boss’, he said, ‘That if he wants six British prisoners he must go to England and catch them!’
German civilians too – the only time that I personally encountered real hostility was immediately after those terrible fire bomb raids on Dresden (only some sixty miles from Zittau) on 13th February 1945 – and then the hostility was mild and only verbal. I don’t find it surprising that air crews captured in the wake of (to my mind) such inexcusable terror raids, should have been given a rough reception
One unusual job on which I was engaged gave me quite undeserved local celebrity status many years later. At the time it was ‘just another heavy job’.
I was one of a party of prisoners who were detailed to load heavy boxes of ‘treasures’ from Zittau town museum onto a lorry and to go with them to the summit into what I thought was a ‘Dracula style’ ruined castle but was, as I subsequently discovered, a ruined monastery at the summit.
It was over sixty years later that I learned that I had, in all probability, transported to the top of Mount Oybin, Zittau’s unique ‘Lenten Veil’ or ‘Fastentuch’, an enormous piece of cloth, seven centuries old and decorated with 90 painted biblical illustrations, 45 from the old Testament and 45 from the New. Thus, I had unwittingly played a small part in the centuries old history of this unique artefact. (See ‘The Zittauer Fastentuch’).
Another job sadly ended in tragedy. It was a ‘night job’ in which we had to go to Zittau’s railway sidings and unload a railway wagon (I have forgotten its contents) into a lorry. I think that it was expected that the lorry would have to make several trips to complete the job.
There were four or five of us. The wagon’s side door was open, the lorry’s tail-gate down and the lorry was backing up to the wagon for us to transfer the load. Trying to help, one of my fellow-prisoners stepped onto the track and started to signal to the lorry driver to help him complete this manoeuvre. I was just a foot or so away.
Suddenly, without previous warning, there was a rushing sound, a crash and the truck we were to unload leapt forward as a runaway truck sped down the line to us crashing into the buffers of our truck, crushing my comrade and killing him instantly.
He was given a military funeral a week later. Looking, we hoped, our very smartest, we slow-marched from our lager to the cemetery, stood to attention through the brief grave-side service and threw sprigs of yew onto the coffin. A Wehrmacht firing squad from the nearby barracks, also looking very smart, fired a volley over the grave. It was a moving occasion.
As far as I am concerned one of the saddest things about this wartime tragedy is that, while I can remember so much, I can’t remember that prisoner’s name or indeed anything about him. I am quite sure though that he wasn’t a member of my 67th Medium Regiment RA.
Time passed quickly. From the end of 1944 we could hear the constantly increasing rumble of gunfire from the east. Throughout that bitter winter a steady stream of refugees from the eastern front poured through the town – old men (the young were all in the forces) women and children, many on foot, trudging through the snow, some with their belongings piled on ox carts, yet others with ramshackle motor vehicles running on ‘wood gas’. Among them were prisoners of war and civilian ‘slave workers’ together with defeated remnants of the armies of Germany’s allies cold, tired and dispirited Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians and renegade Cossacks.
Their plight made us forget our own problems – and we had no doubt that the end was near.
We were marched out of Zittau on 7th May 1945 with the town rocking under constant gunfire. As we climbed into the Sudeten foothills we watched Zittau experience its first air raid as Soviet aircraft dropped bombs on the town. We spent a chilly night in a barn with the sound of gunfire all around us. The next day we began our journey home!
Former prisoners of war are sometimes asked if they are able ‘to forgive and forget’. I shall never forget my experiences as a POW – but my memories are by no means wholly negative ones. I sometimes think that it was as in that prison camp in Italy and on the railway sidings and in the streets of Zittau that I finally grew up.
I have nothing to forgive. Nor, I think, do either the Italians or the Germans have anything for which to forgive me.
………………….
See also ‘The bombing of Dresden’, ‘Home Again – at last’ and ‘Return to Zittau’ in this ‘My Life’ series.
The transfer from the Italian Campo PG73 to Germany probably saved my life though it certainly didn’t seem so at the time. We were crowded into cattle trucks and freight wagons, just like ‘the transports’ to the Concentration Camps. In those wagons, with just a couple of brief breaks for exercise, we stayed until we reached our destination deep in Germany.
It was late summer and in Italy it had still been comfortably warm. We hadn’t been travelling many hours though before the air began to chill and the train slowed down with frequent stops. We were going up into the mountains. I think that it must have been on or near the Brenner Pass that the train stopped with a jerk. We heard rifle shots and a commotion outside our wagon. Its doors opened and furious German guards, cursing and brandishing their rifles bundled a further dozen or so prisoners in with us. The doors slammed and the train moved away again.
We learned from the newcomers that in their wagon some of the more enterprising inmates had managed to lift two or three of the floorboards. Whenever the train stopped two or three prisoners would drop through and lie down between the rails. When the train moved on over their heads they would get up and make for the woods that surrounded the track.
At the last stop one of the guards had spotted what was going on. A prisoner, realizing they had been discovered, got onto his feet and fled, making a bid for freedom. The guards had fired at him – but had missed! Prisoners remaining in the wagon had been herded out and distributed among the other wagons.
Did any of those who escaped get clean away? I never discovered whether they did or not. It was a chilly night and they certainly weren’t dressed for the cold. On the other hand we were up in the mountains in the Italian/Austrian/Yugoslav border area. It was quite possible that Italian Anti-Fascist Partisans or Tito’s Partisans from Yugoslavia had been keeping an eye on the train. I certainly hope so.
The train steamed on – and on – for two nights and part of two days. It was just possible to get a glimpse of the world beyond the track through the ventilator high in the side of the wagon. We took turns to see whatever was to be seen.. We were eager to know where we were. I was having my turn as we crawled through a station. I spotted a board with MÄNNER printed on it in big letters and exclaimed excitedly that ‘We’ve just passed through a place called Männer’, only to be told by someone who understood a little German that this word was the equivalent of the GENTLEMEN sign that you might see on any English station. Thus I learnt my first German word!
Eventually the train slowed down and came to a halt. The doors opened ‘Alleman austehen!’ came the order and we climbed out to survey our surroundings.
We saw barbed wire fences with high guard towers at regular intervals. There were wooden huts and one or two more permanent looking buildings. There was a well-guarded entrance gate. Grey-uniformed soldiers could be seen going purposefully about their business. It was how we had always imagined Concentration Camps to be. The next few hours did nothing to dispel that impression.
Guards wielding their rifle butts as clubs hurried us through the gateway into a reception area. ‘Everybody strip!’ came the order from an English speaking Feldwebel or sergeant, ‘All clothes must be burnt’. They had evidently discovered that we were louse infested.
Naked except for the identity discs round our necks, we were each handed a piece of soap and were ushered into an enormous shower chamber. Warm water squirted down from jets in the ceiling and we gave ourselves a very welcome shower. We rinsed ourselves and then continued to stand under the jets as warm air gushed down to dry us off. It was only after the war when, back in England, I learned all about the Nazi death camps, that I realized how easily that shower room could have been converted into a gas chamber!
Still naked we were photographed and finger-printed (could those photographs still be filed in some German archive!), given immunisation injections, and medically examined. Our names, army ranks, ages, home addresses and former occupations were duly noted. ‘Other rank’ prisoners like myself had to work, and the main purpose of the medical examination was – I have little doubt – to decide how much hard work they could reasonably get out of us.
Our eyes and ears were inspected. Our arm and leg muscles were squeezed. We were carefully observed as we were made to walk up and down. It was all uncomfortably like everybody’s idea of a slave market with our medical examiners working for potential buyers! Most of us were passed for ‘Schwerarbeit’ (heavy work). We were, at long last, given new clean underclothes and British uniforms (but with a large red triangle painted on the back of the jackets), presumably provided by the Red Cross. It was a great relief to wear British uniform again after the louse infested and totally inadequate Italian Army uniforms we had been wearing.
We were shown into barrack rooms where we were to live until summoned to join an Arbeitskommando or working unit. In the meantime we were free to explore the Stalag (short for Kreigsgefangenerstammlager or Prisoner of War Camp) in which we found ourselves. We were, so we learned, in Stalag IVb at Mühlberg in Saxony, not very far from Leipzig. A wide roadway divided the camp into two compounds. In one of them were the ‘western’, British, Colonial and USA prisoners while the other house Soviet prisoners.
We could see them, skeletal figures, behind the wire on the other side of the roadway. The Soviet Union was not a signatory of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POW and it was obvious that their conditions were far worse than ours. Two stories current on our side of the wire may or may not have been true but they seemed quite probable.
It was said that when a Soviet prisoner died, as happened fairly frequently, his mates would support his body between them when they were counted so that they could continue to draw his meagre rations. It was also said that the Germans had let fierce guard dogs loose in the Soviet compound at night to prevent prisoners being out of their huts after dark. The Russians had managed to kill the dogs – and had eaten them!
Our rations, black bread, margarine, swede soup, were perhaps just a little better than those we had had in Italy (after all, they wanted us to be fit enough to work!). Most important though, we learned that Red Cross Parcels were received regularly and distributed promptly.
Not that we stayed there long enough to receive one. On the third (or was it the fourth?) morning I was wakened by a guard while it was still dark and told to get dressed and to be ready to move. This was really where my good luck began though, once again, I certainly didn’t realize that at the time.
Thirty of us were selected (I have no idea by what means) and, in the cold light of dawn, we clambered with two guards onto a passenger train. This was luxury travel for us after our previous experience of cattle trucks and goods vans. A compartment had been reserved for us. We could actually sit down in something approaching comfort and peer through real windows at the countryside through which the train was passing.
After a while we found ourselves passing through the suburbs and into the centre of a substantial city. The train slowed down and stopped. A notice board on the station announced DRESDEN. We had all heard of Dresden of course.
One of the guards, who spoke a little English said, ‘Here vee change trains. Efferybody out!’ We piled out onto the platform and made our way to another platform where a train, and another reserved carriage, awaited us.
Gordon Meadows, one of our number, had been a fellow member of ‘B’ Troop of the 67th Medium Regiment’s 231st Battery. Unlike me he had taken advantage of German lessons that some fellow-prisoners had organised back in Italy. He asked in halting German where we were going. The reply sounded like ‘Tsittow’. The guard wrote it down, ‘Zittau’. None of us had ever heard of it. What work would we be doing? ‘Loading and unloading railway wagons’, came the reply.
The nature of the countryside began to change. All we had previously seen had been a level plain closely resembling our own native East Anglia. Now though, hills – or possibly mountains – could be seen in the distance.
At last we reached our destination. It was late afternoon. We marched through the streets of Zittau for the first time. It was, we noted, a smallish town (I later learned that the population was about 30,000) with cobbled streets and squares and many buildings that dated from the 19th century or earlier.
We were the first British prisoners that the town had seen and we were watched with some curiosity. We were curious too. There were elderly German men with enormous moustaches, puffing at huge pipes and no doubt mentally comparing us with Brits whom they may have encountered in World War I. There were a few German women standing in their doorways eyeing us up and down. I think that we were all glad that we were wearing new British uniform and looking reasonably smart.
We were also surprised at the number of men and women, obviously not Germans, who greeted us with shy waves and friendly smiles. They were shabbily dressed, often wearing padded jackets, and the women and girls mostly wore headscarves. On their shoulders or in some cases on the left breast they all had a small label marked OST. They were Ostarbeiters, ‘slave workers’ who had been conscripted in Russia and the Ukraine and brought to Germany to supply the deficiencies in the labour market.
We halted in a large cobbled square in what appeared to be the centre of the town. It was the ‘Platz der S.A.’ in an area called Neustadt. The square was dominated by an enormous building called the Salzhaus, a building with several storeys above which was a huge ‘mansard’ roof which itself contained yet more storeys! The entrance to our new home was into a building on one side of the square quite near the Salzhaus.
The building was what remained of the old Town Theatre, the greater part of which had been destroyed by fire. Our guards lived on the ground floor while on the floor above we had a day room and a dormitory. The day room was furnished with a long table and wooden benches and had an old-fashioned solid fuel cooking range. There were hangers for our coats and also wooden-soled slippers (Holzpantofeln) that we were told we must always put on directly we entered. My memory is a little shaky on this point but I think that natural lighting was supplied via a skylight.
Our dormitory had fifteen double bunks (one up and one down) with each bunk provided with two blankets and a filled straw palliasse. Opening from it was a communal washroom and a separate biggish bathroom containing a sit-down bath and a w.c. Windows were double glazed and, of course, barred. In the middle of the dormitory was a ‘tortoise stove’ with a flue-pipe passing through the ceiling.
Compared with our previous accommodation both in Italy and in Germany it was positively palatial! It seems that the go-ahead Zittau town council had invested in 30 British prisoners capable of heavy work to help ease the town’s manual labour shortages. They were responsible for our accommodation and they paid for our rations. So, once again I became involved with local government – this time at the lowest possible level!
Our home was known as ‘the Neustadt Lager’. We learned that we were Arbeitskommando 1153 and that, although we had been processed in Stalag IVb we were now officially an outpost of Stalag IVa. To this day I haven’t the faintest idea of where Stalag IVa was!
It was from this base that, every day we went out to work. This was very hard and exhausting, for up to ten hours a day and with only one rest day in three weeks. It was mostly on Zittau’s railway sidings, unloading and sacking coal, scrap metal, flour, sugar, potatoes and other vegetables from the railway trucks and, sometimes, delivering them to customers. We also, when available, did any general labouring jobs that needed brawn rather than brains – street sweeping, grocery deliveries with a hand cart, digging graves in Zittau cemetery, working in a bakery, an opencast coalmine, an iron foundry and so on.
We went out in parties of two or three, sometimes with one of the guards but more often with a German civilian wearing a yellow ‘eagle and swastika’ armband and sworn in as a ‘special constable’.
It would have been easy enough to escape from Zittau but almost impossible to get much further. The nearest neutral country was hundreds of miles away. The fighting front? Well the eastern front was certainly near enough to us during the final few months of the war but I’d have said that the chances of an escaping prisoner getting unscathed through both the German and the Soviet front lines were nil!
Besides, we were too exhausted at the end of a ten hour working day to plan and execute a successful escape bid. That option was open to ‘officers and gentlemen’ confined in an Offlag with nothing to do all day and ‘other rank’ orderlies to help them do it – but not to us!
At first, when we spoke no German and were thoroughly out of condition, the regime nearly killed us. However the rations were better than in Italy (I found black bread and ersatz coffee to be tolerable, though ersatz ‘tea’ was awful), the Red Cross parcels arrived regularly and - well, we were often working where the food was, weren't we? We were rarely hungry. Nor were we cold. Our rooms were double glazed, we had two efficient solid-fuel stoves and we worked regularly loading and unloading coal trucks! We regularly brought coal brickettes back to the lager and, to make sure of the guards’ compliance, we brought some back for them too.
It was surprising how soon we recovered our fitness, and how soon we picked up enough pidgin German to converse with our guards, the German civilians and the other POWs and civilian slave workers (Russians, Ukrainians, Jugoslavs, Poles, French, Dutch) with whom we came into contact. One guard, spotting two of us in animated discussion with a Soviet POW enquired what language we were speaking. He was astonished to learn that it was German – or rather Gefangenerdeutsch (POW German) – totally ungrammatical German interspersed with Russian, French and English phrases.
Our guards weren’t too bad either. They were neither the sadistic bullies nor the half-witted ‘goons’ of fiction. A couple of them were really likeable and I’ve often thought of them and hoped that they got home safely at the end. They knew that they’d got safe and cushy jobs – and there weren’t too many of those in Germany in 1944 and early 1945! There is too, a certain cameraderie among the very lowest ranks even of opposing armies. Many of us suspected that it was officers and NCOs, whatever uniform they might be wearing, who were our real enemies!
I have thought since that one reason why our lives as POWs in Germany were so much more tolerable than those of virtually every other POW to whom I have ever spoken was the fact that we were a very small working Arbeitskommando, miles from any Stalag and with only shadowy connections with the one to which we were officially connected. Our guards were former front-line soldiers from the Eastern Front whom wounds or ill-health now prevented from undertaking anything more strenuous than keeping an eye on POWs.
Not one of them had ambitions for promotion that might have encouraged him to demonstrate to his superiors his keenness, efficiency and hatred of ‘the enemy’. Anyway, there were no superiors to impress. We didn’t see an officer for months on end. In charge of us was Unteroffizier Kurt Laudenbacher. His rank was the equivalent of a British army corporal or (in the artillery) bombardier.
He shouted at us a lot. We used to call him ‘Alleman’ because of the frequency that he would shout ‘Alleman raus’ (everybody up) or ‘Alleman saubermachen’ (everybody get on with cleaning) but he had essentially an easygoing nature. He was always prepared to listen to what we had to say and do what he could about it. He was in early middle age and, as he once confided in me, before the war he had worked in a brewery.
We were paid for our work. Needless to say once the cost of our accommodation and food had been deducted, there wasn’t much left – but there was something. When we first arrived in Zittau we were paid in ‘Lagergeld’, ‘Mickey Mouse’ paper money that could only be spent in a shop or a canteen in a POW Stalag. We pointed out that in our position this so-called pay was totally useless. He agreed, took the matter up with the Lager authorities and we were henceforth paid in real Reichmarks and Pfennigs. We may well have been the only prisoners in Germany with real money in our pockets!
Alleman had a sense of humour too. We were the only people in Zittau capable of doing heavy work. The fit Germans had all been called up and the Ostarbeiters simply weren’t fed well enough to do the hard work of which we were capable. We were in heavy demand. One morning a foreman turned up from a Felt Factory (Filzfabrik) where we often worked. His boss had told him that he had to take six British prisoners back with him. ‘I’ve only got two to spare’, said Allyman. The foreman, who was clearly scared of his boss, wasn’t inclined to take no for an answer.
‘But my boss says I must bring six’, he pleaded (in German of course). Allyman wagged his finger at him; ‘You tell your boss’, he said, ‘That if he wants six British prisoners he must go to England and catch them!’
German civilians too – the only time that I personally encountered real hostility was immediately after those terrible fire bomb raids on Dresden (only some sixty miles from Zittau) on 13th February 1945 – and then the hostility was mild and only verbal. I don’t find it surprising that air crews captured in the wake of (to my mind) such inexcusable terror raids, should have been given a rough reception
One unusual job on which I was engaged gave me quite undeserved local celebrity status many years later. At the time it was ‘just another heavy job’.
I was one of a party of prisoners who were detailed to load heavy boxes of ‘treasures’ from Zittau town museum onto a lorry and to go with them to the summit into what I thought was a ‘Dracula style’ ruined castle but was, as I subsequently discovered, a ruined monastery at the summit.
It was over sixty years later that I learned that I had, in all probability, transported to the top of Mount Oybin, Zittau’s unique ‘Lenten Veil’ or ‘Fastentuch’, an enormous piece of cloth, seven centuries old and decorated with 90 painted biblical illustrations, 45 from the old Testament and 45 from the New. Thus, I had unwittingly played a small part in the centuries old history of this unique artefact. (See ‘The Zittauer Fastentuch’).
Another job sadly ended in tragedy. It was a ‘night job’ in which we had to go to Zittau’s railway sidings and unload a railway wagon (I have forgotten its contents) into a lorry. I think that it was expected that the lorry would have to make several trips to complete the job.
There were four or five of us. The wagon’s side door was open, the lorry’s tail-gate down and the lorry was backing up to the wagon for us to transfer the load. Trying to help, one of my fellow-prisoners stepped onto the track and started to signal to the lorry driver to help him complete this manoeuvre. I was just a foot or so away.
Suddenly, without previous warning, there was a rushing sound, a crash and the truck we were to unload leapt forward as a runaway truck sped down the line to us crashing into the buffers of our truck, crushing my comrade and killing him instantly.
He was given a military funeral a week later. Looking, we hoped, our very smartest, we slow-marched from our lager to the cemetery, stood to attention through the brief grave-side service and threw sprigs of yew onto the coffin. A Wehrmacht firing squad from the nearby barracks, also looking very smart, fired a volley over the grave. It was a moving occasion.
As far as I am concerned one of the saddest things about this wartime tragedy is that, while I can remember so much, I can’t remember that prisoner’s name or indeed anything about him. I am quite sure though that he wasn’t a member of my 67th Medium Regiment RA.
Time passed quickly. From the end of 1944 we could hear the constantly increasing rumble of gunfire from the east. Throughout that bitter winter a steady stream of refugees from the eastern front poured through the town – old men (the young were all in the forces) women and children, many on foot, trudging through the snow, some with their belongings piled on ox carts, yet others with ramshackle motor vehicles running on ‘wood gas’. Among them were prisoners of war and civilian ‘slave workers’ together with defeated remnants of the armies of Germany’s allies cold, tired and dispirited Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians and renegade Cossacks.
Their plight made us forget our own problems – and we had no doubt that the end was near.
We were marched out of Zittau on 7th May 1945 with the town rocking under constant gunfire. As we climbed into the Sudeten foothills we watched Zittau experience its first air raid as Soviet aircraft dropped bombs on the town. We spent a chilly night in a barn with the sound of gunfire all around us. The next day we began our journey home!
Former prisoners of war are sometimes asked if they are able ‘to forgive and forget’. I shall never forget my experiences as a POW – but my memories are by no means wholly negative ones. I sometimes think that it was as in that prison camp in Italy and on the railway sidings and in the streets of Zittau that I finally grew up.
I have nothing to forgive. Nor, I think, do either the Italians or the Germans have anything for which to forgive me.
………………….
See also ‘The bombing of Dresden’, ‘Home Again – at last’ and ‘Return to Zittau’ in this ‘My Life’ series.
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