The former army commander in chief Walther von Brauchitsch was housed in No. 11 (Special) POW Camp, Island Farm, Bridgend - the so-called German Generals’ Camp in South Wales. In his various court appearances he had been economical with the truth and denied having received a cash payment from Hitler at the time of his divorce and remarriage to a Nazi woman. He also claimed to have had no knowledge of the planning of aggressive war and to have been ignorant of the murderous ‘Commissar Order’ that required the shooting of Soviet political officers. From Bridgend he was transferred to the grim Münsterlager to attend trial before a British court, but died before his case came up.72 At one time there were no fewer than 186 German generals or equivalent in the camp. One of them was Lieutenant-General Hans von Ravenstein, who had been taken prisoner at Tobruk. In the spring of 1946 he was transferred to Bridgend from a prison camp in Canada. He was to spend over two years in the camp before he was set free. No one had anything bad to say about him. He disliked Bridgend: the holder of the Pour le Mérite from the Great War looked down on a number of Hitler appointees who were not as well mannered as he might have hoped.73
The generals at Bridgend were housed in bed-sitting rooms big enough to accommodate a six-foot bed. Only field marshals were allowed separate sitting rooms. Ravenstein was befriended by a family of Plymouth Brethren who took him out for picnics, but he was not allowed to carry money. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt was one of those at Bridgend with a set of rooms. Ravenstein admired him, but he was wont to hide behind superior orders when called upon to justify his errors and omissions.74 The tank general Hans-Jürgen von Arnim had also been in British captivity since May 1943. At the time he was the second most important prisoner in England after Rudolf Hess. He was kept at a ‘beautiful’ mansion in Hampshire and allowed certain privileges concomitant with his seniority. He was not released until 1947. By then his estates had been mopped up by land reform in the Soviet east. He died in genteel penury in 1962.75
Some of the German POWs in Britain had been transferred from camps in the United States, and were officially ‘on loan’. These were called Amerikafahrer (American travellers). There were 123,000 of them in all.76 They made up work details, and one of their first jobs was to build a camp for the victory parade on VE Day.77 One Amerikafahrer was Kurt Glaser, whose transport arrived in Liverpool in July 1946. He went first to Wollaton Park near Nottingham, where he lived in a hut with fifty other men in the shadow of the ‘Schloss’. An officer came to see him and asked him six questions about National Socialism, similar to those asked in Texas which had branded him a Nazi. He worked for a farmer in Nottinghamshire, and harvested turnips and potatoes. He was later transferred to Revesby in Lincolnshire where once again he worked on the land. A British intelligence officer informed him that he was working to feed his fellow Germans, as there was not enough food in the zone to nourish them. In September he heard James Byrnes’s Stuttgart speech. When he learned that America had released all its POWs, Glaser could not believe his ears. There were still 355,000 German prisoners in Britain. In the main they were treated with much kindness, however, and when Glaser went for a walk in the manicured grounds of Nottingham Castle an old man came up to him and gave him a florin. Shortly after that, like all the Amerikafahrer, he was sent back to Dachau in Germany to be released.78
The literary prisoner who had found himself hungry on the 2,000 calories he had received in America began to understand the real meaning of the word when he arrived in Sudbury Camp near Derby. As usual he was shunted through a number of different camps - Pendleford Hall, Wolverhampton; Halfpenny Green, Staffordshire - presumably according to the demands of local agriculture. Meanwhile his stomach rumbled.79 Intellectual nourishment was provided by a Dr R, a ‘naturalised emigrant’ who talked to the prisoners about the Nuremberg trials. On 1 October they learned of the executions after the International Military Tribunal (IMT) verdicts.80 Meanwhile they were being graded for their levels of political reliability. The uncertainty about their future had consequences: 219 of them committed suicide.81
The prisoners began to receive a little money for their work - two shillings a day. The British people were strikingly generous towards their former enemies. A woman gave the man two oranges and an apple, although fruit cannot have been that easy to obtain. Soon the prisoners were allowed to walk out of their camps if they remained within five miles. The prisoner admired English Gothic architecture and enjoyed visiting the village churches. Pubs were out of bounds, but he chanced it. ‘From all sides’ he was ‘cheerfully and amicably greeted’. He came out richer than when he went in. The men had bought him drinks and there had been a whip-round. He had been given five shillings.82
The prisoner was back in Germany in the cruel winter of 1947. He saw some prisoners who had been released from the Soviet Union dressed in rags: ‘We are ashamed that we have warm winter clothes.’ The treatment of German prisoners of war was still nagging Frings, who used a trip to Rome in February 1946 to pick up his cardinal’s hat as a pretext to rally German soldiers incarcerated in Italy, together with Cardinals Innitzer of Vienna and Faulhaber of Munich. He visited Britain in September that year and went to no fewer than twelve camps containing a total of 20,000 men. Later he addressed a congregation of 3,000 British Catholics in Westminster Cathedral calling for the men’s release. In 1947 he performed a similar mission to Canada to try to secure the liberation of Germans in Canadian camps.83
The big fry might visit London from time to time to be interrogated in the London District Prisoner of War Cage of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (or CSDIC) in the plush surroundings of Kensington Palace Gardens.do It was here that Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Paterson Scotland led a team of German-speaking officers and NCOs whose job was to compile the dossiers to be handed over to the war crimes tribunals. Their principal concern was the crimes committed against British nationals and above all POWs. The Great Escape loomed large, specifically the killing of fifty of the airmen who had escaped from the Stalag Luft III in Sagan in Silesia. Thirteen Gestapo men were eventually brought to justice and hanged in Hamelin Gaol in 1948. The case was not actually closed until 1964.84
The investigators based in Kensington Palace Gardens were also exercised by the several atrocious massacres that had been carried out by SS units in France. One was the killing of ninety-seven soldiers from the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment at the strikingly inappropriately named village of Le Paradis on 27 May 1940. Responsibility for the crime was pinned on a company commander in the SS-Totenkopf Division, Fritz Knoechlein, who had learned to hate all non-Nazi forms of humanity in the hard school of Dachau: to be a guard at Dachau or any of the other camps required proof of a man’s contempt for his fellows. Knoechlein had absorbed his lessons well. He was hanged.85
Germans complained of their treatment at the hands of Scotland and his team, but the work-over seems to have been gentle compared to those carried out by the Americans. The SS officer Otto Baum said he had been slapped and threatened with extradition to the Soviet Union. Scotland vigorously denied the charges, which could have been brought before the courts in an attempt to prove that a confession had been extracted by force. The prisoners naturally had a number of ruses up their sleeves, accusations of torture being just one of them. Another was to blame everything on a man who was dead, or in Soviet captivity - where there was no chance of corroborating the story, and a fair chance that he would eventually perish anyhow if he hadn’t done so already. That Scotland beat and abused prisoners, however, seems beyond doubt. He even admitted as much in his autobiography, although the relevant passages were cut at the request of MI5.86
Scotland’s men were investigating a full-scale massacre of British soldiers that took place at the time of the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. The command to kill a hundred or so men mostly from the Royal Warwicks was probably issued by the later SS-Brigadef ührer Wilhelm Mohnke, after his men had taken a pasting from the British during the
rearguard action. In connection with the inquiry the Scotland team were able to bring in Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, who was in American custody. Scotland was surprised to find that the former coachman who had become Hitler’s darling was a broken man. He was squat and balding, ‘rough in manners and crude in speech’.87 Scotland had evidently believed what he had heard about the SS superman. He failed to get a confession from Dietrich, or from any other SS man, and concluded that they took their oath of loyalty very seriously.
The British also had their prisons in Germany and Belgium. The Belgian camp was meant to be particularly gruelling, and conditions for the 130,000 prisoners were reported to be “not much better than Belsen’.88 Those awaiting trial for war crimes were housed in the former Prussian town of Minden or in Münsterlager. Conditions here were scandalously bad. When the camp was inspected in April 1947 there were found to be just four functioning lightbulbs in the whole place. There was no fuel, no straw mattresses and no food apart from ‘water soup’. The camp was chiefly guarded by ex-Nazi POWs. The inmates saw no British officers, and even the sighting of an NCO was a rarity. Hygiene was equally nightmarish: there were two washhouses for every 500 men, no soap and no towels.89
British civil servants showed scant concern for the idea that Germans were dying in British camps. Con O’Neill at the Foreign Office minuted a paper written by Hynd in July 1946 to say that a few more deaths might be a good thing, as no one needed more Germans. A suggestion was mooted that the prisoners should be made over to the Russians, as they would know how to deal with them. The Russians would have no foolish sentimentality and would kill them off.90
The British also ran their Civilian Internment Camps or CICs for political prisoners, who had not all been screened or charged, and which contained prisoners as young as sixteen. When questions were asked about the camps in the House of Commons Wing Commander Norman Hulbert called them ‘concentration camps’, the ‘only right and proper description’. This was where the British haphazard denazification took place. Anyone could have ended up there: Junkertum, being a member of the east Elbian or Prussian nobility, called for ‘discretionary arrest’. Anyone with ‘von’ before their names had to watch out. The British decided that it might be better to place the civil prisoners offshore; perhaps that way fewer people would see them. The proposal was to create an ‘Alcatraz’ for up to 10,000 prisoners, but this never happened as the RAF was using the available islands for bombing practice. When the new camp Adelheide was opened there were only 473 prisoners, but thirteen of them were over sixty and another 136 over fifty.91
Once convicted of war crimes the Germans might have ended up at Werl near Dortmund. Death row was in the Pied Piper town of Hamelin. Execution exerted severe demands on the British hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, who could not be in all places at once. It took him seven hours to hang six prisoners in pairs. At one point the British were handing out between thirty and fifty death sentences a month, although a third of them were quashed on appeal.92 There was a suggestion that the British might turn to the guillotine, as it was quicker. Soldiers had made it clear that they did not like carrying out firing squads.93 At Bad Nenndorf near Hanover, CSDIC 74 also possessed an interrogation centre where men were tortured. The centre of the town was sealed off with barbed wire. The torture-chamber was the old pumproom. Here they were beaten, deprived of sleep, threatened with execution or unnecessary surgery. As many as 372 men and 44 women passed through Bad Nenndorf before it closed in July 1947.
Initially they were SS men and Pgs, as well as industrialists and ‘plutocrats’ who had done well in the Third Reich. The British were also frightened of Werewolves, and brought in several Hitler Youth leaders for interrogation. Later many of them were Germans who had been ‘turned’ by the Soviets, and were spying on the British Zone. The camp commander was Colonel Robin Stephens, an MI5 officer. His staff consisted of twelve British - including civilian linguists - a Pole, a Dutchman and six German Jews. They were helped by young soldiers. Some of these had been present at the liberation of Belsen and felt no goodwill towards the Germans. Others had committed minor offences of discipline, assault or desertion and were being punished.
The activities in Bad Nenndorf eventually reached the ears of the prime minister, and Sir Sholto Douglas launched an investigation into the abuse of POWs. A court martial opened in Hamburg on 8 June 1948 at which Stephens was tried together with a German-born Jew, Lieutenant Richard Langham. It was transferred to London and heard in camera. The officers were acquitted. There was alarm in government circles that the public should learn that the British were running a number of branches of CSDIC in Germany, and that ‘Bad Nenndorf ’ should become a rallying cry. Lord Pakenham expressed his concern about the accusation that the British were treating prisoners in a manner ‘reminiscent of the German concentration camps’. Following the court martial Bad Nenndorf was closed down, but interrogations went on in the British base in Gütersloh. When Pakenham heard of this he complained to Robertson. The military commander apparently took no notice.94
Almost all the men who were not suspected of any great crimes, however, were sent home for Christmas 1948 - that is, if they still had a home to go to, or knew how to locate their families.
The Treatment of the Cossacks and Russian Civilians in Germany
Marshal Zhukov raised the question of the return of Russian POWs as early as 5 June 1945 when the Allied commanders met in Berlin. It had been agreed that these soldiers would be handed over to the Russians. Most of the men were Cossacks and Ukrainians who had fought in German units, chiefly SS. Some of them were also labour conscripts and white Russians who had been caught up in the war zone.95 They did not have to be Russian, as the Russians acted for their clients too. The character of Anna Schmidt in The Third Man is one of these. She is from Czechoslovakia. Her lover Harry Lime has had papers made for her. The Soviet authorities allow Lime to carry on hiding in their sector as long as he continues to inform them of cases like hers.
In the film Major Calloway is reluctant to hand Anna over to Brodsky, considering her an insignificant case. In Austria the British co-operated with the NKVD over Russians who had fought in SS units, although they had no doubts that they were leading the prisoners to certain death.dp The Anglo-Americans had 150,000 Russian prisoners. Over of a fifth of these were returned to the Soviets and presumably slaughtered. The Russians were furious not to receive the full tally. One of the most tragic incidents was the handing over of part of Vlasov’s Russian Legion to the Soviets across the border on 24 February 1946. The Russians were housed at Plattling. Guessing their fate, they mutinied one night and the men at nearby ‘Natternberg’ could hear the sound of shooting. They were rounded up and taken to the Czech border. After the Russians were liquidated, Salomon and the other men from Natternberg were transferred to Plattling, along with the Hersbruck camp and the Nuremberg witness camp and the SS men who had been held in Dachau.96
Salomon later learned the whole story. One day a Soviet official had arrived at Plattling and demanded the files on the prisoners. When the Russian POWs got wind of what was going to happen, they mutinied. A senior American officer had placated them by telling them that they would not be handed over, and that they would be resettleddq in southern Europe - the same lie the Welsh Guards used in Carinthia. Then the tanks rolled in. The American guards had been issued with rubber truncheons and went to the Russian huts in the middle of the night, beating them out of their bunks - ‘Mak snell, mak snell’ - and into waiting lorries. They were taken to Zwiesel near the border. American guards reported that corpses could be seen hanging from trees behind the Russian lines. The precise number of Russian soldiers killed is not known. Estimates range from 300 to 3,000.97
The French Camps
A total of 1,065,000 German POWs were attributed to the French. Of these about a quarter - 237,000 - had been captured in France. The rest were an American ‘loan’. Their treatment was particularly brutal,98 probably be
cause the memory of internment in Germany was still fresh in the minds of many French civilians, who had not recovered from the humiliation of occupation either. At the beginning of November 1944, there had been 920,000 poilus in German POW camps.99 Here was the chance for revenge. Very soon after the end of the war the Red Cross reported that there were 200,000 prisoners on the brink of famine in France. The United States treated this report with some scepticism, but it stopped the transports and brought 130,000 of the worst cases back to the US in 1946 because they were in such poor condition that they could no longer work. The Americans compensated the French with another 100,000 Amerikafahrer but were careful to deliver food so that the same thing did not happen again. The French received the prisoners only once they had agreed to abide by the Geneva Convention. The good behaviour did not last long.100 When the Americans put pressure on the French to release their prisoners, the latter complained that neither the Americans nor the British had lost as many labourers in the war and that the German slaves were ‘indispensable for the rebuilding of their country’. France hung on to the men until the end of 1948, when the last 23,609 went home. An attempt to make the work voluntary was unsuccessful.101 Neglect and brutality took their toll: officially 21,886 German POWs died in France, or 24,178 men from the Axis powers.102
Salomon cites one case of an elderly Alsatian German historian who starved to death in a French ‘dungeon’.103 In another camp in the Sarthe, prisoners had to survive on 900 calories a day. In the prison hospital an average of twelve POWs died daily. Camp 404 at Septèmes near Marseilles was originally set up by the Americans and was partly run by vicious ‘Jabos’ or Yugoslav guards. It was a gigantic place with twenty-five separate ‘cages’ filled with tents. Solid structures came later. In February 1946, however, Septèmes was handed over to the French as part of the Western Allied loan policy. The Germans felt they had been betrayed. There were ‘indescribable scenes’ of panic and several suicides and self-inflicted injuries. More, there was the nightmaredr - as far as the Germans were concerned - of finding that their new captors were colonial troops.104
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