The Venlo Incident

by Nigel Jones

  It was a very slow process but in the end a normal friendly spirit developed, and the standard of politeness which I had introduced came to be generally accepted as correct; in fact, the degree in which everyone struggled towards good manners was sometimes quite amusing. In the morning we all shook hands when we met for the first time, and whenever on my way to the lavatory or to the garden I passed a warder he stood to attention and saluted; not a Nazi salute, oh no, that I had suppressed as vulgar long ago, but a proper military salute worthy of the Reichswehr. As a matter of fact, all these fellows were eager to learn how to behave themselves, and as soon as I had convinced them that I was not pulling their legs, or laughing at them I found them, most willing pupils. Anyhow, their newly acquired knowledge of social behaviour was most useful to them when our building was turned into a fashionable boarding house inhabited by important foreigners. Of course occasionally there were instances of a return to primeval sin, but whenever I heard the sound of shouting I always called Eccarius up short, had him in, and told him that such practices must cease.

  Letters from May reached me with very fair regularity and I even received three of the seventy-three parcels containing tobacco and cigarettes which she sent me, and four of the Red Cross food parcels which I should have received fortnightly. At first I frequently inquired about parcels which I knew had been sent and which I had not received, but in the end it became clear to me that the Gestapo had only very few prisoners of war directly in their charge, and it was hopeless to expect that they would forego such an opportunity of increasing their supplies of tobacco and food. I am sure that I scored by ceasing to make complaints, for I noticed that I no longer had difficulty in getting as much to smoke as I wanted, and in many other ways it was evident that my forbearance was appreciated. Yes, I got plenty to smoke, but what stuff it was!

  There is a tobacco produced in Russia called Machorka which has always been the smoke of the moujiks. It consists of the stems and the ribs of the tobacco plants from which all the leaf has been rubbed off for use in cigarette manufacture. This detritus is then passed through a chaff cutter, or similar instrument, until it is reduced to small fragments varying in size from about a quarter of an inch diameter to a coarse powder resembling post-war ration tea. The Russians, I am told, smoke it by pouring it into a funnel-shaped twist of newspaper which must be kept upright by holding the head well back, and it is possible that the newspaper may to some extent disguise its natural flavour, which to me tasted like burning rubber and smelt like a bonfire on a refuse heap. I made the discovery, however, that if Machorka were steamed for three-quarters of an hour, and then dried, something which really reminded one of tobacco, indeed more so than the mixture of homegrown herbs of which German cigarettes were made, could be obtained.

  I manufactured a linen bag in which I put the tobacco and suspended this in a deep enamel jug which I placed on my electric cooker and when this had been done, the window was opened wide and my guard and I fled to the garden. The stench which came from my cell was indescribable, and newcomers to the building often jumped to the conclusion that it arose from some horrible Nazi torture such as burning a prisoner’s feet. After a lapse of three-quarters of an hour one of my guards would pop into my cell and switch off the cooker and when, after a decent interval, I returned, I would find my Machorka gleaming a beautiful golden colour and smelling quite fragrantly. After drying it I sieved it by shaking it about in a cardboard box, in which I had substituted for the bottom a network of quarter-inch mesh made of sewing cotton. I had an awful job making it, but it proved its value. That portion which passed the sieve I kept for myself as cigarette tobacco and the remainder I gave to my guards to smoke in their pipes, which, as the tobacco allowance had been reduced to three cigarettes a day, was very much appreciated. In the end I really got to like this stuff and on the few occasions when I got some of the English tobacco sent me by May it tasted quite tame by comparison; but all the time I suffered agonies from stomach ache which nothing that the doctors could do, although they did everything they could think of, could alleviate. Page after page in my diary tell of my sufferings, of special diets and numerous medicines which the doctors prescribed, but neither I nor anyone else diagnosed the true cause, Machorka poisoning. When circumstances forced me to stop smoking Machorka, my digestion returned to me as good as new.

  Somehow or other time passed and the passage of the weeks was marked for me by my Wednesday visit to the barbers for a haircut and shampoo, by the arrival of my clean linen from the laundry, and by the scrubbing out of my cell; I had managed to acquire an entirely new set of household linen, beautiful linen sheets and blue and white bed-spreads, a dozen towels, and an equal number of pillow cases and dusters, all of which went to the laundry in my own bag and were returned each week. I had accumulated all sorts of cooking utensils, tools, and, I must confess, a mass of useless junk. From the day of my arrival I had picked up and kept everything that I could lay my hands on; old nails, bits of wire and string, rusty razor blades, in short the biggest collection of rubbish that one could imagine. This collecting habit is a real prisoner’s psychosis.

  The passage of my days was very regular and indeed, timed to the minute. I got up at six-thirty, stripped to the buff and did exercises before my open window. Dressed in my warm dressing-gown I ate my breakfast at eight o’clock, always the same, four slices of bread which I toasted with butter and jam. At eight-thirty I went to wash and on my return shaved, and with the help of my guard made my bed and swept out the cell—in this, my duties were confined to supervision, for my guards were deeply offended if I tried to do such things for myself. I did some mending or read until ten-thirty when I went out, staying in the garden till twelve-thirty in the summer or for an hour or so in the winter. When I came back I had my lunch which had been keeping warm for me on my electric cooker, and after this I had a nap until three o’clock. At three o’clock I took down the German war bulletin which at this hour was given at dictation speed, and to this I added comments derived from B.B.C. broadcasts. After this I warmed up some coffee and ate a couple of slices of bread and jam and then struggled with mathematics, did crossword puzzles, or tried my hand at chess problems until my supper came at about five. I ate another four slices of bread with cheese, sausage or whatever else was on the menu, and then went out; in the summer to water my garden and to stay out until about ten o’clock, in the winter for a brisk walk. At ten o’clock I had a shower bath and then I settled down to try to get the B.B.C.

  With all respect to the B.B.C. who certainly saved me from desperation and put out some wonderful broadcasts, I do not think that they had much success in rendering news available to the general public in Germany. No one could, of course, listen to the medium and long-wave broadcasts unless he could shut himself up in a soundproof cell, for the whining noise which the German stations superimposed on British wave-lengths was so much louder than the speech that it could be heard from a distance. I dared only listen to the short-wave stations, but my set, like most in use in Germany was a straight circuit with reaction, and no matter how carefully I manipulated the latter I could not avoid, when trying to keep the volume so that I could hear what was said, occasionally starting my set generating, which of course, was picked up on other receivers in the building.

  Although Eccarius knew perfectly well that I was listening in to England, Hackmann, one of the other warders,’ was constantly trying to catch me out, and often listened outside my door. In the summer I got good reception at night on the fifty-metre band, but in the winter the only time when I could get England was in the afternoon on the thirty-metre band, and at this time lots of people passed under my window and I had to be very careful. As a rule, I depended in the winter for my news on the Swiss station which gave both the German and the British communiqués. News was like dope to me and on days when for some reason I had been unable to get anything I felt absolutely miserable; worse than I did when I had nothing to smoke.

  I could, of course, o
nly listen to the broadcasts in German for, even when the actual words could not be heard, anyone listening outside my cell would almost certainly notice the different rhythm of a foreign language. In this connection I discovered a curious thing about the talks given in German by English broadcasters; my guards could not understand what they said and would not even believe that they were speaking German. Although we make no claim to be linguists, in common with the French we have the ability of understanding our own language, however incorrectly it is spoken, and whatever the accent of the speaker; in effect, we understand a large number of languages which are lumped together under the name of English. We have, I believe, acquired this faculty as a result of our refusal to learn languages, which has forced foreigners who wish to communicate with us to use some variety of ‘English as she is spoke’, and ourselves to understand them. English people and French are so used to hearing their languages spoken badly that they have little difficulty in understanding foreigners, but Germans seldom hear their language spoken with foreign accent, rhythm, and intonation, and their ears are not attuned to such variations. At the best of times great attention is required to follow and understand a broadcast talk, especially when the volume is small and subject to fading, so I am really not surprised that my men could not distinguish the German words through the veil of the Oxford accents in which they were enveloped.

  After the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life of 20th July, 1944, things became very jittery for a time in our building, and it often seemed as though the lives of all political prisoners, including my own, hung by very slender threads. Almost daily new people were brought in; from what I heard most of them were German officers of high rank, who after a very short stay were taken out at night for execution. All the Germans with whom I had any personal contact expressed the greatest horror at the attempted outrage, and were really bloodthirsty in their wish that all connected with it should be exterminated. Hitler’s escape seemed indeed so miraculous that the growing belief in his Godhead was immensely strengthened. My men were all anti-Nazis and had not a good word to say for any of the head men in the party. But Hitler, he was Führer. He was omniscient except that he knew nothing about the bad things done in his name by the Nazi bosses—“The Führer is good. He never wanted war and he has time and again tried to make peace. It is all the fault of the Jews and the plutocrats in England and America who grow rich on the sufferings of the people”—in this way the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels bore some fruit although his broadcasts were listened to with derision.

  No one had any real hope of a German victory and yet, buoyed up by the repeated reassurances in press and radio, no one could yet envisage defeat—Hitler must be right when he said that never again would there be a German capitulation, and the Allies demand for unconditional surrender—of course, this could not be considered for a moment. I have often wondered had any offer of peace approximating to Wilson’s fourteen points of 1918 been made, whether even Hitler, Himmler, and the Gestapo, could have continued the war in face of the hopeless weariness of the people.

  It was obvious to every sane person that German defeat could not long be deferred, and one would have thought that prisoners would be hopeful and more cheerful than ever before. Curiously enough though, at no time were there so many attempts at suicide amongst them, and during the latter half of 1944 at least a dozen prisoners tried to cut their veins or hang themselves. The little Russian to whom I have referred, after making one attempt to cut the artery of his wrist with the glass of his spectacles, was put in a cell with another Russian lieutenant in the hope that company might cheer him up. One night when the alert sounded he climbed down from his top bunk intending to look out of the window, and stepped into something wet, warm and sticky. He said that the whole cell smelt of blood and he started shrieking wildly; even from my cell, quite a long distance away, I heard his desperate yells. A warder came and found a pool of blood on the floor, and the Russian officer apparently lifeless with deep cuts in both wrists which he had made with a secreted razor blade. The doctor came at once and gave him a blood transfusion, and I was told that he recovered in the end, but my little Russian never really got over the shock and to the end remained terribly nervous and depressed.

  He was only twenty-two and had been dropped by parachute behind the German lines to organize a party of Russian partisans. Owing to failure to supply them with food and munitions from the air, and after suffering great privations from cold and starvation, they had been rounded up and my young friend, being a nephew of Molotov, was not murdered with the rest of the party but had been fairly well treated. At the time of his capture he was suffering badly from frost-bite, and as a result the toes of both his feet had been amputated. For a time he had been in the special prisoner of war camp at Sachsenhausen about which I spoke earlier, but at the beginning of 1943 he had made an attempt to escape together with a son of Stalin’s who was also in the same camp. They had been caught almost immediately, having been hunted with dogs, and after this my young friend had been imprisoned in our building whilst young Stalin remained at the special P.O.W. camp.

  After the shock of the attempted suicide of his friend he became so morbid and depressed that Eccarius did not know what to do with him, so I suggested that he should put him in one of the cells next to mine so that my guards could keep an eye on him. As I said earlier, he had for some time taken his exercise on the road in front of my window, and we had established a sort of distant friendship. I gave him tobacco and cigarettes and kept him posted with news of the front by writing brief details of Russian successes on paper which I held up to the window so that he could read it. Eccarius put him in cell No. 42, and he really did seem happier there, as if he were lonely or wanted anything he could rap on the wall and my guard would go and see what he wanted. He was also very fond of light music, and when there was anything cheerful on the wireless I would turn my set on full so that he could hear. Poor little fellow, I really became very fond of him, especially when later I got to know him personally.

  I had become quite good friends with the dentist, Gussow, and as he appreciated that my walks to and from his surgery were the only escapes which I had from the monotony of my prison he helped me by spinning out my treatment as long as possible. Gradually all my teeth were removed one by one after quite unnecessary visits for X-ray photos. After each tooth was gone my denture had to be altered or a new one made—three complete sets of dentures were made for me during my stay and, as under the National Health Service, free of charge. He was a very good dentist and never caused me the slightest pain. Once though I was really a bit nervous for when I came in I saw that he was looking rather downcast and so asked him whether he was ill; “No,” he said, “but my wife has just telephoned to tell me that your country-folk bombed my house last night, and everything I possess has been burnt.” When I sat on the chair, opened my mouth ‘wider, please’, and he started work with the forceps, I wondered whether this time he had really injected an anaesthetic. He was a good conscientious dentist and I felt no twinge of pain. I don’t know whether, had I been in his place, I should have resisted the temptation to practise a little of that retaliation so vehemently pleaded by Goebbels. A popular joke at the time was that Hitler had sent an ultimatum to Churchill that if the bombing of Berlin did not cease, Goebbels would broadcast retaliation for an hour daily.

  On my walk of about 300 yards from the Bunker to the dentist, I always tried to see as much as I could of the life in the camp. Generally, at the hours when I went to the dentist, there were only a few prisoners about as most of them had their work outside, but on three occasions I passed through the square at a time when all the prisoners were lined up for the evening roll call. Until about October 1944 nearly all the men looked fit and well nourished. Since the arrival of Kaindl they no longer wore the old striped camp uniform nor had their heads cropped; instead, they were dressed in civilian clothes taken from the store of effects belonging to dead prisoners. Squares, triangles, or stars of cont
rasting material were sewn into the backs of their coats, and on their trousers they bore their number and the coloured triangle denoting the class to which they belonged. Taken by and large though, they looked much like any other crowd of men engaged on manual labour, and as I passed their ranks I got many a grin and rude personal remark. Curiously enough the old camp uniform was now affected by the camp dudes, the men holding as trusty some privileged position, and any one of these who could get hold of a clean and new uniform wore it with an air of conscious superiority. Some of these men, who were allowed to wear their own underclothing, had got their uniforms specially tailored to fit them and really looked quite smart compared to the prisoners in old, ill-fitting civvies.

  The usual sights on my walk were, first, the punishment squad engaged on its interminable march round and round the square and, secondly, the line-up of new arrivals. My walk led me first about 200 yards in a continuation of the line of the wing of my prison with, on my left, the camp wall and, on my right, the large prison square. Then I turned left through a gateway which led to the Kommandantura, and in front of this gate all the new arrivals were lined up waiting to be registered and to be allotted their quarters. During 1943 and until the autumn of 1944 these had consisted of civilians of all classes, some well dressed and with expensive suit cases at their feet, men who looked like important company directors or successful professional men, others, shabbily dressed workmen; men of all ages and kinds awaiting their turn to be reduced to the lowest common multiple of a concentration camp. There they stood, often from the early hours of the morning until late at night, having their first lesson that they were no longer ‘men’ (Menschen), but prisoners. They would be under the charge of a big burly trusty who could be relied upon to see that they stood at attention and did not try to squat on the ground and, being Germans, they did their best to look military.