Armageddon - Max Hastings [282]
By 1945, the millions who languished within the camps of the Third Reich awaited deliverance in the knowledge that they were doomed unless relief soon came. When staff officers in the armies of Montgomery or Bradley, Zhukov or Rokossovsky asked themselves what need there was for haste in completing the defeat of Hitler’s empire, any man and woman confined behind the wire encircling a thousand Nazi barracks could have given an answer. “They could have been quicker,” said Nikolai Maslennikov, for three years an inmate of concentration camps. “The Western allies only started to fight when the Germans were almost beaten. They were bloody slow. They were too late for too many.”
THE PRIVILEGED
THE MOST FORTUNATE, or least unfortunate, of Germany’s prisoners were American and British soldiers, sailors and airmen, though they could scarcely be expected to see their own predicament thus. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, officers were not liable to work, while other ranks could be conscripted for labour. Ironically, many officers suffered greater psychological stress from the privilege of idleness than some of their men who were put to work. As a PoW, Private Ron Graydon worked without resentment as a coal miner. “You just accepted it.” One of his comrades, a big Guardsman named “Chalky” White, managed to conduct an affair with the landlady of a local bar. Graydon’s circumstances deteriorated when he was transferred to work in a benzine plant outside Chemnitz among slave labourers.
Among those drafted for agricultural service, some were brutally treated by German farmers. Others, however, forged surprisingly close relationships with the families to which they were dispatched. Tom Barker, from Eastbourne in Sussex, was a twenty-two-year-old private in the Royal Engineers, captured in France in 1940. From his prison camp in Poland, he found himself sent to work every day for a local German farmer, Hugo Otto. At first, Barker was merely a clumsy city boy. Within months, however, he found himself managing a horse plough, scything corn, slaughtering pigs, as if to the manner born. He grew to love Laura the mare and her foal Lorchen. The farm grew potatoes and rye, some barley and oats, roots for the animals and a few peas. Barker learned to speak German, and ate with the family: “It always mystified me how, with so few basic things to use, they always managed to produce the most delicious food.” Hugo Otto occasionally offered him a glass of schnapps. Gerda, the family’s teenage daughter, became a close friend, though her somewhat starchy mother tried to insist that, as a PoW, Barker should always walk behind Gerda rather than beside her. In the evenings before he returned to camp to sleep, the girl sometimes sang to Tom’s accordion, while another prisoner played a violin. He was taught to shoe horses, and even to do some iron-working in the forge.
This was the young soldier’s life for more than three years, of a kind shared by hundreds of thousands of others. It would be foolish to assert that many prisoners achieved as rewarding a relationship with their captors as that of Tom Barker. His prison life was not an idyll. Like every other PoW, he suffered a long interruption of his youth. But the experience was redeemed, rendered tolerable, by his engagement with simple peasants. “You may perhaps think that the life of a prisoner as I have described it does not compare with what you have learnt from