International: Home Is the Hunter

Six months ago, Britain’s WAAFs (R.A.F. equivalent of WACs) were forbidden to sing the sentimental German marching song Lili Marlene because it might give German prisoners of war ideas about fraternization.

Last week in Britain the idea of P.W. fraternization no longer seemed so objectionable. In the House of Commons, Tory Martin Lindsay rose to suggest that some P.W.s should even be encouraged to stay and marry. “The advantages in adding to our labor forces thousands of industrious, highly skilled workers would appear obvious,” he said, “[besides] there is today in Great Britain a 200,000 surplus of women of marriageable age. I am one of those people who believe that it is a great misfortune for women to be unable to fulfill their biological function because of a shortage of males.”

Parliament gave little indication of going all the way with M.P. Lindsay, but Britain last week seemed as anxious as most of the other victorious nations to hang on to its war prisoners. More than 14 months after the war’s end, some seven million Germans and Japs were still held prisoner in Allied countries. From Germany and her satellites Soviet Russia alone still retained an estimated four million. From Japan she held a million-odd more. Throughout the U.S.S.R., in coal mines, lumber camps, vineyards, construction camps and factories, from Manchuria to the Urals, they labored for the glory of the new five-year plan. Shortly before the elections in Germany’s Russian zone, Moscow released 120,000, but most of these were sickly, unskilled, or unfit for work. They made poor propaganda. “I wish he had never come back,” said one wife; “month after month I have been waiting and now he sits there, staring at nothing, like a ghost.” Last week the first of Russia’s Japanese captives began to trickle home. The Russians had promised MacArthur that from ten to fifteen thousand would be repatriated monthly. At that rate it would be over five years before 800,000 soldiers and more than 200,000 civilians finally reach home.

Among the Debris. Britain had 551,927 P.W.s still in her charge. Of these some 385,000 are in the United Kingdom, working in the coal mines, harvesting crops, tearing down air-raid shelters and clearing ground for new buildings among the debris left by five years of German bombing. In France, still desperately short of manpower, 700,000 German prisoners are rented out by the Government (at a charge of approximately $1 a day) to private employers. In Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia and the Balkans another 100,000-odd P.W.s are at work.

Of all the Allied nations, only the U.S. has made a determined effort to repatriate prisoners. In June 1945 the Americans had, mostly in Europe, a total of eight million captured Germans. Thousands were turned over to the French and British. Last week, the U.S. held less than 140,000. Of these only 23 remained in this country.

In Guam’s Apra Harbor 2,100 Japs marched aboard a Jap-manned transport en route to their homeland. By December 50,000 more—the last U.S. prisoners in the Pacific—will be returned. Some 90,000 British-held Japs will still remain, and the Dutch have announced that they intend to keep another 13,500 indefinitely in Indonesia for dockside and other heavy labor.

No Hope. Humanitarians throughout the world were beginning to cry “Slavery!” “There is no branch of policy,” charged the Manchester Guardian, “… in which the [British] Government is falling away more lamentably from the principles of its party.” A German caught escaping with his British lady love from Dover last August pleaded desperately: “Germany meant freedom. … I thought that, as the war was over, we could wait until I was released, but there seems to be no hope for a German prisoner getting out of England.” Other prisoners echoed his desperation, and Britain’s man-in-the-street, perennial champion of the underdog, began to cheer at news reports of escaping P.W.S. At the height of the furor, the Government at last announced a plan to repatriate German prisoners at the rate of 15,000 a month. The plan will take three years to complete.

No Compulsion. However, not all of the world’s war prisoners want to go home. In France some 200,000 have asked the Government to let them stay. On rations doubled over last year, France’s German farm and mine workers feel no compulsion to return to the rubble, starvation and chaos described in reports from the fatherland. In Canada an informal poll revealed that 70% of the P.W.s recently shipped out would rather have stayed behind.

In Germany itself those prisoners who have returned found only more carking cares. There were the problems of finding their families, of finding their homes, of facing denazification boards and wives who might have given them up for lost.

Not all could be so lucky as Electrician Hans Detlef Klausen of Kiel, who was captured by the Russians in Riga, Nov. 25, 1918, in World War I. For 25 years he stayed in Siberia, reported dead, and his wife remarried. Then some months ago he decided to escape. When he returned at last his wife was waiting. Her second husband had been killed in a second war.