GERMANY: The Prisoners Speak

In Sweden’s Göteborg harbor last week 4,323 British and 17 U.S. prisoners of war, wounded beyond military usefulness, boarded transports, tasted white bread, coughed over once familiar cigarets. They were a part of the first successful prisoner exchange with the Reich; the stories they brought out were the first such accounts from inside Germany. Some of the Stories:

> Gloom is spreading through Hitler’s Germany, and defeatism is rising. Elderly guards, men in their 50s, let prisoners listen to BBC newscasts. When asked how the war was going, the guards replied: “We are advancing like this,” and marched backwards.

> Prisoners of long standing reported camp conditions in 1940-41 “not too good,” but generally “decent” now. Chief cause of improvement: removal of youthful swaggering Storm Troopers, and their replacement by 16-year-olds and invalided older men.

>Red Cross food parcels formed 75% of the food supply in some instances. Prison bread was black and hard. Said one repatriate: “Without parcels half of us would have been dead before now.”

> When the repatriates left their camps for Göteborg, 900 Canadians in a Stalag at Lamsdorf near Breslau still wore the chains with which they were shackled soon after Dieppe. One Canadian R.A.F. private said: “When the Nazis started to handcuff us the first time, we all lined up before twelve inexpert Nazis, doing twelve prisoners at a time. In the first dozen chained men there was an escape expert, a former London bobby, who quickly showed his companions how to remove the bracelets. They chucked them under a hut and rejoined the queue. The Nazis used up 800 cuffs on 600 men—and found there were still hundreds of the original 600 waiting in line.”