A Perspective from High

 

Many people wrote books about their experiences in Stalag Luft I (as you can see in this display in the Barth Museum). Colonel Hubert Zemke, in his book, “Zemke’s Stalag, The Final Days of World War II,” painted a realistic perspective of what the camp was like, especially in the final months.

Zemke’s journey to Stalag Luft I began on October 30, 1944, when, trying to escape the turbulence of storm, his P-51 broke up, and he parachuted somewhere southeast of Hanover, Germany. He was captured by the Germans, and when he arrived at Stalag Luft I on a bitter cold December day, he learned that he was the Senior Allied Officer among the prisoners. From his first day, “it was apparent that food was the main topic of conversation . . . there wasn’t anywhere near enough to satisfy the smallest of POW appetites.” 

He describes the camp in detail. It was designated an officers-only camp. There were four compounds holding multiple barracks: West, North 1, North 2, and North 3. My father was in the West compound, which was originally called the South compound. The Germans housed British and American Jewish prisoners separately in North 1 (See this note from Seymour “See-Mor” Stutzel, the navigator on their plane, smuggled to my father, who somehow acquired the nickname, “Hockey Bockey.” (You’ll hear more about Palmer Lerum in the future.)

The layout of the camp was a reverse L-shape on a low-lying Baltic peninsula. All barracks were built of rough-cut lumber with a central corridor and small dormitory rooms on either side. A space of about two feet under each made it easy for the Germans to search for tunnels, but also caused the barracks to be much colder from the air underneath. Bunks stacked two or three high with mattresses filled with wood shavings provided sleep accommodations. Each barrack cooked its own food on small stoves.

Zemke saw that a lack of food and warmth had greatly dampened the prisoners’ morale. Food provided by the Germans included potatoes, turnips, beets cabbage, barley soup and black bread with an occasional small piece of horsemeat. Fortunately, the Red Cross parcels supplemented this. The Germans also provided no clothing so few prisoners had adequate clothing to endure the harsh weather. (We were in Barth in early October; the wind that swept over the peninsular was bitter.)

  

Prior to Zemke’s arrival, the Allied prisoners had been organized into the Provisional Wing X with each compound as a group, and each barracks as a squadron as a way to bring strength into their dealing with the captors. In the winter of 1945, as the Germans saw they might lose the war, the attitude toward the prisoners hardened. The camp Kommandant, Oberst (Colonel) Scherer, an ardent Nazi, was suddenly transferred and Oberst von Warnstedt took his place, and at the same time, other shake-ups took place in the staff. Deliveries of food from the Germans started to arrive late causing a reduction in the food supplies. They also limited the amount of food a prisoner could save from his Red Cross parcel and held supplies back. Zemke said, “These inflictions, coming one after another, showed clearly that the new regime was deliberately tuning the screw on our containment.”  To make matters worse, new prisoners arrived each week.

The main source of outside war information for the prisoners came from the BBC over secret radios; copied in longhand, typed up on small pieces of paper, and named “POW-WOW;” passed around the compounds in the false bottom of a tin of dried milk; read to the prisoners; and then quickly burned.  

Zemke could speak German, which allowed him to converse with von Warnstedt, whom he sensed was not a hard-core Nazi and  “a little disenchanted with the war” as well as were other members of his staff. March came and winter still held its grip on the camp. Red Cross parcels dispatched from Switzerland disappeared, and there was no improvement in German rations. Toward the end of the month, some men were so weak they couldn’t stand in the morning.

Since the Red Cross parcels arrived to one of the nearby ports, in late March, Zemke talked von Warnstedt into letting prisoners with German guards drive trucks to pick up the parcels at Lubeck. The Germans benefited because this relieved their own marginal resources. Their more reasoned approach was due to the Allies launching an offensive and entering Germany -- that and the knowledge that the Swiss Protecting Power representative was scheduled to visit Stalag Luft I on April 10. Zemke did well in establishing a reasonable relationship with his Germans captors, which proved extremely productive as the war came to a close.     

Uncovering the Nazis

After sticking our toes in the Baltic Sea, we returned to the site of Stalag Luft 1 to have time to record it in our minds. Taking advantage of the interesting food in a Barth grocery store, we had a celebration picnic on the site. It was after all an true miracle that our father survived his stay at Stalag Luft 1.

The three triangles of trees and the continuous cooing of the cranes provided a wonderful setting. It was a joyous occasion that we were able to come to Germany. We wished all of our family could have been there with us.

After lunch, we walked around the area where our father’s South Compound barrack was located. Trudging through the tall grasses, we found the remnants of bricks where a building might have been. However, the Germans constructed the barracks out of wood so they could survey underneath to prevent tunneling and escapes. There was nothing left of the barracks.

We drove a ways north of there and found some old concrete foundations. Our imaginations went wild as we stopped and explored the area: Nazi buildings aptly covered with vines and moss. And then we drove south of the South Compound and found more old foundations. We surmised that this was the location of the infamous Flak School. 

We had found this information on the kiosk at the site:

“Geneva Convention: The construction of a prisoner-of-war camp in the immediate area of military property, like the ‘Flakschool’ (anti-aircraft-gunnery-training-school) in Barth, is a violations of the Geneva Agreement of Prisoners of War from 1929. Article 9 states, “A prisoner of war may never be brought to an area, where he would be exposed to the first of the combat area or be used through his presence there, to protect certain points or areas from bombardment/shooting. The County Council Barth in Vorpommem (West Pomerania) was the location of two garrisons, aerodrome and anti-aircraft school, and several important armaments factories. Stalag Luft 1 was regularly controlled by representatives of the Swiss Protecting Power. The International Red Cross and the YMCA did send help packages.”

You’ll read more in my father’s diary of his exploration of this area as the war was over. We were glad that these buildings were left in ruins as was the Nazi effort. We returned to our hotel with pockets full of bricks, rocks and remnants of bomb debris to take home as reminders.

All the time we were exploring the site of Stalag Luft 1, we could see the church tower. Here is a quote from Candy Kyler Brown in her book, “What I Never Told You,” about her father’s (John Kyler) stay at Stalag Luft 1:

“The most striking view in Barth, to me, is the beautiful old church, the St. Marien Church . . . It was astounding to me to look at this steeple from the same area my father had. What a feeling it had to be for those men to view this house of worship from behind barbed wire – this beautiful steeple and this beautiful old church and there they were as prisoners doing the best they could to practice any sort of religion. There is just some tranquility that is felt gazing at this landmark and its appearance may have served to provide peacefulness to those captive bodies but free minds.”

Thank you, Candy. I don’t think I could have explained this better. I wonder what the Germans at the camp thought as they looked at the church tower.

The morning we left Barth, we walked down the street in front of the hotel to where the airport had been. Our father had walked this road on May 14, 1945 as part of Operation Revival (and several other times as well) to the place from where he had been flown to freedom. 

We also explored the site where the concentration camp had been. How horrible that evidently not one person had survived. The labor camp has been open from November 1943 to April 1945 and was a branch of the infamous Ravensbruck, the largest concentration camp for women, located about 50 miles north of Berlin. 

Nothing Has Been Forgotten

As we approached the site where the former Stalag Luft once held thousands of prisoners, we saw an open field just northwest of Barth. In the midst of the flat land, a grouping of trees  stood around a large rock and a kiosk. The trees were planted in a large triangle. On each corner of the triangle were smaller triangles of blue spruce representing the Americans, lime trees representing the British, and birch trees representing the Russians. The effect was one of tranquility and beauty.

The metal letters on the plaque on the large rock, which Helga had found and had transported to the site, says:

“This plaque is dedicated by the citizens of Barth and the Royal Air Force Ex-Prisoners of War Association on 28 September 1996 to commemorate all those held prisoner here at Stalag Luft 1, sited here from July 1940 to May 1945: Members of the British Commonwealth and United States of America Air Forces and their Allies from the occupied countries and the Soviet Union.

Nothing has been Forgotten”

To the south of the rock is the field where the barracks that held my father stood. Now it is just a densely growth of tall grasses and a few trees. But from pretty much anywhere we stood, you could see the steeple of St. Marien Kirch (St. Mary’s Lutheran) in Barth. My sister and I liked to think that my father could look at that tall steeple everyday and think that God was in charge. We hope that it gave him and all the prisoners encouragement.  Later that day, we visited the church and walked through the walls of the ancient city.  

Next to the rock is a kiosk with facts about Stalag Luft 1. For instance, there were 8,346 prisoners of war in Stalag Luft 1 in February 1945, a majority of which were Americans. Take a look at the photos. One thing that interested me was: “The construction of a prisoner-of-war camp in the immediate area of a military property, like the Flakschool (you’ll hear more about this in my father’s diary coming up) in Barth, is a violation of the Geneva Agreement on the Treatment of Prisoners of War from 1929.”

We enjoyed being there with Helga and Greta and her son Claus. The west side of the camp bordered a tributary of the Baltic Sea. I wonder how many prisoners thought they could steal a boat and paddle to Denmark just some 70 miles away. I’m sure the Baltic Sea had an effect of the weather. The wind was fierce, and it was cold there even in October.

As we walked around, we heard a low flapping and whispering noise. It was the return of the cranes. We watched them eating bugs from the fields that our father once looked out on.

Making Friends in Germany

Before I went to Germany – because I had read so many books on the horrors the nation had committed during World War II – I was apprehensive.  I didn’t know what I would find or how I would feel about the Germans, although I had been there in 1968 as a clueless 21-year old. What we discovered is that the Germans are people just like you and me. They are kind, generous, fun loving people. (And they like their beer – we did too.) And, as we soon learned in Berlin, they are very upfront about what the Nazis did to the world, but that is another story.

What became one of the highlights of our trip was meeting two German women: Helga Radau and Grete Haslob Koch. They came to greet us the morning of October 1, 2013 at our hotel. Helga had grown up in East Germany; Grete had lived in West Germany all her life. Both women experienced trauma in World War II. We realized Allied and German soldiers were not the only people who suffered from the war.

Helga Radau is the director of Barth museum documenting the history of the town under the Nazi regime. Barth was founded around 1255 and eventually resided in East Germany when the country was divided in 1945. It rests so far north you could paddle to the Baltic Sea from its shores. The museum, titled, “12 years out of 750, Barth, 1933-1945,” features exhibits on Stalag Luft 1(see map above). It also includes exhibits about the concentration camp in Barth (we learned that not one person survived this camp – that gives me chills) and some manufacturing facilities.

When we met Helga, you could tell how passionate she was about the museum. And for good reason. When she was four years old, the Russian army arrived in Barth on May 2, 1944. At the time, the German guards at Stalag Luft 1 had run off, and the war in Europe was about to end. Her mother, father, grandmother and great grandmother lived in the center of town. The family also housed a couple of refugees from Eastern Prussia.

Daily Russian soldiers would break into homes to steal, kill civilians and rape German women. One day all the young women in the house were hidden in the loft of the house, but not her grandmother or great grandmother. Suddenly a Pole and a Russian saw the ladder and went upstairs. The Pole took Helga and would have killed her if had not been for the arrival of a group of Yugoslavian members of the Royal Air Force who were former POWs at Stalag Luft I. They prevented her death and stayed with the family for some days. It was the first time Helga tasted chocolate. She has never forgotten these terrible times, but she is grateful to the POWs and has spent years maintaining contact with the many of the 8,345 POWs (number in February 1945) housed in Stalag Luft I. 

  

And Grete’s story is equally heart-wrenching:  “My father (Heinrich Haslob) went over to the United States in 1923. At first he worked with his two uncles in New York. They had a butcher shop in a great market hall. He married my mother (a German) in 1926, and they had their wedding dinner at the Waldorf Astoria. My sister was born in 1929. 

"He started his own business with a friend on Jamaica Avenue in Long Island. The business did very well, and they expanded the shop. Then his mother in Germany became very ill, and he sailed back to Germany to visit her. In Germany, his parents owned a general store in a small village close to Bremen. Due to her illness, she asked him to move back to Germany to take over the family store.  My father promised her he would come back. My mother wanted to stay in New York because they had a good apartment with all the things that make life easy.  In Germany there was an old house without central heating or indoor plumbing. But she followed her husband with their little daughter, and they returned to Germany in 1930. 

	“With the money my father got from the sale of the business (in the U.S.) they brought  the house in Germany up to date with central heating, indoor plumbing and so on. That same year (1930) his mother died, and just two years later his father died. So I did not know my grandparents, as I was born in 1938. In September 1939, the war began, and my father was called up to the war in 1941. When the war began, he was not able to come home very often and then only for a few days at a time, so he remained unknown to me.”  Here is Grete standing with her father, sister and mother.
Haslob returned home in March before the war ended in May (with photographs and journals, many of which are now in the Barth museum), and his family begged him not to return to the prison camp. When the war ended and the Germans ran away from the camp on April 30, 1945, he was never seen again. The family never knew what happened to him. After the war, Barth was in the Soviet-controlled portion (East Germany) and not until the wall came down in November 1989 was Grete able to travel to Barth in search of her father. She asked the local residents, but no one knew anything about him. She did learn that several unidentified people had been found dead shortly after the liberation of the camp and were buried in the town cemetery.  Grete continued to return to Barth whenever she learned of groups of  ex-POWs visiting the former campsite. During one visit she was told by an American ex-POW that her father had been shot and killed in the days after liberation by an  American POW. He told her that her father had encountered the POW in town, and words were exchanged. Her father made the remark, "I will be home before you are" and with that the POW pulled a gun and shot him. Helga said this wasn’t true. Grete still has hope that she will someday learn what happened to her father.

On a visit to the United States in the late 1990s, Grete met an Red McCrocklin, who remembered her father as a man always smiling. He respected and admired “Henry, the Butcher” as the POWs called him, even though they were on opposite sides. He had given Red a German dictionary, which enabled him to speak the language; a couple of times this saved his life. Grete (as a small child below in front of her father) was grateful to meet someone who knew her father. My father talked about “Henry, the Butcher,” as well.

These two German women were so generous to us. They were delightful and interesting. The time spent with them was overwhelming because there was so much we wanted to know. Grete had brought her son Claus with her; he had never been to Barth and wanted to see where his grandfather had been in the war. They took us to the museum. We ate lunch together, toured the site of the former prison camp and ended the day with a wonderful meal at our hotel. It was a day of mixed emotions, learning about each other’s perspectives and remembering the sacrifices for freedom all of our families had made. 

Finally, Barth, Germany

My sister Nitalynn and brother-in-law Bruce Sigman and my husband Richard and I left Arkansas very early on the morning of September 25, 2013. We flew the largest airplane I had ever seen from Chicago and found Air Berlin to be more modern than any American airline. Crammed in with 400 other people wasn’t too bad, but travel these days is only for the determined. When we landed the next morning, we took a bus to the fancy Berlin train station/mall and from there a train to near Leipzig. The tracks ended for repairs, and we had to take a street car to the central train station near our hotel. Let’s see: that was more than 28 hours traveling by five different modes. I thought of my father flying the “Nita-Lynn” from Long Island, New York to Miami to Puerto Rico to Trinidad to Belem in the Amazon of South America to Brazil. Then they flew across the Atlantic to Dakar, East Africa on to Tunisia and finally to Cerignola-Stornara, Italy in so many days. Our trip was nothing.

I had been in Leipzig in 1968 when it was a dark, drab East German city. Today, it is vibrant, and we enjoyed exploring its museums, monuments, restaurants and stores – mainly absorbing the German culture (Currywurst, anyone?). Richard (and Bruce one day) attended the International Motorcross of Nations in Teutschenthal for two days - our reason to be in Leipzig.

One of the astounding facts we learned is that prayer meetings in St. Nicholas Church there eventually led to the downfall of divided Germany in 1989. Life in East Germany, as we discovered in the Stasi Museum (secret police), was harsh. We also went to a concert at Bach’s church, St. Thomas. As I sat there listening to a wonderful concert, I wondered about the audience. How many of them had parents in the Nazi party?  Or later, in the East German secret police?

Now we can finally get to go to Barth. On Monday, September 30, we woke excited. After all these years of saving and planning, we would go to Barth where our father had spent 13 months of his life. We boarded a train, changed in Berlin, and ended in Stralslund where we rented a car and had an exciting drive (not many speed limits in Germany) to the Pommernhotel in Barth. We learned later that the hotel was on the road where the freed POWs from Stalag Luft 1 had walked to the airport during three days in May 1945 to be flown to France and England. Our father had walked down this street (as it turns out several times).

We also learned that we were lucky to get a hotel as it was crane season (see the cranes in the field) in Barth. That’s right, the birds, and people come from all over to see then fly through Barth. That night, we celebrated being in Barth and eagerly anticipated the next day meeting Helga and Grete and seeing Stalag Luft 1.

Visiting Barth

 

My sister Nitalynn and I are planning a trip to Northern Germany to see the place where our father was in prison camp in World War II. As you’ve read, his plane was shot down by German ME 109s over Yugoslavia on April 2, 1944. He parachuted out and the Germans captured him and took him to Barth, Germany. He stayed there until May 14, 1945, when he boarded a B-17 and was flown to France. The Germans had surrendered on May 7, and the Allies declared victory on May 8 (V-E Day) (coincidentally my sister Nitalynn's birthday).

We’ve been saving for years for this trip with tiny oil and gas checks, thanks to our parents. We are taking our husbands and wish that we could take the whole family.

It will be a trip of mixed emotions. The Germans were once our enemy; now they are our friends. They have a past which they have not forgotten, but are dealing with it in positive ways. You’ve read about the friendly encounters that Red McCrocklin had with the Germans. In the end, Hitler had ordered that all captured enemy air officers be killed. Thank goodness, the Luftwaffe colonel in charge of the camp refused to obey Hitler’s orders to move or kill the prisoners. To help him decide to disregard Hitler’s orders, Allied planes flew over and dropped leaflets on the camp and surrounding area. The leaflets had a photo of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin and said that the Germans at the camp and in the area would be held personally responsible for our safety. Now there’s a miracle.

“Red” McCrocklin's book, “Combat and Capture,” us filled in the blanks and connected us to two German women. We will visit the director of the Barth museum, Helga Radau. She herself was a young child living through horrendous experiences in World War II. We will also meet Grete Haslob Koch, whose father was a German guard in Stalag Luft 1. Her father was friendly to the Americans and once gave Red a German dictionary so he could learn German, which saved his life several times.

In addition to the former prison site, I am looking forward to seeing that church with the tall tower and visualizing the Allied prisoners walking under the arch of the ancient town wall toward the camp. We know that just about all there is at the former site is a large stone with a plaque, but it will still be an emotional time of imagination and remembering. 

Learning to Survive

I spent some time watching "Hogan's Heros" TV series and the movies "The Great Escape" and "Stalag 17" to get a sense of what it was like to be in prison camp. Red said that "Hogan's Heros" wasn't very accurate, but my father said that some of it was true, especially about the Germans being so rigid with their rules and procedures. 

I'm repeating myself, but I am grateful to have Red McCrocklin’s book “Combat and Capture”  to fill in the blanks my father left about their time in World War II. Here are some of his observations about what it was like to be a Kriegie.

“First and foremost, you must be able to adjust to the radical change in your status. The day before your capture, you were free and honored by your country. Suddenly you are in the hands of the enemy who despises you and would as soon kill you as not. It is quite a shock . . . I realized that although I was unlucky enough to be shot down, it could have worse. I could have been killed, or badly wounded as many others were. I did not allow myself to ‘hate’ the enemy, because hatred consumes you and causes you to act irrational . . . To help me survive and to increase my chances of escaping (The Germans expected the men in the camp to try to escape.), I learned enough German to understand what they were saying and to communicate. I was thankful that I did, because being able to communicate saved my life on several occasions.

“. . . There were two roll calls daily, one in the morning and one each evening. The roll calls, though routine, could be quiet an adventure when we tried to mess them up to cover an escape attempt. The Germans would usually tolerate one, or two miscounts, but if we persisted in screwing up the count, they would bring up the machine guns, fix bayonets and say, ‘Now we will get an accurate count, will you please cooperate?’ We would get the message and cooperate.”

Here’s a poem about the roll call from my father’s war log:

Out for the Count (to the tune of “Give My Regards to Broadway”)

Oh, ven ever I go out for roll call

In zee morning or zee afternoon

I always hear a familiar phase

Straight from the lips of a goon

Spoken aloud in a whisper

And minicked by all Kriegies

Mein, zwei, drei, vier, fumf, sech, zeben,

Please slets zem stands zat ease!

 (Photo above is the "cooler" where prisoners were placed in solitary confinement. My father was there from May 31 to June 14, 1944.)

The Kriegies had many things to keep them busy. They played parlor games; athletic games would burn up needed calories. They had a library, a theater and a camp orchestra and old movies. Red said,“The greatest pastime of all was watching our planes come over. One time, it felt as though the entire 8^th Air Force made a low level pass over Stalag Luft I. They were so low that we could see crew members waving at us. It was glorious. . . .it lifted our morale during those dark days of the winter of 1944-1945.