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.