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Private J. D. Caves: The Long Journey Home

The Great March

page 119

The Great March

"Onwards, ever onwards..."

page 120
This 29 March 1945 Red Cross letter contained little information for friends and relatives back home about what was really happening with the POWs in Central Europe

This 29 March 1945 Red Cross letter contained little information for friends and relatives back home about what was really happening with the POWs in Central Europe

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The Great March

Many New Zealand POWs from Teschen had been assigned to work camps further east in the coalmines of Silesia, including at Milowitz near Katowice in modern day Poland. The kiwi coalminers from Milowitz, nearer the advancing Red Army, were evacuated not long after Christmas 1944. Denis was not at the mines and was instead working further west on the railway at Oderburg on the Czech border northwest of Teschen. Oderburg was evacuated suddenly on 27 January 1945, although it's apparent from Denis' hastily scribbled note, "8pm: Grand Trek or retreat from Moscow?" that he had an idea of what was happening.

The column of kiwi coalminers from Milowitz passed into eastern Sudetenland in late January, and Denis' group from Oderburg may have joined this column. The POWs marched approximately 12 miles per day, and in early February they were climbing into the mountains on the Czech border with no definite destination.

Excerpt from the Last Escape

This passage describes the evacuation of POWs from the Stalag VIIIB work camps around Teschen. Denis, evacuated from the Stalag VIIIB work camp at Oderburg, would have had a similar experience.

Hundreds of thousands of British and American servicemen were held as POWs in camps across Nazi Germany by the time of the Normandy landings in June 1944. As winter settled across Europe and the Allied advance threatened German borders, prisoners were moved away from liberating forces. The POWs were forced to march hundreds of miles in appalling conditions. Hundreds died of disease, starvation and exhaustion. Yet when the war was over those who survived found their extraordinary tale was largely ignored and forgotten.

This is one of the most courageous and brutal tales of the final months of the Second World War.

Stalag VIIIB was at Teschen in the far south-east corner of Germany, on the frontier with Poland and Czechoslovakia, and was a focal point for work camps at the many mines in the area. The flight from the Russians took the POWs completely by surprise. They were hustled out of bed by their guards in the middle of the night and were on the road immediately.

One prisoner writes: 'It was pitch dark in the countryside and freezing cold as we trudged along narrow winding roads. In the next 48 hours, we stopped for two hours only, so desperate were the Germans to get away from the Russian advance. We were keen to keep on the move too because the Russians were just as likely to mistake us for Germans and shoot us. When they finally decided we were out of the immediate danger area, they allowed us to sleep. But by then we were lost. Apparently we should have rendezvoused with the main body of British prisoners from Teschen but we had missed them and we were on our own.'

As they marched along country roads, in towns and villages along the way, the people were in out-and-out panic. The SS were shooting Russian prisoners of war and leaving their bodies to line the very roads that the Soviet tanks would soon be sweeping along. With good reason, the locals feared they would pay with their lives for this brutality. No one was safe. In the chaos, a wrong move meant death. A party of Ukrainian slave labourers had heard that their Russian liberators were close and had risen up against their guards, 'but they had jumped the gun and were all being shot.' The small group headed southwest towards the mountains of the Sudetenland, struggling through deepening snow, fighting off frostbite. Eventually they came down out of the mountains and turned on to bigger roads, where they found the main column of prisoners - 'thousands and thousands of them' - and joined up with them. Many were Russians, and still being appallingly treated by the German guards. The trail went on along minor roads, missing the towns and winding through the forests of Czechoslovakia. What food they received was watery dried vegetable soup and that not very often. They drank from cattle troughs. At night they were packed into big barns.

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Denis' route westward across Czechoslovakia in 1945 to eventual liberation in Bavaria

Denis' route westward across Czechoslovakia in 1945 to eventual liberation in Bavaria

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Timeline of Denis' Great March: January 1945-May 1945

1945 World War II placename Denis' reference Modern placename* Location notes Passages in handscript are from Denis' notebook
27 Jan Oderburg Oderburg near Ratibor Raciborz, PL Railway junction on Polish/Czech border between Bohumin, CZ and Chalupki, PL 30km north of Ostrava, CZ. The Oderburg work camp was evacuated the same night as Stalag VIIIB Teschen was evacuated, hurriedly and apparently in the middle of a snowstorm. 8pm: Grand Trek or retreat from Moscow?
28 Jan Altendorf Altendorf Stará Ves nad Ondrejnicí, CZ 15km southwest of Ostrau/Ostrava. Day in snow Guest house and hospitality.
30 Jan Kunewald Runewold Kunín, CZ 20km east-southeast of Odrau/Odry, 10km north of Nový Jicín.
1 Feb Odrau Jagsdorf near Odrau Odry, CZ 25km northwest of Nový Jicín.
2 Feb Schmitzau Schmudou Kovarov, CZ 3km north of Potstat, west of Odrau/Odry.
3 Feb Paslawitz Praslavice, CZ 10km east of Olomouc, just south of Velka Bystrice.
7 Feb Stephanau Sternau Southwest of Sternberg/Šternberk, 60km southwest of Krnov.
9 Feb Littau Lellau/Lillan Litovel, CZ West of Šternberk, southeast of Muglitz/Mohelnice.
10 Feb Müglitz Muglitz Mohelnice, CZ 80km north-northeast of Brno.
Regetz Rajec, CZ 5km southeast of Hohenstadt/Zábreh.
11 Feb Lukawitz Luketach (Lukawetz) Lukavice, CZ Halfway between Müglitz/Mohelnice and Hohenstadt/Zábreh.
Out of Protectorate again, worse luck. 5gms tobacco. Lots of soup.
16 Feb Nemile near Hohenstadt Nemile near Zábreh, CZ Nemile is 2km west of Hohenstadt/Zábreh.
18 Feb Sichelsdorf Sickeldorf Zichlinek, CZ 25km west of Hohenstadt/Zábreh. Protectorate.
20 Feb Triebitz Triebitz Trebovice 20km east of Litomyšl.
21 Feb Kornetz Kornice, CZ 3km north of Leitomischl/Litomyšl.
23 Feb Beistawitz Unidentified Spring coming. Onwards, ever onwards. Barns and backache…
4 Mar Radim Unidentified Birthday.
8 Mar Priory Hall, Pinched case of honey. Soup and bread for rations. Cigarettes from...[?]
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11 Mar Hostin Unidentified Cigs. issue 62 bypassing Prag sign 100k to Vienna. Heading out to Sudeten. Green buds showing.
17 Mar Koleschawitz Koleschawitz Kolešovice, CZ Northwest of Rakonitz, west of Kladno. Signs of parcels.
19 Mar Pladen Pladen Blatno, CZ Close to railway west of Jechnitz/Jesenice. More signs of parcels. No rations eating horse.
20 Mar Luk near Luck Luka, CZ North of Luditz, southeast of Kalrsbad/Karlovy Vary.
Near Luck and luck it was. 3 parcels 1C 1A and 1F between four men. 14 fags each (140 Chesterfield and 140 F between 6 of us.)
21 Mar Long hills and hard trek (no German rations) to Leingrubber but oh! the delight of English food again. Raisins butter biscuits tea and fags. Still waiting on rations however.
22 Mar Karlsbad Bypassed Karlsbad and Marenbad Karlovy Vary; Mariánské Lázne, CZ Marenbad/Mariánské Lázne is 40km south-southeast of Karlsbad/Karlovy Vary. If the column was heading west between Karlovy Vary and Mariánské Lázne it would be heading towards Cheb in the direction of Bavaria.
…and one French parcel Pfeffengrün and 2pk between eleven. What eating - nougat fruit bars biscuits.
Mar Pilsen, Nuremberg Heading in direction of Pilsen and Nurnberg Plzen, CZ Possibly heading south from Cheb towards Weiden; Beyond Weiden is the Nuremberg-Pilsen road.
Apr Weiden Stopped outskirts of Weiden Weiden, DE Weiden is halfway between Nuremberg and Pilsen.
Good barn, planes and raiding. Day helping bombed villages. ½ parcel.
11 Apr Plattling Plattling Plattling, DE 140km northeast of Munich, southeast of Nuremberg, on the Isar river. The POWs were set to work repairing the railway.
3 days hungry - arbeit[?] cheese.
The Raid. What a raid - perfect. Red Cross wagons of parcels - nights of salvage and plunder - days of work and eating and strafing. Are we recognised or not?
24 Apr Small village on Iser 9km from Plattling Possibly Landau, southwest of Plattling.
We moved - buying wagon - civvies and SS raid our lager 12 kilos. Barn buying eggs and anything.
27 Apr Landau Landau Landau an der Isar, DE 110km northeast of Munich, southwest of Plattling.
2.30am marching again through Landau. More planes diving over us. The same old question: do they or do they not recognise us? Arrived at a barn at 3.30pm. Completely done. Called 1:30 a.m left before (?) a.m. more rain, asleep on feet. Barn at 1:30 p.m. Wet and tired.
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29 Apr Vilsbiburg Vilsbiberg Vilsbiberg, DE 70km northeast of Munich, 10km southeast of Landshut. Called at 1.30am marched through Vilsbiberg. Rumours still rife. March just a straggle.
30 Apr Stopped all day. Rumours Yanks on us.
1 May Kraiberg Freiberg, but a later letter says: 'ended up at Kraiberg on banks of Inn' Kraiberg, DE Southwest of Muhldorf.
Left 3.45am marched all day, snow, sleet, Huns demolishing, crossed Isar (river) again Freiberg, barn 7.45pm
2 May Snow everywhere again. Refuse to march further. German guards leave us.
3 May Hot water up 8am. Drink of Klim and under the blankets to be called by hot water up and my God, the Yanks too. One tank and a Guf[?]. So the great day has arrived. Just a recky patrol but 180 tanks are just 4 miles back and all is quiet. No sign of Huns bar a recky plane which was smartly shot down.
11am Frank and I sitting huddled in straw, miserable looking and cold, but have had a good breakfast. Who would have thought we'd finish POW life surrounded with C parcels.
4pm On the road to march back to safety across the Isar. Discard all but a little of our gear and board trucks. Welcome by 14th Amer. Armed Div. In trucks till 4am. Couple of hours sleep in grain store and on to Moosburg.
3 May Stalag VIIA, Moosburg Moosburg Moosburg an der Isar, DE 30km southwest of Landshut, east of Freising. The former Stalag VIIA at Moosburg seems to have been used as a staging camp for evacuating liberated POWs.
Leave Moosburg for barn 4 kilos out to await turn for plane.
10 May Landshut 4km to airfield Landshut 134 Landshut, DE Marched 4km to Landshut. Aboard trucks for drome and 12am after many alarms and false starts.
11 May Airlifted from Landshut to Brussels.

**

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The major POW movements at the end of World War II.

The major POW movements at the end of World War II.

Excerpt from Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War

This passage describes the westward evacuation of New Zealand POWs.

Military authorities in Germany had realised early in 1944 that prisoner-of-war camps situated in occupied territory to the east and west would be safer inside the German borders. The German High Command decided, on the pretext that Article 7 of the Geneva Convention required prisoners of war to be moved out of danger away from a fighting zone, that prisoner-of-war camps in Poland and eastern Germany would be evacuated westwards if Russian forces appeared likely to reach them. Moves would be on foot if necessary; and for a great many camps this was going to be the only means of travel. The adding of hundreds of thousands of prisoners to the already large stream of evacuating civilians and troops was to place an additional burden on the already disorganised rationing systems of the areas through which they passed, and was to cause them tremendous additional hardship and numerous otherwise avoidable casualties.

So began and developed in early 1945 the vast trek of prisoners in Germany from east to west. At first the objectives were fairly definite: men from outlying work detachments were moved towards stalags, staging at previously emptied work-camps page 128on the way; men from stalags were moved west to other stalags. Ultimately, as Germany became more and more disorganised, for those travelling on foot the goals became merely areas in central Germany: Hanover Brunswick, Thuringia, Bavaria. By late February there were approximately 100,000 Allied prisoners moving along a northern route towards the general area of Bremen, Hamburg and Lubeck; another 60,000-odd were moving westward through a central region bounded by Leipzig, Dresden and Berlin; in the south approximately 80,000 were moving through northern Czechoslovakia, some destined for western Sudetenland, others for Bavaria and southern Wurtemburg.

Denis was in this southern group crossing westward across Czechoslovakia destined for Bavaria.

The first large camps in Upper Silesia to be affected by the evacuation were Stalags 344 at Lamsdorf and VIIIB at Teschen. According to the original German plan Lamsdorf was to send as many as possible to Stalag VIIIA at Görlitz, in order to make way for prisoners from Teschen and the Upper Silesian Arbeitskommandos. In fact, Teschen was too far south for its occupants to outpace the Russian advance in a move north to Lamsdorf, and was forced, as were most of its detachments, to turn west into Czechoslovakia. All prisoners except the sick left Teschen in a snowstorm on 27 January. Extremely severe weather conditions in the first stages of their march cost them many cases of frostbite, one hospital at Oberlangendorf having to treat 25 of them by amputation

The general route of the column from Stalag VIIIB and its work detachments, as well as many of those from Stalag 344, was west through the southern tip of Upper Silesia, across the mountain ranges of eastern Sudetenland to Königgraz. Thence they moved in a general westerly direction towards Karlsbad.

For most columns the rations received from the Germans were meagre and irregular issues of bread, tinned meat and potatoes, and there was a constant struggle to get enough food to keep going. Fortunately most of them benefited by gifts of bread and often of hot food and firewood in the smaller Czech towns and villages. Later groups coming on the heels of many thousands of other prisoners did not fare as well as the first parties to pass through the Czechoslovakian countryside, and eventually the Germans forbade the giving of food to prisoners of war since the Czechs refused it to German civilian refugees. But by then the weather was better and the pace easier, often slowed down by congestion on the road ahead. Even if little or no food was forthcoming, the columns received an enthusiastic welcome from the friendly Czechs, a pleasant change from the sullen manner of the Sudeten Germans whose territory they had not long since come through.

The column from Oderburg [to which Denis belonged] marched for some 720 miles before it was released. After two months on the road, these men were in the same condition as those in the other columns which had travelled long distances. Their boots were worn, their clothing lice-infested, their bodies tired and undernourished. The party went to Karlsbad and then down to the flatter country around Chemnitz, where they received an issue of Red Cross food parcels brought by 'white angel' trucks. From Weiden they were taken on by train in late April to Plattling, where they were billeted in an old grain store. The day after arrival they were put on railway construction work for a new line that was being laid in that area, but a heavy air raid on the railway station caused their labours to be diverted to the clearing of debris.

This is the incident Denis wrote in his notebook as 'The Raid' of April 1945. While he described it as 'perfect' in the notebook, it also was the occasion of a close brush with death and some good fortune.

There are at least two versions of this story. Firstly, as related by Michael Caves:

Denis was to be shot at dawn. He'd found a place where he was sneaking out of camp to get to the railway carriages containing the food. He got caught and a German officer ordered him to be shot at dawn the next day for stealing. Suddenly the Allies bombed the railway station and afterwards Denis ended up in a bomb crater with that very same officer. One of them had cigarettes, the other had matches and they swapped. The officer decided he needed every man to help with the clean up in the page 129aftermath of the bombing so Denis was let off.

Secondly, as I recollect, this was one of the very few war stories Denis told me:

The POWs were at a railway junction where goods trains frequently stopped. Denis and some of his POW mates discovered a way to crawl along beneath the carriages and managed to get inside one of them. It was full of cheeses, full rounds. They stuffed as many as they could inside their clothes, under their shirts and coats and were on their way back when they were caught - uniforms bulging with cheese.

Both versions are consistent with the events at Plattling. The air raid was an event Denis did not forget: he would never allow his son and daughter Michael and Judith to squeal as children. He always remembered the women and children screaming when the railway station was bombed.

After some days at Plattling they were moved south again away from the United States forces, but the latter were close behind them. Eventually their guards abandoned them 20 miles from Moosburg, and here the Americans overtook them.

Denis' party marched from Plattling to Landau, southwards to Vilsbiberg and on 1 May southwards in snow and sleet to Kraiburg on the River Inn. The next day the POWs refused to go further, and their guards left them. Denis' notes vividly describe the events of 3 May and liberation by the American advance:

Hot water up 8am. Drink of Klim and under the blankets to be called by hot water up and my God, the Yanks too. One tank and a Guf[?]. So the great day has arrived. Just a recky patrol but 180 tanks are just 4 miles back and all is quiet. No sign of Huns bar a recky plane which was smartly shot down.

11am Frank and I sitting huddled in straw, miserable looking and cold, but have had a good breakfast. Who would have thought we'd finish POW life surrounded with C parcels.

4pm On the road to march back to safety across the Isar. Discard all but a little of our gear and board trucks. Welcome by 14th Amer. Armed Div. In trucks till 4am. Couple of hours sleep in grain store and on to Moosburg.

Michael Caves related these remarks by Denis about liberation:

The Yanks cleared out the Germans, and left the POWs with the gates open. The Gestapo and the Nazis didn't want to give up and were hiding out in the hills and shooting continued, so it wouldn't have been safe to escape across country. The wise ones sat and waited in the camp. Other POWs tried to fly planes home and crashed, or played with bombs and guns in their excitement, with sometimes tragic consequences so close to the end of the war.

At Moosburg there were assembled some 80,000 to 100,000 prisoners of almost every Allied nationality, and including a good number of New Zealand officers and other ranks. Like the other assembly centres, the stalag itself was badly overcrowded. Large numbers of men were sleeping on the floor, in some barracks with only a two-foot-wide sleeping space for each man, and sanitary and washing facilities were similarly choked. While the German ration was hopelessly inadequate, the dump of Red Cross food parcels established at the camp under International Red Cross Committee arrangements largely made good the deficiency except for bread and fresh vegetables. Bad weather held up the air evacuation of the prisoners, and some were billeted for a time near the airfield at Landshut not far away. By 8 May, however, the airfield was taking off several thousand a day to Rheims and Brussels.

Denis arrived at Moosburg at 4am on 4 May. It's unclear how long he stayed at Moosburg itself, but at some stage in the next few days he was billeted in a barn 4km from Landshut and on 10 May, he marched to the airfield. After many false alarms he was flown out at midnight bound for Brussels and England.

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Propaganda pamphlet issued by the Germans urging British prisoners to join Germany in the fight against Russia.

Propaganda pamphlet issued by the Germans urging British prisoners to join Germany in the fight against Russia.

page 131

* Country codes are CZ=Czech Republic, DE=Germany, PL=Poland.

** Placenames are shown German/modern. [?] indicates we've been unable to decipher the handwriting.