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I: The Events of 1944 and German Camps from late 1943 onwards

ALTHOUGH the beginning of 1944 saw a stalemate in Italy, there was much on the Eastern Front to indicate to prisoners of war that Germany's fortunes were on the wane and that liberation might come that year. Before March was out Germany was pulling back in Estonia and the north, had lost an army in the Kanyev ‘pocket’, and was desperately fending off an attack in the Ukraine. She occupied Hungary and Roumania just before the Russian drive into the latter that month, and by the spring she was withdrawing on the whole front. Prisoners following the course of the war had long expected the Second Front to come in the spring, and the news of the landing on 6 June was received with great jubilation.

For most prisoners in Germany the landing was the most significant event of the war; for as it became clear that it had been consolidated, they felt for the first time that they could see the end of their captivity. But the frustration of the plot against Hitler on 20 July, and the attempts of the propaganda machine to urge the German people, through fear, to greater efforts, precluded any thought of an early armistice. And though there were great advances on both the Eastern and Western fronts, and city after city was liberated from German occupation, the Allied forces in the West did not enter German territory until 12 September. After the setback at Arnhem, with the summer gone and the German leaders determined to fight on, nothing decisive seemed likely to happen by the ‘fall of the leaves’ (as had once been confidently expected)¹ and prisoners resigned themselves to another winter in Germany.

By the beginning of 1944 there were few prisoner-of-war camps in Germany that had not felt the influx of prisoners formerly in

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Italian camps. Of the officers' camps containing New Zealanders that existed before the Italian capitulation, Oflags IXA/H and IXA/Z both received sufficient of those transported from Italy to make them full to capacity. Oflag VIIB had been relieved by the transfer in the middle of 1943 of 300 to Rotenburg, but later received 200 of those captured in the operations in the Aegean. In order to maintain sufficient living space, it was necessary for the senior British officers and for neutral delegates to bring the danger of overcrowding constantly to the notice of the German authorities. Nevertheless, taking into account recreation space both indoor and out, their living conditions remained far less cramped than those of the stalags.

Oflag VIIB had a very fine sports ground, sufficient for most of the usual outdoor sports—football, cricket, tennis, athletics—and a large vegetable garden as well. Besides the temporary relief of overcrowding,¹ there had been some attempt by the German authorities to effect improvements in living quarters. Although the water supply still remained inadequate, it was arranged for the officers to have hot showers every fortnight instead of every month. The lighting was somewhat improved and by the middle of the year all barracks had electric light, though it was still weak enough to be a source of eye-strain to those trying to read at night. The camp had a fine library of upwards of 15,000 books, and all kinds of intellectual activity were highly organised. In the spring of 1944 parole walks became regular, there were occasional visits to cinema shows in Eichstaett, and in May there was a visit to a travelling circus. Apart from three mental cases in August 1943, the health of the camp remained good until the end of 1944 despite cuts in the German rations. By 1944 the supply of Red Cross food was regular enough to cover the deficiencies of the German diet, and Red Cross consignments and private parcels had built up adequate supplies of clothing, blankets, and the other more minor comforts that it was possible to send.

The conditions at the two other old-established officers' camps were similar. There was a constant struggle to avoid overcrowding,² with its resultant strain on sanitary and other facilities, poor lighting, and insufficient fuel for heating; an inadequate German supply of food and blankets was made good from Red Cross and private sources; and abundant recreational facilities were created by the prisoners themselves with material supplied through Red Cross channels. The more modern building at Rotenburg was

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spared the shortage of water which troubled other camps, but the shortage of fuel for a building with central heating and stone floors made winter conditions very comfortless. And the cold, combined with overcrowding which involved the use of study and recreation rooms for accommodation, deprived many prisoners of reading, study, and similar palliatives for the boredom and frustration of cramped indoor life.

The camp population at Oflag VA at Weinsberg remained more constant, for from the camp's beginning in late 1943 it had been of a higher density than that usual for officer prisoners.¹ As in most camps overcrowding was felt less in summer, when much time could be spent in the open air, than at any other time of the year. In the early part of 1944 the Germans had carried out a number of improvements. The water supply had been increased so that hot showers were available weekly, sanitation was better, the lighting had been made somewhat stronger, and facilities for sports were greatly increased. Parties of 120 prisoners at a time were allowed the use of a fine sports field amid the woods about half an hour's walk from the camp; and a generous supply of sports material from the World Alliance of YMCAs made it possible to use every yard of ground inside the small barbed-wire enclosure of the camp. Supplies of books and stationery from the same source had enabled the organisation of a wide variety of educational courses, and by early June more than 200 had applied to sit for recognised examinations. While many of the improvements in the camp amenities had been made possible by generous material aid from Allied sources, the appointment of a new German camp officer had resulted in much more reasonable relations with the German authorities and, in the opinion of the Swiss delegate, had caused the whole atmosphere to change for the better.

A matter which gave the prisoners in Oflag VA considerable apprehension, and about which it took a long time to persuade the Germans to take action, was the provision of adequate air-raid shelters. The trenches at first provided for this purpose were insufficient to accommodate all the prisoners and were inadequate in design to afford proper protection. As it transpired that there were in the immediate neighbourhood a factory for making aircraft wings and another for machine-gun parts, the necessity for protecting the camp from air raids was a real one. In 1944 the trenches were improved, and during a raid prisoners could use them or remain inside their barracks, whichever they preferred.

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Relations between the 300-odd senior, elderly, and sick officers assembled in Oflag XIIB at Hadamar and the German staff of this camp also improved. By January 1944 the interior accommodation was satisfactory in almost all respects; and though the area for sport in the camp was too small, walks on parole did much to mitigate this. The transfer to this camp of all those of the rank of brigadier and above from other British officers' camps in May caused some crowding together, and it was soon obvious that officers of whatever rank at Hadamar would have to be prepared to share rooms.¹ Up till the time of the invasion they had had adequate supplies of Red Cross food and other materials, but there were the same troubles with German rations as in other camps. The potato ration was depleted through rotting, and there was the same difficulty as elsewhere in obtaining fresh fruit and vegetables, although, as the senior British officer pointed out, the German countryside was bursting with them. Ample sport, theatricals, and music were organised to keep everyone occupied and entertained. Apart from the conditions resulting from the Allied invasion, the camp remained satisfactory throughout the year.

Material conditions in Oflag VIIIF at Märisch-Trübau continued to improve during the early part of 1944: such shortages as there were (dentures, for example) were common to most camps in Germany, and the general impression made on a Swiss inspector in February² was a favourable one. There was in the camp, however, an active escape organisation, and the discovery in late April by German security personnel of plans involving civilians in nearby Czechoslovakia brought the camp into prominence with the German High Command. The latter, because of some successful mass escapes of prisoners of war, took a serious view of the matter and decided to transfer all the prisoners to another area. In early May they were divided into five parties and the move took place by train. All officers were handcuffed, deprived of braces, belts and boots, and packed up to eighteen in one-third of a cattle-truck, the remainder of which, fenced off by barbed wire, was occupied by German guards. The journey to Brunswick took from 42 to 48 hours, but no one was allowed to leave the trucks until arrival. Both before and during the move tempers were short on both sides, and there was some hitting with rifle butts during the march to the station. During the journey the prisoners soon found that the handcuffs were easy to remove; and some enthusiasts among them took advantage of their cross-country jaunt to distribute through the

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openings of the truck anti-German propaganda leaflets which they had run off on a home-made cyclostyle machine before leaving the camp.

The new camp at Querum (Oflag 79), on the outskirts of Brunswick, was situated only two kilometres from an airfield and was surrounded by military targets such as anti-aircraft batteries and factories. Two buildings inside the camp area had suffered in a previous air raid, and the location of the camp was considered by the Swiss representative so dangerous that a request was made to the German High Command on 9 May for its transfer elsewhere. Apart from this consideration, the accommodation, which was in four two-storied brick barracks, was quite insufficient for 1900-odd prisoners;¹ the same could be said of the modern bathing, toilet, and kitchen facilities, and provision for recreation both indoor and outdoor was practically non-existent. Although arrangements were in hand to increase the camp's accommodation in all these respects, the commandant of the new camp was described by the Swiss representative as ‘petty and narrow-minded’ and ‘not at all fitted for his present post’. By the prisoners he was regarded as an obstructionist ‘refusing all reasonable requests’.

As time went on relations between the prisoners and the German administration improved, and by August the accommodation had been doubled, there was more open space outside the barracks, and the educational classes, various forms of entertainment, and religious activities were all flourishing. On 24 August, however, the fears expressed when the camp was first opened were proved well founded, for during a daylight air raid a number of high-explosive and many anti-personnel and incendiary bombs fell within the camp area. The prisoner casualties included three killed, seven badly and thirty slightly wounded. Every building in the camp was damaged, one being rendered permanently uninhabitable; the cookhouse was destroyed, the electric-light system was dislocated, the entire water and drainage system, except for two barracks, was put out of action; and sizeable bomb craters largely nullified the recent additions to the outdoor games area. The German shortage of labour and material made the repair of the damage a much longer process than had been anticipated, to which continued raids in the Brunswick area no doubt contributed. There was no light for ten days, no proper drainage for three weeks, and no heating for three months, prisoners receiving on 2 December their first hot shower since the raid. In spite of these discomforts educational classes were increased, with some 500 officers preparing for examinations;

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theatrical and musical entertainments were continued; and there was considerable interest in study groups on religious topics and other religious activity.

During 1944 New Zealand Army other ranks held prisoner in Germany numbered something over 6000. The majority of them were in Silesia, some 3000 in Stalags 344, VIIIA, VIIIB and VIIIC and their attached Arbeitskommandos. About half this number were in southern Austria at the farms and other satellite camps of Stalag XVIIIA. The remainder were in Poland, in central Germany, or in Bavaria.

By February 1944 the newly-established camp at Teschen (now Stalag VIIIB) was acting as an administrative base for many of the Silesian Arbeitskommandos, including 53 containing some 11,500 British prisoners, about a thousand of them New Zealanders. During the year the camp strength was gradually increased by another 2000 British, 200 of them New Zealanders. Teschen itself held only 250-odd of the British prisoners, together with about two or three times that number of prisoners of other nationalities. As in other British camps the prisoners' camp leader and his staff arranged all work parties, and the camp leader at Teschen was allowed frequent visits to all dependent Arbeitskommandos. Though the barracks and sanitary conveniences were very old and primitive, there was no overcrowding at this stage. Lighting, heating, bathing, and cooking facilities were all adequate, but there was little space for outdoor recreation.

Lamsdorf (now Stalag 344), on the other hand, remained very overcrowded in spite of the exodus to the new Stalag VIIIB and to Stalag VIIIC. At the beginning of 1944 the British prisoners alone numbered 10,000 in the base camp, with another 9000 spread among the 235 Arbeitskommandos attached to it. The sleeping accommodation, water supply, washing facilities, and latrines at Lamsdorf were all inadequate to cope with such numbers, and the German authorities planned to reduce the camp strength to about 6000 by transferring all Air Force, Canadian, and United States prisoners elsewhere. But in the first half of the year only some 500 were moved. This was enough to obviate the necessity of using the lowest of the three tiers of wooden bunks, but had no appreciable effect on the adequacy of the water supply and sanitary facilities. Shortage of water caused considerable discomfort, but pit latrines not emptied frequently enough to cope with the numbers using them caused an intolerable situation. Fortunately, the medical services of the camp were excellent. And the German authorities, perhaps realising the value of plenty of recreation in distracting prisoners' attention from physical discomfort and in compensating to some extent for their failure to provide a camp conforming to

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proper standards, began to openly encourage sport and theatrical entertainments. The latter, as well as special open-air carnivals, reached a standard hitherto unattained. For the rest Lamsdorf remained a huge, sprawling, changing prisoner-of-war community, ably but not too rigidly administered by the British staff, where a profusion of the world's languages was spoken and where prisoners seemed to be able to get away with almost anything provided they did not make it too blatant. It seems to have had something of the atmosphere of a European seaport city, with a good deal of the spit-and-polish of the regular British Army superimposed.

The other base camp for Silesia, Stalag VIIIC at Kunau, near Sagan, was much smaller than the two just mentioned. Here the British numbered about two to three thousand, with fewer than a hundred New Zealanders. Except for about 500, they were spread over some twenty Arbeitskommandos, most of them industrial.

Besides the Arbeitskommandos at the Silesian coal mines, there were others in factories of various kinds, on construction work, on lumber work in the pine forests, and on railway and general maintenance work. Most of the men at the factories were making their first acquaintance with the industries at which they had to work: cotton, sugar, cement, linseed cake, machinery and paper, to name a few. Occasionally an engineer might find himself operating a concrete mixer, his professional interest almost recaptured, until he remembered it would be better, in the interests of damaging the German war effort, to leave it to a fellow-worker completely unfamiliar with such work. For the majority of the prisoners there was at first a certain rather pleasant novelty about the jobs, and one man even said of coalmining that it was ‘good experience’. At most jobs prisoners were working alongside civilian men and women of various nationalities. Not only was there interest in talking to civilians and finding out their views on the war, but the keener prisoners seized every opportunity to make good the lack of female society they had experienced over the previous years, sometimes with an astonishing disregard for conventional modesty.

Prisoners working at factories lived on the premises or in barracks close by, which were usually well heated in the winter. Their midday rations were normally supplied by the factory owner and cooked for them on the job. In any party of fifty or more the British stalag staff responsible for its organisation would include a medical orderly and an interpreter, so that its immediate medical and administrative needs were more easily looked after. All relied on consignments from the stalag of food, clothing, tobacco, and recreational material. Factory work was usually not too strenuous, and most men had plenty of energy for recreation in the evenings.

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Often in summer the men would be taken to a nearby river to swim; in winter there were the usual card games, darts, and reading. A prisoner working in a coal mine writes of spending the evening ‘talking, reading, arguing and eating in patches’. At the larger Arbeitskommandos there were games of football and cricket, concerts and theatrical shows.

Those on outdoor work, such as driving wedges in tree trunks or shovelling shingle, kept fit without the need of outdoor sports. The men from E588, a forestry party, left by train each morning at six o'clock, worked out of doors all day, and were back in camp by four in the afternoon. A party of three to four hundred, including 40-odd New Zealanders, at Mechtal were engaged in preparing excavations for a building which formed part of an electricity scheme. Another party of the same size, half of them New Zealanders, were doing similar work at Laband in preparation for the erection of a factory. In the spring of 1944 a prisoner wrote that he was the ‘heaviest ever’ due to his getting plenty of physical exercise and Red Cross food.

Some of the most pleasant work must have been that in the forest at a lumber camp. Even though it was sometimes loading heavy logs on bogies, the open air combined with Red Cross food and heavy workers' rations kept the prisoners in a camp such as this very fit. They were far enough away from military headquarters not to be forced to work too hard; and sitting round a roaring fire toasting bread at lunchtime almost gave the illusion of a camp holiday. Because of their remoteness the prisoners' living quarters, in old but snug farm buildings, were loosely guarded, especially in winter when it would have been very difficult for an escaper to get far without being detected. Prisoners often wandered alone to and from the work in the forest, and some were able in the evenings to visit Polish and German women living in the neighbourhood. A sympathetic German guard is even said to have been seen in the early mornings filling in the prisoners' return tracks in the snow.

One small party of 14 men, Arbeitskommando 243, was employed at the gasworks in Breslau, stacking and emptying gas purifiers. It was from this party that the first New Zealander¹ to escape from Germany proper made his successful break. He and another of the party got to know some Ukrainians in the factory and were able to obtain from them civilian clothes and a briefcase each in exchange for cigarettes. On 23 September 1943 they changed into civilian clothes, one a little later than the other, scaled a wall, and walked down the road away from the gasworks. They each went by tram

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to the railway station and by train in various stages to Stettin, where they met again. French workers engaged in loading at the docks smuggled them on board a Swedish ship, on which they hid under coal in one of the holds. On arrival in Sweden they were handed over to the police, but were able eventually to report to the British Embassy in Stockholm at the end of September 1943.

The New Zealander was able to send back word to his companions of previous attempts that in his case the plan they had worked out together had succeeded. Two of these companions, New Zealanders,¹ and a British Army man got away on 23 December 1943 from the working party billets in a cement works at Oppeln. One cut the wire surrounding the latrines and the other two scaled over the main gate. All were experienced escapers, who knew the German language fairly well and had made careful plans and secured the necessary equipment before leaving the stalag. They all travelled by train to Breslau and to Berlin, showing false identity cards as Belgian workers. They went across Berlin by underground to a main station, but had to wait there for an Allied air raid to finish. Eventually they reached Stettin, where they stayed in a boarding house and managed to make contact with some Swedish sailors by going into a brothel. The latter agreed to smuggle them on board a Swedish vessel, which sailed on New Year's Day 1944. After five days crouched in a rope locker, they made their presence known as the vessel neared Sweden and were handed over to the police at Oselsund. They spent a month at Stockholm under British protection and were flown out to Scotland in early February.

The working party engaged on railway maintenance and construction at Oderburg put in a bad winter. They had to work in all weathers except heavy rain, and low temperatures made canvas gloves necessary to prevent their hands freezing on to the metal rails they had to carry. Though overcrowded until some of the men were transferred to a coal mine, their barracks were warm, for the surroundings in which they worked gave them ample opportunity to supplement their coal ration unknown to the guards. When undetected by the guard, they were also able to obtain fresh food from the Polish and Czech civilians with whom they worked in exchange for cigarettes, tea, and coffee. With only three slow-running taps, it would have been very difficult to keep clean if Red Cross soap had not been available to use instead of the German putty-like soap ration. By the spring they had completed the German firm's contract and were allocated to another working

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nearer Oderburg. The Czech overseers, who replaced the German they had previously worked under, shortened their hours of work and treated them more reasonably.

In mid-summer waves of Allied planes began to pass overhead and bomb the nearby industrial cities, and soon an air-raid alert became a daily occurrence. Oderburg was a railway junction of some size through which passed supplies to the Eastern Front, and it was too important to be missed. On 29 September the railway station, the yards, and main lines were heavily bombed. Five New Zealanders, together with a guard and a number of civilians, were killed when an air-raid shelter received a direct hit. The German authorities allowed them a full military funeral, with a guard of New Zealanders from the neighbourhood and the senior New Zealand chaplain¹ from Teschen.

Large numbers of prisoners had been employed since 1940 in the flat forest area south-east of Breslau, around Heydebreck and Blechammer, on the construction of a huge industrial centre. The scheme was under the control of the I.G. Farben group and was planned to realise the extraction of motor spirit and other by-products from coal. In late 1943 some 25,000 prisoners and other foreign workers of both sexes and of many different nationalities were being used there. British prisoners were organised into large construction groups of about a thousand men (known as Bau battalions), Arbeitskommandos of about the same size from which gangs could be drawn for work where required, and smaller Arbeitskommandos for more permanent tasks scattered about the area. By mid-1944 the stage of clearing and preliminary construction was over, and the demand was for skilled workmen to complete the detail of the giant project, and for more and more of the unskilled to go down the mines and hack out coal to feed into it.

A working camp of a thousand was large enough to permit the organisation of most of the amenities of the stalag—music, library, theatre, and even school—and small enough to be capable of an esprit de corps that the stalag lacked. A British camp of this size was allocated a British medical officer, and its well-being depended largely on the combined efforts of this officer and the camp leader. Insistence on adequate facilities for keeping clean and proper sanitation, apart from the treatment of minor ailments and the recognition of more serious ones, were all made easier by the presence of an officer skilled in a science which the Germans respected. His protected status and his visits to small outlying sub-camps, to neighbouring towns, and to stalag made it possible

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for him to obtain articles of great value for the welfare and recreation of the camp; and his officer status enhanced his influence both with the German commandant and with his fellow prisoners. In E3 at Blechammer, the medical officer, a New Zealander,¹ was able over a period of two years not only to build up a very efficient medical service, but to play a large part in developing the general administration of a camp which earned a reputation for the well-being and high morale of those confined in it.

The working camp at the Gleiwitz aerodrome of some 300 British Commonwealth prisoners was typical of those Arbeitskommandos which acted as maintenance unit and light labour force for the surrounding district. The duties of the men in this camp varied from digging water-mains in the town and building barracks on the aerodrome to unloading and stacking on the nearby canal and carting loads of bricks or sand. They often travelled by train to work in Tost, Quellengrund, and other neighbouring towns. The change of scene and the variety of jobs, many of them in the open air, gave them a great advantage over prisoners not so fortunately placed. The German NCO in charge seems to have done his best to protect them against exploitation by civilian overseers, to help them in the organisation of recreation, and generally to see that they were reasonably treated. They were able to visit other camps for football matches, to go swimming, to run a band, to set up a ‘beer bar’, to give quite elaborate concerts. The festivities for Christmas 1943 included a mock court and a ‘grand’ concert, and the year 1944 came in with the band playing and the ‘beer bar awash.’ To offset the numerous searches, the locking up of trousers and boots, and other security measures in the new year, there was news of Allied success everywhere; and even before the spring brought its sunshine and wine-like air, the prisoners felt a certain elation for, as one man wrote, ‘the days seem to fly when the griff is good’.²

All the men in this camp had been X-rayed in February, and about the middle of June some of the New Zealanders were transferred to E535, a coal mine at Milowitz, just over the border from Gleiwitz in south-western Poland. Here they were joined by small parties of other New Zealanders from various Arbeitskommandos in eastern Germany. They took the place of most of the British, Cypriots, French, and Spanish who had been there for some years. Milowitz may be taken as typical of a good number of the mining camps, though not all of them had such bad conditions.

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Both on and off work conditions were rough and crude. The old mine shafts were in disrepair, the machinery was old, and there was a shortage of essential mining equipment such as lamps. The place lacked washing facilities capable of coping with coaldust and there was a totally inadequate soap ration. Near the mine shaft were the barracks—dirty, leaking, insanitary, bug-infested—on a piece of ground where every blade of grass had long since given up the unequal struggle against scoria. Discipline was in the hands of a German NCO of low mentality who was always threatening collective punishment and occasionally manhandling the prisoners. Their diet consisted mainly of swill soup, potatoes and bread, and the quantity would have been quite insufficient had it not been for regular supplies of Red Cross food parcels in the early stages. Fortunately they were able to trade regularly with Polish civilians for eggs and other fresh food, and occasionally for liquor of a kind. Fresh farm produce compensated for the unpalatability of the German rations, and occasional schnapps provided an escape from the ugliness and semi-animal atmosphere of the mine. This illicit trading the German guards tried to circumvent by searches at the camp gates.

As in many other camps, the arrival of newcomers with new ideas was resented by some of the old hands, and some clashes occurred. Gradually, however, most of the original occupants were transferred elsewhere, and more New Zealanders kept arriving until there were more than 500 of them. Old comrades who had not seen each other since the days of Crete met again and compared experiences.

Hours of actual work at the mine were long, usually eight and a half hours in the coal seam, preparations beforehand and cleaning up afterwards added another hour or two, and for a long time only one Sunday in four was a free day. This was later the subject of an official complaint when the International Red Cross Committee investigated all the German mining camps. Falls of stone and coal caused crushed and broken bones, and there were many cases of ‘gassing’ during work below the ground. Down in the mine prisoners were employed in pushing or shovel-loading trucks, working alongside Polish men and boys, sometimes ankle-deep in water. Above the surface they worked with Polish women ‘separating’, loading scrap-iron, coal and rations, and doing camp fatigues.

There was much threatening with pistols by both Polish-born overseers and German guards in order to keep the prisoners working. But constant bullying of this kind failed to make much impression on men who by this time had several years of prisoner-of-war experience behind them, had been screamed at by guards, snarled at by Alsatian police dogs, and threatened with firearms too often

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to be worried. They shovelled the required minimum of wagonloads, less if they could deceive the overseer, and quickly learnt all the ways in which they could loaf on the job and get away with it. But work below was unpleasant and anyone who fell foul of a German guard was kept there for a long period.

The only accepted excuse for not working was incapacity through illness or injury, verified by medical examination. It is perhaps not surprising that there were a good many broken bones, ‘rashes’, burns, and sores self-inflicted by some of these forced miners in order to secure a spell from work. A few men became specialists in the infliction of these ‘krankers’¹ as they were called, and some prisoners were able to avoid mining work for weeks or even months by this means. It seemed justified on the grounds of keeping men from working for the German war effort. But only five per cent of the camp strength was normally allowed off work at a time, and sometimes genuinely sick persons were forced down the mine to make up the work quota. The lot of the genuinely sick was made more difficult in any case if the Germans became suspicious of a succession of similar injuries. The British medical officer and many of the men felt, moreover, that the spells from work should have been shared evenly among those in the camp. The whole matter gave rise to some bitter arguments.

Among men working under such conditions and on various shifts throughout the whole day and night, it was unlikely that artistic and intellectual recreations would flourish as they did in other camps. There were almost no facilities for reading, and even letters were short in mid-1944. Football and boxing matches held on the rare free days and an occasional concert were the only light relief from the weariness and monotony of a life of continual dirt, hunger, and oppression.

Against this drab background there was the brightness of the war news—consistently good throughout this period on all fronts. To back it up there were increasingly severe air raids, and evidence of the approach of the Russian forces in the digging of tank traps in the neighbourhood and the evacuation of prisoner-of-war camps to the north and east. These things kept morale high, even when Red Cross food and cigarettes ran out and when the last quarter of the year brought rain and snow to add their share of discomfort. It was possibly through the inspiration of the good war news that the camp weekly newspaper Tiki Times² came into being in August and ran through 24 issues. It became the camp's chief artistic outlet and an enthusiastic meeting voted to publish it after the war, a resolution that has since been carried out.

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There was no lack of incentive to attempt an escape from Milowitz, but only two New Zealanders¹ were successful. They were in a party of four who got out in September through an old escape tunnel cut from a disused mine working. The break was made late on the night of the 12th, and the four men lost no time crossing into Slovakia. Here two of them were recaptured, but the two New Zealanders had the good fortune to meet in the hills near Mesto Slovakian partisans, who passed them on to the Allied military mission operating there. They were flown to Bari on 5 October.

As in other camps, the end of the year at Milowitz saw the Germans tightening up security measures for fear of concerted action by prisoners under the influence of the good war news. There were stricter searches at the gate to detect illicit trading, and searches of the camp by guards or Gestapo, in one of which a prisoner was caught with earphones listening on a secret radio. Some timely Red Cross food, a concert, and a pictorial issue of the Tiki Times helped to bring some cheer into Christmas, and some illicit schnapps contributed to a noisy New Year's Eve.

The prisoners began the new year with a strong complaint about the shortage of proper miners' boots, and many were allowed to remain above ground on this account. They followed it up by a concerted condemnation of the camp on letter-cards, in which almost everybody took part. The immediate result was the return of all the cards to the camp by the commandant in a fit of rage. Nevertheless, a film was shown shortly afterwards in the newly-built concert hall for the first time, and half the day shift were allowed to remain on surface work.

As the snow fell deeper in the first days of January 1945 the news became steadily better, and rumours of the close proximity of the Russians were confirmed by the feverish digging of defences nearby. On the 18th a pitiful rabble of Jews from the adjacent Auschwitz concentration camp was herded past on the road. Next day E535 was on the march, the first stage of a gruelling 1000-kilometre trek which in the next three months took them across Czechoslovakia and into Bavaria almost to Munich.

The British section of Stalag VIIIA at Görlitz, the other Silesian camp containing considerable numbers of New Zealanders, remained of moderate size compared with Lamsdorf. In 1944 its strength was about 3000, of which more than a third, mainly NCOs and including some 350 New Zealanders, were at the stalag, the remainder being spread over 40-odd Arbeitskommandos. As for the other camp

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communities set up in Germany after the influx from Italy, 1944 was for Stalag VIIIA a period of consolidation and development. Prisoners were able to reap the benefit of the hard work put in while getting the camp in order following their arrival. Until the latter part of the year there were ample supplies of Red Cross food, tobacco, and recreational material. Camp routine was well established, and all the various departments of a properly organised camp, from post office to barber's shop, from library to theatrical rehearsal group, from church to escape committee, were put into smooth running order. In some ways they ran more smoothly than would be normal in civilian life, since in an NCOs' stalag or an oflag these were the only things to which the prisoner need devote his time.

At camps for non-working prisoners a full programme of recreational activities was essential if men were to have sufficient interests to occupy their time. A democratically constituted camp committee at Görlitz co-ordinated the work of a number of subcommittees for sports, education, theatre and the rest. While a large proportion of men engaged in outdoor sports as a means of keeping fit, the theatre was probably outstanding among indoor recreations in providing the most satisfying form of escape for the greatest number of prisoners. For at least the hour or two of the performance men could forget bedbugs, barbed wire, searches, police dogs, evening curfew, and the other annoyances that were all too insistent at other times. Towards the end of the year the theatre at Görlitz was closed by the Germans after a Gestapo search which disclosed, among other things, a radio set in full operation. But if they prevented a Christmas show, the Gestapo did little to eliminate traffic between prisoners and the outside world. For a few thousand cigarettes a group of New Zealanders bought a live sheep, which was in due course smuggled into the camp, slaughtered, and added to the Christmas menu.

The Arbeitskommandos attached to Görlitz were engaged in types of work similar to those already described: coalmining, quarrying, forestry, brick making, work in various kinds of factories, construction and maintenance work. Only a few, notably those at coal mines, had more than a hundred British prisoners; but they were kept up to strength by the German doctor, who ruthlessly drafted out prisoners from the stalag whether or not they were pronounced fit by the British medical officers. A group of about fifty were quartered in three rooms of an inn in the centre of Weisswasser, where they had to manhandle electrical equipment destined for German airfields. Such work was monotonous, and so was the stone-breaking done by another party at Greiffenberg. But in addition to outdoor sports at a village sports field, these men had

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opportunities of swimming and visiting the cinema already noted at other German Arbeitskommandos. Their surroundings both at work and at other times were freer and more pleasant than those of their fellow prisoners in stalags. A congenial party supplied with musical instruments, darts, and other equipment could pass their leisure hours pleasantly enough, and one man rates his time at a Silesian Arbeitskommando as the happiest of his prisoner-of-war days. But the disadvantages of a restricted community were accentuated in a small Arbeitskommando, and there were times when almost every prisoner of war could say, ‘The monotony of the same faces, stagnant conversation, simulated cheerfulness and the deep longing for those we love make any conditions difficult, and the only really pleasant hours are those of sleep.’¹

As in other parts of Germany, many men from these Arbeitskommandos made breaks from billets to attempt an escape. Such men had usually received information and equipment from the escape committee of the stalags they previously had been at. The only New Zealander² to succeed from a camp in this area left his billet at Munsterberg in the early morning of 14 July 1944. He made for the railway station wearing a civilian suit acquired from a Frenchman, and travelled by train to Breslau and on to Stettin. Here he met a Swedish sailor, who guided him while he swam out to his ship and boarded it by a rope ladder. He hid in the airshaft of the ship's main funnel until he could safely disclose his presence and was landed at Kalmar, in Sweden, at the beginning of August. Like most successful escapes from Germany, this was the last of a long series of attempts.

About 1300 New Zealand prisoners of war spent 1944 in southern Austria, the great majority of them in working camps. A good number of the latter, although they were recorded as being in Stalag XVIIIA at Wolfsberg, had never seen the stalag and knew it merely as the centre from which they were administered and obtained their relief supplies. The work of dealing with the needs of nine or ten thousand British prisoners working in more than 300 Arbeitskommandos, as well as the thousand or so at the stalag, was an administrative task at all times heavy, and in 1944 often very intricate. By the middle of that year some of the New Zealanders had begun their fourth year of captivity and some of the British Army prisoners their fifth. In spite of getting used to the routine, the length of captivity and the tension caused by anticipation first of the final Allied push and later by its completion began to tell on

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men's nerves. Fortunately by 1944, as in the camps already described, the organisation of Wolfsberg had reached a very efficient pitch.

There had been little change in the buildings of the stalag itself since the erection of a new barrack for ‘disciplinaires’,¹ a previous one on the same site having been burned to the ground just after its completion. The installation of a new drainage system had made sanitation much easier. The fittest of the German guards had been sent in late 1943 to one of the battle zones and their replacements were found to be susceptible to offers of cigarettes, soap, and chocolate. As a result, it gradually became possible to obtain almost anything desired in the way of fresh food or articles such as cameras, films, and radio valves, which had a special value in prisoner-of-war camps. Discipline became the easiest it had ever been, until a morning check parade mustered only about eighty prisoners and the guards had to be called out to clear the barracks.

If the discipline still continued fairly easy in 1944, the German security was considerably tightened. Representatives of working parties were restricted in their movements, chaplains were for a while prohibited from visiting work-camps except on entirely unacceptable terms,² and both the stalag and its Arbeitskommandos experienced more thorough searches than in any previous year. It still remained possible, however, for British prisoners liable to heavy sentences of imprisonment to be concealed in the stalag,³ just as they were on a larger scale at Lamsdorf. It was possible also to maintain radio reception of BBC news bulletins and so continue the daily camp news service, which became of increasing interest to prisoners as they felt that their time of liberation was approaching.

The amenities of Stalag XVIIIA reached a high standard in 1944. There was a library of 15,000 books, besides large numbers in the Arbeitskommandos and a ‘university’ library of textbooks for serious students. A stalag school catered for the latter and especially for those wishing to sit examinations. There was a sports field inside the camp, besides ample facilities for outdoor games on Sundays at most Arbeitskommandos. A monthly cyclostyled stalag newspaper, the Pow Wow, published administrative instructions and information regarding Red Cross supplies in addition to topical articles, and the chaplains joined in the publication of the equivalent of a parish magazine. Both publications tried to help prisoners

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through the uncertainties and anxieties which succeeded elation over the Allied landings in Europe. On 19 December bombing of the stalag by Allied planes destroyed several barracks and killed a hundred prisoners. Whereas working parties threatened by bombing ‘just made for the hills with the guards’,¹ some of those in the stalag, in a kind of trapped panic, made a ‘mad rush’ for the slit trenches, in a manner which recalled to one eye-witness similar rushes for scraps of food in the early days at Marburg.

A majority of the men in the Arbeitskommandos in southern Austria had hitherto been engaged on farm work, but in 1944 the number used on industrial undertakings rose to 60 per cent: hydro-electric construction at Lavamünd and Unterdrauberg, quarrying at Trofaiac, road construction at Waldenstein and Egydi, railway work at St. Veit, Gross Reifling and Selzstal. Most men knew better than to refuse to do work permitted under the Geneva Convention. Such refusals had in the past produced savage sentences of three or four years at a military prison. A whole working party which refused to parade because an overseer had broken his promise of an extra day off was cleared out of its billet with rifle butts and police dogs. On the other hand, a party which made a firm stand against loading a tank onto a railway truck had its appeal upheld by a German officer. In general men found it better, where there was no legitimate ground for refusing to work, to loaf on the job, though this also was sometimes punished.

A good number of men attempted minor sabotage: breaking picks and shovels, putting sand in the oil-wells of railway trucks, inserting lighted cigarettes in truck-loads of hay. It was possible to get away with these. But anything more serious, such as throwing a hammer into a stone-crusher, was severely repressed by a heavy prison sentence; and one man who was caught jumping on a shovel handle received three years' imprisonment. It is impossible not to respect the spirit and courage of the men who thus defied their captors. But many prisoners held the same view as a successful escaper, who wrote that destroying picks and shovels was ‘not worth the candle’. There certainly does not seem to be evidence that such minor, unorganised acts of sabotage as could be carried out by most prisoners of war had a sufficient effect on the German war effort to warrant their consideration as a duty incumbent on all. Oddly enough, sexual intercourse with German women was punished just as severely. It may have been regarded as an attempt at temporary sabotage of the German female labour force, or as permanent sabotage of the Nazi plan for a nation of pure ‘Nordic’ strain.

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Some of the Arbeitskommandos were large enough to be organised as sub-centres for the smaller parties in their neighbourhood; there were 400 in Klagenfurt and about the same number in the small camps for which it acted as base. By 1944 most Austrian working parties were fairly comfortably housed in barracks or farmhouses, though usually overcrowded. One party which was lucky enough to be billeted in a tourist guesthouse had mattresses, sheets and pillowslips, and three hot baths a week, but it is perhaps unnecessary to say that this was exceptional. Prisoners' rations were the same as those of the civilians who did the same work, but Red Cross supplies and fresh food exchanged for them made up any deficiencies. Though they received no working clothes (except wooden clogs) from their employers, nearly every prisoner had two suits of battle dress towards the end of 1944. Some camps, such as A945GW at Selzstal, were assured of recreation by having their own sports ground, musical instruments and library. But few men were able to concentrate sufficiently in the crowded after-work atmosphere of the billets to do any serious study. One man wrote bitterly that ‘after numerous attempts over two years’ he had had to give it up.

One of the members of the escape committee at Stalag XVIIIA estimated the number of known attempts to escape from the stalag and its work-camps at three thousand. Many were helped by this committee, which collected information, advised men on escape routes and methods, and where possible and needful provided maps, compasses, money and clothes. Many dozens of others made their own arrangements. Of the routes out—Switzerland, Hungary, Italy, and Yugoslavia—the last proved the most fruitful.

Some reference has been made in earlier chapters to the escapes of one or two prisoners of war from camps in southern Austria and to their subsequent movements south into Yugoslavia. In the spring of 1944 the British military mission in Slovenia reported that there was a ‘steady, slow trickle’ of escapers from these camps. They were being assisted by friendly Austrians in Graz and Marburg and outlying villages, and on contacting Yugoslav partisans on the general line of the River Drau, they were able to make their way with partisan guides to Slovene headquarters.

One such New Zealander¹ planned his final escape with some others while at the camp in Spittal. They managed to get transferred to Arbeitskommando 410L at Spitzendorf, near Graz, and on 8 April opened the doors of the farmhouse in which they were locked at night and went off. Having no civilian clothes, they

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travelled by night and hid up during the day. They improvised a raft to cross the Drau and entered Yugoslavia eight days after their break from camp. Their food exhausted, they stopped at the first house, which proved friendly. Shortly afterwards they met Yugoslav partisans who guided them to a post of the British military mission on 8 May. A month later they were flown to Bari.

In June 1944 the Allied escape organisation began to take an active interest in assisting escapers from camps in southern Austria and evacuating them through Yugoslavia. A post of the Allied mission in northern Slovenia had found that at St. Lorenzen, about 30 miles from Marburg, there was a working camp not well guarded from which a raid by Slovene partisans could free all the prisoners. About a hundred of the latter were transported from Marburg to St. Lorenzen each morning to do railway maintenance work, and returned to their quarters at Marburg in the evening. A British other rank, whose job it was to make hot drinks for the party, made contact with Tito agents in the neighbourhood, with whom he arranged for a small party of prisoners to leave the working party and meet Yugoslav partisans in a nearby wood. At the end of August a party of seven¹ was able to walk away past a sleeping guard at three o'clock in the afternoon, and at nine o'clock the men were eating and dancing with Tito partisans in a newly-captured village, five miles away.

Two British officers in the village arranged with the partisans for the rest of the camp to be abducted on the following day. Next morning the seven escapers returned with some twenty partisans to await the arrival of the work-party by the usual train from Marburg. As soon as work had begun the partisans, to use the phrase of a New Zealand eye-witness, ‘swooped down the hillside and disarmed the eighteen guards’. In a short time prisoners, guards, and civilian overseers were being escorted along the route used by the seven escapers the previous evening.

At the first headquarters camp reached particulars were taken of the 132 escaped prisoners² for transmission by wireless to England. Progress along the evacuation route south was by no means uneventful, since German patrols were still very active. A night ambush by one such patrol caused the loss of two prisoners and two of the escort. Eventually they reached Semic, which had become a kind of advanced base depot catering for escapers. They were flown across to Bari on 21 September 1944.

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Besides those in the party from Marburg, one or two other New Zealanders from camps in Austria reached the Allied lines through Yugoslavia in the summer and autumn of 1944. From an Arbeitskommando at Radkersburg attached to Stalag XVIIIA, a New Zealand sapper¹ who had persistently tried to rejoin the Allied forces since his capture in April 1941 finally succeeded. When first rounded up at Kalamata he had managed to get clear, but after being in and out of enemy hands in Greece several times, he was recaptured with a party in a motor boat trying to reach Turkey. He was taken to Italy and was one of the few who escaped through a tunnel from Campo PG 57 in October 1942. Shortly after his transfer to Austria he escaped on 26 October 1943 from a working camp at Graz, and with others made his way into Hungary to join the group of escapers there, of whom some mention has been made elsewhere. Recaptured after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, he was injured while jumping from a train and was taken to Breslau hospital. He was later transferred to Austria again, and on 5 September 1944 walked off the farm at Radkersburg on which he was working. Having made contact with some friendly Austrians according to a prearranged plan, he reached a band of partisans north-west of Marburg. He and other escaped prisoners were taken south to reach Semic on 9 October and to Italy a fortnight later.

Two more New Zealanders left their Austrian working camps in September, to reach Ancona in Italy on the same day in late November. One² jumped, with two companions, on to a passing train while on the way to work at Graz. In this way the three escapers reached the outskirts of the city and walked on after dark, following the River Mur, which runs almost due south. After four nights' travel they met a Yugoslav who put them in touch with partisan forces. They were taken across the Drau and escorted by partisans to Metlika, whence their evacuation was arranged by the Allied military mission. The other New Zealander³ to get away in September escaped a week later with six companions from Arbeitskommando 88HV near Marburg. After reaching Yugoslavia his evacuation was similarly arranged, and both parties travelled from Zara to Ancona on the same British naval vessel.

In October the escapes from Austria included two more New Zealanders, one⁴ from Arbeitskommando 65GW at Thiesen and the other⁵ from 11010GW at Kühnsdorf. The former was one of

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a party who left their place of work near Thiesen, three miles south of Marburg, and hid in a wood. The local women fed them and brought partisan guides to take them south to Metlika. The other New Zealander was a member of an escape party which was also put in touch with the partisans through contact between one of its members and a local girl. The party escaped from the camp latrines while the guards' attention was distracted elsewhere, and made their way to a prearranged rendezvous with partisan guides. Both parties reached Italy from Zara in early December.

Another party containing two New Zealanders¹ got away from Kühnsdorf on 5 November. Shortly after six o'clock in the evening the camp lights were fused and the escapers were able to cut their way through the perimeter wire. An eye-witness account describes how the German camp police dog, well fed for some days before the break, was thrown a bone as the escapers left ‘to keep it busy’. An Austrian-Yugoslav girl who worked in the same factory as the prisoners was waiting half a mile from the camp, and she led them to a rendezvous in the woods with two Yugoslav partisan officers. They were guided south to the Allied military mission at Metlika and finally evacuated from Zara in mid-December. These were the last New Zealanders from Austria to reach Allied lines before the end of the year; though several more broke camp in December, they were not able to get through until April of the next year.²

From 1941 onwards a few British prisoners had made their way into Hungary after escaping from camps in eastern Austria, some only a few miles from the Hungarian border. At first these men were held in a prison at Siklos, where conditions were bad, but later they were treated as military internees and housed in the Komarom camp for internees, where there were refugees from all the countries of German-occupied Europe. Later still they were given the rights of ‘free internees’, corresponding to the status laid down in the Hague Convention for escapers who reach a neutral country, and were accommodated on the estate of a Hungarian count at Szigetvar in the south. They were allowed the freedom of the town of Szigetvar and its neighbourhood to a radius of six miles. By December 1943 there were some twenty British other ranks living there very comfortably and being well looked after, doing nominal work on the estate in return. It was inevitable, however, that in time some of them would become restive under the enforced inactivity. There was some dissatisfaction also among the local Hungarians, who worked long hours but noticed that, although

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the British escapers did not, they always had plenty of money to spend in the local taverns. To avoid this the men were ordered to work outside the estate, but relations with Hungarian employers and other workers were not always without difficulties.

There was in Hungary only one British officer escaper (a South African lieutenant-colonel), who was quartered in Budapest, where he was able to maintain contact with the British authorities. But a New Zealand sapper,¹ who had assumed the rank of captain to assist him in his escape plans, was on his arrival in Budapest sent down to the Szigetvar estate, as it was felt that his assumed rank would assist in maintaining discipline and preventing the occurrence of any incident likely to give the Germans an excuse for interfering. In early 1944 those at Szigetvar were warned that there were German officers in civilian clothes in the neighbourhood, and there is evidence that the Germans did their best to have the privileges accorded to British escapers restricted. In point of fact the Germans had good reasons to be suspicious, for two or three of the escapers had in late January 1944, by arrangement with British military authorities, prepared a landing strip and were ready to operate a system of ground signals for the reception of a British military mission. But its arrival was postponed, and before an attempt to land it could be made the German authorities had decided on the military occupation of Hungary.

This took place on 19 March 1944, and although the Hungarian authorities had given promises of protection for British escapers, they were for the most part not able to carry them out. The British at Szigetvar were taken over by the German troops on the following day; and although Natusch,² another New Zealander, and one or two others were able to break from their guards, they were recaptured later. A dozen or so other British escapers³ (later arrivals) quartered on another estate at Lehervar were however removed to Zugliet prison without the knowledge of the German authorities, the plan being to arrange their escape when opportunity should occur. Later the German authorities heard of them and arranged their transfer to Germany. One or two broke out of the barracks before this happened, among them a New Zealander⁴ who, with an

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Englishman, was helped by an organisation in Budapest and contacted the Russians there in January 1945. Having assumed officers' rank, these two reached Debrecen and Bucharest, whence they were flown to Athens and Bari in late February.

The other New Zealander¹ who escaped from the round-up at Szigetvar headed for southern Hungary, but was caught after a few days and put in a camp at Zemun, near Belgrade in Yugoslavia. On 17 April 1944 heavy Allied bombing practically destroyed the camp and he was able to escape through the wire. He was taken by farm-workers to a village held by Yugoslav partisans, and shortly afterwards met an officer of one of the British military missions. He was moved with others through Yugoslav territory to a landing strip and flown to Bari in July.

Many of those escapers who were picked up in Austria as a result of border patrol activity or the suspicions of civilians spent some time, after their interrogation at Landek, at Stalag XVIIIC at Markt Pongau. The camp had on its strength between six and nine hundred British prisoners, mostly men from Italy and including about a hundred New Zealanders. They were not allowed to share the excellent theatre and sports ground of the French, and in spite of the Red Cross relief supplies, the general conditions and atmosphere of their section of the camp remained bad. One recaptured New Zealander records that it was a ‘depressing place’ and that the guards were ‘tough’. A New Zealand medical officer observes that the huts were ‘big, dark and damp’, that the atmosphere ‘got the men down’, and that the camp ‘stank always’. Some two to three hundred NCOs from Spittal who had refused to work were brought there in June 1944 in an effort to make them change their minds. They were crowded into one hut, segregated from the rest of the camp, and kept there under most unhealthy conditions. Though it was over seven months before any improvements were made, these men were reported as ‘very cheerful’ and they stuck it out to the end of the war. It was not surprising that most of the other ranks who were liable for work were only too keen to get out from such a camp to a working party. The first of them left in January 1944 and their conditions were reported as infinitely better. A Red Cross inspector reporting on Markt Pongau in October 1944 wrote that the camp made an ‘extremely unfavourable impression.’

Among the prisoners of many nationalities assembled in Stalag VIIA at Moosburg, there had been New Zealanders since the time when those captured in the Greek campaign of 1941 had first reached Bavaria. New Zealanders had also formed a proportion of the thousands which had poured through the camp in late 1943

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en route from Italy to camps farther north. The majority had moved on, but for various reasons odd ones had stayed. These, together with airmen occasionally brought down in the district, escapers recaptured in Italy, and newly-captured soldiers from the Italian battlefront, brought the number of New Zealanders at Moosburg by the end of 1944 to over two hundred. About half the British prisoners on the camp strength were out working at Arbeitskommandos. Like the working parties from Markt Pongau, some were employed on digging and constructing air-raid shelters, others on a variety of jobs similar to those on which prisoners were used in Silesia and Austria. Conditions for the men were very much the same too. A large number of those who had been in other ranks' camps in Italy expressed their preference for the treatment they received in Germany.

Further north in Bavaria, the non-working British NCOs in Stalag 383 at Hohenfels were launched on a programme of educational and recreational activity which became one of the most extensive in Germany. In this they were greatly helped by material supplied under the scheme carried out by the World Alliance of YMCAs, and in particular by the interest taken in the camp by the delegate of the Swedish YMCA.¹ Among the 5000 or so NCOs there at the beginning of 1944, 330 of them New Zealanders, there was sufficient variety of talent and sufficient manpower to initiate and keep going almost every possible kind of camp activity. The 400 huts of the camp were organised into blocks and companies, each with its representative. The quartermastering and disciplinary side of the camp was run by the senior warrant officer, the welfare and other activities by an elected man-of-confidence. The German commandant was described as a ‘very fair man’, and there is ample evidence that the prisoners were given every opportunity to employ their leisure time profitably and pleasantly. Apart from the sports, theatricals, and other amenities common to many camps, there was a swimming pool in which over 200 men qualified for Royal Life-saving Society certificates. In winter it became ice-bound, and with a hundred pairs of skates from the Swedish Red Cross the prisoners turned it into a skating rink. There were bee colonies and practical instruction in apiculture, one New Zealander passing the diplomas for the British Bee-keeping Society. An old stable was converted by the prisoners into a school to accommodate 2000, with separate classrooms and a reading room.

Where materials could not be obtained legitimately they could be purchased with British cigarettes on the black market by German guards. Many wireless-set parts, cameras, watches, and other

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articles thus found their way inside Stalag 383, for the purchasing power of British and American cigarettes in the cities of Nazi Germany was in 1944 very considerable. The camp had not one but many radios. There were two well-equipped theatres and 15 varied music groups and orchestras. Stage shows like the ‘Mikado’ could run for three weeks. There was every conceivable kind of sporting event. Anzac Day began with a dawn service, followed on with a march past, and finished with a smoke concert. There were 22 exchange marts in operation, selling everything from a powder-puff to a set of false teeth. The latter might be thought to command a limited market but apparently, after remodelling, satisfied its purchaser. Some men had vegetable gardens; others kept rabbits. A New Zealander wrote, ‘Nora has come along with her third litter’; and later, ‘Knocked off five yesterday and had the best dinner in four years.’ For those who did not care for set occupations or educational courses there was a library of over ten thousand books. One prisoner casually remarked in a letter, ‘I think I’ve gone through most', and as an after thought added (perhaps to avoid being thought ungrateful), ‘but good books can always be re-read.’ There is no doubt that there was ample scope in Stalag 383 for reading, extensive as well as intensive. One of the Swedish delegates who visited the camp on the occasion of the centenary of the