German POWs and the Art of Survival

By Simon Rees | Military History  | 4 comments  | Print This Post  | Email This Post

Following basic training, Lorman’s unit of field engineers was sent to Greece, then on to the Eastern Front. There, in early 1945, as the Red Army advanced, he was promoted to NCO and joined roughly 1,000 men in an intensive training program. But with news of a Russian breakthrough at nearby Poznan, the trainees were rushed to the front. Casualties were high. By April 18, 1945, just 60 remained in Lorman’s unit, fighting desperately alongside a canal between the Oder and Neisse rivers. By that afternoon, only 17 men were left, so a surviving sergeant gathered the men and ordered them to make for headquarters—wherever that might be.

Emerging from the forest, a relieved Lorman stumbled toward a group of 10 or so men, thinking they were a detachment from a Hungarian unit that had been stationed on Lorman’s left. He was wrong. They were Red Army troops, and they beckoned him on. The Russians were amazed to find they had bagged a Slovak in the SS, and a White Russian to boot. Whites were considered traitors and could expect a long confinement in the worst of the gulags—or a bullet.

Asked whether he had any cigarettes, Lorman handed over his stash and was pleased to see they gave some back. “I began to hope that I shall survive this experience,” he recalled. “Surely they would not bother handing back those cigarettes to a man they were about to kill.”

The smoke break was cut short, however, by incoming fire from the woods. A Russian NCO ordered Lorman to stand up and call for the shooters to surrender. Lorman realized the danger he faced: Stand up and get shot, or refuse the order and get shot, but at close range. He jumped up, called out and received a burst of gunfire in reply. Only one bullet hit him, passing through his thigh. Following that action, the Russian NCO had Lorman patched up and sent to an aid station. That night Lorman slept in a goat sty with other POWs.

“There are honorable soldiers in all armies,” Lorman said, “and I was fortunate enough to fall into the hands of some of them.” Those feelings wouldn’t last.

The next morning Lorman watched as a Red Army soldier frolicked with a golden duckling in the spring sunshine. When called to report to a nearby house, the man suddenly dashed the bird to the floor and crushed it dead under his boot heel. For Lorman, it was a terrifying moment. “I don’t want to believe that the central actor in this story was really a Russian,” he recalled. “I cannot describe my feelings at the time. Later when the initial shock wore off, I told myself to be very wary of these people. From that day on I was determined to humor them and to avoid the fate suffered by the beautiful duckling.”

Lorman was sent to a hospital in Swiebodzin to recover from his wounds. The facility sheltered about 120 prisoners. “All of us were wounded or sick,” he said, “but with each new day more and more of us were recovering.” The nurses put the German and Axis POWs to work as orderlies, helping the wounded to the operating theater, cleaning the grounds and burying the dead.

As Lorman realized the hospital was a comparative oasis of calm, perhaps vital to his chances for survival, he improved his language skills and became a translator. “I didn’t miss a single opportunity to strike up a conversation with one or another of the Russians,” he said.

Others were less willing to cooperate. One evening a German officer and his men refused to clean the hospital yard, claiming it was against the Geneva Convention to work after the last meal of the day. Lorman and others broke ranks and started to clean up, while those who had protested, including the officer, were whisked away—to the gulag.

Ironically, that deportation improved conditions at the hospital: “With the number of prisoners now down to less than 40,” said Lorman, “our lives took on an even more peaceful character. We had good food and enough of it, soft enough beds and warm enough blankets, even plenty of books to read.”

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Tags: Historical Conflicts, People, Politics, Social History, World War II