German POWs and the Art of Survival

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

Janssen and five comrades went to a nearby station and jumped on a westbound freight train. When the train stopped seemingly in the middle of nowhere, Janssen and a comrade traveled on by foot until they arrived at Travemünde, near Lübeck, on May 3.

Janssen’s wound wasn’t healing properly, so he went to the hospital, where he was told to stay in the waiting room. He decided to head back to the Trave River and dispose of his pistol and paybook. Returning to the hospital, he soon heard the approach of military vehicles. The British were coming.

After being searched for weapons, the German troops in the hospital were told to await further instructions. “That evening a British officer arrived and in very good German informed us that there was no room in the hospital, and that the British would try and accommodate us somehow,” he said. “Later that night, the British came back. They had pulled a train of cattle trucks into the station. They had straw on the floor of the trucks, and we were put into the trucks and locked up. Guards were placed on the platform.This was my first night of captivity.” On the next day they were moved into a hotel.

After a few days, the British separated the SS men from the rest of the prisoners and sent them, including Janssen, to a newly liberated concentration camp near Hamburg. “Here our lives as prisoners really started. It was pretty rough and still a little cold, as it was mid-May. There were no blankets, and we slept on concrete and were questioned frequently, although not every day….None of us could speak English, and none of our guards could speak German, so there was no way of making conversation.”

After 10 days or so, they were moved to a large bordered-off zone in the Schleswig-Holstein region where again there was no accommodation. “We slept in farm buildings and in hay,” Janssen recalled, adding “some had made temporary holes in the ground, with a roof made of sticks and brush and covered with sods of turf. We were left to our own devices. As far as food was concerned, we had to grab what we could. A lot of stealing was going on—we grabbed potatoes from the fields. Ears of corn were stripped off around the cornfields. Most survived.”

One day a batch of British soldiers arrived and announced they were looking for volunteers from among the POWs. Janssen put his name forward and soon found himself working as a clerk processing repatriation papers. Tellingly, those prioritized for return worked in agriculture or food production.

In early 1946, his job as a clerk over, Janssen was put onto a train of cattle trucks that was locked up and then started to roll. “We had no idea where we were going and how long the journey would take,” he said. “Finally coming to a halt, we discovered that we had arrived in Belgium. All of us from the train were taken to a camp that I believe was at a place called Berchan. This camp was split into ‘cages,’ with up to roughly 6,000 POWs in each one. The camp population, I believe, was close to 36,000 POWs.The situation here was pretty rough, and we often went hungry.”

On April 6 Janssen joined a detachment sent to England. The men were given hearty rations at a transit camp. “[It was] almost like a holiday camp to us,” he recalled. “We could eat as much as we liked, which was fantastic, as by this stage we were quite undernourished.”

Performing various jobs for the British army, Janssen found the conditions not only acceptable but almost comfortable. “Specific skills were needed in different camps at different times,” he said, “and if you had a skill you found yourself moving about quite a bit. If you spoke good English, you would be used as a squad leader and, importantly, an interpreter—a skill much in demand.”

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