Hope Was a Luxury In the Nazi Prison Camps

For obvious reasons the Germans do their best to keep their prisoners of war hidden behind a thick veil of secrecy, but from time to time information leaks out which enables us to form some picture, however inadequate, of their sad plight.

Of all Europe's unhappy millions during WWII, who in Hitler's ridden Europe could have been really happy? Perhaps the most miserable were those whose life was a living hell while in a German concentration camp. Hardly less miserable, however, could be the lot of the great host of soldiers who, after the excitements of war, were now compelled to languish behind the barbed wire of the prison camps.
There were hundreds of thousands of them, wearing the uniforms that were now ragged and dirty, from all the defeated nations of the Continent. Poles and Norwegians, Dutch and Belgians and Frenchmen, they were all represented in the prison camps. In some, too, there were British soldiers, men who had been wounded in the great retreat and had to be left behind or were surrounded like the gallant 51st Division when the line in France was overwhelmed by the German hordes.
Most numerous were the French soldiers who surrendered in crowds as soon as the news of the armistice negotiations reached the front. Before the close of the Battle of France the Germans claimed to have taken nearly a million prisoners and that number may well have been exceeded.
Concentrated in prisoner-of-war camps in occupied France and in Germany, those unhappy poilus were living under conditions of extreme squalor, suffering the pangs of hunger, threatened by pestilence, tormented by half-healed wounds, and clothed in verminous rags. The filth of the camps was unbelievable, said Mr. J. L. Luhan of the American Hospital Ambulance Service, on his return from a visit to some of them a few weeks after the armistice. At a camp of 5,000 prisoners at St. Cloud, where Mr. Luhan distributed food, clothing, oranges, cigarettes, and drinks, the most pressing demand was for beef cubes, chocolate, and fresh bread. It seemed that the prisoners were being given mouldy German bread instead of the fresh French bread to which they had been accustomed. The responsibility for maintaining the prisoners was laid on the French Government by a clause in the armistice, but the lack of transport and difficulties put in the way by the German authorities often prevented food from arriving at the camps. So poor were the supplies that Marshal Petain was compelled to protest to the German authorities.
At the camp at St. Cloud a number of French Negro troops were imprisoned, and the Germans, in accordance with their boasted sense of racial superiority, discriminated against them in every way. When the American visitors called the attention of a German doctor to an unattended case of strangulated hernia in a black colonial, they were told: "We must distinguish between black and white; the French must learn that."

No Release for French Prisoners
The Franco-German armistice brought release to those German soldiers who had been captured by the French, but not to the French taken prisoner by the Germans, who it was decreed should remain in German hands until the conclusion of peace. A week or two later a suggestion in a French paper that French prisoners should be released now that hostilities were over was denounced in a German semi-official statement as “a piece of unparalleled effrontery." Evidently, the statement continued, the French people had misunderstood German leniency, and had forgotten that after the last war it was years, and not weeks, before it was found convenient to begin the release of German prisoners.
Worse, even, than the plight of the French prisoners of war is that of the Poles, 700,000 of whom were transported to Germany in the weeks following the close of the Polish campaign in September 1939. The fate of these men was indeed tragic, particularly those who were interned in concentration camps in the Reich. Typical camps were those of Lansdorf, near Vienna, and Luckenwalde, near Berlin", where during the whole of the bitter winter the huts in which the Polish prisoners were detained-250 men to each hut which was unheated, no blankets were supplied, and the men spent their nights wrapped in overcoats and sleeping on straw which was changed only once every two months. The only food supplied to them was sugarless coffee and 6 ozs of bread per head, but soldiers who were put to work sawing wood or digging potatoes received a supplementary ration of a few potatoes in the morning, one loaf of bread for three men at midday, and potatoes with a small quantity of coffee in the evening. No meat or fat was given to the prisoners, and their families in Poland were distressed by the constant demands for bread and fats which were received. So meagre were the rations that the half-starved unfortunates were reduced to gathering rotting cabbages, bones, garbage-anything, indeed, that was more or less edible.
After some months of this sort of treatment great numbers of the prisoners collapsed in health, when they were sent back to Poland. They looked more like ghosts than human beings when they staggered out of the train; many of them were suffering from frostbite and were crippled for life. Their moral state was as bad as their physical, which is not surprising when one remembers the terrible conditions of their confinement, the inadequacy of their nourishment, the lack of warm clothing, the absence of the most elementary sanitary arrangements, of medical care and medicines, and many humiliations and the corporal and other punishments of every kind to which they were subjected just as the whims of their hard-faced warders dictated.