After the Second World War, a series of trials took place to bring the main perpetrators
of the German war crimes to justice. The most high profile trials took place at Nuremberg,
with the remaining members of Hitler’s high command seeing justice. At the trial, footage
of the concentration camps was shown as evidence to the defendants, and it shocked everyone
inside the court rooms. Images of incredibly suffering were shown, and the largest concentration
camp system established was at Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was split into three main camps, Auschwitz I the main labour part of the camp,
Auschwitz II Birkenau the main extermination centre and Auschwitz III Monowitz the IG Farben
factory. Inside of Auschwitz, over 1.1 million people lost their lives, being victims of
the Nazis and people from all around the world found themselves starved, and systematically
killed inside of the barbed wire fences. It became the major site of the Final Solution,
and when it was liberated it showed the horror of the Third Reich. Stories emerged of brutal
guards who would treat prisoners with sadism and barbarism. Many were killed through medical
experiments, disease, exhaustion, starvation, execution, beatings and inside of the gas
chambers, the method selected to exterminate masses.
One story that emerged from Auschwitz however was the fact that inside of the hell on earth,
British prisoners of war were brought to Aushcwitz and were put to work. This is the story of
the British Prisoners of Auschwitz, as always to support our channel, please make sure to
subscribe.
Auschwitz is a place synonymous with mass murder, genocide and the evils of the Nazi
regime. Inside of the camp complex were a network of sub camps that were established
to hold different prisoners. The satellite or sub camps were named Aussenlager, or external
camps, Arbeitslager, labour camps or nebenlager, extersion or sub camps. They varied in their
size, some holding thousands of prisoners and others holding dozens. The prisoners in
these camps had different tenants who utilised the workforces within them, for example one
sub camp Raisko was used for SS research, one was even used for making shoes. Different
corporations used the work detachments to fill out their workforce to ultimately make
money, and most of these industries contributed to the Nazi war effort.
One of these camps that was attached to Auschwitz was E715, a prisoner of war camp that was
created for British prisoners of war. This was then staffed and was guarded by members
of the German Army the Wehrmacht, and was a sub camp of Stalag VIII-B. (3B) E715 was
attached to the Monowitz Auschwitz III concentration camp, which was codenamed Buna as it made
synthetic rubber. It was just one of 28 other sub camps under the banner of Auschwitz III
where the SS had control. E715 was found right next to the IG farben chemical plant and was
very close to the entrance of Monowitz.
Much of what we know that occurred at E715 comes from the accounts of Arthur Dodd, a
soldier who found himself inside of Auschwitz and the camp. He was captured along with thousands
of other soldiers following the battle of Tobruk and had suffered inside overcrowded
Italian POW camps. He had been dispatched to fight against Rommel in the Desert, and
in his first action he came under tank and machine gun fire, however was captured by
the Germans. He spent 6 months in a camp in Italy, and he was then dispatched to work
in Nazi run quarries and pits in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Poland. He and
other Brits refused to help the Germans, and refused to go down a mine but were beaten
with rifle butts. After this thet were crammed onto a train and deported to a small town
west of Krakow, and they were taken into Auschwitz.
Upon approaching Auschwitz, Arthur Dodd and the other British POWs first noted the freezing
cold and also the stench of the camp. It was said that, ‘you could see the smoke coming
from the chimneys, then as you got off the cattle trucks at the gates, there was this
terrible meaty smell that got on your clothes, in your nose. You couldn’t get rid of it.
I’ll never forget it.’ The British were then marched by German soldiers to their barrack
building, but on this short journey Dodd saw a young Jewish girl being beaten by an SS
officer who was using his pistol as a weapon. She was suffering badly, and for the British
who saw this it was too much and shocking, and they tried to allegedly stop this before
they were threatened with German rifles. Another step forward and they would be shot. The guards
allegedly continued to beat the girl, even stronger and she was never seen again.
The first 200 British POW’s came to Auschwitz in September 1943, and more arrived around
1400 over the ocourse of winter. Many were eventually transferred to other camps, but
what they saw at the camp was disgusting. Most of the prisoners were forced to work
in machine shops, and they were used to make pipes and repair equipment inside the Chemical
Plant. At first life for them was more lenient that the other camps. The day began at 5 with
a Jewish orchestra playing as trains arrived at the camp, thousands of people would be
executed straight away, being sent to the gas chambers during the selection processes.
Unlike the Jewish prisoners, there British were put to skilled work, and were fed and
kept in slightly better conditions.
It was said with regards to the food, ‘if you could call a bit of liquid they called
soup with some moldy carrots at the bottom food,’ and sometimes this came with small
chunks of black bred, made from chestnuts which allegedly tasted like sawdust. The men
dropped weight very quickly because of this. It was said by Dodd that, ‘The jews had
it far worse of course, we used to give them our Red Cross parcels containing chocolate,
butter, tinned ham and bully beef.’ They could speak to us in broken English, and they’d
hide the food inside the toilets at the factory, it was the best we could do.’ Dodd himself
worked inside of the rubber plant, and one say he said he saw Oskar Schindler arrive
at the camp, looking for more Jews to work inside his factories. He initially saw Schindler
as a profiteer, but later changed his mind once the story came out about him saving Jews.
The Nazis pressed for their workforce to become more efficient, and through pushing the workers
too hard, often many were killed. Inside of the plant, the British POWs often sabotaged
the equipment and pipes they were working on putting stones into the pipes. At one point,
a German engineer ordered a pressure test on the pipes, and the POWs knew not one pipe
would pass a test and that they would be shot. As the test was being performed, an air-raid
siren went off, and Dodd stated ‘"We knew that they had found out what we had done.
They had us lined up against a wall to shoot us as soon as the pipes failed the test. I
had just said a prayer, when the air-raid siren went and everyone, guards and prisoners,
dived into the air raid shelters. We heard a bomb fall and when the raid was over we
saw that the only bomb to hit the factory had blown out the wall where the pipes were.
God was looking after us that day.’ After the air raid, all of the pipes had been destroyed
with a bomb hitting the place where the test was taking place. A later air raid on the
20th August hit a shelter where the British POWs were, and killed 38 of them injuring
Dodd.
Inside of E715 there was often the smell of burning flesh from the creatorium nearby at
Auschwitz II. It was common for the British to see the evil treatment of jews and also
the killing of them by SS guards, hanging Jews from the gallows of Auschwitz, and they
also saw Jews being pushed off high scaffolding and structures, plunging to their deaths at
the hands of the Nazis. There was allegedly one incident when a number of British POWs
saw a jewish prisoner pushed into a cement pit to his death by an SS guard, it was said
then that a man from Yorkshire the next day disguised himself as a jewish prisoner, and
then did exactly the same to the SS guard taking revenge. In late 1944, the British
heard noise coming from their huts, and when they went outside they saw a thousands Jews,
old men women and children walking towards Auschwitz II outside of the barbed wire. The
children were playing and many were singing, however the British knew where they were going,
being sent on a death march, where many would be killed on route to another camp away from
the approaching Red Army.
To keep up spirits at times, many of the British played football, and they came up with a team
named the E175 team, named after their specific hut in the barracks block.
Seargent Charles Coward known as ‘The Count of Auschwitz,’ was a British soldier who
allegedly rescued Jews from Auschwitz, and also claimed to have smuggled himself into
the camp one night. He would later testify about his experiences inside sub camp E715.
He gained a significant amount of trust in the camp due to his understanding of German
and became a Red Cross liaison officer for the 1400 British prisoners. He was allowed
to move freely thoguhtout the camp and to visit other towns too because of this. Coward
was also able to pass messages to the British War Office on conditions of the POW’s and
other prisoners, telling of the trainloads of jews also arriving at the camp.
Coward stated at a war crimes trial, ‘I made it a point to get one of the guards to
take me to a town under the excuse of buying new razor blades and stuff for our boys. For
a few cigarettes he pointed out to me the various places where they had the gas chambers
and the places where they took them down to be cremated. Everyone to whom I spoke gave
the same story - the people in the city of Auschwitz, the SS men, concentration camp
inmates, foreign workers - everyone said that thousands of people were being gassed and cremated at
Auschwitz, and that the inmates who worked with us and who were unable to continue working
because of their physical condition and were suddenly missing, had been sent to the gas
chambers. The inmates who were selected to be gassed went through the procedure of preparing
for a bath, they stripped their clothes off, and walked into the bathing room. Instead
of showers, there was gas. All the camp knew it. All the civilian population knew it. I
mixed with the civilian population at Auschwitz. I was at Auschwitz nearly every day...Nobody
could live in Auschwitz and work in the plant, or even come down to the plant without knowing
what was common knowledge to everybody.
Even while still at Auschwitz we got radio broadcasts from the outside speaking about
the gassings and burnings at Auschwitz. I recall one of these broadcasts was by Anthony
Eden himself. Also, there were pamphlets dropped in Auschwitz and the surrounding territory,
one of which I personally read, which related what was going on in the camp at Auschwitz.
These leaflets were scattered all over the countryside and must have been dropped from
planes. They were in Polish and German. Under those circumstances, nobody could be at or
near Auschwitz without knowing what was going on. So the British knew exactly what was happening
at Auschwitz, but as POW’s of Britain’s they were given different treatment. Some
were killed due to over-work and the conditions they were kept in.
Days before Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army, the British POW’s were given different
options by the German guards. They were told they could start walking east towards the
Russians, or the West towards the Americans. This in a sense was a death march, in the
middle of the coldest winter Poland had seen in years. The temperature often went below
minus 25 degrees, and the men froze. One even starved to death, many had to walk past the
frozen bodies of jews, many who had been shot by the Germans, and many who had been killed
by the conditions and the fact they were physically exhausted from the walk. The British POW’s
who had coats on them shared them, and at night they huddled together to keep off the
cold. As they passed through towns, they also noticed the atrocities and slaughter conducted
by the Germans and the Nazis who were now intent on fleeing back towards their homeland.
The British were then liberated as they reached Regensburg, a city in eastern Bavaria.
After the Brits arrived home in Britain, the war office told the relatives that the Prisoner
of Wars held at Auschwitz would be slightly odd for a while, coping with what they had
seen inside the horrific camp. One British man wrote, ‘My wife could never read these
stories, I still have nightmares to this day. It took me eight years before I told her where
I’d been.’ Their treatment by the British government whilst in captivity was even slightly
harsh, as the men had their wages reduced as they were captured, and these deductions
were worked out to pay for the fact their rifles fell into German hands. Later the German
government paid 1 million pounds in compensation for the treatment of the POW’s at Auschwitz,
but not one penny reached the men held there.
So the British prisoners who were held at Auschwitz were treated poorly, and despite
things being much worse for the Jewish prisoners, what these men saw stuck with them for the
rest of their lives. Their treatment was far from ideal, but many of these men survived
the war. A number of them were so haunted and distraught by their experiences inside
Auschwitz that many refused to talk about them for years, and they believed that the
public and their family would not want to hear about their stories and experiences.
Some British were killed inside of Auschwitz, some by the air raid and these were buried
alongside German soldiers, but others were killed by the treatment and conditions they
were kept in. The British prisoners of Auschwitz were just some of the millions of people who
walked through the barbed wire fences of the camp, or who arrived on the tramlines of the
horrific camp. They like so many who survived were haunted for the rest of their lives by
what they saw, but many were lucky being kept alive purely on the basis of where they came
from, the fact they were British POWs.
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Once again thanks for watching.