My father was at POW in Stalig VII in Upper Silesia and always told us stories of his experience as well as stories of others. At the age of 85 he wrote Hillie's War Story 118 pages which my wife published on Amazon Kindle after he died. https://www.amazon.com/HILLIES-WAR-ROMMEL-PATTON-MEMOIRS-ebook/dp/B01DLY5Y0W/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2XEI601FAAN4O&keywords=From+Rommel+to+Patton+by+Hillel+Feldman&qid=1682256197&s=books&sprefix=from+rommel+to+patton+by+hillel+feldm%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C2118&sr=1-1
John Castle's book is a work of fiction he has taken the license to include all the stories he both took part in and heard from others but they are basically stories similar to what my father told us. Do not regard this as a History book.
The narrator is called Mr. Coward and was a Cockney and did a term of service in India in 1924 and returned home working in entertaining. When WW2 began he volunteered and was captured when his unit was trying to flee back to Calais. While being marched he escaped and hid in a haystack. He was captured but on his second escape was wounded and was hiding in a barn when German orderlies brought in wounded German soldiers he found a blanket and covered himself and received a ration was taken to a hospital where he was treated this whole German troop were awarded Iron Crosses. When he was discovered he was transferred to a POW camp.
In a work camp he claims that he worked at the de Havilland factory and the Germans wanted information on what was happening there, so he asked for double rations for his hut and gave them stories till they realized he knew nothing.
Lambsdorf Stalag VIIB was build in 1915 for captured British soldiers from the Western front but was extended in 1943 and house 12000 British POW. A mixture of Australians , Canadians New Zealanders Brits and S. Africans. Suicides were not uncommon by attempting to climb the fence and being shot. The Canadians were captured at the failed Dieppe raid.1943. Once the allies started winning the war there were no new prisoners except RAF pilots shot down and once the American might began US bombers that had crews of 13.
The prisoners used to get a regulars supply of Red Cross parcels and without them wound not have survived.
Army private were allowed to be used for worked which was not connected to the war effort and there gave scope for sabotage and escape. NCO could volunteer for work parties.
He and mate had forged papers of a Bulgarian worker and got a train to Dresden then to Chemnitz (later Karl Markstad in East Germany) and from there to Ulm, hoping to cross into Switzerland . At every station SS checked everyone's documents both coming and going he was finally caught and taken to the Ulm Castle, he was beaten up and sent back to Lambsdorf.
A captured Frenchman had genuine travel warrants to Stettin in the north and he bought one of them. On arriving at the camp he told the guards his pant were crawling with lice and they never checked what was stitched into them.
On being recaptured escapes were put into the cooler of solitary confinement for a week or more. British soldiers were treated well as Germany wanted German POWs treated well.
There was a Russian POW camp nearby and Russia had not sighed the Geneva convention so had no Red Cross laws and protection. This camp might have had as many as a million prisoners and were in unhealthy condition and typhus spread amongst them. Carts took their bodies for burial when the British complained they should treat these bodies with respect so they were taken in coffins but the returning carts brought the coffins back.
A German guard with his vicious attack dog thought he would release it into a room of Russian for fun, within minutes the dog noise stopped and later its cleaned skeleton was tossed out by the starving Russians.
Wing Commander Douglas Bader was brought to Lambsdorf after he had been at Luft III at Sargen near Breslau but gave the Germans a hard time. Despite his prosthesis legs he escaped a number of times till he ended up in Colditz.
For the S. Africans and Australians it was the first time they saw snow and played in it like children.
Coward was sent to be in charge of a work team at a sugar factory in Czechoslovakia near Stad-Bau.
The German officer in charge took prisoners money to buy them booze and kept it. Coward made a concoction of the drugs he had and that evening when the officer came for real coffee he had mug full of the drug went out and was found dead in the snow of a heart attack. On a misty night 15 of them escaped, 3 managed to avoid recapture. You find yourself in a totally hostile world, he got to Bratislava and then Vienne where he was picked up by a prostitutes' and though he would have a warm bed for the night but she walked him hand in hand to the police station.
He was sent to a work group in a camp at Monowitz 3 miles from Auschwitz, This had been an Austrian Cavalry camp before WW1 They were there to install heavy electricity cables. This was set up by Himmler with Col Rudolf Hoess and Kramer known as the Beast of Belsen. By 1941 Jews started being sent to Auschwitz. Here the average expectancy of life was 40 working to death. In 1945 Hoess the Commandant boasted about his achievements openly in 1947 he was extradited to Poland where he was hanged at Auschwitz.
Prisoner always claimed they were sick to get days off work if they really were they wee sent back to Lamsdorf for treatment under British doctors. Coward was asked as a favour to bring a group of prisoner workers to the marshaling yard. This was part of the war effort and instead of refusing they arrived. By 1943 the Allied bomber were paying attention to the railways and as no new rolling stock was available there were bottlenecks and Prison labor was need ed to sort out these jams They worked managed and got the trains off on time but switched destination labels and made small holes in the roofs of the cars . Petrol tankers leaked, contents were wet and spoiled, coupling were unscrewed to the last turn, factory parts instead of food and supplied arrived and the battlefront and in 2 weeks they were quietly withdrawn from the job.
Half the prisoners in Birkenau were non Jews and the Polish underground managed to steel dynamite from the German warehouse and send it into a concentration camp to blow up the furnaces.5 of which had been put out of action and 30 guards.
When the Normandy landing began they started seeing American aircraft in the air. As the war became more difficult for the German they became crueler. Red Cross parcels became fewer and with the Russians moving in from the east , they started moving POWs westwards.and all over Germany there were Death Marches going on with the German's leading them not having definite plans and the Russians were breaking through.
Later at the Nuremburg Trials the narrator gave evidence against IG Farbenindustrie official who used slave labour and starved workers to death.
Historic correction noted below
Alon Shapira
The Password is Courage isn't so much 'a novel' but largely a work of fiction. 2 points in your account worth noting. 1) You mention Coward received a German Iron Cross. It's nonsense. 2) 'Half the prisoners in Birkenau were non Jews and the Polish underground managed to steel dynamite from the German warehouse and send it into a concentration camp to blow up the furnaces. 5 of which had been put out of action and 30 guards.' -- By 1942 the Jews were the majority of the prisoners in Birkenau. More significantly, Coward claimed in the book that he was instrumental in blowing up 3 of the 5 furnaces in mid-44. If that was the case, how did so many Jews perish after that period? In fact, the Sonderkommando Revolt was on 7 Oct '44 and only one furnace was destroyed. Himmler gave the order to destroy the rest on Nov 25, '44. The last one was demolished on 26 Jan '45, a day before the Russians liberated Auschwitz. -- Coward's other major claim to have been instrumental in the escape of 400 Jews from Monowitz is not supported by a scrap of evidence and is demonstrably fictitious.--The one story of real interest is Coward's claim to have swapped identity with a Jewish prisoner to enter the concentration camp to look for the 'Jewish naval doctor', (though not Birkenau as related in the book, but KZ Monowitz as Coward testified in Nuremberg). The Jewish naval doctor was Dr Karel Sperber. I've since uncovered the source story in a recently declassified file at The National Archives based on the testimony of another POW. I've also exposed the sham hoax book by Denis Avey 'The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz' - the title being a verbatim plagiarism of the blurb describing Coward in the 1988 & 2001 paperback editions of The Password Is Courage. Avey appropriated Coward's story and Avey's fabrication is disproven by copious Forensics, while revealing his real history, that he whitewashed his own father was with him as a fellow POW in E715 Auschwitz for a period of 3 months in summer 1944. I'm doing all I can to have Avey's fraudulent book withdrawn from publication, and to publish a book of his real history, which is far more fascinating as is often the case.
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