大象传媒

I often think about the time I saw Adolf Hitler in person.

I was a British POW on a work Commando in Germany and we had been waiting for a train to take us to our labours. If memory serves me right, the railway station was named Grunwald.

The portly station-master came out of his office and talked to our guard, who immediately marched us off the platform. I noticed a couple of civvy police ushering other people off the premises too. Once the station was cleared, we waited about 150 yards away, wondering what was going on.

We were halted by our one and only guard in this country lane, and all was quiet for about ten minutes. Then, like a slow-motion film, this all-black steel monster, which looked like the twin of British Rail Jubilee Express, glided into the station and stopped. There was Hitler sitting in the lounge carriage of the heavily armoured train. Immediately behind the engine and tender was a flat wagon, which held multi-barrelled anti-aircraft (AA) guns, with armour-plated ends and sides. Coupled to that was a black carriage - presumably for the SS guards to live in - followed by a carriage that was obviously for Adolf to live in. Then there was the lounge carriage and another carriage with SS Guards, followed by another flat wagon with steel armour around it and the same AA and machine guns as at the front of the train. It looked like something out of a kid鈥檚 comic - all black and sleek, heavy with armour plating and sinister.

The SS manning the AA and machine guns were on the alert and when the train had stopped an SS guard, clad all in black with a machine pistol at the ready, positioned himself at the door to the lounge carriage.

I could see Hitler as plain as day and he was busy talking to someone across a table. All I had to do was snatch the rifle off the guard next to me and put a shot through the lounge window of the carriage - at the range of 150yrds I could not miss. As a sniper I had knocked off quite a few Germans on Crete. So what stopped me from getting my name in the history books? Well, there was not time to hold a census on whether or not to do it. I also had no right to put my friends' lives in jeopardy by not stopping to think, as I was prone to doing. This time common sense dictated that, if indeed the glass of the window of the lounge carriage was armoured, then not only would my venture be in vain but all the blokes on this Commando, including myself and possibly the German guard with us, would have been put up against the wall and shot.

Now there were quite a few of us on that Commando, and today I would applaud anyone who writes to me to say 'Hello again,' and 'Yes, I remember that black train with Adolf and his Charlie Chaplin moustache in it.'

Tom Barker 2003 1st A&SH

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