大象传媒

This story is taken from a manuscript by Lawrence Travers Dorins, and has been added to the site with his permission by Bruce Logan. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
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THE MARCH 27th. JAN. ---12th. APRIL 1945

In the middle of January, 1945, we began to notice a trickle of refugees coming through the town. We did not know at the time that, while the ordinary people were forced to stay until the last moment, the Party officials had already moved their families and possessions to safety. Sometimes a farmer would come through with horses pulling a wagon with his wife and the children sitting on top of the family possessions, piled up in the back. One day, while I was up at the farm, a group of inmates from a concentration camp came past. My friends who saw them, said they were a pitiful sight in their thin uniforms, striped like pyjamas, rags on their feet, shuffling along in despair with their gun toting S.S. guards urging them on. Although we knew that the concentration camps were places where people were treated very harshly we had no idea that there were death camps. On another day a German soldier came along with two prisoners, one Russian and one British. He referred to them as his insurance policies. As the days went by the numbers gradually increased.

After the 20th we stopped going to work and only went to our farms for a meal. We had heard that the Russians had reached a neighbouring village. On one of my visits to the farm, Daron was in the cellar and when I went down, I found him building a wall across half of it to hide away some of the family valuables. The reputation of the invading hordes had preceded them. In Britain we have indeed been fortunate. The last time we were invaded was when the French burnt Winchelsea in 1377. For so many in Europe it is in living memory and now, as I write, Kosovo. This was the last time I saw him and the rest of the family. I was sorry not to be able to say goodbye. They had treated me very well.

Next day the Waffen S.S. took over our camp. By this stage of the war there were more foreigners in the S.S. than Germans. This lot were from one of the Baltic states, Latvia, I think. It was the 27th. of Jan.,1945, and we were starting on a march which would last until the 12th. of April. We took as much as we could with us. I started off wearing two suits of Army battle dress and a greatcoat. I also had a pack which the Germans had issued. We took what Red Cross food we had and some German Army bread.

At first we followed farm tracks out to Baranovskis farm, where Bolka's family lived, and then on in a North Westerly direction. The Russians had already reached Schneidermuhle to the S. W. so we were being marched to the N. W. to cross the mouth of the Oder. All day we marched, often up to our knees in snow, and at night we slept in a barn. It was bitterly cold and we all huddled together for warmth. We kept all our clothes and our boots on. The boots were wet, and if we had taken them off, they would have frozen and it would have been almost impossible to get them on again. The bread was frozen and it was as hard as a stone. Next day we were still marching at nightfall and we passed a dead Russian who had been shot, lying in a ditch by the roadside. It was a reminder that it might be very unwise to fall out. Later on we came to some Luftwaffe officers who ordered us to push their car to get it started again. It failed to start so they pushed it off the road and continued on foot. There was a lot of confusion, if not panic, on that road that night. We were in single file with guards at the front and rear to allow any traffic to pass. I found myself walking along beside a Dutch S.S. man who was separated from his unit. He told me that he was now going to walk to back to Holland where he was a painter and decorator. He was fed up with the war. He was probably put back in the front line at the next S.S. check point. That is if they didn't string him up straight away. You could not resign from the S.S. when things were going badly.

After two or three days marching we had a great stroke of luck which may have saved a few lives. We came to an American P.oW. camp at Neustettin which had just been evacuated and we were allowed to take as much from the Red Cross food parcels which had been left behind as we could carry. It was still bitterly cold and we were trudging through the snow all day. There were lines of farm carts on the roads and often they had broken down. Sometimes the man was driving but often it was a women alone with her children, perhaps with a young boy or girl helping with the driving, or perhaps grandad. The man of the family was perhaps in the Army or the Volksturm. When I saw the refugees in France I remember saying, "I'd like to see this happening to the Germans," but I got no satisfaction from what I saw. The guilty people had already made their escape.
At this stage of the march the guards always managed to find shelter at night for us and themselves in a barn or a shed. Many of the farms were already deserted.

We spent one night in a large shed with sheep which made it warmer. The sheep had been penned up at one end and we slept in the rest of the shed on straw, spread over two feet of dung. It was glorious, the warmth from the sheep and the dung with smell of ammonia in the nostrils in the morning. I had plans to market DUNGLOPILLO mattresses when I got home. One day I made a sandwich with army bread and carried it in my greatcoat pocket and when I went to eat it, it was frozen hard. I had to put it inside my shirt to thaw it.

During my time as a prisoner, a great deal of the information which we had was based on rumour and was unreliable. After the war I began to buy books on the subject, and reading part of one recently, clarified our position in. the early days of the march. As we were marching along one morning, one of the guards shouted a question to the leader of the column. The reply came immediately, ringing with confidence, "The Leader of the S.S., (Heinrich Himmler) is attending to it.鈥漇uch belief when everything was collapsing around them. From the 23rd. of Jan. Hitler had placed Himmler in charge of the Vistula Army Group and he was a disaster. The Russians were on the banks of the Oder, well above Frankfurt, and the German front line ran from Danzig through Deutsch Krone and Arnswalde to the Oder. Twenty- five divisions were cut off in E. Prussia and the Germans were retreating into a strip of land parallel to the Baltic. We were marching towards Wollin where we crossed the water and moved to the west, again crossing the water at Swinemiinde. At Wollin some brave and humane German women bore the abuse of some of the guards to give us water.
We now moved steadily westward, going through Usedom and Anklam, Demmin, Neukalen, Teterow, Giistrow, Sternberg, Briiel and Schwerin. This is only a probable route that I have worked out. I am sure of some of the towns but not all of them. Schwerin I remember clearly. It was a place I wanted to visit after the war but have never managed it. After our recent experiences there was an air of normality as tired, hungry, dirty and bedraggled, we straggled past a cinema where civilians and soldiers with their girlfriends were queuing for admission. It was another world, one we had almost forgotten, and it too would also soon be shattered.

Many times on our journey we asked the guards where we were going and their stock answer was Fallingbostel. After this gipsy life we would have liked to be behind barbed wire again. Fallingbostel is a small town to the north of Hanover and on the edge of the Luneburger Heide, which became known to countless British servicemen in the post war years who were sent there for training and manoeuvres. We sometimes wondered if we were being moved around to any plan or if the guards had just been told to hold on to us and find places for us where they could. Always we feared that in the end they might kill us. Talking to Germans after the war I heard that there were many ordinary Germans and Nazis who hoped and believed that in the end the fear of communism would cause the Allies to dump the Russians and side with them. Killing British prisoners would not have helped their case. Many also still believed in the wonder weapon which would be ready in time to save them.

After passing through Schwerin we went past Ludwigslust and Eldena and ended up on the banks. of the River Elbe at a place named D6mitz. We stayed there for a few days, resting in a field, sleeping in the warm day time and shivering through cold nights. Someone lent me an erotic book, The Adventures of Don Juan or something like that. On the march there were very few books, so I thought that I was lucky to get it, but starvation and eroticism don't mix and I did not get past the first few pages. While we were there we got very little to eat and with the cold nights in the open we were glad to move on.

Early one morning we marched along beside the river for about a km. and then crossed to the western side by an old and narrow stone bridge. From there we marched past the towns of Dannenberg and Uelzen and after two days we arrived at CelIe where we were marched to the railway station. We had a brief meeting there with John Cranston and Bluet, friends from our days at Wilkenwalde.

The next day we boarded a train which took us to Hamelin, passing through Hannover where the station had been fire bombed. Then followed the inevitable march to Emmertal on the west bank of the River Weser where we were quartered in an old sugar factory. We were very hungry as we had had little to eat at D6mitz on the Elbe and nothing on the journey. Someone soon found out that it was possible to scrape a sugary substance from the factory walls so we were able to get a little dubious nourishment. It was the 28th. of March.

The next day we went back over the Weser to the farmyard of a large estate where, as I remember it, the Hanoverian arms were carved on a stone. A van came out from Hameln and brought us some soup and bread. It was an aid organization which was still functioning. On the march we did not receive much but it was surprising that we got anything considering the military situation and the vast numbers of refugees and prisoners milling around in Germany. We made another trip to Hameln and were able to have a shower and delouse at a camp where some French prisoners gave us eight and a half biscuits each from a bulk issue. On the way back we got very wet in a storm and there was an air raid and bombing nearby. We thought we might stay in Emmertal for a while instead of traipsing wearily around Germany. We suspected that the guards had been left to fend for themselves and were just responding to events, a view that seemed to be confirmed when on Tuesday, the 3rd. of April, at about ten at night, the guards rushed in and told us to get ready to march. There was a rumour that the Americans were already in Paderborn not many miles away. We marched back over the bridge where the army were already placing charges, ready to blow it up, and we had not been marching for very long when we heard the explosion.

Our route was back towards the east and we marched until four a.m. and then rested in the cold until six. We slept a little but were disturbed by planes bombing and strafing the road ahead. I had mixed feelings about our situation. Freedom seemed very close but at any time we might find ourselves defenceless and out in the open in the middle of a battle. This was confirmed after we were liberated by an American tank crew who told us that three times in three days they had had our marching column in their sights and had cancelled the order to fire at the last moment. We were all very conscious of how long most of us had been in captivity and no one wanted to end up like one of those very sad tombstones in the cemeteries around Ypres. Fell on the eleventh of November, 1918. Our march continued and some time later the guards managed to find us some food after about forty-eight hours with only a little rough sugar.

For about ten days we continued our march to the east and I can remember very little about the route. We went through the Harz mountains and I distinctly remember corning down from the hills and seeing the plain dotted with villages. Food was very scarce and we were very weak and it was a struggle to keep going, the scenery didn't register. One day we picked up and ate some dried vegetables with tyre marks on them which had fallen off an army lorry. The best meal I had was on a farm when a German soldier cooked a steamer full of potatoes intended for the pigs. We filed past and he gave us a shovel full each. The only container I had was my hat so I got a good helping and when someone produced some salt I settled down to what felt like the best meal of my life. A day or two later a young London teacher died. He had spent his time as a prisoner working at Stalag XXA in Thorn and, unlike the rest of us who worked on farms and roads etc. , he was perhaps not as physically prepared for the rigours of the march. I doubt if the exact cause of his death was established but no doubt hunger and exhaustion played a part. He was well liked and we were all sad. They buried him in the local cemetery and some of the lads attended. I ought to have gone but was so weak I slept instead. Afterwards I felt very guilty but much more able to cope with the march. The lack of food and sleep and marching for over two months was really beginning to tell and we wondered how long we could continue. When I started I weighed about ten and a half stone and was now below eight. The march continued and each day we needed to stop more often to rest. As we were resting by the roadside an army lorry came along and the driver called out to the guards to move on quickly or they would be caught by the advancing Americans. Then two girls came along and said that the tanks were very near to us. The guards made us move on as quickly as we could, away from the road to the village of Ummendorf where we were put into a barn. We collapsed, exhausted, and we were all soon asleep. The next morning, at about three, we woke up to hear the voice of a German student, speaking in English and telling us that the guards had left the village but it would be safer if we stayed in the barn until daylight .We went back to sleep for a while, not sure if it was true. When we got up and went out we met a sea of white.

Every house had a something white fluttering in the morning breeze and we felt it must be true. At about nine the American tanks began to roll through the village and we began to cheer and shout and went mad with joy. Next to me was Bill Smith from Sheerness, someone I had not seen since Bruss. I had no idea he was in the column. We were both madly excited and I turned to him and said, "We had better calm down. This is no time to have a heart attack." It was Thursday, the 12th. of April, 1945.

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