Chapter III: Men and Slave Labor

There is a large camp near the center of Germany, close to the demarcation line between the Western and Eastern Republics of that divided nation, where the men held in slave labor by the Soviet Government are turned over once again to their families, to freedom. This collection of barracks is known as Camp Friedland, or Land of Peace. For some time, the Russian authorities have liberated between twenty and thirty thousand men every month through Friedland. In general, the men returned recently are adequately dressed and have received more or less the same food as Russian workers. Their appearance is vastly different from that of the skeleton-like creatures with bloated heads and feet that used to be returned in trainloads to their home country.

The day that I visited Friedland, there was no homecoming, so I had time to look at the installations of the camp—notably the Search Service. This is a Red Cross Service to help these men, often separated from their families for anywhere from four to seven years, to locate them again. The Search Service is located in a large Red Cross barracks, whose walls are decked with pictures of the missing. One picture showed a gang of slave laborers rebuilding a city of Eastern Europe. One man was facing the camera, and his features could be clearly distinguished. A notation underneath read:

“This is my husband. I have had no word from him for four years. Does
anyone know where he is now or whether he is still among the living?”

Evidently no one had word of the fate of this man, and in the country where he is held for forced labor, communication with families is forbidden. I saw many other such appeals, mostly printed by the family of the lost man, and carrying a copy of his picture. These appeals are attached to walls and gathering places wherever former Prisoners of War congregate, and are a pathetic testimony to the power of human beings to hope against all hope.

One picture would show an ordinary middle-aged man, and underneath would be such a notice:

“This is our father. He wrote to us from the Eastern front and his
comrades say he was captured near Orel. Our mother has died. Write to
us if you have seen our Father. Greta and Johann Moschle.”

Then follows the address of the children.

Another such flimsy poster carried a picture of a young man and an appeal from a mother:

“My son Gerhard Foerster was never reported dead, but some of his
comrades say he was taken prisoner at Rostov. Has anyone seen him in
any mine or camp in Russia? He is my only child. He was born in 1926.”

The returned Prisoners of War scan these pictures, and if they have knowledge of the persons’ whereabouts, or of their death in captivity, they use the Red Cross Services to notify the families. Even a death notice is far better than the day-to-day anguish of waiting and not knowing. The Red Cross Search Services, as well as the Search Services of the Catholic and Lutheran Churches, all of which are integrated by exchange of cards, operate on a scientific basis. Every returned prisoner, after giving the number of the regiment in which he served, must go to the file where all men missing from that regiment are listed. He will then give information to a trained Red Cross worker about every one of the missing men he has seen at any time during his captivity. This information is annotated, and the family is informed without delay.

The room that is of the most urgent concern to the returned prisoner is that busy room with the teletype machine. Many of the men just returned do not know the precise addresses of their families, since so many were bombed-out during the war or expelled since the end of hostilities. As the men searching for their loved ones enter the teletype room, the information they have listed on a form is relayed to the Red Cross Headquarters in Hamburg. Here at Headquarters is the master file of all expelled families, unified with the files handed in by Caritas (Catholic) Search Service, and by the Lutheran Service. In as little as three hours, a man whose family has been expelled from Silesia, or the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, Danzig, East Prussia, Hungary, Rumania, or Yugoslavia, may hear the joyful news of their new address—even though this new address is clearly that of a barracks settlement.

But for many men, there is no news at all. They know that their families have been expelled. They sometimes learn that a daughter or a son has died in some place or another. But some wives or sons or daughters have died en route, or shortly after arriving, and have left no trace. In the terrible chaos of the great waves of expulsions, no listings of the dead and missing were possible. The men then wait around in the camps while additional searches are made, and finally if no news comes through, they wander back into an empty world and try to take up life again. Many, moreover, are sick. These are gathered into special homes for sick POW’s. Caritas in the diocese of Hildesheim has such a convalescent home, as has the diocese of Paderborn—as have most of the areas of Germany. This is the last bitter end of the double tragedy of expulsion and slave labor—two of the things for whose obliteration we entered the war in the first place.

There are many such men in hospitals, and it is hard to meet the misery of their eyes. They tell how they wrote to their old address in Silesia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia or Poland proper, and how the letter was returned, or how no answer came back at all. Among this group there is a well of misery whose depths no one can plumb—a misery only equalled by that monstrous suffering inflicted by the Nazi regime on innocent people during the years of the war.

In Friedland that day there were some of these men—men who had been lost four or five years in the depths of Russia, and now upon liberation were doubly lost, because life had taken away all trace of those who were dear to them, even their children. The Caritas Director translated their stories for me, stories that in any other age would have been so extraordinary that the teller would have been doubted by his fellows, but today have become the everyday tales of drafted, deported, dispossessed and brutalized humanity.

One, I remember, was a young man in his twenties. He was drafted from his home in Silesia. After being captured on the Eastern front, he was put to work in a Soviet mine even while the war was going on. The food, he said, was indescribably bad those first years, but it was similar to the food of the Russian miners themselves. In 1946 and 1947, as conditions in Russia improved, so did the food served to the slave laborers in the mines. The working hours were shortened, and life became more bearable physically. All the weaker among the forced laborers died during the first three years of captivity, he explained. Men dropped on all sides of him, and no one was informed of their deaths. Those who survived the first two years were the hardiest and the toughest. The hope of being reunited with their families, of seeing again their native villages, helped these men to cling to life in the most desolate hours.

For this young man there was no return to his native village, since it had already changed hands. Ever since the day of his return, the Red Cross had been trying to locate his mother and father and sister, but not a trace of them had been found anywhere. The whole village had been evacuated, and other Expelled families from the same area were listed with the Search Services.

As his parents were rather old, they might have perished anonymously as did so many older people, during the hard days of the flight of the millions from the East to the West. As for his sister, she also had vanished without trace. There had been at that time, many transports of women towards the East, and perhaps this man’s sister was one of the thousands of women of the vanquished who had been carried off almost like the booty that pagan barbarian armies carried off after battle so long ago.

It was hard to say anything to this young man, because words of comfort would sound unreal. He is one of many who, after each transport of returnees, wait behind for word that does not come, for reunions that will never happen.

I asked a delegate of War Relief Services to meet one of the large transports of Heimkehrer (returnees) at Friedland. I received a short report of the human aspect of the event:

“We had been told to expect the release of the 1,700 POW’s at 11 o’clock in the morning. I was at Camp Friedland in time to see Father Krahe set up his supplies—cigarettes, cakes (given by citizens of the localities nearby), cocoa, bread, and such prized amenities as soap and shaving cream.

“Father Krahe always meets the men of the transports as they come past the barrier into the Western zones, and he told me that many men were already informed in Moscow that a priest would be stationed there to greet them. Actually, Father Krahe is not “stationed” there in the strict sense of the term. He has volunteered for this job because his own locality suffered little during the war years, and as a young priest, he wanted to be of some service to the seething mass of humanity displaced since the peace. He has set up a very practical barracks chapel decorated by a striking painting of Our Lady protecting by her mantle the dispossessed and the homeless. Father Krahe gives real service to the “Hard Core” of returned prisoners—those whose families are missing.

“A message came through from the Soviet barrier that the men would not be released until three o’clock in the afternoon. We toured the Camp and inspected the Red Cross Search Service and at three P.M. we were ready at the barrier for the men to start streaming through. Camp Friedland is several miles from the barrier where the men are set free.

“Between the Soviet and Western Zones of Germany there is a No-Man’s Land, the width of about two city blocks. The road is blocked off by sentry boxes and by wooden barriers at each end of the No-Man’s Land.

They came back from slave labor in Russia broken in body, embittered
in spirit.
]

Camp Friedland. The men began to stream through. They were dressed in
remnants of Wehrmacht uniforms four years after.
]

Camp Friedland. The boy at the right is 21 and has known five years
of slave labor. He kneels with a comrade to thank God for deliverance.
]

The doctor, so tired from the return journey that he could hardly
walk, was the one who had to give the news of the death of a
25-year-old prisoner during the trip.
]

“At three o’clock we saw the men lined up beyond the Soviet Zone barrier. They made no sound, and stood quite still. It was not until nearly six o’clock that evening that the barrier was raised on the Soviet side. I stationed myself inside the No-Man’s Land and the men began to stream through. They were dressed in remnants of old torn Wehrmacht uniforms, four years after. Many of them had a sort of blue outfit, with Russian type padded jackets. Under their arms or on their back they carried shapeless bundles, or wooden valises. For more than half an hour they trudged by, and as they came they cried out many things. One young man yelled: “Now after five years, we can laugh again!” Many, seeing a priest standing at the barrier in the Western zone, called out the Catholic greeting “Gruss Gott,” and some shouted, “God be thanked that we are here.” An old man and his daughter who were waiting at the side of the road suddenly entered the line and put their arms around a young prisoner. Until that moment, he had marched like anyone else, but he was so overcome with the joy of seeing them, that they had to help him walk the rest of the way. Sobs broke out from him, and the sister and father wept with him as they walked along.

“Lastly came the sick, who were transferred from Soviet trucks to waiting ambulances, and last of all came an old bearded man. He was a doctor who had been taken prisoner, and he was so tired that he could hardly walk. His wife, who had been waiting for him, saw him just as he left the Russian barrier, and she ran all the way to the Russian side to greet and support him. He had been in captivity five years, and he was worn and ill.

“As he came slowly up the highway in the No-Man’s Land leading to the barrier, I could see how heavily he leaned on his wife.

“All this time, a tired thin man had been sitting on the grass on the opposite side of the road from me. He had taken off his shoes, as though he had walked a long way to get to Camp Friedland.

“When the doctor finally reached the barrier, this man got up, and with his shoes still in his hand, approached him to find out if there were any more men on the transport. The doctor explained that he was the oldest, and the last. All the sick had preceded him.

“The inquirer explained that he had come to Camp Friedland because his son, a young man of 25, had been able to notify him that he would be released on this special transport. The doctor asked for the young man’s name. Then the tired old doctor performed his last sad duty of the return journey, a journey that had taken 14 days in all, including the trip in rough, wooden coaches from Moscow. The young man, he explained, had died on the train, before loving arms could welcome him home.

“The father, who had waited so quietly and patiently all the day long, and for the years preceding this day, walked quietly back to where he had been sitting and sank down on the grass, his face grey.

“Back in Camp Friedland the men who were well enough were lining up for their first meal as we drove in. The sick were being served in the barracks hospital. Even the men who look well often have serious internal disorders, especially heart and kidney diseases.

“They did not mind our photographing them outside the sickrooms, or on the food line. They made many jokes, and told us how grateful to God they were for being liberated from Paradise.

“Meanwhile, a few men gathered quietly in the Catholic Chapel. The greater part of the transport, however, was composed of Protestant men from the northwestern sections of Germany.

“One young man with a child’s face knelt quietly in the chapel. He was just twenty-one and had endured five years of slave labor in the Soviet mines. He had been impressed into the Wehrmacht at the age of sixteen. He was serene and composed, partly because he had been in touch with his parents during his captivity by means of the special Postcard service permitted in some forced labor areas. He was to go to his home the very next day, right after his registration and his checking of the file of men still missing from his unit.”

There are uncounted men still held in slave labor. Some maintain that 1,500,000 men have died in Soviet camps and mines and that their deaths have been unreported, thus leaving a labor pool of 400,000 men still in Russian hands. Some of these, who are classified as war criminals, will not be freed, but it was expected that all ordinary drafted soldiers, whose actions of attack and defense were substantially the same as those of any drafted soldier, would be released in the regular transports.

The figures, however, are hard to reconcile, as this excerpt from a _New York Times_ release will show:

“One year ago the Western allies recapitulated the situation
according to communiques issued on the Russian side during the war.
The total of 3,730,995 prisoners mentioned differed sharply from
Deputy Premier Vyacheslav Molotov’s figure of 890,532 still in the
Soviet Union in March, 1947.

Prisoners repatriated from Russia to March 1, 1948, totaled 252,395
by Mr. Molotov’s reckoning. That would have left 3,478,600 still
detained there by Western reckoning. Even after deducting 500,000
for possible Austrians and ‘Volksdeutsche,’ almost 2,000,000 Germans
would still have been awaiting discharge.” (_New York Times_, Jan.
11, 1950.)

These figures do not include the approximately 80,000 Italian soldiers still listed as being held in Russia, nor the Hungarians, Rumanians, or other men captured in war and never released.

A sizeable percentage of the men released from forced labor are dispossessed and homeless, and find their expelled families in one-room homes in wooden barracks, or even in mass quarters in old castles and hotels. But the return of these men is the signal for the family to take heart again and to begin a new life with the increased strength of the family unit. Each father who returns home decreases the bitterness of some among the millions of German children who knew their fathers were slaves, and whose resistance to teachings of democracy stemmed from a knowledge that the democratic nations of the West had given their name to slave labor at Yalta. Reparations in blood was not one of the ways to erase the crimes of the warring German nation.

Mass homecomings such as the one described above are now no more. The Soviet authorities have made an announcement that has caused a pall to descend over hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the length and breadth of Germany—the simple announcement that repatriation of German prisoners of war from the Soviet Union has been concluded. The mothers, the wives, the children who hoped against hope for an eventual reunion have gone into mourning. The fate of a vast host of men is unknown.

There are so many who are still held in the far reaches of Siberia and Soviet Asia in forced labor, not only Germans captured in war, but Austrian and Hungarian soldiers and unnumbered innocent civilians from Poland and the Baltic States, that we who can help in no other way must at least join in the great prayer of the Vicar of Christ for the Holy Year:

“May the Holy Year be for all men ... the year of the great return
and of the great pardon.... Grant, O Lord, to the Refugees and
Prisoners a homeland, and to all men, Thy grace.”