Eyewitnesses

When a man has been a prisoner of war, he has definite limitations as an objective reporter: his knowledge is likely to be confined to what he saw in his camp, to what he heard and sensed from the guards, to what he may have seen during trips through the enemy countryside. But despite these limits, the stories of the prisoners who landed in Britain last week (see p. 22) constituted a unique picture of 1943 Germany.* From the dispatches, the U.S. caught unmistakable glimpses of German terror, despondency and disintegration:

Food. Civilians scrambled madly for scraps tossed from trains by homebound prisoners. Nazi guards sometimes begged for contents of Red Cross parcels from home. Apart from such gifts, prisoners thought that they fared about as Germans did. British Private Richard Welsh of Yorkshire gave the most telling account: "A lot of us suffered from dysentery and stomach trouble owing to the poor food. Ersatz coffee tasted like burnt wood. We were given mint tea which was generally used for shaving. . . . We were given 'tub fat' which was like axle grease, to put on our bread." Private Alexander Mitchell of Dunfermline said: "Our average daily menu was a half-pint of herb tea, a quart of soup (turnips and hot water), twelve ounces of black bread and once in a while a small piece of sausage."

Bombing. Said British Corporal William McLoughlan: "In two or three minutes--I give you my word for this--the factory had been flattened. Not a building except one shed was standing when the Americans went away. Everybody was thunderstruck by the whole thing. Every one of the bombs fell exactly inside the target area. It was perfection bombing." That was his account of a U.S. Eighth Air Force raid on an unspecified German airplane factory.

Private Ronald Morris of London said that he saw Mariendorf after an R.A.F. night attack, and "it was a terrible mess." U.S. flyers whose route to the embarkation point lay through Augsburg, Berlin and Hamburg reported that Hamburg was "flat for miles and miles--a shambles." Eight British prisoners reported everything flattened on both sides of the railroad over a two-mile area in Frankfurt.

Civilian Morale. Two Army chaplains and a Catholic nun made statements that sounded careful and sensible.

The Reverend Drummond Duff of Renfrewshire: "From the change in their demeanor, from the evident hardship we saw all around us, it is my conviction the Germans know they have lost the war. The German newspapers are sparing them nothing. They don't need to listen to the BBC to know what is happening to them."

Gentle Sister Columba, one of seven Little Sisters of the Poor: "Germany looked a dead country as far as we could see. It seemed to have no life about it."

Grizzled, 62-year-old Reverend G. H. Grundy of Norfolk thought that two things were keeping Germany going: the Gestapo and the Hitler Youth. Said he: "Hitler has made the youth and the youth are ruling Germany. There is only one solution and that is to let Prussia be occupied by the Russians for three months. I think that would be long enough."

* The A. P. said that U.S. Army censorship first left the impression that repatriated Americans had little but good to say of conditions in Germany. Later the Army patterned its rules along more realistic British and Canadian lines.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.