Wolfe Frank - Nuremberg's Voice of Doom - The Autobiography of the Chief Interpreter at History's Greatest Trials

That afternoon, we were transferred to a school in Southampton that had been turned into a ‘Prisoner of War Camp’. [2] Officially numbered 402a or C19, the PoW Camp at Southampton was one of hundreds set up throughout the UK during the Second World War. There were boos and hisses from the crowd as we marched into Reading Station. At Southampton our group was joined by other groups and our overall number grew to about 250.

The officers in charge of the camp were extremely kind and courteous. In a brief speech the Commandant expressed regret at our ‘temporary predicament’, which he indicated he felt certain would not last long. He then asked us to choose a ‘camp leader’ and to make our own arrangements for the carrying out of essential services such as cooking and cleaning. I volunteered to take over the kitchen since I was anxious to keep busy. During my time at that camp I started cooking breakfast at 04.30 hours and kept cooking until 18.00 hours. My helpers were detailed by the internee camp leader and changed daily.

There was nothing particularly unpleasant about that camp, except that one had to get used to being locked into a room at night with a toilet bucket and taking shelter from the occasional air attacks by the Luftwaffe. After ten days we were ordered to prepare to move. We clambered aboard a train at Southampton and immediately noticed a change of atmosphere.

From that point on we were heavily guarded. Soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets stood on duty at each compartment door and they started fiddling with the safety catches of their weapons as soon as one of us moved. They treated us as very dangerous people and refused to tell us where we were going. In fact, whoever was commanding had read the book on rules for the transportation of ‘prisoners of war.’

The train took us to the town of Bury in Lancashire where, carrying a motley collection of luggage, we were shepherded towards a tall chimney belonging to a disused factory that had been entirely surrounded with barbed wire.

Further carriages had been added to the train along its route and about 1,000 of us ‘marched’ through the gates of the compound, which was a disused cotton mill, that had been condemned as being unfit for production by the Ministry of Labour.

Carrying my suitcase, I began to look for a suitable place to park myself. The floors in all the factory halls were covered in grease and the glass roof with many panes missing had been painted black, presumably as an air-raid precaution. At this point, we were herded together and lined up for ‘search and registration.’ This entailed being taken to one of several tables manned by an NCO who took down our name, assigned us an internee number and then passed us on to a private soldier who went through our belongings and pockets with a degree of thoroughness that would put any of to-day’s airport checks to shame.

Our cash, cheque books, cigarettes, cigars, drinks, medicines – in fact everything except clothing and toiletries – were impounded. (Most of our belongings were never seen again and some years after the war, the Commandant of the camp was kicked out of the Army and jailed for the theft of our belongings.)

I grabbed some boards and trestles and staked a claim to a bed space in one of the halls. There were no lights at any time during the three weeks I spent at Warth Mill Internment Camp. [3] Warth Mill Internment Camp, Bury, Lancashire, eventually became a PoW camp. However, it was originally a camp for enemy aliens where the conditions were every bit as harsh as Wolfe Frank describes them.

Opposite me, about twenty Catholic priests were setting up home. I walked over to them and found them wonderfully calm and confident. Some of these ‘highly learned, dangerous holy enemy aliens’ stayed with me throughout my internment and I don’t know what I would have done without them. Their unshakeable trust in the ways of the Lord was certainly preferable to our resentment of the treatment we were given. One of the priests, Father Aschenauer, an Austrian, provided proof of the flexibility of the Jesuit education in the form of the following limerick, which he whispered to me during one of our endless walks around the camp:

Perhaps the Lord objected, as one night, during a terrific thunderstorm, a blocked drainpipe on the roof snapped and a large jet of water poured directly onto the group of priests. They were soaked through in seconds and the water began to rise in their section of the hall. In pitch darkness everybody was trying to help them move to a drier place. The priests took it all in excellent humour.

MY INITIAL ASSESSMENT WAS that there were about 2,000 of us interned at Warth Mill (1,837 as it turned out later). A collection of soya boilers in one of the halls represented our kitchen. There was a total of four – I repeat FOUR – cold water taps for washing ourselves, our laundry and kitchen utensils.

There were fifty toilet seats arranged in two rows. They faced each other and were separated by a long urinal. This ‘facility’ was located outside the factory and, since no one was supposed to leave the buildings after dark, guards were always on the verge of shooting a person trying to reach the toilets during the night.

Rations began to appear mysteriously, and we had to make arrangements for their preparation. We therefore formed a camp administration.

In the beginning the kitchen was manned by volunteers, but we later set up a labour office and detailed cleaning and cooking duties from a roster of all the internees.

I became the assistant to the Camp Leader, however he suffered a nervous breakdown almost immediately and I found myself running the camp. Our immediate concern, after getting the kitchen going, was to create a hospital. Somehow, we obtained a few beds, but we had no medicine, so we sent a message to the Commandant who immediately appeared on the scene.

His name was Major Braybrook and he was one of the most unpleasant Englishman I have ever encountered. He was a Military Police Corps officer who had lost an eye in the First World War and he had been a PoW in Germany. He hated all things German – and that certainly included us.

Major Braybrook had been commanding the camp for some time and before our arrival it had housed Italian internees. I discovered this when I was working in the document centre where I found tea chests filled with the Italians’ personal belongings, which had been confiscated, and placed in individual sealed envelopes bearing the owner’s name. Most of these envelopes however had been torn open and a collection of articles such as wristwatches, razors, prayer books, wallets and family photographs, were falling out all over the place.

‘The discipline in this camp,’ announced the Major ‘would be strict.’ To him we were PoWs and he wasn’t concerned with our past history. We had better not make any trouble, or there would be plenty of trouble for us.

There was no mention of the medical supplies we had requested and running that camp under such a Commandant was far from easy. Many suffered nervous breakdowns and there were attempted suicides, threats of a rebellion and hunger strikes to deal with.

Many of Braybrook’s officers however were on our side. The interpreter, Major Carstairs, did what he could for us, including obtaining some urgently needed drugs behind Braybrook’s back. For our own sakes, he begged us not to make any more complaints. I remember his reasoning to this day: ‘The man is a bloody sadist who revels in your sufferings.’