# Going to the bathroom as a prisoner during WWII. **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 31, 2016, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579 "2016-08-31T16:37:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579/21 "2016-09-01T20:16:58Z")
> [@Jim\_s\_Son](#): > > When I was in USCG boot camp at Cape May, NJ in 1979 our squad bay had urinals and toilets that had walls. It was a lot like a rest stop on an interstate. My first duty station was USCG Yard in Baltimore, MD and one of the decommissioned ships was a 327 cutter USCGC Spencer. It was used for steam school and housing crews from ships that were in for work (if the CO was too cheap to put them up in a hotel). One E-6 I worked with had been on the USCGC Bibb, a sister ship still in service. He said he was surprised the toilets (which have a nickname in the service that I won’t use because this is a family site) on the Spencer had walls, the Bibb didn’t. > > But I’m sure the Guard was a lot different from the other services, in many ways. Just as a matter of curiosity, why won’t you share the nickname for the toilets on the ship? Although the board has concerns about being safe for work, it’s not really a family site. There are very few restrictions on language, and words like shit and fuck are certainly allowed. Not to mention topics on pan fried semen or men who can fellate themselves. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579/22 "2016-09-01T20:38:38Z")
> [@PatrickLondon](#): > > …German and Italian POWs in the UK were often sent out to work on the land, often with minimal supervision by guards, and many were retained for a couple of years after the war to help with reconstruction - some were allowed to settle permanently)… How did POW settlement work, in theory and especially practice? Was it as simple as a POW refusing repatriation assistance and simply walking out of the gates into the community while his former comrades are piling onto buses and planes for their trip home, or was there an application process, threats of deportation, etc.? I’m guessing it would be pretty easy to formally emigrate as a former POW if a soldier married a local or had essential work skills that were in dire need, but what about if the desire was more political or economic? ---
**Author:** ![Sangahyando](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f14d63/32.png) [@Sangahyando](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sangahyando)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579/23 "2016-09-01T22:14:08Z")
> [@PatrickLondon](#): > > My father was a POW of the Germans in WW2, and since he wasn’t an officer he was required to work (as the Geneva Conventions allowed - German and Italian POWs in the UK were often sent out to work on the land, often with minimal supervision by guards, and many were retained for a couple of years after the war to help with reconstruction - some were allowed to settle permanently). > > My dad worked in railway marshalling yards, and later down a coalmine in Poland. If you were sent out on a work detail, you might be held in a camp attached to the workplace, if big enough, or you went out by the day and were marched back to your camp for the night. Officers didn’t have to work, which is how they had the time to plot and plan the kind of escapes they make movies about (not that other POWs didn’t escape, but those were less planned and less often written about). I gather from reading reminiscences by World War 2 POWs, that it was fairly easy to muck about with the German regulations for POWs – largely because there were such great numbers of POWs. Switching-and-swopping of identities, was not hard to accomplish – likewise, just vanishing from the muster-roll (useful in escaping endeavours). Some officer POWs were of a temperament such that enforced idleness for months and years, would drive them mad: they arranged to switch identities with “other ranks”, who took their place in officers’ camp – for the officer initiating the switch, exhausting brute labour was preferable to privileged idleness: plus – if his tastes ran that way – being “out and about” gave some advantages for escape attempts, and / or for sabotaging the German war effort. Long ago, I had a work colleague who was taken prisoner in 1940, and – he being an “other rank” – spent most of the war doing farm work, of a definitely old-fashioned kind, in the as-was “Polish Corridor” area. He said that things could have been a lot worse: in his POW sojourn, he received much kindness from both Germans and Poles. ---
**Author:** ![Leo\_Bloom](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leo_bloom/32/10377_2.png) [@Leo\_Bloom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leo_Bloom)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 1:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579/24 "2016-09-02T01:40:32Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > …Not to mention topics on pan fried semen or men who can fellate themselves. The former thread, and its many cross references in others, I remember well in GQ. Self-fellatio? ETA: Yup. Before my time: [Is It Possible To Give Yourself Oral Sex? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=99254) ---
**Author:** ![Mk\_VII](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Mk\_VII](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mk_VII)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579/25 "2016-09-02T19:13:36Z")
One of the tunnels in Stalag Luft III at Sagan was actually started from in the lavatory block. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579/26 "2016-09-02T19:46:28Z")
> [@PatrickLondon](#): > > Those held by Germany and the western allies were visited by representatives of the “protecting power” (usually Switzerland, I think) and of the Red Cross, who were empowered to report back to both the holding power and the POWs’ own authorities on the conditions they found, and on any complaints. I’ve seen records of such reports in our National Archives for the camps where my father was held: the Swiss government reps seem more inclined to take what the Germans told them at face value, but the Red Cross did report in more detail on things like food supplies, sanitary conditions, health and so on. I read of one complaint over the Germans placing an anti-aircraft gun in or near the camp, thus risking making it a military target; and another where prisoners wanted the Red Cross to report their rejection of someone who wanted to be a “V-Mann” (POWs’ representative to the Germans), who I think had been a fairly prominent Fascist in Britain pre-war. > > But things were very different in relation to the USSR and Japan, which hadn’t signed the Geneva Conventions. Along with this I read a book once that talked about what it was like to be an allied POW in Switzerland itself. See Switzerland was neutral and therefore themselves did NOT have to abide by the Geneva conventions so when say a British aircrew landed in Switzerland they were imprisoned just like if they were in Germany itself and same with German aircrews. Now if any of you know Switzerland you know that different parts of the country are physically and ethnically tied to a surrounding country so if a crew went down on say the German side, well treatment was much worse than say going down on the French side. So on the German side they would often turn them over to the Germans or house them in prison camps while on the French side they put them up in hotels and resorts (which because of the war were empty). Aircraft were often sent to Germany or the Swiss allowed German agents to look over downed planes for evidence of allied technology. Oh, also allied pow’s in Switzerland did NOT get pow pay scale after release. Only regular pay. Sadly their seems to be some cases where aircrews figured this out and deliberately landed their planes in Switzerland so they could sit out the war in safety. They caught some crews stuffing suitcases into their planes. This also gave German agents a fully intact plane to study. Now alot of this changed as the war was ending and it became clear the Germans would lose. The German-Swiss stopped being bad to allied pilots. ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579/27 "2016-09-02T19:55:30Z")
> [@Leo\_Bloom](#): > > The former thread, and its many cross references in others, I remember well in GQ. > > Self-fellatio? > > ETA: Yup. Before my time: [Is It Possible To Give Yourself Oral Sex? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=99254) [Even more recently than that.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=801155) ---
**Author:** ![Ranger\_Jeff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranger_jeff/32/2065_2.png) [@Ranger\_Jeff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranger_Jeff)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2016, 5:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579/28 "2016-09-03T05:25:41Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > Just as a matter of curiosity, why won’t you share the nickname for the toilets on the ship? Although the board has concerns about being safe for work, it’s not really a family site. There are very few restrictions on language, and words like shit and fuck are certainly allowed. Not to mention topics on pan fried semen or men who can fellate themselves. What civilians call “toilets” are called “heads” in the USCG and USN. Probably the USMC also. ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2016, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579/29 "2016-09-03T06:23:03Z")
> [@Ranger\_Jeff](#): > > What civilians call “toilets” are called “heads” in the USCG and USN. Probably the USMC also. I knew they are called “heads.” I thought **Jim’s Son** might have had a raunchier name in mind that he was reluctant to share. Since this site really isn’t family-friendly, I was puzzled by his reluctance. ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2016, 7:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579/30 "2016-09-03T07:23:52Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > I’m guessing it would be pretty easy to formally emigrate as a former POW if a soldier married a local or had essential work skills that were in dire need, but what about if the desire was more political or economic? There would have been the usual bureaucratic processes, which were relatively informal. Most of the cases we hear about would have been precisely where a POW had been working on the same farm, had settled down and become indispensable to the farmer. I think it would essentially have depended on whether an upstanding citizen of some sort would speak up for you and maybe act as a guarantor. There must have come a crunch point where they were given a date for release and repatriation and would then have decided whether or not to ask to stay. I have no idea how many were refused and more or less forcibly repatriated against their will. This was a process lasting for a couple of years, so there would have been time to think about their position. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain\_wwtwo/german\_pows\_01.shtml](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/britain_wwtwo/german_pows_01.shtml) [http://www.radiomarconi.com/marconi/monumento/pow/pows.html](http://www.radiomarconi.com/marconi/monumento/pow/pows.html) DPs or POWs who had been nationals of the former Soviet Union were in a much more difficult position: the Russians wanted them back, particularly those who had gone over to the Germans, and were threatening not to repatriate Allied POWs who had fallen into their hands at the end of the war. The stories are particularly harrowing in relation to those held on the Continent, where there were forcible repatriations. A fair number of Poles and Ukrainians in the UK were allowed to stay as refugees. ---
**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\ **Post date:** [September 3, 2016, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579/31 "2016-09-03T15:15:18Z")
There were quite a high number of ex POW’s allowed to stay after the war; mainly Italians though, as Germans were pretty much disliked. My mother, for example, refused to go to Germany in the late 50’s when my father was posted there, and she was by no means unusual. Italians were treated quite differently and were generally welcomed into the local population. Bear in mind that there was a considerable shortage of young men at that time. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/going-to-the-bathroom-as-a-prisoner-during-wwii/764579.md?page=1)