I’ve found lots of vague references to this online but I can’t find any actual examples. During the second world war and other conflicts POWs would do things like taking their pet brick for a walk to try to be declared mad - and occasionally it actually worked and they were repatriated in wounded prisoner swaps!
Does anyone know of some specific examples and what was done?
oi
wibble
Not World War II, but Doug Hegdahl faked being incredibly stupid during the Vietnam War. His captors even nicknamed him “the incredibly stupid one”. Figuring that he was too stupid do do any harm, they let him roam around freely.
In actuality, he sabotaged vehicles, gathered all kinds of intelligence, and even memorized the name of every POW in the camp by singing it to a song (Old MacDonald).
His “stupidity” put him on the list for an early prisoner exchange. He was then able to give all of the information that he had learned to his superiors, and was even sent to the Paris Peace Talks where he was able to give real first-hand accounts of the true treatment of prisoners.
Can’t speak for POWs in general, but I remember from a book on Colditz Castle it was known as ‘working your ticket’. Generally speaking it was frowned upon as it cried wolf and potentially made it harder for genuine cases to be repatriated.
There is a specific case I can remember; a prisoner faked hanging himself in the toilets, arranging for an orderly to come and cut him down. Instead of sending him home straight away they sent him to an institution for observation. Needless to say, a Nazi German mental institution turned out to be not the safest place - he recalls seeing barbed wire outside his cell, listless skinny inmates in striped uniforms wandering around aimlessly and a man in a straight jacket in the cell next to him writhing around on the floor trying to eat raw potatoes off the floor. He quickly decided that this place was far more dangerous than Colditz and dropped the pretence to make a ‘miraculous recovery’.
go on…
Thanks for that note and link. Hell of a story.