Two, in fact, were cremated at the concentration camp right in my back yard- Struthof
I knew a shopkeeper who to my surprise — he looked too young — had been a POW in Italy, and he said the worse thing was the lice. Which was a factor in most prison-camp experiences; but due to the deathly fear of typhus Germans have had since at least Napoleon’s campaigns — and maybe since the Thirty Years War, which was even nastier than the World Wars — the latter took more extensive measures against such than did the happy-go-lucky Italian administrations.
On another note, as a tribute to my people’s imaginative abilities, I recall the ending of a record of British POWs held in unendurable conditions in Japanese camps, the worst of all even worse than the Russian gulag system, who sailed home and docked on the south coast of England, to be regaled with a free feast provided by the locals.
They were given rice-pudding.
When you think about it, that’s pretty central to all of military life and sacrifice, innit ?
In the grand scheme of things, nobody really cares whether or not Hill 238 is taken in the strictest sense, certainly not to the point of dying or even killing over that stupid hill. But if it is taken, then it can cover Valley 193, which leads into Dinky Town 934, which is one step closer to total victory, which means an end to all the killing. So you get to die for stupid Hill 238. Huzzah.
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I had a British Indian Army officer Great Uncle who was imprisoned by the Italians, Japanese and the Germans (in that order) and his used to say that he actually gained weight as an Italian “guest”.
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German soldiers in North Africa were similarly pretty happy about sharing garrisons and defensive lines with Italian troops : they might not have been the greatest fighters in the world, but their rations were excellent, plentiful and they were more than happy to share any surplus. They even had wine !
I always wondered why the Germans didn’t built the barracks a little higher up on the stilts. It would have made it exceedingly difficult the dig a tunnel under them that way.
Interestingly enough the German POW’s caused little problems. We had a German POW camp in Arkansas. Our local PBS station did a documentary on the camp years ago. Never had any escapes. The POW’s were well treated. There was even a bizarre twist where a local German immigrant family had a relative in the POW camp. The camp transferred that POW to another camp. They didn’t want to tempt the local family into doing something stupid.
Termites? Fire hazards? Sandy soil? :dubious: 
For things like stoves, they had to have brick columns for support in certain places; those were the points the prisoners took advantage of when tunneling.
A funny anecdote from the book: After the Germans discovered “Tom,” they called in a Heer demolitions man to blow the thing up. It was so well-built (the Germans were quite disconcerted at how far the prisoners had gotten in their efforts) and he laid in so much gelignite that the resulting explosion not only collapsed the tunnel, it came roaring up the shaft through the brick column and blew that whole corner off the barracks!
Nice Whoosh! job.
I wish he’d written a book about that. The story sounds fascinating.
Making it back across the Atlantic would have presented more problems than getting across the English Channel or to Switzerland.
My dad told me that, though the US Army (the Air Corps was part of the Army then) didn’t really expect it from enlisted men. I mean, they’re just grunts, right? 
I asked him why he high-tailed it out of Switzerland, where he and his crew were housed in a hotel with a bunch of German internees (he said the Germans got treated better, though since he escaped while on an unsupervised day trip it’s hard to imagine how) he said that it was his duty as an officer. Plus they were about to be transferred to a proper POW camp, without day trips and the occasional night on the town, and it would be harder to get out and back to the war from there. One or two of his men were killed while escaping, so it wasn’t all chocolate and cuckoo clocks in Switzerland.
So, let me get this straight.
If the OP was fighting in WWII and got captured and put into that prison. You wouldn’t try to escape? You’d just sit out the war? You went through like a year or so of training and have been fighting the Nazis for a while and you get captured and you would say, “Ok, you got me. Let me know when it’s over.”
It might be noted that the Geneva Convention barred punishment beyond solitary confinement for escapes and escape attempts. That said, there were exceptions:[ul]
[li]If an escapee killed someone, he could be tried for the civilian crime of murder.[/li][li]If he were caught performing espionage or sabotage, he could be charged accordingly.[/li][li]If he were captured wearing civilian clothing, he could be accused of espionage. This almost happened to one of the Stalag Luft III escapees: the interrogator who questioned him accused him of wearing civilian clothing, but the accusation was dropped after a woman from the outer office confirmed that the cloth was definitely military issue.[/li][/ul]A major reason that the execution of the 50 Stalag Luft III escapees (the Kugel order referred to above) was pursued so vigorously after the war was that it struck at the heart of the Geneva Convention guarantees — which the Germans, or at any rate the Luftwaffe, had at least made a pretense of following (insofar as the Western allies were concerned, that is).
Most of the hate stuff is not representative of fighting soldiers, and was required for the manipulation of public thinking of post-war generations. Just as with pro/anti communism, royalism, fascism, anarchism or whatever the enemy of the moment is. I met a number of people who lived through that war, including members of my family, who had no dislike of Germans in any way, including some from occupied countries such as the Dutch or Danes known for their alleged hatred of Germany.
Which is not to say they didn’t have dislikes for other selected groups, such as, say, depending on whom they had worked beside, the Russians or the French.
Still, a few years back I was working alongside a young Namibian, where a hundred years ago the Germans conducted some notorious imperialistic killing of tribesmen, just like the contemporary American massacring in the Philippines; but he said his people had no dislike of the Germans — just of the British.
Apart from the fact that the OP wouldn’t gave been required to join the fighting forces, there was no especial desire on the part of the average enlisted man — not even the soviets — to kill or hate either the nazis or the Germans.
In the end it was just another war, and we’ve had a lot of them, so much that the enemies shift and blur after a while. Particularly when you’re led by a self-loving nut like Hitler or Churchill — the former had his own well-known changes of whom the current enemy should be; and the latter, just after the German surrender, wanted to arm the German prisoners and invade our previous Glorious Ally alongside them. Which would have entailed a remarkable sea-change in the attitudes previously inculcated into the British people.
I don’t think he wanted to take the Italians along for the ride.
I too would like to learn more.
After reading the Wiki article, I have a few questions. Where did they plan to escape to? It states they had forged documents and civilian clothes and were making for a train station. To go where? Stalag Luft III was deep in eastern germany.
Also, I assume many of them didn’t speak german or if they did it’d be with an English accent. Did they really think they could make it all the way out of occupied Europe w/ no verbal interaction?
At the very beginning of Pauil Brickhill’s book The Great Escape*, it is noted that Prison Life would not be so bad if:
1.) It weren’t such an indefinite sentence. Some guys were in the camp from the beginning of the war.
2.) You could get enough food to fill your belly, at least once. German POW rations were just enough to produce starvation in its most protracted form, it says. Fortunately, Red Cross parcels started coming in after the first year, which helped A LOT – they included tins of “Bully Beef” and “Klim” (evaporated milk, or some kind of substitute).
3.) The Germans didn’t keep dropping hints that they might just shoot everyone, anyway. You can say that’s against the Rules of War, and the Geneva Convention, but Hitler himself signed the “Bullet Order” that lead to the execution of more than 50 of the escapees from Stalg Luft Drei. At the end of the book Brickhill relates how there had been shots fired into the compound. The guys who wrote Stalag 17 (who were POWs, too, and based it in part on their own experiences) also talk about shots fired into the camp.
Add to this that, as stated, it was the duty of the prisoners to escape. Also, the escapes wrere good for morale, which took a severe hit in the camps. Heck, I’d have tried.
It wasn’t just the food – Brickhill describes the appalling state of the POW clothes, worn through in places. The Stalg 17 guys have a scene where the “Geneva Man” comes to inspect the camp, and good clothres and blankets get handed out for the occasion, then re-possessed after the inspector leaves. Prisoners lived dull, constrained lives, staying in bed in the cold weather to conserve strength and heat, often walking “the circuit” around the wire to keep from boredom. There was theater in the camp, but that hardly makes up for everything else. as for the gardening, a lot of that was done in self-defense, raidsed food to supplement their meager (and pretty tasteless) rations. Onions were prized as a soyrce of not only nutrients, but flavor.
The objective in most cases was to make it to a neutral country (Spain, Sweden, Switzerland) overland or through a port and thence back to Great Britain. Either that or make contact with the local underground and have them smuggle you out of occupied territory. IIRC, the three who managed to make it back followed those routes; at least one escapee was turned in to the Gestapo in Prague by a Czech turncoat.
Some of the men spoke another language well enough to try and pass as foreign workers, but the jig was up when they were caught and interrogated. (The incident in the movie where one man gave himself away by lapsing into English actually happened.) Only a few tried masquerading as Germans (one of which was a Pole who was caught wearing the uniform of a Luftwaffe sergeant; he was never heard from again).
Of the 200 men authorized to escape, those who had the best chance of getting away were given priority on the roster, along with those who had been behind the wire longest or had worked hardest on the project. The vast majority weren’t expected to make it very far, and this was openly acknowledged. They had to travel on foot with only rudimentary papers and kit.
Bill Mauldin wrote about this in Up Front in response to an article claiming the American soldier was incapable of hate. I’m quoting him from memory here, but his reply was basically “Maybe we don’t share the deep, traditional hatred against the Germans that the French and Poles feel, but you can’t have friends killed without hating the men who did it. We’ve seen the face of Germany and we know her as a cold, cruel, and powerful enemy.”
Don’t forget long woolen underpants. According to Brickhill, some motherly type back home apparently thought that what they really needed was long woolen underpants, so that’s the one thing they had plenty of. But it was kind of depressing: Brickhill said it was bad enough to be behind the wire, dreaming of Dorothy Lamour, without the final indignity of long woolen underpants. It made one feel hopelessly celibate.
But the POWs had their revenge. One perennial problem with tunnels was disposing of the dirt, which was exacerbated at Stalag Luft III by the fact that the undersoil was a radically different color from the topsoil. One of the camp’s more stiff-upper-lip residents (a regular Royal Navy officer, with all that implied) came up with the idea of cutting the legs off woolen underpants and pinning the bottoms closed to make bags. They would be filled with dirt and carried out into the compound under the prisoners’ trousers, and when nobody was looking they’d pull the pins out and shuffle the dirt around so it wasn’t conspicuous. The scheme naturally required the sacrifice of a great many woolen underpants, and apparently the prisoners carried out the mutilation with gusto.
Why not just sit tight and wait until the war was over? Because, except very near the end, you didn’t know when or if the war would be over. Worse yet, you didn’t know who was going to win. If the other side won, you might be a lot worse off than if you had escaped.