"It is unclear how many Allied men were forced to work as slaves for the
Nazis. Most of these men were not Jewish. Many of them had escaped from
other POW camps or had worked with underground resistance units. Their
actions led the Nazis to recategorize them as political prisoners, which
meant that they lost their POW status and, therefore, the rights
afforded to them under the Geneva Convention. Various British soldiers
were dispatched to concentration camps, which included Buchenwald,
Belsen, and Theresienstadt." (from the introduction)
The huge Auschwitz camp in Poland, the Third Reich's most gruesome death
camp, contained not only the infamous concentration camp--whose horrors
are well-documented--but also a prisoner-of-war facility that housed
British inmates. Situated close enough to the Jewish quarters to smell
the stench of burning bodies from the crematoria, the POWs were forced
to work alongside concentration camp inmates in a Nazi factory.
Witnesses to daily violence, the men survived beatings, hard labor, and
the extreme cold of Polish winters, all while subsisting on meager
rations. Their final ordeal was to march hundreds of miles in the depths
of winter to finally gain freedom in the spring of 1945.
Based on interviews with some of the few surviving members of E715
Auschwitz, this book charts the British captives' true story--from their
arrival on cattle trucks through to their eventual departure on foot.
Haunted by what they witnessed as young men, Brian Bishop, Doug Bond,
and Arthur Gifford-England were unable to speak about their experiences
until decades later when approached during research for this book. In
post-war Britain, there has been little interest in these remarkable
men, and they have had to cope with the trauma of their experiences with
little support.
Allies in Auschwitz records an important and forgotten episode of
modern history. As corroboration of the men's testimony, the final
chapter includes post-war accounts from other British POWs held in E715
Auschwitz, based on documents compiled by war crimes investigators for
the Nuremburg Trials.
