A Return to Sachsenhausen

We are grateful to Colonel J. M. T. F. Churchill, DSO., MC., for this moving report of his recent return visit to East Germany to the location of the once dreaded wartime concentration camp at Sachsenhausen.

 

"This year is the 30th anniversary of the liberation of the German concentration camps. The main camp liberated by the Russians was Sachsenhausen near Berlin. They and the East Germans decided to make some capital out of this fact and had arranged to have a great ceremony at the camp which it was thought thousands from all over East Germany would attend. The eighteen countries that had substantial numbers of prisoners in the camp were all asked to send groups of ex-inmates to take part in the propaganda junketing's. England is not one of the eighteen countries commemorated on the Camps' Memorial, nor has it a room with exhibits attached to the Camps' Museum. However the German and French Old Comrades' Associations know of the very few of us who were there and we were accordingly asked to be present. I think originally there were nine of us who survived Sachsenhausen plus four Irish soldiers captured at Dunquerque who then agreed to work for the Germans in Berlin until they had a row with them and were put in Sachsenhausen where we met them. Of the first group five survive today and two Irishmen.

 

Sqn.Ldr. Jimmy James and I were able to go to the celebrations. In 1944 he and I had escaped by a tunnel from Sachsenhausen and got to Rostock on the Baltic in fifteen days where we were caught and taken back to the camp. The East German Government paid the fares of all who would get themselves as far as the boundary between East and West Germany, and also put us up free at an East Berlin Hotel for the four days we were there. The party was 150 strong from the eighteen nations plus the two of us. An extensive programme of dinners, receptions and entertainments occupied the four days.

 

The most interesting event from our point of view was the morning spent at the old Alma Mater in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. The camp has been largely preserved as a memorial to the 100,000 who perished there and is visited every day by hundreds of tourists. On this official memorial day there were 50,000 visitors which is about the size the camp was in 1944 when we were there.

 

Before leaving England, Henry Brown brought to me at Victoria Station a poppy wreath bearing the Commando Association crest, which I wanted to leave at Zellenbau. This was the heart of the awful place and consisted of a 'T' shaped stone gaol of eighty cells 7' x 12'. The seven men of my No.2 Commando - two wounded - who were captured in the Glomfjord raid in Norway on the 21st of September 1942 spent one - their last - night in the Zellenbau on the 22nd of October and were murdered by the Gestapo at dawn on the 23rd, having been brought to Sachsenhausen from Berlin for this purpose. There names were : Captains Graeme Black MC and Joseph Houghton MC, CSM. Miller Smith, L/Sgt. William Chudley and Privates Cyril Abram, Eric Curtis and Reginald Makeham.

 

On the day we went to Sachsenhausen, after the bands had played and the songs had been sung, and after the endless speeches in German and Russian had finished, James and I were at last able to get away (we had been trapped on the central stage with the V.I.Ps) and make our way to the Zellenbau inside its own wall and a gaol within a gaol. Here I laid the Commando poppy wreath with a card attached with their names and brief details of the raid and their subsequent murder by the Gestapo. I put it directly below the large descriptive notice which now graces the entrance to the gaol. "ZELLENBAU" SONDERGEFANGNIS DER GESTAPO UND SS LAGERSUHRUNG". To end, I played the lament 'Lochaber no more' on the Pipes. 

 

Then we entered the prison to visit our former cells. Mine had been No.14 were I spent the first month handcuffed and chained to the floor in the centre of the cell by a one metre long ankle chain. A dramatic, though not nostalgic moment. After a month I was unchained and allowed twenty minutes exercise on weekdays, walking round the prison yard. After five months we were released from prison and returned to the camp and almost immediately moved to Dachau, then to Richenau near the Brenner Pass where I escaped again and managed to reach the American 88th Division near Trento." Jack Churchill.

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In addition to the above from No.2 Commando of whom Lt. Col. Churchill was Commanding Officer, there were others from No.14 Commando (Operation Checkmate) who died there or at Belsen. Lt John Godwin, Sgt John 'Jack' Cox, Petty Officer Alfred John Roe, Petty Officer Harold Hiscock, Able Seaman Keith Mayor, Able Seaman Neville Burgess, and Able Seaman Andrew Anthony West.