Swinoujscie Train Station (unedited)

May 13, 2024

Swinoujscie, Gross Tychowo 

Things are moving too fast to keep up with a well thought out blog. Internet issues further complicate. We’re driving hours a day and making one night hotel stops to ensure we cover all the POW locations we’ve identified. Please excuse the lack of editing and organization of my notes and pictures. 

I mentioned the evacuation of SL VI last blog and how the men were crammed into the hold of a ship, the SS Insterburg. Swinoujscie port was their landing spot and the men that lived through the boat trip were loaded onto train cars at the Swinoujscie train station just as tightly packed as they were on the Insterburg.  

After seventy-two hours on the Baltic in terrible conditions, without food, water or facilities, they spent another day packed in the “forty and eights”, again without food, water or facilities. It’s easy to imagine what shape they were in. The box cars were known as forty and eights because they were designed to carry forty men and eight horses. 

Their next stop was the train station in Gross Tychowo about three kilometers from SL IV. When the men arrived, they were ordered to remove their belts and shoes.  Then they were shackled together two-by-two and run to the prison. Dogs, bayonet stabs from Hitler Youth and manic yelling from guards to, rouse, rouse made this last four days the most inhumane period of the airmen’s lives. 

There is no way I can describe our feelings as we have visited the Swinoujscie port, train station, Gross Tychowo train station and the road where the horrendous run was made. I know you understand. Jim

Camera crew at Swinoujscie train station 

Gross Tychowo train station 

Various pics from the port area

Filming at the train station 

We leave locks inscribed with information about our father’s WWII service 

This is our Kriegie Kids travel group. Rich and Liz and Pam and me. 

Out hotel in Swinoujscie 

Hitler Punishes the Airmen (unedited)

May 11-12, 2024
Gross Tychowo

In the summer of 1944, with Russians winning the battle in the East and the US doing the same thing in the west, Hitler put the stalags under the control of the Gestopo, and the SS. He knew the war was probably lost and he wanted hold the prisoners hostage for bargaining chips after the war and to punish the flyers for bombing the German cities. He also engages the Hitler Youth to join in the punishment of the American flyers.

July 1944, he (sorry bad internet and cell coverage, pictures out of order)

Example of barns POW slept in on march  

Above the wall still existing that all

Pows slept in on first night of march. 

Above, road that became the path of the viscous “Run Up the Road”

began evacuating the 10,000 POWs of Stalag Luft 6, the stalag nearest Russia to move the prisoners further into Germany and keep then from being liberated by the advancing Russian army. Vic, my father, was in the two-thousand men who began this 72 hour, nightmare of a trip in the hold of a coal scow on the Baltic and ended being run two miles, while police dogs bit at their legs and Hitler Youth prodded them on with bayonet stabs to keep them moving. Shackled together, the airmen struggled to get each to the top of the hill. The boat ride and run up the hill to Stalag Luft 4 were two of the most punishing events of the men’s POW ordeal, but more was to come. 

As the allies continued to advance, Hitler ordered a forced march to hold the POWs hostage for later use. The march, The Death March, for my father lasted 86 days and covered 600 miles, sometimes doubling back over previously traveled routes. Numbers are sketchy, but men died and the ones that lived suffered PTSD and other lifelong ailments. No warm clothes and many with makeshift shoes, little food or uncontaminated water, dealt with below freezing temperatures and dysentery, while sleeping on the ground outside or in barns along the way. 

Our trip has allowed us to stand at the very places the men went through these atrocities and it was a very emotional and meaningful visit. We appreciate the Polish men and women who are working to keep the memories of our fathers’ imprisonment alive. Our fathers and the Polish people were fighting the same battles for freedom. Jim

Pawel Ubanek, the leader of the SL 4 committee 

Picture of the barn as it was on March

Me at the wall of the barn Vic spent his first night on the Death March

Example of a Death March barn

Me on the site of the “Run Up the Road”

Talking with high school volunteer archeologists digging at SL 4

Notes Pawel had on Vic

Pawel

University historian 

SL 4 water supply 

Baltic Sea sunsets 

Ol’ Body is Speaking to Me

April 9-10, 2024
Zagan

We’re eighteen days into our trip and we have eleven to go. It’s been a once in a lifetime experience but my ol’ body is feeling the stresses of lots of rainy and cold walks and “vacation eating.”  The weather in Zagan is beautiful, however, I’m sleeping in today to try and get over a cold and sore throat. The group is touring Stalag Luft 3, you will remember that this is the scene of The Great Escape. (Fifty of the escapees were executed as an example to others with escape in their minds.)

I’ve chosen to forgo the day’s activities to rest up for the next phase of our journey. The atrocities of Stalag Luft 4, the “Run up the Road” and the 86 day Death or Black March forced on the POWs by Hitler. He had two objectives for the forced march: punish the airmen for bombing Germany and to hold them hostage as bargaining chips after the war. 

The third atrocity is known as the “Baltic Cruise”. I’ll have more on the cruise later, but it was the worst 72 hours of Vic’s ordeal  

Pam will be with the SL 3 visit and I’ll report her observations. 

Our lodging in Zagan

Stalag Luft 3 was important for lots of reasons, but the escape of over seventy POWs is the most notable. My father was never here, so for me it was a good day to miss. 

Friday May, 10

It is now Friday May 10 and we’ve moved on to Koszalin, Poland, where we’ve been touring the city with a former ambassador to India and the chairman of the WWII museum here.  It’s been a four hour trip over from  Zagan, so not a lot of time to gather information to write about. I did do a video session with the film brew on the Baltic shore to talk about the “Baltic Cruise”, the torturous trip for the airmen that were selected.  Don’t know why the 2,000 or so men were chosen to be “shipped” on the Insterberg, a captured Russian coal scow across the Baltic instead of going by train as the other 8,000. The most probable reason was to punish the airmen and to place them in danger of being sunk by an allied attack. The Allies were attacking every ship possible in the Baltic. 

The men were packed into the hold of the ship so tightly that they couldn’t move and had to take turns sitting on the seventy-two hour trip. No food or facilities, little water and breathing fumes from the bilge water and diesel fuel mix was stifelling. One man named Walter Getsy had a nervous event, he panicked severely and the guards took him topside. When he tried to jump overboard he was shot and killed. We don’t know how many more men were killed or died during the ordeal. but we do know that it was a significant event in the PTSD that many of the men suffered later in life. 

We will be traveling tomorrow to Gross Tychowo and reliving the “Run Up the Road” to Stalag Luft 4,  anoth atrociously. 

I’m sorry for the lack of pictures, I’ll try to make a picture catch up post ASAP. Jim

Buchenwald

 Wetzlar, Buchenwald
May 9, 2024

Today was a difficult for several reasons; it was cold windy and dark, but considering we were to visit Buchenwald it was very appropriate. At the end of the war Buchenwald was the largest concentration camp in Germany. It is an expansive property, and even though many of the barracks and other buildings are gone, there is no question or doubt of its inhuman mission. The barbed wire, guard towers and large chimney of a foreboding building on the edge of the compound brought reality to the stories I’ve heard and read about.

Our guide for the day, Mackenzie, shows us the front gate. The inscription “to each his own” is positioned to be read by the prisoners from the inside.

Nazi headquarters and administration building.

Solitary confinement was the main type of punishment in the camp. The cells were small, and completely void of facilities. Some had a wooden cot to sleep on, and others had chains attached to the walls where shackled prisoners were hung in painful positions. 

My father was shackled to his buddy, Ed Staley on the punishing run up the hill to Stalag Luft IV. I wonder what his shackles looked like. 

Jewish prisoners were not generally executed in Buchenwald, it was known as a punishment and work camp. Jewish prisoners were “rented” out to businesses and corporations as free labor. Interesting that many of these prisoners got better treatment from their captors than those working in the rock quarry adjacent to the camp. Almost sixty thousand died there, but for the large majority, starvation was the cause of death. I’m having trouble making the number of victims here to be sixty thousand because most references quote 1.1 to 2 million. . 

Buchenwald had many satellite camps, maybe hundreds of them. I’m guessing that the larger number included all the executions in all the various iterations of Buchenwald. 

The Nazi officers kept a brothel in the camp of girls ages about ten to eighteen.  They also built a camp Zoo  for the children of the officers. 

Prisoners were subjected to horrific medical experiments in the name of research. 

The most graphic building of the tour was the crematory. The pictures tell the story. 

The extensive museum at Buchenwald continued to tell the story. 

I mentioned that Buchenwald was not an execution camp like Auschwitz, but they did execute all captured Russians. The captives were taken to the basement of the crematorium and shot. The bodies were then placed on a lift and moved to the crematory and disposed of. The picture below is a cart used to carry the Russian bodies to the crematory before the lift was installed.

The memorial to the Buchenwald prisoners is a square stainless steel plate with names of the fifty countries represented by those imprisoned. America is represented because two American airmen died here on route to their Stalags. They were not executed but died from injuries sustained during battle. The plate is held at constant 98.6 degrees by a heater underneath to represent “life”.

Our visit to Buchenwald was not a direct part of the history of our fathers POW experience but it magnifies the importance of why our country was willing to fight and send men like my father to war. Jim