Durchgangslager
The life of a prisoner would logically seem to begin with capture. No matter who a man was, or how he found himself in the position, his capture would seem to be the natural point that marked his transition between airman and prisoner. Capture would be his first introduction to the bureaucracy of imprisonment and his first taste of how he would spend his time behind barbed wire.
While it is true that capture invariably marked the physical transition from soldier to prisoner for all men, the mental transition from soldier to Kriegie came only later. (1) Sitting safe in our chairs, some sixty years removed from the hostilities, it is difficult for us to understand this phenomenon, but for the men who experienced it, capture was often just one more event in a series of catastrophic events. It came almost immediately for some, and later for others. Some went willingly into captivity, relieved to no longer be on the run across a foreign land filled with hostile forces and nursing wounds received.
What happened to the men after their capture depended on where they were caught and by whom. The Luftwaffe generally, although not always, tended to look upon the captured airmen as brethren, albeit brethren fighting on the wrong side of the war. A certain sort of camaraderie held over from the days of the First World War, when the first small group of pilots took to the skies on military operations. The other branches of the German military treated captured men with various degrees of kindness, ranging from the fair treatment given to those in the hands of the Wehrmacht to the blatant mistreatment of Russian prisoners by the SS. And, especially during the last stages of the war, men were often in more danger from the German civilian population than the German military.
After an indeterminate and often variable amount of time with the group that initially captured them, the new POWs would be transferred to interrogation centres, where highly trained officers tried to gather what military information they could from the shaken men. It was perhaps at these massive interrogation centres, where the men were generally kept in isolation until their interrogation had been concluded, that the mental transformation to Kriegie began to take place. But the transformation was still far from complete.
Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, prisoners were guaranteed certain rights and privileges. (2) Most men knew only the basics. Until they found themselves at the interrogation centres, they had never needed to know more. But what little they did know was often sufficient to get them through this initial time. Name, rank, and serial number: it was a mantra repeated endlessly throughout hundreds of interrogations. That was all the men were required to reveal to their interrogators. Nevertheless, the Germans tried to glean whatever information they could out of the men while the information was still fresh enough to be of value.
Despite this provision of the Geneva Convention, some men revealed more than just those three basic facts. Men were kept in isolation until they had been interrogated, especially if the Germans thought they had valuable information. Rations would be cut or completely withheld. Interrogations could take place at any hour of the day or night, hoping to throw the men mentally off balance enough that they would begin to answer questions. Some men revealed information accidentally, not realizing what they were doing. Some men were tricked into revealing information, told that their fellow prisoners had already told everything. Others gave way under pressure, and others accepted promises of preferential treatment. And some never revealed anything.
Once the Germans had decided the interrogation was finished, a captured man was allowed out of isolation, entering the prisoner population for the first time. Another argument for the mental transformation to Kriegie may be made at this time, but the Durchgangslagers were not permanent camps. The population was highly transient, consisting only of men awaiting assignment to a permanent camp. Many of the men were wounded and spent their time in the camp recovering, either as part of the general population or in hospitals, under the care of captured Allied doctors and their civilian counterparts. (3) Some formed tentative bonds with other members of the camp, only to have those friendships broken apart as men were reassigned. But most isolated themselves, leery of the Germans and still shaken from their ordeals.
The Germans quickly became efficient at processing prisoners. They would extract what information they could from the men before tossing them out into the general population of the Dulags. (4) Most enlisted men and non-commissioned officers were put through the system quickly. Although they had more information than Allied intelligence would have wanted the Germans to know, they generally had little information the Germans couldn't gather from other sources. Officers, however, and especially higher-ranked officers, tended to know more. As a consequence, the Germans tended to expend more time and energy on their interrogations, often to little consequence.
The general process was roughly similar for men of all three branches of the military. Following their capture, they would be questioned by an intelligence officer and then shuttled into the system. However variations arose due to necessity. Army prisoners, as opposed to airmen, generally had less individual attention paid to them; they tended to surrender in larger numbers and in the midst of a battle situation. They would be taken, shunted to the rear and out of battle, and then dealt with by Intelligence. Navy prisoners were far fewer in number than either soldiers or airmen. (5) They also could easily find themselves grouped together with either soldiers or airmen, depending on the circumstances. Navy pilots captured by the Luftwaffe would often remain prisoners of the Luftwaffe, and landing craft crews captured by the Wehrmacht following amphibious landings would sometimes remain within the Wehrmacht camps.
The meticulous notes in Squadron Leader Hamish MacDonald's file reveals not only information about the treatment that captured officers could expect to receive from their captors, but also something much more personal. A team of German interrogators spent slightly more than four weeks attempting to make him reveal information about his bomb group, their tactics, and the Allied strategy. He was subjected to temperature extremes and kept in complete isolation. His rations were reduced at times to bread and water. He was woken at all hours of the day and night to be brought before interrogators and deluged for hours on end with questions. He revealed nothing.
It can be difficult to find the personal element in the midst of the matter of fact notes left behind by the German officers. But nonetheless, it is possible to make one unequivocal statement about MacDonald. He was stubborn. He resisted all attempts by the Germans to force information from him. Even if that is the only thing that may be learned about him from his file, and it is not, it would still be a powerful discovery.
That stubbornness of Squadron Leader Hamish MacDonald would serve him well in prison life. It would help in his transformation from a pilot to a Kriegie. And, more importantly, it would find an outlet in a relentless desire to do something, anything, to defeat the Germans. That desire would transform him from a troublesome Kriegie with a poor escape record into the first man on the rolls of the RAF Special Services Command.
Hamish MacDonald was born the fourth child and the first son of Annie and Douglas MacDonald. Douglas, a school teacher, had served with distinction in the prestigious Black Watch during the First World War, receiving a mention in dispatches and a battlefield commission. However, when the war had finished, he quietly packed away his uniform and went back to his books. According to his children, he rarely spoke of the war, content with having done his duty and seeing no need to relive the experience.
Reluctant though he was to speak of his experiences, he did give his son a few words of advice on the even of the Second World War. Although he recognized the same spirit in his son as he had in his younger self, he cautioned the lad to avoid the army; flat feet and pack marches were not pleasant companions. It was one of the few pieces of advice that the younger MacDonald heeded.
Within days of the outbreak of war, Hamish had given notice to the Edinburgh firm that had employed him as since his graduation from Saint Andrew's as a mechanical engineer, married his college sweetheart, and enlisted in the Royal Air Force as an officer candidate. Following his father's advice, he had decided against the army, and the Royal Navy was too quintessentially English for the patriotic Scotsman. So he chose the Royal Air Force and was lucky enough to pass their rigorous qualifications.
In those first days of the war, the services were selective about those they accepted. The RAF especially wanted men with flight experience. MacDonald, through one of those fortuitous quirks of fate that seemed to characterize his life, had chummed throughout college with a fellow student who rebuilt and raced airplanes. Through this association, he had acquired just enough flight experience to be deemed acceptable by the recruiting officer. He entered basic training with a new wife, an eye on the sky, and no inkling of what was to come.
MacDonald's service records reveal the details of his flight training. He passed all of his exams, both written and practical, with flying colours. His fellow trainees recollect that the material seemed to come almost effortlessly to the burly Scotsman. He seemed to spend more time in the pubs than he did studying, but he came out the top of his class. The same held true throughout the remainder of his training. Through whatever unconventional means, MacDonald seemed to always have the right answer when it counted although his classmates never seemed to see him open a manual. Some chalked it up to his engineering background. Others looked on in envy as he jaunted about the base while they spent hours memorizing specifications. Commissioned as a pilot officer following completion of his training, MacDonald acquired his first bomber crew and began flying active operations in 1940, only a few weeks before the fall of France.
Although Fighter Command was considered to be more glamorous than its sister, Bomber Command, MacDonald never complained about his assignment. Perhaps his father had spoken of the tight comradeship that forms between men that serve under fire together. Or perhaps he was foresighted enough to realize that it was the bombers and not the fighters that were truly the offensive weapon of the RAF. Or perhaps his complaints merely went unnoted. But the assignment of one man to a bomber crew, rather than a fighter, would help change the lives of thousands.
(1) Kriegie shortened slang for a POW, abbreviated from the German Kriegsgefangen. Throughout this work, attempts will be made to use the forms common to the times and, if possible, to the Kriegies.
(2) The Geneva Convention, an international agreement signed first in 1864 and updated in 1906 and 1925, provided for such things as the treatment of wounded, the conduct of war at sea, and the treatment of prisoners of war. A 1949 update allowed for the treatment of civilians during times of war.
(3) Although doctors, as non-combatants, were supposed to be protected from capture under the terms of the Geneva Convention, they were generally held if captured. They provided what services they could to the prisoners and often received special privileges in return for gentlemen's agreements with the Germans that they wouldn't attempt to escape.
(4) Dulag was the abbreviated form of Durchgangslager. Durchgangslager was the general term for any type of German transit camp. The prisoners were intended to remain within the transit camps only for as long as was required to transfer them to permanent camps. Further shortening also resulted. For example, a Durchgangslager der Luftwaffe (Luftwaffe transit camp) would be known as a DulagLuft or a LuftDulag, depending on preference.
(5) Captured merchant seamen also fell under the umbrella of the Kriegsmarine. Separate camps were set up to accommodate this merchant seamen, although they were not technically recognized as members of the combatant military.