Liberation - The First Step on the Road to Freedom

This January it’s 80 years since prison camps in Nazi Europe were liberated as a prelude to the end of the Second World War. Drawing on his family history Tom Blackmore explores this liberation as the first step on the road to freedom. His father-in-law Sen Casson (Cass) was a PoW for 4 years, held close to the modern day town of Broumov in the Czech Republic. Records show that he was returned to England by April 1945. Tom’s grandfather, David Maxwell Fyfe was at the heart of two important events on which marching prisoners like Cass could build their future freedom : the Nuremberg Trials and the drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights.

There is a corridor of 300 miles which runs more or less parallel with the present Czech Republic border with Poland. It is one of the routes down which prisoners of the Concentration Camps were marched in the winter of 1945. During January Hitler issued a number of orders to clear the camps and move the inmates west to avoid their liberation by the advancing Soviet Army.

At the south-east corner of this corridor sat the Auschwitz Death Camp. From the 17th January 60,000 inmates were evacuated, many marching up the corridor to Sagan. By the time the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz there were only around 7,000 prisoners remaining, amongst whom were the sick, the weak and the children. Although unprepared for the devastation, the Soviet troops nevertheless filmed what they discovered.

A year later on the 13th January in Nuremberg, the prosecutors of the leading Nazis were shown this film for the first time. British chief prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe, whose youngest daughter Mo was then eight years old, wrote home to his wife:

‘I went to a pre-view of the Russian film in Auschwitz concentration camp. When one sees children of Mo’s age and younger in this horrible place and the clothes of infants who were killed, it is worth a year of our lives to help to register forever and with practical result the reasoned horror of humanity’

Further up the corridor is Stalag 344 (originally VIIIB). Although other nationalities were present, and often less well-treated, this was where the Nazis chose to imprison the bulk of the British and colonial prisoners of war.

Sen Casson’s illustration of his working party billet E388

Map of the site of the Stalags in Sen Casson’s scrapbook

Amongst them was Sergeant Casson of the Royal Medical Corps, the father of my wife Sue Casson. Taken prisoner on Crete, Cass was at Stalag 344 for 4 years, much of it spent in the English Working Party 388 working on the railway a little way up the corridor at Bodish, a village close to the modern day town of Broumov. Cass kept a diary for a period between 1942 and 1943, which provides an insight into his everyday life there but stops well before the camp was liberated.

The evacuation of Stalag 344 began on January 21st, but it took those marching north-east up the corridor a bit over a fortnight to reach Broumov. Sue doesn’t yet know how her father got home but assuming he was still in Bodish at the start of 1945 a few routes suggest themselves.

Some men who marched from Lamsdorf to Broumov, including other members of the Royal Medical Corps, were put on a train to Nuremberg via Prague. There they were kept in other camps until they were liberated by the Americans. Sue remembers her father describing a railway journey in which he was lucky to escape injury.

Alternatively he may have joined the prisoners marching further up the corridor, who at the top would have passed Stalag Luft III, the camp for aircrew remembered for the Great Escape attempt of April 1944, which by then would have been mostly deserted. The march from Stalag Luft III began on 27th January 1945, the same day that Auschwitz was liberated.

The Long March 1945

As they marched, those prisoners carried memories of the murders by the SS of the escaped airmen. This evidence played a pivotal role in David Maxwell Fyfe’s cross-examination of Hermann Goering in Nuremberg in March 1946, set against wider mistreatment and murder of prisoners in the death camps and those incarcerating prisoners of war.

One way or another we know that by April 9th Cass’ records had been updated and that he was no longer a prisoner of war, although he was not necessarily home.

Liberation in the winter of 1945 was an uncertain, messy and dangerous business. Thousands died as they danced their unsteady march in the depths of Silesian winter, as the landscape transformed from deep frozen to deep mud over the weeks of the march. It is unclear whether the prisoners were designed to be a human shield, but in the end, chaos enveloped all in once proudly organised Germany. The relief of the ending of their captivity overcame the horror of the march for the prisoners and so records are slim as they wisely kept their counsel.

But liberation was only the first step towards freedom. There was the journey home, recovery from illness and injury, and demobilisation to be faced. There were persistent nightmares to contend with, reacquaintance with the once familiar, and lives to be rebuilt. Where on that journey could the prisoner say that he was set free?

What could the governments of Europe do to support each prisoner on their journey to freedom?

London Conference June 1945

Evidence Room at Nuremberg

The allies were faced with a choice – to track down the Nazi leaders, and as Winston Churchill suggested, shoot them as quislings, or to put them on trial to establish order and justice to replace the anarchy and lawlessness of the war years. Barely two months after VE Day the London Conference set up the imperfect Nuremberg War Crimes Trials which opened only four months later in November 1945.

Then, Robert Jackson, the American Chief Prosecutor said :

‘That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.’

The evidence of Nuremberg, the memories, documents, and images marched west with the prisoners in the early months of 1945 and was stored and sorted before the Tribunal opened.  

After Nuremberg the governments created a Council of Europe to explore further ways of protecting their citizens. In 1950 they signed the Convention for the protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, a further rock on which the marching prisoners could build their lives of freedom.

David Maxwell Fyfe was one of the two artisans of the Convention, and in his mind were the horrors of Holocaust, and the lives of men like Sergeant Casson who built the modern world of liberty.