Allied airmen at Buchenwald

On Sunday 20 August 1944 a train of cattle wagons that had set out from the outskirts of Paris five days earlier pulled up at the ramp of the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. Alongside more than two thousand French political prisoners, 168 Allied airmen climbed out – men shot down over France, Belgium and the Netherlands in the preceding months. According to the most frequently cited breakdown they comprised 82 Americans, 48 Britons, 26 Canadians, 9 Australians, 2 New Zealanders and 1 Jamaican serving in the RAF. As members of the armed forces they should have been sent to Luftwaffe prisoner-of-war camps and protected by the Geneva Convention. The Gestapo, however, had classed them as “terror airmen” (Terrorflieger) and spies, to whom prisoner-of-war status was denied.

The airmen spent two months in Buchenwald – shaved, barefoot, for the first weeks without a roof over their heads, in the worst part of the camp. Two of them died. During the night of 19–20 October 1944, 156 of them were taken to the Luftwaffe prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III at Żagań (Sagan), and the rest, too ill to travel, were moved there over the following weeks. Their story, long little known, is one of the best-documented cases of Western prisoners of war being held in an ordinary concentration camp, and it shows how, in the last year of the war, the authorities of the Third Reich ever more openly violated the laws of war in their treatment of enemy airmen.

“Terrorflieger”

By the summer of 1944 Allied air power dominated Western Europe. British and American bombers struck German cities and, before and after the Normandy landings, French and Belgian railway junctions, bridges and airfields. Losses among the crews were still heavy, and hundreds of downed airmen parachuted into occupied territory. Those who were not captured at once tried to reach Spain or wait for the Allied armies to arrive, with the help of Resistance escape networks such as the Belgian-French Comète line or the Pat line.

Nazi propaganda had long portrayed Allied airmen as murderers of women and children. In May 1944 Joseph Goebbels published an article justifying lynchings of downed crews, and Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann instructed in a confidential circular that Germans taking part in lynchings were not to be prosecuted. In the months that followed dozens of downed airmen were killed by civilians, party members and policemen. At the same time the German authorities – including, according to historians’ findings, the Foreign Ministry – took the view that an airman caught in civilian clothes, without identity discs or in the company of Resistance members, did not enjoy the protection due to a prisoner of war and could be treated as a spy or a “bandit”, much as captured special forces soldiers had been treated since 1942 under the Commando Order. Such treatment was contrary to the Geneva Convention of 1929: a serviceman who went into hiding after being shot down and tried to get back to his own side did not lose prisoner-of-war status merely because he was wearing civilian clothes.

Many of the airmen on the Buchenwald transport had fallen into the Gestapo’s hands precisely on the escape routes. Some had been betrayed by German agents who had infiltrated the networks – the best known being Jacques Desoubrie, a Belgian-born Gestapo agent who had been breaking up the Comète line since 1943. According to the airmen’s accounts and post-war investigations, the Germans paid him for every airman he handed over; in 1949 a French court sentenced him to death as a collaborator and he was shot near Paris. The captured airmen were interrogated at Gestapo offices in Paris and held in Fresnes prison together with members of the French Resistance.

The last transport from Paris

By mid-August 1944 the Allied armies were approaching Paris and the Germans were hastily emptying the prisons. On 15 August one of the last great deportation transports from France left Pantin station: more than two thousand men – mostly French political prisoners – and the 168 Allied airmen, crammed several dozen to a cattle wagon. The women on the same train were later separated and sent to Ravensbrück. The journey took five days, in the heat and with almost no water or food; some of the French prisoners managed to escape on the way, while others did not survive it.

The senior officer among the airmen was Squadron Leader Phil Lamason of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, captain of a Lancaster bomber of No. 15 Squadron RAF shot down on 8 June 1944 during a raid on the Massy-Palaiseau marshalling yards near Paris. For several weeks he was hidden by the French, and in the summer of 1944 – according to his own account and his biographers, through Desoubrie’s betrayal – he was arrested in Paris while trying to get to Spain. According to his fellow prisoners, when he protested against the treatment of the airmen as they were being loaded into the wagons, an SS man knocked him to the ground.

In the “Little Camp”

Buchenwald, founded in 1937 on the Ettersberg hill near Weimar, was by the summer of 1944 one of the largest concentration camps in the Reich: together with its subcamps it held tens of thousands of prisoners from all over Europe – Poles, Soviet citizens, French, Germans, Czechs and Jews – who worked, among other places, in the nearby armaments factories. The concentration camps came under Heinrich Himmler’s SS, not the armed forces, and in them the airmen became mere numbers. They were treated like the other prisoners: their clothes and boots were taken away, their whole bodies were shaved, they were issued with striped uniforms or rags and placed in the so-called Little Camp (Kleines Lager) – the quarantine section with the worst conditions and the smallest rations. For the first three weeks they slept in the open on a stony hillside. According to survivors, their papers bore the abbreviation “DIKAL” (darf in kein anderes Lager – not to be transferred to any other camp), which they themselves took to mean that they would never leave Buchenwald.

As the senior officer, Lamason took command. He introduced roll calls, drill and military discipline to keep up morale and hold the group together, and demanded that the camp commandant, Hermann Pister, treat the airmen as prisoners of war. According to survivors he also refused to order his men to work in the armaments factories, on the grounds that servicemen could not be made to work for the enemy’s war industry. The group made contact with the prisoners’ underground – the International Camp Committee, in which German communists and Soviet officers played an important part – through agents of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) held in Buchenwald: Christopher Burney and Forest Yeo-Thomas, who was hiding under an assumed name. Thanks to the underground the airmen received extra blankets, clogs and food.

On 24 August, four days after their arrival, American bombers attacked the Gustloff-Werke armaments works and other industrial sites adjoining the camp. Several hundred prisoners were killed – estimates vary – along with many SS men; among the fatally wounded was Princess Mafalda of Savoy, daughter of the King of Italy, who was being held in the camp. By their own account the airmen helped to put out the fires and rescue the wounded. Hunger, disease and violence reigned in the camp, and two of the airmen did not survive: Philip Hemmens of the RAF Volunteer Reserve died in Buchenwald, and the American Lieutenant Levitt Clinton Beck shortly after the main group had left.

The Luftwaffe intervenes

According to their own accounts, Lamason and Burney managed to pass a message to the Luftwaffe, through a trusted prisoner working at the nearby Nohra airfield, that downed Allied airmen were being held in a concentration camp. The Luftwaffe was responsible for the prisoner-of-war camps for airmen and, for its own reasons – including concern for the fate of German airmen in Allied captivity – opposed such practices. Survivors recalled that a few weeks after the group’s arrival Luftwaffe officers came to the camp, officially to assess the damage from the air raid, and spoke to the airmen. Years later veterans identified one of them from photographs as Colonel Hannes Trautloft, Inspector of Day Fighters. The story is not, however, borne out by the documents – Trautloft makes no mention of it in his diary – and the Buchenwald Memorial cautions that the visit may have taken place and influenced the decision, but that the transfer was not decided by a single officer.

During the night of 19–20 October 1944 the Luftwaffe took over 156 airmen and moved them to Stalag Luft III at Żagań; ten sick men who had remained in the camp were brought there later in small groups. According to Lamason, who is said to have learned it from the prisoner Eugen Kogon, the airmen’s execution had been scheduled for 26 October – but this is not confirmed by the documents and historians treat it with caution. Lamason did not tell his men, so as not to break their morale.

Place in the war

The transfer to Stalag Luft III did not end the ordeal of the Buchenwald airmen. At the end of January 1945, ahead of the advancing Red Army, the Germans evacuated the camp at Żagań and drove the prisoners westwards on a winter march to other camps deeper inside the Reich; most of the airmen from this group lived to be liberated in the spring of 1945. Buchenwald itself was liberated by the Americans on 11 April 1945, and the images from the camp, soon shown to the whole world, became one of the symbols of Nazi crimes.

The fate of the 168 airmen was only one manifestation of the increasingly brutal treatment of downed crews in the last year of the war. Although this group was ultimately saved, in the same period – while the trials of the 20 July conspirators were under way in Berlin and the regime was turning ever more openly to terror against its own citizens as well – airmen were being lynched in Germany, often with the passive acquiescence or participation of the police and party officials. After the war Allied military tribunals – especially the American courts at Dachau – tried hundreds of Germans in the so-called flyer cases, and many of the perpetrators were sentenced to death or to long terms of imprisonment.

For years the Buchenwald survivors struggled to convince their own authorities and the public that, as prisoners of war, they had been sent to a concentration camp; their accounts were dismissed or considered exaggerated. They called their group the “KLB Club” (from Konzentrationslager Buchenwald), and its badge was a bare, winged foot chained to a ball. Only in the last decades of the twentieth century did their story become the subject of research, books and documentary films; the last of them died in January 2025. For the history of the war the case is an important testimony to how thin the line between captivity and the concentration camp had become by 1944 – even for servicemen of states towards which the Third Reich had throughout the war tried to observe the Geneva Convention, at least formally.