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161 Chapter 16 8 December 1944–1 May 1945 Kriegieland For the next four-and-a-half months, Lamar and his fellow prisoners at Stalag Luft I assumed new identities in a new land. Prisoner 6424—formerly known as Lt. Edgar Lee Lamar—left the community of human beings and became a Kriegie, short for the German word Kriegsgefangen, or prisoner. He and the others lived in a parallel universe they called Kriegieland, a place where despair replaced hope, hunger was a constant companion, and fear and anger became normal emotions. Each day was a twenty-four hour cup of time filled with rigid German discipline and procedure but with very little to do. Each was a copy of the day before, with very few exceptions. Some of the American Kriegies had been there for two years or more. Some of the British fliers had been imprisoned for four or five years. All were undernourished , surviving on a diet of about eight hundred calories a day, and many had developed nervous tics or other manifestations of stress. A few stared vacantly across the compound for hours, seeing things they could not or would not articulate. For all of them, their weakened bodies were unable to resist colds or infections, and the shortage of showers and sanitary facilities left them filthy and diseased. But as Lamar and all those who continued to swell the prison camps knew, time was growing short for the Third Reich. They had seen the devastation of the German cities firsthand, and they realized the fragility of the German will to continue the war. The newly arrived Kriegies brought with them a sense of hope that they would soon rejoin the rational world of families and sweethearts and meals and jobs and life instead of death. Under the protocols originated in the Third Reich for the securing, housing, and treatment of prisoners of war, Hermann Goering, the pompous and obese 162 The Final Mission of Bottoms Up Reichsmarshall with a penchant for operatic uniforms, insisted that Allied flying personnel would be guarded by the Luftwaffe. Following the strict class divisions within the German military, officers would be segregated from enlisted men, and the “gentlemen fliers” would not be compelled to work. The Luftwaffe wanted to foster a sense of an elite fraternity of the air, regardless of nationality; it was an extension in some ways of their Aryan race mentality, and the mindset that led to the Holocaust.1 By the time Lamar reached the gates of the POW compound north of Barth, however, the responsibility for the prisoners had been shifted to the Gestapo, and life became exponentially harsher for the prisoners. Punishment was swift for the slightest infraction. This usually meant time spent in solitary confinement, but it might be physical abuse as well. During Lamar’s imprisonment, at least one prisoner was shot and killed by a guard for inadvertently stepping outside his barrack at the wrong time. More than nine thousand Allied prisoners called Stalag Luft I their temporaryhome .AfterAmericaenteredthewarlatein1941,therewasasteadystream of downed flying officers marching through the gates of the prison camp, and soon the original compound was augmented with a second, then a third. A fourth—NorthCompoundIII—wascompletedjustasLamarandhistraincompanions from Obereusal and Wetzlar arrived. They were the first to occupy the just-completed prison area. The camp was situated on a peninsula that jutted into the Baltic Sea, and sharp, icy winds blew through the compounds and through the flimsy wooden barracks that housed the captured airmen. It was a bleak setting, a gray landscape set against a cold gray sea, with scudding gray clouds blocking the sun save for infrequent days when it broke through to warm the backs and hearts of the prisoners. Fine hard snow blew like sand across the open spaces, stinging exposed skin, and the frigid Baltic wind brought tears to the eyes of anyone outside. The new wooden buildings were as stark and bleak as the landscape. Nine large residence barracks each housed about two hundred men. Each barracks, an exact duplicate of the others, was subdivided into smaller rooms, with the larger spaces holding twenty-four officers. The prisoners slept in three-tiered bunks; each large room contained a small coal-burning stove, and a rough table and benches. The entire camp was surrounded by a pair of parallel, high barbed-wire fences, with guard towers situated not more than a couple of hundred feet apart. The towers held shacks about ten feet square, and...

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