‘Gentlemen, the cheese is all gone!’Footnote ¹ This is what the foreign secretary, George Brown, told a group of former British prisoners of war (POWs) who had been denied financial compensation for British victims of Nazism. The compensation scheme had been made possible by the Anglo-German agreement of 1964, under which West Germany had provided £1,000,000 for British victims. The exclusion of a number of POWs, among them survivors of the ‘Great Escape’, turned the issue of the distribution of financial compensation for British victims of Nazism into a public scandal, leading to a parliamentary inquiry in 1967. The Anglo-German agreement of 1964 – coming at the end of years of acrimonious negotiations – was among the last of eleven bilateral agreements concluded by West Germany with West European states between 1958 and 1964 to compensate non-German victims of Nazism. The distribution of the money, organised by the British foreign office, presented a number of major problems: who would be recognised as a victim of National Socialist persecution? How would the victims be identified and found? Would those receiving compensation be the same as those remembered as victims of Nazism in public memory?

This article focuses on the distribution of compensation funds to British victims of Nazism following the 1964 agreement with Germany. It does so in the context of British memory of the Second World War. The article has three main aims. First, it asks who was recognised as a victim of National Socialist persecution and who was not. An analysis of the distribution scheme devised by the British foreign office shows that a very heterogeneous group of victims benefited from compensation payments. Second, the article focuses on a major group of victims who were largely excluded from compensation: British prisoners of war (POWs) who had been the victims of violations of the Geneva Convention. Given that provisions of the agreement with West Germany precluded compensation to mistreated POWs, the distribution of the money almost inevitably led to bitterness and discontent. By examining the refusal of a number of POWs to accept their exclusion from the compensation scheme, the article addresses the interplay of political pressure and public opinion that led to a parliamentary inquiry into what became known as ‘the Sachsenhausen affair’. Third, this article treats the distribution of compensation funds to British victims as a window on British memory of the Second World War. It analyses the impact of the Great Escape on British wartime memory, the public reception of the film The Great Escape (1963) and the way in which public memory influenced the debate on compensation. It juxtaposes the efforts of the foreign office to include Jewish and non-Jewish refugees who had survived the camps in a British compensation agreement with the sentiments of a British public that was sympathetic to the compensation of British war heroes. It shows how an uneasy coexistence of two memories – that of Britain's experience in the Second World War and that of the Holocaust – had an impact on the handling of the compensation question.

The story of the Great Escape has fascinated millions. From the outrage at the murder of the recaptured escapees, and the promise to bring the perpetrators to justice, to the film The Great Escape, which became a classic in Anglo-American cinema, the ingenuity, bravery and tragic fate of the murdered men of Stalag Luft III at Sagan became a cornerstone of British (and to some extent American) memory of the Second World War. Memoirs, histories and documentaries on the clandestine digging of the tunnels ‘Tom’, ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry’ are abundant, but comparatively little has actually been written about the role of the Great Escape in British memory of the Second World War.Footnote ² The Sachsenhausen affair has been analysed only in the context of a history of the office of Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration (Ombudsman).Footnote ³ Scholarship on financial compensation for victims of National Socialism has mainly focused on the Luxembourg Agreement concluded by West Germany with Israel and the Jewish Claims Conference in 1952.Footnote ⁴ In addition, the more recent controversies over Jewish assets held by Swiss banks and over compensation of former forced labourers have generated considerable interest.Footnote ⁵ Scholars have also increasingly been working on international, comparative aspects of compensation, linking postwar German compensation policy to the situation in Japan or the claims of native Americans in the United States.Footnote ⁶ By comparison, the compensation agreements concluded by West Germany with eleven West European states between 1958 and 1964 (collectively known in German as Globalabkommen) have attracted little attention.Footnote ⁷ Most recently, a research project at the University of Munich headed by Professor Hans Günter Hockerts filled this lacuna.Footnote ⁸ However, there is to date no work in English about the Anglo-German agreement of 1964.Footnote ⁹ This article aims to fill this gap. Starting with Anglo-German negotiations towards an agreement, it explains how the money was distributed to the victims and why the process ended as a major disaster for the foreign office. It shows how postwar international politics created a legal situation whereby certain groups of victims were excluded from compensation, and how this exclusion clashed with public memory in Britain of the Second World War.

Negotiations with West Germany

In 1956, following a period of informal appeals, eight West European states sent a joint demarche to Bonn demanding compensation for their victims of National Socialist persecution. Ambiguous international provisions and conflicting signals had essentially caused a situation in which West Germany was obliged only to provide compensation for German victims of Nazism.Footnote ¹⁰ The Germans had been able to argue that compensation of foreign victims would fall under the category of ‘reparations’ – that is, the payment of war damages by the losing party to the winners. This position was consistent with the 1946 Paris Reparations Conference and the 1953 London Debt Conference. Both had stipulated that claims by individual citizens would be treated as part of a reparations arrangement.Footnote ¹¹ The London Debt Agreement of February 1953 had proved crucial in reaffirming the German position that compensation for foreign victims was part of the reparations – and not the compensation – framework. In addition, the London Debt Conference had agreed to defer a final settlement of the reparations question until the conclusion of a definitive peace treaty between Germany and the Allies.Footnote ¹² As Germany's permanent division became apparent, it also became clear that a peace treaty and a final settlement of reparations would be postponed into the distant future.

Consequently, the Federal German Compensation Law of 1953 provided compensation only to victims who had been living permanently in West Germany or had emigrated from the Third Reich. Imprisonment in a concentration camp during the Nazi era did not qualify as permanent residence.Footnote ¹³ A few exceptions were granted for Jewish victims from occupied areas in East Germany and, on a greatly reduced financial scale, for non-Jewish, stateless victims.Footnote ¹⁴ This was also in accordance with the 1952 Bonn Settlement Convention regulating West Germany's transition to sovereignty. The Federal Compensation Law's provisions corresponded to the minimum requirements for compensation stipulated in the Settlement Convention. Relying on legal as well as financial arguments to avoid accepting a moral responsibility, Bonn rejected pleas by various European governments and victims' organisations to include some provisions for non-German victims in the revised federal compensation law of 1956. In this situation the United Kingdom, Norway, France, Greece, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark (the Eight) applied diplomatic pressure in the form of a joint demarche to secure compensation for victims of Nazi persecution living in those countries.

In response to the multinational demarche of 1956, West Germany offered to take up bilateral negotiations with each individual country, holding out the prospect of voluntary German payments.Footnote ¹⁵ Bonn stressed the voluntary nature of payments because the West German government's priority was to avoid an erosion of its position that West Germany was under no legal obligation to pay anything at this stage. These negotiations ultimately led to the conclusion of eleven bilateral treaties (after Italy, Sweden and Switzerland joined the initiative of the Eight).Footnote ¹⁶ The British voice proved instrumental in persuading the other states to accept the German offer of voluntary payments. The foreign office warned against ‘exaggerated expectations’, emphasising that despite all sympathy for the victims, Whitehall was not willing to let the issue escalate into a major confrontation with Bonn.Footnote ¹⁷ The position was entirely pragmatic: it was based on a sober assessment of the legal situation and the negotiating position of the Eight. An official admission of German responsibility, as some of the Eight had originally envisaged, was clearly not within reach. The Eight had already rejected an earlier German offer (similar in terms), and it seemed unlikely that a substantially improved German proposal would be forthcoming any time soon. Therefore the foreign office opted for fast results.

Anglo-German negotiations, conducted by representatives of the foreign office and the Auswärtiges Amt respectively, proceeded slowly. The agreement between West Germany and the United Kingdom was the second-last to be concluded; only the German–Swedish agreement came later. A couple of factors were responsible for the lateness of the treaty with Britain. First, the foreign office had given priority to the question of compensation for stateless victims, many of whom were still living in displaced persons' (DP) camps in Germany in miserable conditions, with little or no material aid from German institutions. London supported ideas advanced by the Refugee Defence Committee and various victims' organisations calling for a UN-administered fund for stateless victims of Nazism.Footnote ¹⁸ After protracted negotiations with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), West Germany agreed to provide for a UN fund of DM 45,000,000 (just over £4 million) in 1960 and to improve federal compensation legislation for stateless victims. Second, the numbers and geographic origins of British victims proved to be a major obstacle in the negotiations. The German delegation, led by Hermann Meyer-Lindenberg, only acknowledged British claims for compensation of the approximately 2,000 British deportees from the Channel Islands and a few British citizens who had lived on the Continent during the war. By contrast, foreign office officials demanded compensation for thousands of victims who had come to Britain during or after the war and had obtained British citizenship. Two thousand Channel Islanders – most of whom had been held in internment camps – represented only a small group of victims in the British claims. However, the foreign office lacked figures based on anything but rough estimates, which ranged from several thousand to tens of thousands of potential claimants.Footnote ¹⁹ The West Germans were outraged by these demands, arguing that the Federal Republic would only provide compensation for those citizens who had been British at the time of persecution.

Eventually, under growing public pressure in the United Kingdom, agreement was reached in June 1964. London had considerably lowered the number of victims, essentially reducing it to 2,000 – the figure accepted by the Germans.Footnote ²⁰ To some extent, lowering the overall figure of British victims was facilitated by the conclusion of the German–Austrian financial treaty (Finanz- und Ausgleichsvertrag) in June 1961, which had provided for compensation to Austrian victims of persecution, including those Austrians who had emigrated to Britain.Footnote ²¹ However, the foreign office had not given up the demand for compensation for victims who had obtained British citizenship after the war. This was crucial, since the British estimated that the bulk of the claimants would be survivors of the camps (Jewish and non-Jewish) from Eastern Europe.Footnote ²² Ultimately, West Germany agreed to pay the meagre sum of £1,000,000

In the months before the agreement was reached, public pressure to obtain an agreement with Bonn had intensified. A number of victims' organisations and charities, such as the Standing Conference of British Organisations for Aid to Refugees or the Polish Association of Ex-political Prisoners of German Prisons and Concentration Camps, had since the 1950s campaigned for the compensation of Nazi victims. Their efforts were supported by many prominent individuals, among them Baron Janner, Lord Astor, Lord Russell of Liverpool, Colonel Tufton Beamish, MP, and Dame Irene Ward, MP. The government was confronted with mounting criticism from MPs of all parties in the House of Commons about the lack of progress in the negotiations with West Germany.Footnote ²⁴ Recalling the stories of prominent war heroes and their suffering, the British newspapers put the blame for the delay on both governments.Footnote ²⁵ However, Britain had been instrumental in securing the UN fund for stateless refugees, which had delayed bilateral negotiations. The British negotiating position was also weakened by the lack of specific numbers of victims (the French, for example, based their demands on the cartes des deportés et internés, distributed in 1945). In the absence of any precise British figure the Germans would only accept 2,000 as the maximum number of British victims, for whom they offered a total of £700,000 (DM 10 million). While the British ultimately had to accept this figure of 2,000, the Germans at least increased their total offer to £1 million in the final stage of the negotiations. The foreign office also prevailed with regard to the question of whether victims who had not been citizens at the time of persecution were covered by the agreement.

The newspaper reports also foreshadowed a major conflict: foreign office officials expected the majority of victims to be recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. In the newspapers British war heroes and their suffering, the victims of the Great Escape, the British agents abducted in the notorious Venlo incident, or Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents such as Forest F. E. Yeo-Thomas and POWs who had languished in concentration camps, were portrayed as having wrongly been denied compensation for so long. Many different victim groups would compete for the £1,000,000. And it was the British, and not the Germans, who had to decide who would be eligible to receive a share of the German compensation money.

The distribution of compensation to the victims

To begin with, the foreign office had to find a definition of what exactly constituted ‘National Socialist persecution’, which was tantamount to deciding who would receive material compensation and who would be excluded.Footnote ²⁶ The following definition governed entitlement to compensation:

Clearly, the foreign office applied a very narrow definition of National Socialist persecution, anticipating large numbers of applications for a total of only £1,000,000. The agreement reflected the idea of uniquely National Socialist persecution based on criteria established by the Allies after the war: ideology, race, religion and nationality. In fact, the first Allied efforts to define the term ‘victim of Nazism’ had included imprisonment in a concentration camp as a criterion.Footnote ²⁸ However this provision was later dropped, as National Socialist persecution had not necessarily been confined to imprisonment in a concentration camp. Thus the foreign office essentially reverted to an earlier, narrower definition. As stated explicitly in the last sentence, the mistreatment of POWs would not be covered in this scheme, which did not include violations of the Geneva Convention. Violations of the Geneva Convention fell under the distinctly different category of reparations, and would only be settled in a peace treaty with a united Germany. British POWs ‘who had suffered undue hardships’ in Japanese internment camps had received some compensation as a result of the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan.Footnote ²⁹ The majority of the deported Channel Islanders – essentially the only category of victims the Germans had recognised as deserving compensation – would also be excluded from the scheme, since they had been held in internment camps rather than concentration camps. The definition left open a number of serious questions: what exactly would be covered by the phrase ‘conditions comparable with those in a concentration camp’? Who would decide, and on what basis of evidence? Could National Socialist persecution be limited to confinement and murder in a concentration camp?

Eligibility for compensation payments was limited to British citizens who had received citizenship before 1 October 1953. All resident aliens or citizens who had been naturalised at a later date were expected to be able to claim compensation directly from West Germany – where a modification of the compensation law was imminent – or from the UN refugee fund.Footnote ³⁰ Thus a large number of refugees who had come to Britain during or shortly after the war would be able to claim financial compensation in the United Kingdom while other victims who had come a later stage, for example as refugees after the failed revolution in Hungary in 1956, or had been hesitant in applying for British citizenship, would be excluded. In other words, the date of naturalisation became a decisive criterion for inclusion or exclusion.

The Claims Department of the foreign office introduced a system in which applicants would be allocated units according to the length of imprisonment and gravity of health damage. For example, a week in a concentration camp was worth one unit, permanent health damage of 1–20 per cent was worth 20 units, and victims whose health damage was above 51 per cent were awarded 80 units.Footnote ³¹ For the death of a victim relatives could claim 100 units. The Claims Department made its calculations based on an estimated 2,000 approved applications with an average sum of £500 to be paid out per claim.Footnote ³² The deadline for applications was 31 July 1965. The arrangement was widely publicised in all newspapers; information and application forms were available in post offices and could be obtained from the foreign office and British embassies abroad. In addition, the foreign office actively helped to track down potential applicants, working with the Red Cross and the International Tracing Service in Arolsen, West Germany.Footnote ³³

Despite these efforts to inform the victims, and despite announcements in newspapers, on the radio and on television, fewer than 200 applications had been approved by spring 1965, while more than 800 had been rejected.Footnote ³⁴ Clearly, the foreign office had seriously miscalculated: far fewer applicants than had been expected conformed to the narrow foreign office definition of who qualified as a victim of Nazism. This was a potentially very embarrassing situation: the Claims Department faced the prospect of having to justify why a small number of victims would receive comparatively large sums of compensation while a majority of claims had been rejected. German officials might renew their earlier accusation that the British had inflated the number of Nazi victims living in Britain. The foreign office decided to extend the deadline until 31 March 1966 in the hope that further meritorious applications would be received.Footnote ³⁵ Eventually, 1,015 applications were approved (about half of what the Claims Department had originally estimated), whereas the number of rejected applications was exactly three times as high.Footnote ³⁶ Overall, 44,971 points had been awarded, which meant that one point was worth £22. The average payment amounted to £985 and thirty-one applicants received £4,000 – the highest sum awarded.Footnote ³⁷ (By comparison, British POWs who had been interned and brutally mistreated by the Japanese had received £76.50 per person in 1951.)

What caused the figures for claimants to be so far below expectation? First, around 1,500 applications were rejected because the applicant had been imprisoned in an internment camp, POW camp or ‘ordinary prison’, suggesting that if the definition of persecution had been less narrow, there might have been many more qualifying victims. Some of the refugees, particularly the Jewish refugees, had had the opportunity to claim compensation under the compensation law for the US zone of occupation or the West German federal compensation law. Many victims suffered from poor health and had died early. Some relatives of deceased victims may not have claimed compensation out of ignorance over the fate of their loved ones. And finally, as mentioned above, British citizens who had been naturalised between 1953 and 1965 had been excluded. The fact that over 900 claims were rejected on the grounds of nationality allows for the conclusion that had the most recently naturalised British citizens been included in the scheme, more claims would have been approved.

The foreign office had expected that the bulk of victims would be naturalised refugees from Eastern Europe. Ultimately however, the heterogeneity of victim groups was striking. The Anglo-German agreement provided material compensation for a wide variety of victims, among them Jewish and non-Jewish refugees from Western and Eastern Europe, former German Jews, British citizens from north Africa, and British SOE agents and POWs who had been sent to concentration camps. In particular, the fairly large group of British Jews from north Africa constituted a group of forgotten victims of which no one had been aware during the Anglo-German negotiations and which had only been identified through the enquiries of British embassies and consulates. The following individuals and their biographies stand as examples of very different groups of victims.Footnote ³⁸

Mrs Georgette M., a French woman from Paris, became British by marriage in 1949. She had been arrested in July 1944 in France and sent to Auschwitz on 31 July 1944. After six months she was moved to the Kratzau labour camp in the Sudetenland, where she was liberated in spring 1945. Israel M. had lost his entire family – his parents, three sisters and two brothers – following their deportation to the Riga ghetto in October 1941. Israel and his brother had been sent from Riga to Stutthof, but only Israel had survived. It is not clear whether the family possessed British citizenship, as Israel's father had been born in Bombay, or whether Israel was naturalised after his arrival in Britain. Mr Ivor J., a British POW who had escaped while on a train from Stalag 344, was taken on his recapture to Theresienstadt, where he spent January to April 1945. He exemplifies the group of British POWs who had been sent to concentration camps. Abramo, Irma, Norina and William R. were part of a group of over one hundred Jews from north Africa with British citizenship who had been interned by the Italians in Tripolitania and Italy. In 1944 they were sent to Bergen Belsen by the Germans. After the war they returned to Tripoli.Footnote ³⁹ French-born Odette Hallowes had received British citizenship by marriage before the Second World War. Following the outbreak of the war, this mother of three little children joined the SOE and was sent to France in 1942. Together with Peter Churchill, another SOE agent, she was arrested in 1943. Hallowes was sent to Fresnes prison, then to Ravensbrück where she was liberated in 1945.Footnote ⁴⁰

The process of distribution was completed quickly and without bureaucratic hurdles for the victims, many of whom were old and in poor health. In that respect the scheme could be called a success, especially as in other countries the distribution was delayed for years.Footnote ⁴¹ However, it soon became apparent that the rigid definition set down by the foreign office and the ambiguity left by the phrase ‘conditions comparable with those in a concentration camp’ caused a number of problems.

The protest of the POWs from Sonderlager A

Four servicemen who had been brought to a camp adjacent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp vigorously protested against the rejection of their claims. They had been part of a group of twelve survivors from the Sonderlager Sachsenhausen. Among them were three survivors of the Great Escape – the spectacular escape attempt made by Allied prisoners from Stalag Luft III in Sagan in March 1944 by digging a number of secret tunnels to lead them to freedom. Most of the seventy-six escapees were soon recaptured. Hitler ordered fifty of the recaptured men to be shot, while the others were either sent back to Sagan or transferred to other camps, among them the Sonderlager Sachsenhausen. Before analysing the case of the twelve claimants, it is necessary to sketch out the intra-governmental debate on whether to include mistreated POWs in the compensation scheme.

The ministry of defence (MOD) brought the case of the murdered men of the Great Escape to the attention of the foreign office as soon as the agreement with the Germans had been reached, arguing that if the foreign office adopted ‘internment in a concentration camp’ as a condition for eligibility, these men would be excluded. The foreign office took the view that these cases of contravention of the rules of war ‘were clearly not taken into account in negotiating the Agreement’.Footnote ⁴² The air department of the MOD was not alone in pressing the case. Airey Neave, a Conservative MP and former escapee from Colditz, who had become a vociferous advocate for compensation of mistreated and murdered POWs, also took up the case in Parliament and with the secretary of state for foreign affairs, R. A. ‘Rab’ Butler.Footnote ⁴³ What followed was a quarrel between the foreign office and the air department over the definition of Nazi persecution. The latter complained that the foreign office was only concerned with keeping the number of applicants down.Footnote ⁴⁴ The foreign office wanted to avoid a situation in which a large number of claimants would receive embarrassingly low sums of compensation. Hugh Fraser, a Conservative MP and minister of defence for the RAF, attempted to mobilise the ministers of defence for the army and navy to lobby for a wider definition:

The quarrel highlighted four dilemmas. First, the terms of the German payments excluded violations of the Geneva Convention, but could specifically National Socialist persecution be separated neatly from such violations? Second, what about National Socialist persecution that had occurred outside a concentration camp? Third, how to deal with prominent (and deserving) victims who did not quite fit the criteria adopted by the foreign office? Fourth, differentiating between National Socialist persecution in a concentration camp and cruel treatment in another category of camp would be very difficult to understand and accept on the part of the victims, their families and the public (especially given that in the case of Japan all POWs who had suffered ‘undue hardship’ had received compensation).

While the foreign office acknowledged that the murdered men of the Great Escape needed to be included in the scheme because of the public outrage caused by the case, officials were disinclined to modify the terms along the lines suggested by the ministry of defence. The scarcity of funds was one reason, but the foreign office also argued that military victims ‘had already received some sort of compensation in the form of pension from HMG’.Footnote ⁴⁶ At a meeting between representatives of the foreign office and the air department of the MOD on 3 September 1964, Peter Thomas suggested a solution:

This solution, however, left open two important questions. What would be done with the survivors of the Great Escape? And what about other military personnel who suffered fates similar to those of the murdered men of the Great Escape? With regard to the latter, there was only very rudimentary knowledge and information available. In fact, the discussion over the murdered RAF officers had set in motion a process of searching the files for evidence about murdered British service personnel. Airey Neave demanded a full list of all military personnel who had been detained in concentration campsFootnote ⁴⁸ – which, needless to say, was not available. The results were rather disappointing: the victims of a series of operations in Norway (e.g. Muskatoon, Checkmate and Freshman) were identified as potential claimants, but the names and whereabouts of the individuals in question were hard to determine. Lists of RAF personnel shot down and murdered in the final stages of the war were riddled with question marks.Footnote ⁴⁹ Information on British POWs and civilians who had been sent to concentration camps was incomplete.Footnote ⁵⁰ For example, some cases emerged where, apparently, British soldiers had been killed in German concentration camps, while relatives were wrongly informed that their husbands, sons or brothers had been ‘killed in action’ or were ‘missing in action’.Footnote ⁵¹ Research into these cases was encouraged, particularly after the first deadline of June 1965, when it became clear that far fewer than 2,000 applications would be approved.Footnote ⁵²

While the heroes of the Great Escape were at centre stage in public attention and memory, officials had little information on the overall numbers of murdered servicemen inside or outside concentration camps. Their fate had not become part of collective memory of the war. On the other hand, the heroes of the Great Escape were celebrated as exemplars of Allied ingenuity in the face of German evil, and were immortalised in the 1963 film The Great Escape. They constituted a major pillar of British collective memory of the war.Footnote ⁵³ Another reason for the lack of information may be that although the War Office investigated cases of missing airmen and British citizens in concentration camps at the end of the war, many fates were never fully established, as British willingness to bring the perpetrators to justice declined rapidly. The British government had decided to end war crimes trials by 1948, even if British victims were involved.Footnote ⁵⁴ Despite widespread evidence of serious offences against British military personnel and many airmen being unaccounted for, British officials recommended an end of the trials for political reasons. ‘It is now necessary to dispose of the past as soon as possible’,Footnote ⁵⁵ argued the Commonwealth Relations Office. West Germany, after all, was to be turned into an ally for the Cold War. The dilemma in 1964 was that justice had not been done, which in turn made it harder to identify and financially compensate former victims (or rather their dependants). While the search for potential victims continued, the foreign office made it clear that imprisonment in a concentration camp would be the benchmark by which all applications would be measured – no matter whether they would be civilian or military.

Three survivors of the Great Escape who had been held at the Sonderlager Sachsenhausen – Group Captain Harry Day, Flight Lieutenant Sydney Dowse, and Flight Lieutenant Bertram James, as well as nine fellow inmates of the Sonderlager, among them S. Payne Best and R. Stevens, captured in Venlo, and the SOE agent Peter Churchill – found their claims for compensation rejected.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Sonderlager Sachsenhausen, built in 1941 under SS command, had been immediately adjacent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, designed to hold special prisoners, among them ‘Prominente’ (VIPs) such as Leon Blum or Kurt Schuschnigg and allied POWs. The British POWs had claimed compensation not only on the grounds that the Sonderlager was part of the concentration camp proper but also that (with the exception of Peter Churchill) they had been held for some time in the notorious cell block (Zellenbau), shackled to the wall in solitary confinement and threatened with execution. The cell block was the ‘prison’ of the concentration camp, situated within the main compound of the camp, where in many cases the guards committed the cruellest acts of torture and murder. However, a section of the cell block was also used to house prominent prisoners separately from the concentration camp inmates. Herschel Grynszpan, for example, there awaited the planned (and later abandoned) show trial for his murder of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in 1938.

The rejection letters explained that Sonderlager A was considered to have been outside the perimeter of the concentration camp proper, and asserted that in the Sonderlager the POWs enjoyed privileges, such as Red Cross parcels, sports facilities and food rations equivalent to those of the guards, that were a far cry from the murderous conditions in the main camp. Therefore, despite harsh treatment in the cell block they did not meet the criteria of having been imprisoned in a concentration camp or comparable institution. They had suffered from violations of the Geneva Convention. Ironically, the foreign office argued that the decision was based in part on the published memoirs of two of the claimants, notably Peter Churchill's book The Spirit in the Cage and S. Payne Best's The Venlo Incident.Footnote ⁵⁷ In their books the conditions of internment were not described as overly harsh, which, the foreign office claimed, was consistent with their 1945 oral testimonies. The foreign office compared testimony given in 1945 with testimony from 1964 arguing that there were discrepancies – implying, of course, that harm and suffering had been magnified with increasing distance to the events.Footnote ⁵⁸

The former inmates of the Sonderlager did not accept the decision (with the exception of Peter Churchill, who had not been in the Zellenbau) and four of them, Day, Dowse, Best and Lieutenant-Colonel J. Churchill, took action against the foreign office decision with the vocal support of Airey Neave. (Both P. and J. Churchill were held as hostages because the Nazis wrongly believed that they were related to Winston Churchill.) In addition, the press now took up the case of the Great Escapers. ‘It makes one's hair stand on end to see how a Labour Minister tries to justify this particular piece of bureaucratic inhumanity to men who have suffered so much’, wrote Sam Russell in the Daily Worker.Footnote ⁵⁹ The article continued with a detailed description of torture methods at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The Daily Express reported on Dowse's outrage at the decision, quoting him as saying ‘the government is playing down all the atrocities’.Footnote ⁶⁰ He went as far as threatening in the Sun to try to enlist the East German government's help in the case.Footnote ⁶¹ Having failed to persuade George Brown to reconsider the cases,Footnote ⁶² Airey Neave pressed the issue in Parliament. In a major exchange on the floor of the Commons on 7 November 1966, Neave, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Emanuel Shinwell pleaded with Brown to reconsider the case, but Brown remained adamant.Footnote ⁶³ An all-party deputation submitted new evidence to Brown (including an aerial map showing the exact location of cell block and Sonderlager), but could not change the foreign secretary's mind. Brown was backed in his position by the prime minister, Harold Wilson.Footnote ⁶⁴ As a consequence, Neave decided to collect signatures from MPs calling for an inquiry by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Commissioner could, on behalf of members of parliament, review cases of suspected government maladministration. Having collected over 350 signatures, Neave submitted the case to the Ombudsman, Sir Edmund Compton, in June 1967.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Compton inquiry 1967

After just over six months of research, Compton submitted his thirty-page report in December 1967. It could scarcely have been more damning of the foreign office. Compton concluded that ‘there have been defects in the administrative procedure by which the decisions on these claims were reached . . . and defended when subsequently challenged’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Compton argued that the foreign office decision was based on largely irrelevant information, since Peter Churchill had never been in the Zellenbau and Best did not address brutal treatment in his memoir. The Ombudsman argued that the foreign office had dismissed evidence about the cell block as an integral part of the main concentration camp compound and the harsh conditions the claimants had experienced there. Even worse, by suggesting that the oral testimony of the claimants in 1964 differed from testimony given in 1945, the foreign office had created the impression that the applicants had wilfully magnified their claims. Compton wrote, ‘the Foreign Office have done harm to their standing and reputation. For these men it is an essential part of a distinguished and gallant war record that they were held in a concentration camp and suffered Nazi persecution there.’Footnote ⁶⁸ What Compton had criticised here and what was clearly more important than any financial settlement was that the foreign office had stripped the survivors of the Great Escape of their membership of the club of Nazi victims and denounced them as liars.

The somewhat disturbing aspect of Compton's report lies in its tendency to create the impression that conditions in the main concentration camp may not have been all that bad. Relying on testimony from Day, Sergeant Starr – a British POW who had been held in the main camp – and a Norwegian POW, the report described the main camp as a place of food parcels, football matches, band concerts, hot showers and ‘spotlessly tidy huts’,Footnote ⁶⁹ evoking images of a POW camp. Compton thereby lent credence to the view expressed by the claimants that, by and large, conditions in the main camp were no worse than in the Sonderlager. To be sure, the Sachsenhausen camp had a hierarchy of prisoners whose treatment differed when it came to food rationing, work hours and assignments, and housing. But the difference was one between almost certain death and a chance for survival.Footnote ⁷⁰ Even for those who were not at the bottom of the hierarchy with the Jewish prisoners, a few festive Christmas concerts and Himmler's permission to receive parcels for Christmas 1942 did not alter the basic living conditions: hard labour resumed in the early hours of St Stephen's Day.Footnote ⁷¹ Yet Compton failed to state clearly that one British and a few Norwegian POWs who were living in relative comfort in the main camp were rare exceptions.Footnote ⁷² While he used Damals in Sachsenhausen, a collective memoir of former inmates, to describe conditions in the cell block, he did not reflect adequately the horrors of daily life in the camp described in the book.Footnote ⁷³ Evidence of the harrowing treatment of seven British seamen captured in Norway in autumn 1943 (Operation Checkmate) and their murder in spring 1945 should have indicated that the chances of survival for British POWs in the main camp had not been exactly favourable.Footnote ⁷⁴ Blurring the overall qualitative differences between the Sonderlager and the main camp was not only morally questionable, it was also quite unnecessary. The case of the claimants could have rested on evidence that the cell block had been, after all, in the main concentration camp compound.

Unimpressed with Compton's report, Brown continued to defend his department's decision in the House of Commons.Footnote ⁷⁵ While he ultimately announced that compensation would be paid, he also severely criticised the Ombudsman for blaming the foreign office's civil servants rather than himself (as responsible minister) for any wrongdoing that might have happened.Footnote ⁷⁶ Brown's defiance triggered an outcry in the press that was particularly scathing about the way in which Brown had treated the claimants. In a brief meeting he had told them: ‘Gentlemen, the cheese is all gone. Other mice have got it and my advice to you is to forget the whole thing.’Footnote ⁷⁷ The press also widely commented that ‘now when Sir Edmund Compton produces his first really damaging opinion, he is denounced by a leader of the government which put him in business’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Compton's findings were largely endorsed by the Select Committee of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administration in May 1968.Footnote ⁷⁹

Public opinion and Parliament were firmly on the side of the Sachsenhausen claimants. The newspaper coverage was extensive.Footnote ⁸⁰ Public interest and support was spurred by the 1963 film The Great Escape – the most famous of the POW movies that became a ‘rallying point for national identity’,Footnote ⁸¹ despite its ahistorical Americanisation. Nicholas Cull has argued that ‘Englishness was encoded in the memory of the war’ (leaving aside more complex historical truths) and celebrated in ‘POW movies that represented a microcosm of the Second World War’.Footnote ⁸² The film captured the way in which Britain wanted to remember the fight against Nazism: a great skill for improvisation, the famous ‘muddling through’, strength of character and individualism, and firm resistance to tyranny.Footnote ⁸³ It is therefore not surprising that when compensation was denied to the English war heroes of the Great Escape, many saw Englishness under attack. Even worse, Englishness seemed to have come under attack from Englishmen; Whitehall officials had questioned the British war heroes' membership of the club of Nazi victims.

One outcome of the affair was a brief discussion of the possibilities for compensation for all those POWs who suffered under violation of the Geneva Convention. The results were daunting:

At the same time however, this memorandum conceded that compensation had been paid to British POWs who had been captured by the Japanese.Footnote ⁸⁵

The conclusions drawn from the Sachsenhausen case by the foreign office included the recognition that it ‘should never have been entrusted with the distribution of the money’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Someone also suggested a review of some unspecified ‘skeletons in Claims Department . . . before we are interrogated on them’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The claimants were awarded retroactive compensation available from the interest earned on £1,000,000 (including for time spent in the Sonderlager).Footnote ⁸⁸ A few other previously rejected claims were reviewed, but fears that the decision to pay compensation to the Sachsenhausen claimants would trigger a series of demands to reconsider rejected claims proved unfounded.Footnote ⁸⁹ Finally, in November 1968 Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary of state, could report to the Select Committee that changes such as an increase in the number of staff in the claims department and the reorganisation of supervision had been implemented. In the future, the Foreign Compensation Commission or some other judicial body should undertake the distribution of compensation awards.Footnote ⁹⁰