Wed 9th 2002 - "Lloyd's List" Newspaper, London
 

Sea heroes seek justice for ordeal as Nazi slaves

Battered and beaten by the Nazis in the Second World War,captured seafarers are set for compensation from Germany.Mike Gerber reports

MERCHANT seamen were the forgotten, neglected, heroes of the Allied war campaign against Nazi Germany. Now, a lifetime since the last blast of the Second World War, there's a slim chance of compensation for some veterans, or for their surviving families, from a new German government fund. Seafarers who were captured and interned illegally in camps in Nazi-occupied Europe could be in line for payouts from Germany's forced labour compensation programme, if moves by three determined individuals succeed in extending the deadline for seafarers' consideration.
Established in 1999 to compensate civilians who were slave or forced labourers under the Nazis, the closing date for claim submissions to the International Organisation for Migration, one of the fund administrative bodies, was December 31, but since New Year lobbying has been stepped up to have the deadline extended. As it is only very recently that it has been realised that former seafarers might be eligible, there is growing pressure on Germany to extend the deadline. The pressure largely stems from Peter Mulvany, an Irish law graduate bus driver from Dublin, who last year began what could spiral into a campaign of international dimensions when, chancing to learn about the fund, he felt that a good number of his countrymen might have an exemplary claim.
A deadline extension is also sought by Bill Anderson, an English union official who, tipped off by Mr Mulvany, has had only a handful of months to start tracing UK claimants. Given sufficient time, Mr Anderson is certain that he can unearth many more. And at the end of last year the International Transport Workers' Federation, on learning about the fund through Lloyd's List, started alerting its affiliated shipping unions in countries that were part of the Allied war effort. In the categories most applicable to seafarers, the fund could pay out up to Dm15,000 ($6,861) to those who were slave labourers, Dm5,000 to forced labourers for a company or public authority, and Dm2,000 for agricultural forced labourers. Some claimants might qualify for all three.
The campaign started with a phone call from Newcastle wartime internee John Hipkin to Mr Mulvany, a relative of one of those lost and an honorary life member of the Merchant Navy Association. "John told me a story which I had never heard before, about Irish seamen who were serving on British ships who had been captured by the Germans and forced to work at Milag Nord merchant navy labour camp in Germany, some of whom died from ill treatment." Mr Hipkin, only 14 when captured, was one of those interned at Milag. Mr Mulvany contacted the Milag Association in the UK, which represents ex-merchant seamen who were interned at the camp. In June he began research with the co-operation of the Irish Military Archives, and the support of the Milag Association, and learned about Allied seamen who had been sent to the Gestapo work reform camp at Bremen Farge.During his research into a camp which was originally investigated by the War Crimes Unit he read about the German compensation fund. With help from the Irish government, Mr Mulvany persuaded the IOM to defer the closing date for claims submissions, originally August 31, to the end of 2001. With many outstanding claimants he is now intent on having it extended again. Despite his notifying the Irish press, so far only one claimant from Ireland has come forward. This elderly ex-seaman's recollection of how he and his colleagues were treated, as recounted to Mr Mulvany and relayed to the IOM, makes grim testimony. The claimant, a cook on the ill-fated Africa Star, owned by Blue Star Line who refused to be named, was interned at Farge, near Bremen, from March 1943 until 1945.Mr Mulvany takes up the story. "In March 1943, 32 Irish merchant seamen were selected late at night by the Germans and transported from Milag Nord to the Bremen labour office.Later that month and without warning they were moved to the notorious SS work camp at Farge just outside Bremen. "Here the Irish were beaten with hoses by their SS guards as they got off the wagons, ordered to line up, and advised by the Germans that they were civilians, that no-one was aware of their location and that as far as the SS were concerned they could do what they wanted with them. "Working for 12 to 18 hours a day, six days a week, the Irish merchant seamen were forced to work at Farge and survived with only a bowl of soup and three slices of black bread per man. On Sundays they were forced to work on a local farm." Harrowing details follow about the maltreatment of Belgian, French, Polish and Russian internees too. Among the thousands who died were five Irish seamen, says Mr Mulvany. When piecing together evidence for the submission, Mulvany relied on a statement from Jim Waggot, secretary of the Milag PoW Association, who was in Milag and other camps.
First-hand testimony is also included from the claimant, who recollects: "We were told we were civilians and that no one knew where we were. We laid rails and submarine pens. In March of 1945 we were sent back to Milag Nord. "When I came home to Ireland I suffered from malnutrition. My eyesight failed for six months. I did not work for another 12 months." Other nationals interned in Nazi camps, says Mr Mulvany, included men from America, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Egypt, Burma, and seafarers from the whole range of what are now Commonwealth countries. In the UK, Mr Anderson, Liverpool-based organiser of the RMT ratings' union, has in a short time mustered submissions for four claimants, all with accounts of forced labour. He is determined to see veterans, or their kin, who often received nothing from the UK government, get something from the fund. UK government support has proved limited. The response, in November, from Dr Lewis Moonie, the MoD minister for veterans' affairs, was unhelpful.Dr Moonie wrote: "The camp for British merchant seamen (known as a 'Marlag') quite clearly was not a 'concentration camp' or 'forced labour camp' within the accepted definitions of such places. The Marlag was subject to inspections by both the Swiss Protecting Power and the Red Cross and surviving contemporary records from these inspections do not indicate that British merchant seamen were being improperly forced to undertake work." The minister concluded: "Accordingly, I can see no prospect of merchant seamen as a group being eligible for the German scheme." Lloyd's List asked Dr Moonie's office for clarification on these records but none was forthcoming. It is illuminating, therefore, to turn to one of the key sources that Mr Mulvany relied upon in building up his evidence, Gabe Thomas, a former registrar general of shipping in Cardiff.
Mr Thomas is author of a book titled Milag: Prisoners of the Kriegsmarine, Merchant Navy Prisoners of War, published by the Milag Association. Mr Mulvany extols Mr Thomas' book as "the bible" on the issue in question. And Mr Thomas tells Lloyd's List: "I am distressed to learn that the UK authorities are still seemingly unaware of the conditions under which the Allied merchant seamen were illegally held in Germany and elsewhere by the Axis forces." Their detention was illegal because, as civilians, they should have been repatriated under the Geneva convention. Although the Nazis gave captured merchant seafarers PoW numbers, their civilian status was certainly recognised by their captors. The point is important because the German compensation fund is not open to PoWs. Dr Moonie was wrong about the Marlag camps, which Mr Thomas explains were where Royal Navy PoWs were held. Moreover, merchant seafarers were incarcerated in concentration camps at certain periods. Thomas points to the testimony of "scores" of survivors to counter the line of the MoD. "These men and boys - some as young as 14 - were initially herded into concentration camps at Drancy outside Paris and then the notorious Sandbostel concentration camp in Germany to conceal their capture from the Red Cross, contrary to the Geneva convention. It was only in August 1941, thanks to the protests of representatives of the Protecting Powers, that a separate prison camp was created in Westertimke Germany for some 4,500 Allied merchant seamen. Like military prisoners of war, merchant navy officers were not expected to work, but ratings had to work in quarries, factories and on farms. On occasions seamen protesting at having to carry out such work were kept at morning roll call until they capitulated. "Several such incidents took place in the winter of 1942/43 when for months no Red Cross parcels were received at Milag and starvation took its toll, the deputy camp commander, kept the ratings standing for hours in 18 degrees of frost until they finally agreed to work." On another occasion, he says, the roll call was surrounded with soldiers armed with cocked machine guns and given a 15 minute deadline to get to work. "Fortunately the seamen gave in as it afterwards transpired that the German camp commandant admitted that he would have given the order to fire on selected ring leaders."
According to Mr Thomas, Irish and Indian seafarers were singled out for particularly sadistic treatment. The Germans thought these groups would dislike their British masters because of battles over independence, he says. "The Germans failed to realise that both groups would remain staunchly loyal to the Allied cause. As a result of their refusal to co-operate, the 32 Allied seamen of dual British/Irish nationality were sent to the Bremen Labour Office - an offshoot of the Sandbostel concentration camp where Russian and Jewish prisoners were being used as disposable slave labour.During their incarceration there, prisoners were shot and salt rubbed into wounds, beaten to death with hose pipes and buried alive in the camp latrine trenches. Most of the Irish survived despite getting no special treatment nor Red Cross parcels. Five died at Bremen, mainly from typhus. Chinese seamen taken from British ships were sent from Sandbostel concentration camp to another work camp at Hamburg where several died under mysterious circumstances, he adds. "Most of these are still not even recognised as war dead." Though such treatment was exceptional, Mr Thomas says all merchant seamen except officers were forced to work. "They did receive some payment, in the form of LagerGelt which could only be used in the camp shop." This "Monopoly money", he says, was deducted from their back pay at the end of the war "as though it had been real money with real value. A cruel trick played upon these men by their own government and which still smarts nearly 60 years later. Armed forces PoWs did not suffer this indignity." Merchant seamen lost nearly one in four of their shipmates to enemy action, a death rate far higher than any suffered by the Armed forces, Mr Thomas underlines.
Like Messrs Mulvany and Anderson, Mr Thomas swears he will do everything possible to correct the injustice done to these men. For his part, Mr Mulvany suspects that the German government set the criteria for fund eligibility "to minimise their outstanding liability while maximising, in the public domain, their so-called regret for past wrongs". Should these campaigners succeed in winning further deferment of the submission deadline, and claims pour in from all over the world, the final bill to the German government and industrialists for the sins of the Nazi era could be massive indeed.For claim details on the German Forced Labour Compensation Programme,Contact the International Organisation for Migration Geneva at + 41 22 717 9230; email: compensation@iom.int; website;www.compensation-for-forced-labour.org

Previous