Charlie Coward joined the Royal Artillery on the 16th. June 1937 and was serving
with the 8th. Reserve battalion as Quartermaster Battery Sergeant Major when
he was captured in may 1940 at Calais by the Germans. He managed to make two
escapes before they even got him to a prisoner of war camp! During his seven
subsequent escapes he managed to be awarded the Iron Cross whilst hiding in
a German army field hospital, he spotted experimental V1 rockets and managed
to send coded information on them back to the British intelligence via
letters to his father via Mr William Orange:
On the pretext of writing to his father (who was dead), in care of William
Orange, he could get out about a half dozen letters a week to let the people
in England know what was going on. He figured that he could pass the censors
that way, and at the same time get the information to the War Office. In the
letters he sent information that he thought had military value and also
wrote about the conditions of work for the civilians and the inmates, as
well as the British prisoners of war. He wrote giving the particular dates on
which he had witnessed thousands arriving and marched to the concentration
camp. Inquiring of the people in Auschwitz where the next batch was
coming from. In the letters he would say that 600 arrived from Czechoslovakia,
so many from Poland, et cetera. The turnover was in the hundreds of
thousands. You could not count them. The majority of them went into the camp
next to us.
His wife Florence was at first confused by these letters and it took a few
months before she spotted the ruse and redirected the mail to the War
Office.
Charlie arrived in Auschwitz in December 1943. Auschwitz was under the
supervision of Stalag No. VIII B. The camp at Auschwitz at which they lived
was E 715. It was one of the camps grouped around The I.G. Faben plant at
Auschwitz. At the time when about 1,200 British
prisoners of war were working for I. G. Faben. Toward the end of 1943, our
camp held 1,400 British prisoners of war. At the beginning of 1944, British
prisoners were sent to Heydebreck and Blochhammer and about 600 British
prisoners of war remained.
Charlie was sent to the factory at Auschwitz where as senior British
prisoner and the Red Cross representative he witnessed the atrocities at
first hand. True to form he resisted and by bribing guards he managed to
swap the dead bodies of Jewish prisons for some 400 live people, knowing
that the concentration camp guards only measured the number of people
transferred from the camp to the gas chambers he took live prisoners out of
the ranks and buried them in a shallow hole to be recovered later and
replaced them with a dead prisoner he knew that the SS would assume that
the prisoners died on the march., after all, if he was questioned
what would he, a gentile, know or care about Jews. At least 80 of these
poor souls are known to have survived the end of the war. With the
assistance of fellow POW's. and polish resistance workers Charlie helped to
smuggle arms and explosives in to the death camp and substantial damage was
done to the gas ovens that never was fully repaired. Thus ensuring that a
substantial number of other prisoners had some extra chance of survival
from this hell on earth. One of his last duties before he left the camp was
to organise the funerals of 34 British prisoners of war who had been killed
by a stray American bomb after a raid on the factory started whilst they
were on a sports activity. Prior to this he had complained
The British prisoners of war were
not permitted to use the air raid shelters in the IG plant. Charlie complained to
Duerrfeld ( the civilian manager in charge of the factory) about this. He
was very abrupt and said that a place was being allotted. The place we could
use instead of an air-raid shelter was locked so that we would have to get
the guard to get us a key before we could get even that protection. The
inmates had no air-raid shelters of any kind, and the foreign workers were
marched out into the fields.
It is sad to record that the mass graves were subsequent directly hit by
another large bomb and the prisoners' remains were destroyed.
After the war he testified at the Nuremburg IG Fabens war crimes
tribunal.
His testimony ensuring that the civilian contractors could not be excused
from their dreadful part in this savage Auschwitz death factory enterprise:
"I discussed the gas chambers with German civilians. I never heard of any of
the German foremen who protested against the gassing. The others were in
favour of gassing - provided it was for Jews. They looked upon killing Jews
as killing vermin. We were not permitted to talk to the inmates but managed
to do so anyway. I was told by quite a number of inmates that if they were
sick for more than 5 days, they would be sent to the gas chambers.
One foreman boasted about having seen Jews arrive for gassing, 100 to the
railway wagon, standing because there was not enough room to sit down. It
was too much trouble to take the inmates out so a gas pipe was put into the
wagon. He also told us about the Jews walking into the gas chambers."
