208801 L/Cpl. Dennis Coulthread British Army 10/11 Commando My uncle, Dennis Coulthread, was with Geoffrey Keyes on Operation Flipper, the raid on 'Rommel's House' at Beda Littoria in Libya, November 1941. The raid did not go well (to put it mildly) and he was eventually captured by the Italians. I don't know the sequence of events, but he ended up in Stalag 8b, part of the Auschwitz complex. He only spoke to me once about this. He did forced work in a local factory and said he kept his head down and his mouth shut.
One morning he gave a Jewish boy some food from a Red Cross parcel. When he returned from the factory, he saw that the boy had been hanged, having refused to say who had given him the food.
He said that towards the end of the war the prisoners were force-marched into Germany. Many died on this march, and anyone who tried to help someone was shot there and then. Dennis was a robust, tough man, and he said it was this that got him through.
I think that by the time Hitler issued his infamous 'commando order' they must have lost track of his real identity, either by chance or deception. No doubt they would have carried out this order retrospectively. My father said Dennis's hair had gone from jet black to pure white over a couple of years and this made him appear older - probably saving him from hard labour in the mines and further concealing his real identity.
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