However, for many troops, Dunkirk was only the beginning. The POWs were denied food and medical treatment. The wounded were jeered at. To lower officer morale, the Nazis told British officers that they would lose their rank and be sent to the salt mines to work. They were forced to drink ditch water and eat putrid food. They had fought the battles to ensure the successful evacuation of over , fellow soldiers.
Their sacrifice had brought the salvation of the British nation. Yet they had been forgotten while those who escaped and made their way back home were hailed as heroes.
The crimes began as Dunkirk was being evacuated. On May 28, the SS Totenkopf Division marched about members of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, which had just surrendered, to a pit in a farm in Le Paradis and murdered them with machine gun spray.
They were forced into a barn and massacred with grenades. As the war dragged on, forced marches became more common, sometimes with very little food or none at all β one British battalion reported receiving only two sugar lumps and two tablespoons of a mixture of carrots and potatoes a day. On arriving at train stations the POWs were loaded into cattle cars for trips to work sites in Germany and Poland.
A year-old from Essex, Waite was captured on May He was moved from place to place and kept prisoner on a farm in Poland and forced to work the fields with Nazi guards watching.
