SLIT TRENCH

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5280, 17 December 1946, Page 7

SLIT TRENCH

* . ' At every turn of the road nowadays one seems to ]be faced with the inflationary trend in the country's finances. Exservicemen, who had for years been looking forward to rehabilitating themselves to a large extent with the deferred pay and gratuities that had been banking up at home, found that ' these moneys, although always acceptable, did not go half as far as they expected. In the light of these eircumstances it is interesting to hear the tale of an ex-Kiwi who spent four years behind barbed wire in Germany, and who .. tells us of the methods of exchange in prison camps -and the praetical jyorking of the primeval law of supply and demand.""""

"When the first batch of New Zealanders were captured," he tells us, "most of fchem still had a few personal trinkets of some value, such as watehes, -cigarette cases and Ijghters and maybe rings or other* itefns of jewellery that they inteifded taking back to their mothers and sweethearts. In a lot of cases, these articles were immediately Aaken from them by the Germans, but a surprising number of men managed to keep their treasures. "In the early stages of 'gefangensehaft,' as prisoner of war life was commonly termed, practically every prisoner did it rather hard as regards food and smokes. This was inevitable as the enemy had not really had time to organise himself and in many cases the prison cages were only a few miles from the front line. Food therefore was scarce. The prisoners' rations usually comprised an eignth of a tin of bully, a few biscuits and a half-pint, of thin skilly— if he was lucky. "In those camps, then, were sown Ihe seeds of what were later to be known universally as 'the rackets.' Prisoners found that a guard was willing to risk imprisonment and bring a few loaves or a piece of meat or a eouple of packets of tobacco in order to get hold of a watch or a ring or whatever the prisoner had to offer." Many people, said our informant, had a'sked him why the guards bothered to barter' for the items they wanted. Why didn't they just come in and take the things? The answer, he said, was quite simple, although rather hard to understand — the Germans, most of the time, held a healthy respect for the Geneva Convention, which protected prisoners of war from looting. Why this should have been in the early stages when Jerry had nothing to fear in the way of reprisals to his own men in Allied hands, as there were no Germans in Allied hands to speak of, is rather remarkable, but nevertheless true. Of course there were hundreds of cases of individual plundering of a prisoner's possessions but the officers would never countenance it and if they should come to hear of a case, the miscreant was immediately severely punished. So the "rackets" were born and in time developed into one of the biggest business enterprises in Germany. The Beginning of the Rot "In the early days," continued the speaker, ^"the ItraJde wap all on a fairly small scale. The prisoners on the one hand had only a limited amount of bait "to offer the guards, and the guard themselves had access to only a limited amount of tgoods. Foodstuffs and tobacco were the only things that were in demand in the camps and fabulous priees were sometimes offered for these items. "Let me site," he said, "one or two instances in the No. 2 camp, Salonika, in the later stages of '1941. By this time the la-ds were getting a small supply of Red Cross parcels which eontained items the Germans wanted very badly. They wanted 'cocoa and coffee, which they hadn't seen since the start of the war, and at first they were prepared to pay a reasonable price for them. But the law of supply and demand reared its ugly head and reasonable prices went by the board. Prisoners wanted bread and smokes as badly as Jerry wanted coffee and cocoa and a pernicious system of overbidding set in which was to last throug'hout the whole of the four years. A tin of coffee, for instance, which was worth probably 100 marks outside the camp, sold for 20 cigarettes, worth 50 pfennigs, or one twohundredth of that price. "The Jerries v/ere not slow in waking up to this glorious opportunity it was really too good to be true. For a small risk and the inevitable temptation of drinking the cocoa themselves they could make 20,00'0 per cent. clear profit. Even a Jerry, who was never renowned for his perspicacity, would be a mutt not to snaffle that lot." This terrible state of affairs sprang not from the Germans, who were peifectly prepared in the first place to purchase their luxuries a't a reasonable price, but by the avarice of the inmates of the camp, who so badly wanted smokes (food was not so scarce in tlrose days) thht they were willing to ruthlessly outbid their more controlled eomrades. Inside the camps there sprang up a group of men known as "racke- ' teers." These men were invariably Palestinians or Egyptians, well knoAVn for their sharp business abilities, who set themselves up as go-betweens for the nicotine-starved "kreigies"" and the profit-drunk Jerries. The racketeers found that they

also could feather their nest fairly comfortably out of these dealings. One would thinlc that with the price cut as low as 20 eigarettes for a tin of coffee, there' wouldn't be mueh in it for any middle man — but there was. They were less ambitious than the Jerries and satisfied themselves with a profit of one or two eigarettes .per deal. Twenty deals gave them 20 eigarettes, and 20 eigarettes would fetch a reasonable -watch from a smokestarved man who didn't happen to get any coffee or cocoa ih his parcal. '^Later on when we became established in Germany, these skyrocket prices came down a good bit. Supply and demand again. The men were now receiving regular supplies of eigarettes from England as well as an issue of 50 with their weekly parcel. So eigarettes were out of fashion. In like manner, the lads were getting a sufficiency of food and i*arely wanted anything that Jerry had to offer. Perhaps they would buy a loaf of bread to eke out their own small ration or a piece of fresh meat or a chicken or some other luxury that didn't come in pai'cels. But they were not desperate fov these things and therefore bert the Jerry down to a reasonable exchange. Dog Bites Dog. But then, paradoxically enough, the tables turned. ■ Instead of food, the men wanted trinkets, watehes, caraetas, jewellery — all the thinjfcs tlhat they had at first snrrendered for food, and the Jerry wanted food. He wanted anything in the food line. Biseuits meat-loaf, bully — -things he was now unable to get in his own country. He wanted eigarettes as badly as Tommy had wanted them in the early days. He was issued with three miserable little coffin-nails each day that wouldn't have rocked a child of two. He wa.nted nicotine no'v; with a vengeance. , The racketeers came into their own.. The profit now was on their side -of the fence and they meant to make the best of it. For 1000 eigarettes they could get a good camera from the smoke-starved Hun and a good camera would sell in the camp through the carefully controlled markets for 5000 eigarettes .The cigarette became the unit of exchange. Marts and shops sprang up throughout the camps loaded with goods, for exchange and sale. Each day, with the fluetuation of the demand, the prices would rise or fall. Each article was valued in cigarette ratio. "Business had now progressed far beyond the hole in the corner bargain at the -barbed wire. ino longer did slinking figures creep round in the dead of night to a prearranged spot and silently exchange a small packet for a large one. Now German officers and Feldwebels within the prison compounds, ostensibly there to stop the very thing that they were indulging in, brought their valuahle wares in in kitbags and handcarts. Radio sets by the dozen came in and sold to the middle men for 2000 and 3000 eigarettes, , later to retail at 10,000. Precision cameras brought similar prices. Then came the fall. In June, 1944, the Allies landed on t' e Continent. An overwhelming spirit of o'ptimism on the part of the International tRed Cross stopped the supplies of Red Cross parcels just before Christmas. They had really believed that there wouldn't be any need for those supplies after that date. But they were needed. The war dragged on until March and April for mo.st of the prisoners in Germany and diuring that time rations reached prehaps the lowest ebb of all In addition to the lack of Red Cross supplies, the Germans themselves, wbose eommiunriications were so severely hampered by the Allied bomhing, -could not longer get nominal rations to the camps. Instead of five men to a lbaf, rations were cut to eight men and then 12 men, and then no .bread at all. Potatoes grew scarcer and scarcer, and men grew thinner and thinner. What use^ were their radio sets and their watehes and their cameras? No use. They couldn't eat them. So they finished -off where they started, and some finished far worse 'off than they started. During their spell behind the wire men -had learned that they had amassed £300 and £400 at home in gratuities and ideferred fiay. In their desperate attempts to get a bit of food to cram into their empty bellies they heedlessly mortgaged these hardwon savings with the racketeers. The Germans couldn't help them nruch more — they were as hungry almost as the prisoners-— but the racketeers could at a price.Values soared to the most fantastic heights. One thousand eigarettes sold for £300 — or the whole of a man's savings during those hard years of

captivity. Ten eigarettes sold- for £5 — an even more monstrous sum. Cigarettes were no longer a nieans of exchange — they were a dire neeessity. A man without food is apniserable man, but a man without food and a smokc is desperate. The Spoils. "I hate to think of the profits that some of those racketeers3 ma.le out of the wreck," concl.ded our informant. "A Britisher usually honours his debt and I suppose most of those unforunates honoured theirs. I Suppose . if they had committed' themselves on paper as- those sharks would make sure that they did, they would he legally bound to honour them." One might say that man was a fool to pay*' such a price, .but the law of demand and supply dominates at all times. If a man will pay an absurd price for a motor car these days, is it harcl'to believe that he would have paid an equally senseless price for food to fill his ero-p or a smoke to soothe his worn ouit nerves?