ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Nazi Treasure

This wet and windy Wednesday after dinner I retired to the lounge and sank into my favourite armchair with a relaxing pot of tea, the TV had been left on ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ 1 from a previous programme. The early evening news was on. Normally I save my news viewing until later in the evening but on this occasion my attention was drawn to the screen and the images of euphoric sportspersons and politicians gleefully celebrating what they were describing as England’s greatest victory of the Modern Era in obtaining the 2012 Summer Olympics. Come off it! I thought, have they not heard of our triumphs in two World Wars, two major sports World Cups or even the occasional Ashes win, then again maybe ‘modern era’ means today not yesteryear.
These images were then replaced with scenes of the demonstrations at the Gleneagles G8 Summit Conference showing the hooligan behaviour of a few ‘anarchists’ and as I further relaxed I considered the state our country would be in (the world even) if we had not had demonstrations in the past. The Luddites, the Suffragettes and the Jarrow Crusaders, all in their time described by the press of the day as ‘anarchists’.
I mention these two news items to set the mood of reminiscing I was in as the main news was replaced with the local regional news programme.
As I sat there, lulled into a past era, there appeared, as if by chance, an item about World War 2 with viewers being invited to write to the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ with their recollections or stories of the war years. I thought ‘ I could do that’, although the last time I had seriously put pen to paper with any success was in my mock GCE ‘O’ levels over fifty years ago having to write an essay beginning with the line ‘As the man stood on the battlements dangling his keys over the moat’
This piece surpassed any of my previous works, moving me up to third place in English Language from the lower echelons, a feat never to be repeated, eventually bottling it to fail my finals.
Nevertheless, here goes (perhaps if I had been one of those euphoric sportsmen I could have been granted a ghost writer) I will try my best in the hope that my story may be interesting enough to be published.

I was born in 1938, shortly before the outbreak of World War 2, in the Lancashire cotton town of Oldham. I was the only Son of Elsie Roberts, a cotton mill worker, and Elias Thomas Roberts, a Welshman employed as a building operative engaged during the war in MOD work, building and repairing military establishments throughout Britain. The street where we lived was called Hollin Hall Street, so named I believe after the manor house that had once stood there. I give these details, which appear to be irrelevant, in order that maybe one of your readers can verify my story.
At the top end of the street lay Greenacres cemetery, the largest in the region.
My first recollection of the war was of being huddled in the cellar of the terraced house with my Mother, equipped with candles, blankets, a tin of biscuits and a ‘Thermos’ flask of hot tea during the German air raids attempting to destroy the AVRO Lancaster bomber factory a couple of miles away and of my father’s occasional visits home when he used to help the local ARP’s (Air Raid Police) equipped with steel helmet and gas mask.
During the day when not at school ‘our gang ‘, comprising of about six boys ranging from my age to boys a couple of years older with a few girl hanger- ons, played on the local ‘croft’ behind the house. We also played on the flat-topped cemetery wall with strict instructions from our parents not to stray too far into the cemetery.
It was during such an occasion when playing on the wall that we noticed a burial taking place attended by men in uniform and men in strange dull grey tunics with a coloured piece of material sewn onto the back. As they moved away we jumped off the wall and tentively approached the unmarked grave and solemnly stood there until one of the older boys asked a passer —by who the men had been.
To our surprise we were told that this plot of land was dedicated to the burial of POW’s who died in captivity at the camp on the far side of the cemetery and he pointed out a number of graves of German and Italian soldiers.
Our interest was aroused and we decided to break our Parents rules and set out to explore. After what seemed to be a long trek for our young legs we arrived at a hillock overlooking a compound of wooden huts surrounded by a barbed wire fence and containing a large number of the men in the same drab grey uniforms. So these were the enemy. At the time I suppose my feelings were both one of excitement and one of fear. We were determined to return the next day.
The following day our fear had been replaced by a sense of bravado and we began to salute and shout ‘Heil Hitler’ to the inmates (in our innocence we considered all the prisoners to be Hitler’s men) until eventually one of the prisoners shouted at us.
We ran like frightened rabbits down the side of the camp onto an adjoining road.
To our amazement we stumbled across more POW’s entering an old cotton mill that had seen better days during the pre-war cotton boom. One of the older boys told us that that the mill was called the ‘Glen’, his quick observations had noticed the name on the mill tower. (It was well after the war that we found out that the mill had been used by the POW’s as engineering and carpentry workshops).
Now we had discovered this place we were definitely coming back.
I think it was a few days later before we returned as by this time any fear we had felt had disappeared and the gang set out to explore the land surrounding the mill.
All cotton mills had ‘lodges’, reservoirs that stored the water to run the steam engines and obviously this was to be our first port of call. Surprisingly to us the lodge was almost empty (caused by the long hot summer that seemed to occur every year when I was young) and the slimy muddy sides were exposed. How it happened to this day I will never know but suddenly one of the gang shouted that he had found some ‘treasure’ in the mud. Ignoring the black muddy conditions the rest of the gang dived in and before we realised it we had unearthed a massive treasure trove of Nazi coins.
Imagine our excitement, there would be enough money here for us to go the cinema every week for the rest of our lives!
Washing the coins the best we could we crammed them into our pockets and swore that this was to be our secret, not even were we going to tell the girls-especially the girls. Over the next few days we collected hundreds of coins each until eventually we had to call a halt because our stores were overflowing, in my case I had made a moneybag out of an old cotton sheet that I was finding impossible to carry.
I have not mentioned that at this stage we had not told our parents in fear of being severely reprimanded and being confined to the house.
Unfortunately with my cache being so large it was only a matter of time before my mother found it hidden away in the shed in our backyard and when she did, ‘reprimanding’ is too mild a word to describe the punishment meted out for disobeying her orders by going to the far side of the cemetery.
Looking back I now realise why she was not impressed that we were rich, as she knew then, what I now know, that the Nazi Deutchmark was virtually worthless and that even with the coins that I had totalling thousands of marks, in Germany a loaf of bread was costing a million marks.
My story now moves on.

As time went by and the war in Europe ended the Glen POW camp became filled to capacity but the prisoners were granted more freedom to move about the area and security became more lax. I was another year older and was myself allowed to roam further so one day the gang decided to return to the ‘secret place’ only to find the lodge overflowing.
The camp itself had changed little except for the addition of a few small nissen huts situated, conveniently for us, next to the fence that had fallen into a state of disrepair.
To young mischievous minds these were now another objective for exploration.
The doors of the huts had been left off the latch making it easy for the gang to enter, into what turned out for us, to be like Aladdin’s caves.
In retrospect we stole, to us it was a form of recompense, from the huts discarded or confiscated German military personnel equipment such as army caps and, what was my prize, a Wermacht helmet complete with the German eagle emblazoned on the sides.
Proudly I took my ‘trophy’ home to show my mother, telling her that I had found it in the cemetery. I must at this time tell of my mother’s hate of the Germans, that had been intensified by the killing of one of her friends and her husband when a V2 rocket had landed half a mile away in the latter stages of the war.
Naturally, but mystifying to me at the time, she did not want this hated symbol in the house so I was forced yet again to hide it in the backyard shed, for it to be taken out when we were ‘toy fighting’
Although about three sizes too big the helmet was popular amongst the boys, the only drawback being that whoever wore it had to be the ‘baddie’.
Over the next few years the bag of coins ‘just disappeared’ according to my Mother and the helmet was converted into a plant pot for my Mother, who by this time had mellowed in her hatred for the Germans, and eventually it just rusted away.

As a footnote to this story, the Glen Mill became empty when the last of the Prisoners were repatriated then, after a couple of years, it was leased by two returning British soldiers where they opened a latex cushion manufacturing company that was to become the world’s largest Flexible Foam Company, Vitafoam Ltd (later to become the British Vita Group) and my employers for 28 years before my retirement in 1995.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.