‘Only way you leave is through the chimney...’
STANLEY BOOKER did not just stare death in the face... he could smell it too. Barely able to stand he was exhausted, badly beaten, bruised, malnourished, dehydrated and mentally abused. It was then a menacing SS officer vowed to terminate not just his spirit, but his life, growling: “The only way you leave is through the chimney.”
Brave Stanley was one of 168 airmen dispatched by the SS to the notorious work camp Buchenwald in 1944. It was effectively a death sentence for many inmates, who died by being worked to death, medically abused or assassinated.
Squadron Leader Booker, later appointed MBE, survived torture, starvation and beatings at the camp.
Even after his exit he overcame arduous circumstances and treatment as a POW.
Yet he returned to military life after the war, working on the Berlin Airlift in 1948, before settling in Germany as a secret agent for British Intelligence.
Aged 99, Booker is the last living survivor of the group.
He is currently finalising his memoir, where he opens up for the first time about his 11-month journey to hell and back behind enemy lines.
Three days before D-day, Booker’s Halifax fighter was shot down by Nazis in Dreux, France. But despite a badly damaged knee he found his way to a resistance safe house.
As Nazis swarmed the area, Booker “in my best schoolboy French” stayed a step ahead, hiding in graveyards, woods and even in a widow’s chateau grounds.
Charged with returning to London with secret resistance plans, the 22-yearold was betrayed by infamous Gestapo double agent Jacques Desoubrie.
He was then transported to a Parisian SS station where he was “interrogated and tortured over several days”.
“My problem was that I had been given this sealed envelope... secret information ... I didn’t know what it was.
“But it was of major interest to the Gestapo. I experienced three very, very nasty beatings, being hit continuously with rubber truncheons and my skin burnt with cigars.
“I was knocked unconscious and the last time I woke up I was lying naked on the floor, bruised, bleeding and handcuffed, not a very pleasant condition.”
After days in the “flea infested”
Fresnes prison in Paris, SS officers lined up the Allied soldiers. “We hadn’t had a shave for weeks: we all had long hair and looked like Robinson Crusoe. It was horrible, we smelt awful. Many faces were bruised and suffering from flea bites.
“We were packed into waiting French buses and army lorries.we were warned not to attempt to escape, otherwise hostages would be taken and shot.”
They were herded into cattle trucks, where 80 people per car “jostled for space and ventilation” on a five-day rail journey to Buchenwald – without explanation or acknowledgment of the Geneva Convention regulations on captured servicemen.
“We had been given no food or drink although a Red Cross team did try to offer some prisoners some refreshments.
“There was a pail of water and a canister for our waste in each truck.”
The torment worsened on arrival at Buchenwald on August 20, 1944.
“We were met with a scene of horror – German guards with whips and clubs, fierce Alsatian dogs barking and salivating, prisoners herded along a platform hysterically shouted at by the SS, and a subdued audience of emaciated prisoners staring at us through barbed wire.
“We had the indignity of being stripped, bodily shaved and doused with Cresol disinfectant before being given a ragged collection of clothing. We had
no shoes and all our possessions were taken away.there were no belts or string to hold up our trousers.
“We were marched to an inner quarantine compound known as Little Camp and left to sleep in the open, on cobbles.
“We survived on a diet of acorn coffee, a bowl of cabbage or nettle soup and a piece of black bread. The occasional baked potato and the maggots in the soup provided protein. Our bowls were precious – if yours was lost or stolen then you could not have any food.
“The putrid smell and sight of the smoke from the crematorium pervaded every part of the camp and made you nauseated. Fear was ever present.
“The guards would say to us, ‘Your only way out is up the chimney’.”
More trauma followed: “We were lined up and given two injections into our chest wall – dirty shared blunt needles were used and the syringes were filled with a green noxious substance. We didn’t know what we were being given as by then we were aware the SS killed prisoners with lethal doses of phenol.”
Incredibly the international troupe, made up of Jews, communists and gypsies, joined “together as a military unit”.
Booker and the “motley group” fought to keep their spirits from breaking as they witnessed murders and beatings.
Then as SS command ordered their extermination, a Communist resistance fighter got word to a nearby no-nonsense Luftwaffe colonel, Hannes Trautloft, who ordered the men to be
put under his care. Frail, sickly and dealing with PTSD, they were sent to Stalag Luft III POW camp, famous for The Great Escape.
The memoir will be the first time Stanley has described in detail his astonishing Buchenwald story, which daughter Pat Vinycomb is overseeing.
Pat, 74, hopes the book, out next year, will finally expose the truth of the plight of the “Buchenwald 168”, and quash all those naysayers who denied their existence.
The determined daughter also wants to show how the Allied governments were unsupportive of the captured airmen.
Reflecting on her father’s decision to publish his memoirs, Pat said: “I have always considered my father a role model and hero from an early age. It is time his story is told.
“Stanley is very positive and confident to have his memoirs published and is aware that many of his questions and things that have puzzled him have been explored.
“He feels guilty he survived and that two of his crew died. He is pleased his story is still of interest and never forgets those men who shared his experiences in Buchenwald.
“Writing the book is time consuming and has absorbed my life for the last 18 months.
“My own family is aware of its importance – as a record for our future generations and my grandchildren to understand their great grandfather’s life.”
Until Stanley’s retirement his work was sensitive and he could not have a public profile. Pat explained: “From May 1945 he was constrained under the Official Secrets Act not to discuss events pertaining to his capture and incarceration in Buchenwald
Concentration Camp.” The pertinent war time documents and Foreign Office files were embargoed for 70 years.
Pat feels Stanley is still recovering from his wartime experience: “After my mother died in 2018 my father was more able to acknowledge the PTSD which has haunted his life since his liberation in 1945.”
Pat found a new Veterans’s Mental Health team who gave Stanley the intensive therapy he had been denied for 74 years.
She said: “This therapy was liberating. Stanley will be 100 next year [April 25] and feels he still has a real story to tell. Not only Second World War exploits but the Cold War too – and he has an obligation ‘To remind the living to honour the dead’ – the words on the Buchenwald memorial.
“He still feels an injustice has been done by the Government .”
Alongside hours of insight and recollection from Stanley, Pat has researched UK, French and German archives to discover “facts that prove the hidden truth behind my Father’s capture and imprisonment”.
Pat says the memoir raises issues with the British government over Stanley’s treatment: “Three Buchenwald Airmen were told not to talk about their experiences.
“They were denied medical treatment and appropriate support. They suffered in silence and felt isolated from their fellow men.who or what was being protected?”
Stanley battled with successive governments, gaining the support of Airey Neave MP who started a campaign in 1964 for compensation from the Federal German Government for British wartime prisoners held illegally in Nazi Concentration Camps.
Incredibly the Foreign Office claimed it “was not in possession of a complete master list of wartime eligible detainees and there was no evidence any British airmen had been in Buchenwald”.
Refusing to accept this, Stanley eventually discovered the International Tracing Centre at Arolsen had sent official notification to the British Authorities in 1964, that proved he had been detained in Buchenwald Concentration camp from August 20, 1944, to October 19, 1944. “The Government’s reluctance to actively investigate whether there was documentary proof was frustrating and made Stanley determined to start investigations himself,” said Pat.
“He felt very strongly that the British government was deliberately blocking his investigations and he suspected that someone was being ‘shielded’ – someone more important to the UK than the lives and well being of the traumatised airmen.”
Stanley contacted prime minister Margaret Thatcher and enlisted her support in ensuring the Union Jack would fly at Buchenwald and guaranteeing an official military presence on Remembrance Sunday at the memorial to the two airmen who died at the camp and the special agents murdered by the SS during Stanley’s incarceration.
Pat said: “He still feels angry at times about the indifference of the MOD who would not listen to him or believe him and did not provide appropriate medical treatment for his injuries as a result of torture.
“He feels the government should refund the money they deducted from his pay during the time he was imprisoned. “
In 1992 Stanley’s war recollections were collated for the Imperial War Museum and RAF Museum to provide a definitive history of the RAF at Buchenwald 1944.
Surviving Buchenwald: The inspiring memoirs of Sqn.ldr Stanley Booker MBE, will be published by Pen and Sword.
American filmmaker Mike Dorsey’s movie, The Lost Airmen Of Buchenwald, featuring survivors telling their story, is out on DVD from major retailers and available to watch on various streaming services.