How WW2 survivor helped convict 'sadists'

By Steve DuffyBBC news

It is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, in the final days of World War Two in Europe.

A Welsh solider would become the only British prisoner to give evidence in the subsequent war crimes trials that followed.

Sergeant Evan Llewellyn Edwards, known as Wyn, was a career soldier with the Welch Regiment.

But for nearly eight months from the end of 1943 he was prisoner in the notorious camp in Germany.

Wyn, then 33, was regularly beaten and lost nearly half his body weight before he was finally transferred.

His evidence of ill treatment at the US-run war crimes trial - back at the camp a few months after its liberation - would help convict some of those responsible.

Eventually, 36 guards and other officials at the camp were sentenced to death.

What was Dachau?

• Dachau, near Munich, was the first concentration camp set up by the Nazis in 1933
• More than 200,000 people are thought to have been imprisoned there
• It originally held political prisoners, Communists and other "enemies of the state" but also later German Jews
• More than 40,000 people died there before its liberation by US troops in 1945
• Hundreds died after being forced to march south as the American forces closed in
• Forty two camp officials were found guilty at a war crimes trial and 36 were sentenced to death. Of these, 23 were hanged in May 1946
• Medical experiments also contributed to some deaths, with Dr Claus Schilling still working on his records in the hours before his execution

"Taffy" Edwards, as he was inevitably called by colleagues, was first taken prisoner by the Italians in north Africa in February 1942 but managed to escape several times - if not always for long.

One of his longest periods on the run through Italy saw him steal a bicycle before being recaptured.

And then he escaped through a window with two RAF officers while being transported to Germany on a train in September 1943.

He was re-captured as he tried to reach Allied troops alone a month later on another train. Wyn had been betrayed by an Italian civilian he had befriended, who had given him civilian clothes.

He was interrogated and beaten by German officers for insolence before being packed off with around 200 other prisoners.

Wyn was transported to Dachau by another train, this time in handcuffs - which had to be sawn off him when he arrived at the camp.

The new arrivals were made to stand naked for three hours in rain, before being given ice baths and hot showers, which led to 20 men dying of pneumonia.

He was given a red triangle to wear on his clothing, the badge of a political prisoner.

Conditions were dreadful and Wyn risked torture to steal a cabbage stump to add to the meagre serving of soup.

"The rations were rotten, one day eight men to a loaf, another 12 to a loaf, a quarter litre of potato water soup or four dirty potatoes," he told the trial.

'I was taken to a building and battered'

He described his maltreatment in some detail in his deposition: "I always remembered I was British but sometimes hunger got the better of me and I would be in the scramble for anything going.

"I was taken to hospital in November, but saw and heard so much of prisoners being injected with different fevers and other things that I was glad when I was discharged.

"Then I had to work on a stone gang. The Kapo Man in charge was a prisoner named Knoll, a swine who used his boot or fist quite freely. He hated the English, and reported me to the SS, saying I was lazy. For this I was taken to a building and battered.

"Then I was handcuffed by the left arm and slung from a hook in the ceiling, for 20 minutes this lasted and the pains were terrible. The same evening, I was tied hands behind my back and hooked to a hook in the wall. My feet on both occasions were ten inches from the ground. After release from this I had to do exercises."

Wyn also described the numbers of prisoners dying and his own despair.

"The 10 crematorium furnaces were at this time working night and day as prisoners were throwing themselves on the electric wires surrounding the camp and also the hospital was turning out a lot of corpses. One more wouldn't make much difference."

Wyn tried to convince the camp officials that he was a serving British soldier but Gestapo official Johann Kick called him a liar and he was "punched from side to side" by him and SS officers.

He staggered out barely conscious at 7.30am the next day outside the camp hospital with 15 of his teeth knocked out and gashes on his head and over the left eye.

"My wounds were stitched with an ordinary needle and thread," he recalled.

Finally, Wyn was granted a transfer out of the camp to nearby Munich but not before further interrogation and being kept in a "lousy" cell, still wearing the clothes he had been wearing since his capture in Italy.

He was then taken to Saltzburg, Austria, where one old woman took pity on him as he was marched barefoot in snow to the railway station and gave him a pair of old shoes. A rare act of kindness he never forgot.

When he entered Dachau, his weight had been 11 stone (69.8 kg); on leaving it was 6.45 stones (41 kg). Wyn was also left with a scarred face and a limp.

After the war, Wyn, by now 35 and newly-married to Lilian Hurley - they met through a prisoner of war pen-pal scheme - returned to Munich to give evidence. A car was waiting for him to take him to London when he arrived back from his wedding, with his summons.

His papers from his testimony at the trial, which he brought back with him, tell what he saw.

'Trained sadists'

"At Dachau, men were gassed in hundreds, kicked to death, died from starvation," Wyn told the trial.

"The hundreds of fir trees around the camp - each marked the grave of a Russian soldier, Polish priest or even a Russian boy between the age of eight and 15 who had suffered the same cruelties and tortures by the SS and Gestapo - trained sadists who delighted in seeing a man die from starvation and enjoyed beating and torturing men."

He managed to describe some of the men who mistreated him in detail, but also a woman, one of the commander's secretaries, who witnessed the beatings and once stood over him and spat at him.

Wyn claimed Christof Knoll, the Kapo prisoner given responsibility for supervising others, boasted of kicking a man to death and was also credited with having kicked the private parts off a Polish priest.

Both Kick and Knoll were hanged in May 1946.

Another prisoner officer, a former actor, he said "was indirectly the cause of over 500 floggings of which I personally know".

Wyn, believed to have been originally from mid Wales, went to live with Lily in Nora Street in the Roath area of Cardiff but died in 1959.

His nephew Jeremy Hackman - who never got the chance to know him - has curated his story.

"He never really talked about it but my aunt kept all his papers," he said.

"After the war, I don't think he worked - I think he was a bit messed up, a broken man, so to speak, a bit affected about where he'd been but he settled down."

Jeremy said: "I think how it could have been me, it's not a hero in some film - but the man next door."

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