The following day we were taken to work, nevertheless. We dug trenches for the draining of the marshes. It was a very hard sort of work, which started at 6:30 in the morning, to be completed at 6 o’clock at night. We had two stops, each of a half-hour. We had nothing to eat during the day. Soup was given to us, when we came back at night, with a piece of bread, a small sausage or 2 cubic centimeters of margarine, and that was all.
Following our attempted escape, our guards held back from us all the parcels which our families sent to us for a month. We could not write nor could we receive mail.
At the end of three and a half months, in September 1941, we were shipped to the regular Kommandos. I, personally, was quite ill at that time and I came back to Stalag X B at Sandbostel.
M. DUBOST: Why were you subjected to such a special regime, although you were an “aspirant”?
ROSER: Certainly because of my attempted escape.
M. DUBOST: Had you agreed to work?
ROSER: No, not at all. Like all my comrades of the same rank and like most of the noncommissioned officers and like all “aspirants,” I had refused to work, invoking the provision of the Geneva Convention, which Germany had signed and which prescribed that noncommissioned officers who were prisoners cannot be forced to perform any labor without their consent. The German Army, into whose hands we had fallen, practically speaking, never respected that agreement undertaken by Germany.
M. DUBOST: Are you familiar with executions that took place in Oflag XI B?
ROSER: I was made familiar with the death of several French or Allied prisoners, specifically at Oflag XI at Grossborn in Pomerania. A French prisoner, Lieutenant Robin, who with some of his comrades had prepared an escape and for that purpose had dug a tunnel, was killed in the following manner: The Germans having had information that the tunnel had been prepared, Hauptmann Buchmann, who was a member of the officer staff of the camp, watched with a few German guards for the exit of the would-be escapees. Lieutenant Robin, who was first to emerge, was killed with one shot while obviously he could in no manner attack anyone or defend himself.
Other cases of this type occurred. One of my friends, a French Lieutenant Ledoux, who was sent to Graudenz Fortress where he was subjected to a hard detention regime, saw his best friend, British Lieutenant Anthony Thomson, killed by Hauptfeldwebel Ostreich with one pistol shot in the neck, in their own cell. Lieutenant Thomson had just sought to escape and had been recaptured by the Germans on the airfield. Lieutenant Thomson belonged to the RAF.