Work Camp 785 GW

Location: Weissenbach an der Enns

Type of work: Paper Mill

Man of Confidence: Sgt F Collins

Number of Men: 59 approx.

Known to be present

Autumn 1942	Spring, 1943	Spring 1944
RASC group	Colonial group	Nov '42 group
Autumn 1943	Birmingham group	Birmingham group
Room 4, Summer 1943		Room group
George Bradbury	I McPherson	M A Crang
Duff Cooper	Ernie Jacks	Jock
Ozzy	Jack Worsnop	Baines & Rutter
Manchester group, 1943	RAOC group, 1943	Room 2, 1943
Mark Jenner & Lager cat		Percy & Yorky
Christmas 1943	Christmas 1943 Program	Christmas 1943
	Weissenbach 1984

Thanks to Gill Bradbury, daughter of George Bradbury, and John Collins, son of Fred Collins,  for the names and pictures.)

The following excerpt is taken from 'Arbeitskommando' by Elvet Williams.

Weissenbach a.d.Enns already had a British POW camp. Its inmates had been absorbed into the village work-force, and that work-force lived on and for the paper mill. The mill straddled the village between road and stream. Timber stacks occupied more ground than the mill itself.. The huge stacks kept the prison camp, sited on the narrower back road, out of sight of main village life.

The camp consisted of only one building. It also bordered a road, whilst its compound contained a narrow useless area, enclosed by barbed wire on all four sides.

The entrance door of the building opened straight into a dining room or common room extending the width of the hut. At the far end an identically situated door led down several steps into the compound stretched along the bank of the stream but separated from it by barbed wire. From the right of the common room a central corridor passed along the longer end of the building, with doors opening on either side into small barrack rooms, each with four double bunks. On the left, the common room showed three doors. The first was the entrance to the guards quarters, which meant that all their comings and goings had to be an intrusion into common room activities. The second door had two different padlocks with two different keys, one held by the Germans, the other by the British, and belonged to a small room used as a parcel store. The third door, against the further wall, took one into a short corridor lined on both sides with zinc troughs serving as wash basins and equipped with taps for cold water. the corridor led through another door into the Big Room, a dormitory spanning the width of the hut.

The casement-pattern windows opened outwards for air, but not for short cuts, since strong iron bars were set into the frames. The only stove in the prisoners' quarters squatted in the middle of the common room, ensuring that most off-work hours would be spent away from the bunks. The great attraction of the stove lay not so much in the amount of heat it through out to warm the room, but in its versatility, attributable to its large area of hot plate and its rear oven.

A further significant improvement in our lot was that lighting was by electricity, in every room.