Reginald Austin Hartland (*1919)
“Some of my most horrible recollections of Auschwitz are seeing inmates thrashed to death or beaten unconscious and taken away in wheelbarrows. Inmates who were badly injured at work sometimes were left lying on the factory grounds until evening when their comrades carried them in.”[1]
Reginald Austin Hartland was born on November 15, 1919, in Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire, England. Hartland worked as a plumber until February 15, 1940, when he joined the British Army and was assigned to the Royal Engineers. On April 8, 1941, Hartland fell into enemy hands at El Melchili, Lybia. He spent two and one-half years as a POW in Italy, and following Italy’s change of sides in 1943 he was sent by the German Wehrmacht first to Stalag IV B and then to Stalag VIII B, in Lamsdorf. On September 16, 1943, Hartland arrived at E715, the camp for British POWs at Auschwitz, where he had to work at the I.G. Farben construction site.
There Reginald Hartland witnessed the brutal way the I.G. Farben employees and the SS dealt with the prisoners from the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp. Although all contact between the British prisoners of war and the inmates was prohibited, he attempted to help them. In the process, Hartland made friends in particular with the inmate Norbert Wollheim, for whom he sent a letter to Wollheim’s friends in Boston, MA. Wollheim said later that he even received a reply from these friends in late December 1944, through Reginald Hartland, as the Geneva Convention gave the British POWs the right to communicate by letter.
On January 21, 1945, the British POWs, guarded by Wehrmacht soldiers, were forced to march through Czechoslovakia to Bavaria, where Reginald Hartland was liberated near Regensburg by the U.S. Army. Hartland left military service, returned to England, and began working as a fireman in Worcester. In November 1947, Hartland traveled to Nuremberg to take part in the I.G. Farben Trial. There he gave a statement under oath on November 14, 1947, and was examined as a witness for the prosecution on November 18, 1947. His friendship with Norbert Wollheim is mentioned both in the affidavit and in Hartland’s examination as a witness.
Hartland’s current whereabouts are unknown to the editorial team. We are grateful for any information in this regard.
(MN; transl. KL)