Christmas In Nazi Horror Camp

Spending his first Christmas at home since 1932 is Sergant E.L. (Taffy) Edwards, of The Welch Regiment, of Nora Street, Roath, Cardiff.
It will be a very different Christmas for him from that of 1943 when, held as a political prisoner in the notorious German concentration camp at Dachau, he risked torture to steel a cabbage stump to supplement his daily ration of watery soup.
Sergt. Edwards arrived home in Cardiff towards the end of last week after being the only Briton to give evidence in the three weeks trial by a U.S. military court of the 40 beasts responsible for the running of the camp. Thirty six of the 40 were condemned to death for their crimes.
Sergt. Edwards was taken prisoner by the Italians in Libya in February 1942 and while travelling by train, escaped near Cremona on September 1943. Making his way to join up with the American troops he was arrested by Gestapo on October 10, after being given away by an Italian.
He was handcuffed and taken to German High Command where he was put through the third degree. When the Germans told him "We love our Fuhrer" he replied "If we catch him we will show him a another kind of love," for which he was severly beaten.
He was taken with 80 civilian internees and two British sailors to a train and was handcuffed to a post in such a position that he could not sit down and the fellow passengers had to kneel and lift his feet up to take the strain off his wrists. The train arrived at Dachau on October 18 and the handcuffs had to be sawn off.
On arrival the prisoners were made to stand naked for three hours in the drizzling rain. In groups of five they were taken to shower baths where they stood under ice cold water after the skin had been scalded off their shoulders by boiling hot shower. Twenty of the men died of pneumonia.
A red triangle was sewn onto the Sergant's clothing ----- badge of a polictical prisoner. Daily he made applications to see the Camp Commandant, and was eventually sent for an interviewwith Criminal Investigator Kik. He told Kik that he was a British soldier, and was immediately called a liar. Kik did everthing to get him to deny that he was British.
"I knew no more," the Sergent told the Echo reporter, "until I came to the next morning at 7:30 outside the camp hospital with my teeth knocked out and gashes on my head and over the left eye. My wounds were stiched with an ordinary needle and thread."
Altogether, Sergt. Edwards spent nearly eight months in Dachau. When he entered his weight was 11 stone on leaving it was 5 stone 4 1/2lbs.

Newspaper clipping date unknown