Private John Cassidy
3260 1st Loyal North Lancashire Regiment
Died as a Prisoner of War 16th February 1915, aged 40
Lived at 22 King Street
Buried in Berlin South Western Cemetery, Germany XIX.D.1
Burnley Express 12th May 1915

DIED IN GERMANY
BURNLEY MANS SAD FATE
(Burnley Express & Advertiser 12th May 1915 )

Mrs. Cassidy of 22 King-street Burnley has received an official notification from the War Office that her husband, Pte. John Cassidy of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment has died as a prisoner of war at Wittenburg in Germany. Pte. Cassidy who was 40 years of age, was a time expired reservist and rejoined his old regiment after the outbreak of war. He went to France on November 3rd and was taken prisoner on December 22nd. The last time his wife heard from him was on December 9th and the next news she had respecting him was that he had been posted as missing. The War Office notice states that the cause of death has not yet been notified. Pte. Cassidy took part in the South African War and was the holder of the King’s and Queens medals for that campaign. He lived in Burnley about 20 years and worked as a tailor. His wife is left with a little girl aged eleven months

Extract from " The War behind the Wire" by John Lewis-Stempel

The wrath of winter was unforgiving on the sandy plain at Klein Wittenberg in December 1914. A wind whipped in from Siberia, sending temperatures plunging to minus 20 and freezing the water troughs in the newly built Lager, which occupied a 10.5 acre site adjoining the railway line to Berlin. Rather than venture outside, the 17,000 prisoners squeezed into the fetid wooden huts.
Body after body did little to keep out the cold, because most of the PoW’s greatcoats had been pilfered and rations of fuel were to paltry to keep the two stoves per cavernous barracks running. The men – mostly Russians captured at Tannenburg, but including around seven hundred British as well as a number of French – were underfed. Each man received a daily ration consisting of one cup of black acorn coffee, 100 grams of black bread, thin soup from potato and horse beans for lunch, and a thinner soup containing grease, usually margarine in the evening.
The lying together of overcrowded, starving prisoners at Wittenburg produced a disaster as great as if God himself had come down and smitten the land. By order of the Kriegministerium each mattress in the camp was shared by a Frenchman, a Briton and a Russian. This forced mingling of the nations condemned hundreds of British and French prisoners to death as certainly as putting them before a firing squad. Because their Russian bedmates carried lice which harboured the typhus bacterium Rickettsie prowazekii; the Russians had a level of immunity to the disease, the British and French did not.
On Christmas Eve men started to dying at Wittenburg. Instead of devoting proper resources to treating the sick, the German staff, led by the commandant, General von Dassel, opened the internal gates to allow the healthy and the diseased to freely mix. Then the Germans evacuated the camp. Utterly totally abandoned it, setting Alsatian dogs to patrol outside the wire to make sure the diseased could not leave. Supplies for the prisoners were thrown over the wire, or pushed on a trolley running on a twenty-yard
railroad, all so there was no actual physical contact with the pariahs. Not until the fleck typhus epidemic had been running amok for over a month were six British RAMC doctors sent to Wittenburg. The six were Major Fry, Major Priestley, Captain Sutcliffe, Captain Vidal, Captain Field and Lieutenant Lauder.
On entrering Wittenburg the good doctors happened upon scenes of suffering so appalling that Major Fry broke down. Dead and living were lying next to each other in the cramped dim lit huts; since there were no stretchers,the sick were moved around on table tops on which the men ate. These could not be cleaned because there was no soap. Some who had survived typhus had succumbed to gangrene because there were no blankets, socks or shoes to keep them warm. Almost everyone was grey, pallid and running with lice. According to the subsequent official British report, the appropriately named “The Horrors of Wittenburg”

“Major Priestley saw delirious men waving arms brown to the elbow with faecal matter. The patients were alive with vermin; in the half-light he attempted to brush what he took to be an accumulation of dust from the folds of the patients clothes, and he discovered it to be a moving mass of lice.”

Those patients who had been moved to the so-called camp hospital were on a diet of half a petit pain and half a cup of milk per day. There were no bedpans or toilet paper, and no more than half a dozen beds for 100 men.

Through tireless work and incessant seeking of supplies, the British Doctors, aided by about fifty volunteers from the inmates, eventually triumphed over the disease. By July 1915 the cases had dwindled to zero. The cost was high. Of the 1975 typhus cases recorded between 15th January and 23rd July at Wittenburg, 185 men died, 60 of them British. The fatalities included three of the six RAMC doctors- Major Fry, Captain Field, Captain Sutcliffe – along with ten of the volunteers: Lance-Corporal E.Long, Loyal North Lancashire; Lance-Corporal P. Almond, LNL, Lance Corporal Alfred McDonald, RIR; Private P. Wright, LNL; Private J Gormley LNL; Private W. Jackson, Middlesex; Private George Ramsey, Cameroons; Private W Rennell, S Lancashire; Private J. Ward, LNL.

A black obelisk memorial, paid for by the British survivors of the epidemic, was erected in 1921 ‘ in honour of those who died during the Typhus epidemic 1914-1915’. It was moved to its present position in the local church graveyard in the 1960’s

Only once during the entire epidemic did the official German camp physician, Doktor Aschenbach, enter Wittenburg. He did so, recalled Captain Vidal, ‘in a complete suit of protective clothing, including mask and gloves’. His inspection was ‘very rapid’ Aschenbach was instrumental in refusing the request of the RAMC doctors (‘Englische
Schweine’) that the British prisoners were segregated from the Russians on the inevitable and sarcastic grounds that the British should get to know their allies better.

Improbably, Aschenburg was awarded the Iron Cross for his dutiful ‘gallantry’ at Wittenburg.