Why were British prisoners taken to a place whose existence the Nazis wanted to keep top secret?

It was rather astonishing to hear Kevin Barrett and Jim Fetzer, discuss a British: Prisoners of War [POW's], football team in Auschwitz; on noliesradio.

The Football Team

                       British soldiers at Auschwitz were allowed some privileges, including their own football team.

During the week prisoners of war were employed at forced labour camps but on Sunday allowed to play football.

The Red Cross heard about it and brought the teams four sets of shirts - English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh.

JEWISH CHRONICLE ONLINE, article; 'Revealed: the British troops imprisoned at Auschwitz', [2010], advises that it was a Journalist and author Duncan Little, who stumbled across the story of British prisoners of war who worked as slave labourers alongside Jewish Auschwitz inmates at the IG Farben chemicals factory next to the camp'.

“I was at the national archives researching a television programme I was directing and I stumbled across a document about a British man who had been flogged. I wasn’t aware of any British prisoners at Auschwitz - I began to do some more picking and I realised there were many British POWs there.”

The interviewer asks a very pertinent question: Why were British prisoners taken to a place whose existence the Nazis wanted to keep top secret?

“I have struggled to answer that question,” says Little. “It is strange that the Nazis would allow POWs to witness what they were doing.  

 The article also highlights, how the POW's, like Jewish inmates, also had to go on the so-called 'death march of January 1945', when the camp was evacuated in the face of advancing Soviet forces.

“The POWs followed the same route taken by the Jewish prisoners a week to 10 days earlier, which meant that along the way the soldiers saw the dead bodies of many thousands of Jews. They were marching in freezing conditions with very little food. They had to use their own resources to find things to eat. Ultimately, the horse which carried their rations in a cart was slaughtered and eaten.”

Voltaire: On doit des egards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la verite. 'We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth'.