There is an interesting little anecdote along these lines that I learned from visiting the site museum at Buchenwald, Germany, provided by their federal government. There was a prison population of communists and Russian POW's housed there in the last year of WWI, and in the waning months of the war, when Buchenwald fell to the Allies, that the guards turned their weapons over to the prisoners, along with the keys to the gates and barracks, and simply traded places with the prisoners. It must have looked very weird at the time, and resonates the same today.