Colditz Page 14
By the end of 1941, Eggers recorded the following escape figures:
Number of tries to get away
British
25
French
30
Belgian
6
Polish
19
Dutch
14
Caught inside camp
British
23
French
6
Belgian
6
Polish
10
Dutch
8
Caught outside camp
British
2
French
14
Belgian
0
Polish
8
Dutch
2
Home runs
British
0
French
10
Belgian
0
Polish
1
Dutch
4
On 2 January 1942, Padre Platt made the following cryptic entry in his diary:
Three weeks ago I introduced Dick to an entry I made in December. He thought there was some mistake and said how hesitant he would be to make such an entry but our conversation gave direction to his observation.
I have waited these three weeks with considerable anxiety; if he failed to observe, and decided against my judgement, my plan to short-circuit the miserable business (a carefully thought-out plan, too) would fall to the ground. However, to my intense relief, he came to me this morning boiling with indignation, having proved the matter against his own wish and will.
He has real influence with a more or less central person in the wretched affair, and is prepared and willing to use it to the utmost. I cannot begin my personal contacts until Dick wins his round.
This was followed by another entry on 5 January:
Dick engaged his man in earnest conversation today. He was frightfully ashamed of his conduct and promised to cut it out. At tea time he asked to see me and made a frank but shame-faced confession. Now the stage is set, and I must attempt as difficult a task as has yet come my way.
Some of those to whom I propose to speak will deny all knowledge of anything of the kind; while one, I imagine, will tell me to mind my own business. But this happens to be my business; I half wish it were not! The thing I must avoid is direct accusation. At least in the initial stages. I think I will begin by enquiring confidentially of each of the persons concerned if they have observed any homosexual tendencies. What they think of such perversion and of the perverts. The answers will no doubt reveal with what deliberateness or otherwise such indulgences have been embraced.
A severely curtailed version of Padre Platt’s diary, edited by Margaret Duggan, was published in 1978. The original written manuscript of the diary was kindly lent to me by the padre’s widow in 1983. The above entries and that of 6 December 1941, all of which I have checked against the original, caused a great fluttering in the dovecot of Colditz POWs and Colditz fans. As Dick Howe was named as collaborating with Padre Platt in the latter’s aim of excising the cancer, Commander “Mike” Moran, the Colditz ex-POWs organization voluntary secretary, wrote to Dick in 1979 asking for his views on Padre Platt’s pronouncements. In his answer Dick regretted that “perversion should be used to pervert the truth.” He was adamant that throughout his three years as escape officer his stooges, who were watching the movements of the Germans twenty-four hours a day in several parts of the Castle, would have noticed any midnight liaisons and reported them to him. He continued:
As for daylight liaisons, I would think it would be easier to have a homosexual relationship in a tube train. Ironically, the only two people who could have had an undisturbed relationship were Padre Platt and Padre Hobling, who were the only two people who had a room to themselves, which was known as the “Priests’ Hole.” The rest of us had to suffer the discomfort of something like twenty to a room with not a place in the castle where one could go for a bit of peace and quiet, not even the loo, which if you remember only had half doors….
I can recall as if it were yesterday Don Donaldson saying to Platt in his wise-cracking Canadian way that the only thing Platt could write about was Padre Hobling; as you may recall Platt hardly ever ventured outside the Priests’ Hole or the British common-room. Platt used to reply to Don Donaldson that he knew more than most people thought, but then we all knew Platt to be the leading bullshitter in the camp and Don always told him so—I was more polite! Platt could have kept some pages to himself, but I doubt it, and I have some sympathy for anyone trying to edit what I regarded as rubbish and not very interesting at that.
I would hardly regard Pat Reid’s opinion as worth much as he was only there for about a third of the life of Colditz as a POW camp. [He means as a Sonderlager. My “opinion” related to an overall approval of the book Padre in Colditz and I admit to no knowledge of homosexuality while I was in Colditz]…
I must re-study my old mates to see which ones he is thinking about as I can only think of one individual who had those tendencies but, poor chap, there was nowhere with any privacy to practice them.
Of course there were individuals who found the frustration almost unbearable and I am surprised the slime pedlars have not picked up the incident of the fellow who cut off his penis as he reckoned he would not have any further use for it. To my certain knowledge, there were more cases of self-inflicted wounds due to sexual repression than homosexuality, which I would say was non-existent or so rare as to have missed the attention of my all-embracing stooging system…. Come to think of it, Micky Burn and I could have had a good time when we were locked in the radio cabin for two hours at a time.
* “Where are the Gemans? / They’ve fallen in shit, / Where we drive them in—up to the ears.”
9
A Voice in Every Wind
Winter 1941–1942
IT WAS TIME THE BRITISH had a break. They had had no successes to record during the whole of 1941. So it was exhilarating for the camp to learn on morning Appell on 7 January that two British officers and two Dutch officers were missing. Eggers describes it thus:
We ran another of our special searches from 10 a.m. to 2 in the afternoon of that day, keeping over 500 prisoners in the cold of the yard while we did it. The uproar was so loud, unceasing and so threatening, that the Kreisleiter [District Organizer, Nazi Party] phoned from the town to ask what was up. He said the townspeople were getting upset! We found nothing….
By then the OKW was getting worried. They began to ask about the “spoil” from an obvious tunnel which we had been reporting off and on for weeks. They bombarded us with questions and advice. One night they rang up, “Is Romilly there? Is Emil there?” We sent [an] NCO to his cell. “Yes, he’s there. No, there’s not somebody in his place. No, it’s not a dummy. We’ve been in and woken him up.”
Now follows a most significant report by Eggers:
A few days later I found our Emil trotting round the yard. I hadn’t seen Romilly taking exercise like this before.
“What does this mean?” I asked jokingly. “In training?”
“Aha!” he replied, “when it’s my turn to make the trip I must be fit.”
“Well,” I thought, “that’s a smart reaction. If Romilly has it in mind to be away too, the exit must be from inside the Castle and not down in the park. Romilly never leaves the Castle yard.”
Eggers accordingly determined to make a thorough search of every conceivable place where an exit could have been made. But meanwhile the four escapers were travelling quickly away from Colditz. How had they got out of the Castle?
The story began when I was doing a period in “solitary” in the autumn of 1941. All I could see from my cell window was the wall of a section of the Saalhaus or theater-block, and staring blankly at it one day I suddenly realized the potential significance of its structure. I was an engineer, given
to visualizing the skeletons of buildings, and what I had so suddenly understood was that the theater’s wooden stage extended over a part of the Castle, sealed off from the prisoners, which led by a corridor to the top of the German guardhouse immediately outside the courtyard.
As soon as I was released from my cell, I examined the stage. I found I could crawl underneath by removing some wooden steps, and so inspect that part of the floor over the scaled room. It was just straw and rubble lying on a lath-and-plaster ceiling. Later, with Hank Wardle’s help, I cut through this ceiling and descended by sheet-rope to the room below. It was empty. I picked the lock on the door, made a quick reconnaissance down the corridor, relocked, and began work. This involved the installation, in the hole we had made, of a wooden frame and false ceiling. It fitted snugly and after laborious work over many days we eventually made it virtually undetectable to anyone looking up at the ceiling of the sealed room.
On a further reconnoiter along the German corridor I unlocked another door to find myself in the attic over the German guardhouse. From here a spiral staircase led down to the guards’ quarters. My plan was simple enough. The escapers would sortie in two pairs, dressed as German officers, on successive evenings immediately after a change of guard stationed at the front entrance to the guardhouse. Thus the new sentry would not know which officers, if any, might have entered the guardhouse in the previous two hours.
I had already chosen Airey Neave and Lieutenant John Hyde-Thompson as the first escapers, provided they could produce first-class imitations of Gennan officers’ uniforms. Airey, after all, had had an apprenticeship! But for two reasons they needed Dutch assistance, so with Vandy’s agreement two Dutch officers were selected to make the team up to four. Of course it was a great help that the Dutch spoke German fluently.
Dutch greatcoats, with minor alterations, could pass in electric light as German greatcoats. Dutch supplies of lead piping (most of ours had been used to construct a distilling apparatus!) were melted down to produce, with the help of molds, the various metal parts of German uniforms: swastikas, eagles, buttons and buckles. Leather parts such as belts and revolver holsters were made from linoleum, and leggings from cardboard. Excellent service caps were created by our specialists.
And so it was that after evening Appell on 5 January I led Airey and Lieutenant Tony Luteijn (Royal Netherlands Indies Army) up to the Saalhaus, through the hole beneath the stage and eventually to the attic above the guardhouse. I left them and returned to cover up our traces. Watchers reported a perfect exit from the guardhouse and the two were last seen heading for the moat bridge where there was a gate leading down into the moat.
The next day the two Appells were covered. Van den Heuvel arranged this with equanimity. He still had at least one dummy saved in his secret hideaway.
In the evening, I repeated the performance of the night before. Hyde-Thompson and his Dutch colleague, 2nd Lieutenant H. G. Donkers, departed from the camp.
Eggers persevered with his search for the secret exit. Little did we know how Giles Romilly’s incautious remark had improved his chances of success. After much fruitless searching, including the wine cellar and the chapel, he came to search the Saalhaus on the 13th. A corporal prised up one of the floorboards of the steps up to the stage and Eggers ordered the smallest man from the guardroom to squeeze through and see what he could find. What he found was our hole in the ceiling. Eggers reports:
So confident had the escapers been over this exit that no camouflage to speak of had been used to cover the framework on the top side, and close alongside, under the stage, we found hidden a rope made of bedsheets, for lowering the escapers to the floor underneath [in fact the wooden frame was carefully covered and camouflaged, as were the bedsheets]. This was obviously how the four of them had got out the week previously.
We checked back, interviewing guards. Naturally no one remembered anything a week after the event, but someone or more of them must have let four prisoners past.
More precautionary measures were once again forced upon us…. The door at the top of the guardroom stairs … was doubly bolted. The horses, however, had gone. Two never came back. But I got a week’s leave and a bottle of champagne from the Kommandant for my discovery up in the theater.
On 10 January, Hyde-Thompson and Donkers were back. They had been trapped at Ulm—a railway junction necessitating a change of trains. But their recapture exposed a serious flaw in my escape strategy which becomes evident from Airey Neave’s account of his progress out of the Castle and through Germany. Changing at Ulm they had asked for tickets to Singen. The ticket clerk frowned at their papers and called a railway policeman:
The policeman took us to an office in the goods yard where a thin, tight-lipped German railway police Lieutenant sat at a desk. He examined our false papers with bewilderment. It appeared to me that the writing on it did not make sense to him. I could hardly stop myself from laughing as he lifted them to the light, looking, no doubt, for water marks. He was, however, impressed by Luteijn’s Dutch passport and there seemed no inkling in his mind that we were escaped prisoners of war.
“I don’t understand these men at all,” he said helplessly. “Take them to the Labor office. I wish someone would control these foreign workers more efficiently.”
Escorted to the Labor office by another armed policeman, they escaped through a back door. After this incident and a few more risky encounters, the two, traversing forests and fields in deep snow near Singen, on the same route that Larive had taken, crossed the frontier safely into Switzerland.
The Ulm policemen were not going to be taken in so easily again, so that when Hyde-Thompson and Donkers arrived the next day with similar identity papers and travelling to the same destination the police pounced on them.
In future the route to the frontier would have to be varied.
Airey Neave had progressed from the Eton Officers’ Training Corps through Oxford Territorial Army—an infantryman. Then, at the outbreak of war, he became a gunner in a searchlight training regiment in Hereford. From there he crossed to Boulogne in February 1940 in charge of an advance party of rugged old veterans of the First War. During the Blitzkrieg in May 1940, Airey moved from Arras to the outskirts of Calais with his battery to take part in the last stand before Dunkirk. On 24 May he was wounded. “A field-grey figure appeared shouting and waving a revolver. Then a large man in German uniform and a Red Cross armband put me gently on a stretcher. I was a prisoner-of-war.”
In August, Airey was in Oflag IXA/H, a castle high above the town of Spangenburg, near Kassel. From there he was transferred in February 1941 to Stalag XXA, a vast POW camp in Poland, at Thorn, on the banks of the Vistula. Here he found himself with hundreds of other officers living in damp cold vaults in an old Polish fort surrounded by a moat. This was a measure of reprisal for the alleged ill treatment of German POWs in Canada. From here Airey made his first escape, on 19 April, only to be recaptured a few days later when frontier guards found a small map of Grandenz Aerodrome in his pocket (his fellow escaper was Flying Officer “Bricky” Forbes, and they had planned to steal an aircraft). They were returned to Thorn, and shut up at first in filthy underground storerooms, with rotting swedes and fetid air.
Then, one morning in the early hours, Airey was led from his cell towards some lights on the fort’s drawbridge; as he drew closer he noticed shadowy figures stamping their feet, talking in English and even laughing. He recognized Forbes and then Squadron-Leader Paddon and Lieutenant-Commander Stevenson, who a short time before had tried to escape in a dust cart.
“Where in hell are we going?” Airey exclaimed.
“To Colditz.”
Airey, with Tony Luteijn, had made the first British home-run from Colditz. For the men he left behind he was like the dove released from the Ark which had found land.
The Germans found it difficult to believe that four officers had got away without trace. On the morning of 10 January when Donkers and Hyde-Thompson returned they made a further
search of the British quarters, thinking two men were concealed. Then on 14 January, after the discovery of the Saalhaus exit, the whole British contingent was marched down from the Castle to the Schützenhaus.
A march of about half a mile brought them to what had long been regarded as a Mitarbeit—collaboration—camp. The presence of decorative electric bulbs on two Christmas trees; a domestic cat purring by a hot stove; a quantity of Mitarbeit propaganda, together with spacious grounds in which to walk, play at football, grow vegetables, and keep about forty Angora rabbits, appeared to confirm the suspicion.
The residents of the Schützenhaus were occupying the upper portion of the building, and the POWs on the ground floor were prevented from having any contact with them by armed sentries posted on the stairway. A wise precaution! Few people were quite so detested as collaborateurs. Officers therefore experienced none of the restraints of conscience in availing themselves of Mitarbeit flex, lamps and fittings. An intention to introduce pussy to more of the “best people” of Gefangenschaft (captivity) was frustrated by a prescient orderly who evidently sensed the impending depredation and removed her to the safety of the upper story.
The floor of the British subalterns’ dormitory had received considerable attention in their absence from the Castle, and the one remaining tunnel found.
10
’Tis All a Checker Board
Winter to Spring 1942
EARLY IN JANUARY, about the 9th, thirty-one French officers were transferred from Colditz to Oflag IVD at Elsterhorst. The reason for the transfer has never been clearly explained. Eggers gives no reason for it. The fact that Lieutenant de Bykowitz, a White Russian (French Army), tried to jump train on the way is of only passing interest. He was recaught, trapped by Germans, on the ice-covered buffers at the end of the train. Nevertheless there may have been a reason for their transfer because amongst the thirty-one were some members of the team who had been working on the great French tunnel, a truly prodigious undertaking, since May 1941. The Germans knew a tunnel was being excavated. After 7 January, according to Eggers, the OKW were wondering if the tunnel wasn’t finished and men being trickled out by a secret exit. There had been visits by experienced police inspectors from Dresden prior to this—every month—to find the tunnel, but with no success. The Kommandant became very nervous and, as soon as Eggers had returned to Colditz by Christmas, he had been given the special task of uncovering the secret. Stabsfeldwebel Gephard and Obergefreiter (Corporal) Schädlich were his assistants.