Colditz Page 18

  The French were very keen on the body-concealment idea but also not a little worried about the effect of such foreign bodies on the intestines. They consulted their doctor, who reassured them provided they followed some simple rules as to cleanliness. As many of the creepers were home-made affairs, he also advised them as a precaution to attach a thread to the lower end, so that their withdrawal would not be a matter of uncertainty. The French were particular about this to such an extent that on a major French search it proved their undoing. An astute German searcher, when it came to the body search, noticed a thread. When he had registered its presence in some half a dozen Frenchmen, he demanded their recall—and pulled on the threads with disastrous results thereafter for a large number of the French contingent.

  The British doctor, on the other hand, had not specified this accessory, and the British body search revealed nothing.

  By now the reader should appreciate not only the significance of the cigar tube but also of the name of the brand of the cigar, printed indelibly in blue on the tube. My engineering colleagues back in Britain had done their research well. The tubes could be cut to an appropriate length, and the cap could be hermetically resealed usually with sticking plaster. It is a fact that all the necessary escape items listed above could be and were so rolled as to fit snugly in the tube.

  Another light relief which went the rounds was the story of a complaint voiced by one of the German guards to his Unteroffizier that his relief had not turned up and he had missed his mid-day meal and was very hungry. Peter Tunstall immediately produced a German coin and offered it to the German with the words, “Here you are, my good man, go out and get yourself a good meal.” The guard in confusion replied, “Nein, danke. Nein,” and refused the coin. The point of the story is that one of the main aims of the search was to find and confiscate every vestige of German money.

  The French General Giraud escaped from Oflag IVA, the castle of Königstein, on 17 April 1942. This was a sensational escape—a serious blow for the Germans. They tried to conceal knowledge of it from the public for many days. General Le Brigant recounts the joy with which the French received the news through their clandestine radio on 5 May, four or five days after the departure from Colditz of the French Lieutenant Raymond Bouillez for court-martial at Stuttgart (Bouillez had been sent to Colditz from Oflag XC to await his trial). Bouillez had jumped his train at night as far south as was possible. He was found unconscious by the railroad next day with broken jaw, broken arm and head injuries. In this condition he was taken before the judges, acquitted and then returned to the infirmary ward in Colditz. Le Brigant immediately paid him a visit and told him the good news of Giraud’s escape. Bouillez took a little time to pull his bemused mind together and replied that he knew of it already the day before he was returned to Colditz; a French prisoner in the booking hall at Leipzig station had told him! Le Brigant’s reaction was “Here is a man who has possessed the most sensational news of the war for a whole twenty-four hours in Colditz without telling anybody!” Bouillez was indeed in a bad way. He was removed to hospital. He escaped from there on 25 June and reached France successfully.

  Giraud’s escape had repercussions in Colditz. Eggers was seconded to Königstein to discover Giraud’s trick. He stayed until the end of July 1942, and was able to establish that the general had slid down a cliff beneath the Castle on a length of telephone cable. Königstein’s Kommandant and his security officer were both punished with six months’ imprisonment at Gollnow in Pomerania. “We thought they were lucky to get away with that,” remarks Eggers, “because Romilly, our civilian hostage, was a standing death sentence to the two officers in the same position at Colditz.”

  Before the month of April was out (on the 26th), a further major escape of five Colditz officers took place from the military hospital at Gnaschwitz, near Dresden; three Poles, one Belgian and one Englishman. The Tierarzt had sent them for treatment as “serious cases.” He was wild with fury!

  Two of the Polish officers, Lieutenants Wychodzew and Niestrzęba, coolly sent the Kommandant a picture postcard from Hof, a town on the road from Dresden to Stuttgart. The Germans warned the Stuttgart Kriminalpolizei, and they picked up the first-named at the station after two days at large. Niestrzęba was caught in a train the next day at Singen, disguised as a Belgian worker, with papers in the name of Carl Winterbeck. Unfortunately he also had on him his POW number plate, with Oflag IVC on it.

  The other three “sick” were the Polish Lieutenant Just (yet again!), the Belgian Lieutenant Rémy and the British Squadron Leader Paddon. These three all posed as Belgian workers. In Leipzig they came under suspicion. Just and Rémy were being watched when Rémy suddenly made a dash for it. Paddon and Just, who had intended to travel separately, met again by chance. Eggers reports as follows, though his memory cannot be considered faultless; Rémy, for instance, disagrees radically with his version of paragraph (11):

  We discovered among papers during a search, the Paddon Escape Rules—a memorandum written up after this escape. Born of experience, this is what they said:

  (1) Travel in slow trains, not by expresses or specials, as no passes required when buying tickets. No control of passes on slow trains under the first 100 kilometers.

  (2) Express trains—between Leipzig and Dresden the control is carried out by a German sergeant. He requires only our identity cards.

  (3) Passes recognized by police as forged because

  (a) they had seen this type of phoney pass before;

  (b) there is no such thing as a Nebenbauamt (Branch Works Office) stamp;

  (c) no such thing as Bauinspektor (Building Inspector);

  (d) the signatures on Lieut. Just’s identity card and mine were different, but in the same handwriting;

  (e) the stamp was poor—it was weak and hence illegible;

  (f) same handwriting in both my passes, although one was issued in Leipzig and one in Dresden.

  (4) Brown pass O.K. for identification only. Not for travelling. For 24 hours the police thought I was a Belgian. The interpreter in French at Leipzig police station spoke worse French than Just and I together!

  (5) Best of all is a leave pass. Everyone asks for it and it commands fare reductions. This is the key to everything, and it must be a pleasure to travel with a good one.

  (6) Tuttlingen is in the frontier zone. Tickets to Stuttgart issued sometimes with and sometimes without identity cards being demanded.

  (7) We went from Dresden to Stuttgart via Leipzig. Wish I had followed my own intention and not taken the advice of the train conductress.

  (8) German civvies better clad than we had thought, especially on Sundays—a bad day therefore for travelling.

  (9) It is always possible to get something to eat without having to produce coupons. I’ll never again carry chocolate or Red Cross food.

  (10) Remove all names from clothes, or sew false ones on if you have none. Lieut. Just had his name and “Oflag IVC” on his trousers! That’s why they were so suspicious about my story of having just been shot down. Just and I met in Leipzig quite by chance after our initial escape.

  (11) Rémy, who travelled with Just, made himself conspicuous. Both were watched in the train by a civilian (? Gestapo) after they had been checked by the sergeant. Rémy disappeared suddenly when they got to Leipzig, while Just was left trying in vain to get rid of the overcoat that Rémy had left behind in the compartment. Although he pretended not to see it, people pressed it on him as belonging to his friend. I was picked up half an hour later as I was speaking to Just, thinking he was by then clear of suspicion.

  (12) He travels best who travels alone!

  Rémy, the Belgian, made a home-run.

  On 28 May the French Lieutenant Michel Girot disappeared during a park walk. He was the Benjamin—the youngest of the French company. He was caught on a train going to Frankfurt but the Germans never found out how he escaped. A bar in one of the French rooms had been sawn through. Actually he had concealed himself under a pla
nche during the walk. This was his second attempt. He made three further attempts of which the last was from the French tunnel at Lübeck on 27 April 1944. He was caught by the Gestapo and executed.

  May was a busy month in the Castle’s administration. Early in the morning of the 19th, some sixty-three Polish officers and four Serbian officers left Colditz. This left a balance of about forty Poles—mostly hardened escaper types. They were followed on the 28th by 125 French and Belgian officers, including the Jews. They were destined for Oflag XC at Lübeck. On the 21st the British contingent (but not the colonels and majors) moved quarters from the first floor of the east wing to the fourth story (eighty-eight steps) of the north wing over the chapel. Then the Kommandant announced that he would allow parole walks for the British chaplains outside the Castle perimeter. (Padre Platt appears not to have availed himself of the opportunity.) A more serious matter was the attempted suicide on 26 May of Don Middleton, the Canadian RAF pilot, one of the first three of the British contingent at Colditz. He had appeared to be quite resigned and content, pursuing a course of studies for an eventual university degree. Then letters from his wife began to haunt him. Padre Platt and a fellow Canadian, Don Thom, appear to have been his confidants. Platt maintains the wife’s letters were not calculated to undermine his morale. Nevertheless he became obsessed with the idea that he must release his wife from their marriage. He opened his wrist vein with a razor in the bathroom but was discovered in time. Dr. Playoust (an Australian POW who spent a short time in Colditz) stitched up three cuts on the resentful patient. Then Don attempted to throw a bottle out of a window at a sentry to get himself shot. Next he attempted to cut his throat. From now on he was under constant observation by a roster of POWs. Rahm examined him on 27 May (a day before Rahm left Colditz) and appeared convinced enough of his instability to start proceedings to have him removed to a mental hospital. In the meantime the roster continued twenty-four hours a day. Don Thom remained always close to him, to his own detriment. Before the end of the war, Don himself became mildly but permanently insane.

  Don Middleton was removed on 29 May under guard to the hospital at Elsterhorst. At one point he tried to grab a German’s bayonet, and when crossing the river bridge in Colditz on the way to the station, he leapt over the bridge parapet in order to provoke the guards to shoot him. He hung suspended over the water until hauled back by a guard, aided by Captain Cyril Lewthwaite who was also going to the hospital.

  Two events of note occurred on 2 June. Errol Flynn came out of “solitary,” having done three consecutive terms of one month with breaks of three days between. He was starving because no Red Cross food was allowed to POWs in confinement. The second event was the news that Mike Sinclair had escaped from Leipzig hospital where he had been taken for treatment for chronic sinusitis. He reached Cologne a few days later where he was trapped on 6 June in a round-up of suspected British RAF pilots, parachuted survivors of planes shot down during a recent air-raid on the city. Sinclair’s disguise was not good enough. He was taken to a Stalag, escaped again and was recaught.

  On 7 June, 360 Red Cross parcels arrived for the British, together with a large consignment of battledress uniforms. For the first time in the history of the British at Oflag IVC the POWs had one parcel each to cover one week. Thereafter the ration was reduced to three-quarters of a parcel and later to half a parcel per head per week.

  Squadron-Leader “Never-a-dull-moment” Paddon was called to face a court-martial at a former prison camp in the north-east of Germany, charged with insulting an Oberfeldwebel (sergeant-major) by accusing him of theft. He was duly equipped for an escape and left for his destination under heavy guard on 9 June. It was a long journey and he would be away for several days. As the days turned into weeks, Colonel Stayner naturally became concerned, and demanded an explanation from the Kommandant. The latter replied with a resigned shrug of the shoulders: “Es war unmöglich, trotzdem ist er geflohen”—“It was impossible, nonetheless he escaped!” Paddon eventually reached Sweden and then England safely. He was the second Englishman to do the home-run from Colditz. Eggers states that the Germans never discovered how he escaped, though he goes on to theorize, correctly, that Paddon had joined a party of British orderlies detailed to leave the camp each day at 6:45 a.m. to work on nearby farms. He wore an Army battledress over a makeshift civilian outfit (all items, except his own RAF trousers, borrowed overnight from fellow-prisoners), and slipped into a barn, where he removed the battledress and walked calmly away. According to Platt’s diary, the POWs first knew of Paddon’s success on 24 July.

  On 15 June there had been some excitement caused by a fire deliberately started by the British at the bottom of their staircase. The fuel was provided by a pile of woodshavings dumped by the Germans as filling for the straw mattresses. As anything to divert the POWs from their monotonous existence was welcomed, buckets of water were produced and thrown anywhere but on the flames. Dominic Bruce decided to continue a water battle started some days before when the courtyard had been full of recumbent sun-bathers. A mass of water thrown from a height of three or four stories can cause an almost explosive effect landing on cobbles (or on human beings). The evening Appell was long delayed, Bruce was caught red-handed and the acrid smell of damp cinders polluted the staircase for days.

  Saturday, 20 June, was the first anniversary of the German attack on Russia. Being high summer and the news from the front being optimistic, youthful spirits amongst the nationalities developed another water-bomb-bucket battle. Anything that held water—bowls, tins, buckets and best of all home-made paper containers filled with water—came into their own. The younger officers, Poles, French, Dutch and British, were soaking each other indiscriminately and hilariously. Even the sentries were laughing. Then suddenly the Riot Squad (fifteen-strong) entered the yard led by the aging Hauptmann Müller who was the post officer and evidently on guard duty that evening. It appears that the noise from the courtyard was loud enough to be heard in the town and had alarmed the townspeople, who appealed once again to the Kreisleiter, who in turn telephoned Oberst Schmidt, who ordered the duty officer to restore order.

  Müller ordered the horseplay to stop, which only caused the players to use their ingenuity from windows, corridors and staircases, while the “barracking” started up from all the windows where spectators had been enjoying the fun. With “Où sont les Allemands? / Les Allemands sont dans la merde,” this now well-rehearsed Colditz chant of derision swelled to an anthem. Müller gave incomprehensible and incoherent orders to the POWs, presumably concerning retreating from the windows and piping down. All to no effect. The Riot Squad opened fire at the windows. A French officer, Lieutenant Maurice Fahy, a spectator leaning out of a third-story window, was shot through the neck and shoulder. Eggers says that Fahy was wounded by a shot from Hauptmann Müller’s revolver. He returned from Elsterhorst, where he was sent for treatment, on 23 July. The fingers of his left hand were paralyzed.

  André Perrin, Lieutenant French Army, arrived in Colditz on 18 June from Oflag XB.

  The Verkest trial papers had all gone to Hitler, as they involved the death sentence. They were returned with Hitler’s marginal note “Loss of freedom sufficient.” The court therefore sat again at Leipzig on 21 July. Verkest’s sentence was now reduced to two years. By the time he was out, the Belgians had left Colditz. Verkest served his sentence at a prison in Graudenz. When released he rejoined the Belgians at Lübeck.

  On 6 July the whole camp was shaken by an action of the Poles. At morning roll-call Colonel Kowalczewski gave the customary order for “attention.” He then turned to the German Oberleutnant Püpcke and, reporting the number of Polish officers present, said, “Forty-seven officers and one traitor.” Ryszard Bednarski, claiming to be a lieutenant in the Polish Army, was removed at once by the Germans. Bednarski had escaped with Lieutenant Just from the Königswartha hospital on 5 May 1941. Eggers has the following telling commentary:

  Bednarski got as far as Cracow where he should ha
ve certainly been quite safe. Although our people could not discover all the underground network in that city, we were able to get our hands on part of it. And so the Gestapo picked up Bednarski and in due course returned him to us as an Officer Prisoner of War. Naturally he came back with the most valuable information of all kinds from which his fellow prisoners were able to benefit.

  The italics are mine! Can anyone in their right mind believe that Bednarski would be allowed by the Gestapo to return to Colditz to give the prisoners valuable information without holding him on a long leash?

  Bednarski had arrived back from Cracow in May. An eye-witness of Bednarski’s “drumming out” after a Polish court-martial in Colditz relates that on a certain day (probably 5 July) all the Polish officers were told by their adjutant, Captain Lados, to assemble in the largest room of the Polish quarters. The roll was taken. Colonel Kowalczewski, the Senior Polish Officer at that time, entered. Everyone stood at attention. Ladas reported all present.

  Kowalczewski ordered Bednarski to step forward. He then pronounced him a spy and a traitor, unfit to wear a Polish soldier’s uniform or insignia—and called upon Lieutenant Kępa to remove the insignia from his uniform. Kępa then ceremoniously, but also with force, tore the epaulets from his tunic. Bednarski was ordered to leave the room. Colonel Kowalczewski had to restrain some officers from beating the traitor up. It is not confirmed, but likely, that the Senior Polish Officer asked the Senior British Officer to accompany him and that they went to the Kommandant, informed him of the trial and conviction and demanded Bednarski’s removal the next day, on the ground that the SPO would no longer accept responsibility for his life. Bednarski would certainly have been hanged or killed if he had remained in the Castle. A Pole who was at the trial reports that it was a legally constituted court-martial. Bednarski was to be thrown out of a high window to simulate an accident.