Colditz Page 29

  The case of Dan Hallifax RAF is exceptional and should be recorded.

  A fighter pilot, Dan was shot down on 15 May 1942. His aircraft was on fire, as was his oxygen mask. The result—Dan’s hair was burnt off, as were his ears. The rest of his face was a mess. As one got to know him the injuries vanished. He was Dan Hallifax—a wonderful, charming man.

  From the moment he was shot down his mind was full of just one thing—to get back to England as soon as possible, to the skin-grafting magicians. He was acutely troubled by the belief that the longer it was delayed, the more difficult it would be to rebuild his face and hands.

  Efforts to get repatriated achieved nothing, so the only hope for Dan was to get home under his own steam—which got him into Colditz on 14 November 1943.

  As soon as he arrived in Colditz he made another bid for repatriation which went through the SBO and the normal channels. He had been passed for repatriation long before he arrived in Colditz under Article 69 of the Geneva Convention as far back as 6 June 1942. The Germans replied that under Article 53 they were entitled to keep him a prisoner for an alleged “criminal offense.” But Dan had never been charged with an offense. Even Eggers knew nothing of this “offense.” Colonel Tod wrote to the OKW. In the meantime, Dan missed the repatriation contingent which left Germany on or about 18 May.

  The SBO received a reply from the OKW on 12 June, now saying he was not held under Article 53 but “retained on security grounds.” The SBO promptly wrote a letter of the case history with all the relevant facts to the Protecting Power, asking them to inform His Majesty’s Government, and to the Mixed Medical Commission. Dan Hallifax eventually left Colditz for repatriation on 7 January 1945.

  On Whit Sunday, 28 May, Colditz saw and heard the biggest air-raid so far, in the afternoon. Air-raid sirens—no less than ten blasts—at 2:10 p.m. signified planes approaching nearby. Leipzig was attacked and the hot air blast from huge detonations was felt at the Castle windows. When formations of bombers, returning after unloading their bombs, escorted by fighters, for the first time ever passed directly over the Castle, the reaction of the prisoners was uncontrollable. They howled and cheered and danced as no football crowd has ever done. Not an enemy plane seemed to be in sight. The Leipzig anti-aircraft guns had disabled one plane. Four men were seen to bail out. “Straggler” planes came and went, quite low, and were given a tremendous cheer. Far to the west, several planes were seen to crash, whether fighters or bombers, enemy or Allied, could not be discerned.

  Later, one of the four unlucky ones who had bailed out was seen approaching the Schloss under guard. He was given a rousing cheer. And after he had passed out of sight under the western wall going towards the entrance, the prisoners rushed into the Saalhaus hoping to see him if he was brought into the Kommandantur. His flying boots and Mae West jacket were spotted in the Kommandantur yard but not he. Then an ambulance arrived, evidently with the other three—one of whom at least was thought to be wounded as he made no attempt to keep his parachute from swaying as he came down.

  If ever dull monotony was shattered, it was that day! British air supremacy had passed out of the realm of newspaper reports into mass formations of bombers, with an umbrella of fighters, sailing into sight as unmolested as though they were flying over England.

  On 4 June after services and the normal mid-day Appell, a special King’s Birthday parade was held. The officers conducted themselves with military precision and the SBO led three rousing cheers for HM King George VI.

  Purdy was seen leaving the Castle under escort two days later, just as rumors floated into the POWs of an Allied invasion. (It indeed began on the 6th.)

  In June 1944, shortly after D-Day, two visitors came to Colditz, in the uniforms of the British Free Corps—John Amery’s collaboration corps. The initials BFC were on the arm-bands they wore. They said to the Germans they wanted a chance to talk to the prisoners, with a view to getting some of them to join up in the BFC. It was hardly the moment to expect the British to begin active collaboration with the enemy!

  While the Kommandant would not take the risk of any trouble that might arise from escorting these two “recruiting officers” around the Castle, their leaflets were distributed among the POW mail. These leaflets stated that no action was intended hostile to the British Crown. The war was condemned as the work of Jews and international finance, and it was declared to be a betrayal of the British Empire. The pamphlet ended with an appeal for an Anglo- German alliance.

  The prisoners at first burnt all the pamphlets and then, on second thoughts, demanded more as souvenirs. The visitors by then had gone and there were no more of the leaflets left. The SBO protested about the insertion of the pamphlets in the British mail and received an apology from the Kommandant stating it was “the error of an underling.”

  The underling, however, was none other than Eggers!

  On Thursday, 8 June, Doc. Henderson, returning from duty at Lamsdorf, reported the first news of the great tunnel escape at Stalag Luft III, Sagan. As an indirect result of this escape, Eggers travelled to Sagan to study the security arrangements there. What he found was a German Guard Company of 250 men guarding 7,000 British and American Air Force personnel—i.e. one guard per twenty-eight prisoners. The comparable figure for Colditz was about one for one! There were about 200 POWs in Colditz in May 1944.

  On 16 June, the guard under the archway halfway out of the Castle heard a noise beneath his feet. At this spot there was a manhole cover. There was another one further up the approach yard towards the guardroom and a third just outside the courtyard gate. All were in a stretch of about fifty yards of cobbles. The guard gave a shout and out came the Riot Squad and the security officer. “Up with all three drain covers” was the order.

  The German Staff Paymaster Heinze, who was born in about 1888, a true Saxon, was wont to strut the cobbles of Colditz complete with boots and spurs, long cloak and sword! He loved to play a warrior-type of the days of the Kaiser and he loved to hunt the British. He came from Dresden. He had lost two sons at the front. As the manhole covers came off, he happened to pass by and looking down one, he spied the English “curs.” He spat at them, called them “stinking swine” and passed on. They were indeed “stinking.” The SBO obtained an apology later.

  Three tunnellers, Dick Lorraine, Bos’n Crisp and Dominic Bruce, were taken out of the last manhole. There was an immediate Sonderappell. After this Appell, an effort was made to save as much of the tunnel as possible within the POW courtyard. Three men, Bob Barnes, Alan Cocksedge and Rex Baxter, went down the shaft from the entrance in the ex-Polish long-room. There was a vertical shaft in the thickness of the three-yard-thick wall down to the canteen. From this a connection was made to the drain under the canteen. Unfortunately the Sonderappell had given the Germans time to work their way up the tunnel (the drains) and they met the three Britishers at the bottom of the shaft. The whole length of this shaft and sewer tunnel was over a hundred yards.

  The news of the attempt on Hitler’s life came through on 21 July. It altered little as far as the prisoners were concerned. It affected the Germans seriously. Eggers reports that they started wondering: “How would the Armed Forces as a whole come out of this plot formed within their ranks?”

  The Officer Korps got its answer very shortly. Up to now the Hitler salute had been given by German officers only when entering or leaving their mess, or as a form of unofficial salute when not wearing their caps. From now on it was to be used officially between ourselves and also as between officers and prisoners. The Wehrmacht salute was replaced by the raised arm salute of the Partei.

  We had to put up with a great deal of ridicule in the yard for the next day or two after this order was propagated, but in the end things quietened down and the Nazi salute came to be taken as something in no way out of the ordinary….

  When we [non-Partei soldiers] felt safe, with the Partei men outside the room, some of us did discuss the point—what to do if and when, and as, the end came. Altho
ugh with all of us the unspoken hope was “may the Americans get here before the Russians,” there were differing reactions even to this possibility.

  One said, “I’ll shoot myself and my family. But before that I’ll go into the yard and finish off a few of the prisoners first.” [That was no doubt Paymaster Heinze.]

  Another said, “You can do what you like with your family, they’re your affair, but the prisoners are the responsibility of all of us, and what one may do may be avenged upon the whole lot of us here.”

  As a matter of fact, when the order about giving the Hitler salute came through to Colditz, Hauptmann Püpcke visited the SBO privately to explain to him (apologetically) why he would have to use the salute. The SBO called a meeting and explained the situation. Hence normality and courteous reception of Püpcke the next morning at Appell.

  On 27 July, Harry Elliott, Skipper Barnett and Louis Estève departed from Colditz on their repatriation journey at 4 a.m. Charles Hutt left at the same time on 4 August. On 8 August, a large white painted notice was nailed to the Kellerhaus wall in the courtyard with large black lettering proclaiming “Camp Order No 21: POWs escaping will be shot at.” Several officers took pleasure in informing Mike Sinclair of the new order! An ironic warning as well as a cynical joke!

  On 23 August three counter-intelligence officers of the American Army arrived in Colditz. The senior of them, Colonel Florimund Duke of the American Signal Corps, had parachuted over Hungary with the other two officers on a secret mission code-named “Sparrow” to try and prevent Admiral Horthy (Regent of Hungary) from joining forces with Hitler’s Germany. The other two were Captain Guy T. Nunn, US Infantry, and Captain Alfred Suarez of the US Army Engineers. Mission Sparrow originated in the OSS headquarters of Allen W. Dulles in Berne.

  The three officers had been dropped in Hungary not far from the Yugoslav border on the night of 15 March 1944. Duke was forty-nine years old. By making this parachute jump, his first ever, he became the second oldest American paratrooper in the Second World War. Hitler pre-empted the scheme by summoning Admiral Horthy to meet him at Klessheim on the 17th. Germany then invaded Hungary, and Duke and his team were captured. They took the opportunity just in time of giving a very large sum in Louis d’Or into the safe-keeping of Major Kiraly, a Hungarian officer.

  These Americans suffered months of abominable treatment at the hands of their captors and would have been put to death in obedience to Hitler’s secret order (as the Musketoon commandos had been) had their existence not been uncovered by the Swiss Protecting Power.

  With them, because he had been discovered by the Swiss at the same time, was an “American” major, Kiril Sabadosh. His captors could not understand why a man in American uniform could not speak his own language. They assumed he was a spy and handed him over to the Gestapo. In fact Sabadosh was Yugoslav. He had volunteered to serve in a Yugoslav bomber squadron which was sent to train in the United States. He was shot down during a bombing raid on his own native city of Belgrade.

  Duke had an extraordinary story about his imprisonment in the Landesgericht prison in Vienna. In the yard was a bloodstained guillotine. Every cell was a solitary cell. It was an up-to-date prison in that every cell had a flushing lavatory. No private telephone system was provided for the condemned men, but by emptying the lavatory bowl air-lock—a nauseating job—and preventing the bowl from reflushing, an internal telephone system was provided by speaking tube—the lavatory piping. Duke had to put his head into the bowl, along which, with the foul odors, came the sound of voices. He had a last conversation in broken languages with the man in the cell below, who was guillotined the next day. His last words were: “Avenge us!”

  By this secret telephone Duke heard of the Normandy Invasion on 6 June long before the news ever became public.

  To the Americans, after months in solitary, having a whole castle to roam around seemed for a while like freedom. Suarez found out quickly that they did not need any more wireless experts in Colditz, but he also found out that Kiril Sabadosh was the chess champion of Yugoslavia. Suarez vowed to himself he would beat him and, after many days and games, he did. Now that he was the undefeated chess champion of Yugoslavia, he announced he would not play any more, and he didn’t.

  Nunn played chess for a while. Then he started to learn Czech from Flight-Lieutenant Cenek Chaloupka RAF.

  Duke took to the bridge table. For the first time in his life, he now had a fine handlebar mustache. He had started it long before Colditz to give himself something to think about during the endless solitary hours. Captain Eggers made a point about it.

  “Have you always worn a mustache?” he asked.

  “Hell, no! I never had time until I became a prisoner-of-war.”

  “Yes,” sighed Eggers, “and it will be the first thing that comes off if you escape.”

  In dealing with the Kommandant the Americans were represented at first by the British Senior Officer. Seeing advantages in separate recognition, Duke went to see Tod. “We have no complaint,” Duke explained. “But if the Americans are recognized, we’ll be two against one.” The SBO was all for it. But the Kommandant at first would not see why four Americans should have the same kind of recognition as 200 British. Duke argued, “The Americans fight beside the British, not under them. We are not under British command as POWs. If you deny us separate representation, then you violate the Geneva Convention.” He won his point.

  Duke had fought in the US Air Force in the First World War. He could not be kept away from the hazards of the Second. He was a handsome, quiet man with a consoling personality. In civilian life he was the advertising manager of the magazine Time.

  Suarez—known as “Al”—was of Spanish descent. He loved adventure; he had volunteered and fought against the insurgent forces of General Franco during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. A gay daredevil with a great sense of humor.

  Brigadier Edmund Davies arrived with seven other British officers at the same time as the Americans; they were likewise beneficiaries of Swiss vigilance. Davies had been parachuted into Albania and wounded in an interpartisan affray in the spring of 1944. One of his team, Major J. H. C. Chesshire RE, had also been wounded. They went to a hospital in Tirana, capital of Albania. Chesshire moved soon. Davies remained for two successive operations and was then moved to Belgrade where he met Captain Victor Vercoe of the Royal Fusiliers, who had been parachuted into Yugoslavia to join Brigadier Armstrong’s mission to Mihailovitch. Both of them were moved to Banica concentration camp under Gestapo control. There already was Lieutenant J. Potochnik, a Yugoslav, a wireless operator attached to the Royal Navy, and Captain H. Hawksworth RE.

  They moved on to Vienna and then to Mauthausen, where by an amazing twist of fate, the Kommandant, Zeireis, instead of disposing of them in the normal way (the gas chamber) returned them to Vienna to a prison under Wehrmacht control. From here they were moved to Kaisersteinbruck and thence to Colditz.

  One of the first remarks made by Brigadier Davies when he had settled down in Colditz was “You ought to build a glider here!”

  On 22 August Padre Platt records that “Bets were laid on the fall of Paris.” (Paris fell on the 25th.) On 1 September he wrote:

  If the best of the German soldiers in this camp are able to interpret the situation from their newspaper, and know how near the collapse of their nation’s dream is, they deserve congratulation on the level demeanour they maintain, and the calm exterior they present.

  Ronnie Littledale, commanding the 2nd Battalion, the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, was killed on 1 September in Normandy, his jeep blown up by a land mine.

  Bombers flew over the Castle again on 11 September, and Platt inferred from the resulting column of black, belching smoke that the Leuna petrol refinery was once more the target.

  A week later, Cyril Lewthwaite attempted to escape on the park walk using a blanket “so adorned,” according to Platt, “with dirt and dead grass and leaves (the latter stitched to it) as to represent a heap of rubbish whe
n he fell down and drew the blanket over him.” Unfortunately one of the guards spotted him. Platt concludes:

  One of the interesting aspects of the event was that when discovered, there was none of the accustomed abuse or threatening to shoot, and Franz Josef was there!

  As the autumn days of 1944 shortened and the second front in France settled down, the prisoners of Colditz gritted their teeth once more to stand another winter behind the bars, hoping for relief in the spring. The prisoner contingent now numbered 254 officers, about twenty-five other ranks and two civilians, of whom about 200 were British, the remainder French de Gaullists and a sprinkling of every other Allied nationality. An air of sadness and depression spread over the camp; the eternal optimists had little enthusiasm left for the victory that was always “next month” and “just around the corner!” They were nearly played out.

  A double fence of barbed wire about eight feet high penned in the POWs during their one hour’s exercise allowed in the park. About six feet inside this fence, there was another low fence of barbed wire which ran the whole way around the compound. There was a notice in the compound to the effect that anyone crossing over this inner fence would be shot by the guards without warning.

  Mike Sinclair had made by this time eight unsuccessful escape attempts. He now decided to try again. His indomitable spirit could not be tamed. He would finish the war in harness, pulling his weight as an officer on active service.

  This time he planned a lone and dangerous break. Surprise was the essence of it. He would repeat the escape of Pierre Mairesse Lebrun who, in 1941, had been catapulted over the barbed-wire fence in the park. Mike planned the break alone so that no other man could be blamed if a hand or foot slipped or the timing went wrong.

  On 25 September Mike went down to the recreation ground and walked the well-trodden path around the perimeter inside the wire with Grismond Davies-Scourfield. In half an hour the guards had settled down. At the most vulnerable point in the wire, Mike stopped suddenly, turned and shook hands with Scourfield. “Good- bye, Grismond,” he said quietly. “It’s going to be now or never.” He was ashen-pale.