Colditz Read online

  The river (the Mulde) is a tributary of the Elbe, into which it flows forty miles to the north. Colditz itself is situated in the middle of the triangle formed by the three great cities of Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz; in 1940 it was therefore in the heart of the German Reich and 400 miles from any frontier not directly controlled by the Nazis—a daunting prospect.

  I continued in The Colditz Story:

  We marched slowly up the steep and narrow cobbled streets from the station towards the Castle, eventually approaching it from the rear, that is to say, from the mainland out of which the promontory protruded. Entering the main arched gateway, we crossed a causeway astride what had once been a deep, wide moat and passed under a second cavernous archway whose oaken doors swung open and closed ominously behind us with the clanging of heavy iron bars in true medieval fashion. We were then in a courtyard about forty-five yards square, with some grass lawn and flower-beds, and surrounded on all four sides with buildings six stories high. This was the Kommandantur or garrison area. We were escorted farther; through a third cavernous archway with formidable doors, up an inclined cobbled coach way for about fifty yards, then turning sharp right, through a fourth and last archway with its normal complement of heavy oak and iron work into the “Sanctum Sanctorum,” the inner courtyard. This was a cobbled space about thirty yards by forty yards, surrounded on its four sides by buildings whose roof ridges must have been ninety feet above the cobbles. Little sun could ever penetrate here! It was an unspeakably grisly place, made none the less so by the pallid faces which we noticed peering at us through bars. There was not a sound in the courtyard. It was as if we were entering some ghostly ruin. Footsteps echoed and the German words of command seemed distorted out of reality. I had reached the stage of commending my soul to the Almighty when the faces behind the bars suddenly took on life; eyes shone, teeth flashed from behind unkempt beards and words passed backwards into the inner depths:

  “Anglicy! Anglicy!”

  Heads crowded each other out behind tiny barred windows, and in less time than it took us to walk thirty yards there was a cheering mob at every window; not only at the small ones which we had first seen and which we were to come to know so well, but from every other window that we could see there were jostling heads, laughing and cheering. Welcome was written on every face. We breathed again as we realized we were among friends. They were Polish officers….

  Later that evening we made our first acquaintance with the Poles. There were hushed voices on the staircase, then four of them appeared beyond the grill. They unlocked the door [into our attic room] with ease and advanced to greet us. We were the first English they had seen in the war, and the warmth of their welcome, coupled with their natural dignity of bearing, was touching….

  They brought food and some beer. Two of the four could speak English and the remainder French. They all spoke German. The meeting soon became noisy and there was much laughter, which the Poles love. Suddenly there was a warning signal from a Pole on the look-out by the stairs, and in less than no time they were all distributed under beds in the corners of our two rooms, where suppressed laughter continued up to the instant of the entry of a German officer with his Gefreiter [corporal].

  The attic door, and others below, had, of course, been locked by the Poles, so that there was nothing to cause suspicion other than our laughter, which the Germans had overheard and had come to investigate. The officer was shocked that we, reviled prisoners, whose right to live depended on a word from him, should find occasion to laugh. It was like laughing in church, and he implied as much to us. He noticed we had shifted all the bunks to make more floor space and promptly made the Gefreiter move them back again into orderly rows. The Poles moved with the beds. No sooner had they departed than the Poles, like truant schoolboys, reappeared, laughing louder than ever at the joke. They called the corporal “la Fouine,” the French for a marten, which has also a figurative meaning, namely “a wily person” whose propensities have been translated into English as “ferreting.” The merriment continued for a while, then they departed as they had come, leaving us to marvel at the facility with which they manipulated locks. In order to visit us they had unlocked no fewer than five doors with a couple of instruments that looked like a pair of button hooks. Such was our introduction to Colditz, which was to be our prison house for several years.

  The Polish contingent constituted a unique cross-sectional representation of their nation. Their most senior officer was General Piskor. Then there was Admiral Unrug, who though older was junior to General Piskor. His sailors were very thin on the ground in Colditz—not more than half a dozen. So Piskor’s Army contingent made the running. Unrug nevertheless acted as SPO,** probably because he understood German perfectly.

  Tadeusz Piskor was born in 1889 in central Poland. A member of the Polish Socialist Party, he fought with the Polish Legion on the side of Austria from 1914 to 1917, and rose to command the Lublin Army in the September campaign of 1939. Having been forced to capitulate, he was made prisoner. In Oflag VIIA at Murnau he was the senior prisoner. There is extant a photograph of him standing at attention with his hands held rigidly to his sides, in response to the offer of the German camp commander, a general, to shake his hand. Piskor’s was a gesture of defiance. For this affront to a German general and for his patriotic leadership of the prisoners in Murnau camp he was sent, in January 1940, to Silberberg, and from there to Colditz.

  Piskor was short and rather plump and not of military bearing. He was essentially tolerant and kind, although his small mustache gave him an expression which rather belied that kindness. The impression was that of severity coupled with energetic intolerance.

  Piskor brought along with him to Colditz many well-known Polish officers, among them Colonel Mozdyniewicz, who was secretly the chief of the Polish Resistance movement within the German prison camps, in touch with the Home Front from Colditz. He used microfilms from the end of 1941 onwards. There were also Colonel Bronisław Kowalczewski, Lieutenant-Colonel Eugeniusz Szubert, Major Walerian Klimowicz and Major Władysław Steblik; then 2nd Lieutenant Jan Niestrzęba, 2nd Lieutenant Zygmunt Mikusiński, Pilot-Officer Zdzisław Dębowski and 2nd Lieutenant Jerzy Klukowski, who had composed one of the escape parties from Silberberg. Three others who were close friends and who were to be persistent escapers were 2nd Lieutenants Pawel Zieliński, Stanisław Bartoszewicz and Feliks Maj.

  When three newly arrived British padres were being “deloused” on 3 December, prior to being let loose in the prison, they met three more Poles in the delousing shed who had arrived the same day after recapture from an escape. The chief of them was Lieutenant Wacław Gassowski, a Polish Air Force pilot and athlete of international renown. Also there was his friend Lieutenant Wacław Gorecki, another Air Force pilot.

  Jozef Unrug’s father, a Pole, served in the Prussian Army and became a general. Jozef’s mother was a countess of Saxony, Isidora von Bunau. However, both Jozef (born in 1884) and his brother were brought up and educated as Polish patriots—an offense for which their father was prematurely retired (dismissed) from the Prussian Army by Bismarck.

  It is worth noting that during the period when Poland was partitioned by its three powerful neighbors (Prussia, Russia and Austria) in the years 1795–1918, and especially when no Polish Army existed (1831–1917), it was a principle of Polish patriotism to encourage young Poles to serve in the armed forces of the partitioning powers (also in the armed forces of France and some other countries) in order to acquire the necessary military skills which might one day be needed in the service of resurrected Poland.

  Jozef Unrug was born in that part of Poland which was under Prussian rule. He enrolled therefore into the German Navy. In 1914 he was a German lieutenant-commander and in command of a German submarine. After the outbreak of the First World War the German naval authorities apparently did not trust him as a Pole, and withdrew him from this command. They named him instead commander of a school of submarine training for naval other ranks. When t
he war ended and he became free from his obligations to the German Navy, he offered his services immediately to Poland and entered the Polish Navy.

  Poland, after having recovered by the Treaty of Versailles a small sector of her ancient Baltic coast, lost since the partitions of Poland, undertook immediately to build a large port at Gdynia and to create a Navy. Originally that Navy was composed only of a few small ships, but slowly it became bigger, obtaining a number of modern destroyers, submarines, minesweepers and also one large minelayer. Apart from the Navy in the Baltic, Poland had also a Naval River Flotilla on the river Pripet, a tributary of the Dnieper, which played an important role in the Polish-Soviet war of 1919–1920.

  These two units, the Baltic fleet and the River Flotilla, formed the Polish Navy, under the administration of the Naval Office in Warsaw. In 1939, the head of the Naval Office was Rear-Admiral Swirski, the commander of the River Flotilla was Captain Zajaczkowski, and the commander of the Navy in the Baltic was Rear-Admiral Unrug. He commanded that fleet from 1925. He was to a great extent the educator of the Polish Navy and creator of its esprit de corps.

  A few days before the outbreak of war three large destroyers were sent to Great Britain. The battle lasted nineteen days on the mainland against an overwhelmingly powerful German attack. On 19 September—the last heights of Kępa Oksywska, north of Gdynia, were taken by storm by the Germans and the commander of the Polish defenders, Colonel Dabek, committed suicide rather than give himself up.

  Unrug became a prisoner of war. The Germans were insolent enough to offer him a return to the German Navy, which he treated with disdain and anger. In consequence, at the beginning of 1940, he was placed in the “special” camp of Srebrna Góra in the Sudeten mountains. The Germans considered Unrug a traitor to the German nation not only because he was a former German officer, but because they considered him to be a German baron, descendant of an old German family, the Barons von Unruh; then of course his father had been a Prussian general and his mother a German countess. They tried hard to convert and exploit him during the time he was in Colditz, but the admiral rebuffed them. He always demanded a Polish/German interpreter to be present at meetings with them and spoke exclusively in Polish. When asked once by a German general why he did not speak in German (which he spoke fluently) he replied: “The language which I use officially is exclusively Polish.”

  Unrug became recognized as the father of the Polish Navy—a strict disciplinarian and a capable instructor. His outstandingly courageous defense of the besieged peninsula of Hel throughout September 1939 has earned him his place in history.

  * Now restored to St. Petersburg since 1991.

  ** Senior Polish Officer

  3

  The Challenge

  Christmas 1940 to Early Spring 1941

  TIME PASSED MORE QUICKLY for the British, making new friends in the new surroundings. The Germans, after a week or so, gave us permanent quarters; a dormitory with two-tier bunks, a washroom, a kitchen and a day-room in a wing of the Castle separated from the Poles. The rooms were severely whitewashed and every window was heavily barred. The courtyard was the exercise area. At first the British exercised at different hours to the Poles but the Germans eventually gave up trying to keep us apart. To do so would have meant a sentry at every courtyard door, and there were half a dozen of these. Moreover, the Castle was a maze of staircases and intercommunicating doors, and the latter merely provided lock-picking practice for the Poles. Prisoners were so often found in each other’s quarters that the Germans would have had to put the whole camp into “solitary” to carry out their intentions, so they gave it up as a bad job.

  A trickle of new arrivals increased the British contingent, until by Christmas we numbered seventeen officers, seven other ranks and one civilian, Howard Gee (he had been captured returning as a volunteer in the defense of Finland). French and Belgian officers appeared. All the newcomers were offenders, mostly escapers, and it was impressed upon them that the Castle was the “bad boys’ camp,” the Straflager, the Sonderlager. At the same time, they also began to appreciate its impregnability from the escape point of view. This was to be the German fortress from which there was no escape and it certainly looked for a long time as if it would live up to that reputation. The garrison manning the camp outnumbered the prisoners; the Castle was floodlit at night from every angle despite the black-out, and, notwithstanding the sheer drop of 100 feet or so on the outside from barred windows, sentries surrounded the camp within a palisade of barbed wire. The enemy seemed to have everything in his favor. Escape would be a formidable proposition indeed.

  The eight British newcomers who arrived before Christmas were: two Anglican Army chaplains, Padres Heard (Dean of Peterhouse College, Cambridge) and Hobling; one Methodist chaplain, Padre Ellison Platt; Lieutenant-Colonel Guy German of the Royal Leicestershire Regiment; Lieutenants Peter Storie-Pugh of the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment, Teddy Barton of the Royal Army Service Corps, Tommy Elliot of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, and Geoffrey Wardle of the Royal Navy. Lieutenant-Colonel Guy Johnson German, a territorial army officer educated at Rugby School, was the Senior British Officer in Colditz for a long time. He was familiarly called “the SBO.” A handsome, young-looking colonel (he was thirty-eight in 1940), he was broad-shouldered, tall, well built, with bright blue eyes. His nature was very down to earth and good-tempered, but he was quick in decision. This quality probably accounted for the fact that in spite of his size he played scrum-half for Oxford University, playing at Twickenham against Cambridge in 1923. He brooked no nonsense and was feared by the Germans.

  His father had founded the firm of estate agents known as John German and Sons. Guy had studied farming seriously as well as country estate and property management. Much of his peace-time activity was that of farming consultancy. His firm provided an advisory service to farmers and landowners up and down the country. Along with several others, I started a course in agriculture under his direction and tuition which continued for a year. Guy had taken part in the Norwegian campaign, sailing from Rosyth in HMS Devonshire under Captain Mansfield on 17 April 1940. He fought a rearguard action at Tetten. His battalion was saved, returning to Glasgow on HMS Rodney in May, but he himself was captured on 23 April. Imprisoned at Spangenburg, he publicly burnt all the copies of an issue of a German magazine for POWs—as “dangerous propaganda.” That sent him to Colditz.

  A remarkable rencontre had taken place when Padre Platt stood with others before the gate into the prisoners’ courtyard on his arrival at the Castle. A German officer approached out of the darkness. It was Eggers.

  “Good evening, my English friends!”

  The POW group (six of them) came to attention and saluted. Eggers waved their stiff approach aside.

  “You must be tired after so long a day…. You will sleep well tonight…. Oh, by the way, which is the Methodist chaplain?”

  Padre Platt stepped forward. Eggers with an engaging smile said:

  “A very personal friend of mine is a Methodist minister. He stayed in my home when he studied in Germany. Do you happen to know Rev. Connell?”

  Dick Connell and Jock Platt had been at college together and played on the same football team. There was an immediate friendly exchange of experiences between the German and the Englishman. Platt confirms that it softened the hard edges of the Castle’s walls as he passed through “the needle’s eye” of the gate into the penumbra of the courtyard.

  Padre Joseph Ellison Platt was born in 1900 and educated at a local grammar school in Winsford, a small town in Cheshire. His father was a Methodist preacher. When Jock was about twenty-five, he entered Hartley College, Manchester, to train for the Methodist ministry. Here he met Dick Connell. On 29 May 1940 Platt found himself at the 10th Casualty Clearing Station in Kzombeke, a Belgian village, in the no-man’s-land between the advancing Germans and Dunkirk only a short distance away.

  Nine hundred wounded men lay head to foot in the village church. The doctors were working
round the clock and Platt found himself performing the task of anesthetist. He was taken prisoner with the rest of them. He found himself eventually at Oflag IXA—at Spangenburg. He was accused of having brought into the camp from Stalag IXA “a housebreaking instrument—a jimmy—for escape purposes.” Actually it was a piece of wire he used for propping up the lid of his battered suitcase. This was enough to send him to Colditz! Well built, of medium height, he possessed stern features, carried a mustache and wore hornrimmed spectacles. Though only forty years old, his hair was already graying and he was regarded as an “elder.”

  Over Christmas the Poles entertained the British with a marionette show of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They had received a few food parcels from their homes in Poland. The British were overwhelmed by their hospitality. We only had German prison rations until on Boxing Day fifteen Red Cross parcels arrived! The excitement had to be seen to be believed. They were bulk parcels; that is to say they were not addressed individually, nor did each parcel contain an assortment of food. There were parcels of tinned meat, of tea, of cocoa, and so on. Apart from a bulk consignment which reached Laufen the previous August, these were the first parcels of food from England and we British felt a surge of gratitude for this gift, without which our New Year would have been a pathetic affair. We were also able to return, at least to a limited extent, the hospitality of the Poles. We had to ration severely for we could not count on a regular supply, and we made this first consignment, together with thirteen parcels which arrived early in January (which we could have eaten in a few days) last for two months.

  Padre Platt’s unpublished diary, written at the time, describes the end of 1940 in Colditz:

  New Year’s Day 1941

  The New Year’s party was a roaring success. An extension of lights until 12.30 a.m. made a real new year’s scene possible. Our hosts (the Poles) were in great form. A special allowance of beer had already “lighted up” one or two of the younger officers. Song and laughter greeted us as we were conducted to the central table as guests of honor. It was a perfect Beggars’ Opera, for we were the most ragged and out-at-elbows people in the room.