The Great Escape (17 page)

With a nice feeling for gentle and ironic humor, Tim Walenn gave his factory the code name of “Dean and Dawson,” after the British travel agency. Getting around the Third Reich was largely a matter of having a fistful of permits and passes, and one couldn’t go far, particularly by train, without having to submit them to the cold eyes of the Gestapo or
Sicherheitspolizei.

Walenn had that methodical and precise nature which, if you didn’t know it before, is essential for good forging. He had a smooth, unruffled face — and hid most of it behind a spreading, Jerry Colonna-type mustache which revolted every artistic feeling in the compound. Artists liked to work with him because he was so unfailingly courteous.

His first efforts in East Compound were faking gate passes and simple travel permits in the form of typewritten sheets. A tame Goon had produced the originals from the kommandantur and Walenn hand-lettered copies with such incredible care and accuracy it was impossible to tell them from the originals without looking very closely. Gordon Brettell was one of his first assistants, and no one ever figured out how Brettell came to be a good draftsman. He was a dark, tough customer with a thickset jaw and had been a racing driver before the war.

He had tested one of the passes just before the move into North Camp. Wangling his way into a working party, he had drifted into one of the half-built huts and hidden in some paillasses. Pieber searched the camp for him, even fussed about the spot where he was hiding, but didn’t find him, and at night Gordon sneaked away from the empty compound. He was only picked up through bad luck. At Chemnitz he asked for a ticket to Nuremberg, not knowing that Nuremberg was verboten territory because of a recent bombing. And the Gestapo collared him. He had one of the passes saying he was a French worker. The Gestapo accepted it, but Gordon’s French wasn’t good enough to confirm it and he did three weeks’ solitary before coming back to us.

The Gestapo never woke up to the fact that the pass was hand-made. Walenn had gone to such pains that he’d even hand-lettered strikeovers, as though some of the letters had been mistakes and been typed over with the right one. Others he did as though the shift key hadn’t completely returned, showing part of the capital of one letter slightly above the line and the top of the lower-case letter slightly below.

The factory grew, and more artists joined the gang. One of them was a curly-haired little man who smoked a pipe nearly as big as his head — Dicky Milne, D.F.C. and Bar, who’d been fighter wing commander at Biggin Hill before he was shot down. Henri Picard, the Belgian youngster with the Croix de guerre, was the man who had got the German rifle measurements with home-made calipers for the delousing break. The most distinctive, in appearance anyway, was Alex Cassie. No one could look like Cassie without working hard at it. He had a great thatch of long ginger hair that fell over his eyes like a Skye terrier and little tufts of ginger beard sticking out of isolated spots around his jaw.

One of the forgers was an American, Donald Stine, a very quiet, slim, dark lad with a crew cut. He was a beautiful artist who also made many drawings and paintings of camp scenes and personalities. Ley Kenyon, tall, fair Englishman, was another magnificent artist who became a forger.

They started working in North Camp in an empty room in 120 until Adolf, suspicious of the stooges outside the block, started hanging around and walking up and down looking in the windows. One of Dean and Dawson’s occupational hazards was that they had to sit by a window so they could get enough light for the finicking work. Adolf nearly caught them a couple of times, but they were just able to cover the work before he reached the window.

Adolf was getting too dangerous, so Wallen moved the factory to a room in the kitchen block next to the room where the camp orchestra practiced. They worked there with peculiar noises in their ears. It wasn’t a very good orchestra. They took the duty stooge into the room with them. He sat on a high stool looking over their heads out of the window at a little chair standing beside 122. If a ferret approached, a man sunbaking by 122 moved the chair; the stooge muttered a sharp “pack-up,” and the work was covered in a moment. The only time Walenn ever lost his gentle courtesy was if he saw the stooge take his eyes for a second off the chair by 122. When the orchestra finished practice, the forgers packed up too, and the stooge walked out with the musicians, carrying a violin case. He took it over to 104 when Pengelly opened it, took out the forged papers, and stowed them behind a secret wall panel.

Bit by bit, mostly through Valenta’s tame Goons, Walenn built up his stock of originals. He had an
Ausweis
for being on Reich property, gate passes, two types of
Urlaubschein
for crossing frontiers, about three different forms of travel permit, and a French worker’s identity card.

Once when Pieber was away on leave, a new hauptmann came in as lageroffizier. He didn’t understand P.O.W. morality very well and was induced to take his tunic off and sit down in a room for a brew one day. It wasn’t till he got outside the compound that he found his personal identity card missing. He was in an awkward spot. He couldn’t very well report that the prisoners had stolen it because the Kommandant would have given him, figuratively speaking, a disciplinary kick in the seat of his well-cut breeches.

He chose the lessor of two evils, and in some embarrassment and as politely as he could in the circumstances, he asked the squadron leader who had been his host if he would be good enough to arrange the return of his card. He couldn’t very well be rude about it because the squadron leader would have blandly denied all knowledge of it, and there would be nothing the hauptmann could do about it without getting in hot water himself. The squardron leader said he would do what he could, and two days later handed the card back. Walenn didn’t want it any more. He had a very accurate copy of it.

The
Soldbuch
of the ordinary soldaten was easy to get hold of. The soldbuch was a combination pay-book and identification card, and the very young obergefreiter who had signed the receipt for the chocolate used to hand his soldbuch to his contact when he came into the compound.

“But you
must
let me have it back when I go out,” he pleaded.

One of the complications about the soldbuchs and a couple of the other passes was that they carried a photograph of the bearer. The meticulous Tim told Roger that they must get genuine photographs of the people who were to use them.

“We’ll have to get a camera, that’s all,” said Roger, and passed it on to Valenta. Valenta told the contact, and the contact put it up to the young obergefreiter who nearly passed out with fright on the spot and pleaded to be excused this time. Valenta, a little conscience-stricken, went to Roger.

“We can’t ask the poor little Goon to do this,” he said. “He’s liable to be shot if he does.”

“Tell him,” said Roger grimly, “he’s liable to be shot if he doesn’t.”

The little Goon brought in a tiny camera. Later he brought some developing and printing materials and Chaz Hall, the compound meteorological expert, set up a little studio in his room. Tommy Guest supplied imitation German uniforms and civilian clothes for the sitters.

Forging was a slow business. Some of the documents were covered with line upon line of close print; others had a background of fine, whorled lines almost like a banknote, and it all had to be reproduced with fanatical care and accuracy with pen and ink or brush and paint. Tim scrapped any forgery that he didn’t consider to be nearly perfect. One careless line would wreck a little document that a forger might have been working on for days.

One of the urlaubscheins used to take a skilled forger, working five hours a day every day, a whole month to make. Altogether, Dean and Dawson eventually turned out about four hundred documents. It was a little hard to believe. They had fifty forgers and stooges on the job three to five hours a day for a year. All the phony documents were endorsed by official Nazi stamps, bearing the eagle and swastika and the titles and signatures of various police branches. Tim used to paint the designs on rubber boot heels, and Al Hake, the compass maker, carved them out with bits of razor blade.

As well as passes, Tim used to fake letters for escapees to carry. If a man got out, say, as a French worker, Tim would give him a little bundle of letters in French bearing loving bits of gossip from his “wife” back in Cherbourg or somewhere. They were rather convincing. One of his favorite stunts was the letter of authorization. These, hand-“typed” on a business firm’s letterhead, authorized their employee, Herr So-and-So, to travel to Stettin or Danzig or some such strategic place. Stettin or Danzig were both favorite spots because neutral Swedish boats docked there, and if you could stow away on one of them your troubles were nearly over.

From tame Germans Tim got a couple of actual letterhead sheets to copy. If he wanted something different, he designed it himself. He produced an imposing embossed letterhead purporting to come from a near-by Focke Wulf factory. Gordon Brettell did the embossing by pressing a toothbrush handle on the back of the hand-painted “print” against a pad of paper. It looked quite genuine.

One of the documents was a travel permit in the form of a typed foolscap sheet. They did a few laboriously by hand, but each one took ages. Valenta got Thompson working on the little German juggler in the kitchen, and he agreed to help. Tim gave him one of the sheets, and the little German took it out of the compound in his boot. He sent it to Hamburg, where his wife had a typewriter, and she typed stencils of the form and sent them back to her husband, who delivered them to Tim.

Travis made a tiny printing press with a roller made of a carved piece of wood covered with a strip of blanket. Brettell and Cassie made printing ink from fat-lamp black mixed with neat’s-foot oil, and they ran off dozens of the forms.

Getting the right quality, thickness, and color of paper for some of the passes was a constant problem. They used to tint paper with water-color backgrounds, and for some of the better-quality paper Tim ripped out the flyleaves of a few Bibles. The soldbuchs and a couple of the other identification ausweises had stiff linen-faced covers. The forgers glued tracing linen over thin cardboard, tinted it the right color, and painted the lettering over it. You couldn’t pick them from the originals.

On some of the originals, the eagle and swastika stamps were embossed, particularly over the identification photographs. Jens Muller cut out a mold of the stamp in soap and cast a replica in lead from melted silver paper. Travis made a stamping maching with a centering device, and that difficulty was overcome.

Rubberneck began to hang around the kitchen block so Tim put muslin over the windows of the forgery room, ostensibly to keep out flies. They went on working there till Adolf whipped around the corer one day and, before they could cover the work, he was peering in at them through the muslin. Apparently he couldn’t see very clearly because he wandered away again, but Tim thought it was getting too hot and moved the factory across to the church room in 122. The padre raised eyebrows and voice in protest, but Roger claimed it was all God’s work in a good cause, and as there didn’t seem to be any specific ruling on this point in church dogma, the forgers kept going to church every day to indulge in a little Christian counterfeiting.

It wasn’t long before the wretched Adolf was hanging around again. He must have noticed the stooges because he kept wandering around 122 looking in the windows; and a couple of times every day the forgers had to cover up in a hurry and sit around innocently while Cassie gave an imitation of a lecture in psychology until Adolf went away. Tim thought it was getting too hot again and moved across to the library in 110. Travis, who’d had his engineers there, moved down to the bottom of “Dick’s” shaft. There wasn’t much room there, but it was quiet and safe for such noisy pursuits as tin-bashing and filing.

The other departments didn’t seem to be troubled so much by security. Des Plunkett, a nuggety little man with a fierce mustache, had a staff of map tracers dispersed in various rooms throughout the camp. Through the contacts he had collected all sorts of information about the surrounding country, and his local maps showed all the quietest paths away from the area. His general maps illustrated the escape routes down through Czechoslovakia to Switzerland and France and through the Baltic to Sweden.

Tracing was too slow to do all the maps he wanted, so he got a contact to scrounge some invalid jellies through a German in the hospital block in the kommandantur. He cut them up, soaked them in hot water, and wrung them through a handkerchief, tasting the fruity solution that streamed out until it was no longer sweet. Having extracted the sugar from the mess in the handkerchief, he had the straight gelatine, which he melted, poured into flat trays made from old food tins, and there, when it set, was his mimeograph.

He drew his maps for reproduction with ink made from the crushed lead of indelible pencils (strictly verboten, but the tame Germans supplied them). After pressing the maps on the mimeograph, he ran off hundreds of copies. Tim Walenn used his mimeograph sometimes for his forged papers.

Tommy Guest also dispersed his tailors in rooms throughout the compound. Cloth was his main trouble. Mostly he took old uniforms to pieces and recut them along civilian lines. He got bits of cloth smuggled in from outside and sometimes used the heavy linings from old greatcoats. The only jackets and trousers ever issued in the compound came through the Red Cross, and they were either rough old Polish uniforms or the unlovely stuff they issued (and still do) to R.A.F. “other ranks” — made of heavy serge. Guest had a couple of people shaving the serge nap off with razor blades to fine the cloth down, and then he dyed it — with beet-root juice, or a boot-polish solution, and once or twice in dyes made from the covers of books soaked in water.