The Great Escape (29 page)

Shortly after six o’clock that morning, the telephone from Sagan had called
Oberregierungsrat
Max Wielen out of his bed in Breslau. He was area chief of the Kriminalpolizei, and as soon as he realized the extent of the break, he ordered a
Grossfahndung.
That was the nationwide hue and cry, the highest search order in Germany.

The German radio broadcasted the news, and thousands of troops and auxiliaries turned out to search. Gestapo and Sicherheitspolizei worked through all trains checking papers, searched vehicles on the roads, patrolled the roads, checked hotels and houses and farms. The warnings went out to all the S.S., Army and Luftwaffe troops in the neighborhood, and out from their homes for miles around came the old men and boys of the
Landwehr
and
Landwacht
(a sort of Home Guard) to watch over the fields and lanes. Far away in ports like Stettin and Danzig, the
Kreigsmarine
co-operated with the Gestapo and Polizei to prevent any escapees slipping across to Sweden as stowaways. Around the Czech, Swiss, Danish, and French borders the
Grenzpolizei
were alerted. For a hundred miles around Sagan itself the country was thick with searching Germans.

It developed into the greatest search in Germany during the war up to that time. Wielen, that morning, appointed
Kriminal Kommissar
Dr. Absalon to inquire fully into the circumstances of the break and furnish a report.

After getting out of the tunnel, Marshall and Valenta had walked cautiously through the woods for ten minutes until they emerged from the trees. Their direction had been good. In front of them was a narrow road and directly opposite, beyond crisscrossing railway lines shining dimly in the dark, they saw Sagan station. They walked up and down looking for the entrance to the subway which, they had been told, led under the tracks to the booking office and platforms. Unfortunately a shed had been built over the subway entrance as a shelter from the weather, and it was unrecognizable in the dark from the description they had.

For some time they searched for the subway which was right under their noses. A couple more dark shapes emerged from the woods and then two more. They couldn’t find the subway either, and before long there were a dozen or so tramping up and down looking for it. A couple of times Marshall heard muffled curses and once, distinctly, an angry English voice asking where the hell the bloody subway was. By the grace of God no Germans heard.

In desperation Marshall and Valenta pushed open the door of the shed to see what was there. A couple of trains had come and gone already, and then they heard the air raid sirens. They couldn’t see anything in the darkness of the shed, and while they were wondering what to do a German poked his head around the door and flashed a torch on them.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Don’t you know the siren has gone and you must go to the shelter?”

Valenta mumbled something at him in German, and they brushed past out into the road again. There was only one train left that they could catch. It meant a dubious change of trains later on, and in any case the train might be held up by the air raid. If the escape were discovered early, the train was bound to be searched.

“It’s not worth the risk,” Valenta said. “Let’s strike down on foot for Czechoslovakia. I know the way, and I can get help there fairly easily.”

They turned back into the woods, heading for the road that skipped the western boundary of the camp, found the road, and followed it till they were out of the camp area. They tried then to walk parallel to it across the fields, but it was too slushy and they had to go back to the road and take the risk of running into Germans.

Well before dawn they came to the Breslau
Autobahn
running about twelve miles south of the camp, crossed over it, and as dawn broke sheltered deep in some woods. They stayed there shivering with cold all day and too keyed up to sleep. At dusk they pushed on along a lane and walked through a small village. At the other end three men suddenly loomed out of the darkness, and before they quite realized it a shotgun was pointing at them.

Valenta tried to bluff it out, but they started firing questions at Marshall then. Marshall knew little German and tried to bluff it out as a French worker, but one of the Germans spoke better French and the game was up. The Germans were so obviously expecting to meet the escaped prisoners that they had no chance. The Germans marched them back to the village and phoned for police from Halbau. Marshall knew then there was no hope for bluffing any further and managed to tread his passes, maps, and compass into the snow.

An hour later a police car arrived and drove them to a small jail. They pushed them into a tiny cell about seven feet square, and there they found Humphries, a slim Australian called Paul Royle, and Shorty Armstrong, whom they had seen last the previous night in 104. All three had been caught in much the same circumstances. Jammed in the cell like sardines they found a little comfort in the common predicament. At least it was warm there in contrast to the weather outside. They chewed at their hard rations, talked for a while, and then slept, exhausted.

At dawn the cell door swung open and half a dozen tough-looking men in police uniforms called them out, pushed them roughly into a car, and drove them back to Sagan over the road they had walked. Not to the compound, but to the civil jail, where they were interrogated and pushed into a large cell full of three-tier bunks.

During Marshall’s interrogation the phone rang in the little office, and he heard a guard who answered repeat in German into the mouthpiece, “Yes, yes. Six at Hirschberg, yes, and four at Danzig.”

It wasn’t hard to guess what it meant.

They found the big cell bug-ridden and cold. It was a little surprising not to be taken back to the camp cooler, and a vague disquiet was growing in them. The door opened again after a while, and in came Ogilvy, Chaz Hall, and two other escapees. Like Marshall and company, they had been picked up by patrols south of the autobahn and found the Germans too suspicious to be bluffed.

Three times more during the day the door opened and more escapees were shoved in. It was the same story. They had tried to walk across the fields, but the snow and slush had forced them back onto the roads and into the hands of the patrols. By dusk there were nineteen of them. The guards gave them each two slices of black bread for the day, but no blankets.

Wings Day and Tobolski found the booking office hall on Sagan Station half full of escapees. A couple of hours earlier they’d all been chatting in 104, and now they were walking around not recognizing each other. Day brushed shoulders with Kirby-Green and Kidder, who were traveling together, and the South Africans, Gouws and Stevens, and none of them even winked at each other.

In the train to Berlin, Day sat apart from Tobolski, but they joined up later and felt safer when they walked among the crowds in the Berlin streets. They had the address of a Dane living in Berlin, found him at his flat, and stayed there overnight. In the morning they didn’t like the look of the Dane’s German girl friend and spent the next two days in a bombed-out cellar. On the Monday they went to the Stettiner Bahnhof for a train to the Baltic port, and on the platform a man sidled up to Day, showed a police pass, and asked for his identity card.

Day showed it to him, feeling the sweat starting up all over him and the detective glanced casually, handed it back, and walked off. “Unteroffizier” Tobolski brazenly got his soldbuch stamped for leave at the R.T.O.’s office. They reached Stettin safely and after a day there made successful contact with some Frenchmen in a labor camp. The Frenchmen took them into their barracks and promised to find some Swedish sailors for them.

They were waiting there in the morning when four German police burst in, and the leader demanded at once, “Where are the Englishmen?”

Day and Tobolski tried to bluff it for a while, but five minutes later they were being marched off with hands in the air and guns in their backs.

The Dodger, traveling with Werner, accompanied the party of ten “workmen,” including Pop Green, going by train to Hirschberg and then down to Czechoslovakia. Al wearing cloth caps and dirty clothes, they got out of the train at dawn at a little station just before Hirschberg, and there they split up.

The Dodger and Werner set out to walk to Czechoslovakia, but it didn’t take more than a couple of hours to see that the snow was going to beat them. They went to Hirschberg Station that night, had a little trouble getting their tickets, but collected them eventually and were sitting in the carriage waiting for the train to start when the police came through, looked very closely at their passes and said, “
Komm mit.
”

Taken to Gestapo headquarters, they found half a dozen old friends, Jimmy James, Pop Green, and some of the Poles. The Gestapo had the Poles standing with their faces to the wall, forbidden to move. After interrogation, they handcuffed the Dodger and pushed him into a cell.

Plunkett, the map maker, and Dvorack lost their new freedom on the station at Klattau (Czechoslovakia) because they did not have the right type of leave pass. Danny Krol and Sydney Dowse were nabbed in a barn near Oels. The Gestapo caught Van Wyeermisch in Berlin.

Neely got to Stettin, where some French slave laborers hid him in a hut at the rear of a hospital while they tried to find him a ship to Sweden. They came back and told him that police were combing the whole town. Soon after that, police descended on the hospital, and Neely got out the back way as they were coming in the front door. He got to the station, caught a train to Munich, and miraculously avoided all identification checks on the way, but they picked him up in Munich Station when he arrived.

Tim’s passes were good enough for ordinary times, but in that enormous grossfahndung you needed more than good papers. The Germans rounded up several thousand people and threw them into jail. Some were innocent and later released. Many more were German deserters or wandering slave laborers. Some were criminals, fugitives from justice for a variety of reasons. The net that spread out from Sagan gathered them all in.

One by one the Sagan escapees were rounded up, and a fortnight after the break, out of the seventy-six who had got clear of the tunnel, only three were still free. The Germans never did find them. Two were already in England; the third was on his way.