The Great Escape (30 page)

At Berchtesgaden, on the Sunday morning, twenty-six hours after the break had been found, Hitler received the first full Gestapo report on it and flew into one of the rages that were becoming more frequent with him. Staying at Berchtesgaden at the time were Himmler, Goering, and Keitel. The Fuehrer called them into immediate conference and ordered that no minutes were to be taken of the meeting. There is not much doubt that by this time he knew what he was going to do. He had reached the state of mind that could deal with the escaping prisoner problem by one method only.

Keitel later reported that Hitler was “very excited” as he told them what had happened. Himmler immediately blamed Keitel for it. It would take, he said bitterly, 70,000 police and God knows how many working hours to recapture the escapees. Goering blamed Keitel, too, and Keitel in turn blamed Himmler and Goering, and a heated three-cornered argument developed in front of the angry Hitler. Keitel said they were Air Force camps and therefore Goering’s ultimate responsibility. He would not, he said, endure any more reproaches in the presence of the Fuehrer.

Hitler squashed the argument.

“They are all to be shot on recapture,” he said flatly.

At tactfully as he could, Goering protested — not, be it said, on grounds of humanity, but of practical politics.

To shoot them all, he explained, would make it quite obvious that it was murder. Besides, there might be reprisals taken on German prisoners in Allied hands.

Hitler apparently saw the logic of this.

“In that case,” he said, “more than half of them are to be shot.”

Keitel and Himmler held a private conference afterward to plan the shootings, and later that day Keitel saw Generalmajor Von Graevenitz, his staff officer in charge of prisoners of war, and told him that more than half of the recaptured prisoners were to be shot.

Von Graevenitz, a regular Wehrmacht officer, was disturbed by the news. “We cannot just shoot these officers,” he said, and the angry Keitel shouted at him, “The time has come for an example to be made, or we will not be able to cope with escapes. This ought to be such a shock that prisoners won’t escape any more. Every prisoner must be told about it.”

That night Himmler spoke to his second in command, Kaltenbrunner, in Berlin, and in the morning Kaltenbrunner issued the text of what has since become known as the “Sagan Order.”

“The increase of escapes by officer prisoners of war is a menace to internal security. I am indignant about the inefficient security measures. As a deterrent the Fuehrer had ordered that more than half the escaped officers are to be shot. Therefore I order that Kriminalpolizei are to hand over for interrogation to the Gestapo more than half of the recaptured officers. After interrogation the officers are to be taken in direction of their original camp and shot en route. The shootings will be explained by the fact that the recaptured officers were shot while trying to escape, or because they offered resistance, so that nothing can be proved later. The Gestapo will report the shootings to the Kriminalpolizei giving this reason. In the event of future escapes my decision will be awaited as to whether the same procedure is to be adopted. Prominent personalities will be excepted. Their names will be reported to me and my decision awaited.”

S.S.-General Mueller, Berlin Gestapo chief, and General Nebe, Kriminalpolizei chief, sent for Wielen, and that night they showed the Sagan Order to the Breslau police chief and sent him back with orders that Oberregierungsrat Scharpwinkel, Gestapo chief in Breslau, was to form an execution squad to dispose of the escapees caught in the area.

Scharpwinkel appointed one of his trusted lieutenants,
Obersekretaer
Lux, to head the squad, and he and Lux chose half a dozen men to help him.

In Berlin, General Nebe told Mertens, his secretary, to bring him the record cards of the recaptured prisoners. He sat at his desk looking at them and sorted them into two piles on his desk. Mertens remembers him looking at one card and saying,
“Der muss dran glauben”
(“He is for it”) and putting the card on the bigger pile in front of him. Later, looking at another, he said, “He is so young. No,” and he put it on the other pile.

Nebe marked the cards on the larger pile with red crosses. Mertens said he was grimly excited and behaved “uncontrollably.”

Top secret teleprint messages went out to Gestapo bureaus which had reported recapture of some of the escaped prisoners. The first message said firmly, “In five minutes a message will be coming over which is for the eyes of the senior official of the bureau only. No one else will be standing by the machine when it comes over.”

A few minutes later the teleprinters tapped out the main message. It ordered the shooting of the officers being held, as laid down by the Sagan Order, and commanded absolute secrecy.

They arrested Von Lindeiner on the Sunday morning, on Goering’s orders. He was confined to his room. Pieber reported later in the compound that he had gone to bed with a heart attack. That same morning Von Lindeiner heard that some of the escaped prisoners had been lodged in Sagan Civil Jail. He rang Dr. Absalon and asked that they be returned to the camp. Absalon refused insultingly. He said he wouldn’t take any orders from Von Lindeiner because Von Lindeiner had been relieved of his post.

About midnight on the Monday night the nineteen men huddled on the bug-ridden bunks in the big community cell at Sagan Jail heard tramping feet outside; the door swung open and in walked a collection of sinister-looking men who bashed them to their feet with tommyguns. The newcomers were all in civilian clothes, but it was a kind of uniform dress: they all wore heavy overcoats with belts and had black felt hats pulled down over their eyes. Marshall thought they looked like Hollywood’s typical gangsters.

They prodded the nineteen outside and herded them into the back of a big covered in truck which shortly moved off. Marshall thought they were being taken back to the camp, which was only a mile or so away, but the truck kept going, and he soon realized that they were on their way somewhere else. He thought it might be another camp, and Valenta asked one of the guards who was sitting by the tailboard, nursing his tommygun and morosely surveying them. For answer he got a grunt and an ugly look. They could not see much outside the truck, and it was quite dark anyway so they just sat there quietly and not very happily.

It was nearly 3 A.M. when someone up by the tailboard said he thought he could see houses on each side, and soon he reported that they were running over a cobbled road and seemed to be in a largish town. The truck slowed and passed under what looked to be a stone arch, and a few yards further on it braked to a stop.

The guards piled out shouting “
Raus! Raus!
” and formed a cordon around them as they dropped one by one over the tailboard. In the darkness they could dimly see they were in a cobbled courtyard surrounded on all sides by stone walls about three stories high, pierced by little windows. There were bars over the windows. Evidently they were in a jail. Not so good!

At gunpoint, the guards herded them through a door, along gloomy stone corridors, and up a couple of flights of stairs. At the top they were pushed, four at a time, into tiny cells about six by nine feet. Three-quarters of the floor space in each cell was taken up by a wooden platform about a foot high. That was supposed to be the communal cell bed. Exhausted and hungry, the fours in each cell crowed together on the platforms for warmth and slept fitfully.

Crashing doors woke them at first light, and guards brought in their breakfast, a thin slice of black bread and a cup of ersatz mint tea, cold and horrible. No milk. No sugar. Funnily enough everyone was in fairly high spirits. They hadn’t the faintest idea what was going to happen, and for the time being anyway, they didn’t let it bother them.

They inspected the new quarters. Not much to see. Four bare stone walls of dirty white, a concrete floor, thick steel door, and high up in the walls a small window, heavily barred. Looking at the window they could see that the walls were nearly two feet thick. It wasn’t very cold just then, and they relaxed on the wooden platforms and started yarning about their experiences since they crawled out of the tunnel. It was the first decent chance they’d had to talk, and in lighthearted accounts of their adventures their spirits rose further and they passed an uneventful, though hungry, day.

There wasn’t room in the tiny cells for the usual bucket that served as a latrine in Nazi prisons, but if they banged long enough on the door a guard came eventually and took them to a bucket down the corridor.

The corridor reminded Paul Royle of a submarine — it was narrow, dank, and gray with the forbidding steel doors inset at intervals. The only people they saw for a while were drab-uniformed warders carrying bunches of enormous keys for the old-fashioned locks. All of them were unfriendly.

Later on a doddering old German and a little Polish boy, a slave worker aged about fourteen, came around and perfunctorily cleaned the cells out. Marshall tried to get the boy to talk, but he didn’t seem to understand and the only thing he said, with a sidelong glance toward the door, was “
Deutschland Kaput.
” Supper consisted of two slices of black bread and a bowl of watery soup. They felt just as hungry afterward.

Valenta was getting worried but trying not to show it. Only Marshall knew that Valenta had done intelligence work before he joined the R.A.F. Valenta knew the Nazis rather better than the others. None of them slept well that night.

In the morning guards several times entered the cells and took out one prisoner at a time. No one knew where, or why, and nerves were getting a little edgy. In the afternoon a guard came and took Paul Royle out, escorted him downstairs, out into the courtyard, under the archway, and into the street. It was the first time Royal had walked openly in daylight in a street for four years, and after the confinement of the cells he felt exhilarated just to be looking at people and houses. It seemed a big town, and the guard, who was friendly enough, told him it was Goerlitz, about forty miles south of Sagan and not far from the Czech border.

They walked half a mile, and the guard prodded him into a gray stone building about four stories high and took him up several flights of stairs and into an office where a villainous-looking interpreter with a strong American accent told him to stand up and answer questions. Behind a desk sat an elderly gray-haired man who put the queries through the interpreter.

The questions seemed harmless enough — “Where were you heading?” “What were your plans?” “Where is all your equipment…compass and maps?” “What sabotage directions did you receive?” “What information were you to collect on the way?”

Royle answered simply and as disarmingly as he could. He denied, with a faint smile, that he had had any sabotage directions or intentions to collect information. He had just been four years behind the wire, he said, and he was sick of it. He suggested that the interrogator might feel the same if the positions were reversed.

The interrogator seemed like some sort of civil police official. He did not seem particularly hostile, and after a while he said to the interpreter. “This man is obviously all right.” Royle knew enough German to understand the words and began to feel a little better. The guard took him out after a while and back to the jail, but this time he was put in a different cell.

As every man returned from his interrogation he was put in a different cell, where he found other prisoners whom he had not seen since the night of the break. Evidently there were more of the escapees held there than the nineteen from Sagan Jail.

The interrogations went on for four days. Marshall had a bad time. The men who questioned him were much more hostile than those who saw Royal. As soon as he was pushed into the interrogation room, a heavy-featured English-speaking German got up from a chair, walked heavily across the room, stopped six inches from him, stuck his face out till it was almost touching Marshall’s face, and said ominously, “You’ll never see your wife and children again.”

Not an encouraging start but so obviously meant to intimidate that Marshall became very much on his guard and decided to play dumb. The interrogator behind the desk was a brisk, businesslike man who shot his questions out curtly. Marshall replied innocently to the same innocuous questions that Royle had been asked, and then the interrogator started insisting on knowing what Marshall had done with his papers.

“Papers?” Marshall asked, stalling and playing dumb as hard as he could.

“The papers you got in the camp,” the interrogator said dryly. “You got papers, didn’t you?”

“Heavens yes,” Marshall said. “
The Voelkischer Beobachter
— that’s Goering’s paper, isn’t it? — the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
and the…”