The Great Escape (35 page)

Thost and the Dodger went on to Munich, stayed a day or two in a little hotel in the mountains to the south, and on April 25 reached the Swiss border at Lake Constance. That night the Dodger left Thost and walked up to the Swiss police at St. Marguerita. In a couple of days he was lunching in Berne with army intelligence officers, and within a week the R.A.F. landed him in England.

It was two days before V.E. Day that the Dodger dined with Churchill and the American Ambassador, John Winant, and told them of his adventures. When he got to the part about Schmidt and no unconditional surrender, Churchill took the cigar out of his mouth and grinned from ear to ear.

Chained to the dungeon floor at Sachsenhausen, Wings Day had passed the time by learning by heart a Hitler speech on a piece of latrine newspaper. In February, he and Dowse, James, and Jack Churchill were unchained and taken by train to Flossenberg Concentration Camp in the Harz Mountains. They heard the volleys of the execution squads there and saw the bodies of the victims being carried past. It was not a comforting sight, and they waited rather tensely for their own turn but no one came for them. After a fortnight they heard the approaching American guns, and just as release was beginning to seem possible the Germans took them out, loaded them into trucks, and drove them to the notorious Dachau, where they were locked in the hut that had been the camp brothel. Again they heard the rifles of the execution squads, and again they waited for their own turn.

They heard American guns again, and just as it seemed once more that release might be on the way, they were taken to a camp up in the hills near Innsbruck. The strain of alternate hope and dread was tearing their nerves to pieces.

After a fortnight the Germans took them across the Brenner Pass to an Italian village. By now they were deep in Hitler’s “Southern Redoubt,” and with them were about fifty more important prisoners. It was uncomfortably clear that they were being held as hostages. Among them were Blum, Pastor Niemoeller, Schuschnigg, Schacht, the Dutch Minister of War, Greek generals, Italian generals, a nephew of Molotov, a son-in-law of the King of Italy, and a sprinkling of princelings.

Wings got away from the party, met an Austrian called Toni, and got him to drive him in his car to Bolzano. He contacted the Italian Resistance and continued on by car and foot toward the Allied Lines. He joined in the fighting in one town and took over the Gestapo headquarters in another. He commandeered another car, drove full tilt throught the German lines, and with a bursting feeling of exhilaration reached a forward American patrol. It was his ninth escape since being shot down in 1939, and at last he had made it. It was one day before the Italian Front Armistice.

It was from Wings Day that the Allies learned about the colony of important prisoners up by the border. The Americans sent a column pelting up to the border and rescued them just in time. The Germans had had orders to shoot them.

And North Compound?

About the time of the Hitler bomb plot in July, 1944, “George” was creeping out under the theater toward the wire. “George” was “Harry’s” successor, and Crump and Canton had cut a trap for it under a seat in the twelfth row of the theater. They were dispersing the sand under the floor, and a reformed “X organization” was very active, though there was no definite policy, just yet, on mass escapes. We wanted to get “George” finished first, and then see what the situation was.

A few weeks later the contacts picked up a few hints from Pieber and one or two others that if Germany fell — and nothing was surer — the camp might be wiped out. After the shooting of the fifty that seemed logical enough. We had no illusions as to the popularity of the Allied Air Forces. Wilson, the S.B.O., formed the Klim Klub. “Klim” was the name of a milk powder in the food parcels, but the Klim Klub was the camp self-defense unit. Everyone was in it — the whole compound population being split up into sections, platoons, and companies. There were secret lectures and training, and a special commando company was to have the honor of having their heads blown off first as shock troops. I don’t suppose there was much we could have done, but if the regrettable business of impromptu demise had to be faced, it was better to be doing something about it rather than be sitting on one’s bottom waiting for it.

Over in the kommandantur, a German stenographer, disgusted at the shooting of the fifty, sent in a message by a tame guard that she had heard through her work that all prisoners who escaped henceforth were to be shot. A bony-faced Scot called McCulloch wanted to try it anyway, but “X” wouldn’t let him. He argued and argued until, rubbing their chins dubiously, they agreed to let him try.

He got out hiding under a pile of empty tins in one of the garbage wagons but was back in the cooler a couple of hours later, still alive. Some good-tempered Wehrmacht soldiers had nabbed him down the road and brought him straight back to the camp. It didn’t prove anything one way or the other. It was a question of what would have happened if the Gestapo had got hold of him.

By the time the snow came and finished escapes for the winter, “George” had reached just beyond the wire. It was kept there as a bolt-hole in case the rough-stuff started.

In the middle of January, the Russians started their winter offensive and the Ostfront came sweeping toward Sagan like a whirlwind. We were praying they would overrun the camp. They did, but we weren’t there any more. The Germans marched us out on January 26 into a foot of snow and force-marched us more than sixty miles for days and nights to Spemberg, where they loaded us into cattle trucks. It was a fairly grim trip. We’d been on half-issue of food parcels for some months, and they gave us only one meal (barley soup) on the way.

There was one laugh on that march. Glemnitz was back with us for the march. He’d always guessed we had a radio and came tramping along the column of men and boomed affably, “Well, I suppose you’ve brought your radio with you. Who’s carrying it? Who’s got it, eh…you?” (pointing to one man)…“you?” (pointing to another)…“you?” (to a third).

And one or two of us who knew where the radio was felt there was still something to laugh at in life.

Pieber, that kind and prudent man, had parts of it in his attaché case in his car.

We were two days in the cattle trucks. There was just room to sit, but not to move, and after thirty-six hours they
did
give us each a cup of foul water drained off the engine. They let us out of the trucks near Bremen, and we marched to an old condemned camp and waited seven hours outside in the rain to be searched before we entered. A lot of men collapsed at that point. About seventy-five were already missing — about half left at various places through illness and the rest just “missing,” maybe escaped, maybe shot. Of the rest of us, 70 per cent were sick, and everyone had lost more weight, up to thirty pounds. We really hadn’t had that much to spare, and most of us were looking a little bony.

The Allies crossed the Rhine and came surging up toward us, but again the rosy dreams of liberation didn’t come off. They marched us out again, heading north. I’ve got to hand it to the Germans. They were really reluctant to let us go. This trip, though, was a picnic by comparison with the last one. A few people were shot by trigger-happy guards and a few more killed by strafing aircraft, but the weather was good and we traded Red Cross coffee for eggs and bread and stole bushels and bushels of potatoes.

We didn’t know it at the time (just as well) but the guards had orders to execute all of us if we didn’t reach the Elbe by a certain day. We didn’t reach the Elbe by that day but at this late stage the guards were getting rather prudent about mass murders so they decided to overlook the order.

We were sheltering in barns up near Luebeck when we heard the barrage as the British First Army crossed the Elbe. Two days later, on May 2, we heard firing down the road and two tanks rumbled through the trees from the south. We didn’t know whether they were Germans or British, and you could practically see the nerves sticking out of everyone’s skin and vibrating like piano wire. The hatch of the front tank opened, and two Tommies stuck their heads out. We ran up to them screaming at the top of our voices.

It was cold-blooded butchery and we are resolved that the foul criminals shall be tracked down.”

Anthony Eden,

House of Commons, May, 1944.

In August, 1945, Wing Commander Bowes, of the R.A.F. Special Investigation Branch, flew to Germany to find out what had happened to the missing fifty. There was no final proof they had been murdered, though there didn’t seem much doubt about it. Bowes was to find out if they had, in fact, been murdered, track down the people responsible, and arrest them.

He was a good choice for the job, and ex-Scotland Yard detective with no frills about him, a square red face and a reputation for dogged toughness. Back in Victoria’s day, they’d have called him one of the Bulldog Breed. He didn’t have much to go on — the stories of the people who had come back from Goerlitz, the bare German announcements of the deaths, and the urns of ashes engraved with the places of cremation. He naturally suspected the Gestapo, but there was no real evidence to pin on them.

In Hamburg he formed six interrogation teams of four men each, and they toured the length and breadth of Western-occupied Germany questioning captured Germans, now held in scores of thousands in the camps where they had imprisoned us. They couldn’t get into the Russian Zone, or Poland — the Russians wouldn’t let them in — and that was the big snag. Sagan lay now across the new Polish border that had moved forward to embrace German Silesia. So did Breslau. Goerlitz lay half in the new Poland and half in the Russian Zone. In those forbidden cities lay the keys to the mystery.

Day after day, week after week, and then month after month, the interrogators went from camp to camp in the British, American, and French zones, questioning and questioning. One by one, Germans of the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the S.S., the Gestapo, and all the other police forces were marched in front of them. A man might question 250 of them in a day but every time, day after day, with the same result — nothing known.

They concentrated particularly on the areas named on the urns and leafed doggedly through reams and reams of records. They questioned altogether 250,000 Germans. No result. Not the vestige of a clue. The murderers, whoever they were, had covered their tracks and the mystery seemed impenetrable….

Until, in March, 1946, a message came from Prague. The Czechs were holding a Gestapo man named Kiowski who they thought knew something about Kirby-Green and Kidder. Bowes flew to Prague, taking with him another ex-Scotland Yard detective, Flight Lieutenant Lyon, who spoke German.

The Czechs were holding Kiowski in Pangratz Prison, which the Gestapo had used during the war. A Czech officer showed Bowes over it.