The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (17 page)

“So this is where we are going to lose the best years of our
wives!”
[16]
Rees reminded his fellow POWs.

In his first permitted letter home to his wife, George Sweanor wrote a tribute to his Halifax pilot, Pat Porter, who “had not left [the aircraft] via the top hatch as I had thought, but had deliberately sacri
ficed his life to save ours. I felt deep guilt being alive. . . . Would
I ever be worthy of his sacrifice?”
[17]
Sweanor and others thought
Porter’s heroism warranted his receiving the Victoria Cross posthumously, but since so many pilots had died similarly in an air offensive experiencing such high casualty rates, Porter received recognition only by Mentioned in Dispatches. Tangible evidence that his first letter got to Joan arrived at the prison camp about a month later. One day, Sweanor spotted a familiar face coming through the main gate of the North Compound. He waited patiently while the outside guards processed the new arrival and the inside kriegie interrogators passed him. Then he pounced on his fellow 419 Squadron crewmate, Jack Fry. The two men exchanged the latest 419 news. Fry explained that he had been shot down over Stettin on April 20; despite being fluent with his high school German, he’d been unable to get through German checkpoints. Fry assured Sweanor that Joan had received his first letter home as proof he was alive.

Several weeks passed before Sweanor learned about the escape activities that abounded in the compound. His initial contributions were the few bits of escape kit he’d managed to smuggle past the
search guards and into the compound. He joined the outdoor gardening units, mixing regular surface soil with the yellow tunnel sand that passing penguins deposited in their vegetable patches. But Sweanor saved some of his best work for the camp-wide security network, serv
ing X Organization as a stooge. He worked in shifts spying on the
whereabouts of ferrets, the
Abwehr
men in their blue overalls. Stationed outside at the northeast corner of Hut 101, with a full view of
the main gate into the compound, Sweanor would look, for all the
world, as if he were just reading a book or playing a game of chess with another kriegie. In fact, he was the “duty pilot,” logging every German
who entered or exited the compound via the main gate, especially the chief ferret Hermann Glemnitz and his
Unteroffizier
(Corporal) Karl Griese. Because of the nature of his appearance—he had a conspicuously long neck—the kriegies nicknamed Griese “Rubberneck.
”

One day, the Germans appeared to have vacated the compound,
but Sweanor’s log showed Rubberneck still somewhere inside the
prison camp. The Commonwealth officers working as security stooges
narrowed their search to the cookhouse, which they discovered was
locked from the inside. They responded by closing the shutters, so anyone inside the cookhouse could no longer see out. Within an hour, Rubberneck emerged embarrassed and fuming. It wasn’t long
before the duty pilot position at the main gate was openly accepted
by both sides. Even by Glemnitz. One afternoon, the
Oberfeldwebel
himself came through the gate, walked up to Sweanor, saluted, and shouted, “I am in. Mark me down.”
[18]

Sweanor marked Glemnitz in.

“Who else is in?” Glemnitz asked and took Sweanor’s logbook. It showed no other ferrets in the compound. Further, it showed Rubberneck and another guard had just left the compound. Glemnitz was not happy. “Book me out!” he bellowed.

Sweanor learned later that the two ferrets had left their posts too early. Glemnitz punished them—one got four days in the cooler, the other no leave for two weeks. The stooges were beating the ferrets at their own game—surveillance. In fact, in early September 1943, when tunnel “Tom” was discovered, X Organization bounced back even when the Gestapo briefly took over the compound. The secret
police, who descended on Hut
123
and its occupants, were accus
tomed to pushing around civilians, not experienced air force officers. At the North Compound, when the Gestapo men set about searching an area, they armed themselves to the teeth, surrounded the offending area, and then ransacked it, placing anything they fancied—pens, pencils, rope, and anything resembling a tool—in a “swag bag” off to one side. As soon as they put the swag bag down, the kriegies created diversions and began pilfering the contents of the bag back. The net gain invariably favoured the prisoners, not the Gestapo.

“To any but the Gestapo,” Bob Nelson wrote, “it was a well-
known fact that if a workman was sent into a prisoners’ compound, two guards also had to be sent to watch the workman’s tools.”
[19]

A perfect illustration of Nelson’s assessment occurred about the same time as the Italian army in Sicily capitulated to the Allies in the summer of
1943
. Colonel von Lindeiner, sensing a need to
compensate for the Mediterranean setback and ramp up German
morale, sent in a work crew to begin stringing electrical cable for a loudspeaker to broadcast German radio propaganda into the prison camp. The escape committee noted the workers in their midst and organized a diversion to attempt to steal some of the electrical cable. They were too late. Coincidentally, Canadian officer Red Noble had just completed a term in the cooler, so German guards were releasing him back into the North Compound. In strolled the redheaded Noble, carrying his blanket over one arm. He spotted a spool of wire
lying unattended on the ground. Going just a few steps out of his
way, but not missing a beat, Noble snatched the wire, tucked it under his blanket, and disappeared into a hut, leaving the workmen flummoxed as to where they’d mislaid the wire. Noble had pilfered more
than eight hundred feet of wire, which immediately went into the
vertical shaft of tunnel “Dick” for storage and later provided power for the lighting system inside tunnel “Harry.”
[20]

The impromptu Gestapo inspection of the North Compound that autumn may well have appeared to be a bumbling affair, with
the kriegies quickly reversing every measure the secret police instituted or recapturing any contraband their jailers seized. As Nelson
observed, the Gestapo did not appear to understand the nature of
a Luftwaffe prison nor the means of containing its inmates; he ridiculed the Gestapo “searches [as] very ineffective compared to those of the experienced Luftwaffe ferrets.”
[21]
On the other hand, allowing the kriegies to believe they had the upper hand inside the wire may have been part of a greater Gestapo game plan.

In November 1943, Max Wielen, the head of the
Kriminalpolizei
(
Kripo
) at Breslau visited von Lindeiner at the North Compound and toured the site. A system of buried microphones, which the Germans had installed a year earlier, conclusively revealed that throughout the previous six months “large-scale digging was being carried out by the prisoners.”
[22]
However, Wielen’s search of huts and other buildings, according to von Lindeiner, “failed to discover where the tunnels were situated, or at least left that impression in the camp.”
[23]
The
Kripo
chief’s visit to Stalag Luft III was followed by renovations to
several of the compound facilities, including construction to enlarge the camp area. Not surprisingly, during such disruptive renovation (and perhaps not coincidentally as escape activity began to intensify), Luftwaffe administrators were forced to remove the microphone listening equipment. Still more remarkable was that the microphones remained disconnected through the fall and into the new year.

Then, early in 1944, von Lindeiner convened a meeting of district security personnel to discuss ways to prevent camp breakouts. He brought in local security chief, SS Major Erich Brünner, who listened to von Lindeiner’s concerns that a large-scale escape was imminent. However, Brünner stayed at the meeting barely an hour. He merely chatted with von Lindeiner about the problem, carried out no inspections of anti-escape measures, and refused to order the redeployment of the underground microphone listening system. Dissatisfied with the security chief’s response, von Lindeiner went so far as to arrange a meeting among Group Captain Massey, the senior Commonwealth officers, chaplains, and doctors and delivered a special warning to be passed to the prisoners not to undertake a major escape plan.

“Escapers [will] in future suffer very severe penalties,”
[24]
Kom
mandant
von Lindeiner told one of the RAF officers.

This pre-emptive approach was reinforced when the camp adju
tant,
Hauptmann
Hans Pieber, spoke to F/L Henry “Johnny” Mar
shall early in February. Pieber liked Marshall and hinted that the RAF reconnaissance pilot and his fellow POWs might face horrible consequences from higher up the chain of command if they attempted a mass breakout. If they did, he suggested, the Gestapo might respond with lethal force. Pieber’s warning to Marshall, as well as Brünner’s
failure to re-activate the anti-escape defences, and von Lindeiner’s
veiled warning against mass escapes all suggest that German High
Command had already decided it would turn a blind eye to or even encourage a larger escape. And if such a breakout occurred, that would prompt the Gestapo to take matters into its own hands. The
Gestapo, it appeared, was setting a trap for both the Commonwealth
prisoners and the camp’s Luftwaffe administrators. What made the secret police involvement a greater threat to those involved in an
attempted escape was that the German High Command was drafting a restraining order called “
Stufe Römisch
III,” or Grade III, which decreed that any recaptured escaped POW—whether he escaped in
transit, via a mass escape, or on his own—would not be returned to
his military jailers, but instead be handed over to the secret police.
[*]

Inside the wire, with the Gestapo seemingly out of the picture and von Lindeiner and the Luftwaffe guards apparently back in control of Stalag Luft III during the autumn of
1943
, X Organization’s tunnel
activity went on hiatus. While the diggers and penguins enjoyed a
well-deserved rest, the pause did not signal a decline in escape com
mittee activity. To be sure, Big X entertained one-shot “wire jobs.”
Roger Bushell welcomed kriegies presenting reasonably sound escape plans and travel arrangements that might deliver them out of Germany. To assist, the escape committee would supply potential escapers with some currency, compasses, civilian outfits, and wire cutters.
Among the attempts, a New Zealander and a Canadian thought they
had found another blind spot at the far south end of
the sports grounds. On the designated night, they crawled for seven hours, undetected by searchlights or tower guards, and had all but two wires of the outer fence snipped when a patrolling guard spotted and recaptured them. Meanwhile, the escape committee ramped up production in the map
making, tailoring, and forgery sections.

If Bushell’s grand plan to have hundreds of Allied POWs escape
and fan out across German-occupied Europe was going to succeed, he needed assurance that his escapers would have the appropriate documentation.
[25]
Through his own experiences and listening to tales from fellow officers who’d also tried to get back to Britain, Big X knew
his escapers would need at least a light grey identity card (
Kennkarte
) or, better, a visa (
Sichtvermerk
), plus a pass (
Ausweise
), and likely a brown card (
Dienstausweise
) legally allowing the holder to be on Wehrmacht
property. In addition, if a man were disguised as a foreign worker,
he would require
Polizeitliche Bescheinigung
, a police permit authorizing the worker to be in a specific area;
Urlaubsscheine
, a yellow paper entitling the worker to be on leave to get there; or
Rückkehrscheine
, a pink-coloured form that signified the worker was legally en route to his home country.

For Dean and Dawson, the escape committee’s forgery section, obtaining accurate samples of these documents amounted to only half the challenge. Equally daunting, the forgers had to procure tools and materials—pens, inks, brushes, and paper stock—to generate the
fakes. Initially, Tim Walenn’s forgers worked in an empty room in Hut
120
, in the row of huts farthest from the main gate. His team of
artists, mapmakers, printers, and even carvers spent the better part of a year assembling master documents, finding the ink and paper with which to duplicate them, and then painstakingly replicating. They even built a mimeograph and used razor blades to carve designs into a boot heel for recreating official Nazi stamps with the swastika and eagle emblems. In Hut 120 there were relatively secluded windows, guarded by stooges, where forgers could practise replicating the documents in bright daylight.

I
n one respect, one member of the Dean and Dawson document factory owed the quality of his forgery to Canada’s Group of
Seven artists. Born and raised in Toronto, Robert Buckham had been attracted to sketching and painting as a young man. In the 1930s, he
signed up for art classes at the Art Gallery of Toronto and attended Saturday lectures from established artists such as Arthur Lismer of the Group of Seven.
[26]
Before the war he worked in advertising as an art director. When the war interrupted his career, the six-foot-four Buckham was twice refused by the RCAF for his height; but with the war not going well for Britain in
1941
, he was finally accepted. He’d flown ten combat operations with
428
Squadron
when his Wellington bomber was shot down by a night fighter in April
1943
. At Stalag Luft III, X Organization forgery section leaders Tony Pengelly and Tim Walenn were delighted to learn Buck
ham was an artist.