The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (26 page)

After the shootings, Scharpwinkel ordered Hänsel to drive the
service truck into Halbau to arrange for an undertaker to take away
the corpses for cremation. When reports of the shootings leaked to the British Government via Switzerland, Hänsel was ordered to
another conference, at which Scharpwinkel told him that they were
to say that on March
30
their vehicles had broken down along the
autobahn and that “the prisoners used this opportunity to attempt an escape.”
[15]

The great escape had ended in murder for these six Commonwealth air force officers. Mike Casey, the brilliant RAF Blenheim
pilot who in the camp had managed to hide the priceless forgery tools from the earliest days of the North Compound, died at that roadside.
Also killed there was Australian-born Spitfire pilot Al Hake, who
mastered technical drawing and metalwork so well that at Stalag Luft
III he created the most sophisticated assembly line for the manufac
ture of compasses ever generated from thin air. Fellow Australian
Tom Leigh was also murdered that afternoon. And New Zealand
Flying Officer John Pohe, who had maintained a steadfast sense of
humour throughout his imprisonment at Sagan by signing all official
papers as a Maori tribesman named Porokoru Patapu.
[16]
British-born Squadron Leader Ian Cross had previously made an unsuccessful escape attempt, but this time paid with his life. As did Canadian George Wiley, who had no valuables for the Gestapo to
confiscate that March
30
afternoon since he’d left his watch and a goodbye letter with his roommate back in North Compound the night of the
escape. Somehow Wiley sensed it might end this way.

That night, Scharpwinkel’s execution squad made its way back to
the Görlitz prison. Through the same evening hours, the undertak
er’s vehicles arrived at the roadside where Casey, Hake, Leigh, Pohe, Cross, and Wiley had been shot, and the bodies were carried away to
Görlitz to be cremated. Two days later, on April
1
, the same group of
henchmen, led by
Kriminal Obersekretaer
Lux, handcuffed ten more
Commonwealth air force officers, drove them away from Görlitz,
and killed them en route to Sagan in a similar fashion. This group of
murdered officers included Flight Lieutenants Edgar Humphreys, Cyril Swain, Charles Hall, Brian Evans, and Flying Officers Wally
Valenta, Wlod Kolanowski, and Bob Stewart.

Also killed in this execution were Canadian X Organization committee members George McGill, Pat Langford, and Hank Birkland. McGill was the RCAF navigator told to bail out of his burning Wellington in January 1942 only to learn later that the pilot had managed to get the bomber safely home to Britain; he’d spent twenty-six
months behind wire, providing diversions for other escapers, and
had co-led the team keeping all three tunnels secure night and day; he was dead at twenty-five. Also twenty-five, Alberta-born Pat Langford had survived severe burns bailing out of his Wellington in July 1942
; a self-taught pianist and multi-faceted athlete, he’d served
Canada as an air training instructor, a combat pilot, and at Stalag Luft III was the man responsible for keeping tunnel “Harry’s” trap entrance secret and safe for a year. But perhaps none had given as much of himself to the “operational function” of escaping than Man
itoba’s Hank Birkland; shot down in his Spitfire in
1941
, Birkland had tunnelled at Dulag Luft, Stalag Luft I, and Stalag Luft III, and coped with claustrophobia in a hole, vomiting from lack of oxygen, and the
challenge of tearing tons of earth from beneath his captives’ feet to help his air force mates escape. At the end of three years under
ground, Big Train had tasted only a few hours of freedom for himself.

In total, Lux’s shooters were responsible for murdering twenty-seven of the officers recaptured following the mass breakout on the
morning of March
25
. Simultaneously, another execution squad assembled at a police prison in Zlin, Moravia, where two more of the Commonwealth officers had been brought for interrogation. Despite being temporarily buried in sand during the cave-in the night of the
escape, Tom Kirby-Green had emerged from “Harry” thirtieth on
the escape list. Canadian Gordon Kidder came through the exit hole right behind him. The two were masquerading as migrant Spanish workers; both were fluent in German, French, and Spanish, so their
linguistic abilities put them high on Nebe’s hit list. They had managed to get through the air-raid blackout at the Sagan station and over the next three days travelled by train unnoticed as far south as Hodonin, in Moravia, where they were recaptured. Severe interrogation went on for twenty-four hours. Then, about
2
a.m. on March
29
, under the direction of
Polizeiassistant
Erich Zacharias, Kidder and Kirby-Green
were loaded into two cars, apparently for the trip back to Breslau.
One of the two Gestapo drivers, Friedrich Kiowsky, recalled the pris
oners being manacled with their hands in front of them.

“As I was driving, I asked [Erich] Zacharias what was going to happen to them,” Kiowsky reported. “Zacharias sat beside me and
said nothing, but turned his thumb downwards. . . . At the same time he told me to drive slower and looked around the countryside.”
[17]

About six miles from Moravska Ostrava, Zacharias ordered Kiowsky to stop his vehicle at the side of the road. Without realizing it, Gordon Kidder played into Zacharias’s hands by asking if he could
relieve himself. Zacharias directed Kidder and Kirby-Green (from
the second vehicle) with their guard Adolf Knueppelberg to the curb. It was all going according to the Gestapo plan.

“Knueppelberg raised his right hand holding the pistol, with the barrel pointing in the direction of the back of [Kirby-Green’s] head,”
[18]
Zacharias said. “I drew my service pistol, which was all ready for firing . . . and fired obliquely in the left side of my prisoner [Kidder] in order to hit his heart.”
[*]

To complete his action, Zacharias fired a second shot at Kidder’s
head, then crouched to check for a pulse and called to Knueppelberg
[**]
to make sure that Kirby-Green was also dead. When the first shots were fired, Kiowsky, then lighting the cigarette of the fel
low driver, turned to see what had happened. First he saw blood all over the snow, then the two air force officers lying dead in the ditch, and finally the two senior Gestapo officials removing the handcuffs
from Kidder and Kirby-Green. Half an hour later, a van from the
Czech police force arrived to pick up the bodies. Gestapo higher ups told all those present to report that the two air force officers had been shot while attempting to escape.

“I saw nothing that gave me the impression that the officers had wished to escape or had made the attempt,”
[***]
Kiowsky said.
[19]

Among the other Commonwealth officers murdered outside
Hirschberg by Lux, was James Wernham, the Winnipegger who had survived the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne in May 1942 and then the rigours of numerous productions in front of kriegies
at the North Compound theatre. Meanwhile, Nils Fugelsang and
fellow Norwegian officer Halldor Espelid, who’d been given Canadian pilot Dick Bartlett’s escape number just before the breakout, together had attempted to make their way to Denmark; they were
recaptured near Kiel on March
26
and then handed over to a hired Gestapo gunman, SS
Sturmbannführer
Johannes Post.
[*]
In a most macabre sequence of events, Post interrogated Espelid, Fugelsang, New Zealander Arnold Christensen, and James Catanach, the Australian bomber pilot decorated with the DFC and promoted to
squadron leader in 1942 when he was only twenty.

Following his orders with particular zeal, Post had manacled the four air force officers with handcuffs behind their backs and loaded them into two cars—Espelid, Fugelsang, and Christensen into one
vehicle, and Catanach into the other, Post’s own staff car. En route through the city of Kiel, Post had directed his driver stop at a resi
dence so that he could pass on a set of theatre tickets that (because of Post’s orders to execute the prisoners that afternoon) he would not
be able to use. Post even chatted to Catanach about the landmarks the vehicle passed, Catanach noting that he recognized them from previous combat operations over Kiel. Suddenly Post remarked, “I
am going to shoot you.”
[20]

Catanach smiled at what he thought a tasteless joke and countered, “I have an appointment in the cooler at Stalag Luft III.”

“Those are my orders,” Post confirmed. At a field outside of Kiel,
the destination Post had chosen to carry out the order, he ordered
his prisoner out of the car and repeated his statement, “I have orders
to shoot you.” In the awkwardness of moving into the field on the
premise of allowing the POW to relieve himself, Post’s nervous assistant gunman accidentally fired a shot from his pistol. Afraid the man
might botch the execution, Post pulled out his own pistol and shot Catanach through the heart. Moments later, when the second car
arrived, Christensen, Espelid, and Fugelsang were quickly escorted
to the same spot and shot at close range. Post later claimed proudly it was he who had killed “these terror-fliers. . . . For the glory of the Führer I have killed any number of sub-humans.”
[21]

While the Gestapo squads translated Nebe’s paperwork to physical execution for some, those spared his death sentence were returned
to do time in the cooler at Stalag Luft III. First, Bernard “Pop” Green and Doug Poynter arrived from Hirschberg. Alex Neely arrived from
Berlin. Next, the first of the Canadians, Keith Ogilvie and Tommy Thompson, came back from Görlitz with Alistair McDonald and Paul Royle. Also transported from Görlitz back to Sagan were Shorty Armstrong, Tony Bethell, Les Brodrick, Dick Churchill, Johnny Marshall, Michael Shand, Bob Nelson
[*]
and Canadian Bill
Cameron. The cooler at the North Compound was so busy following the mass escape, each cell contained four or five men. But the arithmetic quickly became obvious. Of the eighty kriegies who’d
emerged from the tunnel the week before, only fifteen were back in
the compound. And when the officers emerged from the cooler to
share their individual stories, they tried to calculate what had happened to the scores of others they had seen recaptured.

It took nearly two weeks, but the ripple effect of the Sagan Order finally arrived at the North Compound on April 6, 1944. As George Sweanor remembered it, Hans Pieber came into the compound late
that morning and summoned Group Captain Massey to a meeting with
Oberst
Braune at the
Kommandantur
. Leaning on his cane
and
accompanied by Squadron Leader Philip Murray, his personal interpreter, Massey accompanied Pieber out of the compound. The two Senior British Officers were inside the
Kommandantur
less than
thirty minutes. Just after noon, word spread that a senior man from
every
room was expected in the theatre on the double. In minutes, three
hundred kriegies occupied the Red Cross crate seats.

“As senior man in my room I left on the run,” Sweanor wrote. “Massey limped onto the stage and came right out with, ‘The new
Kommandant
has just informed me of the shocking, unbelievable
news that forty-one of the escaping officers have been shot.’

“I was half expecting such an announcement. I raced back to my room to report. ‘The bastards have shot forty-one!’ I repeated the SBO’s words.”
[22]

One of Sweanor’s hut mates mocked him for being so gullible. He said the announcement was just a bluff to stop the remaining kriegies
from attempting another escape. Sweanor hoped his fellow officer
was right, but knew the news of the executions had to be true. Amplifying his certainty, Sweanor heard Hans Pieber imploring the kriegies
not to blame the Luftwaffe. The shootings were committed by the
Gestapo in response to the escape, he emphasized, not by his air force.

When Keith Ogilvie finished his term in the cooler, he immediately ran into Red Noble and got the latest news.

“They shot all those guys,” Noble said, “trying to escape.”

“That’s not so, Red,” Ogilvie retorted. “These guys were fine. I saw them. There’s no way they could re-escape.”
[23]
Until then, Ogilvie considered his brush with the Gestapo as little more than a fling away from the camp. All he and his mates wanted was to get back to the air force camp and wait for the end of the war.

A few days later, the Germans posted a comprehensive list of the
officers shot. Someone counted the names. There were forty-seven
names on it, not forty-one! Among the revised list of dead was Big
X. Roger Bushell and Free-French officer Bernard Scheidhauer had been captured en route to France at Saarbrücken station and executed nearby on March
29
. Also shot that day by the Danzig Gestapo were Gordon Brettell, who had escaped previously with Canadian Kingsley Brown in
1943
, and Tim Walenn, the man who had directed many of the camp’s printers, journalists, artists, cartoonists, photographers, and calligraphers in the production of official documents—all perfect
forgeries—to ease the passage of his fellow escapers.