One of the barn doors was padlocked but the other was secured only by a wooden bar held in place by twisted wire which the corporal had already loosened. It was the work of moments before they were out in the open farmyard. Through the dark, they could make out the farmhouse, which was used by Germans as a mess. A dog growled and then barked, and they froze as an officer looked out to satisfy himself that there was nothing untoward, before bolting the door. Clambering over a high wooden fence, they could make out the profile of low hills where the Germans had an artillery firing range. They walked quickly across marshy ground, fearful of the noise of tracker dogs and torchlight pursuers, but they had got clean away. Neave rapturously breathed the fresh air of freedom. ‘It was like walking on air,’ he remembered. They stumbled through a landscape pockmarked by shell holes. Their route took them into a wood, along rides between the trees towards the town of Alexandrov, some twenty miles distant. Occasionally, they saw lights and once, near a small settlement, a dog disturbed the night silence. They hurriedly took refuge in the dark banks of trees.
It was hard work. The heavy rucksack of tinned food dug irritatingly into Neave’s shoulder, while beneath his thin workman’s clothes he sweated in thick Red Cross underwear. By 4. 30 in the morning they had covered ten miles, and stopped to fortify themselves with chocolate and an apple. A cold wind sprung up, bringing rain. Swinging his tins of sardines and condensed milk on to aching shoulders, Neave and his companion trudged on. There was no mistaking the amateurish nature of their enterprise: ‘These were the pioneer days of 1941, when escape was not a science but an emotional outburst,’ he admitted later. ‘I thought of an escape as a kind of hiking tour … as for Forbes and myself, we were tramps or hoboes, glad to be at large.’4
Dawn found the pair by the railway line which ran from Podgorz and Sluzewo, checking their compass to keep on a southeasterly direction to Warsaw, 150 miles away. They tramped on, bypassing Alexandrov and keeping to the fields to avoid German patrols. The early morning rain turned heavier, soaking and dispiriting the pair. They took refuge in a Polish farmhouse, where two young women watched wordlessly as they stripped naked and dried their clothes before the open fire. Resuming their march through sodden fields, they came upon evidence of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg on Poland in the autumn of 1939: Polish army helmets perched atop rough white crosses, burned-out farmhouses and barns, a shattered chapel with a crucifix broken in two. At nightfall, lost in a labyrinth of cart tracks, they sought shelter in another Polish farmhouse. A farmworker listened to them ask the way to Wlocawek (German Leslau), smiled and answered in English. The farmer there was ‘Tscherman [German] … very bad’. He suddenly appeared, shouting at the farmworker as if he were a dog, and the escapers fled. Deeper in the countryside, they came on another farm, where they were welcomed by the old man of the house and his two daughters. Neave stood awkwardly in the living room, pointing to his soaked and torn trousers. The old man spoke to one of his daughters and she left the room, returning with a pair of peasant’s corduroy trousers. They had no fly buttons and Neave cut off the buttons from his painter’s trousers for the girl to sew on, which she did, blushing and giggling. No money changed hands. Neave was conscious of the dangers the family ran in helping them. Another Pole came to warn that the German farmer was looking for them, and fear was evident in the way they talked. ‘A great feeling of guilt ran through me as I witnessed their terror,’ Neave recalled. ‘Was it to destroy these simple lives that I had escaped?’5 They could sleep in the barn, said the old man, but they must leave at dawn.
After a fitful night in the hay, the pair resumed their forced march to Wlocawek. Neave shaved by a stream and cooled his blistered feet. He reflected how oddly domestic it seemed, using Elastoplast to dress his sores. By mid-afternoon on their second day of freedom, they reached Wlocawek. Resting by the River Vistula, they were spotted by a German officer, who went away without speaking. Once in the town, they were overwhelmed by the ubiquity of Nazi flags and emblems, even above the doors of workmen’s cottages, until they realised the date: it was 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. In Wlocawek Neave witnessed an act of thoughtless Nazi brutality: a young SS thug assaulted a Jew wearing the Star of David on his back for not saluting his troop, sending the man flying into the gutter and his hat across the road. No one dared pick it up. That evening, they again sought refuge at a farm but realised they were among the enemy. The family was German, the boy of the family sporting a swastika belt bearing the legend Gott Mit Uns. They escaped into the cover of a pine forest and huddled together for warmth, worn out by their ordeal.
By the third morning of their escape, Neave was in a state of physical exhaustion. The regime of a poor diet and lack of proper exercise during almost a year of captivity was taking its toll. He felt that he had ‘lost his feet’, which had deteriorated to ‘raw stumps’ dragging along the ground. Their pace slowed. Hauling themselves painfully along rough tracks, they halted from time to time to sleep and regain their strength. Apart from a lonely woodman, they met no one. They crossed the Vistula by a rail bridge taking the line south from Plock, and in the evening approached the village of Gombin. It was empty and unwelcoming. They stumbled on the road to Warsaw, looking for shelter but finding none. The pair lay down in a ploughed field, endeavouring to sleep but waking regularly to keep their circulation going. Their reserves of chocolate had gone, forcing them to eat a revolting mixture of condensed milk and tinned sardines. ‘I thought the night would never end,’ recollected Neave.
When it did, they set off without breakfasting but with as much vigour as they could muster to reach their goal, Warsaw, by nightfall. Trudging across interminable ploughed farmland, they reached the agricultural town of Itow, thirty miles from the capital. Beyond Itow they would be in the frontier zone of the General-Government of Poland, the remnant of Polish territory left between the Russians and western Poland handed over to German nationals. They had no papers to enter this zone and only a haphazard idea of where the actual frontier lay. Three miles further on from Itow, they came to another run-down village, and asked a woman where the border was. Nervously, she replied ‘It is here’, and fled. Pain and weariness conspired to rob them of vigilance as they walked through the village, towards the frontier post alongside a guardhouse, which was apparently unmanned. They strode through the gate, straight into the arms of two watching German sentries sitting by the roadside, rifles by their sides. They did not have the strength to run away. The soldiers, remembered by Neave as big, stupid and fresh-faced, asked them for their papers. Forbes, the German speaker, admitted that they had none. But everyone had to have papers to cross the General-Government, the soldiers insisted. Surely these men knew that. ‘We were only going to visit our mother, who is sick in Sochaczew,’ said Forbes. ‘This is my brother.’ They were led into the guardhouse where a German official, a whip hanging on the wall behind him, bawled ‘Attention, Polish swine!’
He then instructed the sentries to take Forbes outside while he interrogated the exhausted Neave, who mumbled his prepared explanation that he was a Volksdeutsch from Bromberg. Desperate with fatigue, his brain refused to function. He forgot his limited stock of German and spoke haltingly. The official laughed and brandished the whip in his face. Neave stuck to his story, hoping to give time for Forbes to make a run for it. ‘I could not. I no longer cared that I was caught again or even if this brutal official were to flog me to death,’ he admitted.6 After a few minutes, Neave gave up the unequal struggle and brought from under his shirt the metal disc identifying him as Prisoner of War No. 1198. His enthusiastic but ill-prepared bid for freedom was over. Had his grasp of German been better, or his exhaustion not so complete, he might have bluffed his way through. It was not to be.
Pandemonium broke out. Forbes was brought back into the guardhouse, and another official woke from his sleep and joined in the general clamour. Neave’s co-escaper tried manfully to cope with their accusations. ‘You are not Englishmen, but Polish spies,’ they cried. ‘This
is a matter for the Gestapo.’ Neave’s accuser gabbled down the telephone, his dog-tired prisoners barely understanding what was being said. They were then marched back to Itow by a soldier, who, conscious of their condition, did not hustle them. Neave noticed Forbes discreetly tearing up his map of Graudenz aerodrome, which might suggest they were indeed spies, and panicked. Where had he put the other copy? From the police station at Itow they were driven back under guard to Plock, which turned out to be a down-at-heel town swarming with SS. Their lorry dropped them outside a modern block and Neave’s heart missed a beat. By the door, he saw a board carrying the legend ‘GESTAPO’. Their worst fears had been realised.
The two men were taken to a small room where an SS officer and an interrogator in plain clothes asked them more questions and ordered them to empty their pockets. Pitiful remnants of their bid for freedom – bits of chocolate and bread, scraps of paper, a match box disguising a compass – spilled on to the table. The plain-clothes interrogator sorted through these items disdainfully and then seized on a small, folded piece of paper from Neave’s wallet. It was the map of Graudenz aerodrome. ‘So, my friends, you are from the Secret Service!’ he said triumphantly. Unbeknownst to Neave, Graudenz was a bomber station, from which the Luftwaffe would attack the Soviet Union at the outset of Operation Barbarossa only two months later.
Neave was taken to an upper floor where a young, uniformed SS officer questioned him closely in English, while a typist took down his answers. Years later he confessed, ‘I was in great terror, though I tried to appear calm and innocent.’7 Neave insisted to his interrogator that he had got the idea from other prisoners, working near Graudenz, which was half true. He had been inspired by the Canadian flying officers at Thorn and had planned to escape by stealing an aeroplane, because Forbes was a pilot. ‘You are lying,’ said his inquisitor. ‘You are a spy. You were taking this to the Russians.’ Neave maintained that they were not, and told the curious officer that they were trying ‘the same game’ as the Canadian escape, of which his captor was unaware. The SS officer telephoned Thorn camp and received verification that there had been just such an escape bid, and that prisoners Neave and Forbes were indeed missing. Gradually, the tension eased. They were joined by another SS man, and began talking more casually about the war, referring to a map on the wall. Neave’s brave sally that Britain would win the war prompted cynical laughter. They asked if Polish peasants had helped their escape, and Neave, still wearing his peasant’s corduroy trousers, diverted the questioning to German mistreatment of the Poles. The SS men showed utter contempt for the Poles and their Catholicism, but they ceased interrogating him about spying. Neave’s composure gradually returned. He asked his blond young interlocutor what he had been doing before the war, and, with his resentful admission that he had been at university studying for his doctorate of philosophy, the interrogation ended. Neave and Forbes were marched through the streets of Plock under armed guard to the town prison and put into solitary confinement. Their pathetic civilian disguises were exchanged for coarse grey prison clothes. Neave slept for several hours before being roused for his evening ‘meal’, a bowl of swill containing bad potatoes and swedes. The Polish orderly boy, in prison clothes, whispered that the other inmates knew their identity, and managed some patriotic sentiments before continuing his round.
But Neave’s ordeal was not yet over. Above the door of his cell a notice identified him as ‘Neave, Airey. Spion’. For two days, he recovered in his cell, sleeping most of the time between ‘lunch’ of bread and turnip soup and a half-hour exercise period. Separated with Forbes from the other inmates, he hobbled round the prison courtyard, quietly exchanging details of their interrogation. To Neave’s relief, Forbes had given the same story about the aerodrome map. They had already concocted an agreed version of their escape from the camp, exonerating British other ranks. Neave’s reverie was interrupted some days after the initial interrogation by his gaoler’s curt insistence: ‘The Gestapo wants you.’
Back in the Gestapo building, he had a new, more vicious interrogator, this one with close-cropped black hair and a scarred face. He was just finishing questioning a defiant Polish woman, to whom Neave offered a sympathetic smile. ‘Go on, smile you English officer,’ raged his Nazi debriefer. ‘You started this war. You brought these Poles into it. Both of you are spies! Spies! Spies!’ The SS man glowered at Neave, with, as he thought, ‘murder in his eyes’, and challenged his cover story. The Graudenz map, he shouted, must have come from a Pole. Neave reiterated that it had come from a British prisoner of war. Who? He refused to say. Then, English gentleman, added the plain-clothes SS man, he would remain a guest of the Gestapo until he thought better of his obstinacy. Suddenly the officer softened, becoming for a moment a soldier like Neave. The prisoner should not think, he said, that just because he was in civilian clothes he had not fought like the lieutenant. In fact, he had seen action on the Polish Front, and a small ribbon in his button denoted an award for bravery. ‘Go, Herr Neave, and think things over,’ he admonished.
Back in his prison cell, Neave contemplated his position. He trembled at the prospect of further interrogation, fearing that if physically tortured he would reveal more of the truth. He felt defenceless and alone, anxious lest he face execution like the Polish officer in the cell opposite sentenced to death for killing a Gestapo agent. He prayed, cursed and patrolled his cell agitatedly. ‘I closed my eyes, and despair came over me like a great fog,’ he wrote later.8 ‘I could not see a way out of the darkness.’ In his dreams he was tramping through swamps of dark, stagnant water on the road to Russia, the way marked with the bones of former travellers. The next morning brought relief; he was awoken by the warder who addressed him as Herr Leutnant, and told him he was going back to Thorn ‘with Oberleutnant Forbes’. Once again, he was a British officer. The attitude of his gaolers changed markedly. They were handed back their civilian clothes, including the hated rucksack with its remaining sardines and condensed milk. Neave also retrieved his pipe, tobacco and the box of matches with its concealed compass. With Teutonic thoroughness, everything had been returned, except the map that almost cost him his life. He had memorised the layout of Graudenz, however.
After ten days, the escapers were taken back by train from Plock to Thorn, along the north bank of the Vistula that had been their bearing for Warsaw. They talked amiably of the war to their guards, who knew less than they did. The POWs at Thorn had a radio receiver smuggled in in a medicine ball from Spangenburg. Their welcome at Thorn was less agreeable than their departure from the clutches of the Gestapo. A furious German officer, whose guards had allowed them to escape, drew his revolver and marched them ‘Hande hoch’ to windowless dungeons in the outer wall of the fortress. When they protested at the pigsty conditions a sentry thrust his gun down the ventilation hole into Neave’s cell. ‘If you are swinehounds, you must expect to be kept in pigsties,’ he yelled. Neave threatened to report his filthy language to the Kommandant and the gun was hastily withdrawn.
After a night in appalling conditions, they were locked in a room above the keep, without furniture but for two beds, while weighing over their failed escape bid. They came to one maddeningly simple, but vitally important, conclusion. They had tried to cross the Polish countryside too quickly and without method. ‘We had, as it were, charged the barricade of the General-Government frontier without calculation,’ he decided. And yet they had got so close to Warsaw. It would have been comparatively simple to skirt the ill-defined border through the woods and make their way to the capital. Moreover, in such inhospitable terrain, an escaper had to understand the strain his vulnerability would place on his spirit. ‘Loneliness and physical stress undermine the most resolute,’ he wrote.9 The escaper must conserve his forces by lying up in the warmth for long periods. The lessons of this failed escape bid were not lost on him.
On being sent back to his room in the fort, Neave found that his short period of freedom had given him fresh strength. He went back to the novels of
Victorian England that reminded him so much of home, and found an inner peace. One night, after he had finished Mrs Henry Wood’s sentimental melodrama, East Lynne, he was roughly roused by a German guard and told that he was being moved immediately. ‘We have had enough trouble with you,’ said the guard. Gathering his few belongings in a bundle, he joined a small party of prisoners among whom he recognised Forbes. ‘Where the hell are we going?’ asked Neave. ‘To the Bad Boys’ Camp at Colditz,’ came the reply.
5
Colditz
High above the Saxony town of Colditz broods an impregnable castle surrounded on three sides by sheer rock precipices, approached only by a narrow cobbled causeway over a deep moat. Infuriated by the frequent escapes of Allied officers, the Nazis decided to concentrate here, in a Sonderlager, or punishment camp, the most recalcitrant of the ‘bad boys’ from other camps in Occupied Europe. Colditz was thought to be escape-proof, and indeed it had proved to be so in the First World War when it housed Allied POWs. The logic was understandable but erroneous. By putting all the most determined officers together in Oflag IVc, the German High Command effectively established an escape academy, which scored an impressive number of ‘home runs’ in the five and a half years of its existence. ‘We made things better for our prisoners by cramming Colditz with new escape material week after week,’ confessed the camp intelligence officer in a frank post-mortem. Every new arrival brought knowledge of new methods of escape, of fresh routes, or documents, of checks on trains and the like. ‘In this castle, the prisoners had the interior lines of communication, and the initiative as well.’1
This did not seem to be the case at all when the first British officers arrived in the autumn of 1940. Captain Patrick Reid, the chairman of the British escape committee, recollected that the prisoners could see their future prison almost upon leaving the station: ‘beautiful, serene, majestic and yet forbidding enough to make our hearts sink into our boots’. Schloss Colditz towered over the town of the same name and the River Mulde, a tributary of the Elbe. The castle was rebuilt on much older foundations, dating back to 1014, in the early eighteenth century by Augustus the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony (known as ‘the Strong’ because of his tireless sexual drive: he is supposed to have fathered 365 children). The castle had seen many sieges and sackings and even its name betrayed its fortunes. Colditz is a Slav word-ending, dating from the time it was occupied by the Poles. Its original name was Koldyeze. The town, essentially an overgrown village, was situated in the centre of a triangle formed by the big cities of Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz. The land surrounding the castle was hilly and wooded, known locally as ‘little Switzerland’, and levelled out northwards into a fertile agricultural plain. It was buried deep in the Reich, 400 miles from the nearest neutral territory, Switzerland.
Public Servant, Secret Agent Page 7
