Public Servant, Secret Agent

by Paul Routledge

  Back out in the streets, they tramped about in the blackout before making for the railway station. Luteyn bought tickets for the journey south towards Switzerland. He remembers booking only to Nuremberg although Neave believed he booked right through to Ulm, not far from the Swiss frontier. They waited ‘tired, cold and anxious’ in the station waiting room, Neave again observing his fellow passengers closely. Some, mostly civilians, were poor and infirm; others were soldiers, army clerks in uniform and SS men, marching around ‘like locusts’ requisitioning food and newspapers. ‘Such is total war,’ he reflected.

  Military police were checking servicemen but allowed civilians straight through on to the platform. The two men stood by their train until it was time to board; finding all the seats taken they stood in the draughty corridor. As the train progressed south, passengers got off, making space in the compartments. Neave and Luteyn were, however, reluctant to take up the empty seats for fear of being discovered during a chance conversation. At one point an SS officer with a compartment to himself invited them to join him. Not for the first time Neave’s and Luteyn’s recollections differ. Neave recorded that the officer first asked them if they were Jews but Luteyn denies this.12 It does seem an odd question. At this stage of the war, barely 150,000 Jews survived in Germany, all of whom were required to wear the yellow star. ‘He asked us in, and it would have been dangerous not to do so,’ said Luteyn. ‘We went inside and I put Neave in the corner where he could sleep.’ The SS officer spoke to Luteyn, who told him they were Dutch electrical workers travelling to Ulm. ‘This is how it should be – working for Germany,’ said the officer. He volunteered that his destination was Munich, and then Vienna for a conference. They nodded politely, and took it in turns to sleep. More passengers came in, eyeing their down-at-heel appearance contemptuously, but when the military police asked for their papers, the SS man waved them away with the explanation that they were Dutch Fremdarbeiter (foreign workers). As Luteyn slept, Neave counted off the stations: Zwickau, Plauen, Hof and Regensburg, where they changed trains. They sat in the waiting room, heads resting on a table like the other travellers, until the connecting service took them on to Ulm.

  Here, they were in a sensitive border area, with officials on the alert for suspicious looking individuals. Luteyn tried to buy two tickets for Singen, a German town less than twelve miles from the Swiss frontier. The female booking office clerk understood from Luteyn’s language that he was not German, and asked for their papers. She studied them sceptically before telling them to wait while she called the station police. They stood nervously in a queue in front of the booking office window, the Germans eyeing them ‘as if we were scoundrels’, said Luteyn. He edged Neave towards the door, but when they were almost outside a fat red-faced railway policeman halted them. Luteyn tried to explain that they were electrical workers based in Ulm and were on an excursion to visit an aunt in a village near Singen. The policeman refused to listen, and marched them across the station yard to a police office, where a more senior officer examined their papers. Their Colditz-manufactured documents, ‘stamped’ by the Leipzig police confirmed that they were Dutch voluntary workers being transferred to Ulm. The police lieutenant could make neither head nor tail of the papers but he was impressed by Luteyn’s genuine Dutch passport, issued when he left Batavia (now Jakarta), capital of the Dutch East Indies, in 1936 to enrol in Breda Military Academy. ‘Is this yours?’ he asked, and began to talk in a relaxed manner about the East Indies. Neave kept quiet. The officer sent them under armed police guard to the nearby State Labour Office, a two-storey building ‘guarded’ by men in brown uniforms with spades. On the way, Neave was frantically eating his Ausweis, thinking it would not stand up to further scrutiny. ‘He thought if they saw it that it would be extra time in prison, so he tore pieces off in his pocket and ate the whole thing,’ remembered Luteyn.

  In the reception room of the Labour Office there was a list of offices. Room 26, where the policeman was to take them to verify their identity, was on the second floor. There were no lifts. Their police escort had clearly had enough. ‘You go up there and fix your business, and I’ll find you quarters,’ he said, trustingly. Neave and Luteyn had had enough, too.

  They went up one flight of stairs and found themselves in a long corridor with a metal staircase on one side leading down into a coal shed. They clambered down, climbed through a window, jumped a fence and made good their escape through an open window into the side-streets of Ulm. They crossed the River Donau, unchecked by military guards on the bridge. Luteyn bought a motoring map of the surrounding area and they began walking to Singen. It was still bitterly cold.

  Entering the town of Laupheim further on, they encountered a tramway going in their direction. Night was falling, and in the market square they bought tickets to Stockach, the village nearest the frontier to which they dared book passage. They sat undisturbed, though the object of rustic curiosity, on a bench waiting for the train. Once installed in the wooden compartment, fell asleep, worn out by their exertions. Clattering through the village of Pfullendorf, they reached Stockach at about nine in the evening of 7 January 1942. Watched by an inquisitive railway official, they walked among the white-painted cottages towards Singen. The road became steeper and dense woods hemmed them in on both sides. Great banks of snow lined the route. They walked all night to reach Singen. At one point, they met a Frenchman on the road driving a horse and wagon. Neave challenged him in French: ‘Can you turn round and take us to Switzerland?’ The alarmed Frenchman demurred. From their bearing, he guessed that they were Allied officers. ‘No. It is too dangerous for me. You as officers can have a good time, but if they get me I will be put somewhere rotten. I have a good life on the farm. You can hide. I will not say anything.’13 They continued to hike through the intense cold all night, and before dawn encountered four German woodcutters walking with lanterns to their work in the forest. The men challenged them, asking if they were Poles from a labour camp in the vicinity. Luteyn said they were. The woodcutters did not believe them and sent one of their number off by bicycle to fetch the police from Singen. As on the previous occasion of his escape in Poland, fatigue almost did for Neave. He was all but ready to give himself up. His feet felt like blocks of ice and he hardly cared that they had come so far only to be recaptured. He could only think of warm fires and beds.

  As the fourth man pedalled off, the three remaining men looked uncomfortably at their charges. Then Neave and Luteyn realised that the woodcutters were as scared as they were, if not more. Sensing their opportunity, without saying a word the pair sprinted into the woods at the roadside and continued until they could run no further, sinking at last exhausted into the snow. Regaining their breath, they stumbled on through the forest. According to Luteyn, Neave was by now hallucinating, imagining he was back at university. Neave admits to suffering ‘a kind of delirium, between sleeping and waking’, and thinking he was on the parade ground talking to his colonel. Luteyn snapped him out of it, but it was vital that they find somewhere to rest up for the day before making their final bid for freedom. It was snowing heavily again. Then, crossing a clearing in the trees, they came to a woodman’s hut. They approached it walking backwards, to give the impression that someone had left it rather than entered. They climbed in through an open window and found a couch. Utterly drained, they crawled under a blanket together and slept until mid-afternoon. They were woken at one point by dogs barking, but otherwise they were not disturbed.

  However, one further calamity occurred – this time involving Luteyn. He had taken off his soaking wet shoes before falling into deep sleep. In the bitter cold, they had frozen to the floor. Without shoes, he could go nowhere. They both got down on to the floor and blew on Luteyn’s shoes until the ice melted. All the while they could hear the distant noise of traffic on the road to Singen. From their little map, they gathered they were only two or three miles from the border town. Neave recorded a further meeting with two Hitler Youth, and recalls his readiness to
kill them to ensure his freedom. Once again, however, Luteyn does not remember this incident.

  During the night the two men passed through Singen, skirting a great coal heap in the blackout. Neave recorded in his official report on the escape, now in the Public Record Office, how they walked west from Singen as far as a signpost showing ‘Gottmadingen 4 km’. From there they travelled north and skirted a large wood fringing the Gottmadingen – Singen road, eventually travelling south over the railway line that ran north of the road to a point where the road and frontier met for about 50 yards. An open space lay before them with woods all around. Less than 100 yards away, they saw a German sentry at a barrier stopping cars. At 00.30 on the morning of 9 January, Neave and Luteyn, walking and crawling through deep snow, crossed the road and the open space and thus passed over the frontier. ‘We saw no Swiss guards and no lights,’ Neave reported. After accidentally crossing back into Germany, ‘which we discovered by observing a sentry on our left – i.e. to the east, we followed a compass line to Ramsen and were there interned at 01.00 hours’.14

  Both Neave and Luteyn also left less formal accounts. ‘We knew exactly where to cross,’ said Luteyn. ‘We shook hands and said “OK, let’s go”.’15 He recollected that it was about four in the morning. They navigated a big ditch and floundered across country for a mile or so before entering a forest they knew to be Swiss. ‘Nobody shouted at us.’ It was absolutely quiet, apart from their laboured breathing. Neave’s boots were weighed down with ice, and the effort of wading through deep snow was sometimes too much. They lay down, panting and cursing. Luteyn was blabbering in Dutch and at one point had to be pulled from a deep drift that buried him up to his ski cap. ‘Then,’ recollected Neave, ‘it was my turn to flounder, helpless and distraught, murmuring with a last attempt at humour that Patriotism was not enough.’16 Coming out on to higher ground, they heard a clock chime five and they stumbled on to a road. The dark shapes of buildings materialised on either side, and soon they found themselves in a rural street ending in a church tower. Neave spotted an advertisement for a circus. By the flame of his cigarette lighter he read that it was being held in Schaffhausen, which was in Switzerland. They were in the Swiss village of Ramsen. They had made it.

  7

  Operation Ratline

  Safe in the knowledge that he had reached freedom, Neave’s first instinct was to pray. ‘I thought of kneeling in the snow and thanking God for our deliverance,’ he said later. Luteyn and he shook hands again. At this point, their accounts diverge once again. Neave recollected that they heard the sound of army boots ringing down the street and backed into the shadows in case it was a German patrol. On being challenged, however, they realised it was a Swiss frontier guard and announced their true identity, before performing an impromptu dance together in the main street. Luteyn remembers that they sat down in the snow shouting: ‘Hey Swiss, come on out! Come and get us!’ until a sentry came to investigate.1 On this occasion, unusually, Luteyn’s recollection is the more romantic. Both concur that the Swiss guards took them into their frontier post and warmed them with mugs of hot chocolate.

  Neave was ecstatic. ‘Never in my life, perhaps, will I ever know such a moment of triumph,’ he reflected. Almost imperceptibly, the partnership between the two escapers began to dissolve. A Swiss official requested their personal details, and asked if anyone in Switzerland could speak for them. Neave offered the name of Madame Paravicini, wife of the former Swiss Minister in London, who had been sending parcels and letters of encouragement to Neave and other British POWs for many months. Luteyn could not emulate his social connections. The escapers were taken under guard to Ramsen police station, and allowed to sleep until dawn. A Swiss policeman offered Neave a razor and ‘the great escaper’ was shocked to see his reflection in the mirror: a grey face with cracked black lips and ears raw with chilblains. His eyes were defiant, but he still noted fear.

  The fugitives had one last contact with Nazi territory. The little Swiss train from Ramsen to Schaffhausen ran through a neck of Germany. Its carriages had balconies down each side, guarded by Swiss guards in plain clothes on one side and a German sentry on the other. Safely in the police station at Schaffhausen, the pair were questioned individually. Neave’s interrogation was conducted in French and generally reflected curiosity about life under the Nazis. Having been a closely guarded prisoner of war he could tell them little, though he expatiated on the shortage under the Third Reich of that Swiss delicacy, chocolate. He concluded his interview with a long denunciation of the Germans, whom he described contemptuously as Boches. A highly diverted police official asked him to remember he was now in a neutral country.

  As the first escapers to reach Switzerland in 1942, Neave and Luteyn were welcomed by the burgomaster of Schaffhausen and promptly placed under ‘hotel arrest’ in the Hotel Schwarn, as regulations required. They were not to let it be known that they were escaped prisoners, as the Dutch and British embassies had first to be informed. This quickly proved to be an impossible injunction to observe. In the hotel dining room the escapers sat down to their first proper lunch for two years. Steak and wine were served, and the proprietor joined in the merrymaking. Neave became so drunk he started to speak in a meaningless polyglot language, mixing English, French, German and a few words of Polish. The hotelier soon realised the two men could not handle alcohol and bundled them to an upstairs room where they slept off their meal. The days of ‘hotel arrest’ that followed were amiable in the highest degree. Curious Swiss would come in and buy them drinks, sharing their stories of derring-do in Germany. Neave found the memory of prison slipping rapidly away, except as a topic of conversation with his hosts. He did not forget his arrangement to report his escape, however. He sent two postcards back to Colditz, one in code under an assumed name to a fellow prisoner, the other in English to Oberst Prawitz, the Kommandant. ‘Dear Oberst,’ wrote Neave, ‘I am glad to be able to inform you that my friend and I have arrived safely for our holiday in Switzerland. We had a pleasant journey, suffering the minimum of inconvenience. I hope that you will not get sent to the Russian Front on my account. My regards to Hauptmann Priem. Yours sincerely, A.M.S. Neave, Lieutenant, Royal Artillery.’

  The cards were not posted for several weeks, to give time for the two other escapers, Lieutenant Hyde-Thomson and Lieutenant Donkers, to get out of the castle by the same route taken by Neave and Luteyn. Not until 7 January did the camp authorities find that four officers had actually flown the coop. Nor could they find the escape path. However, on 12 January, three days after Neave and Luteyn crossed into Switzerland, Hyde-Thomson and Donkers were recaptured in Ulm, posing as Dutch electrical workers and trying to buy tickets to Tuttlingen in the frontier zone on the same train. After the first party’s daring getaway from the State Labour Office security at the station had been increased and RAF bombing of the city put the authorities on alert for downed air crew. Railway police soon saw through the disguise of the second pair and arrested them. Thereafter, Colditz escape managers adopted a new policy, that no more than two fugitives would travel the same route. After a diligent search, ‘shovewood’ was found by the Germans on 13 January and closed. ‘The horses, however, had bolted,’ mourned Reinhold Eggers. ‘Two never came back.’ He nonetheless got a week’s leave and a bottle of champagne from the Kommandant for discovering the unusual theatre exit.

  Comfortable as it was, hotel arrest began to pall. Just as they were becoming increasingly impatient, the police came and told them they should pack. From Schaffhausen they were escorted by train south, where they were separated, Neave going to the British embassy in Berne and Luteyn on to Geneva. Despite the intensity of their eighty-four-hour escape ordeal, they were to meet again only three times, once in Switzerland and then in Holland and London many years after the war. Their ordeal did not make them lifelong friends, a testimony, perhaps, to Neave’s self-containment.

  In Berne, Neave was taken through the legation to a side door in the garden leading to a small house next do
or used by the British military and air attachés, where he was welcomed by Colonel Henry Antrobus Cartwright, the military attaché and a war hero in his own right. He had made repeated attempts to escape from captivity during the Great War, succeeding the fifth time, and chronicled his exploits in Within Four Walls, published in 1930 and exactly the kind of reading enjoyed by the young Airey. ‘I greatly respected him,’ he wrote subsequently. ‘His book was a classic and had inspired a new generation of escapers. As a small boy, I had read it with romantic pleasure, and it played a great part in forming my philosophy of escape.’ Cartwright, who served as British consul in Bratislava for two years from 1920, was recalled to government service in the Sudetenland in 1938 before being posted to Berne on the outbreak of war in September 1939. His work as military attaché was useful cover for his role with MI9. MI9’s role was to organise the repatriation of escaped and evading British officers and other ranks from Occupied Europe. It was an offshoot of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Apart from its quasi-humanitarian mission, MI9 was heavily engaged in gathering military intelligence for the war effort. Neave was immediately given a short interrogation, at which point he delivered his assessment of Graudenz aerodrome, the destination of his unsuccessful escape bid the previous year. His volunteering of such useful intelligence material may simply have been an act of soldierly zealousness. It seems unlikely, however, that an officer of Neave’s background would not appreciate the impact of his communication. He had been accused by the Nazis of being a spy and here he was acting like one. Innocently or otherwise (probably otherwise), he was offering himself as a prime candidate for intelligence work. In his first contact with the secret world of the security services, he acquitted himself well and his performance was duly noted.