by Barris, Ted
For the moment, the real action was happening at the exit end of the tunnel. The sentries were marching Bob McBride, Len Trent, Roy Langlois, and Lawrence Reavell-Carter to the guardhouse. In spite of the rifle shot, most of the compound guards inside were still asleep. As the guards were roused by the sentries, the escapers took advantage of a nearby stove and jettisoned their forged papers into the fire. When he arrived, Kommandant von Lindeiner was livid. He demanded to know the number that had escaped, which kriegies had led the escape, and where the tunnel had originated. Finally, he told the four foiled escapers the Gestapo would soon be involved.
“They will shoot you,” he predicted, “get rid of the lot of you.”[29]
On the involvement of forces outside the camp he was right. Within an hour of the discovery of the tunnel, seventy German troops equipped with helmets, machine guns, and Schmeisser automatic pistols arrived at the compound and surrounded Hut 104. Even von Lindeiner, Hans Pieber, and Broili had their revolvers drawn. Over a hundred kriegies began to emerge from the barracks building to face an armed force that didn’t seem the least bit interested in upholding the Geneva Conventions. Outside Hut 104, snow began to fall. The ferrets forced many of the men to strip to their skin. Every man was searched. All the civilian clothes accumulated or altered by Tommy Guest’s tailoring crew were thrown into a pile, leaving most of the kriegies in little more than their underwear against the cold. John R. Harris was wearing clothes that looked more like his uniform, not civilian clothing, so he didn’t have to strip. He tossed a blanket that hadn’t been confiscated to a fellow kriegie without any clothes. Harris had forgotten, however, that he and his partner still possessed an obvious connection to the escape.
“Did you burn the maps?”[30] Johnny Crozier, his escape buddy, suddenly asked.
“What maps?”
“The ones I gave you inside,” Crozier reminded him.
Des Plunkett’s mapmakers had given most of the hard-arser kriegies maps that would guide them away from Stalag Luft III. Since Crozier and Harris would be travelling together outside the wire, the pair had been given a set of nine stencilled maps showing them the country from Sagan south to the Czech border. But in the confusion following the rifle shot and the closing of “Harry” an hour earlier, both men had forgotten to destroy the evidence.
“You never gave me any maps, Johnny,” Harris insisted.
That’s when Crozier realized they were still in his pocket. The Germans could quickly determine the routes the other escapers might be taking if they suddenly came into possession of the stencilled maps in Crozier’s pocket. He and Harris had to get rid of them. And fast.
“Fortunately, I had read many thrillers in my boyhood,” Harris wrote. “We could eat the maps. And that’s just what we did, along with the help of any other prisoners to whom we could surreptitiously pass a map. Some of those fellows never spoke a friendly word to Johnny or me again.”[31]
Nine stencilled maps were the least of the Kommandant von Lindeiner’s worries. Inside Room 23 of Hut 104, a ferret who had entered the tunnel from the exit hole outside the wire had made his way back to the entrance shaft. With “Harry’s” entire length now exposed and nothing left to hide, Red Noble opened the trapdoor to let the man out. Noble and Shag Rees were then ordered outside, where Rubberneck relished the moment of humiliating his nemeses, tearing off their civilian clothes. Noble and Rees pushed back, ready to fight. Rubberneck reached for his revolver. Von Lindeiner intervened and had the two kriegies marched, in the nude, to the cooler. But the German colonel had yet to face the toughest truth of the entire episode.
“At last an appell was called,” Don Edy remembered, “and everyone was turned out onto the sport field under heavy guard. The Germans were beyond themselves with rage. So we did nothing to provoke them further.”[32]
Out came boxes with the name and photograph of every prisoner in the compound neatly catalogued and filed. It took two hours, but every man was identified and accounted for as he stood in the snow. More stressful to von Lindeiner was the process of elimination: Who was missing? As the list of escapers rose eventually to the seventy-six who had managed to get away from the North Compound, George Sweanor watched the Kommandant’s face grow pale. Eventually, he left the compound. Von Lindeiner knew that not only had he failed to keep prisoners of war from escaping, but he was also now in danger of violating the Aktion Kugel and Stufe Römisch III orders by not immediately handing over the four escapers his men had recaptured at the exit hole to the Gestapo.
“Gentlemen,” Hans Pieber said to the kriegies as von Lindeiner left the compound, “you should not have done that to him.”[33]
After the camp offices had completed the inventory of those present or absent, all remaining kriegies were dismissed back to their huts, except those from Hut 104. They stood virtually naked under guard for another hour before the Schmeisser-wielding guards allowed them to dress and re-enter their block. That afternoon, von Lindeiner learned that sixteen escaped officers had been recaptured and were being held at the Sagan civil police station. In spite of the two German High Command orders to the contrary, he demanded his prisoners be returned to the camp. He placed dozens more phone calls, notifying railways stations, airfields, border crossings, and even port authorities along the Baltic about the breakout.
Meantime, Max Wielen, the head of Kripo at Breslau, issued Kriegsfahndung, a nationwide manhunt order, and then Grossfahndung, the highest alert to police stations across the region, advising them to hold recaptured prisoners under the Stufe Römisch III order. Just as Big X had hoped and expected, the manhunt diverted the energies of police, SS, armed forces, Hitler Youth, the Home Guard Air Raid Precaution personnel, and civilian searchers—some seventy thousand Germans[34] —away from the war effort to the recapture of the officers who’d escaped from Stalag Luft III.[*] Later the same day, Saturday, March 25, the German counter-intelligence chief, SS Major Brünner arrived at the Sagan-area prison compound with orders to arrest von Lindeiner in preparation for his court-martial over the escape. The sixty-four-year-old colonel suffered a non-fatal heart attack over the matter.
The North Compound experienced an eerie calm after the original storm on Saturday. All the stories of the events of the mass escape the previous night circulated from hut to hut around the camp. However, scuttlebutt about the seventy-six escapers remained scarce. Von Lindeiner was replaced with a temporary Kommandant. Initially, that didn’t change things, but the sequence of events that had sealed von Lindeiner’s fate was about to overtake the kriegies and the escapers as well.
A Canadian flying officer from Winnipeg was shot down the same weekend as the breakout. At twenty-six, Gordon Venables was older than most RCAF aircrew, and when he tumbled into a farm field that night he broke his leg. F/O Venables came through the prisoner-of-war delivery system in the middle of all the post-escape upheaval. Luftwaffe medical staff set his leg, but he was soon on the move to Stalag Luft III. He was fortunate not to have been swept up and dispensed with in the Stufe Römisch order, but still endured a rough passage to the POW camp. German civilians were riled up by increased Allied bombing attacks on their cities and by the highly publicized mass escape.
“I had a broomstick for a cane,”[35] Venables said. “We arrived at the train station. People were everywhere. To my surprise, a compartment was cleared of passengers for [the guard and me. We] had to change trains at Frankfurt. The city had been heavily bombed . . . with severe damage and loss of lives. He told me to stay close to him as the people were very angry and liable to turn on me. He put me in the cab of the engine, away from the civilians [until] we arrived at the POW camp near Sagan.”
On April 1, 1944, exactly a week after the breakout, the Gestapo arrived at the North Compound and the mass searches of men, belongings, and barracks huts resumed. As usual, the Gestapo men appeared ham-fisted as prison guards, until they started handing out summary judgments. When they inspected “Harry,” the first thing they spotted was the stri
ng of lights up the tunnel. They grilled all the German electricians involved in maintaining the camp, forcing two to confess that the theft of the wire had gone unreported. Gestapo men promptly shot the two men. Next they shot the supervisor for not acknowledging the loss and punished two more prison guards for possessing morsels of food that had come from the prisoners’ Red Cross parcels. The newly installed Kommandant, Oberst Braune, announced there would be four appells a day. He closed the theatre, stopped all mail in and out, and dumped wagon-loads of raw human sewage down the entry shaft of tunnel “Harry.”[36]
What kriegies had known as a “spine-tingling sport” at best, and an uncomfortable existence at worst, was taking a deadly turn.
* * *
* Paul Brickhill suggests information gathered from the tamed German guards at Stalag Luft III put the total number of Germans—military and civilian—involved in the search for the escaped POWs closer to five million.
9
THE HATE CAMPAIGN
* * *
THE FATE of the hard-arsers—as Big X had accurately predicted—was pretty much in their own hands. Or, in the case of New Zealand officer Michael Shand and Canadian officer Keith Ogilvie, their feet. When the guard outside the Stalag Luft III fence fired his rifle, Shand, who was already in the woods, bolted in one direction while Ogilvie crawled for about a hundred and fifty feet, stood up, and started to run in another direction.[1] Whether from fear of being caught by prison guards and interrogated by the Gestapo or just from the shock of the late winter conditions on his system, Skeets kept on running for most of the next forty-eight hours. Perhaps the last kriegie to get away that morning, he had planned to make his way toward Czechoslovakia, but all that mattered initially was to get clear of the compound and the search parties that would inevitably be on his trail. He simply ran west, but since snow covered much of the countryside, he tried to find less travelled roads to put as much distance between himself and the compound as quickly as possible.
“I ran out of food and it was still wet in the trees and the snow. And you couldn’t sleep,” Ogilvie said. “Bloody miserable.”[2]
By Sunday night, he’d managed to cover almost forty miles and had reached a major road heading south toward the Czech border. But the moment he left the relative cover of remote roads and forested areas, Ogilvie—dressed in army battledress and a greatcoat—was spotted by members of the German Home Guard near Halbau, Germany, and taken to a local inn. Knowing his escape bid was over, en route to interrogation, he tore up the maps and forged identification in his pockets[3] and discreetly dropped the pieces when the guards weren’t looking. The inn proved to be a holding cell for several recaptured kriegies. Before long, Ogilvie was joined by RAF officers Charles Hall and Brian Evans as well as Canadian countryman Tommy Thompson. The three had linked up with another Canadian, Bill Cameron, outside the wire in the pine woods shortly after the Germans sounded the alarm at 5 o’clock on the morning of the escape. Within a few hours, Cameron began suffering from exposure to the cold. Hall, Evans, and Thompson wrapped him in all the warm clothing and blankets they could spare, left him some rations, and pressed on.[4] Cameron was soon recaptured near Sagan, the others by the Home Guard in the same region as Ogilvie.
Until early 1944, German police had held very little jurisdiction over recaptured prisoners of war and generally, after brief questioning, returned them to German Armed Forces; in short, the Gestapo could not punish them. In February 1944, however, Heinrich Himmler’s Aktion Kugel, or Operation Bullet, had wrenched control of recaptured POWs from the military, in this case the Luftwaffe at Stalag Luft III, and given it to the Gestapo. Under Bullet, recaptured prisoners other than British or American were to be taken to Mauthausen concentration camp and exterminated. It didn’t matter whether the escape occurred in transit, in a mass breakout, or singly—all recaptured POWs would be turned over to the secret police, not the military authorities, as quietly as possible.
By coincidence, the same weekend of the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III, the leaders of the German Prisoner of War Directorate were en route to Berchtesgaden. They arrived at the Führer’s Bavarian headquarters in the midst of a tempest. Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Wilhelm Keitel had been conferring since word of the mass escape from the North Compound had arrived. Amid the accusations and laying of blame, Hitler decreed that all recaptured escapers would be shot. Göring protested. Ultimately, the weekend conference at Berchtesgaden decided on the number of Commonwealth air officers to be executed. That night, Himmler issued the “Sagan Order” to the POW Directorate and quickly altered the operations at police and military prisons across Hitler’s occupied Europe. Those moves had life and death consequences for the prisoners of war detained in them.
The Sagan Order began by describing the increased number of POW escapes as “a menace to internal security.” Adolf Hitler had initially demanded all eighty Commonwealth air officers who made it out of the tunnel be shot. Ultimately, however, the Sagan Order decreed that “more than half of the escaped officers . . . after interrogation . . . are to be returned to their original camp and to be shot en route.” Had Hitler’s order been carried out to the letter, the Sagan Order might have meant forty killings. But the arithmetic appeared to be lost in the Gestapo’s eagerness to retaliate. Fifty would be killed. Finally, the order spelled out how the killings would be covered up, by declaring that “the recaptured officers were shot whilst trying to escape.”[5]
The man given the job of choosing which fifty men would die was SS Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe. At age fifty, the former First World War explosives soldier turned police detective had served the Nazi Party, the state police, Kripo, and the SS Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA. Three days after the escape from Stalag Luft III, Nebe began receiving daily telegrams on those kriegies the manhunt had recaptured. He then sat in his Berlin office with each POW’s identity card and his record sheet and played god. The factors influencing Nebe’s decision were the prisoner’s age and life status: middle-aged with a family, he lived; not too young and unmarried, he died. In addition, if the POW had led groups of escapers because of his fluency in various languages—a so-called “linguist”[6] —the Gestapo considered him dangerous and therefore expendable. The air officer’s place of birth was a deciding factor too: almost all men of non-British origin and “an unduly high percentage of men from the Dominions”[7] received Nebe’s death sentence. His decisions were passed to subordinate Gestapo officials, first Max Wielen, the Kripo chief, and then to the chief of the Breslau Gestapo, Oberregierungsrat Wilhelm Scharpwinkel. It was up to Scharpwinkel to organize the execution squads and fulfill the Sagan Order.
Late in the evening on Sunday, March 26, security guards escorted Keith Ogilvie and thirty-four other escapers to a Gestapo prison at Görlitz, ironically near the Czech border where so many of them had been headed. Three days later, Gestapo interrogators there questioned Ogilvie about the escape and its organization.
“I’m a British officer and it’s my duty to escape,”[8] he parroted back, and then remained silent to further questioning.
During his interrogation, an interpreter translated his statements as a female typist recorded them. When the questioning ended, the interpreter turned to Ogilvie and said, “The young lady [typist] said you are lucky. You have escaped in a soldier’s uniform. Therefore you will be tried before a military court. The others will not be so lucky.”[9]
Tommy Thompson’s interrogation at Görlitz, also on March 29, proved more confrontational and frightening over the issue of whether he was who he said he was and the protection of his rights as a military officer. When the Gestapo interrogator demanded information about the breakout, Thompson refused to answer.
“I must warn you,” the interrogator said. “You are not the in hands of military authorities, but . . . the secret service. Anything might happen to you without protection and you may never go back to your camp.”[10]
“Despite whose hands I am in, I [am] prot
ected by the Geneva Convention,” Thompson protested.
The interrogator half laughed, and even when Thompson presented his identity tags the man waved them aside. Ultimately, Thompson managed to convince his questioner that his clothes were indeed military dress. “You are lucky,” the Gestapo man said finally. “You are recognized as military. The rest are wanted for civil investigation.”
The contradiction of the next hours for Ogilvie, Thompson, and others, proved to be watching Commonwealth officers clearly dressed in the air force battledress (he saw George Wiley in his Canadian blue battledress and John E. “Willy” Williams in his Australian airman’s tunic with flight-lieutenant stripes visible) being led away from the prison. Following his interrogation, Keith Ogilvie was returned to a cell with fellow escapers Charles Hall, Neville McGarr, and Paul Royle; the cell was so small that all four men had to either stand or lie down at the same time. A few days later, Ogilvie spotted a German corporal he knew from Stalag Luft III outside his Görlitz cell.
“Say, Horst, when are you gonna get me out of this place?” he asked.
“Oh, Mr. Ogilvie, tomorrow morning you’ll go,”[11] the guard said. Indeed, the next day Luftwaffe guards arrived and escorted Ogilvie and seven others back to Sagan. Only one of his cellmates—Australian Paul Royle—was with him; Briton Charles Hall was taken from Görlitz prison March 30, and South African Neville McGarr disappeared April 6. Some time later, the eight survivors of the Görlitz imprisonment and interrogation learned the fate of the other twenty-eight kriegies held there.
