The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  On Thursday, March 30, Oberregierungsrat Scharpwinkel and his staff arrived at Görlitz to carry out the Sagan Order. First the Commonwealth officers—Squadron Leader Ian Cross, Flight Lieutenants Mike Casey, Tom Leigh, and George Wiley, and Flying Officers John Pohe and Al Hake—were collected by the dozen Gestapo men in civilian clothes and pushed into three waiting cars. Other recaptured officers looking through prison windows knew Hake was suffering from frostbite and assumed the men in civilian clothes were escorting the air force officers in the cars to a hospital. They were actually going to the local Kripo headquarters for interrogation.

  “I went to Görlitz,” Scharpwinkel[*] said, “for the purpose of getting a picture of the prisoners. As I speak English, I put one or two questions to the prisoners . . . Were they married? Had they children? I did not ask any questions about how the escape was organized, because I was not interested in that.”[12]

  The interrogations of the half-dozen Commonwealth officers went on for three and a half hours. Kriminalinspektor Richard Max Hänsel[*], who was in charge of the local Gestapo office at Görlitz, attended the interrogations. He recalled that interrogators questioned the prisoners one at a time. He said there was no torture, but that the questioning covered name, rank, place and date of birth, previous occupation, unit, targets bombed, where shot down, duration of captivity, organization of the escape, source of civilian clothing, origin of false papers, names of other escapees, and how each had been captured. Hänsel said the interrogation included the confiscation of the prisoners’ watches and then a blanket threat from Scharpwinkel directed at everybody—prisoner and guard alike.

  “Take care they don’t get away,” he said. “Otherwise something unpleasant will happen to you. Or something unpleasant will happen to them.”[13]

  The interrogations wrapped up at 12:30 in the afternoon, when the POWs were again pushed into the waiting cars. As there was insufficient room in the three cars for all the Commonwealth officers and the Gestapo men, Scharpwinkel told Hänsel he would have to drive a service vehicle with two of the POWs and the Gestapo chief to their next destination. The three cars and service truck travelled along the autobahn to a wooded area five miles past Halbau. Scharpwinkel ordered the column of vehicles to stop and the prisoners got out to stretch their legs. Hänsel said he led the two officers in his service truck to the head of the column where the others had gathered and returned to the truck to retrieve his lunch from a briefcase. Two of Scharpwinkel’s staff carried sub-machine guns as the Gestapo chief ordered the POWs deeper into the woods.

  “The prisoners were placed in position,” Scharpwinkel said, “and it was revealed to them that the sentence was about to be carried out. The prisoners showed considerable calm, which surprised me very much.”

  The six Commonwealth officers—several of them wearing their air force blue battledress, clearly military POWs—stood stationary, side by side in the woods. With a hand movement, Kriminal Obersekretaer Lux[*] gave the order to fire and the execution squad fired a burst into the unarmed prisoners of war. Lux shot the prisoners as well, and by the end of the second salvo, the officers were dead.

  “While I was eating my slice of bread and butter,” Hänsel said, “several shots were fired. I ran at once to the place in the wood, which was about 150 metres [500 feet] away and learnt . . . that the prisoners had attempted to escape and had been shot in the attempt. They lay sprawling in the wood about four or five metres [15 feet] from each other. . . . I myself do not suppose that the prisoners attempted to escape.”[14]

  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 manufacture 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 undertaker’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 Manitoba’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 underground, 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 prisoners 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 fellow 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 residence 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.

  News of the shootings reached Britain in mid-May. Anthony Eden, the British secretary for foreign affairs, informed the House of Commons that word of the deaths had come from Switzerland. Then, in late June, he rose in Parliament to announce that official word had come from the German government about the deaths of fifty officers. The offic
ial German note claimed “the escapes were systematically prepared, partly by the General Staffs of the Allies, [with] both political and military objectives [that endangered] public security in Germany.” Eden scoffed at Germany’s contention the officers had met their deaths while escaping Stalag Luft III or resisting recapture. He accused Germany of “cold-blooded acts of butchery” and vowed His Majesty’s Government would track down “these foul criminals . . . to the last man. When the war is over,” Eden said finally, “they will be brought to exemplary justice.”[24]

  There were still Stalag Luft III prisoners of war who believed the trickle of information, the posted lists of dead officers, and even the Gestapo purge at the camp had all been a bluff to cow the remaining POWs into total compliance. The Germans couldn’t have stooped to murdering all those air force officers, some kriegies insisted. Then, pieces of military kit, suitcases, and some personal effects the escapers had carried through the tunnel and into the Silesian countryside were delivered to huts in the North Compound. Belongings such as shoes, handkerchiefs, and even bloodstained personal photographs were brought to the SBO. Ultimately, all doubt about the finality of events following the breakout of March 24–25 were put to rest the day Kommandant Braune delivered urns of cremated ashes to Group Captain Wilson. And it didn’t take the SBO to deduce why the fifty had been cremated. Ashes would offer no evidence of the cause of death.

  “[It proved] that this had been a deliberate massacre,”[25] George Sweanor wrote. “I could not forget my old school chum, George McGill, nor the boyish face of Tom Leigh, nor my boss, a man with an envious war record, Tom Kirby-Green. . . . What a terrible loss to humanity.”

  McGill’s ashes came from Leignitz, Sweanor remembered, Tom Leigh’s from Görlitz, and Tim Walenn’s from Danzig. He concluded from the locations of the crematoria engraved on the urns that many of the escapers had covered great distances before being recaptured and killed. Sweanor found some solace in knowing that the Germans had expended millions of man-hours away from the frontlines tracking down George McGill, his classmate from St. Clair Public School in Toronto. Eventually, as if reuniting the dead men with their wartime comrades, the remaining Commonwealth officers gathered and housed the fifty urns in a building inside the wire of the North Compound. One of the kriegies who had created so many of the theatre production sets, Wylton Todd, volunteered to design a permanent memorial and the new Kommandant provided stone for the masons among the POWs to build a crypt that would contain the urns.