The Great Escape: A Canadian Story

by Barris, Ted

  “A committee was formed to collect the belongings of the fifty and to put all up for auction with the proceeds going to their families after the war,”[26] Sweanor wrote. “We gave promissory notes for payments and bid outrageous prices to show our sympathy: $200 for a pair of running shoes, $50 for a razor, and $15 for a handkerchief.”

  Even Staff Sergeant Hermann Glemnitz, still on duty at the North Compound, attended the highly publicized auction. He got swept up in the spirit of fundraising and could be heard urging the kriegies to bid higher for the benefit of the dead airmen’s families. Among the auction items that drew particular attention, Tom Kirby-Green’s wooden suitcase went for twenty-five pounds and some of the personal clothing of Canadian airman Pat Langford earned 104 pounds. To commemorate the fifty murdered air force officers, kriegies wore whatever black insignia they could find—black ties, black hats, black diamond cutouts sewn to their sleeves—to indicate they were in mourning. Though it was forbidden to sing it, at every opportunity in front of their captors, the kriegies sang “God Save the King,” if only because, as Tony Pengelly put it, “we sang it and felt better.”[27] The POWs considered every possible act of stubbornness, inaction, and passive resistance they could conceive as a protest to the killings.

  George Sweanor didn’t agree with the tactics, fearing their campaign of hatred might bring even more reprisals. He was right. The tit-for-tat psychological warfare inside the wire continued seemingly without end. Kommandant Braune responded to kriegie insolence by withholding incoming mail for six weeks. When Pieber conducted his roll calls, the prisoners made life miserable for him, ridiculing his appell, resisting his demands, and interfering wherever they could. One day, when the innocuous guard looked totally demoralized, George Sweanor took pity on him. They happened to be walking side by side across the compound.

  “Cheer up, Pieber,” Sweanor said. “We can’t keep this up forever.”

  Pieber flashed a quick smile, but that was all he could muster.

  The spring and summer of 1944 brought a welcome rush of good news to the inmates of Stalag Luft III, news many of them wished had come six months earlier; it might have persuaded even diehard escapers such as Big X to wait out the war. Still, the BBC broadcasts received by the canary, Dick Bartlett’s wireless radio receiver, gave officers in the North Compound a needed lift. Kriegies learned of the liberation of Rome on June 5, the Normandy landings on June 6, the main Soviet offensive in the Baltic region on June 22, the Chindits’ victories in Burma on June 26, the attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, the liberation of Paris on August 25, the Canadian capture of Dieppe on September 1, and, on September 17, the bold airborne Operation Market Garden attempt to catapult the Allies to the enemy’s side of the River Rhine. That same summer, letters addressed to Stalag Luft III prisoners from fictitious relatives informed kriegies around the North Compound that three Commonwealth air officers had actually completed Roger Bushell’s so-called “home run.” Per Bergsland and Jens Muller had made it back to Britain via Sweden within a week, while Bob van der Stok had reached his occupied homeland, the Netherlands, within thirty-six hours. He soon pushed on across the Pyrenees to Madrid and arrived back in Britain four months after emerging from tunnel “Harry.”

  A lot had changed at Stalag Luft III since the March 1944 escape. Von Lindeiner was gone; he would be court-martialled in October for allowing as many as 262 escape attempts during his command of POW camps and for defying the Sagan Order to hand over escapers directly to the Gestapo.[*] Von Lindeiner’s nemesis Roger Bushell was also gone, executed under that same order. What remained, however, was X Organization, which both men had grappled with since April 1943. Bushell had determined and manipulated its objectives, its tactics, and its timing like a battle force pursuing an enemy. Von Lindeiner had fought back, trying to destroy its gains and blunt its resolve with unexpected appells, relentless surveillance by ferrets, and isolation punishment in the cooler. In some senses, both von Lindeiner and Bushell failed to control the fate of X Organization. True, the organization had delivered Bushell his greatest objective—a mass escape and a resulting nationwide manhunt—and ultimately von Lindeiner’s Gestapo successors appeared to have buried its material gains by filling “Harry” with human waste and by exterminating X’s ringleaders with the Sagan Order. And yet the Germans had never found tunnel “Dick,” which still housed tunnelling tools, bed boards, and wire, and they had not annihilated all of X’s brain trust—men such as Robert “Crump” Ker-Ramsey, Norman “Conk” Canton, and Tony Pengelly, who had given up his number on the escape list expressly so that the escape committee might carry on.

  “Immediately after news of the executions reached England,” Pengelly said, “Air Ministry told us over the BBC, via our smuggled radios, to stop escaping. . . . [But] with the incentive of escape work gone, many were losing the comparative peace of mind with which we had lived and endured the long years. Our morale was dangerously low.”

  The Normandy invasion in June and the attempt on Hitler’s

  life in July re-inspired the kriegies and breathed new life into a dormant X Organization. Pengelly and what was left of his mapping and document forgery team decided to reintroduce the war of wits to the education room of the North Compound library. They manufactured and posted a huge, detailed map of Europe on the library wall and began sticking in pins (thread strung between the pins graphically illustrated the front lines of the war). Based on the BBC reports, they updated the location of the pins and thread daily. That spring and summer of 1944, the thread lines showed Allied gains in mainland Italy, in Scandinavia, a toehold in France, and significant Soviet advances along the Eastern Front.

  “On the Russian front there were two sets of thread lines, one red and one black,”[28] Don Edy recalled. “The one represented German news from the front . . . and the other based on the BBC news, which always showed the Allies closer than the German news. We often saw the German ferrets coming in to take a look at the map, then walking out shaking their heads.”

  “It gave us infinite satisfaction to show [the Germans] the ring drawing ever tighter,”[29] Pengelly said.

  The war of the pins gave momentary satisfaction, perhaps, but the rapid westward advance of the red thread on the library wall map—representing victories for the Soviet armies over German armies along the Eastern Front—posed a number of new and potentially ominous threats to Stalag Luft III’s imprisoned airmen, officers and NCOs alike. The first impact of the declining fortunes of the German Army in Lithuania, East Prussia, and eastern Poland arrived in the form of other prisoners of war that summer of 1944. Kriegies under guard began arriving from POW camps east of Sagan; they described their captors force-marching them ahead of the Soviet onslaught. With no new huts available for the newcomers, the Germans forced them into existing barracks. They supplied lumber and the loan of tools for the kriegies to convert double bunk beds to triple bunks in existing huts. Rations were halved. Sick parades ballooned. And Red Cross parcels for the original North Compound POWs became few and far between.

  If the flight of POWs ahead of the Soviet advance didn’t put the kriegies nerves on edge enough, the sudden arrival of a purge of Commonwealth and American airmen from a place called Buchenwald certainly did. George Sweanor learned that in previous months German SS had had rounded up the 168 downed airmen, including twenty-six RCAF aircrew, stripped them of their identities, and shipped them off to the Buchenwald extermination camp. Starved, tortured, and bearing the scars of Nazi medical experiments, these latest additions to the North Compound shocked Sweanor and his roommates with their first question:

  “How many do they shoot each day?”[30] they asked.

  George Harsh discovered that such fears were based more in reality than in fiction. Shot down, interrogated, and sent to Stalag Luft III in October 1942, the American-born RCAF gunner had served X Organization inside the wire as a tunnel security boss. A sudden purge at the end of February 1944, just weeks before the planned mass escape,
had then whisked Harsh and eighteen others away from the North Compound. He had learned about the March 24 breakout and the reprisals of the Sagan Order from their prisoner-of-war huts at Belaria, a satellite compound five miles from Stalag Luft III. Harsh had survived POW imprisonment for nearly two years, but he recognized that his experience on a chain gang in the 1930s had prepared him more than most to live one day at a time. Even so, he admitted that he still lay awake nights worried that Gestapo guards would suddenly descend, line them up, and shoot every tenth man unless the kriegies surrendered the radio the Germans knew was hidden.

  “Toward the end of the war,” Harsh wrote, “Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, as a representative of the International Red Cross, was allowed into the camp. [He] slipped word to us that Hitler had ordered Himmler to have every one of us shot rather than let us be liberated by the approaching Russians.”[31]

  Such rumours and fears sparked a reconstituted X Organization to a predictable response. In July, those comprising the core of the escape committee gathered at the now reopened North Compound theatre. Yes, there would be new productions that summer and fall, if the war went on that long. Airman John Casson would produce a version of J. B. Priestley’s I Have Been Here Before, while airman David Porter would rehearse a musical comedy called Palina Panic. Since the Germans had never discovered the repository of all the tunnel sand excavated from “Harry”—in the space beneath the raked floor of theatre seats—the escape committee reopened the theatre’s secret subterranean enterprise. This time, X Organization diggers began excavating tunnel “George” from beneath the theatre proscenium eastbound toward the North Compound exterior wire. It was a short distance from the new tunnel to the sand dispersal site, all under the same roof, and there was still plenty of room to store “George’s” excavated sand under the same theatre floor.

  Kommandant Oberst Braune may well have suspected that news passed along by new kriegies arriving in the North Compound, or indeed from BBC radio reports of Allied successes across Europe, would embolden his prisoners. In September, the new Stalag Luft III administration adorned the walls inside the camp huts with threatening posters. In broken English, the lengthy proclamations first accused Britain of instituting “illegal warfare in non-combat zones in the form of gangster commandos, terror bandits, and sabotage troops even up to the frontiers of Germany.” The poster claimed that a captured British booklet, entitled “The Handbook of Modern Irregular Warfare,”[32] encouraged the English soldier to be “a potential gangster (with) the sphere of operations (to) include the enemy’s own country . . . and neutral countries as a source of supply.” The poster described the areas of Europe in which English soldiers might consider operating as a “death zone.” Finally, if the message wasn’t clear enough, the narrative concluded with a series of warnings to prisoners “against making future escapes. . . . All police and military guards have been given the most strict orders to shoot on sight all suspected persons. . . . Escaping from prison camps has ceased to be a sport!”

  But the Kommandant hadn’t finished his propaganda offensive. Soon after the death zone posters went up came another blizzard of proclamations with a provocative assessment of the war and a most peculiar invitation to “soldiers of the British Commonwealth and the United States of America.”[33] The poster began with some apparent revisionist history, turning the retreat of German armies from occupied areas of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe into “the great Bolshevik offensive [crossing] the frontiers of Germany. The men in the Moscow Kremlin believe the way is open for the conquest of the Western world. This will certainly be a decisive battle for us. But it will also be the decisive battle for England, for the United States, and for the maintenance of western civilization. Or whatever today remains of it.”

  The posters’ rhetoric painted an even bleaker picture of Europe under Bolshevik domination than under Nazi occupation. Suddenly, German captors appealed to all POWs, “regardless of your rank or of your nationality,” to recognize “the danger of Bolshevik-Communism” and (in bold type) to see “the consequences of the destruction of Europe—not just of Germany, but of Europe—[and what] it will mean to your own country.” Unable to disguise its inherent racism, the document positioned its authors and readers not as captors and captives, but “as white men to other white men.” Then it laid out a specific offer to the kriegies: “Whether you are willing to fight in the front-line or in the service corps, we make you this solemn promise: Whoever as a soldier of his own nation is willing to join the common front for the common cause, will be freed immediately after the victory of the present offensive and can return to his own country via Switzerland.”

  And finally, in bold-type exclamation, the poster completed its call-to-arms with, “Are you for the culture of the West or the barbaric Asiatic East? Make your decision now!”

  George Sweanor remembered that the German press joined the propaganda initiative as well. Every time a Völkischer Beobachter or Frankfurter Zeitung arrived at the North Compound library, Sweanor devoured every detail, including the one-sided reports of “Soviet atrocities.” Then, during one appell that autumn of 1944, representatives of Kommandant Braune called for volunteers to help the German war effort against the perceived Communist threat.

  “We were surprised when one man volunteered,”[34] Sweanor said, “saying he would be glad to help. But we could not conceal our mirth when they asked him his civilian trade. He answered, ‘Funeral director.’”

  Bomb-aimer Sweanor had always considered the mass escape plan to be futile. He had served in the protection and completion of the tunnels from the moment he arrived at Stalag Luft III in 1943, but his highest priority was always survival. Consequently, he rejoined the X Organization service, assisting in the completion of tunnel “George” and preparing his fellow kriegies for the kind of chaos the propaganda posters had predicted . . . or worse.

  “We knew that as the Soviets advanced there would be bedlam outside our compound. We would have no Red Cross food. The Germans would be evacuating and leaving weapons behind,”[35] Sweanor said. “I joined a group we were training as commandos. I had had some army training, artillery training, and so I was put in charge of a small platoon of people to find German weapons . . . so we could provide an armed united group. . . . We decided to use ‘George’ to store the equipment. The tunnel was considered to be our after-Soviet occupation outlet, our last survival exit.”

  As the snows of late November began to accumulate around Sagan, tunnellers under the North Compound at Stalag Luft III brought the face of “George” to a position just beyond the east perimeter wire and within feet of the surface. X Organization planners agreed the tunnel would not be used for another escape attempt, merely, as Sweanor had considered it, an emergency exit from the North Compound, a bolt-hole should either the retreating Germans or advancing Soviets decide to take out their frustrations on the kriegies. Meantime, under SBO Wilson’s direction, the entire compound population was reorganized into sections, platoons, and companies of the commando self-defence force. The Klim Klub, as it was code-named, prepared for an expected final confrontation with either the camp guards or a hostile invading army.

  As it turned out, however, there was a more lethal enemy than either the Germans or the Soviets in the final battle to survive Silesia: the natural elements, among the very reasons the creators of Stalag Luft III had located the prison there in the first place.

  * * *

  * Oberregierungsrat Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, chief of the Gestapo at Breslau, was arrested by the Soviet Army on May 10, 1945. In August 1946, the Soviets allowed Captain M. F. Cornish of the British Intelligence Corps to travel to Moscow to interview Scharpwinkel (under Soviet supervision). His voluntary statement (quoted here) was taken September 19, 1946. He died in a prison in Moscow, October 17, 1947.

  * Kriminalinspektor Richard Max Hänsel, in charge of the Gestapo sub-office at Görlitz, was in British custody by June 20, 1946, and four days later, the Royal Air Force War Crime
s Interrogation Unit took a voluntary statement (quoted here) from him. A war crimes trial began in Hamburg on July 1, 1947, and lasted fifty days. The Judge Advocate General determined there was insufficient evidence to convict Hänsel; he was formally acquitted on November 6, 1948.

  * Kriminal Obersekretaer Lux was killed during fighting at Breslau in 1944.

  * In 1945, Gestapo officer Erich Zacharias managed to acquire papers from American occupation authorities in Germany identifying him as a Customs official with no Nazi record. He was eventually traced to a refrigeration plant in Wesermünde and arrested; he escaped and was recaptured April 1, 1946. His voluntary statement (quoted here) was taken April 12, 1946. He was found guilty of murder and hanged at Hameln jail on February 27, 1948.

  ** At the end of the war in Europe, Gestapo NCO Adolf Knueppelberg was in the (Soviet) Red Army Camp 33 , near Brno, and prematurely released. He was never arrested.

  *** In the fall of 1945, Gestapo driver Friedrich Kiowsky was arrested by the Czech police. His testimony and February 22 , 1946, voluntary statement (quoted here) implicated Zacharais and Knueppelberg in the murders of Kidder and Kirby-Green, but he was found guilty and executed in Czechoslovakia in 1947.

  *Sturmbannführer Johannes Post was executed at Hameln jail on February 27, 1948.