This Great Escape

by Andrew Steinmetz

  We make slow progress, inching past human links on the chain, towards the final demo which is set for 15:00 at the Odeonsplatz. I’m familiar with these streets and alleys and many of the landmarks. So would Michael have been: any visitor to Munich actually.

  As we come upon the platz, Joerg stops me in my tracks. He reaches his arm across my chest and bars the way. There is no way forward without a history lesson first. Munich was the birthplace of the Nazi party. Hauptstadt der Bewegung, capital of the movement. Bavaria is sometimes regarded as ‘the nursery’ where the child-monster learned to crawl, eventually to squawk.

  “Do you know this place?” Joerg asks.

  He means the Feldherrnhalle. ‘The Field Marshall’s Hall’ was built in the 1840s to honour the Bavarian army. Its roof shelters the statues of military leaders from The Thirty-Year War and The Franco-Prussian War. We’re talking low-on-the-list generals like Johann Tilly and Karl Philipp von Wrede, who continue to fight for a place in the national memory. Things around here changed in 1923. Here I’ll stop cutting from Wikipedia and paste a full sketch.

  On Friday morning, 9 November 1923, the Feldherrnhalle was the scene of a confrontation between the Bavarian State Police and an illegally organized march by the followers of Adolf Hitler. When ordered to stop the marchers continued; the State Police felt threatened and opened fire. Four policemen and sixteen marchers were killed and a number were wounded, including Hermann Göring. As a result, Hitler was arrested and sentenced to a prison term. This was one of the efforts by the Nazis to take over the Bavarian State, commonly referred to as the Beer Hall Putsch.

  The Nazis erected a memorial to the fallen putschists on the east side of the Feldherrnhalle, opposite where Joerg and I are now standing in the street.

  “Some nut put himself on fire here in the 90s.”

  “In protest?”

  “For sure.” Joerg refers to Reinhold Elstner, a World War II veteran who committed suicide on this exact spot in his seventy-fifth year. A Wehrmacht veteran, Reinhold Elstner decided he could no longer stomach what he considered to be the ongoing and blank demonization of the German people and army. A martyr, then, was Elstner. He chose the spot for obvious reasons. The same Odeonsplatz which is today packed with a rainbow coalition of citizens, old and young and male and female and rich and poor, served the Nazis for the midnight swearing in of SS men. During the war years, the memorial on the side of the Feldherrnhalle was guarded around the clock by SS henchmen. When passing the memorial, party members would give the Nazi salute. Giving the Nazi salute was not everybody’s idea of a good time, but it was conspicuous not to stop. To avoid having to salute, a passerby would walk down a path behind the monument and take an alternate route to the Odeonsplatz. The route along Viscardigasse quickly became known as Shirkers Alley.

  Joerg asks, “Shall we go around?”

  It does not seem relevant. We go straight on through. There’s a difference between history and superstition, which shall haunt us forever if we bow to magical thinking. The gathered forty thousand are evidence of that, proof the fucking German way is not locked in time, forever.

  Michael Paryla as Cosimo de Medici opposite Friedrich Domin in Life of Galileo (1959).

  1 There is a War on Drugs and a War on Terror. No one has heard of the War on Michael, I realize, but the internal logic and outcome is the same. The War on Drugs means we have never been more surrounded by drugs and pharmaceuticals. The War on Terror has translated into more terror for people of all creeds. The War on Michael (WoM) is fabricated to give us all more Michael. The WoM has been prosecuted to increase his stature. Not to eliminate him. Not to cluster bomb his reputation. But to bring more of him around more often. At least to partially rehabilitate his IMDb STARmeter ranking, which as of this writing stands at an abysmal 3,802,520.

  The Great Escape …

  For Those Who Missed It

  THIS IS A MANHUNT. Roll camera, roll away Sturges. The motorcade swings into Neustadt Station. Nazis à la mode arrive in swank gangster cars. That’s him in the lead car. I need to pause here. Is it a Mercedes Benz 260D or the popular Mercedes 540K cabriolet? Reich Marshall Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe chief, was vigorously fond of the 540K. The armoured sedan limousine pretty much served as the moveable clubhouse of the Third Reich.

  I point the remote. A sea of darkness. A bit of history.

  STALAG LUFT III

  Stalag Luft III was no ordinary prisoner of war camp. The POWs called it Goering’s luxury camp. The Luftwaffe chief betrayed a chivalrous kinship with the Allied Air Force. Goering believed that captured enemy flyers deserved escape-proof comfort.

  Completed in April 1943, the camp was situated in a forested region of Silesia, an eastern part of Germany, as far as possible from the Western Front. Locally it was positioned a half-mile south of Sagan, at the juncture of eight rail lines. At its peak, 10,000 men were billeted in six compounds: air force personnel given to superior education, aggressive behaviour, and self-reliance.

  Extra precaution was taken in planning for its construction. In addition to equidistant watchtowers and two nine-foot-high perimeter fences, rolls of barbed wire wreathed atop and tumbleweeds between, an eight foot ditch, search lights, machine gun nests and guard dogs and patrolling sentries, the earth was implanted with seismographs and microphones. Day and night the underground was monitored for sound vibrations.1

  KRIEGIES & GOONS

  Kriegie (sing.). POW slang. Kriegie is the shortened form of the German word for prisoner of war, Kriegsgefangener. The Allied POWs named themselves Kriegies. Kriegies of The Third Reich referred to their captors as Goons. Goons paraded in jackboots and carried tommy guns.

  FERRETS

  Ferrets were the camp animals who specialized in escape detection. A half-dozen ferrets patrolled the compound at all times with probes and torches. Chief German ferret in Stalag Luft III was Oberfeldweber Glemnitz. Fieldweasel Glemnitz was incorruptible, but allegedly only tepidly clever. His second in command, Unterofficier Griese, was more dangerous. Nicknamed Rubberneck, Unterofficier Griese was zealous. Fortunately, ferrets could be bribed with black market goods. This means they could be tamed.

  COOLER

  A concrete block house with barred windows, a punishing destination for prisoners placed in isolation. The cooler at Stalag Luft III was situated in the Vorlager, a forecamp outside the main compound.

  GEHEIME STAATSPOLIZEI

  Secret state police. The evil formerly known as the Gestapo. Uniform consisted primarily of the trench coat and fedora. Plain clothes, yet dressed to kill.

  GOONSKIN

  A false German uniform. POWs manufactured these out of RAF uniforms.

  TRAP & TRAPFUEHRER

  Not what you expect. In POW camp parlance, a trap is the term for the opening of an escape tunnel. Sometimes it is the material used to conceal the tunnel opening, e.g. a concrete slab. The POW who would watch for ferrets and replace the trap at the tunnel opening held the rank of Trapfuehrer.

  HUNDFUEHRER

  The dog leader. A type of sentry who prowled outside the perimeter fence or inside the camp with a dog trained to go for a factual mistake.2

  WIRE-HAPPY

  A psychological condition related to cabin fever. A prisoner behind the wires for three or four years could develop eccentricities and entertain symptoms like visual and oral hallucinations. Wire-happy prisoners were prone to delusions and making brazen escape attempts in broad daylight. In the movie, Steve McQueen’s fast friend, Flying Officer Archibald Ives, has the crazed-eyes of an emotionally distraught jockey. Ives is wire-happy. But, we sense, not for long.

  CODE OF CONDUCT

  During the Second World War, it was an officer’s duty to escape should he be taken prisoner. Attempting escape was an obligation imposed on Canadian and British and American POWs by their country’s military code of conduct. Effor
ts were coordinated from inside by an escape committee composed of senior ranking officers. The escape committee comprised a legal and moral authority in a non-place where free will would find limited expression. Near the end of the war, escape attempts continued to be a vital part of the Allied strategy, intended to divert scarce military resources. Even unsuccessful breakouts upset law and order behind enemy lines. The collective effort of POWs in this pursuit was regarded as an example of ‘carrying on the war by other means.’

  THE ESCAPE COMMITTEE

  Luft III’s escape committee was headed by RAF Squadron Leader Roger J Bushell, known in the movie as Big X or Bartlett and played by Richard Attenborough. Roger Bushell was the mastermind of the plan to put as many as 250 men outside the wire. He planned for three tunnels, at least thirty feet deep, each with an underground railway and ventilation system. To execute the plan, Bushell set up secret factories and workshops comprised of forgers, tailors, manufacturers, scroungers, tunnelers, engineers and surveillance experts.

  Meanwhile, as the plan unfolded, Roger Bushell became an active participant in the camp theatre. In the months leading up to the March 1944 breakout, he was busy with rehearsals, learning the part of Professor Higgins in a production of Pygmalion.

  CHIVALRY

  Several months after Stalag Luft III opened for business, Canadian Ken Toft and American William ‘Red’ Nichols discovered a blind spot between two sentry boxes. After bringing their discovery to the escape committee, Toft and Nichols were given the green light. Equipped with wire-cutters, and employing high-school styled diversionary tactics in the main compound, Toft and Nichols made their break in broad daylight. They made it as far as Frankfurt before being recaptured and returned to Stalag Luft III, whereupon Colonel von Lindeimer, the camp Kommandant, invited Toft and Nichols into his office for a chat. The Kommandant was impressed by the duo’s brazenness and presented them with a bottle of whiskey before dispatching them to their punishment. Cooler. Two weeks.

  In the movie, Steve McQueen and Angus Lennie re-enact the Toft and Nichols’ escape. They too end up in the cooler. In fact, ‘The Cooler King’ and Hollywood Monarch, McQueen, spends a good chunk of the movie in the cold room, tossing a baseball against the wall, big leather mitt and all, to the considerable irritation of the wire-happy Lennie, who is refrigerated in the next cell.

  TOM, DICK AND HARRY

  The escape committee baptized the network of tunnels, Tom, Dick, and Harry. The logic to digging three tunnels simultaneously was simple: if the Goons discovered one, they might suppose that’s it for the shenanigans of these notorious POWs. If they found a second tunnel, surely then Kommandant von Lindeimer and his band of ferrets would conclude the game was up, definitely.

  MOLES, CREEPERS, AND TUNNEL KINGS

  To be a digger you needed stamina and steady nerves. Sneeze and a load of sand could collapse on your back and pin you. Moles like the New Zealander Henry W. ‘Piglet’ Lamond burrowed into the blind. Moles flew solo. The creepers were a separate breed. The creepers and over-ground crawlers cut through the wire and inch-wormed their baggy segmented-selves into the forest cover beyond the perimeter fence. The Tunnel Kings, a collective who played patiently at the long game, planned for the big show of a massive breakout. Kings like Crump Ker-Ramsay, Johnny Marshall, and Johnny Bull, and the original Stalag Luft III Tunnel King, Wally Floody, who was head of the Tunnel Committee. The Tunnel Kings worked closely with sand-dispersal chief George ‘Hornblower’ Fanshawe, and with tunnel-security chief George Harsh.

  WORK

  Work on the tunnels began in spring 1943. Harry and Tom were thirty feet down after two weeks. At this depth there was some house cleaning to do. Three chambers were excavated. Chamber One was five feet long and used to store gear. Chamber Two was used to store sand. Chamber Three was six feet wide and housed the air pump. The tunnel shaft along the horizontal was tight. There was no room to turn around, the men had to lie head to foot, and inch backwards to find the light. The morning shift used homemade spirit levels to check the floors. The night shift used the Wehrmacht’s own prismatic compasses to check the final orientation. When Harry reached twenty feet, the tunnel men began to lay an underground railway, used for hauling sand. The trolley was made of beechwood bed boards and the wooden bearings were greased with margarine (not butter). A pipe line for oxygen was buried below the railway and attached to a pump, with an air vent opening near the head. Ah, praise the air pumps and the pumper: the first pump was made of an old accordion, the second from a kitbag and boot leather. Don’t ask me what a kitbag is. The pumper was rags and flesh and blood.

  THE YELLOW SAND

  Whilst digging the first tunnel, Wally Floody discovered the yellow sand. Stalag Luft’s infamously yellow-tinged subsoil was hidden beneath a layer of gray dirt. To construct Tom, Dick, and Harry, there was an estimated one hundred tons of sand to disperse without the camp ferrets sticking their nose in it. Note: Dug sand fills out more space in its loose form.

  TROUSERBAGS & PENGUINS

  Made from long woollen underwear, the original Stalag Luft III Trouserbags were designed by sand dispersal-chief Peter ‘Hornblower’ Fanshawe. The trouserbags were used for the hauling and dispersing of Luft III’s bright yellow subsoil, which (the ingenuity of the aforementioned Kriegies withstanding), was a definite bitch to get rid of. Back in the days of 1943, trouserbags were a hit with camp Penguins. Penguins were the poor sods in charge of carrying out sand dispersal. Penguins were so-named because they shuffled as they strolled back and forth, through the compound (wearing the God-awful and itchy aforementioned trouserbags looped around the neck), searching for a safe spot to drop their load, under the constant watchful eyes of camp Ferrets like Rubberneck.

  FAINT CRACK

  When the Germans suspected an escape tunnel was being dug, the guards drove heavy wagons around the compound, trying to collapse them. The strategy was effective. Even if the sand was solidly shored up the whole way using bed boards, the tunnels often caved in. In fact, they frequently caved in spontaneously. Underground the tunnelers heard a faint crack before the sand collapsed; ominously (I’m taking an educated guess) the sound seemed to originate from within their own being. It was hardly enough warning to get clear before the yellow stuff buried them alive. Many a tunnel-man had to be hauled out by the ankles.

  ESCAPE CONSTRUCTION: BREAKDOWN

  A breakdown of the materials used in the construction of Tom, Dick and Harry: 4,000 bed boards; 1,370 beading battens; 1,699 blankets; 161 pillow cases; 34 chairs; 52 20-man tables; 90 double tier bunks; 1,219 knives; 478 spoons; 30 shovels; 1,000 feet of electric wire; 600 feet of rope; 192 bed covers; 3,424 towels; 1,212 bed bolsters; 10 single tables; 76 benches; 246 water cans; 582 forks; 69 lamps.

  TOM & DICK

  Tom measured 260 feet in the summer of 1943 when a ferret detected the entrance under the chimney in Hut 123. Thereafter, for security, Roger Bushell put Dick to sleep. Though it was not used in the actual escape, Dick’s underground sleeve was handy for the storage of construction materials. Dick’s trap, under the shower drain in Hut 122, was never discovered.

  GOOD OLD HARRY

  That left Harry. Good old ‘Arry. The entrance to Harry was under the stove in Hut 104. The POWs had cut through a brick and concrete plinth and then dropped 30 feet before leveling off. This was the safe depth calculated by the escape committee so as not to upset the camp’s sound-sensitive topsoil. Harry would run under the cooler to the northern wire and beyond a second boundary fence into the woods. The tunnel-men burrowed another 350 feet and laid out their trolley track for hauling sand, with its two station stops, Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. Oh yes, down in the claustrophobic dark, working by the glow of forehead-fastened fat lamps and under the constant threat of an overhead collapse, the incorrigible escapees got high on the fumes of success. Nobody lost (his sense of) humour.

  Harry took a full year t
o dig.

  DEAN AND DAWSON

  The forgery factory was headed by Tim Walenn. It’s code name was Dean and Dawson, after the British travel agency. Walenn’s merry group turned out over 400 different phony documents, reproduced hundred of maps and passbooks, and copied the whorled lines of banknotes, all with fanatical care. Favourite forgeries included the Ausweis for being on Reich property; gate passes; several types of Urlaubschein for crossing frontiers; the French worker’s identity card; and the ordinary soldier’s Soldbuch, a combination of paybook and identification card.

  STOOGES AND DIVERSIONISTS

  Prisoners not chosen for work in the factories or tunnels were taken by the security detail and performed as either a stooge or a diversionist. Stooges kept watch over the movement of Ferrets. In the diversionist category of persons, there was a range of roles to pick from, including becoming a member of The Sagan Serenaders. The camp choir toured the compound, keeping to a hectic schedule, and generally made enough noise to hide the sound of a hammer blow or scraping shovel. The elaborate security system set up by Roger Bushell and George Harsh was highly successful. The prisoners were able to protect the secrecy of the factories by tracking the movement of Ferrets within the compound, and could account for the location of every Goon in the system.

  A MEMOIR

  Most of this is found in The Great Escape, Paul Brickhill’s wartime prison camp memoir. An Australian pilot, Brickhill was shot down over Tunisia in 1943. Upon capture, Brickhill was sent to Stalag Luft III, where he remained a POW until the end of the war. Brickhill was a trusted piece of Roger Bushell’s escape machine and was involved in the construction of all three tunnels, including the infamous Harry. He was put in charge of arrangements to protect the document forgers, who worked, exposed, in front of windows. At the last moment, Bushell barred Brickhill from joining the escape party when he learned the latter suffered from claustrophobia. ‘A correct, if infuriating decision,’ writes Brickhill in his memoir.