The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  Bennett and his fellow tunnelers had no such luck. Only a week after the assault on Downes, a heavy rainstorm flooded the Ströhen moor. When a guard on patrol crossed over the sap, his boot sank right into it. Niemeyer ordered the tunnel dug up to determine its starting point. Some of the officers congregated to watch, yielding one of them a jab with a bayonet. The tunnel led to the floor underneath where Bennett and Fitzgerald bunked. Of the twenty-eight in the barracks, they were the only two involved in the scheme, but when they attempted to give themselves up to save the others from punishment, the senior officer in their barracks ordered them to remain silent.

  Niemeyer threw the lot of them into solitary. Day after day, the Germans interrogated them, trying to trick them into revealing who had participated in the digging. The guards told them that several others had already confessed, and they only wanted to cross off the names on the list of those who were innocent. None of the British officers took the bait, and Niemeyer grew more incensed by the week.

  After the discovery of the tunnel and a rash of other escape attempts, Niemeyer was forced to bring in reinforcements. Even though he was stewing away in a cell, Bennett found comfort in the knowledge that in order to assist Niemeyer, young, fit German soldiers were being drawn away from the fighting on the front lines.

  David Gray had very little left to give. Pale and listless, he emerged from his isolation cell at Schwarmstedt into the bright summer day. A guard led him to one of the water pumps to bathe, and a crowd of prisoners gathered around him, his poor condition stirring them to emotion. “What is it like?” one called out. Gray barely managed to look up. He knew better than to speak while out for his twice-weekly bath, but wanted them to know. “Very bad,” he uttered, almost broken. Then he returned to his cell.

  The space measured only a few square feet. There was a single barred window, too high up to see anything but an angle of the sky. Since the window was never opened, the only fresh air he enjoyed came through the uneven slits in the roof. He spent most days and nights baking in the heat of the cell, whose tarred roofs and thin walls acted like a furnace. He sweated constantly, and his body was pocked with insect bites. The only respite from the heat was during the occasional thunderstorm, when rain leaked through those same breaks in the roof.

  The guards permitted him no books, no pen and paper. One hour of exercise was allowed a day. Meals were the only other interruption, and these were pushed through a slot in the door. On occasion, a fellow prisoner bringing his soup or a donated tin of food would offer a kind word of encouragement. Then Gray would return to his solitary plight. Life in the regular camp was conveyed to him in the distant summons to roll call, the indistinct voice of a passing guard, or a muffled tramping of feet, perhaps signaling a breakout.

  A good military man, Gray would have made the effort to remain in shape while in his cell. But as July staggered into August, he was a shadow of his former self. Even so, thoughts of escape burned inside him. He determined to make his next attempt his final one. Any successful escape, he understood from his failures, would need to be a four-stage event: intense preparation, a foolproof breakout, an evasion scheme, and a bid to cross the border. At any of these stages, the entire effort could fall apart. One was no less important than the other, and each demanded thorough planning, resolve, quick wits—and a measure of good luck.

  Toward the end of August, Gray was led out into the yard, free from his confinement. Guards led him and several others who had languished in solitary on foot to Hademstorf, five miles away, then onto a train bound for Ströhen. He was there only a short while before Karl Niemeyer was replaced by another commandant.

  Hänisch was forming a new camp in a town called Holzminden, intended to hold the most troublesome, escape-prone British officers in Germany. He needed an iron fist to oversee them.

  Eight

  Charles Rathborne looked out into the dark night of September 11, 1917, from a train headed northward from Heidelberg. Crowded into his carriage were two dozen other British officers. They passed town after town, but except for a brief stop in Kassel, the train never slowed, thwarting a plan by several prisoners to leap from a window. They were all destined for Holzminden, the first group to be sent to the new camp.

  Although a student of German, Rathborne could be forgiven for never having heard of the town south of Hanover in Lower Saxony. Founded in 1245 at the edge of the river Weser by Count Otto von Eberstein, it had little of which to boast. Its medieval timber buildings had been leveled by fire during the Thirty Years’ War, a seventeenth-century struggle that only World War I would top in terms of cataclysmic destruction across Europe.

  In the centuries that followed, the town had been home to iron foundries, a monastery school, some craftsmen guilds, and, most recently, a fragrance company—specialists, by some accounts, in the manufacture of the scent of vanilla and violets. At the onset of war, Holzminden was little more than a garrison town of roughly ten thousand people. The inhabitants of the red-roofed village had the benefit of a picturesque location, set on a broad plain cut through by the silver-dappled Weser, surrounded by small farms, extensive beech and fir forests, and rolling hills.

  Rathborne and the others saw none of this during their nighttime approach, but expectations about their future camp were high. According to the Poldhu, it was to be a “prisoner’s Mecca—fine, brand-new buildings, spacious grounds, good scenery, good air.” They had no way of knowing whether this was true, but the very possibility fostered much debate, both skeptical and hopeful. Rathborne did not have enough experience of the German archipelago of camps to know which side to agree with.

  Just months earlier, on April 14, the thirty-one-year-old pilot and RNAS wing commander had led a fighter escort providing cover for a bombing raid on Freiburg. The attack on the city center was in retribution for a number of unanswered atrocities by the Germans, including the death by firing squad of Edith Cavell, a British nurse who helped scores of Allied prisoners escape from occupied Belgium; the treatment of POWs, notably the many who died of typhoid at camps such as Wittenberg; and the recent torpedoing of a hospital ship. After the bombers dropped their eggs, Rathborne turned to escort the squadron home. Suddenly, a pack of German Albatros fighter planes struck. In the flurry of gunfire, Rathborne’s engine was hit and his observer killed. Forced to land behind enemy lines, he was quickly seized. He was a great prize for the Germans—a lieutenant colonel and the Freiburg killer. They paraded him through the streets and pasted his photograph in the national papers.

  Broad-shouldered, thickset, and of medium height, Charles Rathborne had soft features and a welcome smile. One likened his visage to “the face of an archbishop,” a description that belied his natural grit and ambition. Private-school-educated and fluent in German and Italian, Rathborne joined the Royal Marine Light Infantry on his eighteenth birthday. He quickly rose through the ranks, his superiors remarking that he was “keen,” “energetic,” and “very good in taking charge of men.” Frequently applied to him was the word “zealous.” In 1912, sensing that air flight was the future, he trained to become a pilot. At the outbreak of war, he was named a flight commander, then a squadron commander, then placed in charge of an operational wing. The mission that saw him shot down was likely one he could have ordered subordinates to perform.

  As a POW, Rathborne proved no less ambitious. In May he arrived at a camp in Karlsruhe, where he assumed the role of senior British officer. He fielded pleas from his fellow officers for better conditions and persuaded the commandant to provide them. Escape was a high priority, but his first effort, in which he planned to walk straight out of the gate in civilian clothes, was foiled by a spy who gave away the hiding place of his escape kit. Before he could concoct a new plan, the order came for transfer to the new camp at Holzminden.

  It was after midnight when the train finally stuttered to a halt, and Rathborne and the others disembarked. In the twenty-one hours it had taken to travel from Karlsruhe they had been given nothing t
o eat and had slept only a few halting minutes in the overpacked carriage. They dragged themselves and their few belongings a mile east to the edge of the town.

  At last, they arrived at the Holzminden officers’ camp. The former infantry barracks, built a year before the war, was ringed by tall stone walls and lit by electric arc lamps. Guards directed them through the arched main entrance on the camp’s western side. Directly to their right, they passed a small house that served as a guard room and then entered the main prison grounds through a gate in a barbwire fence. To their left stood a monolithic stone barracks they would come to know as Block A. A seventy-yard gap separated it from its twin, Block B.

  Although exhausted and desperate for food, they were made to assemble in rows on the cobblestone path in front of the barracks. Beneath the glare of arc lamps, they were forced to wait in the chill of the night. Finally, a tall, beetle-browed German officer smoking a cigar strode to the head of the assembly to address them: Captain Karl Niemeyer. None of the prisoners had heard of the camp officer, a position second only to the commandant, and they were surprised when he addressed them in a cheerful, albeit off-kilter, American accent.

  He opened by saying, that he was happy to see them, as he was always “glad to see any Englishman,” many of whom had been his “great friends” before the war. He hoped this would be the case again, but, “in the meanwhile, war was war.” He advised that they would be best served, “y’know,” to write straight away to their families and friends “for your thickest clothes, y’know. It is very cold here in winter, y’know.” He concluded, “So now, gentlemen, I expect you will be glad to go to your bedrooms. I will wish you good-night. You will be searched in the morning.”

  With that, the guards took them to the third floor of Block A, a four-story whitewashed building with a mansard roof covered in slate. As Rathborne and the others climbed the steps, they wondered if Holzminden might well live up to what the Poldhu had promised. Some imagined “bedroom candles and a comforting nightcap” awaiting them in the barracks. They were divided into three rooms with high ceilings and bare walls. Each room had a stove, but no coal or wood to fuel it. For furniture, each officer had a small cupboard, a stool, and an iron-framed bed whose mattress was filled with straw, wood shavings, and paper. Although they were desperately hungry, the guards offered them no food, and the doors clanged ominously shut when they left. Still, the prisoners continued to hope for the best.

  In the morning, Rathborne succeeded in keeping hidden the compass he had bribed from a guard at Karlsruhe. He got a good look at Holzminden from the windows, then later, before roll call, on a walk around the grounds. The prison was a series of secure enclosures, one smaller than the next, like a Russian nesting doll. On the outside was the rectangular stone wall, eight feet high, topped in places with a barbwire palisade angled inward at 120 degrees to prevent climbing. Within this was a half oval—in the shape of the letter D—protected by a twelve-foot-high fence of thick mesh topped by another barbwire palisade. A chain of sentry boxes was positioned directly outside this fence. Six feet separated this enclosure from another barrier, which was the same shape and made from a simple three-strand wire fence strung on low wood posts. The space in between these two fences was a no-man’s-land. Prisoners were allowed only within the inner enclosure, which contained the barracks and Spielplatz (a dual parade ground and exercise yard). In a sense, Holzminden was a prison within a prison within a prison, all set 150 miles from the Dutch border.

  Beyond the security, and the buildings themselves, Holzminden was ill prepared to accommodate the hundreds of POWs sent there and the guards who oversaw them. The cookhouse lacked any dishes, and there were only three cauldrons. There was but a handful of taps, and no showers. Nor was there a parcel room or a canteen from which to buy goods. In the light of day, it became clear to the men that Holzminden was no prisoner’s Mecca.

  At morning roll call, the twenty-five officers gathered on the Spielplatz. Having not eaten in almost thirty-six hours, they were nearly faint. Beside Niemeyer stood the titular head of the camp, the elderly Colonel Habrecht, who stood by passively as his camp officer addressed the new arrivals. Niemeyer asked if they had breakfasted. The men answered no. Niemeyer promptly ordered his guards to prepare a meal, the likes of which, he promised, “you wouldn’t get in Regent Street or Piccadilly.” The famished British officers salivated at the thought of bacon and grilled sausage. Once dismissed, they hurried into the dining hall on the second floor of Block A, only to be served some tepid acorn coffee. Nothing else.

  When Rathborne, senior among them, complained, Niemeyer feigned surprise over the men’s purported dissatisfaction. Rathborne continued to press him on the men’s treatment, reminding him that they were British officers.

  “You damn well do as I tell you,” the camp officer finally said, shutting down further discussion. “If you think you can get out, try.” Then he and Colonel Habrecht marched off. They had other prisoners to welcome. As day after day passed, the officers were allotted little more than cabbage soup and small portions of bread to eat. Malnourished and harassed at every turn, they quickly grew to despise Karl Niemeyer.

  On September 20 a storm swept across Schwarmstedt, with sand invading every crevice of the camp’s huts. The prisoners hunkered down, covering their mouths and noses with wet cloths to help them breathe amid the onslaught. After the storm passed, the men were just beginning to clean up their quarters when the commandant assembled them for an announcement. Following a series of complaints to the British government about conditions at the camp, the men learned, Schwarmstedt was to be emptied.

  Prior to the transfer, a search for contraband ensued. As the guards began opening trunks and pawing through their belongings, Will Harvey grew nervous. After being informed about the camp closing, he had procured a civilian suit in which he might cross the German countryside without arousing suspicion. Civilian clothes were prohibited in the prison, and if the guards found the suit, there would be hell to pay. His plan to jump from the train on the way to the new camp and make his way to the border on foot would be foiled.

  Moments before the guards arrived at his barracks, Harvey came up with a bold solution: he would don the civvies under his Burberry trench coat, hiding his compass and map in the pockets. Standing just a few feet away from the guard who was meticulously inspecting the contents of his box, Harvey stifled an anxious laugh. If only the guard knew, he thought, that his escape kit was hiding in plain sight. Finding nothing of interest in the box, the guard moved on to the next prisoner and resumed his search.

  The following day, the weather clear and fine, Harvey and over two hundred other officers prepared to leave the camp. The commandant gave an incomprehensible speech, praising the prisoners as “men of honor.” Then they headed out of the swamp, leaving Schwarmstedt.

  Once in the woods, three prisoners made a dash for it. Guards fired after them, but the men got away. Closer to Hademsdorf station, another prisoner broke free. Bullets fired by the guards tore at tree stumps but missed their mark. But then the fugitive stumbled in a ditch, and the guards giving chase successfully tackled him.

  Harvey bided his time. He figured the train offered the best chance of escaping undetected, while giving him the advantage of a head start. He had his route to freedom carefully planned, thanks to Captain Godfrey Phillimore, who had escaped Schwarmstedt only to be captured just shy of the border; after twelve nights on the run he was returned to the camp. He’d shared every detail with Harvey and the Pink Toes, from the route he had followed to advice on when to travel (after midnight to avoid chance encounters), the best cover growth (rye), and places to avoid (damp woods—and mosquitoes that “rob you of vitality”). Finally, he cautioned them to abandon all roads and circumvent all villages within thirty miles of the frontier.

  Once he and the other men had boarded the train, Harvey stashed his knapsack, filled with some tins of meat and several slabs of Canadian hardtack for his journey to the border, in
a lavatory in the corridor. Then he entered his carriage and took a seat. The guard in his compartment was positioned at the door with a rifle between his legs. The opposite door was locked.

  Harvey planned on waiting until after dusk, excusing himself to go to the lavatory, exiting through the window, and jumping, preferably when the train was on a slow uphill course. His compartment mates, wise to his intentions, made several trips to the lavatory in the first few hours of the journey, returning to the compartment without event, lulling the guard into a sense of complacency. He was an old soldier, with rheumy blue eyes and a slumping posture, who occasionally nodded off, spit bubbles forming on his lips.

  After a time, Harvey stood and made his way to the lavatory to inspect it. Once inside, he pulled down the window. Fresh air rushed through the open gap, but it was too narrow for him to crawl through. The corridor outside was lined with windows, but none of these opened wide enough either. He returned to his carriage, this time with his knapsack.

  He had one other option: soon after setting out from Hademsdorf, the men in his compartment had convinced Spit-Bubble to open their windows; these definitely allowed enough space for a grown man to climb through. He would have to make the leap without the guard seeing.

  More hours passed. Harvey and the others offered Spit-Bubble some of their food and wine, which he gladly accepted. The meal, and the metronomic back and forth of the train, lulled the old guard into sleep, but time and again he would jar awake, eye his charges, then drift back to the spit bubbles.

  The train passed through Hanover, then down through the countryside toward Holzminden. They were making fast progress, and the sun had yet to set. Another guard passed through their carriage, announcing they would disembark within the hour. Harvey knew he had to go. After handing his knapsack to a fellow officer to hurl out after him, he waited for Spit-Bubble to drift off again. Then, with two of his compartment mates standing in front of the guard in case he awakened, Harvey climbed onto his seat, gripped the hanging arm-strap with one hand, and half-swung, half-pitched himself through the open window. The strap supported his weight. For a brief moment he stood on a railing outside the carriage car, buffeted by the wind, the countryside passing in a blur below his feet. Then, as the train rounded a bend, he leaped.