The Grand Escape

by Neal Bascomb

  General Karl von Hänisch, head of the German Army 10th District.

  Near the end of his short visit, Hänisch allowed Major John Wyndham, the senior British officer, to address him. Forty-six years old, an army lifer and veteran of several campaigns, Wyndham was unafraid. In German, he first demanded better accommodation for his men. “There are no public rooms, no library, one solitary cookhouse, and no bathroom,” he said. Hänisch turned to Habrecht and Niemeyer. They spoke quietly, then the general responded that a proper bathroom and another cookhouse would be provided. The rest were luxuries.

  Back in his office, Habrecht gently suggested to Hänisch that the British major, and the prisoners overall, deserved some modicum of respect. Niemeyer interjected that respect was something they were given too much of. Within 48 hours of the general’s departure, Habrecht was ordered to pack up his office. Niemeyer was now completely in charge.

  As some of his first acts as commandant, Niemeyer ordered a guard to fire at prisoners in the barracks building who were mocking the Germans during their morning drill marches. He made the sick and invalid stand in the parade ground for hours in the cold. He shut all the prisoners in their barracks for a day. And he ordered that any officer caught in the act of a breakout be shot on sight.

  Still, the escapes continued.

  Throughout October 1917, batches of prisoners continued to arrive at Holzminden, many among them with a roster of failed escapes under their belt. Over sixty men came from Ströhen, including David Gray and Caspar Kennard, who had found themselves together there again after being shuffled from camp to camp. The new prisoners gathered in the Spielplatz, its grass now trampled into a muddy soup because of the rain and daily tread of hundreds of boots. Prisoners stood on one side, guards on the other, then Karl Niemeyer performed his typical routine for newcomers. The Ströhen arrivals knew Niemeyer well—he had been the camp officer there before Holzminden was opened and had ordered guards to bayonet prisoners. Three of them had been seriously wounded. When asked to account for his order, he had declared, “I had nothing to do with it all. I was not in the camp. I did not give the order.”

  “Look at these criminals and mark them down,” Commandant Niemeyer said to his guards. “These are not officers and gentlemen, they are criminals, and I hope you will treat them such.”

  One officer bluntly said, “Oh shut up, Niemeyer.”

  Niemeyer flushed. “Did you tell me to shut up?”

  “Yes I did,” the officer said.

  A POW’s humorous illustration of Niemeyer.

  “Then I’ll have you arrested immediately. In five minutes!” Niemeyer roared.

  Some of the officers snickered at his lack of certainty, some a little too loudly. Niemeyer ordered the guards to clear the Spielplatz. “You are very clever? Yes? Well, I make a special study of this escaping. You will not escape from here. You think I, the commandant, know nothing. You are wrong. I know damn all.” Paroxysms of laughter followed his mistaken admission of being a know-nothing.

  The prisoners were hurried at the point of bayonets to their assigned barracks. There they quickly learned about the removable panel in the attic. Despite intensive searches, more sentry patrols, widening the stretch of no-man’s-land, and interrogating anyone who had escaped and been caught on the run, Niemeyer had yet to discover their method. More than a dozen prisoners had used the hatch, and there was a veritable German-uniform factory in one of the barracks rooms.

  However, not a single man had yet succeeded in making the long journey to Holland. Thorn, Wilkins, Gaskell, and all the others were captured on their runs to the Dutch border. It was risk enough to escape the walls of Holzminden, but that was only the first step to freedom.

  “Get up!” A guard pounded on the door, rousing Gray and the three other officers with whom he shared a room in Block B. The pounding, and the call, were repeated down the corridor. If they did not rise quickly enough, guards would enter their cells and shove them out of bed with the butts of their rifles. Roll call was at 9 a.m. sharp, and the prisoners spilled out of the barracks onto the snow-dusted Spielplatz to make it. Stragglers and those who failed to properly salute—or to stand at attention in uniform—were rewarded with a stay in the jug for a day, or three. “Cost price,” Niemeyer would say in his shaky grasp of American idiom. No matter how cold the day, the men were forced to wait an interminable time as one of Niemeyer’s lieutenants walked up and down the lines, calling out names and checking them off his list.

  Since arriving at Holzminden, Gray had realized that Niemeyer had created an environment intended to dehumanize the officers by a thousand petty humiliations. Apart from the dining room, which could only seat a hundred men at a time, there were no common rooms in which they could assemble. This meant that most prisoners ate where they slept. The officers conducted church services at the ends of corridors or in stairwells, where gatherings for lectures and card games were also held. Men scrambled over and around one another like ants in a nest. One was almost never alone with one’s own thoughts.

  Waiting was one of the most subtle instruments of harassment used. They waited for morning roll call, and when it was over, they waited for a wash at the taps in the yard. They waited for a paltry breakfast of bitter coffee and hard biscuits. They waited to get close enough to the noticeboard to see if they had a new parcel. If they did, they joined another line and waited to receive the parcel, then they waited again while the guards hacked to pieces or spilled out onto the table items their family or friends had sent. The queue for parcels started in the morning, and if you were not there early enough, you could well be waiting until the end of the day.

  The dining room at Holzminden.

  They waited to use a stove, of which there were too few, to cook their lunch. They waited for yet another round of inoculations. They waited to use the lavatory. To buy firewood at the canteen. To get their ration book for bread and wine. They waited for letters that did not come. For their name to be called at the 4 p.m. roll call. For whatever watery stew they were serving for dinner. Once a whole cow’s skull was found floating in the cauldron they dished it from. By 6 p.m., when they were locked in for the night, they had spent hours standing, waiting, time stretched out to lengths they never could have imagined.

  The cookhouse at Holzminden.

  The little tyrannies exercised on the prisoners at Holzminden were almost limitless. Despite—or perhaps because of—the inviting countryside outside the walls, Niemeyer refused to grant parole walks. As a result, they had only the half oval of grounds inside the wire for exercise and recreation. This was at best 410 yards around, space taken up by two cookhouses, horse troughs, a woodshed, a parcel office, a potato patch, and a dozen straggling trees. They tried to create a cricket pitch and football field in this limited space, but Niemeyer prohibited most games, telling them that one of the arc lamps had been broken by an errant ball. Their offer to pay for its replacement was met with silence. There was a gymnasium, built for the original barracks, but it was set between the inner wire and the surrounding walls—out of bounds. And so, when not in line or sitting in their packed rooms, prisoners wandered back and forth in the crowded Spielplatz like penned cattle.

  An officers’ bedroom at Holzminden.

  Bathing facilities were a horse trough that had hot water only twice a week, and the men had to wash in full view of the rest of the camp. A shower block was built on the senior officer’s request, but Niemeyer decided to use it to shelter his Alsatian guard dogs instead. He even posted a sign outside: “When a more suitable place in the camp can be found for the dogs, officers may have baths on Tuesdays and Fridays.”

  Theft was pervasive. The guards destroyed the cakes, bread, meat, and other food sent to the prisoners with shameless glee, but they also stole what they pleased, especially cigarettes and soap. Letters from home, often describing what had been sent, were “misplaced.” Goods were supposed to be sold at cost, but prisoners were charged triple the prices of other camps on ever
ything from coffee, wine, butter, firewood, eyeglasses, pencils, razors, notepads, watches, and toilet paper. Niemeyer also extorted charges for such necessities as food, hot water, and fuel for the kitchens. As well as turning a blind eye to outright theft, he also set the tone of abuse at the camp—and reveled in it. He paraded about the camp grounds and barracks throughout the day, hands stuffed in his greatcoat, chewing on his cigar. His voice could change from a soft dolorous coo at one moment to a harsh rasp the next. He spat on the floors in front of the British officers. He ordered rooms emptied at bayonet point and conducted searches that left beds and lockers in shambles. For no reason other than a sour mood, he sent men to solitary or closed the parcel room.

  The nonstop pinpricks that came with Niemeyer’s rule left the men feeling rattled and helpless. One officer at Holzminden wrote to his mother, “Time drags slowly on here, much the same day after day; it is extraordinary how restless one gets after a while—you feel that you must be doing something, yet cannot settle down to anything.” Some had lost a great deal of weight, others went listless, and one or two were spiraling into madness. With winter coming, and very little fuel to heat their rooms, their lives were certain to get worse.

  “The wearisome sameness of the days, the monotony of the faces, the unchanged landscape, the intolerable talk about the war, all these tended to produce the effect of complete and utter depression,” one prisoner wrote. “This was far and away our worst enemy: whole days were drenched in incurable melancholia.” Second Lieutenant William Harvey likened the effect of barbwire disease to a green mold that grew thick on his mind, leaving him stale and incapable of joy.

  There was no outlet to air their grievances. Niemeyer refused to meet with Wyndham and the other senior officers, nor would they have had much luck with him if he had. As far as he was concerned, his countrymen were the ones suffering because of the British and their allies. A rumor circulated the camp that Germany and Britain had met in The Hague to review POW and civilian internment conditions. From what they could make out, officers from both countries who had been held for more than 18 months would soon be sent to neutral Holland and Switzerland, where they would remain until the end of the war. But the war showed little sign of ending, and internment in Holland seemed a fool’s promise.

  Each man would have to find a way to survive the place they now called “Hellminden” or the “Black Hole of Germany.”

  Some of the men remained determined to survive it by escaping. In late October, several officers, including Kennard, made a break through the as-yet-undiscovered panel in Block A. Kennard ran into trouble attempting to cross the river Weser, whose width and fast current made for a perilous swim. He was caught, returned, and sentenced to a solitary cell. He was one of the last to use the hatch. After yet another intensive search, the guards found it at last, and a whole new series of security measures was put in place. The barricades in Block A were reinforced with iron sheets. Permit passes were instituted for the main gate and elsewhere. Windows were nailed shut. Barbwire fences were raised. The censoring of letters and inspections of parcels intensified. The barracks were scoured for contraband, and the number of guards increased. Niemeyer made every effort to ensure that the black mark on his record from all those early escapes would be erased by the prevention of any future ones. The Holzminden inmates were clearly jailbreakers of the first order, and not only did he intend to make the prison impervious to their schemes, he would crush their spirits while he was at it. “You see, gentleman,” he announced to the whole camp, “you cannot get out now. I should not try; it will be bad for your health.”

  Private Dick Cash of the 19th Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, had no plans to escape. Cash was one of Holzminden’s 130 orderlies, and, while the camp was a terrible place, his chances of starving there or being worked to death were slim compared to the salt mines or forced-labor camps that his rank could be subject to. When war broke out, Cash was 37 years old, a father of three and owner of a small grocery store and photography business in Thirlmere, Australia. He arrived on the front in March 1917, and his battalion saw its share of heavy fighting. On May 3, they were ordered across no-man’s-land in an early morning assault on the strategic German stronghold at Bullecourt. The Australians faced withering heavy machine-gun fire in their approach to the enemy lines.

  The POW officers at Holzminden.

  During the attack, Cash was shot in the chest. The bullet punctured his left lung, but he continued ahead. A series of mortars threw him first skyward, then sideways. Shrapnel pierced his back, and many of his teeth were knocked out before he landed in a shell hole, boots first. The ongoing barrage then filled up the hole around him until all but his head was underground. There he remained for almost 30 hours, trying to squirm his way free, before he was taken prisoner. Field surgery and a torturous 300-mile ride into Germany had followed. Cash managed to survive the maggot-infested squalor and rough attention accorded many wounded Allied prisoners and spent the next couple months at a hospital in Hamelin. By September, he had recovered enough to work as an orderly. Compared to the horrors he had faced on the front and in hospital, Cash knew that he could abide Holzminden for as long as he had to in order to survive and get back to his wife and family.

  He lived with the rest of the orderlies, many of whom were also recovering wounded, in Block B. Twenty men slept in the same size room as 12 officers, who were already tightly quartered at that number. The orderlies got out of their cold beds before the officers woke up. They dressed in gray-blue tunics, trousers, and caps sewn with bands of yellow cloth down the sides, and their prison number stamped in red on the front of their shirts. On the back, in large letters, was KG (Kriegsgefangener—prisoner of war). At 7 a.m., they began their day serving as the “nanny” or “batman” for five officers. They steeped pots of tea. They collected their uniforms, caps, and boots and polished and cleaned them before the wake-up call. Then they ate their own breakfasts before showing up for morning roll call. After that, they returned to their officers’ rooms to make their beds, empty their ashtrays, and tidy up. Then they swept the corridors and staircases. Twice weekly, they changed the bedsheets and beat the rugs of dust.

  Barracks Block B.

  The Germans then typically assigned the orderlies to some menial task around the camp such as bundling up paper or hauling firewood. After that was complete, they returned to their officers’ rooms to straighten up, make tea, and help serve meals. Most of the work was fairly light, albeit monotonous, and they rotated rooms so they did not have to suffer any particularly needy officer for long. As one orderly wrote, “Taking the officers by and large, they were a pleasant and easy going crowd, perhaps inclined to be a little thoughtless.” For those “tartars,” the orderlies could always exact a trivial retribution—a broken teacup, undercooked food—to signal that they could only be pushed so far.

  None of this service seemed odd to Cash, his fellow common-rank soldiers, or the officers they served. Although they were all prisoners, so traditional was the class separation between them that not even Niemeyer, who abused them all at every opportunity, ventured to make the officers fend entirely for themselves. European society had a rigid class system, and the military was yet another beast. However, officers and orderlies alike knew that they were all in this war together. They all faced the cruelties and whims of Niemeyer, the dreary repetition of days, the interminable lines, the thefts, the meager amounts of food, and most important of all, the absence of freedom.

  A number of orderlies had helped officers escape from other camps, providing them with uniforms and acting as lookouts. They intended to do the same at Holzminden. Dick Cash, with his toothless smile, made clear to the top breakout artists his willingness to help.

  Shorty Colquhoun wanted to dig a tunnel. Since the Germans’ discovery of the escape hatch, he could see no other way out. Although the tunnels British prisoners had started at other camps had fallen shy of success, he remained confident that one could be pulled off a
t Holzminden. Desperation often steeled the spine that way.

  Finding the best place to start a sap would be a simple exercise in eliminating options. Given the number of Germans inhabiting Block A, Colquhoun crossed that off the list of options straightaway. The cookhouses and woodshed in the Spielplatz were easy to access but were too public and too far away from the surrounding camp wall. So that was another possibility eliminated. That left Block B. Most of the cellar space underneath the officer’s section contained detention cells, and guards watched over the corridor night and day. The cellars under the orderlies’ quarters in Block B, which were used to store wood, tins, bread, potatoes, and other goods, were the only other option. Although guards did patrol there, they did so infrequently. Further in their favor was the cellars’ location adjacent to Holzminden’s eastern wall. A tunnel would only need to stretch some 15 yards to reach beyond the camp wall—out into an unguarded field.

  Colquhoun wanted to get down there to see whether a tunnel was possible. The officers and orderlies each had their own entrance to the barracks: the officers’ in the west wing; the orderlies’ in the east. Officers were forbidden to use the orderlies’ entrance, and a guard posted 12 yards opposite the door watched all comers and goers. But nobody registered when orderlies entered the officers’ section to carry out their daily duties. There, Colquhoun saw his opportunity. He recruited his friend William Baxter Ellis, a young RFC pilot, to join him on the reconnaissance. Orderlies provided uniforms and a duplicate key for the cellar door. During lunch, when most of the Germans were inside the Kommandantur, the two men crossed the yard and entered the eastern wing. Even though Colquhoun was tall and gangly, nobody paid him—nor Ellis—any mind. Inside, they found that the layout was a mirror image of their own wing.