The Venlo Incident

by Nigel Jones

  On the 11th July we had our first air raid warning and from my bed I heard the flak bursting, as it seemed, directly overhead. Next day there were very long faces in the Bunker and it was clear to me that Berlin had received its first quota of bombs. It had been a funny but exhilarating experience to feel that my own countrymen had come so close. There was nothing more until the 25th August, but from then on till the middle of November Berlin was raided on almost every fine night, culminating with two big raids on the 14th when the alert lasted from 8.45 p.m. till 6 a.m. next day. Meanwhile, the Battle of Britain had started and had been won, though all that I knew about it came from the daily ‘Sondermeldungen’ (special announcements) on the radio, heralded by blaring fanfares of trumpets and ending with the playing of the England Song which told of hundreds of British planes shot down without German losses; the paper, too, was full of sensational reports about the complete destruction of the R.A.F., and the ruin and desolation caused by German bombs. There was such obvious exaggeration, that I was, as I now know, inclined to discount the reality of this threat to British air supremacy. You see, my experiences of air warfare dated back to the First World War when the superiority of British pilots was never really called in question—the Germans said that they were having a walkover, and knowing that this could not be true, I disbelieved everything they said.

  On the 19th September two men from the Gestapo handed me a large file of typewritten papers which they told me to read, saying at the same time that they would soon be able to take me home to my wife in England, unless, of course, I would prefer to have her join me in Germany—“when you see what we have done to London, you won’t want to go there—it has been almost completely destroyed—let’s hope that your wife got away in time”. They told me to read the papers in the file and to give them back to the warder in the morning. They were the proclamations which the Germans were going to issue in occupied England. There were about fifty of them, I should say, and they dealt with every phase of the military administration of a conquered and occupied country, where every breach of the regulations was an offence punished with death. All fire-arms and wireless equipment must be surrendered within twenty-four hours. All railways, canals, and ports to be taken over, and all stocks of timber, coal, and oil to be requisitioned. There was a regulation for the registration of all men below the age of fifty, and another fixing the value of the pound at 9.60 marks. It is hopeless for me to try and remember them all, but one thing struck me about their wording; they obviously did not envisage a complete occupation of the whole of Great Britain, but only of the southern half. This was obvious, for there were frequent references to ‘occupied’ and ‘unoccupied’ territories, with regulations for civilian travel from one to the other, and also to a British Government, apparently that in the unoccupied zone. The German plan seemed to be based on the armistice arrangements which had been effected in France.

  Now, why on earth was this shown to me? My own conclusion was that the whole thing was a washout, the idea of an invasion of England had been given up, and the Gestapo was just having its bit of fun with me. As a matter of fact, my guards had talked to me quite a lot about the possibility of an invasion of England, and they had certainly not seemed optimistic—no one could understand why the invasion had not been carried out immediately after the fall of France. The British Army had been annihilated, British warships were sunk by Stukas as soon as they left harbour, and the R.A.F. had ceased to exist—what was the Wehrmacht waiting for?

  A new guard had come to me early in August, Paul König, who, throughout the rest of my stay at Sachsenhausen was to be my most loyal and self-sacrificing friend. That I am here today, that I learnt how to make my life in prison tolerable, that I was able to avoid all the pitfalls which bestrewed my path, everything I owe to the loyalty and wise counsel of my dear friend Paul. He was a short man and so fat as to be almost square; his gait was that of a duck, but of a very brisk determined duck. Although he was almost exactly the same age as I he had thick, fair, curly hair, which would have done credit to a boy of twenty; this was brushed to a cockatoo like crest which made him look rather like the caricatures of Mr. Herbert Morrison. He was the typical Berliner, just as Sam Weller was the typical Cockney of his day—he knew his way through life—as he always said himself, if you fall, fall on your feet, not on your head. He belonged to the lower middle-class, he was what he himself called, ‘der kleine Mann’ (the little man) and his philosophy could be summed up in the belief that the little man was between the upper and the nether millstone, and his life a constant struggle against being crushed out of existence. He had no use for Nazis, Communists, or indeed, for any political party. All promise the little man everything he desires and, as soon as they have power, try to take away from him what little he has.

  He was not a man who could fight for his own selfish interests, nor had he the self-assurance to stand alone. Like a dog, he must attach himself to someone, and to that person he showed all a dog’s fidelity and in him placed all his trust. Almost from the first day that he entered my cell, before that he had been for a week or two with Stevens, he adopted me as his master, and from then on my interests were his and to further them, this naturally rather timorous little man, was ready to face the greatest dangers. He was so convinced his duty in life was to serve me and that this was an honour, that in the end he managed to convince nearly everyone that I was an exceptional and extremely important person. Speaking to me he always called me Monsieur, this being in his opinion the respectful way of addressing a distinguished foreigner; when speaking to others, I was ‘der Chef’, the Chief, and the time came when even Eccarius, the head warder, always spoke of me by this term.

  After his first turn of night duty he said to me: “But this is no good at all, no one can sleep with all that light shining on him; you should have a good shade over the lamp.”

  “That’s all very well,” I said, “but where is the shade coming from?”

  “Very simple, just make one. I will bring you some cardboard and blackout paper and you can make a shade.”

  Well, so I did, and it was such a good shade that I was kept busy making more for others. It was a tube of cardboard covered with black paper which fitted over the globe of the lamp, and at the bottom it was so cut as to throw a beam of light by which the guard could see to read whilst leaving my bed in darkness. I used porridge as paste and made a reflector of tin foil.

  The next thing with which Paul found fault was my bed; it appeared that the straw mattress, which I in my ignorance had accepted as a normal trial of prison life, was very far from being what it should be. The straw in it was so old that it had turned to chaff, and certainly, it was one of the hardest and most lumpy things I had ever lain on; it felt in fact very much like a cobbled road. Paul had a private talk with the head trusty and, when I came back from exercise, there was a brand new mattress absolutely bursting with fresh-smelling long-stalked rye straw. Then, as I complained of my pillow, this, too, was taken in hand. My ears tend towards the bats-wing model and offer great resistance to attempts to flatten them against my head; I had really suffered agonies at night from my debris-filled pillow and I would have even preferred one of Japanese pattern which would have left my ears free to flap without restriction. Paul produced a pair of scissors and said: “Let’s see what’s in the animal.” I protested that this might cause trouble if the warder saw that I was operating on the pillow, but Paul gave his usual answer: “The soup is never eaten as hot as it is cooked. If you wait until they allow you to do anything you want to in this hole of a place you will have to wait until a beard grows on your backside. You just do what you want, and if the warder makes a row, well you weren’t born dumb either, were you?”

  The pillow was unstitched and out of it came two bundled up and very dirty sacks, and a small quantity of evil-smelling powder which Paul said had once been straw. He called for the trusty and got him to bring a bundle of straw and two new blankets. The straw was bunched up criss-cross so th
at it was nice and springy, and around it we wrapped the two blankets and sewed them into place; with a piece of new ticking which the trusty produced I had a soft and most comfortable pillow which served me throughout the next five years.

  So it was with other things. My clothes were showing signs of wear and so far I had been unable to get needle and thread to mend them, but Paul said: “The wife can help there,” and after his next day at home in Berlin he brought me needles and various kinds of sewing cotton and thread, and soon I was happily engaged on ‘Make and mend’. I am by nature fairly ingenious and there are few things to which I cannot turn my hands; so far though I had rather accepted my impotence as a prisoner as an unavoidable circumstance of my condition, but with the encouragement given me by Paul and later by other guards, I became a revolutionary, or perhaps, better said, an old lag. Prison life is a constant clash of wits between warders and prisoners. The warders have power and they know all the answers, but they are few and the prisoners are many; besides, the prisoners know what they want and are prepared to try, try, and try again; their desires are positive and therefore far more potent than the mere negative attempts of the warders to keep them doing nothing. Warders are human and want to make their work as easy as possible, so that as long as prisoners don’t flout regulations in any blatant fashion, they are but little inclined to interfere.

  Our warders knew perfectly well that almost all the prisoners were doing things which were not allowed; smoking in their cells, tapping out messages on the radiator pipes, talking to each other through the windows, and exchanging notes. They must also have known that the trusties were on the side of the prisoners and helped them where they could. But, what could they do? Their duty was to make a report to the commandant if they discovered any of these delicts, but they also knew that to make many reports would certainly lay them open to the charge that they were inefficient and incapable of maintaining discipline. They themselves had no authority to punish and even if Ettlinger would beat up some unfortunate when he was in the mood, he did so, not in the interest of public order, but to satisfy his own inclination towards cruelty.

  Under Paul’s guidance and instruction I took every advantage of my position, until gradually the warders recognized that to interfere with me generally brought them only grief and sorrow, and that, too, where they least expected it. For Ettlinger I was no match, for he could get back at me by docking my smokes, and he also enjoyed the especial favour of the commandant, but he was only on duty one day out of three and Eccarius and Drexl I found easy to manage. In the end I got Ettlinger too, but that comes later in this story. My system was to appear most obedient and law abiding; if a warder told me that something I was doing was forbidden, I pleaded ignorance but said that I could not take orders from him and that he must report the matter to the commandant. If he did so and the commandant came to see me, my attitude was sweetly reasonable; I apologized for the trouble to which I had put him, but said that of course he would understand that I could not accept orders from an N.C.O. I was only too anxious to keep to regulations and he could be sure that if I had sinned, I had done so in ignorance.

  When talking to the commandant I always tried to create the atmosphere of two brother officers talking together, which seemed to flatter him and put him off his stroke. He would be quite pleasant and say that he quite understood how difficult it was for me to understand German conditions, but that he was sure that I did not want to cause unnecessary trouble. Then I would gently insert my sting. “Excuse my asking commandant, but you see I have only had to do with the Wehrmacht and never before with the SS. In the army a soldier on duty is not properly dressed if he is not wearing his belt and cap, but I notice here that the warders often go about their duty in shirt sleeves; of course I agree that it is much more comfortable for them, but it does strike me as a bit unmilitary.” Now, if there was one thing about which the SS was sensitive, it was any suggestion that their behaviour was less martial than that of the Wehrmacht. When I said something of this nature, and I could generally find some artless question of the kind, the commandant could not get out of my cell quickly enough, and as soon as the door was closed after him his wrath exploded and the warder on duty was cursed up hill and down dale.

  After that the warders would be careful that I never saw them improperly dressed, and so in the evening I was free from the danger of sudden incursions into my privacy. One or two similar ripostes and the warders lost all inclination to report my doings to the commandant, and all that they did was to tell me that some action of mine was forbidden adding, if the commandant finds out, don’t forget to tell him that I told you that it was not allowed. Of course all this was not achieved in one day, but by the end of 1940 a pretty well established non-aggression pact was tacitly observed by both sides. Much later there came a day when I turned to the attack and the warders learnt that it was they, not I, who must obey.

  Yet, when all was said and done, my life during the first year of imprisonment was very drab and yet full of nervous strain. Just take a glance at my cell: it is five yards long by two and a half wide; at the end, six feet above the ground, is a large window outside which are five thick vertical iron bars; as you stand near the door you can see the tops of some pine trees about a hundred yards away. On your right with his back towards you sits my guard at a small table, about two feet by one; then comes my bed; hanging on the wall just above the guard’s table are two small shelves on which are my few possessions such as soap, shaving brush, comb, etc. On your left, close to the door is the radiator, then against the side wall a similar table to that of the guard at which I am sitting on a kitchen chair either reading or playing patience. The walls and ceiling are whitewashed, but are rather dingy with a good few cobwebs in the corners. Scratched in the wall over the radiator and then whitewashed over are some obscene drawings apparently representing women of some Hottentot tribe; there is also what appears to have been a calendar with numbers scratched out. The wooden floor is a dirty grey. Only the bed looks bright and clean with its blue and white squared overlay, clean white sheet, and pillow-slip, but the cold north light makes everything look hard and inhospitable. I am wearing a well-worn grey herringbone suit, my trousers are pressed and my shirt, collar and tie are quite presentable; whatever the difficulties, I always take pains to keep myself looking as neat and well dressed as possible.

  The status of a prisoner depends more than one would think on his dress; one could almost divide them into classes on this basis alone. At the top, the so-called ‘Prominenten’ which can best be translated as V.I.P.s (Very Important Prisoners), who wore their own clothes; next, the middle-classes, wearing their own clothes but deprived of braces, bootlaces, collars, and ties; unfortunates, whose girth prison fare had diminished, making them the slaves of slipping trousers; then came the trusties who wore clean and well-fitting prison uniform and often their own shirts and even collars; last of all the grey mass of the camp prisoners in their dirty shapeless grey-blue striped garb, their heavy clogs from which bits of sacking or straw stuck out, their shaven pates and jaunty little round caps. When I first became a prisoner I had no idea that such distinctions existed and I felt myself one with all the others, yet, as time passed, I must confess to my shame, that I came to regard the people in the camp outside as belonging to some lower order of humanity—not consciously, for I was intensely sorry for every one with whom I had any personal contact, but the prisoners in the mass became for me simply part of my normal environment.

  At the time when Stevens and I were first brought to the Bunker, it housed only two V.I.P.s; Pastor Niemöller in cell No. 1, and Thaelmann in cell No. 76. Shortly after the occupation of Belgium and Holland, two new guests, said to be Belgian or Dutch bishops, joined us, and were given cells Nos. 62 and 63. The story was told that they had been sent to Sachsenhausen by Goering, to whom they had refused to give the Nazi salute, to be taught manners. They had comfortable cells which, from a glimpse I was able to take through an open door, were luxuriously
furnished compared to mine; I saw a bookcase full of books and an easy chair. Their education in Nazi social etiquette was confined to their exercise time in the garden. Then, a stick was stuck in the ground half-way along the centre path, and on this was placed an SS uniform cap. The two men then took up positions on the path ten paces on either side of this saluting base, and at the word of command, started marching briskly towards each other; as they passed the cap they had to raise their right arms and cry “Heil Hitler”, they continued their march for another ten paces, did a smart right-about-turn, and repeated the operation. This they did for two hours daily for more than a year and a half, and by the end of this time they had trampled two ruts, which were at least six inches deep, into the side of the path. From my cell I could hear their ‘Heil Hitler’s’ and the warder’s ‘Louder!’ always ‘louder!’ and once, when the warder had by mistake said that the garden was empty whilst they were still out there, I caught a glimpse of them when I went to the door to go out myself. A friendly prison doctor told me later that he had never seen two men whose physical condition had been so greatly improved by regular exercise.

  Gradually the correspondence with Stevens ceased to amuse me, particularly since I knew that all our letters were going to the Gestapo, and I had continued it merely because it seemed to cheer him up a bit. Prochnow or König gave me almost daily news of him and their general description of his state was ‘Verbissen’ (looking grim). According to all accounts he would be quite well and cheerful for some days, and then suddenly he seemed to lose interest in life and would just lie on his bed all day refusing to eat or to speak to anyone; these moody attacks became quite a joke with the guards and were called his ‘monthlies’. I did all that I could to cheer him up in my letters, but I had my own difficulties to counter, and in the long run began to find that his letters tended to depress me. It was really very sad for him that he could not achieve a more equable frame of mind, because his guards disliked his moodiness, and the nicest men among them all got themselves transferred to duty in my cell as soon as they could. During most of the time he had three of the most obnoxious men in the building as guards; men named Deckert, Schulz and Lenkeit, who were all real Nazis and reported everything he did or said to the warders. Of my own guards, Böning, Ebert and König had all started duty with him before coming to me, and if he had only managed to win their liking and allegiance, his life could have been so much pleasanter than it was.