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The Venlo Incident

Page 15

by Nigel Jones


  Anyhow, towards the end of October 1940 I decided to stop our correspondence and in doing so, to have a little fun. When Ettlinger came into my cell one day I handed him one of my letters in its tarred cover and said: “Would you perhaps be so kind as to give this to my comrade?” He looked very blank and did not seem to know what to do or say. “You see,” I went on, “you people make such mistakes that our correspondence is becoming completely disorganized. This is a letter which I wrote to Stevens three days ago and left in my usual hiding place, and this morning I found it in the place which Stevens uses for his letters. Now, I suppose, each of us has got his own letter back. I think it would make everything much simpler for the future if we just handed you our letters so that you could censor them and pass them on.” This was too much for Ettlinger who found nothing to say but just went away taking my letter. I wrote and told Stevens what I had done, getting Prochnow to post the letter for me so that I could be sure that it would reach him. A few days later I heard that Stevens had been very poorly and that to cheer him up the Gestapo people had told him that I had had a letter from May, and that in it she had said that she had seen his wife and that she was very well. This was, of course, a lie, but since it might be a consolation for Stevens I did not contradict it.

  Just before Xmas, when I went out for exercise, Head Warder Eccarius told me that I must keep to the middle path and not walk or sit anywhere else. Whilst I was out two of the Gestapo men came and began telling me off for corresponding with Stevens. In reply, I pointed out that from the first it had been obvious to me that my letters were being intercepted, but since nothing was said to me about it I supposed that they enjoyed reading them; in any case, as they must have heard from the head warder, I had myself put an end to the exchange of letters so that their reprimand came a little too late in the day. Then I turned to the attack and began complaining about the conditions of my imprisonment and the fact that I was treated like a condemned criminal, to which they counter-attacked by saying that I was being treated far too well, and that their people who had been caught in England were being beaten and tortured or kept in dark underground dungeons. Soon we were all three shouting at the tops of our voices and having a splendid time, but it all ended well and we finished by wishing each other a Merry Xmas and they handed me a hundred cigarettes with the compliments of the Brigadeführer; I did not at first grasp whom they meant, but it turned out to be Oberführer Müller who had been promoted to major general in the SS.

  So 1940 came to an end and I was no longer a new boy. I had no illusions about the probable length of my imprisonment but had resigned myself to the idea that I was in for at least another four years. Could I make the grade and last out? Everything depended on my health and I determined to do everything that I could to recover some of the strength which I had lost during my illness. Things really weren’t too bad and I felt pretty confident that, if they would only leave me where I was, I should soon find ways of improving the conditions of my life. Even at that time I realized that, if I ever regained my liberty, I might be tempted to dramatize my experiences and make out that my sufferings were greater than they were in truth, so at the end of each year I entered a little summary in my diary. That at the end of 1940 reads:

  On the whole, time has passed quickly. My health on the whole has been fair, and except for constant worry about May, I have been free from depression. My nerves are in a pretty bad state. Treatment has in the main been considerate, though I consider the fact that I am chained to the wall at night a quite unnecessary indignity.

  During December there had been a lot of noise of hammering in the building, and I had heard that alterations were being made to cells in the two other wings. On the 21st I heard that Stevens had been moved from cell No. 44 to the end of his passage where two cells, Nos. 38 and 39, had been knocked into one large cell. My guards were quite excited about this and told me that similar alterations had been made at the far end of the other wing, opposite that in which Stevens lived; this must surely be intended for me, and we were all overjoyed at the idea of a possible move to the front and sunny side of the building, and away from the damnable lavatory. But January came and I was still in my old cell No. 51, listening to the w.c.s next door flushing merrily away and inhaling my morning and evening dose of excremental effluvia. Then we heard that a new and very secret prisoner had been brought to the Bunker and occupied a very large cell, which had been made by knocking Nos. 11, 12 and 13 into one. Like me, he had guards with him day and night, but they slept in his cell and were forbidden to associate with Steven’s guards and mine. It was all very well to make regulations such as these, but even if the guards were not allowed to fraternize while in the Bunker, there was nothing to prevent them doing so in the canteen and elsewhere outside, so not many days passed before we knew quite a lot about No. 13 as he was called.

  The first news was that, as the guards put it, he was a ‘Todes Kandidat’, meaning a man condemned to death; next his identity was established; he was Georg Elser, the man who, according to press and radio, was guilty of the attempt to assassinate the Führer on the 8th November, 1939, by a bomb built into one of the pillars in the Bürgerbraukeller at Munich. What did this mean? Why had he not been executed? We were all greatly intrigued, particularly because, in the papers, my name had been coupled with his and the suggestion made that I had been his employer. If it were true that he had been condemned to death, what about me—was I in the same boat? Bit by bit information leaked out and my guards came to me with the story that I was to be tried for complicity in the attempt on Hitler’s life, and that Elser would give evidence that he had acted on my instructions. Of course I had had nothing to do with the business at all, and all I knew about the story was limited to the short report which I had read in the Dutch paper on the morning of my capture. As for Elser, all that I knew about him was that I had seen in one of the German illustrated papers which a guard was reading, his photograph next to mine; this was at the time when I was not allowed to read, and I had only caught a glimpse of it as I passed the guard on my promenade up and down the cell.

  In the course of time I was able to establish relations with Elser and although we never met or spoke to each other, a sort of friendship developed between us. From what he communicated to me himself, and from information which I picked up from a number of other sources, I was eventually able to piece together his very strange story which I will tell at the appropriate time.

  From the beginning of 1941 there was a marked improvement in the general atmosphere (except for its smells) in the Bunker. I heard no further sounds of flogging or execution, and it was noticeable that the number of camp prisoners confined in dark cells was greatly reduced. From one after another of the windows facing my garden the boards were removed, and it was plain that the cells now housed an entirely different class of prisoner. My guards were never allowed to learn the names of prisoners who were always referred to by their cell numbers, but they told me that a lot of foreigners had been brought in, most of them as they thought, French. A lot of these new people were in cells on the opposite side of my wing; on my side of the passage, except for the two bishops, all the cells were occupied by SS men serving short sentences for military crimes.

  It was, however, not only in the Bunker that conditions were improved but I was told that there had been a complete revolution in the treatment of the prisoners in the camp. Manpower had become a vital element in German war economy and someone had come to the conclusion that the abnormally high death-rate in the concentration camps constituted a waste of this valuable asset. Instructions were therefore given that measures should be taken to preserve, not only the lives of the prisoners, but also their physical capacity for work. New ration scales had been introduced and prisoners were allowed to receive food parcels from their relatives; this had previously been forbidden. Although much of the food was still purloined by the commandant and other camp officials, enough remained to enable the prisoners to keep body and soul together. The m
en too were employed on more important and consequently lighter work than the hard and often useless drudgery with pick and shovel which had been their main occupation. A large number, some 3,000 or so, were employed at a large brick field belonging to the camp, and others worked at the Heinckel aeroplane works and at other factories in the neighbourhood engaged on war work. More and more, as the war progressed, the concentration camps were regarded as important labour reservoirs, and prisoners as particularly suitable for employment on secret development work since their discretion could be assured. On my walks to and from the dentist it was very noticeable how much brisker and better fed the prisoners looked.

  My days followed a fairly regular routine. I rose at 5 a.m. and went to the lavatory to wash, and when I got back to my cell it had been cleaned and aired. Then the warder brought me my razor, a mug of hot water and a mirror. After shaving, I dressed and lay down on my bed for a nap. Breakfast was brought in at about eight o’clock, six slices of bread with honey, jam, or butter—on Sundays, two doughnuts and a bowl of chocolate as well. I then either dozed on my bed, read, or played patience. At ten I went again to the lavatory—after quite a fight I had got this time established. From noon to one o’clock I went out for exercise and when I got back my dinner was waiting for me on the table; the food was always excellent, but I hated having everything brought to me ready cut up so that I could eat with a spoon, the only utensil which I was allowed. After dinner another snooze, and then read or played patience till my supper was brought at about five; this again consisted of five or six slices of bread with sausage, boiled bacon, or cheese. It was always most tastefully prepared for me by the chief trusty who, knowing that I had trouble with my teeth, cut up my bread for me in small squares. From then until ten o’clock I would generally chat with my guard or read. Then to the lavatory, undress, get into bed, and the warder came with my wristlet and I was chained up for the night. A lazy futile sort of life for most of which I was only half awake, but it must be remembered that I had to snatch my sleep when I could, and that at least once every two hours I was awakened by the change of guards.

  On the 4th March there was a sudden burst of excitement. Two of my guards vanished and König and Böning had to do duty turn and turn about. In the evening I asked Paul what was up, and after some difficulty got it out of him: “Your comrade tried to commit suicide with a bootlace and now two guards must be with him day and night.” I was, of course, very much upset at this news. When I later asked Stevens about this incident, he said that there was not a word of truth in it; he had been sitting reading and idly playing with a bootlace which he had put over the back of his neck; he had said something to the guard, the man named Schulz, that one could easily strangle oneself with a bootlace, who had reported to the head warder making out that there had been an attempt at suicide which had only been frustrated through his watchfulness. The result was unpleasant for poor Stevens, but it was equally so for me as they took my glasses away in case I broke them and cut my throat, and it was two days before I was allowed to have them back. Then, first Hofmann and Ebert left me, and subsequently Prochnow and Paul König. In their place I was sent two lads of eighteen and nineteen years of age and another young fellow named Pohle, who turned out to be quite a good sort. I strongly objected to the presence of these two lads in front of whom I had to bathe and do everything else.

  There had been another change in the organization of the Bunker which I forgot to mention; since the beginning of February, an officer, Lieutenant Heydrich, had been appointed as chief; and the warders no longer had things all their own way. This man had been in to see me once or twice and had struck me as quite a decent little fellow. He was that most unusual figure in the German Army, a ranker officer, having been given a commission in the First World War for gallantry in the field; he was, of course, a dug-out, and, I believe, an SS man by compulsion. I asked whether I could see him and complained to him about the young men being sent to me as guards. He was very nice about it and quite understood my attitude; he agreed to let me have Paul back and another older man if he could find one. The man he sent was a fellow named Teppich, who had been for a time with Stevens; a most unpleasant fellow who, whenever he came on duty, whether by day or by night, brought with him some food or other which he noisily devoured, washing down each mouthful with some coffee which he sucked in bubbles through his lips. Very often he was tipsy in the evening and, unlike Prochnow, inclined to be quarrelsome.

  I put up with him for about a fortnight and then had little Heydrich in again and reported that he had adopted a threatening attitude towards me, and had said that Stevens and I were only common spies and ought to be shot. This was, I am sorry to say, a slight perversion of the truth, but I could not afford to be too scrupulous if I wanted to get my own way. Actually, all that Teppich had done was to say that he could not understand that two spies like Stevens and me had not been shot and, one evening when he was pretty tight, he started showing off his strength by holding a chair out at arm’s length over my bed. Anyhow, Teppich was known as a drunken, quarrelsome fellow, and my story was accepted without demur, with the result that Teppich was given three weeks in a cell on a diet of bread and water and then drafted to the front. I tell this at length, because this incident materially eased my own position as, seeing how easily I had dealt with Teppich, all the officials came to the conclusion that perhaps I was better left alone, and even Ettlinger became much more civil.

  Unfortunately this business did not end merely with the disappearance of Teppich, for the question of guards drinking on duty became the subject of an investigation by the commandant, and they, as well as the warders, were had up before him and warned that should there be any more complaints of this nature the punishment would be far more serious, and the man involved might find himself deprived of his SS uniform and sent to the camp as an ordinary prisoner. As Drexl had been on duty the evening when Teppich had been drunk on his arrival in my cell he was dismissed from his post as one of the warders in the Bunker. I was very sorry about this, for he had always treated me very kindly; actually, it turned out very well for him because he was detailed to a sort of batman job with the widow of SS-General Eycke, where, as I later heard, he was extremely happy in the role of devoted attendant to two small children.

  Teppich was replaced by another man who had previously been with Stevens. This was Johann Odörfer, one of the strangest and most amusing characters I have ever met. In appearance he was rather like a gorilla with his stooping gait and long swinging arms; his head was covered with a thatch of reddish hair which had never known brush or comb, and his face, for most of the week, was also a field of thick stubble. His uniform was dirty and covered with stains, and almost always there was a bottle sticking out of one of his bulging pockets; not something to drink, but varnish or oil, for he was by way of being an artist. Odörfer was a man who had been born 300 years too late, for he was the soldier of fortune who would have found his true place and felt himself at home in the times of the Thirty Years War. He was just a fighting man. He had no interest in nor use for drill and the spit and polish of peace, all he wanted was the chance to go out and kill a few people, no matter at what risk to himself. He had been a sapper in the First World War but, as soon as these were formed, got into one of the ‘Stoss Truppen’ which were, in a way, the prototype of the Commandos of the Second World War. Wounded five times he had acquired every decoration for gallantry within his reach; he spent the war either fighting, in hospital, or in the cells, for his general method of inducing a medical board to pass him fit for general service was to knock out the chief examining doctor.

  After 1918 he joined one of the free corps, and saw a lot of fighting in the Baltic and in Upper Silesia, then, when his unit was disbanded, he took up with the Nazis as they seemed to offer a bigger prospect of a little honest manslaughter than any of the other political parties. He joined the party quite soon after its formation, and so had the party emblem in gold, which made him quite an important pers
on, as this gave him the right of personal access to Hitler if he were in any difficulty. He took not the slightest interest in the party programme, nor had he any reverence for Hitler and the other party leaders. He had joined the SS simply in order to get some fighting and he had actually managed, in spite of his age and war disability, to take part in the Polish campaign; then, to his disgust he had been classified ‘Fit only for garrison duty at home’ and had been sent to this camp. What he had seen in Poland, and since then, in the camp, had given him a furious hatred for everything to do with the Nazis, and unlike most Germans who always tried to excuse Hitler by saying that he did not know what was being done in his name, Odörfer was clear-sighted enough to place the whole blame upon him. What could you expect from a corporal? He liked his officers to be gentlemen, and if a man was not fitted to be an officer he was probably equally unsuitable as political leader of his country.

  In spite of his inclination towards a life of violence Odörfer, from the very first and as long as he was with me, did everything that he could to help me and render my life as agreeable as possible. He considered that I had been unjustly treated, and that as I had been captured by a trick and not during an honest fight, it was his duty to help me to liberty. Almost daily he came out with some wonderful scheme for escape which he had worked out in the minutest detail; unfortunately, none carried us farther than the door of the Bunker and this we would only reach after we had slaughtered half a dozen warders and other officials—how we were to get out of the camp itself, for he intended to accompany me, was a problem for which he could find no solution. When telling me of his plans his enthusiasm was tremendous, and he had a way of puffing and snorting with excitement which made you expect to see flames issuing from his nostrils like a dragon of old.

 

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