by Damien Lewis
On the morning of their fourth day in captivity, one by one the five captives were taken from their cell, bundled into a waiting car and driven off at speed. It was barely a five-minute ride to Place des États Unis, but still it provided time for Vaculik to glance around ‘at all the people . . . going about their business in freedom while I was a prisoner held by armed men who would not hesitate to shoot if I attempted to escape’. Upon arrival, each of the captives was frogmarched through the wrought-iron gates, and propelled to the top floor, where five cells had been readied for them.
The rooms were sparse: one wooden bed, a mattress and a bucket beside it. Each had iron bars set across the windows. They looked out over the unmistakable form of the Eiffel Tower in the distance, while nearer at hand young girls played in the courtyard of a convent, situated on the Rue de Lübeck. A spyhole had been fitted into each of the doors, and every fifteen minutes or so ‘an eye became visible as the SS gaoler looked in to see whether everything was in order’.
In fact, here at their new prison the guards would turn out to be somewhat less hardline than those at Avenue Foch. Mostly they were former Russian POWs, who’d been presented with a harsh choice by their captors: either join the cause of Nazi Germany, or be worked to death in the concentration camps. They were known as ‘Hiwis’ – an abbreviation of the German word Hilfswilliger, meaning ‘those willing to help’.
‘They were prisoners of war . . . captured somewhere on the Eastern Front,’ Ernst Vocht, another of the Avenue Foch interrogators, remarked of the Hiwi guards. Vocht, who walked with a pronounced limp, had taken six bullets in a shootout with an English SOE agent, yet still he remained a tireless Gestapo agent. ‘They never learned German properly . . . I know Kieffer regarded them as a liability, not from the point of loyalty but that an accident might occur because they had not been able to understand their orders. They knew the difference between us and our English and French prisoners, that they must not let the prisoners go.’
Vaculik could speak a smattering of Russian, and he worked at building bridges with the Hiwi guards, many of whom had realised by now which way the fortunes of the war might be blowing. This was something that Vaculik and Jones would take advantage of, to execute their first daring attempt at escape. But before any such thing could happen, the fickle hand of fate was to twice intervene in the fortunes of the SAS captives. Both would be as the result of attempted assassinations – the first of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the second on Adolf Hitler himself. In each, British special operators were seen as having their hand at the very throat of the German high command, and the SAS captives would reap the whirlwind.
The highly respected Field Marshal Johannes Erwin Rommel –known as der Wüstenfuchs, the Desert Fox – had forged a formidable reputation in the battle for North Africa, and more recently commanding German forces opposing the Normandy landings. A long-time antagonist of Allied high command, it was as the result of a recent SAS operation that Rommel was seen as being unusually vulnerable. To the southeast of the Op Gain area, A Squadron 1 SAS had been executing a contemporaneous mission, codenamed Operation Houndsworth, with similar objectives – to block German armour and reinforcements from reaching the Normandy beachheads.
In the process, Major Bill Fraser, Houndsworth’s commander, had learned that Rommel himself had his headquarters at the Château de la Roche-Guyon. Fraser had a personal reason to want to ‘get Rommel’. Two and a half years earlier, in Operation Flipper, a group of Commandos had landed by submarine in North Africa to attack Rommel’s then HQ. All but two of the raiders were killed or captured, and they’d failed to kill Rommel, who was absent at the time. Fraser’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey Keyes, had died during the raid, earning a posthumous VC.
Though Rommel’s French château lay some 250 miles away, Fraser radioed headquarters, asking to have a crack at the German commander. Instead, SAS command stood up its own mission, which was given the fitting codename of Operation Gaff, a gaff being a large barbed hook used to land captured fish. Op Gaff would be commanded by a twenty-four-year-old Franco-American, ‘Jack William Raymond Lee’, whose real name was Raymond Courand. Courand – variously a French Foreign Legionnaire, a decorated war hero, a sometime gangster, and a veteran of the SOE and the Commandos – had been shot in both legs during Operation Chariot, the 1942 raid on St Nazaire, but had survived.
In the spring of 1943 Courand had been recruited into 2 SAS. A year later, Brigadier McLeod – the hunting, polo-playing, pigsticking SAS commander – figured that Courand was the man to lead Operation Gaff. Courand’s hand-picked assassination squad consisted of four fellow ex-legionnaires, including a German sergeant named Marx (or ‘Mark’ in some reports) and a Russian named Fedossof, with the sixth man being an English lance corporal called Moore.
In his orders for Op Gaff, McLeod charged Courand and co.: ‘To kill, or kidnap and return to England, Field Marshal Rommel . . . If it should prove possible to kidnap Rommel, and bring him to this country the propaganda value would be immense . . . To kill Rommel would obviously be easier than to kidnap him, and it is preferable to ensure the former than to attempt and fail in the latter.’ Any successful assassination was to be ‘reported by pigeon’.
Courand and his team duly parachuted into France at St-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse, some 50 miles from their target, carrying sniper rifles, the intended means of assassination. But in a belt-and-braces approach, the RAF’s 193 Squadron flying Hawker Typhoons attacked Rommel’s HQ, overturning his staff car and seriously injuring the German field marshal. It was only when Courand first reported into SAS headquarters by radio that he learned that the RAF had beaten him to it and that ‘Rommel had been got’.
With their target hospitalised and out of reach, Courand and his team – undeterred – turned their attentions to freelance raiding instead, hitting several trains, and even tracking a senior enemy commander to his headquarters before attacking it, while Marx yelled out orders in German to confuse the defenders. Finally, with their ammo and explosives exhausted, Courand and his men had escaped to Allied lines.
As fate would have it, the injured Field Marshal Rommel had been brought to the Hôpital La Pitié-Salpêtrière. There Lieutenant Wiehe, still stubbornly hanging onto life, learned of Rommel’s admittance from Corporal Richard, the anti-Nazi orderly. Richard spoke no English and only broken French – but it was enough for the two men to make each other understood. As all knew, Rommel was a high-profile German commander and a hero of the nation. With the Allies targeting such senior figures, it didn’t bode well for those who had fallen into the enemy’s clutches. But worse was coming.
Three days after Rommel’s injury and hospitalisation, the attempt on Hitler’s life was made. On 20 July a bomb concealed in a briefcase was detonated at the Wolfsschanze (‘Wolf ’s Lair’), one of Hitler’s top-secret headquarters, situated near Rastenburg in what was then East Prussia (present-day Poland). Four senior Nazi figures were killed, but Hitler suffered only minor injuries.
As the attack was classed as sabotage, it fell to SS Sturmbannführer Kriminalrat Horst Kopkow to investigate, just as he had done with the attempt to assassinate General Reinhard Heydrich, two years earlier. Kopkow rapidly established that the bomb had ‘English chemical-mechanical timer’ components, plus firing pins and detonators. The hand of Britain’s covert agencies – of her sabotage and assassination specialists – was seen as being at work.
Over time, the 20 July plotters – senior military figures who had planned and executed what would become known as Operation Valkyrie – were rounded up and some 200 would be executed. At the same time Hitler and his coterie of Nazi loyalists took an even firmer grip on power. The Führer himself declared: ‘Having escaped death in so extraordinary a way, I am now more than ever convinced that the great cause I serve will survive its present perils and that everything can be brought to a good end.’
At 84 Avenue Foch, the fallout from Operation Valkyrie would be felt most personally. SS S
tandartenführer Helmut Knochen, who ran operations on the third floor, quickly fell under Berlin’s suspicions. Suspected of being an accomplice of the Valkyrie plotters, Knochen was arrested and accused of ‘behaving in an unsoldierly, not to say cowardly manner’. Shortly, he would find himself demoted to the SS equivalent rank of a private and sent to the front line, to fight.
In the meantime, all staff at 84 Avenue Foch were ordered to wear their SS uniforms, as opposed to their much-preferred civilian clothing. ‘I felt I was putting on fancy dress,’ remarked one. ‘Then Kieffer had us all photographed, told us we were to assemble below. It was the whole staff of 82–84 Avenue Foch, Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst together . . . Just before the shutter clicked, the colleague standing beside me whispered: “Is this to make sure the British will know us, to hang us?”’ The Gestapo and SD men knew what they were guilty of. They feared a reckoning was coming.
The cumulative effect of such repeated assassination attempts –Heydrich, Rommel, Hitler – was a thirst for revenge at the very highest echelons of the Nazi regime. While Kopkow was caught up in the exhaustive and swingeing investigations into Op Valkyrie, the SAS captives in Paris had gained a little breathing space. For now. But when the focus returned, it would do so with a vengeance.
It would be from Hitler himself that their fate would be decided.
Chapter 15
It was when poking around at the bars to his window that Vaculik first sensed the possibility of escape. Of course, solitary confinement is designed to do what it says on the tin – to deprive an individual of all other human contact. In the SAS captives’ case, they were supposed not even to know the fate of their fellow prisoners. But Vaculik had managed to befriend Vassiliev, a Russian guard who had been captured two years earlier, during the Battle for Moscow, opting to join the German military rather than be shot, and Vassiliev was proving helpful.
From Vassiliev, Vaculik had managed to scrounge the odd cigarette. More importantly, he’d learned that Ginger Jones was being held on the same floor, as were Walker, Young and Varey. The five were together, but apart. He was determined to get a message to his friends, to stiffen their spirits. Via Vassiliev’s good offices, Vaculik managed to broker a trip to the lavatory with a brief stopover at the door to Jones’s cell. After checking the coast was clear, the Russian flipped aside the peephole and beckoned Vaculik over.
‘Ginger!’ Vaculik hissed, as he forced a partly smoked cigarette through the narrow aperture. ‘Here’s a dog-end for you.’
‘Good lord!’ Jones cried. ‘How goes it? I thought you were dead.’
‘Not quite, but they fixed me up alright.’
‘We’ll make ’em pay for it later,’ Jones growled.
The guard hurried Vaculik away, but on hearing those few words of defiance he had felt his spirits soar. Later, in the privacy of his cell, he took a careful look at his watch, which by chance his captors had failed to confiscate. With infinite care, he managed to dismantle it, removing the mainspring, the coil of toughened steel that, when wound, provides power to the timepiece’s mechanics. With the spring straightened, Vaculik broke it into two pieces – the kind of lengths that might serve as a makeshift file – and hid the remains of the watch deep in his mattress.
That done, he crept to the window and began to work on the bars. Luckily he could hear the guard’s approach, whenever he came to check via the peephole, and could break off from his sawing in good time. After two hours’ work, and with fingers rubbed bloody and raw, he’d managed to sever the first bar. The cut from the narrow ‘blade’ was all but invisible. He figured there was little chance it – and subsequent cuts – would be discovered.
The following day he managed to slip a length of the spring through Jones’s peephole, under the cover of grabbing a few quick words. He felt sure his friend would know what to do with it. While the food at 3 Place des États Unis consisted of little more than a hunk of coarse black bread, a bowl of thin soup and a mug of bitter coffee, if they could only keep their strength up escape was possible: Vaculik felt sure of it. With time, he and Jones could saw through the bars, ‘and escape one night into the convent garden’ that lay below.
Vaculik felt compelled to make the attempt, no matter how slim were their chances: ‘Life was sweet and I wanted to live.’ That desire was driven by the conviction that sooner or later, he would be ‘taken out . . . and shot without a soul knowing what had happened’. He felt sure the other captives would be feeling and acting likewise.
With twelve of the bars cut, and ‘day five’ of his solitary confinement scored on one wall of his cell, Vaculik was feeling guardedly optimistic, but all his hopes were about to be dashed. A hatchet-faced SS sergeant arrived at his door, making a routine inspection. Vaculik had rubbed in some chewed-up black bread to hide the cuts to the bars, but one shake by the SS man was enough to reveal his handiwork.
Furious, the man span around and thumped Vaculik in the face, delivering a blow that almost made him swallow the length of steel spring he’d secreted between his top lip and gum.
‘Donnerwetter! That’s you, I suppose.’
‘Me? I don’t know anything about it. Someone else must have done it. What do I have to cut it with?’
The sergeant scowled. ‘I don’t know, but for sure we’ll find out.’
Vaculik’s room was turned upside down and he was thoroughly searched. Fortunately neither the dismantled watch nor the hidden spring was found. That night Vaculik lay on his thin mattress feeling frustrated and disheartened. There would be no more sawing through the bars. Then another idea struck him. There was a cupboard in his room. It was locked, but he could use the spring to pick the lock. Once inside, he could try to tunnel through the wall. He’d need some kind of digging tool, but surely he could find one.
The following morning he searched his cell from end to end. There was nothing remotely capable of chiselling through masonry. Downhearted, Vaculik glanced out of the window. His eye was drawn to a girl who had appeared on one of the convent balconies. She looked about seventeen or eighteen years old. With her chestnut-brown hair and sparkling eyes, she was arresting, and she had a wonderful air of freedom and defiance about her.
As Vaculik watched, she held up a blackboard on which she had written: ‘My heart is with you. Have courage. Henrietta.’
Vaculik felt his spirits soar. ‘I no longer felt so utterly alone,’ he remarked of the moment. There were others in Paris who knew what was going on at 3 Place des États Unis. At the same time he was painfully aware of how dishevelled and dirty he must look. Repeatedly he’d been tortured and beaten, and he’d not washed or shaved for days. Even so, Henrietta’s brave gesture – her spirit of resistance – spurred him on. He must escape. He must.
Later, he got a visit to the bathroom. It wasn’t Vassiliev on duty, and the guard forced him to use the lavatory with the door wide open, so as to prevent him from trying to escape. Even so, Vaculik’s eyes were drawn to a thick iron nail driven into the bathroom wall. It looked perfect for his plan to tunnel his way out. On the way back to his room, Vaculik risked a momentary peep into another of the cells. For his pains, he was shoved violently by the guard and assailed with a string of curses.
But it had been worth it. Vaculik felt shocked at what he’d just seen. Momentarily, like some scene from a horror movie, he’d caught a glimpse of a young woman sitting on her bed in that bare cell, reading. When Vassiliev came on duty later, Vaculik redoubled his charm offensive.
‘Dobrý veer, tovarich,’ – good evening, comrade. Vassiliev returned the greeting. ‘Tell me,’ Vaculik continued, ‘what’s that young woman doing locked in the cell along there?’
‘She’s a spy. She’s waiting to be shot. The Germans don’t wear kid gloves, even with women.’
Vaculik asked if he might speak with her. Vassiliev stressed that it was strictly forbidden, but when he next took Vaculik to the lavatory he promised they might give it a try. A while later they made the short journey. Once in th
e bathroom, and with the door firmly closed, Vaculik wrestled the thick nail free from the wall and slipped it into his pocket. On the way back, the Russian paused at the door to the woman’s cell, before reaching out, unbolting it and swinging it open.
Vaculik knew he only had a few precious seconds. ‘My name is Jean Dupontel,’ he announced, hurriedly. ‘I’m being held prisoner here with a number of English comrades.’
‘I’m Charlotte L.,’ the woman replied, ‘an agent of Free France. I was captured a month ago and I am to be shot soon.’ She spoke the words calmly, the ghost of a smile playing across her lips.
‘You are very brave, mademoiselle.’ Vaculik reached out to her. ‘I am proud to shake your hand.’
They shook hands briefly, before Vassiliev hustled Vaculik away. That night the Gestapo came for the condemned prisoner. Vaculik heard her cell door being opened and the sound of Charlotte being marched away, defiant to the last. Instinctively, he sank to his knees. There were no words for such inhumanity.
The following morning, he etched another grim score in the wall of his cell – eight days at 3 Place des États Unis. While Charlotte L.’s horrible fate proved hugely dispiriting, it was also a spur to his anger and his courage. He inspected the cupboard, and within thirty minutes had the lock open. He swung wide the door, and was delighted to discover it was more than deep enough to work inside. He vowed to start his excavations that very night.
Each evening the guard would order him to strip, taking away his British uniform as a disincentive to escape. No bother: he would work in his underclothes through the night hours. He’d place the bolster and the bucket tucked under the blanket, to mimic a person asleep in the bed, while he beavered away in secret. That first night Vaculik slaved away, feverishly attacking first the plaster, and then the brickwork, catching all the debris and lowering it to the floor. As the hours passed, he saw the light of the guard periodically glint through the peephole, but each time the bucket-and-bolster deception seemed to pass muster. At one stage he heard a lump of masonry tumble away from the far side, and land on a neighbouring roof with a tremendous clatter.