Outside the guardroom in the Vorlager stood the Kommandant of Stalag Luft 3, the tall figure of Oberst Friedrich von Lindeiner. He was raging at the four kriegies captured at the tunnel exit. Heads bowed, they stood in line in front of him as he blasted them. Von Lindeiner was actually liked by SBO Massey, and Brickhill and other prisoners felt sorry for him because he’d been a fair man and they knew he would be punished by his overlords for allowing a mass escape right under his nose. The colonel had even passed warnings into the compound that the Gestapo would shoot escapees caught on the run. Now, his mouth was flecked with foam as he raged at the captured quartet.
‘So, gangsters, you do not like my camp? I will hand you over to the Gestapo. They will finish you all!’104
As the compound filled with Luftwaffe troops, all camp inmates were ordered out into the snow and searched. The 140 men from 104 were formed up and kept apart from the others, who were ordered to line up in ranks on the Appell ground. As guards attempted to count the prisoners, some POWs slipped from rank to rank to confuse the count. Shaking with anger, Oberst Von Lindeiner drew his automatic pistol.
‘I shall personally shoot the first man that moves!’ he shouted.105
It was clear he was in deadly earnest. No one moved after that. The final headcount made the commandant turn grey – seventy-six prisoners missing. Seventy-six! It was the greatest RAF prisoner escape of the war. As the quartet captured at Harry’s exit were hauled off to the Cooler, the men from 104 were marched to the gate. There, they stood in the cold. Von Lindeiner was so enraged, some thought all would be handed over to the Gestapo. The remaining kriegies were kept in their ranks, shivering, on the Appell ground. All had to stand in place for hours as their belongings were searched and the blocks turned upside down. Eventually, all were dismissed to their blocks.
Within two weeks, all but three of the Stalag Luft 3 escapees had been caught. And Oberst Von Lindeiner had been replaced as the camp’s commandant. Relieved of duty by Goering two days after the escape, he would face disciplinary action – but would survive the war and live to the age of eighty-two.
On the morning of 6 April, SBO Massey was summoned to the commandant’s office, where he met the acting commandant, Oberstleutnant Erich Cordes, who himself had been a prisoner of the Russians during the First World War. Via an interpreter, Massey was informed by Cordes that forty-one of the men who’d escaped on March 24–25 had been shot while resisting arrest or while attempting to again escape when in custody. Massey couldn’t imagine that every one of these escapees had died as a result. To his mind, some must have suffered wounds that weren’t life threatening and ended up in hospital. But when Massey asked how many of the forty-one had been wounded, he was stiffly informed that all had been killed. Clearly, they had been executed.106
Massey, stunned, called 300 senior officers to a meeting in the compound theatre, and passed on the news. The 300 relayed the information to the rest of the prisoners. Paul Brickhill, like most of his colleagues, didn’t believe it at first. He thought the Germans were bluffing, trying to put a scare into inmates to discourage further escape attempts.
Massey left the camp shortly after this, in a group of prisoners repatriated to Britain because of physical or mental infirmities. He was replaced as North Compound’s SBO by Group Captain Douglas Wilson, who was transferred over from East Compound. Shot down in June 1943 flying a Halifax, forty-six-year-old Wilson was an Australian, originally from Berowra, New South Wales. In 1942, he’d been RAAF Officer Commanding Northwest Area in Australia when the Japanese repeatedly bombed Darwin. At the time he was downed, Wilson was on exchange duty with the RAF.
Like his predecessor, Wilson was pro-escape, and no coward. Involved in East Compound’s wooden-horse escape the previous year, he’d also bravely put his neck on the line to protect Czech prisoners from the Germans, an act for which he would be awarded a medal by the Czechoslovakian Government post-war. But in the wake of the deaths of so many men from North Compound’s mass escape, Wilson was now very worried, and ultra-cautious. He was not alone. As news of the executions spread, SBOs and SAOs at British and American POW camps across the Reich ordered all escape planning halted. At Schubin, Oflag 64’s Senior American Officer would even order existing tunnels filled in.
On 15 April, Hauptmann Pieber handed SBO Wilson a list containing the names of Stalag Luft 3 escapees who’d been shot. But there weren’t forty-one names on the list. There were forty-seven. As Wilson had the list tacked up on the compound noticeboard, the camp’s newly appointed commandant, Oberst Franz Braune, had his guards prepare for a possible riot by prisoners.
Paul Brickhill, one of the kriegies who crowded around the noticeboard, saw that the list included Big X Roger Bushell, Wally Valenta the intelligence whizz, first man out Johnny Bull, Aussie supply supremo Willy Williams, George Harsh’s two security henchmen McGill and McGarr, and two of Brickhill’s closest friends in the camp, chief forger Tim Walenn and the singing Australian compass-maker Al Hake. There was no riot by the kriegies. They were too shocked to muster the anger for that. So shocked, in fact, they kept returning to the noticeboard throughout the day to check that the names of close friends were indeed on the list.
On 25 April, the compound’s remaining Australian and New Zealand POWs gathered to commemorate Anzac Day, their joint national remembrance day. The little German camera used to make ID pictures for escapees was put to more traditional use, with the Aussies and Kiwis bunching for a group photo. Brickhill was there, neatly dressed as usual, in battledress, shirt and tie. And, as usual, he was to the forefront yet keeping a low profile, squatting in the front row. Members of the group had one thing in common; all wore slightly shell-shocked expressions. Just two weeks after they’d heard the news of the executions of their comrades, they were still in disbelief.
The news worsened. On 18 May, another, shorter list was pinned to the noticeboard. This contained the names of three more escapees shot by the Gestapo. The total now stood at fifty. From now on, the executed men were referred to collectively by prisoners as the Fifty. The dead men had come from thirteen different nations and included twenty-one Britons, six Canadians, six Poles, five Australians, three South Africans and two New Zealanders. Urns containing the ashes of the Fifty were subsequently returned to the camp and interred at a graveyard nearby, where Oberst Braune permitted kriegies to build a stone monument to the executed men.
Fifteen of the recaptured escapees were returned alive to Stalag Luft 3. Only much later would Brickhill learn the fates of all seventy-six men who’d made it out of Harry. Every one of the recaptured men had been jailed and questioned by the Kripo, Germany’s criminal police, but only the Fifty had been handed over to the Gestapo, who shot them. Of the rest, Wings Day, Johnny Dodge, Bertram ‘Jimmy’ James and Sydney Dowse were lodged in a dungeon at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, while the others were distributed around various special camps and prisons. All would survive the war.
Three escapees made home runs to Britain. None were Britons. Two of them, Per ‘Peter’ Bergsland and Jens Muller, were Norwegians who escaped to Sweden by stowing away aboard a ship that sailed from Stettin on the Baltic coast. From there, they flew to England, landing within weeks of the breakout. The third man took four months to get back. That last man ‘home’ was Bob van der Stock, eighteenth man out of the tunnel. After first reaching his native country of Holland, which was occupied by the Germans, he was hidden for several months by countrymen until he set off to enter Spain via southern France. He reached Spain by walking across the Pyrenees. The British embassy in Madrid sent him to Gibraltar, and from there he was flown to England by the RAF.
Throughout his escape, Van der Stock had worn the RAAF greatcoat, minus military adornment, that Brickhill had likely given him. Like Bergsland and Muller, the majority of escapees had travelled in pairs. The route via France and Spain that Van der Stock took on his own suggests that he and Brickhill, who’d been fervently studying French and Spanish, may ha
ve originally intended travelling together, a plan thwarted when Brickhill was pulled from the escape list by Bushell at the last minute.
The three men who succeeded in their escape bids had several things in common. All spoke fluent German, and on the run all traded on their home backgrounds – Van der Stock’s cover story, for example, was that he was a Dutch worker travelling for his job. The British and Dominion escapees had no such backgrounds to exploit, and were up against it from the beginning. From England, all three home-runners sent postcards to Stalag Luft 3 using false names, letting the inmates know they’d made it. Just the same, the score was not pretty: three home, twenty-three back behind the wire, fifty dead.
In the weeks following the escape, as the grim news of the murder of his colleagues sunk in, Brickhill became determined to document the mass escape, and the sacrifice of the Fifty. As he began talking to survivors of the break, he told fellow Canary transcriber Conrad Norton what he had in mind. Throwing the idea around, they agreed there was plenty of material in the camp for a book about a series of daring escapes. Some stories they’d been told by fellow kriegies about escapes from crashing bombers made the hair stand on end. So, the pair agreed to jointly compile escape stories for a book. As Norton hadn’t been involved in the mass escape, Brickhill would focus on that, while Norton collected other individual tales of escape. In the end, Brickhill would also contribute several additional escape stories.
This would be a book they would publish once the Allies were victorious and they were free men again. Brickhill never doubted that victory and freedom lay at the end of the long road ahead. He would later say that the two worst aspects about life as a POW, once he got used to the lack of beer and female company, were the omnipresent feeling of hunger and the indefinite nature of his time in the camp: ‘You couldn’t say you wouldn’t still be there – or worse – in ten years.’107
Doug Williams, the new SBO, had no objections to the Brickhill-Norton writing project, and the pair began surreptitiously interviewing colleagues and taking notes. Brickhill made a point of interviewing the returned escapees, West Australian Paul Royle among them, in an attempt to learn what had happened to all the men on the break once they’d left the tunnel.
There were two problems for the chroniclers to overcome. Their captors forbade prisoners from writing anything other than the approved number of letters and postcards every month. The keeping of diaries was verboten. No writing materials were dispensed by the Germans apart from a ration of pencils, pre-printed forms for letter writing, and postcards. So, for Brickhill and Norton’s notes, in pencil and employing the smallest writing possible, they scrounged every piece of paper they could, including blank pages cut from books with razor blades.
The second difficulty was keeping their notes out of German hands. Anyone found with notes about the camp would be accused by the Germans of being spies, and probably shot. The pair’s notes, then, had to be hidden, and with great care. Initially, their growing manuscript was slipped behind a wall panel in 103. But regular searches by the ferrets meant that sooner or later that hiding place could be found. To avoid this, whenever other blocks were searched, Brickhill would wait until the guards had moved on, then relocate the notes to the latest block searched. It never occurred to the methodical Germans to double back and search that block again the next day. With the permission of the reconstituted X Organisation, the writers also resorted to hiding their notes in the dispersal area down Dick.
Ever the good journalist, Brickhill tried to get their guards into conversation to obtain juicy quotes from their perspective. He asked one ferret why, with the war turning against the Germans on all fronts, he would want to continue to be a Nazi.
‘You understand not?’ said the ferret. ‘To be Germans we must be Nazis. I know that the whole country is behind the Fuehrer.’108
German radio was routinely broadcast in Stalag Luft 3 over loudspeakers, and, on 6 June, Brickhill and his colleagues heard a German announcement about two massive Allied armadas spotted approaching the French coast off Cap d’Antifer and Calais. This, thought the POWs, must be the much-anticipated Allied invasion of France. ‘It gave us great joy,’ Brickhill would say, ‘but we wondered for months what had happened to those convoys.’109 Those armadas were radar deceptions, designed to mask the true D-Day landings in Normandy.
Come August, the British, Americans and Canadians had been ashore in France two months. In Italy, the Allies had taken Rome and were pushing north. In the East, the Russians were overrunning German armies and had even established a foothold in eastern Poland. As the Germans retreated on all fronts, life for kriegies became even grimmer than before. Red Cross rations were halved that August, and would remain at that reduced level. At the same time, delivery of clothing from family and friends via the Red Cross, which, up to that time, had occurred every three months, ceased altogether. In North Compound, to keep spirits up, X Organisation began another escape tunnel. Called George, it was dug from beneath a seat in the compound’s theatre. There was no specific escape plan in mind, but the project kept minds and muscles active.
By late in the year, outside contacts suggested that Hitler would order the execution of all POWs rather than give them up. George had reached the wire by this time, but the descending winter forced the suspension of tunnelling. Now, SBO Wilson created the Klim Club, a secret army within the compound involving all inmates. Rather than allow themselves to be executed en masse by the Germans, the Klim Club began making weapons, conducting lectures and preparing tactics for a battle of survival inside the camp. George would be used as a bolthole should resistance prove necessary.
Continuing Allied victories and the creeping advance from east, west and south should have been cause for hope and joy for kriegies. In reality, those victories, and the prospect of a cataclysmic end to the Nazi Reich, made Christmas 1944 the gloomiest yuletide yet at Stalag Luft 3.
13.
March or Die
BY THE EVENING of Saturday, 27 January 1945, the advancing Russian Army was getting too close to Stalag Luft 3 for the comfort of German authorities.110 The Russians had crossed the Oder River at Breslau, just ninety kilometres away, while advance elements of the Red Army were reported to be as close as forty-five kilometres from Sagan. At 9.00 pm, word quickly spread through the camp that all prisoners were to prepare to march in an hour’s time. Men in the compound hospital considered too sick to be moved could remain, but close to 11,000 men would be evacuated from Stalag Luft 3 overnight, in one fell swoop.
Sure enough, from 10.00 pm, in darkness, prisoners were progressively herded out onto a road covered with 30 centimetres of snow, and pushed west, away from the Russians. The occupants of West and South Compounds went first, then the men of Centre Compound. The occupants of North Compound followed. The last to hit the road, at 6.30 am next day, would be the men from East Compound and the inmates from the nearby maximum security camp at Belaria, George Harsh and Wally Floody being among the men marched from the latter. All were part of a forced movement west from Nazi camps of more than 300,000 Allied POWs.
As they left behind the now-abandoned forest camp that had been home for many of them for several years, Brickhill and his colleagues began the march rugged up with as many items of clothing as they could wear, and draped with bedrolls and improvised haversacks. Those haversacks were packed with belongings and as much food and cigarettes as possible from Red Cross parcels stockpiled at the camp. One prisoner was to estimate that 20,000 unopened Red Cross parcels had to be left behind.111
Some handy prisoners were the envy of their comrades after ripping out the sides of bunks or pulling down bookshelves to hastily build sleds onto which they piled their loads, complete with improvised tow ropes around their necks. Brickhill wasn’t that ambitious; loading his pockets with goodies, he slung a bedroll around his neck, made up of his thin mattress bound up in blankets.
It was 4.00 am before the last men from the last North Compound block departed. The bright mo
onlight that lit their way was sometimes blotted out by snowstorms, as, preceded by staff cars for Luftwaffe officers and a truck carrying provisions for guards, the prisoners dragged themselves and their loads along in a struggling, slithering column which trailed away for as far as the eye could see. A detachment of Stalag Luft 3’s Luftwaffe guards, including the camp’s dog handlers with their snapping German shepherds, walked at intervals beside the column. The guards wore greatcoats and gloves, were armed with submachine guns, and carried full packs on their backs. They, too, were being made homeless by this hurried evacuation.
Before long, the prisoners were mixing with retreating German troops and refugees on the road west. Soon, the route was lined with POWs’ discarded personal treasures and broken sleds, cast aside in the snow among dead horses and the bodies of refugees who’d perished. There was even a kriegie’s saxophone among the flotsam and jetsam. Over seven days, the POWs were marched one hundred kilometres through the snow. En route, their guards gave the prisoners a single meal, of barley soup. The Red Cross packs of raisins, tinned bully beef, chocolate, tea and coffee each man was carrying were supposed to fill the void.
As each day passed and his strength ebbed away, Brickhill progressively offloaded things to lighten his load as he staggered along. He dumped packets of cigarettes, razor blades, even Red Cross food. Through it all, he continued to carry his bedroll. In the centre of that bedroll was a roll of papers – the notes that he and Norton had written in Stalag Luft 3, which they were determined to turn into a book. At night, Brickhill would use that grubby mound of papers as a pillow. Each day, back the notes would go into the bedroll.
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