In the light of the above, he warned me, he was fully entitled to classify me as ‘illegal’–in other words, as a partisan–which gave him the right to have me put up against a wall and shot. This sounded decidedly unhealthy. But my continued refusal to answer had little to do with any great display of courage on my part. Based on the given facts, his hypothesis was simply too ridiculous. Just how did he suppose I engaged in partisan activity while flying on operations? Besides, he didn’t seem to be taking the matter too seriously himself. He soon let it drop, for in the meantime he had found other ways of gathering information about me.
On the fourth day of my questioning he placed a copy of the weekly magazine Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung in front of me. It was the issue dated 20 April 1944 (coincidentally the Führer’s birthday) containing a double-spread illustrated feature on an unidentified ‘Jagdgeschwader in the West’. He had folded the paper so that all I could see of it was a picture of my Gruppenkommandeur, Major Hohagen. Oberst King told me that I need say no more. He now knew all there was to be known about me. I was a member of 3. Staffel of the ‘renowned’ Jagdgeschwader Richthofen. I had been with the unit since March 1944, and this was a picture of my commanding officer. He also identified the airfield I had taken off from; namely Cormeilles.
This last snippet gave me a great deal of satisfaction, for we had vacated Cormeilles some three weeks before my last mission. So the information provided to the British by the French resistance, or perhaps even by French workers employed by our own supply services, was at least that long out of date, if not more. Our recent frequent moves from one landing ground to another suddenly began to make more sense.
Having thus established my background in his own mind, Oberst King went off on another tack. He now wanted to know something about our tactics in the air. He tried to provoke some sort of reaction out of me by implying that we German fighter pilots were not all that skilled and weren’t achieving very much. I’m afraid I rose to the bait by describing the encounters we had had on 25 May and the evening of 6 June, both of which had ended very much in our favour. I could tell from the expression on his face that he thought I was shooting a line. But after rooting around in some files he seemed to have a change of mind, and this subject too was quietly shelved.
Then, of course, there came the question of what exactly had I been fighting for and why was I prepared to lay down my life for Hitler. Here I was on safer ground. I explained that, as a boy growing up in the Germany of the ‘twenties and’ thirties, I could not help but be influenced by the mood of the times; the desire to right the wrongs of the hated Versailles Treaty and to see Germany emerge as an equal among her European neighbours as set out in the constitution of the Weimar Republic. These were the principles for which I was willing to lay down my life–not for the person of Hitler.
I warmed to my subject, describing the historical developments in Germany prior to World War One and even going back as far as the events of 1848. This resulted in my being visited the following day by another German-speaking officer. He was carrying a thick book under his arm. This was an historical tome, written in German, which he presented to me as reading material for the rest of my stay. In the course of a long stroll through the extensive grounds surrounding the camp, he encouraged me to expound further on the causes and reasons for Hitler’s rise to power. I noticed that he voiced no opinions of his own during our discussion and assumed–as the war was still on–that the Geneva Convention prohibited him from influencing me politically in any way.
I never did get to read his book, however, for on the very next day, after about a week of my sojourn, I was taken along with several others to a camp near Derby in central England. This turned out to be a transit camp where we joined some fifty other German officers who were undergoing medical examination before transfer elsewhere. And the fact that we had to parade in front of an American general left us in little doubt where that was to be. We were in for a trip across the big pond to a prisoner-of-war camp in the United States.
After just two days at Derby we left for Liverpool, where we were put aboard a large troop transport. Our accommodation was somewhat unusual. We didn’t particularly mind being herded together ten or twenty to a cabin, but the fact that the doors were reinforced by steel grilles and laced with barbed wire, with an armed GI standing guard in front of each one, did strike us as a trifle excessive. Apparently–and this I only discovered later–it was honestly believed that we Germans were capable of the most dastardly acts. Many feared, for example, that we might somehow overpower the ship’s crew and sail it ourselves to a German-held port!
In complete contrast to life in our cabins below, when we were escorted up to the officers’ mess for dinner on the first evening we were welcomed as ‘guests of the US Navy’ by the captain, who also wished us bon appetit before we sat down to eat. I must admit to finding the whole situation somehow schizophrenic, but there was nonetheless a definite undercurrent of mutual respect between the two sides on board the ship. At around noon each day we were allowed up on deck for about half an hour to get a breath of fresh air. As an absolute landlubber, it was my first taste of the delights to be had from an ocean cruise–even if it was one being undertaken in rather exceptional circumstances.
We discovered that our ship was just one of a large convoy. All around us other freighters and transports were butting their way through the enormous waves (enormous to someone like me, that is, who was more accustomed to the ripples on a Bavarian lake). The vessels were spaced so far apart, and over such a wide area of ocean, that the outer edges of the convoy could not be seen. Now and again we would catch a glimpse of the sleek form of a destroyer out on the horizon, one of the flotilla of escort vessels that were chivvying us along like so many sheepdogs guarding their precious flock.
On a couple of occasions during the crossing the U-boat alarm was actually sounded. We then had to muster on deck wearing our life jackets. As may be imagined, our feelings were decidedly mixed. While wishing our U-boat boys every success, our sense of patriotism did not stretch quite so far as to relish the idea of being sent to the bottom ourselves.
After a good week at sea we were ordered up on deck again, but this time we were instructed to take all our personal belongings with us. It was around noon on 12 July 1944, as I can remember quite vividly, and in a few hours’ time we would be docking in New York harbour, where we were to be immediately transferred on to a train that would be waiting to take us on the next stage of our journey. The famous skyline of Manhattan–that symbol of ‘capitalist decadence’ as we had been brought up to believe–was already beginning to loom up over the horizon.
As we slowly made our way up the East River in the shadow of the huge skyscrapers, a ‘150 per center’ among our ranks suggested that we all deliberately turn our backs and look in the other direction in order to display our complete indifference and not to give the Amis–as we referred to the Americans–the satisfaction of witnessing our sense of wonder and admiration.
Speaking personally, my feelings weren’t those of wonder and admiration. Confronted by this solid mass of architecture towering into the sky, the mighty assemblage of shipping in the river, the endless expanse of docks and wharves with their forests of cranes, what I felt could be more accurately described as total disbelief and shock. As a European I simply couldn’t take in the vast scale of everything I was seeing.
The transfer from ship to train, the latter also unlike anything I had ever experienced in Germany or France, went without a hitch. It wasn’t long before we were all securely inside the compartments to which we had been assigned. An armed GI again stood guard at either end of the carriage to make sure that we didn’t leave our seats. The only time we were permitted to do so was when we had to go to the toilet. This involved a ritual that reminded me strongly of my first year at school: finger held up in the air to attract the teacher’s–sorry, the guard’s–attention, await his affirmative nod, and then straight to the toilet and back with
no talking.
Whenever we stopped at a station the windows would have to be closed and the blinds pulled down–and again no talking. You couldn’t be too careful. After all, these ‘damned Krauts’ might have been hatching a plot to jump out of the windows and take the local townspeople hostage; maybe even force the train driver to head for the Mexican border (even if Mexico had declared war on Germany more than two years earlier). In fact, all the signs were that the train actually was heading southwards.
On the second day of the journey we stopped, if I remember rightly, at Nashville, Tennessee, a name that didn’t mean anything to me at that time. As on the day before, we were escorted under guard into the station restaurant, where we were allowed to seat ourselves at the neatly laid tables. After a little while two black waitresses poked their heads round the kitchen door and stared at us, their eyes wide with fright. When they saw that several armed GIs were standing guard over us, they ventured hesitantly into the room and started to serve us.
Their curiosity soon got the better of their fear and before long they were inspecting us from head to foot. It all seemed very strange. Eventually, one of our number who spoke English asked them why they had been so frightened of us at first. When he translated their reply we were all dumbstruck. Apparently they had been terrified when told that they were going to have to serve lunch to a crowd of German prisoners-of-war. According to what they had heard, Germans were ‘some kind of devils with horns and cloven hooves!’ Further comment is superfluous.
That afternoon we passed through Memphis. We were all impressed by the awesome size of the River Mississippi. Was everything bigger in this country? But for me, despite the majesty of its powerful slow-moving current, the mighty Mississippi could not compare with the tumbling crystal waters of the much smaller River Inn of my boyhood. It was not long after leaving Memphis that our train pulled into the provincial township of Como, Mississippi. This was our destination, and from here we were taken by road to our new home, Camp Como, several kilometres out in the country. What little we could see of the landscape on the way was not very encouraging: a flat, almost barren plain baked dry and dusty by the summer sun blazing down out of a milky-white sky.
Knots of prisoners were standing at the camp gates eagerly scanning the faces of us newcomers hoping to spot a friend or acquaintance from earlier shared ‘days of glory’. The camp itself consisted of about sixty large wooden barracks huts standing on concrete pillars nearly a metre high (presumably to discourage tunnelling). Each hut was divided into four separate compartments, which shared a long communal veranda running along the front of the building.
This rustic style gave the place something of a homely, almost cosy feel. In the centre of the camp, high above everything else, was a large wooden water tower of the sort familiar from countless Wild West films. Thin rivulets of water trickled constantly from the leaky metal tank atop the wooden structure. When the heat became too unbearable these provided blessed relief to anyone standing beneath them.
At the four corners of the camp, each side of which was about 200 metres long, stood a watchtower. These were equipped with searchlights and manned twenty-four hours a day by armed guards, whose job was to make sure that nobody made a break for it–they, the guards, were not always successful, I might add. Between the towers stretched a double fence, some three metres in height, the top of which was angled inwards and covered in barbed wire. Immediately outside the camp were the living quarters of the guard personnel and a hospital that served both the camp staff and prisoners alike.
After first dumping our things in the huts, we went outside to get to know the establishment’s occupants. There were about 200 men already in the camp. They were all ex-Afrika Korps, the vast majority of them taken prisoner after the fall of Tunisia in the spring of 1943. Although they had arrived at Como only a few weeks before us, they had been in allied captivity for well over a year and were thus able to pass on all sorts of handy tips and useful advice.
Further batches of prisoners would continue to arrive over the course of the coming weeks so that, by the end of September, the camp contained its full complement of close on 1,000 men. To my pleasant surprise I bumped into an old friend and comrade from my training days with LKS 4 at Fürstenfeldbruck who, like me, had also gone on to serve with JG 2 in France.
The compartments mentioned above each comprised a kind of anteroom, or lobby, with two bedrooms adjoining. With two prisoners sharing a bedroom, this meant that we lived together in groups of four. The rooms were, on the whole, quite comfortable, although they had looked a bit bleak and forlorn when we first arrived. They had previously been occupied by Italians–also apparently captured in North Africa–who seemed to have set little store on gracious living. The only decorations were a few faded pin-ups still adorning the walls. But after we had added a few personal touches they became much more homely.
With traditional German thoroughness and ingenuity we set about producing picture frames for our family photos, as well as hand-painted lampshades, bookcases and the like. We even hung curtains at the windows and made elaborate nameplates for the front doors. These latter usually reflected the occupants’ home towns or states. As I lived with a group hailing mostly from Lower Saxony, our door was decorated with that province’s rearing white horse with the name ‘Ems’, the region’s largest river, carved beneath it.
According to military law a so-called ‘camp elder’ had to be appointed. His task would be to liaise with the American commandant of the camp, a Captain Henkle (of German descent), and ensure that any orders or instructions given were properly carried out. He would, in effect, be responsible for the internal running of the camp and the maintenance of military discipline among the prisoners.
The job fell to the highest-ranking officer among us, an infantry Oberst by the name of Seiderer, who came from Freising, a town not far to the north of Munich. He was, thank the Lord, neither a stickler for the minutiae of military regulations, nor a political 150 per center, but a solid and down-to-earth frontline soldier. He performed his duties fairly and conscientiously and soon won the trust and respect of the Americans. A small advisory staff helped him manage the everyday affairs of the camp and look after our best interests.
Our official duties within the camp were not exactly onerous. We were required to parade in ranks of three at 07.00hrs every morning to be counted, we were expected to mess together at lunch and dinner–and that was about it. After dinner each evening a spokesman for the camp leaders would make one or two administrative announcements. More importantly, he would also read out that day’s Wehrmacht communiqué broadcast from Germany. This was received via a long-wave radio that one of the signals officers had been able to put together from components he had gathered from somewhere or other. It was a precious link with home that was kept successfully hidden from the Amis until the end of the war.
With little of an official nature to keep us occupied, we turned our attention to our surroundings. The Italians had been just as neglectful of the camp’s open spaces as they had been of their living quarters. When we arrived the huts stood on a barren and dusty expanse of ground broken only here and there by a few tufts of coarse grass. We were determined to improve this depressing vista. We had the necessary money; for in accordance with the rules of the Hague Convention, prisoners of-war of commissioned rank were entitled to receive pay to allow them to buy personal items from the camp canteen (we were even permitted to purchase one bottle of beer per day).
As a Leutnant I got the equivalent of forty US dollars a month in camp currency. Higher ranks received correspondingly more. Every one of us contributed a percentage of his money to a central fund and a considerable sum quickly accrued. This was then paid over to the camp authorities, who arranged for the supply of small garden tools, grass and flower seeds, and suchlike. Full of enthusiasm, we were soon hard at work. Alongside the steps up to the verandas and around the verandas themselves we planted fast-growing climbers. Water was in plentiful su
pply and so, with the heat of the sun, it was not long before green shoots started to appear all over the camp and the first creepers began climbing up the posts and railings outside the huts.
But the most important task, which every prisoner had to confront and tackle on his own, was to find something that would occupy his mind and keep the dreaded ‘camp twitches’ at bay. We were particularly fortunate in the unusually high level of education and learning among the 1,000 or so officers at Como. In addition to the regular soldiers, many had been academics in civilian life, which offered possibilities for a wide range of activities.
Among us there were college professors and schoolteachers versed in all kinds of subjects: mathematics, physics, languages, philosophy and astronomy. We had sports instructors, artists and professional musicians, including an orchestral conductor. From the world of theatre there was a director, several actors and a make-up man (the last was to play an important part, not only in our drama productions, but also in our future escape plans).
With such a wealth of talent to hand, it was decided to organize the camp along the lines of a university. There would be two terms in the year: the summer term devoted to sports, and the winter term to studies. Our academics were more than happy to offer their services as lecturers and teachers, for this was also an ideal way for them to break up the monotony of life in the camp.
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