by Paul Simpson
Dillinger survived on the run for four more months, but since he had crossed the state line in the stolen car, the Bureau of Investigation were hot on his trail, with Special Agent in Charge Melvin Purvis assigned to bring him in. Dillinger’s girlfriend, Mary Evelyn “Billie” Frechette, was arrested in Chicago and then Purvis and his men nearly caught Dillinger, who had now teamed up with another well-known gangster, “Baby Face” Nelson, at the summer resort of Little Bohemia Lodge on 23 April. Dillinger escaped by the skin of his teeth, leaving behind an arsenal of weaponry. The Bureau were responsible for the death of civilians, and its leader, J. Edgar Hoover, brought Samuel Cowley in to assist Purvis.
In an effort to avoid recognition, Dillinger underwent painful plastic surgery on 28 May, after which he needed to recover for a month. On 22 June, Dillinger’s thirty-first birthday, Hoover designated him “Public Enemy No. 1” with $10,000 offered for his arrest, and $5,000 for information that led to his capture. A few weeks later, Anna Sage (an alias adopted by Rumanian Ana Cumpanas) tipped off a police detective that Dillinger was living in her apartment as the boyfriend of her lodger – the FBI’s official history claims that Sage was the madam of a brothel, and that Dillinger had visited, together with a friend of hers, Polly Hamilton. On 21 July, Sage told Purvis and Cowley that she, Hamilton and Dillinger would be going to the movies the next day.
On the evening of 22 July, the Bureau set a trap around the Biograph movie theatre in Chicago’s Lincoln Park area. John Dillinger went to see the gangster film, Manhattan Melodrama. It finished at 10.40 p.m. and within a few minutes Dillinger was dead. Realizing that he was trapped as he left the cinema, he reached for his gun. He was hit by four of the six bullets that Bureau agents fired before he could aim – one of them went through the back of his neck, through his brain, and out beneath his right eye.
When they heard about Dillinger’s death, Harry Pierpoint and Charles Mackley realized that they would need to escape from death row without any potential help from their friend. Both had been sentenced to death in the electric chair the previous March. They decided to try to emulate Dillinger’s means of escape from Crown Point.
The pair created fake guns from bars of soap which they had blackened with shoe polish. On 22 September, they made their move. The weapons were convincing enough to persuade the guards to let them out of their cells, but when they reached the main door other guards opened fire on them with rifles. Makley was killed instantly, but Pierpont survived, although he was seriously injured with a bullet remaining in his spine. As a result, he had to be carried to the electric chair on the morning of 17 October 1934. Russell Clark, the third man arrested for the murder of Sheriff Sarber, was convicted of bank robbery; he was sentenced to life in prison.
Sources:
Gangster File – The Sensational Truth: Bonnie & Clyde/Al Capone/Dillinger Online, courtesy of yakidk89’s channel at YouTube. (This has a lot of useful historical footage, although the narration is inaccurate in places.)
Interview with Edwin Saagar from University of Southern California archives: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e6C7kScGHLw
FBI: Famous Cases: John Dillinger (http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/john-dillinger) (includes huge pdf files of all the correspondence between agents of the Bureau regarding Dillinger)
G. Russell Giradin, with William J. Helmer and Rick Mattix: Dillinger: The Untold Story (Indiana, 2009)
Burrough, Bryan: Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34 (Penguin, 2009)
Hammond Times, 22 July 1984: “The Hobart Wilgus Story”
Chicago Herald and Examiner, 27 August 1934: “Crime does not pay!”
The Unknown Great Escape
Many of the escapes contained in this volume are well known, either because of the amount of coverage they received in the media at the time, or because they have become the source material for books, screen adaptations or plays. Others have become lost in the mists of time, including what may well be one of the largest prison escapes of the twentieth century, if not ever. The aftermath of the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III during the Second World War horrified the world when 50 of the prisoners were executed, but that number pales compared with the statistics for the escape from Fort San Cristobal on 22 May 1938. Nearly 800 prisoners fled; over 200 of these were killed, and only three made it safely across the border into France.
Construction on a military fortress had begun at the tail end of the nineteenth century in the Ezcaba enclave, not far from Pamplona in the northern Spanish Navarre region. It was designed to be a formidable defensive structure, built into the top of a mountain, within which were three buildings that could not be seen from the outside, and a moat to deter infantry attack. Unfortunately what the designers didn’t anticipate was the advent of aviation, so when the fortress was completed in 1919, it was immediately redundant.
San Cristobal was used as a prison between 1934 and 1945, and throughout that time there were complaints about the dreadful conditions within its walls. Hundreds of prisoners were installed there after the October Revolution in 1934, and deaths led to a mutiny within the fort, as well as strikes in nearby Pamplona and other cities around Spain calling for a change in the way the men were treated. From November 1935, some of the 750 prisoners began to be moved out but not in particularly large numbers; three months later, an amnesty for political prisoners saw four hundred released, many of whom immediately condemned the insanitary and unhygienic conditions.
The military coup on 18 July 1936 led by General Francisco Franco saw the prison refilled to its capacity and beyond, with two thousand or so inmates housed within its walls. Conditions remained harsh, with reports of beatings, extreme hunger and outbreaks of lice. Some prisoners were apparently told that they were free to go, so set off down the mountain, only to be killed when they reached the foot. Twenty men were shot on 1 November 1936, four more sixteen days later – official records indicate that 305 prisoners died, although many of the deaths are ascribed to anorexia, heart attacks, or tuberculosis. By spring 1938, there were 2,487 prisoners held at San Cristobal, many of whom had no real idea what crimes they had committed to be incarcerated in such a hellhole. They weren’t allowed to look through the windows – the guards would fire at them if they did – and their correspondence was censored, if it even reached them at all. It was against this background that a small group decided to make a break for it in May that year.
The vast majority of those who decided to flee San Cristobal that day had no idea that there was any form of escape being planned. They took the chance to flee an oppressive regime, and many of them paid the ultimate price. A small group of prisoners were looking out for any weaknesses among the prison guards’ routine, and they realized that Sundays would be the best day to strike – in common with many other prisons, less went on that day since it was deemed a day of rest, so less guards were on duty. Led by Leopoldo Pico, prisoner number 319, the twenty or so men used the made-up language Esperanto to keep their plans concealed from eavesdropping guards, or fellow prisoners who might overhear something and try to gain capital with the authorities by betraying them.
On Sunday 22 May, there were only ninety-two guards at San Cristobal to monitor over twenty-five times that number of men; in Pamplona, six miles away, there were 331 soldiers. At eight o’clock in the evening, Pico and another prisoner, Baltasar Rabanillo, took hostage the guard who was bringing them dinner, seized his keys and locked him up. They then went up to the next floor of the prison, and captured the four guards there. Pico put on one of the guard’s uniforms, and then split the rest of the escapees into two groups to apprehend the other guards. One group rounded up the cooks and anyone else in the kitchen area; the other locked guards into the tool room.
However, when the freed prisoners started to cross the yard, one of the guards started to raise the alarm. According to the account given by survivor Ernesto Carratalá in his memoirs, “it was the
first and only time in my life I saw a man killed. A group of my countrymen accurately, brutally and repeatedly hit the guard on the head. They did so with a hammer, and did not stop until they had overcome his resistance, and the soldier fell inert.” The guard succumbed to his injuries, the only one to die – Pico had given instructions that no one was to be killed. Entering the Oficina de Ayudantía, Pico and his men disarmed the guards, and made one of them request the guard on the far side of the door to open it. When he did so, he was also disarmed, and the prisoners were then able to get access to the keys to the cells. As the other guards, who were either having their dinner or were on duty watching the perimeter, were rounded up, the prisoners were released from their cells.
All seemed to be going to plan. Within half an hour, the prisoners had taken control of the fort, and those that wanted to could make a mass getaway. However, Pico couldn’t anticipate that one of the guards would return from Pamplona, see the situation unfolding and run back to the town to raise the alarm. Nor could he have expected that one of his fellow prisoners, Angel Alcazarde de Valasco, would flee from the fort to inform the authorities.
Pico had banked on the escape remaining undetected until the next batch of guards arrived to take over duties the following morning, but instead, military trucks with huge searchlights were dispatched from Pamplona, and many of the prisoners turned tail and returned to the fort. By 3.30 the next morning, there were 1692 inmates remaining in San Cristobal. Nearly one third of the total population, 795 men, had fled to the surrounding thickly wooded hills.
Carratalá, who was only eighteen years old at the time of the escape, remembers that the confusion was total. Some people thought that the war was over, and made their way to the train station in Pamplona, where they were arrested when they tried to buy a ticket. He himself spent a quarter of an hour running through the woods, but when he heard the sound of the approaching vehicles, he decided to cut his losses and head back to the prison. Like many of his comrades, he was back in his usual place by the time the military arrived.
Many of them didn’t last long in the wild; 207 were shot rather than arrested; 585 were brought back to San Cristobal. Among them was Felix Alvarez, who very nearly reached the border with France. Running from the troops, who were shooting the escaping prisoners like rabbits, he and a couple of men from the same area got as far as the village of Gascue-Odieta, but a woman there reported them to the military. She did make up for it to a certain extent – before they were returned to San Cristobal, she made them what Alvarez still recalled as the best soup of his life.
The military authorities were humiliated by the sheer scale of the escape, and tried to claim that many of those who fled were common criminals “of the worst kind . . . a bunch of murderers, robbers and thieves”. When they were returned to San Cristobal, they were thrown into the worst cells, on the lowest level, and were often left naked and without food for days on end, receiving regular beatings from the guards. One man, Amador Rodriguez Solla, later nicknamed Tarzan by his peers, managed to remain on the loose, hiding in a cave eating snails, frogs and plants, until 14 August.
Seventeen leaders of the escape were tried by a military court; fourteen of them were sentenced to death and shot in the centre of Pamplona on 8 September 1938; one of them was sent to the asylum in Pamplona. Pico was also illegally executed, although there are various different reports as to when. The prosecutor at the trial said he had been shot before those proceedings began; some said he was killed in the woods; others that he was captured, returned to San Cristobal and shot there. De Valasco, who had raised the alarm, had his prison sentence reduced; everyone else who was recaptured received a further seventeen years.
Three of the men did make it across the border into France; one of them emigrated to Mexico, where he never discussed his time in prison or his escape with his family.
When the French press denounced the way that Franco’s regime had handled the breakout and its aftermath, the dictator issued an “official note” commenting on the French defamation of his actions, pointing out that a guard had been killed during the escape; most of the escapees had been returned to the prison; those who had been killed had fought back against their pursuers; and wondering about the activities of certain French citizens who had been visiting villages close to San Cristobal prior to the escape. It was the only comment that the regime ever made about the escape.
Conditions did improve within the prison; the director was dismissed following the mass break out, and the financial administrator was prosecuted for embezzlement. A memorial was erected on the fiftieth anniversary of the escape, but it was regularly vandalized, and was destroyed completely by members of the extreme right in 2009. The prison was closed in 1945, and the Spanish Army abandoned the fortress in 1987, with a surveillance unit remaining for a further four years. In 2001, it was declared cultural property of the state, and over the past few years excavations of the area have allowed many of the bodies of prisoners to be removed and given proper burials.
The inscription on the memorial is perhaps the best tribute to those who died in the unknown great escape: “I die without pain, since I lay down my life for freedom.”
Sources:
El Pais, 21 October 2007: “La fuga de los 221 muertos”
Memoria Libertaria, May 2005: “Fuerte de San Cristobal 1938” (includes quotes from the documentary La gran fuga de las cárceles franquistas)
Cheating the Death Camp
Although there have been various accounts over the years of heroic escapes from the confines of the Nazi concentration and death camps, some of which do not stand up to close scrutiny, few are as well documented and accepted as the escape from Treblinka in August 1943.
The death camp had been established as part of Operation Reinhard, the Nazi’s codename for their Final Solution: the total extermination of the Jewish people across occupied Europe. There was already a forced labour camp near the formerly Polish village of Treblinka; this became known as Treblinka I. Treblinka II was solely concerned with the mass murder of as many people as possible in the shortest possible time.
The death camp was begun in May 1942, and was in operation by that July: a railway branch line was built connecting to the nearby station, along which the truckloads of Jews were brought. On arrival, they would be informed that this was a transit camp, and that for hygiene purposes, they needed to take a shower before being dispatched to their new workplaces. Separated by gender, with children remaining with the women, the Jews would strip naked, reassured that their belongings would be returned to them after the showers, and the women’s hair was shorn. They were then herded along a narrow passageway into a shower room. Once there, carbon monoxide gas from the exhaust pipe of a Russian tank was pumped into the room, asphyxiating them within a few minutes. The bodies were then removed from the showers, and taken to the mass burial pits before the next group were brought in to meet the same fate.
Although they were supervised by German and Ukrainian guards, Jewish prisoners had to carry out the repulsive tasks of emptying the train cattle cars of those who had died during the journey to the camp; taking the bodies from the showers to the burial pits; and searching through the clothing and belongings of their fellow Jews for anything of value. Anything that identified the items as Jewish was removed – such as the yellow stars that Jews were forced to wear – and all identity papers and passports were destroyed.
Initially, the Jews chosen for this task were replaced every three to five days by fresh arrivals, but when the former Commandant of Sobibor camp, Franz Stangl, was placed in charge, he began to create groups of Sonderkommandos, Jewish slave labourers. Roughly 700 men and a few women were, at least temporarily, saved, although they were killed for the slightest offence, and many chose suicide rather than be complicit in the murder of their own people. After new gas chambers were built, the camp operated at peak efficiency into the spring of 1943, by which time over 850,000 people had been murdered.
When
Heinrich Himmler visited Treblinka that spring, he ordered that the mass graves were to be emptied, and the bodies burned. The bones were then to be crushed, and the ashes replaced in the graves. It was an attempt to hide the scale of the massacres, once the tide of the war had turned against the Nazi regime. This process took four months or so to complete; the Sonderkommandos were well aware that their own lives would be forfeit as soon as the work was completed.
There were many attempts to escape from Treblinka before the mass breakout in August 1943. Some Jews tried to flee from the trains but were shot by the guards, or worse, handed back to the Germans. This was the fate met by the Cienki brothers, who returned to their home town in October 1942 to tell their friends and neighbours the truth about the Treblinka trains. They were handed over to the Gestapo and shot. Aron Gelberd escaped the same month, but was stripped by Ukrainian farmers who found him. He managed to reach a place of safety and emigrated to Israel after the war. Others managed to get away to Jewish ghettoes, but then found themselves returned to Treblinka when these too were emptied as part of Operation Reinhard.
Attempts to hide inside the trains carrying the possessions back for resale were rarely successful. Moshe Boorstein and Simcha Laski managed it in late July 1942, and returned to Warsaw in time for the uprising there. Two months later, Czech businessman Oskar Berger managed to conceal himself, but was caught and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. He survived the war. Yechiel Berkowicz, Abraham Bomba, Yechezkel Cooperman, Israel Einshindler, all successfully hid in the clothing.
Tunnels were started but few reached past the perimeter fence. One man, Lazar Sharson, did use a tunnel, and fled to the Warsaw ghetto on New Year’s Eve 1942. Four others with him did not manage to escape, and were hanged in front of the other prisoners in the death pit area. Some men, like Anshel Medrzycki and Abraham Krzepicki ran away naked, and were not apprehended.