The Escape Artists

by Neal Bascomb

  They arrived into Düsseldorf and took a tram to a bridge that spanned the Rhine. It was a cloudless Sunday morning, and they stopped for a short meal break in an adjacent park. A middle-aged German man in an ill-fitting suit approached them. By his long, studied gaze, they figured him to be a police detective, but rather than risk finding out for sure, they took off across the bridge, hailed a ride on another tram, then headed into some woods northwest of the city.

  As they waited for nightfall, three hunters with double-barreled shotguns came upon them after their dog flushed a rabbit out of some nearby bushes. Blain and Parker sprinted away, then separated as the hunters gave chase. Other locals joined in pursuit. At one point, Blain was forced to duck into a backyard garden, hiding amid some pea sticks. Such was his fright that he mistook a stick for a trigger cocked at his ear when in fact there was no one in sight.

  That night, he returned to the woods to try to find Parker, not least because his friend had their knapsack of food and their one decent map. But Parker was nowhere to be seen. Blain marched west, using as his guides a compass and a scrap of tissue paper on which he had made a rough sketch of the surrounding area from memory. He hoped to cross the Dutch border near Venlo, some thirty miles away.

  He soon became lost in a forest and decided to stop for the night. He stayed hidden through Monday, then ventured off after dusk, first in search of water and food. He ended up eating some raw turnips and drinking stagnant water out of a wagon rut—then vomited. Pushing away the nausea, he made good progress across the countryside and spent the daylight hours of Tuesday in a swamp. From there, he found his way onto a railway that he followed until dawn on Wednesday. He was sure he was near the border. Crossing the rails, he slipped and pulled the hamstring muscle in his left leg, and hobbled into some woods again to take cover and rest. With every hour that passed, he was weakening from thirst and a lack of food. Risky as it was to travel during the daytime, he needed to keep moving.

  After finishing his last cigarette, Blain sneaked through the woods. The bright afternoon sun dried his damp clothes, and the pain in his leg eased. He spotted a string of sentries spaced a hundred yards apart at the far end of a turnip field. The border—half a mile at most. He was so close now.

  Creeping back into the cover of the trees, he decided to cross that night. Once the sky darkened, he moved forward again. When he reached the edge of the woods, he dropped to the ground and crawled. For two hours, he slithered through the turnip field, muddying his clothes black. He was close enough to hear the footfalls of the sentries and to see their moonlit shadows pacing back and forth across the beaten track of what he felt sure was the border.

  He began to time their movements, growing accustomed to their patterns, and waited a long spell before he felt ready. Finally, he crept toward the track, ears keen for any sudden movement or signal of alarm. Hearing nothing, he scurried across. He was almost on the other side when he heard the approach of a border sentry. He moved his foot from the track a mere instant before the German stepped in the same spot. Face buried in the weeds, he kept motionless, breath caught in his chest, heart beating like a trapped animal.

  When the sentry continued on his way, Blain rose and ran into a thicket to hide. He wanted nothing more than a decent meal, fresh water, a warm shave, and an even warmer bath. The thought of such creature comforts almost brought him to tears. Up ahead, he saw a town lit up. He had no map but was certain it must be Venlo. He wanted to cry out in joy at the sight of it.

  He tried to clean his clothes of muck as best he could, but after three days of striking through woods and fields they were little more than rags. He headed into the town, slightly dragging his injured leg behind him. Next, a bark in German came from behind. “Halt!” He turned to find a German soldier, rifle at his side. He asked the soldier what the hell he was doing in Holland. “This is not Holland, it is Germany.”

  Blain tried to talk his way out of detention, saying that he was a worker from Venlo who had got turned around in the woods, but the soldier would have none of it. He later learned that if he had only followed the beaten track a couple of hundred yards to the left, he would have reached Venlo. Instead, he had never left Germany. He was crestfallen at having come so close. Any dreams of beefsteak, a good drink, and a hot bath quickly evaporated. Only black bread and insults awaited him on his return to Clausthal.

  Upon his arrival, a semicircle of guards with fixed bayonets surrounded him. Then Heinrich Niemeyer strode forward. The camp officer was in a fury, tearing at Blain’s muddied suit until the airman was almost naked. Blain managed to palm his compass and twenty marks, and kept them hidden.

  He was dispatched to a new cell, this one with a guard posted outside his door around the clock. Parker was returned to the camp soon after. While crossing a river, he had lost his rucksack (and his clothes, which were bundled inside). He hiked naked for a few miles, then hid out in a chicken coop only to be discovered by its owner. It was an ignominious end to a brave flight. Niemeyer promised Blain and Parker that, after a long stay in isolation, they would be out of his camp for good.

  Throughout October, batches of prisoners continued to arrive at Holzminden, many among them with repeated escape attempts to their record. Over sixty men came from Ströhen, including Gray, Kennard, and Bennett. The new prisoners gathered in the Spielplatz, its grass now trampled into a muddy soup due to rainfall and the daily tread of hundreds of boots. Prisoners stood on one side, guards on the other, then Karl Niemeyer performed his typical routine for newcomers. Most of the newcomers were familiar with Milwaukee Bill (as he was commonly known from his tales of bartending in that city) from their stay in the moor.

  He began by addressing his guards. “Look at these criminals and mark them down. If I see any German speaking to them he will be sent to the front.” He pointed to the prisoners. “These are not officers and gentlemen, they are criminals, and I hope you will treat them such.”

  To which one officer stood forward and said wearily, “Oh shut up, Niemeyer.”

  Niemeyer flushed. “Did you tell me to shut up?”

  “Yes, I did,” the officer answered.

  “Then I’ll have you arrested immediately. In five minutes!” he blustered.

  Some of the officers chuckled at his lack of certainty, some a little too loudly. Niemeyer’s English often made him the butt of jokes among the men, who nevertheless knew they took real risks in angering him. Before having his guards clear the Spielplatz, Niemeyer delivered one more promise to the men, apropos of nothing. “You are very clever? Yes? Well, I make a special study of this escaping. You will not escape from here. You think I, the commandant, know nothing. You are wrong. I know damn all.”

  Stifled laughter followed his inadvertent acknowledgment of the men’s disdain for his intelligence—or lack thereof—as the prisoners were hurried at the point of bayonets to their assigned barracks. Once they had settled in, they quickly learned of the prison’s vulnerabilities—notably the removable panel in the attic. Despite intensive searches, additional sentry patrols, the widening of no-man’s-land, and harsh interrogations of anyone who had escaped and been caught on the run, Niemeyer had yet to discover the attic-hatch method devised by Thorn and Wilkins. More than a dozen prisoners had used the hatch, and there was a veritable German uniform factory in one of the barracks rooms. However, not a single man had yet succeeded in making the long journey from the camp to the Dutch border. It was risk enough to escape the walls of Holzminden, but that was only the first step to freedom.

  Eleven

  Get up!” A guard pounded on the door at 8:00 a.m., rousing Gray and the three officers with whom he shared a small room in Block B. The pounding, and the call, were repeated down the corridor. The men knew that if they did not rise immediately, the guards would enter their cells and shove them out of bed with the butts of their rifles.

  Since arriving at Holzminden, Gray quickly realized that Niemeyer had created an environment intended to dehumanize the off
icers by a thousand petty humiliations, starting with the barracks. Although the buildings were clean and waterproof—a vast improvement over the shabby huts in the Ströhen moors—prisoners were forbidden to put pictures on the walls or coverings on the windows, and they were allowed only the small lockers provided for all their belongings. This left the rooms devoid of any sense of personalization, even those chambers designated for senior officers like Gray. The overcrowding made it worse, as did the prohibition against opening windows.

  Apart from the dining hall, which could seat only a hundred men at a time, there was an absence of common rooms in which the men could assemble. This meant that most prisoners ate where they slept. The officers conducted church services at the ends of corridors or in stairwells, where gatherings for lectures, card games, and the like were also held. Men constantly scrambled over and around one another, like ants in a nest. There was no privacy; one was almost never alone with one’s own thoughts.

  Roll call was at 9:00 a.m. sharp, and the prisoners spilled out of the barracks onto the snow-dusted Spielplatz to make it on time. Stragglers and those who failed to properly salute—or to stand at attention in uniform—were rewarded with a stay in solitary for a day, or three. “Cost price” the commandant called it in his idiosyncratic American jargon, as if his punishments were a matter of simple straight-dealing rather than petty whim. No matter how cold the day, the men were always forced to wait an interminable length of time as one of Niemeyer’s lieutenants walked up and down the lines, calling out names and checking them off his list.

  Gray found that waiting was one of the most subtle, but key, instruments of harassment used at Holzminden. Once morning roll call was over, he stood in line for a wash at the taps in the yard. Then he lined up again for a paltry breakfast of bitter coffee and biscuits hard as hammers. After that, he joined the crowd of men making their way to the noticeboard on the Spielplatz to see if they had a new parcel. If they did, they joined another line and waited to receive it, then they waited again while the guards checked their items for contraband, hacking into packages or spilling out their contents. The queue for parcels started in the morning, and unless you were there early, you might still be waiting at the end of the day. There was another line to the “tin room” to access the contents of previously received parcels, chiefly foodstuffs not allowed to be kept in the rooms.

  Gray waited to use a stove, of which there were too few, to cook his lunch. He waited for yet another round of inoculations. He waited to use the lavatory. He waited to buy firewood at the canteen. He waited to get his ration book for bread and wine. He waited for letters that did not come. He waited day after day for his name to be called at the 4:00 p.m. roll call. After that, he rushed to the barracks to wait in yet another line if he wanted more than the dregs of whatever watery stew they were serving for dinner—once, a whole cow’s skull was found floating in the cauldron they dished it from. By 6:00 p.m., when he was locked into Block B for the night, he had been standing for hours, time stretched out to agonizing lengths he never could have imagined before his life as a POW. Lights-out was hard set at 10:00 p.m.

  The small tyrannies imposed on Gray and the others at Holzminden were almost limitless. Despite—or perhaps because of—the inviting countryside outside the walls, Niemeyer refused to grant parole walks beyond the limited terms set by Hänisch, in protest over which the prisoners had ripped up their cards. As a result, they had only the half oval of grounds inside the wire for exercise and recreation. This was at best 410 yards around, and it was occupied by two cookhouses, horse troughs, a woodshed, a parcel office, a potato patch, and a dozen straggling trees.

  They tried to create a cricket pitch and soccer field in this limited space, but Niemeyer prohibited most games. They were told that one of the arc lamps had been broken by an errant ball. Their offer to pay for its replacement was met with silence. A gymnasium had been built for the original barracks, but it was set between the inner wire and the surrounding walls—out of bounds. It would have been ideal as a recreation space for the men, particularly as the weather got worse. And so, when not in line or sitting in their packed rooms, prisoners wandered back and forth in the crowded Spielplatz like penned cattle.

  Bathing facilities were a horse trough that had hot water only twice a week, and the men had to wash in full view of the rest of the camp. A shower house had been built on the senior officer’s request, but Niemeyer decided to use it to shelter his Alsatian guard dogs instead. He even posted a sign outside that read, WHEN A MORE SUITABLE PLACE IN THE CAMP CAN BE FOUND FOR THE DOGS, OFFICERS MAY HAVE BATHS ON TUESDAYS AND FRIDAYS.

  Theft was pervasive. The Landsturms (or “landworms” as the British called the typically older militiamen) oversaw the parcel room. It was bad enough that in “inspecting” items, they destroyed, with shameless glee, cakes, bread, meat, and other food sent to the prisoners, but they also stole what they pleased, especially cigarettes and soap. Letters from home, often describing what had been sent, were “misplaced.”

  At the canteen, Feldwebel Welman was equally criminal. Goods were supposed to be sold at cost, but Welman charged triple the prices of other camps on everything from coffee, wine, butter, firewood, eyeglasses, pencils, razors, notepads, watches, and toilet paper. The prisoners were certain that he shared most of the profit with Niemeyer, who by Camp Order no. 13 “fixed” all canteen prices. Their commandant also extorted charges on every prisoner for such necessities as food, hot water, and fuel for the kitchens. Some figured Niemeyer was clearing the kingly sum of thirty thousand marks a month in profit.

  There was no outlet to appeal their legion of grievances. Niemeyer refused to meet with Wyndham or other senior officers, nor would they have had much luck with him if he had. As far as Niemeyer was concerned, his countrymen were the ones suffering because of the British and their allies. Across Germany, food prices had shot up, and people were hawking heirlooms, furniture, and clothing to feed their families. Soup kitchens operated in most cities. “Meatless” Tuesdays and ersatz products (wheat flour extended with powdered hay; “butter” made with curdled milk, sugar, and food coloring) were the order of the day. Soaps had vanished from shelves, and tobacco was a “luxury” most often mixed with beech leaves. People surrendered their savings for war loans and their copper chandeliers, bronze bells, steam pipes, and even brass doorknobs to be melted down for the war machine.

  As well as turning a blind eye to outright theft, Niemeyer set the tone of abuse at the camp—and reveled in it. He paraded about the camp grounds and barracks throughout the day, hands stuffed in his greatcoat, chewing on the big black cigar that was a fixture at the corner of his mouth. His voice could change from a dolorous coo at one moment—“I guess, you know, my dear sir”—to a tyrannical roar in the next: “You must not speak to me. I am the commandant!” He spat on the barracks floors in front of the British officers. He ordered rooms emptied by bayonet point and conducted searches that left beds and lockers in shambles. For no reason other than a sour mood, he sent men to solitary or closed the parcel room.

  After only a short time, Gray witnessed how Niemeyer’s rule, and the nonstop pinpricks that came with it, left the men feeling rattled and helpless. The abuses were far less severe than those Gray had documented in the secret report he had managed to keep hidden since his escape from Crefeld, but they were abuses nonetheless.

  One officer at Holzminden wrote to his mother, “Time drags slowly on here, much the same day after day; it is extraordinary how restless one gets after a while—you feel that you must be doing something, yet cannot settle down to anything.” Some had lost a great deal of weight; others were listless; a few were spiraling into madness. With winter coming, and very little fuel to heat their rooms, their lives were certain to grow darker.

  Internment in Holland seemed a fool’s promise, and the war showed little sign of ending soon. Each would have to find a way to survive the place they now called Hellminden, or the Black Hole of Germany. Gray knew that h
e would survive by escaping. He did not yet know how, but he was confident that with the camp packed with a master’s guild of breakout artists, many of whom he called his friends, an opportunity would surely arise.

  In late October, Kennard and several other officers made their break from Holzminden, starting through the removable panel in Block A. Locals in the area surrounding the camp were on the alert for any strangers, and like others before him, Kennard ran into trouble attempting to cross the river Weser, whose width and fast current made for a perilous swim. He was soon caught, returned, and sentenced to solitary.

  He was one of the last to use the Block A hatch. After yet another intensive search, the guards found it at last, and a whole new series of security measures was put in place. The barricades in Block A were reinforced with iron sheets. Permit passes were instituted for the main gate and elsewhere. Windows were nailed shut. Barbwire fences were raised. The censoring of letters and inspections of parcels intensified. The barracks were scoured for contraband, and the number of guards increased.

  Niemeyer dedicated every effort to ensuring that the black mark on his record owing to earlier escapes would be erased by the prevention of future ones. The Holzminden inmates were clearly jailbreakers of the first order, and he intended not only to make the prison impervious to their schemes, but to crush their spirits in the process. “You see, gentlemen,” he announced to the whole camp, “you cannot get out now. I should not try; it will be bad for your health.”