Colditz

  André Perrin, the tough little Frenchman, who had spent eleven weeks in solitary in Colditz, had gone to Lübeck with the other French in the summer of 1943. He had promised his English friends, among them Bader and Romilly, that he would bring news of them to their relatives in England before the end of the war. He kept his promise.

  The Belgian contingent were moved from Lübeck on 9 September 1943. Five Frenchmen exchanged places with five Belgians. Perrin changed places with Thibaut de Massières, and escaped from a train. At the end of 1944 he arrived in London. He wrote: “I meet Madame Romilly and Mrs. Bader.”

  On 13 December two French officers arrived who had been shot down over the western front only three weeks before: Sous-Lieutenant R. Guillerme and Lieutenant N. Heliot.

  A coded message had been sent at the end of November to the UK via MI9 as follows:

  All ranks of the British and Dominion forces at Oflag IVC present their humble duty to his Majesty and request that he will graciously accept their Xmas Greetings. Signed W. Tod, Lieut. Colonel.

  A gracious reply was received by the same means.

  Eggers takes up the story of the German Götterdämmerung:

  Morale among our people was reduced to mere stoicism. Thousands were buried every day under the bombed ruins of their houses. The survivors lived as they might through that dreadful winter. Worst of all was the misery of the endless trek of hundreds of thousands of refugees from East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania and Transylvania, fleeing before the Soviets.

  Life in the Castle, where the guard companies now consisted almost wholly of men between the ages of fifty and sixty-five, reflected the growing disorder outside:

  Conditions at the end of 1944 were getting steadily worse. In Oflag IVC, Colditz, we reached the lowest level ever in food supplies for the prisoners. A bare 1,300 calories a day was the best we could scrape up after the New Year. Fuel was nearly gone. We were reduced to allowing officers out in the woods on parole and under guard to collect branches for their own fires. No more parcels came from the International Red Cross because the railway to Switzerland was cut. The prisoners ate up most of their last food stocks at Christmas, and their own internal market prices rose to fantastic heights—cigarettes were £10 per 100, while chocolate and raisins were proportionately high. A pound of flour obtained on the black (German!) market was priced at £10 sterling.

  Indeed Padre Platt tells of the sale of a 1938 14h.p. Renault coupé on 7 December for five pounds of chocolate and £10, the car and the sterling being in England.

  There was another camp truce from 24 December to 2 January. Eggers describes Lieutenant Chaloupka stark naked running three times round the Hof on Christmas Eve, having lost a bet that by then the war would be over.

  Colonel Schaefer left under escort for court-martial at Schubin on Christmas Day 1944. He was returned on 29 December under sentence of death. Lieutenant Schmidt, who had obstructed the Unteroffizier, was also sentenced to death.

  Platt records that the only signs Schaefer gave of discomposure were a slight paleness and a failure to keep his cigarette alight. The following day he lodged an appeal against the sentence, drafted by Black Campbell, but it never appeared to get to its destination. Hitler was the last recourse of appeal. Eggers says that Hitler himself had been advised of the affair and had himself ordered the death penalty. The Swiss representative visited Schaefer during his last visit to Colditz on 6 February 1945. Schaefer suffered the enormous anxiety of uncertainty.

  The New Year opened with the trial of Peter Tunstall at Leipzig on 5 January. Black Campbell had prepared his brief very carefully and ably. It was Pete’s seventh trip to Leipzig and he returned with a sentence of five months Gefängnis (imprisonment). The original charge was “Insulting a German officer and the state: using the words ‘Bloody bastards’ of Germans.” This was a retrial ordered by the appropriate authority which had refused to confirm the sentence of six weeks passed by the same court on 23 July. He was not allowed the services of Herr Naumann, the lawyer who defended him in the first case, and the counsel he was allowed had later refused the case. It was then conceded that he could take Black Campbell, but when the proceedings were opened Campbell was forbidden to defend Tunstall, or even to sit in court. Hugh Bruce, witness for defense, asked if he might give his evidence on oath, but was told it was not necessary. The German witness gave his evidence and afterwards was asked to give his oath. The summing up of the president of the court pointed out that there was contradiction between the two sides, but since the German soldier’s evidence was on oath, and that of the defendant’s witness was not, they were entitled to believe the evidence of the former. That is the gist of the story as Padre Platt heard it told by Campbell and Tunstall on their return.

  When the war ended, Pete had been court-martialed by the Germans five times. Except for one other POW who was court-martialed twice, nobody else had more than one. When Colditz was liberated Pete had served a total of 415 days’ solitary confinement, which is probably more than any other POW of the Germans in the Second World War. When the war ended Pete still had many months of “solitary” outstanding!

  There were two more Allied bombing raids on the Leuna oil refinery on 16 and 17 January. Platt estimated that the Leuna must have suffered twenty such raids, and concluded that the plant must have been built underground if it had really withstood such attacks. (His assumption was correct; the plant was partially underground.)

  Writing about the 17th, Platt says:

  At 10a.m. we had a red-hot rumour that 500 Red Cross parcels had arrived in Colditz station. Confirmation came at 11a.m. Excitedly, like children, dormitories were a perfect babel of vocal anticipation. During the course of the afternoon Colonel German went to the station to check the number. At supper time my mess was eating a dish of turnip peelings with two small potatoes each.

  On 19 January, four French generals, captured in 1940, were brought in four cars from Königstein: Generals de Boisse, Buisson, Daine and Flavigny. Six out of the seventy French generals at Königstein were expected, but only four arrived. Generals Mesny and Gauthier were due in a day or so. But on 22 January, General Flavigny was told that General Mesny was shot dead while attempting to escape en route from Königstein to Colditz. Mesny was known to have assisted in the escape of his old friend General Giraud. His luggage was brought to the camp and Eggers forwarded it to his widow. General Flavigny at once protested, accusing the Germans of murder. Years later Eggers wrote that Hitler had ordered that a French general should be killed “whilst escaping,” in retaliation for the death of the German General von Brodowski, shot while attempting to escape from the citadel of Besançon, which was being used as a POW prison. In 1961 the SS General Panzinger was arrested for carrying out this order on Himmler’s behalf, but he committed suicide in prison.

  On 23 January, a portable X-ray was brought to the camp, in an effort to see if the general loss of weight sustained by the prisoners was caused by tuberculosis. No trace of TB was found.

  Platt reported on the anniversary of Stalingrad (1943) that the Red Army under General Zhukov appeared to be about fifty or sixty miles from Berlin. By February, German refugees from the east were already streaming into Colditz town. Eggers comments: “Groups of refugees from the East pass through Colditz. They are in a terrible state. It is strange that no refugees flee before the American and British armies, only the Red.”

  21

  Firm to Their Mark

  Winter 1944–1945

  ON MY RETURN to Berne from the Swiss frontier where a “Repatriation” train had arrived from Germany, I was moved to write a letter to the War Office which is probably one of the first, if not the first, voicing serious alarm for the safety and lives of the POWs at Colditz in the proximate future. On 29 January I wrote:

  There is no doubt left in my mind that the Officers (including the Prominente) of Colditz and for that matter of other Officer Camps, will be held as hostages. The SS already control Colditz though they do not actua
lly guard it. The war may be over sooner than we expect—but it may go on for some months. The POWs will at a specified moment be moved from Colditz to the centre of the Nazi ring wherever that may be.

  I feel that something should be done for them just before they are shifted. This should be the optimum time, because they will be moved only when they have to be moved—i.e. when Germany is beginning to crumble. This will give the POWs a chance for their lives—if they are freed.

  As for freeing them I have only the one suggestion—and that for Colditz as I know it. Blow the Garrison Courtyard and the guard house to bits by very low accurate bombing—drop arms in the inner courtyard and give the officers a chance for their lives. I know they will react—simply warn them to be ready—saying the above may happen any time. They will do the rest. I am not a brave man but I know that if I was offered a last chance free preferably with a weapon, to becoming a Nazi hostage I would choose the former course any time. The men in Colditz already feel they are going to be hostages.

  On 9 February the SBO asked for the second time (the first was in September) for a meeting with the Kommandant to discuss the procedure and steps to be taken on the approach of the Americans. The Kommandant again replied he had no instructions on the point. Yet Eggers has a note on the subject much earlier, implying that in fact the Kommandant had received instructions.

  The SBO was not letting the grass grow under his feet in this respect. He had already made moves to enable him to act independently of the Kommandant in the event of a collapse in Germany. For the following description of what developed from this initiative I am deeply indebted to Major J. “Jack” Pringle MC. Jack had been imprisoned in Gavi, the Colditz of Italy. He very nearly made Switzerland from Gavi in an escape which involved Lieutenant-Colonel David Stirling as well. By January 1944 he and Stirling were in a prison at Marisch Trubau, only six miles from the border of Czechoslovakia. They both eventually and inevitably arrived in Colditz on 20 August 1944, along with Major D. W. G. Lee.

  In December 1944 the SBO decided that the information available to the British was inadequate, and that a proper organization would have to be set up to find out, as quickly as possible, what the German plans were and, having found this out, to make all possible arrangements to safeguard the POW position and anticipate any moves the Germans might make against them.

  He decided to call on David Stirling to organize an intelligence system, and he gave him, as his object, (1) to find out the entire local set-up of the German Party, Army, Gestapo and SS, with names and dossiers of the important personalities; and (2) to try to locate some weak spot if the Germans ever decided, in the last days, to liquidate the camp.

  Stirling’s first step was to take over the camp black-market organization, whereby the prisoners obtained from their guards various commodities in exchange usually for items from Red Cross parcels. Only two officers were now allowed to have dealings with these guards. Stirling could thus control the amount of chocolate and cigarettes given to the guards. At the same time the information gleaned from them, channelled through only two contacts, was much more coherent.

  The two agents were Flight-Lieutenant Cenek Chaloupka of No. 615 Czech Squadron RAF and Lieutenant Dick Jones. “Checko” Chaloupka had flown for Czechoslovakia, for Poland after Munich, for France after September 1939, and for England after the fall of France. He was decorated by all four nations. An adopted godson of Eric Linklater, he was puckish, dynamic, uproarious and explosive. Dick Jones, of the Malta Sea Defense Regiment and General List, came from Cairo and was a member of an Allied secret service organization. Captured twice by the Vichy French in North Africa, he escaped both times, only to be taken prisoner by the Germans in Tunisia in February 1943 while crossing the German lines to join the British. Padre Platt commented in November 1944, “We have at present three Mohammedans: two Pukka Arabs and Dick Jones!” Dick spoke Arabic, French, German and Italian, and very little English.

  On his arrival in Colditz in April 1944, after thirteen months in the hands of the Gestapo, Dick regaled his new colleagues with tales of his adventures as a spy. They thought the stories a bit highly colored until Stirling, who knew about Dick from his own period in North Africa, was sent to Colditz and verified them. In fact the use of the black market as a spying organization was Dick’s idea. Stirling has said that he often had to ask him to use threats if he did not get answers to his questions from the guards. These threats were of such severity that had they been reported he would have been shot.

  This control of the black market was not popular with the other prisoners: 300 hungry officers were strongly tempted to use their own devices to obtain food. This problem was solved to some extent by pooling the food received by Chaloupka and Jones and distributing it in equal portions.

  Jack Pringle and Pierre de Vomécourt decided what information was needed and directed what questions should be asked by the two agents. They also planned, in conjunction with Stirling, how such information was to be used in their final objective of reaching German collaborators on the outside.

  Jack explains how things developed:

  We had one great piece of luck. Chaloupka, who at one time had been taken to a Prague Gestapo prison for interrogation, had been seen leaving the camp by a girl employed in the office of the local dentist. She had followed him to the station, lost her heart completely to him and waited for every return train from Prague until Chaloupka (much to his and our surprise, I must say) eventually returned. She then begged him to try, under some pretext, to get to the dentist. Chaloupka, an extremely good-looking man, with more than his share of attraction for the girls, had been only too pleased to try to do this, and had, in fact, by virtue of smashing some of his teeth, eventually got to the dentists on three occasions. He had never seen the girl alone but she had managed to tell him that she would do anything for him, and if ever he needed help to try and contact her through a guard.

  Up to now, he had not been nearly confident enough of any guard to trust him with a note of this compromising nature, which might easily have got the girl shot. But once we had organised it so that we had full run of all the available guards without any interference from competitors, Chaloupka discovered one local boy who after various preliminary trial runs, he judged to be trustworthy enough to undertake such a mission. Gradually, starting with the unimportant romantic notes, we brought the notes to the subject of the German war effort, the trend of the war, and the likelihood of the German defeat. We asked her to find out about this (always as if coming direct from Chaloupka but, in fact, now all being written by me and de Vomécourt).

  Her answers came back carefully thought out and intelligently written. But we noticed that, although she herself was obviously anti-Nazi, she had fears at the back of her mind the insistence of which could only come from living in the strictest Nazi environment. Gradually, we discovered that her father was a leader of the Nazi Party in the local district and that she had access to information, both gossip and fact, which could be of great use to us in assessing the strength of Nazi authority, at any given moment.

  Simultaneously, we were making rapid progress with this young guard who acted as our courier. He was a boy of about twenty-two years of age and his father was one of the richest men in the local village, a man of considerable property and with a good deal of influence among the moderate element in the surrounding country. We started a campaign to show the boy the advantages which would be his if the English won the war, and he had assisted us in the final stages. Eventually, we got him to confide in his father that he was aiding us by acting as courier to the girl. Once his father came into his confidence, we started to submit to the boy a list of questions dealing with local organization, and Gestapo, Army and Party personnel in the locality. From these, we compiled dossiers of each man. In some instances, these were very detailed indeed, and included many interesting facts. For instance, we knew that the mistress of the keenest local Nazi was the wife of the most moderate local industrialist.

&nb
sp; The boy also supplied maps of the town, on which Jack and Pierre marked the houses of important local people, garages where cars were kept, petrol stores, food stores and medical stores. This sort of information was needed in case the prisoners had to take over the town completely amidst the chaos of Germany’s defeat.

  Our next step was to get the boy to introduce the girl to his father so that we had a little group interested in working together for us; the girl, motivated by her love for Chaloupka and the man and his son, motivated by dislike of the Nazis and desire to safeguard their future. This little combination worked very well together.

  From information coming from the three of them, we then started to select an alternative local government to replace the Party and the Gestapo, and one which would realise in the last days of the war that their directive was to come from us in the Castle and that their efforts could be concerted and productive instead of unrelated and without purpose. The process of selection progressed fairly rapidly. By this time the father had confided in other local anti-Nazi elements and we were able, from the dossiers given us by the girl, to check on the veracity of the information given us by the father, concerning identical personalities.

  But they were also concerned to find out about the Kommandantur organization and to gain access to the files and the switchboard so that they could discover everything relating to the prisoners. After an intricate operation, they obtained the confidence of the office staff and in the end were receiving telephone messages in the camp before they were transmitted to the German officers for whom they were intended. The switchboard operator in the town likewise relayed messages concerning the prisoners. It was at this stage that Dick Jones had to utter most of his death threats.

  A remarkable breakthrough achieved by the Colditz British Intelligence Unit was an early-warning system by coded signals with a well-informed German source in the town. The code cipher was contained in and deciphered by use of an eight-volume history, breakable only by code-breakers of “Enigma” caliber. The German agent was given an innocent-looking map, of which Jack Pringle had a duplicate. It resembled a map of the Nile Delta, and so it was named. The prisoners had a clear view of one or two streets from their windows. Everything bore a code significance. If the agent walked in the center of the road, past the restaurant, halted at the first telegraph pole on the left for half a minute and returned, he would be signaling “Extreme danger. Come out at all costs.” That would be if the Castle was to be blown up, for instance. The agent had contact with the authorities in the village who would be responsible for giving these orders, so the prisoners would be warned of anything that was to be done.