Colditz

  Through the dentist’s receptionist (Imgara Vernicker), the prisoners were able to perform another astonishing act, namely the transmission of an anonymous letter in perfect German (by Lance Pope) to the Gauleiter of Dresden, the most important and dangerous man in the whole region! It was a strongly worded, threatening letter, intended to put the wind up him, beginning: “Your day of power is passed, now you face death.” He was led to suspect strongly that the writer was either the Liberal leader Carl Goerdeler or one of his aides. Since the attempted assassination of Hitler in July 1944 a huge price (1 million marks, dead or alive) had been put on Goerdeler’s head. Luckily he had been in hiding before the fateful day.

  Lieutenant-Colonel David Stirling DSO has earned his place in war history as the initiator of a new conception of daring and dangerous warfare by which valuable objectives are achieved by a combination of first-class intelligence, speed of communication, speed of decision and speed of action, resulting in success, surprise and in most cases a minimum of casualties. He commanded “L” Detachment in the Desert War, which became eventually the 2nd SAS Regiment. He was in effect the progenitor of the SAS as the world knows it today.

  Checko was the only POW in Colditz Castle who could lay claim to have kissed a girl while imprisoned there. It occurred probably at the beginning of his romance with the dentist’s receptionist, when he “inadvertently” left his muffler behind after a session at the dentist. She appeared at the guardhouse and persuaded the guard commander to let her deliver the muffler personally. Checko was sent for. Through a small grille in the great oak gates of the prison yard, she passed him the muffler and presented her lips for their reward. Checko was not slow to respond.

  The starvation diet on which the prisoners existed had an undeniable effect in dampening down the sexual urges of the natural male. In any case the total absence of contact with women made it easier to blot out their existence from the conscious mind, much as would happen in a monastery.

  The German censors sometimes had an insight into the workings, warped and tragically despairing, of the prisoner’s mind. Eggers reveals:

  Once an officer posted home a drawing of himself, idealized perhaps, but a good likeness, in perfectly fitting uniform, smiling, well and fit. The paper seemed unusually thick and heavy, so we slit the picture, looking for concealed messages behind it. There was indeed a second sheet. It contained a message—a very passionate one—and again a sketch of the writer, not this time in uniform, but in all his (perhaps imagined) Olympic nakedness, the true representation he would wish his sweetheart to see.

  Platt reports the arrival on 5 February of General Tadeusz Bór Komorowski and his entourage, and comments:

  General Bor is the most insignificant-looking and the worst clad of any of the officers. It was very pleasing to hear Polish voices again, but they have the typical military precision of the last Poles; there is as much heel clicking as ever.

  General Bór Komorowski was the head of that courageous, almost suicidal band of Polish patriots who kept the heart of Poland beating throughout the blackest years of the war. The Warsaw insurrection was the culminating point in the general’s underground career. He survived, though war, treachery and murder had threatened to engulf him each day. He possessed hostage value in the eyes of the German leaders, a fact which undoubtedly saved his head.

  A man of courage and resource, he won the hearts of all who knew him by his simplicity and cheerful friendliness. He was perhaps a man who had greatness thrust upon him, with the modesty of an aesthete, saintly in his detached outlook upon life. His head was partly bald and reminded one of a tonsured monk. Of slender physique, medium in height but wiry, he had direct, searching, hazel eyes under dark eyebrows. A neatly trimmed mustache, beneath an aquiline nose, set off his sensitive nostrils.

  General Bór, indisputably Prominenter, was given the cell that Giles Romilly and Michael Alexander had occupied. The British group of seven Prominenten was concentrated all together in the cell immediately opposite.

  Giles Romilly gives the following impressions:

  When John Elphinstone called he found General Bor seated at a table receiving reports from his officers; he was reading with great concentration and “Nyet!”—“Tak!” (no—yes) were the only expressions that came from him. John was struck not only by this reducing of speech to an economy that evidently General Bor’s officers were accustomed to and understood, but also by a sense of the sharp clarity and quick firmness of judgement that it expressed.

  Bór was a great horseman. In 1924 he had ridden for Poland in the Olympic Games in Paris. In 1936 the Olympic Games had been held in Berlin. There he captained the Polish jumping team. His team won the first prize, and Colonel Bór (as he then was) received the prize personally from Hitler.

  22

  Let the Hawk Fly Wild

  Early Spring 1945

  PLATT ENTERED A CRYPTIC remark in his diary for 12 February:

  The attics seem to be under repair. Evidently either the 1000 … or the 1300 new arrivals … are expected. We do not like the idea of the attics being renovated. [My italics.]

  The explanation is not far to seek, for the British were up to something. In fact they had been up to something in those attics for a long time.

  Flight-Lieutenant L. J. E. “Bill” Goldfinch and Lieutenant Anthony Rolt, the motor-racing driver, had been laying down detailed plans for a glider for a long time when Jack Best came out of solitary confinement after the terrace escape in the early spring of 1944. Encouraged by his reputation for tireless patience and his skills as a craftsman, they invited him to join them. Jack agreed.

  Dick Howe was approached. He was incredulous at first, but when he learned that the entire contraption would be constructed from wooden bedboards and floorboards, cotton palliasse covers and a large quantity of glue, he began to think the scheme might be feasible. Designed to carry two men, the glider would be launched from the Castle roof, catapulted by the dropping of a concrete-filled bath sixty feet down through the Castle floors (in which suitable holes would first have to be made).

  But it was really only possible if the team had a workshop where they could labor undisturbed. Tony Rolt had an ingenious idea. Overnight a dozen men walled off a section of the top attic over the chapel with a series of prefabricated frames under a layer of canvas palliasse covers from the unused dormitories. This was then plastered over using local ingredients—the fine grit from the French tunnel debris—to effect the best camouflage.

  The next day the attic was inspected by the Germans in a routine visit. They noticed nothing untoward. The shortening of the room would only really be evident after measurement of the lengths of floors at different levels. In fact the attics were inspected almost every day.

  Soon Jack constructed a trapdoor into the workshop from the lower attic on the floor below. Stooge Wardle joined the team. The construction of the glider began in earnest. A workbench had been set up. Electric light was provided. The glue came mostly from Checko’s black market. The tools were home-made.

  The four members of the glider team knew that only two of them would eventually take off in it. They agreed not to make the selection until the machine was ready, thereby ensuring that all four would continue to put their whole effort into the labor of construction.

  Work continued on the components and on the assembly of wings, fuselage, rudder and controls and on the runway saddle-boards, pulleys and ropes through the winter of 1944–1945, guarded by an elaborate stooging system. Construction had started seriously in May 1944. The take-off was scheduled for the spring of 1945. By that time, it was estimated, air-raids over the Berlin and Leipzig areas of Germany would be sufficiently intensified to provide ample black-out cover at night in which to break out the hole in the outside wall of the workshop, set up the launching ramp, assemble the glider and take off without being heard by the sentries below or seen by observers farther afield in the village. By the spring, too, the winter floods on the meadows flanking the
far side of the river below the Castle should have subsided. They would provide an excellent landing-ground for the glider, over 300 feet below the launching-ramp and 200 yards away.

  The stage had been set for the greatest escape in history. Would the spring of 1945 see its fruition?

  In February, as the Allied advance continued, Peter Allan asked Eggers for the first refusal of a small hand truck on which to carry his kit should the camp be moved. Eggers replied, “If the Russians get this far, we shall hand you over to your Allies.”

  Meanwhile Pierre Mairesse Lebrun was serving on the staff of General de Lattre de Tassigny, whose 1st Army had finally crossed the Rhine:

  At last, with our feet on German soil I felt bold enough to approach General de Lattre with an idea that I had been nursing for a long time. I asked him if he would let me go forward to liberate Colditz.

  I assumed that many of my comrades were still imprisoned there. I did not know that the French contingent had been moved to Lübeck. Also I knew of the Prominenten, not only the British but a few French as well. I was convinced that they, if not every POW in Colditz, all known as Deutschfeindlich, would become hostages to be held as such or massacred in the last resort. I also saw that the war of movement was gaining impetus, that it was nearly over. Whatever I did had to be done quickly.

  De Lattre listened to my plea and my reasoning and to my request for two squadrons of tanks with supplies and ammunition for a lightning thrust to Colditz. We had crossed the Rhine south of Strasbourg. I reckoned the distance to be covered was about 600 kilometres in a north-north-easterly direction. There was little German resistance behind the Rhine. Germany was beginning to crumble.

  De Lattre approved Pierre’s plan. He had, however, to alert the American divisional staffs on his left and take into account the position of the Russians advancing from the east, and this is where the plan was frustrated. Politics, as so often happens, made a hash of what was really a simple military situation and a well-planned expedition. The Russians were thought to be advancing fast. In fact they were not. The diplomatic situation that had evolved from the meeting of Russian and Allied leaders at Yalta in February made appeasement of the Russians a priority. De Lattre could not persuade his allies; neither could he take the responsibility of such an internationally crucial decision entirely upon his own shoulders. The plan had to be scrapped.

  In retrospect, it is possible to say that during the first half of March there were no major German units in or near Colditz. The French striking force could have taken the Castle with ease. All the prisoners would have been released alive at least one month earlier than they actually were, and all the Prominenten would have been rescued long before they were seized and taken to Bavaria. Some terrible events might have occurred in Colditz during the five weeks before the Americans relieved the Castle. That fate was kind to the inmates does not justify the caution or conceit of weak men who make timid decisions imagining them to be wise.

  As it happened, and western intelligence must have known it, the Russians were hundreds of miles to the east of Colditz. It was not until March that 1,500 French POWs arrived in Colditz in the general German retreat before the Russian advance. It is justifiable to ask whether the forces in the west were not influenced by national pride when it came to deciding which Army was to provide the spearhead that should advance furthest and first towards the cast.

  The prisoners of Colditz witnessed a very long and very heavy aerial bombardment to the north-east during the whole night of 13/14 February 1945. Dresden lies about thirty miles away to the north-east. What the POWs witnessed was the heaviest, most devastating and appalling air-raid of the whole war. To this day, the Germans hold that more people were killed here than at Hiroshima.

  Eggers provides the German side of the story:

  Between February 14th and 16th there were three very heavy air raids, two British raids in one night and an American raid by day, on Dresden—a city which up to this time had been untouched by bombing. The wife of the Kommandant, who was a refugee from Silesia, was at the time staying in the city with her baby in the house of our Paymaster. The Paymaster went off to help as best he could and was caught in the second raid and barely got to his home through the fire and destruction. He came back to Colditz and next morning a young paymaster of his staff went to Dresden with a lorry, got through, found the woman and the baby safe and brought them back to the castle.

  My clerk asked for leave likewise to go to Dresden to help his family. When he got home he found the house burnt out and his family all dead, along with other unidentifiable bodies in the cellar. He told me that in the old market square in Dresden corpses had been piled up high and burnt with flamethrowers. The inner part of the city was completely destroyed, and to prevent the spread of disease it was barred off even to those who had property and relations there. Some of the approach streets were actually walled up. Many officers of the Army District Command No. 4 in Dresden were killed along with their families in these raids. People in the city were quite demoralized by these massive attacks, even to the point of openly mocking at officers in the street that they should still wear Hitler’s uniform.

  At Colditz the POWs took this raid as the final sign of victory in the war.

  A ten percent cut in the bread ration took effect from 19 February. At 6 p.m. the SBO called a meeting of mess representatives. He said, “The thing is so bad as to be funny. 1,500 French will arrive on Friday; they are on foot from IVB, eighty miles away. All the British, including the Gaullistes and Czechs, will have to accommodate themselves in the Kellerhaus, officers on first three floors, orderlies on fourth floor, ex-Belgian quarters. No day/dining-place, have to live entirely in dormitories. A twelve percent cut in rations next week!”

  The new French prisoners arrived in fact on the following Monday, the 26th, having marched for eight days from Elsterhorst. Padre Platt describes what he saw the next morning:

  I went across the Hof to shave at 7.40a.m. Never saw such a sight. The more ingenious of the French had made themselves trolleys, hand barrows, trucks of every conceivable model [used for transporting their possessions from Elsterhorst]. One truck I saw was very ingeniously sprung on two tennis balls. There were three perambulators. Some of the trucks were as rude structures as one can imagine. Wheels in most cases were hand turned and tyred with tin. We had decided to jettison the kit we could not carry (in the event of a move) but many of these trolley manufacturers appear to have brought all they possessed…. Col. Schaefer has been in solitary confinement seven weeks yesterday.

  Two exalted visitors, Colonel Baron von Beninghausen and Freiherr von Beschwitz, came to Colditz in March in attempts to persuade General Bór to order the Police Home Army to cease fighting against Germany and instead to fight against Russia alongside the Germans. They got nowhere with the implacable Pole. Less happy was the failure of the prisoners to extract from their visitors any assurances about the fate of the Prominenten.

  On the 8th, immediately after the 8:00 a.m. Appell, the SBO warned Padre Platt to be on duty for the burial of an American at 8:15 a.m. the next day. He had no further particulars. The dead man was Corporal Tom Ray Caldwell. He had contracted double pneumonia on the march to Colditz from Gorlitz, Stalag VIIIA. A guard of German soldiers was present at the burial the next day.

  On the 20th Platt writes:

  Was called this afternoon to the Kommandantur to be interviewed by a German Foreign Office official. He was quite a friendly type, but he gave no indication of the purposes of his visit. After interviewing the Chaplains he visited the S.B.O. and perhaps, though I have not heard, some of the French— General Flavigny refused to see him.

  The following day:

  General Flavigny was returned to Königstein today. He was not acceptable as S.F.O. to the Germans. His refusal to see the F.O. official sealed it. Surprisingly he arrived at Königstein safely.

  Late in March 1945, the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) ordered the creation of
an irregular force which was called the Special Allied Airborne Reconnaissance Force (SAARF). It consisted of about sixty men, British, French and Belgian and one Pole (Andy Kowerski-Kennedy), recruited from SOE and experienced as parachutists in enemy territories. Teams were set up and allocated to target POW camps all over Germany.

  The unit was divided up into teams of three: an officer and an NCO and a signaler with an easily hidden transmitter set. At exactly the right moment the team would be dropped after dark near its allotted prison camp. Dressed in tattered uniforms they would lie up in the woods, spy out the land, then slip unobserved into POW working-parties and get inside the camp, to contact the Senior British Officer and open radio communications with advancing Allied troops; these would then drop arms and supplies and give air cover while the garrison was overpowered or the Kommandant bluffed until Allied troops arrived, in order to foil attempted evacuation to the dreaded “Redoubt”—Hitler’s mountain retreat in the southern mountains of Bavaria.

  Patrick Leigh Fermor and Henry Coombe-Tennant (Welsh Guards, who had already escaped from Germany) found themselves allotted to Oflag IVC, Colditz, each commanding a team. A third team was soon allotted to Colditz under an American. Studies and preparations were completed and they waited daily for the order to go.