The Venlo Incident

by Nigel Jones

  Later I was so foolish as to indicate to one of my Gestapo visitors that I knew of their presence and had been given a forcible and categoric denial. Unfortunately, suspicion was aroused that one of my guards had been talking, and all four of them were had on the mat and told that any indiscretion on their part would be most severely punished; the result was that all my information from this source dried up for a long time. I was therefore greatly excited to have this direct communication from Stevens and hoped that it might be possible to continue in correspondence with him. For the time being I contented myself with scuffling out what he had written and scratching my own reply:

  No. P.B.

  That evening while lying on my bed and keeping an eye on my guard to see that he was not looking, I wrote a few words to him on a scrap of paper which I rolled and charred to look like a cigarette stub. Next day I threw this on the ground near the bench, arranging two matches on the ground so that they pointed towards it; I hoped that Stevens would follow this clue. The following day my letter had gone and a series of matches directed my eyes to a scrap of paper stuck into a crack in the bench. Poor Stevens seemed to be making heavy weather in his anxiety about his wife, mainly because she had a very low opinion of the Germans and would certainly imagine that he was being put to all manner of torture. Myself, I had never worried about such things, as I felt confident that May would in her heart trust me to get out of any trouble into which I had got myself; in any case, she knew Germany well and would therefore be less inclined to place credence in all the stories of atrocities which were current. I hoped, too, that she would follow my principle of not worrying about things which she could not influence.

  Stevens told me that he was in cell No. 44 in Wing B, and that he had caught a glimpse of me once as I was going into the interrogation room; the conditions of his imprisonment were the same as mine; a guard in his cell day and night and the chaining to the wall at night. In the days that followed we exchanged several notes in this way, and I was really deeply concerned as it became clear to me how intensely Stevens suffered, mainly because he had a sense of grievance and considered that, according to the rules of war, he was entitled to different treatment. This was, of course, as may be. When we were captured we had both, I think, rather anticipated being shot at dawn on one of the next days and would have been surprised if by argument about the Geneva Convention we had succeeded in averting this danger. Well, we hadn’t been shot nor, on the whole, had we been very badly treated, so I felt that we should be thankful for small mercies and make the best of the situation.

  Of course, I didn’t enjoy imprisonment, but I did not feel that it would become any more enjoyable if, as Stevens wished, we were transferred to a prisoner-of-war camp, or even brought together and allowed to share a cell. I have never liked crowds and therefore felt reluctant to exchange that measure of privacy which I now enjoyed for life in a camp, even if, strictly speaking, the Germans had no right to place me in solitary confinement. It was most unlikely that the Gestapo would make any alteration in their plans, however much we might protest, and I therefore preferred to devote my energies to making the best of the position in which I found myself, and to finding practicable methods of rendering it more tolerable.

  At the beginning of May our contact was roughly broken for a time, as a chill from which I was suffering took a wrong turning and I went down with an attack of pneumonia which, according to the doctor, almost relieved me of all my troubles. I didn’t know much about it as I was off my head and only semi-conscious for about eight days. When the crisis passed and my interest in mundane affairs was reawakened I found that two of my old guards, Schnaars and Schwartz, had left, and had been replaced by two new men, Ebert and Prochnow. With them my life took a distinct turn for the better; they did not seem to have been so carefully briefed as the first men and from the start they were friendly and quite ready for conversation. Of course I could not ask them questions about the outside world and the progress of the war, but anyhow it was a great relief to be with people who did not seem scared out of their wits if we exchanged a few harmless remarks.

  Very possibly, my illness had rather frightened my captors for, as I learnt later, there would have been very serious trouble for them had I died, as this would have been in disobedience to the orders of the All Highest, that I was to be kept safe and in good health. Anyhow, there was a marked improvement in the attitude of the warders towards me, and whenever I asked for a book or anything else that I needed, I got it at once. Only cigarettes were again in short supply, for the wretched doctor had cut me down to two a day. It was at this time that I started collecting fag-ends. I had previously kept my own and with them rolled cigarettes; now I started my guards collecting theirs for me; later on the time was to come when I picked up any old cigarette end that I could find without worrying about who might have cast it aside. Towards the end of the war, when the ration was six cigarettes for ten days, fag-ends, ‘Kippen’ as the Germans called them, became marketable articles, three good ones fetching a mark.

  Ebert, one of the new men, was a nice, clean little Pomeranian bootmaker. He was a Nazi, and had been one of the first men in his village to join the party, but he was by no means a fanatic, and as time went on he lost faith in everything and believed nothing except that it was the fate of the common people to be lied to by all those whom they had trusted. We never became friends in the sense that I could take him into my confidence, but he always behaved correctly and in his way, was kind and considerate.

  Prochnow, the other new man, was a very different proposition, and we got on well with each other from the moment that he started duty. He was a tall, very thin, saturnine looking fellow, who had neither principles nor beliefs but lived only for drink; when drunk, his normal state, one could not want a pleasanter or more amusing companion; sober, he was the picture of sullen misery. His thirst was enormous and his weekly pay did not cover his needs for even one day; the ingenuity which he displayed in obtaining the means to satisfy it for the rest of the time, afforded me amusement and delight throughout the time that he was with me.

  A few days after he came to me he struck a very bad patch, and was without drink as I was without tobacco; then I had a happy thought. I still had my signet ring which the Germans, believing it to be a wedding ring, had not taken from me with my other belongings. I suggested a deal to Prochnow. If I gave him this ring he could sell it and satisfy his thirst, but I would only do this if he agreed to supply me with smokes equivalent to its value. No sooner said than done, and next day he came in very drunk and very happy, and told me that the ring had made eighty marks and “das geld ist alle”, the money has gone; he had spent the evening at a café in Oranienburg, and when he got home his pockets were empty, but, he said, “I did not forget you,” and with that he threw two packets of tobacco on to my bed. You would think that I had made a bad bargain but Prochnow, if poor, was honest, and whilst he was with me never let me want for something to smoke, and this is saying a lot, for everything he brought me was paid for in his life’s blood—alcohol. What a time I had with him and what narrow squeaks we had. No matter how drunk he was, as long as he could sit and keep awake, he seemed sober as a judge; he was one of those men who get drunk from the waist downward.

  The greatest difficulties occurred in the evenings when he had to go with me to the lavatory. Luckily, the warders had given up going with me and now contented themselves with telling us when the lavatory was free, and leaving me to go there under the sole charge of my guard. I would hoist Prochnow out of his chair and once we got moving, he could carry along pretty well for the short distance we had to go, but when we got to the lavatory it was the devil’s own job to know what to do with him. He couldn’t stand unaided and there was nowhere for him to sit except on one of the w.c.s. But these were of the upended drain-pipe pattern and Prochnow was so thin and so limp that I feared he might double up like a jack-knife and disappear. I tried propping him up against the wall, but twice his feet slipped away
and when I looked round he was on the floor dreaming blissfully. Getting him on his feet again without making a noise was no joke especially as, when wakened, he was inclined to be fractious. Luckily he sobered up quickly and if he could have about an hour’s nap when he came on duty he would be all right for the rest of the time. While he slept I had to keep watch, and if I heard anyone coming I would give a yank at a string tied to one of his fingers. He was very valuable to me, both as a source of tobacco and also because he kept me informed about what was going on in the world, so I was always in a panic lest he should be caught out and taken from me.

  After I recovered from my illness Stevens and I soon picked up the threads of our correspondence again. We had, though, only exchanged one or two letters when Prochnow told me that one of Stevens’s guards, a man named Lenkeit, had given him away and that our letters were being intercepted and, after being photographed, replaced. As a matter of fact I should have spotted this in any case, for on one of Steven’s letters someone had written fifty-one, the number of my cell, and then crossed it out and put forty-four, Stevens’s number. I tried to give Stevens the tip that this was happening, but I could never get it to register with him. From that time my letters were written more for the eyes of the Gestapo than for Stevens, though occasionally, when I wanted to tell him something important, I would give my letter to Prochnow to plant in the garden, which he could easily do unobserved. It was of course absurd to hope that two prison amateurs such as we could succeed in carrying on an illicit correspondence without being spotted. All prisoners try to do this and the warders know all possible ways in which it can be done.

  It was nearly the end of May before I heard anything about the German offensive in the west; on the 23rd Becker, who had been away on leave, smuggled in a paper, and I read of the occupation of Denmark, Norway and Holland, and of a break through Belgium and France to the Channel. A few days before I had heard the Wilhelmus, the Dutch National Anthem, played on the radio, and this had filled me with forebodings, but what I now heard from Becker gave me a terrible shock. A few days later, Grothe turned up, bringing with him a Red Cross Inquiry from May, just twenty-five words, which told me that she was well and staying with a cousin of mine in England. It was the best tonic that I have ever had, and even when Grothe gave me more news of the war and told me that the French were in full retreat and the British Army encircled, I could not feel depressed; I just felt that everything must come right in the end.

  On the 22nd June I was called to the interrogation room where I found Schellenberg and Oberführer Lohritz, the former in the uniform of a Sturmbanführer in the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, and wearing the First Class Iron Cross, which he had been awarded for his bravery in capturing Stevens and me. Schellenberg put on his most impressive air and pushing a newspaper before me asked me to read what I saw; France had asked for an armistice; millions of prisoners; the British Army routed.

  “You would not believe that we should win the war. Now you see, the war has been won! What do you think that England can do alone? We are going to destroy England, very soon there will not be a house standing in London—I hope that your wife has the sense to leave before it is too late.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “Are you going to bomb London? I thought that the Führer was against bombing civilian targets.”

  “Oh, but England started it and has killed hundreds of innocent people in Germany—now, we are going to teach your country a lesson and when we are finished with her, ‘England wird total vernichtet sein’.” (England will be completely destroyed.) He then went on to ask me, obviously with certain concern, whether I still thought that England would refuse to give in and might try to carry on the fight from Canada and other parts of the Commonwealth, and I assured him that he could make up his mind to this, that the British would never accept defeat but would fight on to the last man.

  Schellenberg had a large bundle of newspapers with him and at first it seemed as though he intended giving them to me, but he changed his mind and said that he would let me have them in a few days’ time; I heard later that Stevens had them first. He then said that arrangements had been made for me to have a paper, the Völkische Beobachter, daily in future, “So that you can see how Germany marches from one victory to another”.

  In the days that followed, after the exhilaration caused by the news from May had lulled, I passed through some very bad hours, and in my heart I really feared that Germany had proved too strong for us. On the 2nd July Grothe came again and gave me copies of the Völkische Beobachter from the 10th May to 30th June, and also three more Red Cross Inquiries from May. How often good news and bad news come together!

  The next two days I spent in reading through all the papers which Grothe had given me and, at the end, I felt far less hopeless and depressed. The reports of the German victories were too exaggerated; they seemed to me to display the old familiar inferiority complex and doubt of ultimate success; there was something naïe, almost childish in their tone; joy at an unexpected and undeserved gift from heaven. No, to me, the argument that because the German Wehrmacht had overrun Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France, they would also have a walkover in England simply failed to convince, and I can truthfully say, that from that time I never doubted that Germany would ultimately be defeated. The news was to be very black for a long time yet, but the gross exaggeration in all the German reports which never admitted losses or setbacks of any kind, always gave me comfort.

  The weather became fine and warm, and often I would take my clothes off in the garden and have a sun-bath. Restrictions on my freedom had gradually become much less noticeable; of course I was a prisoner and the chain at my wrist at night was a daily reminder, but as long as I did not allow myself to want to do anything forbidden, I could feel that I was free. I read, played patience and talked to my guards; in the garden I no longer marched round and round, but amused myself watching ants and other insects, or just lying in the sun dreaming. What a curious thing was this loss of liberty which had befallen me; what did it really imply? In some respects I felt freer than ever before, for I had neither responsibilities nor duties; nor had I any real interest in life. The material and physical discomforts I discovered, mattered nothing; they might arouse temporary irritation but they made so little impression on my mind that most of the time I simply did not notice that they were there. What did matter was the intense sense of frustration, the feeling of uselessness, and something akin to shame that I should have allowed myself to be captured. It would have been so much better to have died fighting at the frontier.

  Then, there was anxiety, generally subconscious, but nevertheless gnawing at my nerves and showing itself physically by an uncontrollable tremor of my hands. Where was May? Was she well and did she know that I was all right? Then, the war. I had the feeling that I had learnt many interesting facts which might be useful if I could only make them known. I wanted an outlet for my energy, I wanted to play my little part in the war, but here there was nothing to do but to kill time, surely the most wasteful, most futile occupation there is. I really believe that ill-treatment, giving me something to fight against, would have been easier to bear than this life of a prize pup; well housed, well fed, taken out on the lead for exercise, and finally, chained up to sleep. At this early stage of my imprisonment I was allowed to do nothing for myself; the warder saw me one evening making my bed according to my own ideas: “You mustn’t do that. If you will tell me what you want done I will get the trusty to do it while you are in the lavatory. We don’t want you to say when you get home that we made you do work of that sort.” My job was just to keep alive in case the Gestapo or anyone else wanted me for anything; I was in cold storage.

  For a time I threw myself into the game of the exchange of letters with Stevens and into devising new methods for their concealment. While I was ill a series of sheds, extending the whole length of the centre path on the prison side, had been erected. These housed large quantities of timber of all sorts ranging fro
m deal to mahogany, as I later learnt, a private store which the commandant had abstracted from the camp supplies. At each of the German concentration camps there was an organization called the ‘Deutsche Ausrüstungs Werke’ (German Equipment Works) where all manner of trades were carried on by prison labour; one of these was carpentry and the manufacture of furniture for government offices. Actually, there was practically nothing that you could not get made or mended, whether it was a suit of clothes or a watch, a yacht or a roll-top desk, and at Sachsenhausen most of the work was for the commandant.

  Well, these sheds were covered with freshly tarred roofing which, in the heat of the sun melted and formed a sort of black icicle. These, Stevens and I collected. Our letters we made into small rolls, and after wrapping them in silver paper from our cigarette packets, we gave them a thick coating of this tar. When they had been rolled in the dust they looked just like any other of the bits of slag which lay on the cinder-covered paths of our exercise ground. We just threw them down in a prearranged spot when, knowing what to look for, we could spot them quite easily. Unfortunately, this dodge was given away by the same guard, Lenkeit, who noticed Stevens preparing one. To arrange the spot where our letters should be left, Stevens occasionally sang in the lavatory, putting in a few words, such as: “On the left, near the bench,” which I could hear quite clearly from my cell next door. It is interesting to read these old letters now, for I was able to keep those which I had from Stevens and bring them back with me to England—how far away it all seems now.