The Venlo Incident

by Nigel Jones

  My cell in 1943 and 1944 made a very different picture to that in the previous years. The walls were a soft pinkish shade and on them hung two self portraits that May had painted and sent me, and a sketch of the farmhouse where she was living at Chagford. These had been framed, very nicely too, at the camp workshops. On the right as one entered was the small table at which my guard sat, and next to it my own large table with my wooden arm-chair. On the left of the table was my wireless set, before me my typewriter, books, papers, or whatever else engaged my attention. On my right stood a table lamp, a most valuable acquisition since its light could be properly shaded at night so that I could be in darkness whilst my guard could still see to read. On a stool to my left stood my electric cooker for which Elser had made me an asbestos-lined cover which enabled me to keep food warm for long periods. Next to the table was a large double wardrobe which contained not only my clothes, but in a special glass-lined cupboard, my reserves of provisions. On the other side of the cell came first the radiator and next to this a three-shelved bookcase with on top of it my large atlas. Then came my bed, in the daytime covered with a rug and with a large blanket-covered bolster which I had made, against which I could lean if I wished to lie on my bed and read. The tables and stools were all covered with blue and white checked covers, I usually had a bowl of flowers or a growing plant so that, especially in summer with wide open window, the general effect was bright and cheerful.

  Until the middle of 1943, whenever I wanted anything I had to ask Eccarius who, if he felt so inclined, might get it for me. He entered up the cost in a cash book which I had to sign. In July of that year I was told that in future I was to receive officer’s pay at the rate of ninety-six marks (£10) per month, and that I was free to buy anything I wanted either at the canteen or, through my guards, in Berlin or elsewhere. I was particularly told that no restrictions were placed on what I might buy except that I must enter every purchase in an account book which would be open to inspection. As regards anything in the way of drink which I needed from the canteen, I was not, like the SS, subject to ration but could buy any quantity I liked. Eccarius was a thirsty soul, and when he told me this I could see from the gleam in his eyes that he felt there were happy days ahead and indeed, I did not disappoint him.

  The food was excellent, and as I received double SS rations, more than ample. Through a wangle with the doctor I had got them divided into one ordinary military ration and one so-called special diet which entitled me to eggs, milk puddings and an extra butter allowance. Breakfast consisted of ersatz coffee with butter, jam, or margarine, and the weekly ration of the two former was so liberal that I never once ate margarine during my stay at Sachsenhausen. The midday meal consisted, except on two days when ‘Eintopf’, a sort of Irish stew, was obligatory for everyone in Germany, of soup, meat with potatoes and some green vegetable, and either a sweet or fruit. For the evening meal there was again butter or margarine with sausage, tinned fish, cheese, or something similar; once a week there was generally a hot supper such as sausages and mashed. In the evening I received my bread ration for the next twenty-four hours, which consisted of a loaf and a quarter of excellent wheaten white bread weighing nearly 2 lb. At the midday and evening meal I also received a quart of some milk pudding or three or four fried eggs. Of such things as sausage or cheese my double ration had a weight of lb. or more and, for instance, I often received two whole Gamembert cheeses, or two tins of pilchards. Besides this, there were many extras such as sweets, oranges, lemons, strawberries, caviare and other specialities of the occupied territories. To drink I could buy wine, beer, and spirits, though for my own use I bought by preference a quart of very good skimmed milk daily.

  I am a small eater so that with my extra food I could supplement that of my guards, two of whom had insatiable appetites, and my alcoholic beverages were in great demand with Eccarius who was only happy when drunk. For a warder to accept presents from a prisoner was punishable with death, so Eccarius was very much under my thumb which was just as it should be. The important thing was that nothing that happened should be reported. I feel pretty sure that had the commandant come into my cell one day and found me listening to a B.B.C. broadcast he would have said nothing and behaved as though he had not noticed. If, however, some chance passer-by had heard one of these broadcasts through the window of my cell and had reported this to Eccarius or one of the other warders the matter could not have been hushed up, but would have had to pass through the usual channels until it reached the commandant and, as a result, I should have lost my wireless set. So it was with everything, and I became so expert that although I had one or two narrow escapes I got through without any of my misdeeds forming the subject of an official report. Only one of the warders was a bit of a problem, a zealous young man named Hackmann who was a school friend of the adjutant to whom he was inclined to toady in the hope of promotion. It was some time before I could get him to accept bribes, I mean, of course, gifts, but in the end he chose the better course and accepted odds and ends from my wardrobe; he had been bombed out and lost everything, so he was glad of my help in making a new start towards civilian life after the war.

  Paul came back one dav from Berlin in a state of great excitement for at the station he had met Ettlinger. Ettlinger told him that he had a splendid post at the concentration camp at Vugt in Holland, and that it was an absolute gold mine as many of the prisoners were well off and their relatives would pay anything to secure good treatment for them. With the money obtained in this way all manner of goods, unobtainable in Germany, could be bought and resold in Berlin at enormous profit. The camp commandant, as Ettlinger put it, was an intelligent man and had gone into the business with him, sending him to Germany almost weekly.

  About three months later Paul came with fresh news. Ettlinger, the camp commandant, and his adjutant from Vugt were all prisoners at the Kommandatur, awaiting trial before an SS court charged with stealing from prisoners and of misappropriating government property. Early in 1944 I heard that the commandant had been sentenced to seven years penal servitude, his adjutant to five, and Ettlinger to three and a half years, and the three men were sent wearing the badge marking them as habitual criminals to the Dachau concentration camp. I was really delighted with this news and the justice of a sentence which would condemn Ettlinger to similar treatment to that which he had delighted on inflicting on the helpless prisoners in our building. Probably though this sentence was the best thing that could have happened to him for, to the best of my knowledge, in common with other prisoners at the camp, he was liberated by the American advance, and I have heard nothing to indicate that he was ever brought to trial as a war criminal as he certainly would have been had he remained with us. Kaindl and Eccarius, on the other hand, according to a report published in the German press were condemned by a Russian court in 1947 to life imprisonment in a labour camp; curiously enough, one of the crimes to which they confessed in court was complicity in the murder of Major Stevens and myself in the winter of 1941, though at this time Kaindl had not even been near the Sachsenhausen camp.

  During the earlier part of 1943 there had been several pretty heavy raids on Berlin, but for me, and I believe for most people in the city, the real war from the air started with five terrific R.A.F. raids on consecutive nights starting with the 22nd of November. From that time on my own life and that of everyone in Germany seemed to be governed by the sound of the sirens and the weighty remorseless passage of masses of heavy bombers overhead. The camp was on the direct approach route for planes coming from the northwest and was just within the outer flak girdle. There was a second line of flak batteries and searchlights between us and the city, whilst Berlin itself could develop a terrific volume of fire in which I could distinguish the strings of red beads of the short range guns.

  From my window I could look clear over to Berlin and had a splendid view of everything which took place between us and the city. In course of time I drew a quadrant direction indicator, based on the observation of forme
r raids and the information received as to the localities bombed, and by means of this I could estimate very closely which area was being attacked. When the Pathfinder system was introduced, red flares, they looked like strings of coloured balloons and had the popular name of Xmas trees, were dropped to mark the four corners of the camp and these always gave me a wonderful feeling of security, then in the distance the green and white Xmas trees would make their appearance over the appointed target just before the faint sounds of distant flak heralded the approach of our planes.

  From the moment that the sirens sounded the alert a curious hush came over the camp, and even in my cell I noticed that we spoke to each other in whispers as though afraid our voices could be heard from the air. Before the alert there had been a sudden bustle, the trusties running along the passages turning out the lights in the cells, and I pitied all the unfortunates locked in their dark cages for, of course, I had a proper blackout and my light was left on. Then came the crescendo of the approaching planes till their roar directly overhead seemed to make everything, even ones body quiver, and the noise of the flak barrage sank beside it to insignificance—no sound that I have ever heard has left such a tense memory as this passage of the R.A.F., creaking and groaning along and forming an apparently solid ceiling overhead. The later American daylight raids were spectacular, but because they were flown at great heights lacked much of the blind horror of the terror by night.

  Those five great November raids were a magnificent, a terrible sight. The German defences of Berlin were at their highest pitch of perfection and neither searchlights, flak, nor fighters were lacking. For the last there were at least three lanes of the approaches to Berlin in which they could operate; a fighter would fire a red and green, two red, or two green star shells, the code varied from day to day, and immediately the exploding flak shells would disappear from that area and soon tracer bullets would show that battle with one of our planes had been started. A plane would be caught in the beam of a searchlight, which would be quickly joined by a number of others, soon the beams of most of them would move away to continue their ceaseless search of the skies leaving three to hold the silver moth in the clutch of their crossed beams. The flak would be terrific at that spot and in these early raids far too often a yellowish spot would show, standing out sharply from the prevailing silver tones, would grow, turn red and the plane would veer out of the embrace of the searchlight arms developing a comet-like tail of fire. There would be a bright flash somewhere in the distance and then a long, long time afterwards the sound of a plane diving at unearthly speed followed by a bang which would shake the building. In those November raids our casualties must have been very heavy; I have myself seen on one occasion as many as five of our planes falling in flames at the same time but, no matter what the opposition, there was, as far as I could see, no evasive action and all planes followed their appointed path and bombed their targets without fail.

  We, of course, in the camp ran no danger from bombs, but there was always the possibility of a dud German shell, of which there were many, coming through the roof; also several planes fell, shot down fairly close to us. The pilot of one, who landed in a nearby wood and was captured by one of Elser’s guards, attributed his bad landing and a broken leg to the fact that he had waited to bail out until there was no danger of his plane falling on the camp. This officer spent the night in the cell opposite mine and great trouble seemed to be taken by the commandant and the doctor to make him comfortable. It made me very miserable to know that a countryman was so close and that I could do nothing for him. Where he was taken next day and what happened to him, I do not know. Later several men landed with parachutes in the camp, one of them, whom I saw plainly, on the roof of the barrack opposite my window.

  I held then, and I still believe that this is true, that German morale was at its lowest ebb in the autumn of 1943. Then, as the Allies demand for unconditional surrender became generally known and German towns were smashed by strategic bombing there was a gradual hardening in people’s temper. The working man who lost his home and his painfully gathered household effects saw in German victory his only prospect of compensation and rehabilitation. Homeless and ruined, what could peace bring him except destitution and misery; no, far better fight on, and gladly he allowed himself to believe the promises of Goebbels that victory was not only possible but certain, that Hitler had terrible new secret weapons which would turn the tide of allied success into the bitterness of defeat. It was in those days, I believe, that Hitler, although in fact already nearing madness, became for the masses a god; even my own guards, men who had never been Nazis, and who were almost entirely under my influence, became infected with mystical blind faith that what the Führer said must be true. From everything that I have seen I think that the idea that the morale of a civilian population can be destroyed by physical means such as shells or bombs is entirely false; in fact, I believe that the power of resistance of civilians living in their own familiar surroundings is even tougher than that of troops in the field. As regards the latter it is, I think, true to say that they will show greater stubbornness in the defence of a position in which they have spent some time and which they know than if their surroundings are unfamiliar. The instinct to stick to ‘home’ and to defend it to the last seems to enable all but the very weakest and most cowardly to find courage to withstand the most brutal efforts to evict them.

  The blitz never broke the courage of the British, nor did the far more severe ‘strategic’ bombing break that of the Germans, who I am convinced never feared our planes with anything approaching the dread they felt for the Gestapo. Air raids and bombs were concrete facts and dangers limited in time; you became a casualty or you didn’t, and when the all clear was sounded you could carry on as usual till the next time. The Gestapo with its spies and informers was always there, and at any moment you, or some member of your family, might disappear, and do what they would, no one could find out what had happened. It was a creeping terror against which there was no safeguard.

  Two of my guards were Berliners, one living near the Tempelhof Airfield, an obvious target area, and of the other two, one came from Köslin, a small town in Pomerania, and the other from a lonely village on the slopes of the Schneekoppe, the highest mountain in the Sudeten. The two last, their homes being in no particular danger, bothered little about the bombing and accepted it as a matter of course. The Berliners, who from my window could see their town being bombed and possibly their homes destroyed were in a terrible state of nerves, especially if, as sometimes happened, they had to wait for a couple of days before they had news of their families. When, however, raids came on when they were off duty and at home, they turned up next day cheerful and in good spirits, full of praise for the measures taken to protect the lives and property of the inhabitants of Berlin. The raid had not shaken their morale but rather had toughened it and made them feel more united with their fellow countrymen in the fight against an invader; I understand that the reaction of Londoners to the blitz was identical.

  In sharp contrast to the courage shown by the people in their own homes was their fear of being caught in a raid while travelling by road or by rail, and when later on really widespread attacks were made by fighters on traffic of all kinds, and as it was said, even on single pedestrians and people working in fields, the effect seemed to be far greater than any mass bombing. Warning could be given of the approach of bombers, but the path of individual raiding fighters was unpredictable, and in time they came to be the terror of the entire population and people became afraid to move except under cover of darkness.

  To avoid too great disturbance to the life of the city the Germans introduced two forms of alert; a small alarm consisting of only three up and down shrieks from the sirens, and the full alarm when the sirens continued their wailing for two minutes. In the case of the small alarms work was not stopped at factories and people were free to remain at their homes and air raid precautions only came into force for the full-scale alert. The Berlin popu
lation had been well trained for the latter, knew exactly what to do, and had the feeling that they were being looked after; in the case of the small alarms they were thrown on their own resources, they felt naked and unprotected, and lacked the cohesion which came from facing common danger in a crowded air raid shelter. When later our Mosquitoes came over in groups of sixty and a hundred, sirens sounded the full alert, the population went under cover and everything followed the accustomed routine, and I heard no more grumbling about those accursed Mosquitoes with their aerial torpedoes which had been so greatly dreaded.

  Colonel-General Franz Haider, late Chief of the German General Staff and (below) with his wife after their liberation.

  Major J. B. ‘Johnny’ Dodge, D.S.O., D.S.C., M.G. A photo taken while a prisoner of war in Germany when he was usually known as ‘The Dodger’.

  General Alexander Baron von Falkenhausen, Commander-in-Chief in Belgium after the German occupation. Imprisoned by the Gestapo after the July 20th attempt on Hitler’s life.

  I was very accurately informed as to the results achieved by different raids as Paul always managed to find out exactly what damage had been done, and information received later from other sources showed that his reports were correct. The Germans would then claim to have shot down their usual sixty or seventy planes, and the B.B.C. would report the dropping of several thousand tons of bombs on Berlin and the destruction of specific buildings there which every Berliner knew were untouched—I can’t remember how many times the destruction of the Potzdammer Bahnhof was claimed; about as often as the Germans said they had destroyed Waterloo Station, I should say.