The Venlo Incident

by Nigel Jones

  On the 24th April we had a visit from Stiller, who after all had not been able to make up his mind to desert, and were warned that we should be leaving at five o’clock that evening. At three-thirty, just as we had finished packing, we saw about half a dozen fighter planes dancing over the camp and obviously firing on some ground target; Garibaldi, who knew the layout of the camp said that they were firing at the transport park, and a little later we got word that five buses which were ready to take us on our journey had been shot up and that we should not move that day. We were to be ready at five o’clock on the next day. Our hopes rose to fever point and I really began to believe that Rhode’s man had been able to get my message through and that steps were now being taken to prevent our removal.

  When the afternoon came, we all clustered round the window from which the transport park could be seen, waiting for our friends the fighter planes. Time went on, three, four, and five o’clock. We were told to put our luggage on trucks which some prisoners had brought when, at last, there was a renewed sound of low-flying planes and of firing. Back into the building and to our window. Six or ten planes diving at the transport park and apparently firing with their guns as well as machine-guns; a burst of fire and some puffs of smoke. Three of five buses set on fire and thirteen casualties was what we heard. No move apparently that day either, and we all did a sort of dance, jigging from one foot to the other. After about an hour a renewed order to move and this time we really did so. Three buses had been destroyed, but three lorries had been brought in from Munich to replace them—instead of travelling comfortably in buses our journey was to be made on hard benches in lorries.

  On the previous day some new guests had come to us from the camp, all men dressed in the ordinary camp prisoners’ clothes; they were Prince Frederick Leopold of Prussia, Prince Xavier de Bourbon, Dr. Richard Schmitz, the Mayor of Vienna before Austria’s annexation by Hitler, and Baron Cerrini, Prince Frederick Leopold’s secretary; somehow or other too, the trusties Wouwer and Kohlenklau had also managed to join us with the intention of accompanying us wherever we might be going. All these men had been through the mill of ordinary camp life, but being of the stuff of which good prisoners are made, had suffered hardship and indignities without breaking down. Prince Xavier and Dr. Schmitz looked thin and worn, but Prince Frederick Leopold was in fine fettle, having had a job in the canteen for some time. He had had a very bad time having been forced to do the hardest manual labour. He had nearly died from diphtheria and was given no medical attention of any kind. After his recovery the camp commandant had a happy thought, and made him errand boy and batman to the prostitutes at the brothel, but nothing broke his spirit and he always came up smiling. He was descended from a collateral branch of the Hohenzollerns and had always lived in Austria. Even before he joined us I had heard quite a lot about him as he had made himself generally loved in the camp, where he was called ‘Pat’ by everybody, and on our way out, all the prisoners lined up to see us go, and he could hardly make his way past them; so many hands were stretched out for him to shake.

  When we reached the camp entrance we found a comfortable looking bus and a canvas covered lorry. With Prince Frederick Leopold next to whom I was walking I directed my steps towards the bus, but as I was about to get in I was stopped by Stiller and told that I was to travel in the lorry; as I later learnt, this was because Stevens was already in the bus and Stiller was still trying to obey the injunction to keep us apart. I had quite an argument with Stiller before I would consent to move over to the lorry, for I was really feeling very weak and I dreaded the idea of another uncomfortable cold night journey, but he was adamant and in the end I had to give way. There were four rows of seats in the lorry and I was lucky enough to get a place close to the entrance, from which, at least, I could see something of the country through which we were passing. Müller and Liedig sat next to me and I found that most of the people from the brothel, with the exception of the bishop and his colleagues, were also travelling with us. At the last moment little Wassilli was pushed in so I introduced him to the Russians; from that moment he went Slav and disappeared so completely behind the curtain that I scarcely saw anything more of him.

  We passed through Munich lurching like a ship at sea as we bumped our way over rubble and hastily filled bomb craters—the ruins were still smouldering and the air was thick with smoke—I had lived and studied in Munich and knew every inch of the city, but all that I could see on our passage through the centre were the ruins of gutted buildings behind a wall of rubble that filled the roadway from side to side. After leaving the city we were all eager to see which direction we would take; whether the new motor road to Berchtesgaden or the road through Landsberg to the Lake of Constance, both of which places had been indicated by camp prophets as probable destinations, but from time to time we got glimpses of a river on our left which could only be the Isar, and when we entered the foothills of the Bavarian Alps it became certain that we must be going towards Innsbruck, the Tirol, and perhaps places farther south.

  We came to a place called Mittenwald just as the alert sounded and this seemed to rattie our driver so much that he took a wrong turning and landed us in a blind alley. The other buses had followed us and now it was quite a business to extricate the heavily laden vehicles and in the end we all had to get out. It was pitch dark and I was seriously tempted to disappear into the woods near the road, but decided that the escape of any one of us would certainly make things worse for the others and that it was therefore my duty to stay put. We seemed to have a couple of the world’s worst drivers, for it took them endless time to get out on to the proper road again and our guards were slanging them and telling them that the planes would be overhead at any minute and we should all get killed. At that time all roads leading to passes through the Alps were being regularly and badly shot up by our planes in order to prevent any large-scale movement of troops and munition to the Southern Redoubt. It all went off well though, the vehicles were straightened out on the road and we all got in, thirty-nine people in the lorry and twenty-two in each of the buses—I noticed that there were at least two more lorries behind us which seemed to be filled with luggage and SS guards—we started off again and had hardly got clear of the place before we heard the sound of bombs bursting behind us.

  We jogged along all night, our driver showing a great inclination to leave the road at several steep and nasty bends which he had to negotiate, once bumping a low wall at the side so hard that we nearly tipped over. Just as dawn was breaking we reached Innsbruck but making no stop passed steadily through its sleeping streets. Where on earth were we going now? Unless it was the intention to take us to the Swiss frontier our destination must be Italy and our road be over the Brenner, but soon after leaving Innsbruck we turned down a side track off the main road and came to a stop before a gateway guarded by SS sentries, with beside it a large single story building, obviously just another concentration camp which, as we later discovered, bore the name of Police Education Camp Reichenau, which meant, of course, that it was the police which did the educating.

  We all got out and were taken into the building where we found a room that was a cross between a railway waiting-room and a restaurant; it was, I believe, the canteen of the troops employed at the camp. We were given some bread and sausage and mugs of ersatz coffee and after that we just sat and sat, too tired to bother about what was to happen next. I can’t remember how long we stayed there, but eventually we were told to clear out, and when we got outside we found that it was a lovely hot day, more like mid-summer than spring, and that the camp was in a beautiful valley surrounded by high mountains with the town of Innsbruck seemingly just above us. The building where we had breakfasted was on the left side of the entrance, and on the right was an enclosure which advertised itself to our nostrils as what it was. I saw a man with straw-coloured hair, dressed in khaki shirt and shorts, obviously an Englishman, enter there, so I followed him in and introduced myself.

  He was Lieutenant-Colonel J
ack Churchill, and he told me that there were a number of other British officers in the camp who had come there from Flossenberg; no doubt the convoy which we had heard of at Dachau. I remembered Colonel Churchill’s capture very well, as the German papers had carried long stories about how a close relative of Winston Churchill had been taken prisoner on an island off the Dalmatian coast, and from the fuss which was made one would have thought that this event was a great step towards victory. One of the guards saw me talking to Churchill and I was called back to rejoin our flock, which was then moved farther into the camp and left to stand about in the middle of a broad path, until one of the Dachau guards who had accompanied us was induced to provide some benches on which we could sit.

  One of the Dachau warders was an Austrian of about sixty-five; in peace-time he was a railway guard, and he always treated us as first-class passengers from whom substantial tips might be expected. He was fond of telling how, at the beginning of the war, he had been enrolled in the SS and sent to Dachau where, he was told, he would only have to stay for five months, after which he would be free to return to his railway work—but he had been there ever since. He was in charge of the supply of luxuries to us prisoners, and for weeks we had been on his tail for tobacco which he had promised but which had never materialized; on this day, though, he suddenly appeared with a large basket and said that at last he had been able to get hold of some tobacco, and that he had half a packet (one ounce) for each of us. He said that we must pair up so that each man could fetch the ration for himself and another. This was started quite fairly, but very soon each of us was fetching a packet for himself, and before long the old man’s basket was empty, although half of our party declared that they had had nothing. He said that we must all have had our share as he had certainly had half a packet for each of us, but with a clamouring mob around him, shouting at him, and jostling him, he gave way and promised to fetch more, which he did—all along we had suspected that he had intended to collar half of the tobacco supplied for us, as it seemed unlikely that half packets would have been issued as a ration.

  When he had at last satisfied our demand for tobacco we raised the question of food, and after some noisy argument he went off, and after a time returned with some prisoners carrying big baskets containing sandwiches of bread and sausage and a couple of buckets of normal coffee hog-wash.

  We were all very tired after our all-night journey and anxious to get to some place where we could lie down. It was terrifically hot in the sun, and nowhere was a spot of shade to be found. The night journey had been cold, and warned by past experiences, we had all of us dressed as warmly as possible and were in no state to enjoy the Tirolese sunlight. There were several of the warders from Dachau with us and to each in turn we appealed for billets, but were told that the camp was full and that a barrack was being cleared for us; it was not until evening that we were told to move and were taken to a long wooden hut which was to be our new home. There were several parallel lanes in the camp with these huts on either side, and when we came to ours I saw that the huts opposite were occupied by British officers and men in other military uniforms. Our hut was divided into a number of small rooms containing double-tiered wooden bunks, with filthy looking straw mattresses and blankets. There were thirteen of us in our room and when we had all got in with our luggage there was hardly room to move.

  As soon as I had parked my gear I went across to the opposite huts where I made the acquaintance of the British officers. There was Colonel Churchill, whom I had already met, and also Captain Peter Churchill; then there were a number of the survivors of the massacre after the mass escape from Stalag Luft III of 23rd March, 1944; men who had taken part in the breakout and whose lives for some mysterious reason had been spared. There were Wing Commander (‘Wings’) Day and Flight Lieutenants Sydney Dowse and B. A. ‘Jimmy’ James; all three heroes of numberless escapes. Also in these huts were four Irish soldiers, a rather mysterious Belgian or Frenchman who said that he had served in the R.A.F., and Mr. Greenewich who had been British Passport Control Officer at Sofia; then there were five Greek generals headed by the Commander-in-Chief of the Greek armies, General Papagos, and a couple of Polish air force officers.

  It was a wonderful experience meeting these people, as it was the first time in nearly five and a half years that I had been able to talk freely to men of my own race, men too, who by virtue of their indomitable courage and refusal to accept defeat were the heroes of all their fellow prisoners. They were all extraordinarily nice and kind to me but in my heart I felt very much ashamed that, whilst they had broken out of prison time and again, I had done nothing but sit in my cell leading the well-fed life of a prize poodle. Instead of telling of their own adventures they pretended interest in my tales of the Sachsenhausen Bunker, where they had all been guests for a time.

  Some prisoners wheeling garden water-carts appeared and these turned out to contain our supper; a watery vegetable soup. After we had eaten, to bed, and as we were so few, each of us got an upper bunk. I was very tired and went to sleep at once, but in the morning there were loud complaints from all the others, whose night had been passed in a vain fight with bugs. I am one of those lucky people whose blood is disdained by all insects that bite, and so I had noticed nothing of this disturbance, but von Falkenhausen and Thomas, who had slept on either side of me, complained bitterly that all the bugs from my bunk had moved over to them in columns of four and had almost eaten them alive, and their skin certainly did look rather mottled.

  I remember little about the next day except that the washing facilities of the camp were deplorable and the lavatories open cesspools. The weather was gloriously fine and sunny, but we were all feeling unsettled and nervy wondering what had been happening at the front, and what the immediate future held for us. We saw some of the camp inmates, most of whom seemed to be Frenchmen who had belonged to the Maquis—all looked half-starved and were dressed in rags; amongst them was a party of French girls who were in rather better state and had energy enough to cheek their guards and shout comments on our appearance. Part of the camp was fenced off as a sort of kitchen garden, and I was told that about six men who were working there were American airmen who had been shot down. I think that it was Greenewich who managed to speak to them and who told me that these men had had a terrible time and had been absolutely starved—they certainly looked more like skeletons than living men, and it was pitiful to see their slow and laboured movements as though they had to call up all their reserves of strength to move a limb. This was really the first view at close quarters that I had had of the sufferings of the inmates of concentration camps.

  We, for our part, had quite a good midday meal, for Canon Neuhäusler, one of the clerics I had met at Dachau, had managed to get a guard to fetch a large parcel of provisions from Innsbruck which he shared with us. Although no SS man was supposed to take any part in Christian observance of religion, it was most noticeable how anxious were those who had been Roman Catholics to keep on the right side of our priests. Neuhausler was Canon of Munich Cathedral and had been the chief assistant of Cardinal Faulhauber in the fight against the Nazis; a most unassuming man he was a loyal friend to all his fellow prisoners, and did much to ease their lot.

  In the early afternoon five or six large buses arrived, and after waiting for some time at the entrance the Schuschniggs, Blums, Thyssens, and others of our Dachau party, together with all the other men, women, and children, whom we had previously seen at the prison at Regensburg, were brought into the camp. They also had been travelling all night and were tired, hungry, and dirty; as had been the case with us, too, there was nowhere for them to rest. The best that we could do for them was to offer them our quarters which, even after being warned about the bugs, they accepted with every sign of delight. Stiller had also arrived with the party and button-holing him I managed to get from him an admission that we were moving again that night to the Italian Tirol; he said that he was taking us to an hotel there where we would await the arrival of our tr
oops, and that his orders were to see that our liberation should be effected in an orderly manner. He was, as always, very friendly and polite, but his assurances did not ring true to me and I had a shrewd suspicion that he was holding a good deal back—there was one thing I did not like at all, and that was, that I had seen Lieutenant Bader and a considerable number of his S.D. men in the camp—if it was the intention to permit our liberation, why had Bader and his men, whose function was the liquidation of unwanted prisoners been sent with us?