The Venlo Incident

by Nigel Jones

  When I went downstairs again I found that a really magnificent meal had been prepared and everyone seemed gay and happy—our party ate with such good appetite, indeed, that thirty more rations were drawn than our total number. There was so much to eat that I am sure that everyone had enough with his own allowance, but the prison spirit still endured and those extra rations must have been smuggled up to bedrooms just to be held in reserve in case bad times should come again. It made things very difficult though, for a lot of people were left without food until more could be produced by our cooks. After dinner the proprietress, Mrs. Emma Heiss, announced that she had a small amount of wine left and invited those who cared, to come down to the Weinstube in the basement, where we formed an extremely gay and carefree party. Again though, there was another lamentable proof that the honesty of ex-prisoners could not be trusted, for while we were having our own little party more than fifteen gallons of wine were abstracted from the cellars which Frau Heiss had left unlocked, and as a result of this, and other similar events, no little time and ingenuity had to be devoted in the future to ensuring that each member of our party got his allotted share only of the good things provided for us by the generosity of our hosts.

  This was the first time in my life that I had ever had anything to do with the running of an hotel, but it had to be done, and I believe that it was well done; I am, in fact, rather proud that very soon the majority of our guests looked upon Liedig and me, and on all those who took an active part in management and service, as foreordained to minister to their comfort. Liedig became staff manager, and I a cross between host and hotel porter, with questions on every subject in the world being shot at me without intermission wherever I went.

  Hugh Falconer, as our wireless expert, got hold of a radio set almost as soon as he arrived and spent most of his time listening for news and issuing bulletins at frequent intervals. On the first evening when he was listening to a B.B.C. broadcast, one of the SS men who had come up with us and who obviously did not quite appreciate his changed status, started to make a fuss, saying that it was forbidden to listen to foreign broadcasts; for a moment there seemed to be every prospect of an ugly scene but luckily von Bonin came along and soon put the man in his place. McGrath was also extremely active though I never quite understood what his functions were. He had turned out in an extremely smart uniform, with which he wore a red-topped artillery forage cap, and certainly lent an air of military tone to the proceedings; he was a charming and generous fellow, but at times I found his attempts to introduce a martial element in our pleasant casual life slightly trying.

  Dr. Kurt von Schuschnigg, late Austrian Chancellor, with his wife and Sissie on the boat on their way to find a new home in the United States.

  Group-Captain H. M. A. “Wings” Day, R.A.F., D.S.O., O.B.E., A.M.

  To return to the subject of the acquisitiveness of prisoners, two rather amusing incidents occur to me. In our sumptuous bedrooms we had each of us large soft pillows and an eiderdown, and on the day after our arrival one person after another who had a room on the third floor came to complain that pillows and eiderdown had been taken from their rooms, and to ask why this had been done. As we knew nothing about this Liedig went at once to look into the matter, with the result that he found all the missing bedding piled up high in the bedroom of one of our party. Everything was returned to the rightful owners and nothing was said about the matter to the culprit who, I am sure, had acted automatically and subconsciously. Later on I had proof of this in my own case, for although I had been in a measure the director of the hotel and responsible for the equitable distribution of all comforts, when I came to pack my things before leaving for freedom and home I found tins of milk, spam, and butter, tobacco and all manner of other things hidden in my room, which I must have brought there quite unconsciously—certainly, no one was more surprised than I when I found them.

  Before coming up to the hotel I had been to see General Garibaldi again, and had succeeded in making my peace with Colonel Ferrero. They, however, decided to stay where they were in Niederdorf and organize their force of partisans; both had succeeded in finding magnificent uniforms befitting their rank and had turned the town hall into General Staff offices and quarters. Their spirit was so warlike that I was rather afraid that enthusiasm might run away with discretion, and that they might attempt to place the village under Italian rule and so precipitate something like a civil war in which they would be in a hopeless minority; I therefore arranged with von Bonin that he should go down next day and see whether he could not calm them down. He had dinner with Garibaldi whom he found most reasonable and afterwards, in a meeting which he arranged with Ducia, agreement was reached for co-operation between the Italians and the German Tirolese on the basis of majority rule in the villages in the Pustertal.

  Dr. Thalhammer, who deputized for Ducia, came up in the evening with news that the Tirolese Gauleiter Huber with a considerable force of SS had left Innsbruck and were on their way to Bozen; that is, far too close to us to be pleasant. What made this news worse was the fact that our original Wehrmacht guard had been recalled and the company of infantry which was to replace them would only arrive late next day; conditions were most unsettled as deserters were drifting back from the Italian front, and many of them would not have hesitated at murder if he saw a chance of getting hold of civilian clothes. The young people of our party were still exploring the district, going down to the village or visiting neighbouring farms, and it was most difficult to get them to realize how dangerous it was to wander far afield.

  On the next day, the 2nd May, a notice was posted asking all members of our party to assemble in the lounge and we then told them what we knew of the position, and made a special plea that no one should go far from the hotel. From then on we held such meetings daily, when Liedig would first give an address in German, which I then interpreted in French and English. It was a curious thing that, whilst I could manage all right in French I found English most difficult. Not only had I deliberately put English as much as possible out of my mind during my imprisonment, but I had not yet learnt to manage my false teeth in this language, although with German they gave me no trouble of any kind.

  On this same day Mr. Ducia came up with the news that the town of Bozen was not to be defended, but would be evacuated when the American forces reached it, which they were expected to do next afternoon. Ducia said that he thought that it might be possible to reach Bozen, and in any case he intended trying, and asked me whether I, or someone else, would care to come with him. I should dearly have liked to have gone myself, but decided against it for two reasons; my health, and the fact that I was needed in my present post. In any case, it seemed to me that the first chance of such an escape rightly belonged to ‘Wings’ Day as a culmination of the five or six attempts which he had already made, so I asked him whether he would care to go and received his immediate assent. As I knew more about the local situation than he, he asked me to write a letter to army headquarters, which I did, and then we set about dressing him up for his trip, for obviously, as he would have to pass through the German lines, he could not very well travel in Air Force uniform. I had a rather dressy black overcoat which fitted him, but my hats were far too small, so one was borrowed from Prince Philip of Hesse, Hitler’s one-time representative with Mussolini. Poor Prince Philip had been arrested shortly after the fall of Mussolini, but had no idea that his wife, the Princess Mafalda, had also been arrested, and when the news of her death at Buchenwald was given to him broke down completely.

  Ducia had brought a large supply of cigarettes and tobacco with him, which Miss Kaiser and I had the pleasure of distributing, going from room to room and being welcomed as though we were bringing manna from heaven. We had some difficulty with ladies with young children who claimed an allowance for each, but in the end Miss Kaiser ruled that no one under the age of eighteen was entitled to tobacco, and was adamant towards the pleas of mothers for extra rations. We had also instituted a system whereby everyone
had a ration card, which was date stamped when food rations were fetched at meal times; everyone could have a second helping if desired, but we insisted that all food must be eaten in the dining-room and that none might be taken to the bedrooms except in the case of people who were ill and confined to bed, as was the case with M. and Mme. Leon Blum.

  On the morning of the 3rd May a plane flew over dropping leaflets of which we were able to collect a few. These carried an announcement from Field Marshal Alexander to the effect that General von Vietinghof with all troops under his command had surrendered, and instructing all German military units in the district to refrain from further hostile action and to await further orders at their stations. There was great rejoicing by us all.

  Later the same day four men wearing the red neck-scarfs which identified them as partisans, arrived at our hotel by car, and demanded to see Mr. Leon Blum and Molotov’s nephew. The leader of the party claimed to be a French officer and said that he had orders to remove both Blum and Wassilli to a place of safety in the mountains. I told him that whilst there was no objection to his seeing any member of our party I certainly could not permit him to remove anyone from the hotel; I pointed out that we were in a sector which fell into the Anglo-American operation area, and that I had already taken steps to enter into communication with our H.Q., and could not accept a decision from another quarter regarding the disposal of any of the people under my charge. These men were at first inclined to be difficult, but when I told them that we had a guard of some hundred Wehrmacht soldiers, and that I should not hesitate to have them arrested and detained until the arrival of a competent authority, they calmed down; I sent someone to show them to the rooms of the Blums, and of Wassilli, and not long afterwards they came down and went away.

  Of course, had M. Blum expressed a wish to go with them I could not very well have done anything to prevent it, but I was certainly not going to be bullied by these fellows who came in waving their tommy guns about in most truculent fashion. From what they said, they did not belong to Garibaldi’s contingent, but were members of some communist gang from Cortina. I do not know what they said to the Blums or to Wassilli, but just as we were starting our usual noontide meeting someone came to me and whispered that the latter was leaving the hotel carrying a suit case. I went out of the front door and caught him up before he had gone very far, but he refused to come back with me, saying: “I don’t want to be slaughtered.” I understood this to mean that he was afraid of what might happen to him when we were relieved by British or American troops, and told him that he would be quite safe and that I would look after him until he could be sent safely home, but he was in such a panic that nothing that I said had the slightest effect. He was so determined to leave that only by physical violence could I have prevented him, and so I was reluctantly obliged to let him have his own way; a sentry posted on the road leading to the hotel later reported that he had been picked up in a car by our visitors of the morning. From what I learnt subsequently from his friends it appears that it was not our troops of whom he was afraid, but that he believed that if he were returned to Russia he might be executed or murdered by the troops in whose hands he was placed; he believed, it seems, that the Kremlin had ordered the immediate execution of all prisoners of war returned from Germany.

  Late in the evening Mr. Ducia turned up again and reported that Day and he had fulfilled their mission. The American troops had not entered Bozen as soon as had been expected, but they had found them a little farther south of the town. Day and he had been immediately flown to Army H.Q. at Florence, where Day had remained whilst Ducia had been sent back to tell us that immediate steps would be taken to relieve us. The two men had a pretty tough journey to Bozen as Ducia’s car broke down, and they had had quite a long march through the mountains which proved rather a strain to Day who was, of course, quite out of training. What pleased me most about the whole thing was the fact that ‘Wings’ Day had at last succeeded in escaping for he had actually passed through the German lines the day before their surrender. He was an absolutely splendid fellow who won the affection and trust of everyone who knew him—modest, unassuming, he was yet the born leader, and there was nothing that I regretted more than the fact that we did not see eye to eye at Niederdorf when he favoured a revolt by Garibaldi’s partisans to my more pacific solution.

  He has, however, since told me that he thought I had acted for the best, and that he had favoured Garibaldi’s plan mainly because he considered it his duty as a British officer to carry on the war against the enemy wherever and whenever he could. He was shot down in October 1939; that is, a month before my own capture, and in spite of his long imprisonment and an unparalleled series of attempted escapes, two of which were nearly successful, he allowed nothing of the strain through which he had passed to show. When, after his return to England, he was awarded the D.S.O. and O.B.E. for gallantry shown as a prisoner of war, I think that every ex-prisoner felt that these honours had been conferred on their finest representative in recognition of their own sufferings.

  I was worried about little Wassilli, and talking the matter over with McGrath we came to the conclusion that the best thing would be to enlist the aid of General Garibaldi, who perhaps, through his gang of toughs, might be able to find out what had happened to him. I therefore asked Major Treiber, a quiet middle-aged Wehrmacht officer, who had been sent to us by Army H.Q., if he could perhaps arrange for transport so that we could go down to the village that evening, and he at once offered to take us down in his own car. When we got there, we found that Garibaldi had completely taken possession of the town hall, and before we could get to his apartments on the third floor we had to run the gauntlet of some fifty or so of his men who, at the sight of the German officer with us, waved their tommy guns about in most alarming fashion; luckily, someone had the sense to ring up the general, who gave orders that we were to be taken up to him. He was much interested about the case of Wassilli whom he knew quite well, and promised to do what he could to help, though when it came down to bedrock, it was pretty evident that his authority ran in Niederdorf only, and that the men who had abstracted Wassilli from our midst belonged to a rival organization with which he was not even in touch.

  Long afterwards I heard that poor little Wassilli had been taken up to some mountain refuge by his communist friends, and in the cold there had again suffered frost-bite in what remained of his feet and, lacking proper medical attention, died of gangrene. He was a thoroughly nice, ingenuous lad, and during our long association I had become very fond of him, so that the news of his death gave me a great shock and still causes me sorrow—it was all so entirely unnecessary as he was perfectly safe with us, and would, of course, have received every care after his liberation.

  As we passed through the village I saw the Gestapo lorry standing derelict on the square. On the advice of von Bonin the town major had refused to provide any petrol, and eventually Stiller and Bader had set out with the intention of marching to Bozen, and it was later rumoured that they had been attacked on their way by Italian partisans, and several of them, Stiller included, captured and hanged from telegraph poles along the road. Whether this story was true or not was never established, but they certainly deserved anything they got. Earlier in the day a search was made of their lorry, and in it were found nearly 200 Belgian Red Cross parcels addressed to prisoners at Dachau, which they had stolen, and which were then brought up to us.

  Next morning, the 4th May, Andy Walsh came into my room just as I had finished dressing and said: “The whole place is full of those Ities, and they are opening the doors of all the rooms and threatening the ladies with their guns.” I rushed downstairs, and when I reached the hall found General Garibaldi talking to an American officer; half a dozen American soldiers were also standing by. I went up to the officer, who introduced himself as Lieutenant Ashe, and said that he had come up with an advance detachment which would shortly be followed by the rest of the company; they had made a forced march throughout the night in orde
r to rescue us. I explained that whilst we were getting on quite all right I would be much obliged if he would get rid of the Italian partisans who were upsetting all our arrangements, and disturbing the women and children of our party. He saw the sense of this at once, and in a very few minutes had shooed the whole lot of them off the premises.

  I had a few words with Garibaldi, who said that he had only come up to the hotel to show the Americans the way and to render assistance should our German guards offer any resistance. I then explained the position to Lieutenant Ashe and asked that consideration should be shown to the German officers and troops who had protected us from the Gestapo. While we were talking, Captain John Attwell arrived with the bulk of the company, S Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 339th U.S. Infantry Regiment, and immediately took steps to disarm all the German troops. I introduced Major Treiber and the two von Alvenslebens to him; they were cousins and the second of them had come with the German infantry regiment which had guarded us at the hotel. All three were very sad at the idea that they were now prisoners of war, and I made a strong plea to Captain Attwell to make a favourable report about them to H.Q.

  Next on my programme was breakfast. Our American friends had travelled light throughout the night and were both tired and hungry; they seemed to have expected to find us in extremis, and were certainly surprised when, within an hour of their arrival, they found themselves sitting down to a magnificent breakfast, and being waited upon by a number of pretty and very charming girls. To cope with this sudden addition to our ration strength I had the Red Cross parcels, which we had retrieved the day before, opened, and so had ample supplies for everybody. It was a source of pride to me at the time that during this first day, when they themselves were without supplies, we were able to provide our rescuers with three square meals, and even with cigarettes.