Colditz (19 page)

The story began when I was doing a period in “solitary” in the autumn of 1941. All I could see from my cell window was the wall of a section of the
Saalhaus
or theater-block, and staring blankly at it one day I suddenly realized the potential significance of its structure. I was an engineer, given to visualizing the skeletons of buildings, and what I had so suddenly understood was that the theater's wooden stage extended over a part of the Castle, sealed off from the prisoners, which led by a corridor to the top of the German guardhouse immediately outside the courtyard.

As soon as I was released from my cell, I examined the stage. I found I could crawl underneath by removing some wooden steps, and so inspect that part of the floor over the scaled room. It was just straw and rubble lying on a lath-and-plaster ceiling. Later, with Hank Wardle's help, I cut through this ceiling and descended by sheet-rope to the room below. It was empty. I picked the lock on the door, made a quick reconnaissance down the corridor, relocked, and began work. This involved the installation, in the hole we had made, of a wooden frame and false ceiling. It fitted snugly and after laborious work over many days we eventually made it virtually undetectable to anyone looking up at the ceiling of the sealed room.

On a further reconnoiter along the German corridor I unlocked another door to find myself in the attic over the German guardhouse. From here a spiral staircase led down to the guards' quarters. My plan was simple enough. The escapers would sortie in two pairs, dressed as German officers, on successive evenings immediately after a change of guard stationed at the front entrance to the guardhouse. Thus the new sentry would not know which officers, if any, might have entered the guardhouse in the previous two hours.

I had already chosen Airey Neave and Lieutenant John Hyde-Thompson as the first escapers, provided they could produce first-class imitations of Gennan officers' uniforms. Airey, after all, had had an apprenticeship! But for two reasons they needed Dutch assistance, so with Vandy's agreement two Dutch officers were selected to make the team up to four. Of course it was a great help that the Dutch spoke German fluently.

Dutch greatcoats, with minor alterations, could pass in electric light as German greatcoats. Dutch supplies of lead piping (most of ours had been used to construct a distilling apparatus!) were melted down to produce, with the help of molds, the various metal parts of German uniforms: swastikas, eagles, buttons and buckles. Leather parts such as belts and revolver holsters were made from linoleum, and leggings from cardboard. Excellent service caps were created by our specialists.

And so it was that after evening
Appell
on 5 January I led Airey and Lieutenant Tony Luteijn (Royal Netherlands Indies Army) up to the
Saalhaus
, through the hole beneath the stage and eventually to the attic above the guardhouse. I left them and returned to cover up our traces. Watchers reported a perfect exit from the guardhouse and the two were last seen heading for the moat bridge where there was a gate leading down into the moat.

The next day the two
Appells
were covered. Van den Heuvel arranged this with equanimity. He still had at least one dummy saved in his secret hideaway.

In the evening, I repeated the performance of the night before. Hyde-Thompson and his Dutch colleague, 2nd Lieutenant H. G. Donkers, departed from the camp.

Eggers persevered with his search for the secret exit. Little did we know how Giles Romilly's incautious remark had improved his chances of success. After much fruitless searching, including the wine cellar and the chapel, he came to search the
Saalhaus
on the 13th. A corporal prised up one of the floorboards of the steps up to the stage and Eggers ordered the smallest man from the guardroom to squeeze through and see what he could find. What he found was our hole in the ceiling. Eggers reports:

So confident had the escapers been over this exit that no camouflage to speak of had been used to cover the framework on the top side, and close alongside, under the stage, we found hidden a rope made of bedsheets, for lowering the escapers to the floor underneath [in fact the wooden frame was carefully covered and camouflaged, as were the bedsheets]. This was obviously how the four of them had got out the week previously.

We checked back, interviewing guards. Naturally no one remembered anything a week after the event, but someone or more of them must have let four prisoners past.

More precautionary measures were once again forced upon us…. The door at the top of the guardroom stairs … was doubly bolted. The
horses, however, had gone. Two never came back. But I got a week's leave and a bottle of champagne from the
Kommandant
for my discovery up in the theater.

On 10 January, Hyde-Thompson and Donkers were back. They had been trapped at Ulm—a railway junction necessitating a change of trains. But their recapture exposed a serious flaw in my escape strategy which becomes evident from Airey Neave's account of his progress out of the Castle and through Germany. Changing at Ulm they had asked for tickets to Singen. The ticket clerk frowned at their papers and called a railway policeman:

The policeman took us to an office in the goods yard where a thin, tight-lipped German railway police Lieutenant sat at a desk. He examined our false papers with bewilderment. It appeared to me that the writing on it did not make sense to him. I could hardly stop myself from laughing as he lifted them to the light, looking, no doubt, for water marks. He was, however, impressed by Luteijn's Dutch passport and there seemed no inkling in his mind that we were escaped prisoners of war.

“I don't understand these men at all,” he said helplessly. “Take them to the Labor office. I wish someone would control these foreign workers more efficiently.”

Escorted to the Labor office by another armed policeman, they escaped through a back door. After this incident and a few more risky encounters, the two, traversing forests and fields in deep snow near Singen, on the same route that Larive had taken, crossed the frontier safely into Switzerland.

The Ulm policemen were not going to be taken in so easily again, so that when Hyde-Thompson and Donkers arrived the next day with similar identity papers and travelling to the same destination the police pounced on them.

In future the route to the frontier would have to be varied.

Airey Neave had progressed from the Eton Officers' Training Corps through Oxford Territorial Army—an infantryman. Then, at the outbreak of war, he became a gunner in a searchlight training regiment in Hereford. From there he crossed to Boulogne in February 1940 in charge of an advance party of rugged old veterans of the First War. During the
Blitzkrieg
in May 1940, Airey moved from Arras to the outskirts of Calais with his battery to take part in the last stand before Dunkirk. On 24 May he was wounded. “A field-grey figure appeared
shouting and waving a revolver. Then a large man in German uniform and a Red Cross armband put me gently on a stretcher. I was a prisoner-of-war.”

In August, Airey was in
Oflag
IXA/H, a castle high above the town of Spangenburg, near Kassel. From there he was transferred in February 1941 to
Stalag
XXA, a vast POW camp in Poland, at
Thorn, on the banks of the Vistula. Here he found himself with hundreds of other officers living in damp cold vaults in an old Polish fort surrounded by a moat. This was a measure of reprisal for the alleged ill treatment of German POWs in Canada. From here Airey made his first escape, on 19 April, only to be recaptured a few days later when frontier guards found a small map of Grandenz Aerodrome in his pocket (his fellow escaper was Flying Officer “Bricky” Forbes, and they had planned to steal an aircraft). They were returned to Thorn, and shut up at first in filthy underground storerooms, with rotting swedes and fetid air.

Then, one morning in the early hours, Airey was led from his cell towards some lights on the fort's drawbridge; as he drew closer he noticed shadowy figures stamping their feet, talking in English and even laughing. He recognized Forbes and then Squadron-Leader Paddon and Lieutenant-Commander Stevenson, who a short time before had tried to escape in a dust cart.

“Where in hell are we going?” Airey exclaimed.

“To Colditz.”

Airey, with Tony Luteijn, had made the first British home-run from Colditz. For the men he left behind he was like the dove released from the Ark which had found land.

The Germans found it difficult to believe that four officers had got away without trace. On the morning of 10 January when Donkers and Hyde-Thompson returned they made a further search of the British quarters, thinking two men were concealed. Then on 14 January, after the discovery of the
Saalhaus
exit, the whole British contingent was marched down from the Castle to the
Schützenhaus
.

A march of about half a mile brought them to what had long been regarded as a
Mitarbeit
—collaboration—camp. The presence of decorative electric bulbs on two Christmas trees; a domestic cat purring by a hot stove; a quantity of
Mitarbeit
propaganda, together with spacious grounds in which to walk, play at football, grow vegetables, and keep about forty Angora rabbits, appeared to confirm the suspicion.

The residents of the
Schützenhaus
were occupying the upper portion of the building, and the POWs on the ground floor were prevented from having any contact with them by armed sentries posted on the stairway. A wise precaution!
Few people were quite so detested as
collaborateurs
. Officers therefore experienced none of the restraints of conscience in availing themselves of
Mitarbeit
flex, lamps and fittings. An intention to introduce pussy to more of the “best people” of
Gefangenschaft
(captivity) was frustrated by a prescient orderly who evidently sensed the impending depredation and removed her to the safety of the upper story.

The floor of the British subalterns' dormitory had received considerable attention in their absence from the Castle, and the one remaining tunnel found.

Winter to Spring 1942

E
ARLY IN JANUARY
, about the 9th, thirty-one French officers were transferred from Colditz to
Oflag
IVD at Elsterhorst. The reason for the transfer has never been clearly explained. Eggers gives no reason for it. The fact that Lieutenant de Bykowitz, a White Russian (French Army), tried to jump train on the way is of only passing interest. He was recaught, trapped by Germans, on the ice-covered buffers at the end of the train. Nevertheless there may have been a reason for their transfer because amongst the thirty-one were some members of the team who had been working on the great French tunnel, a truly prodigious undertaking, since May 1941. The Germans knew a tunnel was being excavated. After 7 January, according to Eggers, the OKW were wondering if the tunnel wasn't finished and men being trickled out by a secret exit. There had been visits by experienced police inspectors from Dresden prior to this—every month—to find the tunnel, but with no success. The
Kommandant
became very nervous and, as soon as Eggers had returned to Colditz by Christmas, he had been given the special task of uncovering the secret. Stabsfeldwebel Gephard and Obergefreiter (Corporal) Schädlich were his assistants.

The French architects of the tunnel consisted originally of a team of nine officers who constituted themselves the original “
Société Anonyme du Tunnel de Colditz
.” To make sure that it was
anonyme
, the tunnellers had no chief. “
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
” was the motto they lived up to. They were: Jean Bréjoux, a professor of German; Edgar Barras, the strong man and the champion French “stool-ball” player; Lieutenant Bernard Cazaumayou, the weightlifter; Lieutenant Roger Madin, an engineer who was the tunnel electrician; Lieutenant Paillie,
French Sappers and Miners; Lieutenant Jean Gambero, the astute Parisian; and Lieutenant Léonce Godfrin, from the Ardennes. Lieutenant “Fredo” Guigues was a kind of consultant.

Their conception was brilliant and typical. The French are a logical race. They had read in the German press that the Leipzig Fair was to be held in spite of the war. Leipzig was only twenty-two miles away. The thronging visitors would provide wonderful cover for the escape of a large body of prisoners. The only way, it seemed, to despatch a large body of prisoners out of the Castle was by tunnel. Having decided where they would like their tunnel to debouch so as to provide a safe get-away, they worked backwards into the Castle to see where the entrance should be. Eventually they decided on the top of the clock-tower!

The clock-tower provided them with a means of access to the cellar. The clock had not worked for years and the weights, with their long ropes, had also been removed, leaving empty cylindrical sleeves lined with canvas between the floor and ceiling below at each floor level. There were four floors above ground-floor level. The sleeved floors were in small inspection chambers, originally with access doors by the circular staircase at each floor level. The access doors had long ago been bricked up by the Jerries. A heavy steel door on the top landing of the French quarters, at fourth-floor level, gave access to the clock itself. With men like Lieutenants “Fredo” Guigues and Roger Madin in the camp, the padlocks, mortice locks and cruciform locks (like four Yale locks combined) securing this door were soon provided with keys. Once in the clock-room, a camouflaged opening was constructed in the floor and in the ceiling below, which let the Frenchmen down into the chamber on the third floor. The sleeves were a tight squeeze for any adult, being only sixteen inches in diameter, and climbing up again would have been difficult. They constructed ladders instead, using bedboards (taken from their bunks), piercing holes in each chamber floor down to ground level. Electric cable was led in and light provided at each floor. Now the first serious tunnelling began. It consisted of a vertical shaft through the stones and mortar of the arched roof of the Castle cellar.