Colditz (42 page)

Up to now, he had not been nearly confident enough of any guard to trust him with a note of this compromising nature, which might easily have got the girl shot. But once we had organised it so that we had full run of all the available guards without any interference from competitors, Chaloupka discovered one local boy who after various preliminary trial runs, he judged to be trustworthy enough to undertake such a mission. Gradually, starting with the unimportant romantic notes, we brought the notes to the subject of the German war effort, the trend of the war, and the likelihood of the German defeat. We asked her to find out about this (always as if coming direct from Chaloupka but, in fact, now all being written by me and de Vomécourt).

Her answers came back carefully thought out and intelligently written. But we noticed that, although she herself was obviously anti-Nazi, she had fears at the back of her mind the insistence of which could only come from living in the strictest Nazi environment. Gradually, we discovered that her father was a leader of the Nazi Party in the local district and that she had access to information, both gossip and fact, which could be of great use to us in assessing the strength of Nazi authority, at any given moment.

Simultaneously, we were making rapid progress with this young guard who acted as our courier. He was a boy of about twenty-two years of age and his father was one of the richest men in the local village, a man of considerable property and with a good deal of influence among the moderate element in the surrounding country. We started a campaign to show the boy the advantages which would be his if the English won the war, and he had assisted us in the final stages. Eventually, we got him to confide in his father that he was aiding us by acting as courier to the girl. Once his father came into his confidence, we started to submit to the boy a list of questions dealing with local organization, and Gestapo, Army and Party personnel in the locality. From these, we compiled dossiers of each man. In some instances, these were very detailed indeed, and included many interesting facts. For instance, we knew that the mistress of the keenest local Nazi was the wife of the most moderate local industrialist.

The boy also supplied maps of the town, on which Jack and Pierre marked the houses of important local people, garages where cars were kept, petrol stores, food stores and medical stores. This sort of information was needed in
case the prisoners had to take over the town completely amidst the chaos of Germany's defeat.

Our next step was to get the boy to introduce the girl to his father so that we had a little group interested in working together for us; the girl, motivated by her love for Chaloupka and the man and his son, motivated by dislike of the Nazis and desire to safeguard their future. This little combination worked very well together.

From information coming from the three of them, we then started to select an alternative local government to replace the Party and the Gestapo, and one which would realise in the last days of the war that their directive was to come from us in the Castle and that their efforts could be concerted and productive instead of unrelated and without purpose. The process of selection progressed fairly rapidly. By this time the father had confided in other local anti-Nazi elements and we were able, from the dossiers given us by the girl, to check on the veracity of the information given us by the father, concerning identical personalities.

But they were also concerned to find out about the
Kommandantur
organization and to gain access to the files and the switchboard so that they could discover everything relating to the prisoners. After an intricate operation, they obtained the confidence of the office staff and in the end were receiving telephone messages in the camp
before
they were transmitted to the German officers for whom they were intended. The switchboard operator in the town likewise relayed messages concerning the prisoners. It was at this stage that Dick Jones had to utter most of his death threats.

A remarkable breakthrough achieved by the Colditz British Intelligence Unit was an early-warning system by coded signals with a well-informed German source in the town. The code cipher was contained in and deciphered by use of an eight-volume history, breakable only by code-breakers of “Enigma” caliber. The German agent was given an innocent-looking map, of which Jack Pringle had a duplicate. It resembled a map of the Nile Delta, and so it was named. The prisoners had a clear view of one or two streets from their windows. Everything bore a code significance. If the agent walked in the center of the road, past the restaurant, halted at the first telegraph pole on the left for half a minute and returned, he would be signaling “Extreme danger. Come out at all costs.” That would be if the Castle was to be blown up, for instance. The agent had contact with the authorities in the village who would be responsible
for giving these orders, so the prisoners would be warned of anything that was to be done.

Through the dentist's receptionist (Imgara Vernicker), the prisoners were able to perform another astonishing act, namely the transmission of an anonymous letter in perfect German (by Lance Pope) to the
Gauleiter
of Dresden, the most important and dangerous man in the whole region! It was a strongly worded, threatening letter, intended to put the wind up him, beginning: “Your day of power is passed, now you face death.” He was led to suspect strongly that the writer was either the Liberal leader Carl Goerdeler or one of his aides. Since the attempted assassination of Hitler in July 1944 a huge price (1 million marks, dead or alive) had been put on Goerdeler's head. Luckily he had been in hiding before the fateful day.

Lieutenant-Colonel David Stirling DSO has earned his place in war history as the initiator of a new conception of daring and dangerous warfare by which valuable objectives are achieved by a combination of first-class intelligence, speed of communication, speed of decision and speed of action, resulting in success, surprise and in most cases a minimum of casualties. He commanded “L” Detachment in the Desert War, which became eventually the 2nd SAS Regiment. He was in effect the progenitor of the SAS as the world knows it today.

Checko was the only POW in Colditz Castle who could lay claim to have kissed a girl while imprisoned there. It occurred probably at the beginning of his romance with the dentist's receptionist, when he “inadvertently” left his muffler behind after a session at the dentist. She appeared at the guardhouse and persuaded the guard commander to let her deliver the muffler personally. Checko was sent for. Through a small grille in the great oak gates of the prison yard, she passed him the muffler and presented her lips for their reward. Checko was not slow to respond.

The starvation diet on which the prisoners existed had an undeniable effect in dampening down the sexual urges of the natural male. In any case the total absence of contact with women made it easier to blot out their existence from the conscious mind, much as would happen in a monastery.

The German censors sometimes had an insight into the workings, warped and tragically despairing, of the prisoner's mind. Eggers reveals:

Once an officer posted home a drawing of himself, idealized perhaps, but a good likeness, in perfectly fitting uniform, smiling, well and fit. The paper seemed unusually thick and heavy, so we slit the picture, looking for concealed messages behind it. There was indeed a second sheet. It
contained a message—a very passionate one—and again a sketch of the writer, not this time in uniform, but in all his (perhaps imagined) Olympic nakedness, the true representation he would wish his sweetheart to see.

Platt reports the arrival on 5 February of General Tadeusz Bór Komorowski and his entourage, and comments:

General Bor is the most insignificant-looking and the worst clad of any of the officers. It was very pleasing to hear Polish voices again, but they have the typical military precision of the last Poles; there is as much heel clicking as ever.

General Bór Komorowski was the head of that courageous, almost suicidal band of Polish patriots who kept the heart of Poland beating throughout the blackest years of the war. The Warsaw insurrection was the culminating point in the general's underground career. He survived, though war, treachery and murder had threatened to engulf him each day. He possessed hostage value in the eyes of the German leaders, a fact which undoubtedly saved his head.

A man of courage and resource, he won the hearts of all who knew him by his simplicity and cheerful friendliness. He was perhaps a man who had greatness thrust upon him, with the modesty of an aesthete, saintly in his detached outlook upon life. His head was partly bald and reminded one of a tonsured monk. Of slender physique, medium in height but wiry, he had direct, searching, hazel eyes under dark eyebrows. A neatly trimmed mustache, beneath an aquiline nose, set off his sensitive nostrils.

General Bór, indisputably
Prominenter
, was given the cell that Giles Romilly and Michael Alexander had occupied. The British group of seven
Prominenten
was concentrated all together in the cell immediately opposite.

Giles Romilly gives the following impressions:

When John Elphinstone called he found General Bor seated at a table receiving reports from his officers; he was reading with great concentration and “
Nyet!
”—“
Tak!
” (no—yes) were the only expressions that came from him. John was struck not only by this reducing of speech to an economy that evidently General Bor's officers were accustomed to and understood, but also by a sense of the sharp clarity and quick firmness of judgement that it expressed.

Bór was a great horseman. In 1924 he had ridden for Poland in the Olympic Games in Paris. In 1936 the Olympic Games had been held in Berlin. There he captained the Polish jumping team. His team won the first prize, and Colonel Bór (as he then was) received the prize personally from Hitler.

Early Spring 1945

P
LATT ENTERED A CRYPTIC
remark in his diary for 12 February:

The attics seem to be under repair. Evidently either the 1000 … or the 1300 new arrivals … are expected.
We do not like the idea of the attics being renovated.
[My italics.]

The explanation is not far to seek, for the British were up to something. In fact they had been up to something in those attics for a long time.

Flight-Lieutenant L. J. E. “Bill” Goldfinch and Lieutenant Anthony Rolt, the motor-racing driver, had been laying down detailed plans for a glider for a long time when Jack Best came out of solitary confinement after the terrace escape in the early spring of 1944. Encouraged by his reputation for tireless patience and his skills as a craftsman, they invited him to join them. Jack agreed.

Dick Howe was approached. He was incredulous at first, but when he learned that the entire contraption would be constructed from wooden bedboards and floorboards, cotton palliasse covers and a large quantity of glue, he began to think the scheme might be feasible. Designed to carry two men, the glider would be launched from the Castle roof, catapulted by the dropping of a concrete-filled bath sixty feet down through the Castle floors (in which suitable holes would first have to be made).

But it was really only possible if the team had a workshop where they could
labor undisturbed. Tony Rolt had an ingenious idea. Overnight a dozen men walled off a section of the top attic over the chapel with a series of prefabricated frames under a layer of canvas palliasse covers from the unused dormitories. This was then plastered over using local ingredients—the fine grit from the French tunnel debris—to effect the best camouflage.

The next day the attic was inspected by the Germans in a routine visit. They noticed nothing untoward. The shortening of the room would only really be evident after measurement of the lengths of floors at different levels. In fact the attics were inspected almost every day.

Soon Jack constructed a trapdoor into the workshop from the lower attic on the floor below. Stooge Wardle joined the team. The construction of the glider began in earnest. A workbench had been set up. Electric light was provided. The glue came mostly from Checko's black market. The tools were home-made.

The four members of the glider team knew that only two of them would eventually take off in it. They agreed not to make the selection until the machine was ready, thereby ensuring that all four would continue to put their whole effort into the labor of construction.

Work continued on the components and on the assembly of wings, fuselage, rudder and controls and on the runway saddle-boards, pulleys and ropes through the winter of 1944–1945, guarded by an elaborate stooging system. Construction had started seriously in May 1944. The take-off was scheduled for the spring of 1945. By that time, it was estimated, air-raids over the Berlin and Leipzig areas of Germany would be sufficiently intensified to provide ample black-out cover at night in which to break out the hole in the outside wall of the workshop, set up the launching ramp, assemble the glider and take off without being heard by the sentries below or seen by observers farther afield in the village. By the spring, too, the winter floods on the meadows flanking the far side of the river below the Castle should have subsided. They would provide an excellent landing-ground for the glider, over 300 feet below the launching-ramp and 200 yards away.

The stage had been set for the greatest escape in history. Would the spring of 1945 see its fruition?

In February, as the Allied advance continued, Peter Allan asked Eggers for the first refusal of a small hand truck on which to carry his kit should the camp be moved. Eggers replied, “If the Russians get this far, we shall hand you over to your Allies.”

Meanwhile Pierre Mairesse Lebrun was serving on the staff of General de Lattre de Tassigny, whose 1st Army had finally crossed the Rhine:

At last, with our feet on German soil I felt bold enough to approach General de Lattre with an idea that I had been nursing for a long time. I asked him if he would let me go forward to liberate Colditz.