Colditz (21 page)

As heaps of tunnel debris began to pile up alongside other piles of escape material of all kinds which had been concealed in the tower, the
Gauleiter
expressed his astonishment at the siege conditions under which, to him, the camp appeared to exist.

It is not inappropriate at this point to mention something about POWs' pay, which was given to them in
Lagergeld
prisoners' money—i.e. paper money of small denominations which could not be used outside the prison walls.

The Germans wrangled long and loud with the prisoners over the repairs to be done in the clock-tower, under the chapel and in the attics. Who was going to pay for this and for the removal of several tons of rubble? A local contractor wanted 12,000 marks—nearly a thousand pounds—for the clearance job! He had to fill up the holes with concrete as well. The
Kommandant
made a forced levy out of all prisoners' pay. Prisoners were entitled to half their home rate of pay at an exchange rate of so many
Lagermarks
to their own currency (fifteen marks to the pound sterling). The Swiss government held the real cash, which both the Germans and the Allies paid up as backing for camp money issued on both sides. The OKW came into the tunnel dispute at the prisoners' request, and ruled against this collective fine. They ordered the repayment of the forced levy to the prisoners, arguing that this was a collective punishment and the
Kommandant
had no authority to inflict it. They said it was illegal under the Geneva Convention. The Germans lost face at first, but regained it, and the money, by another interpretation of the same Convention, supported this time by the barrack-room lawyers of the OKW: the
Kommandant
levied the canteen profits, which under the Convention might be used “for the benefit of the prisoners.” Obviously, he said, it was to the prisoners' advantage that the roof should not collapse upon them or the floor in their so valuable chapel should not subside beneath them!

As to other measures—the chapel was closed indefinitely. The Germans buried microphones every thirty feet all round the outside of the prisoners' buildings. Brand new tools found in the clock-tower showed the Germans that the bribery and corruption of the guard company was rampant. The OKW ordered the replacement of the whole company.

Some arrivals and departures took place around this time. On 23 January Howard Gee, the civilian, turned up again. He had been despatched from Colditz
almost as a menial in February 1941. Howard Gee had the following to say of his adventures:

I was in Colditz on two separate occasions, arriving first in 1940 as orderly to a group of British officers who had escaped by tunnel from a camp at Laufen near Salzburg. At the time I was rated as an other-rank prisoner, having been picked up in Oslo with several other Englishmen. The Germans did not believe that we were returning from Finland where we had been volunteers for the Finnish International Brigade. They thought that we were British troops in civilian clothes, waiting for the British invasion of Norway, which they had just forestalled. There were some sharp exchanges as to the fate we might deserve. I left Colditz at the beginning of 1941, on being recognized as a civilian.

He returned to occupy officers' quarters on a somewhat similar basis to Giles Romilly. He had made the circuit of several
Ilags
, i.e. civilian prisoners' camps, and having escaped from one of them he was given the final accolade of a red tab on his papers,
Deutschfeindlich
, and despatched to his natural habitat—Colditz.

Guy German and Padre Hobling left for Spangenburg
Oflag
IXA on 21 January. The reasons for Guy's dismissal from his duties as SBO were not far to seek. Over a long period of stewardship it was finally driven home to the Germans that Guy German was totally committed to promoting the escape of officers and also to collusion with disruptive and non-cooperative practices amongst the POWs. He was universally popular but greatly respected at the same time. Undoubtedly he was a scourge to Oberst Schmidt, who must have engineered his removal. With him went his batman, the irrepressible Solly Goldman.

The discovery of the French tunnel was a major setback for the French, but the camaraderie that existed between the nationalities was such that the whole camp felt the loss and were inwardly seething at the success of the Germans. The French would never forgive Eggers.

The first confrontation in the “saluting war” had taken place in September when the Polish Lieutenant Siefert had won a resounding victory and the German side had been greatly discomfited. Now the mood of the whole company was such that another round in the war was imminent.

On 19 January the twenty-two-year-old Belgian Lieutenant Verkest (he had stood in for Mairesse Lebrun in the park-walk count) crossed the path of Hauptmann Eggers
without saluting, on his way to fall in for
Appell
. Eggers stopped him and requested the salute prescribed by the Geneva Convention. Verkest refused to comply. Eggers then said: “Will you not take your hands out of your pockets? It is not the custom in Germany to speak to a superior officer with your hands in your pockets.”

Verkest replied, “Neither is it so in Belgium.”

This was the last straw for Eggers. He reported the incident to the
Kommandant
. Normally the cells were overflowing with officers doing a week's
Arrest
for not saluting. On this day the war came to a head. The
Kommandant
ordered a court-martial and Verkest was “clapped into jug” pending….

The court-martial was ordered on a charge of disobeying an order. The local lawyer, Dr. Naumann, the ex-POW from England, undertook the defense. The hearing was put down for March. In the meantime Verkest remained in “solitary.”

On 29 January Oberst Schmidt summoned all the Senior Officers to a meeting in order to convince them of the necessity of obeying the OKW order. At the end of the meeting a copy of the
procès-verbal
was handed to each. The outcome of the meeting was to establish a sort of
modus vivendi
. For their part the Germans turned a blind eye unless it seemed that prisoners were being blatantly insubordinate. At
Appell
for instance, the prisoners “adapted” to the new order: the French and British saluted “casually”—at the very last minute; the Senior Polish Officer waited until his interpreter had saluted the German and the salute had been returned.

Both sides seemed to accept that approach. The exception was the German Doktor Rahm, who insisted always on being saluted by every prisoner. Every failure to do so was punished, and the cells were full of his victims. The hatred that this inspired, added to his attitude towards sick prisoners, led to demonstrations.

Unknown to the prisoners, on 8 February, a German soldier purloined the revolver of Hauptmann Vent and shot himself through the head whilst the
Hauptmann
was absent. According to Eggers the motive was not discovered. But all the indiscipline in the camp had one significant consequence. Eggers replaced Priem:

The indiscipline in the camp never ceased to have its effect in the cold war between staff and prisoners. L.O.1 [Priem] was held largely responsible for this. We had some argument about it. As senior Duty Officer, had he not started off, right back in 1940, on the wrong foot? This sort of life was no joke, and we felt it was he who had set the tone of our relations from the beginning, and that it was the wrong tone entirely. Besides, he liked his drink, and everyone, the prisoners and ourselves, knew it. There were some
stand-up rows in the Mess about him, and in the end, although he was well in with the
Kommandant
, L.O.1 was helped upstairs to the post of Deputy
Kommandant
, which kept him out of the prisoners' yard pretty well altogether. At the same time, his sharpest critic, L.O.4, was posted down in the town, in charge of the Indian prisoners in the
Schützenhaus
camp there. Two hundred and twenty of them arrived on the 28th of January.

It fell to me now to bear the maximum brunt of contact with the “bad boys,” with three roll-calls and several arguments per day to work from. I had been doing this work while L.O.1 was on leave, and shortly after his return and promotion (on February 14th) I found myself in his shoes, the new “
Lageroffizier
No. 1.”

One amelioration of the POWs' regime resulting from Eggers having taken over the duties of senior
Lageroffizier
from Priem was the installation of an electric bell controlled from the guardhouse for announcing
Appells
. This rang loud and clear giving half an hour's notice of
Appell
, followed by a second bell at five minutes before. The POWs were grateful for the half-hour's notice to wind up their nefarious activities and, in order to retain this advantage, consented to put a little order and punctuality into their own attendance, which benefited everybody. The result was thus beneficial in another direction. Eggers in return had to agree to speed up the
Appell
routine. The time taken was reduced from between twenty and twenty-five minutes to ten minutes.

Temperatures throughout January had been appalling, from 17°C to −33°C. On 28 January the coal shortage necessitated cutting off all hot-water washing facilities for a fortnight. A short thaw actually occurred at the end of the month and to illustrate the effect on the British POW quarters Padre Platt reported that he started de-icing his “Priests' Hole,” collecting four buckets of ice from inside the windows and three buckets of water mopped up from the floor. After the thaw, snow began to fall again and it grew colder.

Spring 1942

T
HOUGH IT HAD PROVED
expensive for the prisoners, the clearance of the rubble from the French tunnel at least offered a couple of escape opportunities.

Jacques Hageman and Cadet F. V. Geerligs walked out of the main gate early in March 1942 dressed as German laborers who were busy removing debris. They got as far as the moat bridge, one of them pushing the Germans' wheelbarrow. Unfortunately, “Little Willi,” a German electrician, was coming the other way. Little Willi would know these two German laborers well. Alas! Hageman and Geerligs had not disguised their faces, relying on their civilian caps as sufficient. Little Willi was about to pass the time of day with them. He hesitated and then he shouted to the guard at the last gate, “Guard! Those two are not our men. They are prisoners!”

Later a cart was being used for the clearance. On 20 March, Lieutenant Desjobert, a Frenchman, managed to climb on board and hide under the rubble. He got as far as the town, but was being slowly smothered so he crawled out from under it. A woman, looking out of an upper window, saw him and warned the driver.

Hageman next was involved in the Dutch tunnel. The Dutch occupied the third floor on the east side of the Castle above the British quarters. Outside on the east wall was a buttress, extending up to the third floor with a balustraded balcony at the top of it. Amongst the prisoners it had always been a question of conjecture. Was the buttress hollow? Van den Heuvel decided to find out.

Inside the main wall, which was about two yards thick, there was a three-man-wide urinal and a WC off one room. This room led to a further room through a large and deep opening. Could the wall between the opening and the main wall be hollow?

Vandy persuaded the Germans that for sanitary reasons the urinal must at all times be thoroughly disinfected. A bucket of liquid tar and a large brush were provided by the Germans. A hole, about eighteen inches square, was started at waist level, lined with bedboards, cut to fit, and cemented in place to form a frame. A close-fitting concrete slab was made to join the frame. Slits were filled with a soap mixture and the whole wall then coated with liquid tar.

From the square hole a short tunnel was dug, turning sharply to the right in the thickness of the external walls. After about six feet the tunellers reached, as they had come to expect, a completely sealed-off cavity, a chamber in the thickness of the dividing wall between the two rooms. It became clear that the chamber was a hall or corridor leading out to the balcony through a doorway which was walled up. From here, the tunnellers dug downwards, through the floor diagonally and outwards.

Eventually they came out at the top of a hollow shaft immediately under the balcony floor. The shaft inside the so-called buttress was about seven feet wide by three feet deep. There is little doubt that this buttress was a medieval lavatory for bedrooms on the second floor. This is further borne out by the fact that the tunnellers, having manufactured a rope ladder to reach the bottom of the shaft, found that the bottom was several feet below the ground level outside, forming a pit.

Starting a tunnel horizontally from the pit bottom, with plenty of room for spoil, they were now only nine yards away from that same steep slope to the ravine which the French had so nearly reached.

Dames and Hageman were on digging shift, Hageman at the face and Dames on watch, when the balloon went up. Eggers had decided to investigate the buttress. It was last on his list of “unoccupied quarters,” and he had asked the paymaster, who knew the Castle from before the war at the time when it was an asylum, whether the buttress was solid or hollow. The paymaster's assurance that it was solid was not enough for him. It is more than likely that his sound detectors had picked up some scraping noises—though he does not admit to that.

With his team, equipped with pick-axes and sledge-hammers, he went straight to a room on the ground floor which backed on to the buttress and began opening up a hole. The tunnellers had already been signaled to stop work. When the hammering began, they climbed up the ladder fifty feet, one at a time, back
into the chamber. There was a race to haul up the ladder before the Germans broke through. They were not quite quick enough. A torch beam glinted on the ladder swinging upwards.