Colditz (27 page)

Lulu procured the services of the red-bearded Lieutenant van Doorninck to manufacture, with formidable skill, a key to open the intricate cruciform lock on the door to Gephard's office. The plan evolved. Lulu had teamed up with Flight-Lieutenant “Bill” Fowler, and they made a foursome with van Doorninck and another Dutchman. Dick Howe, as the new British escape officer, was in charge.

I inspected the office. I saw that it was possible to rip up the floor under Gephard's desk, pierce a wall eighteen inches thick, and have entry into a storeroom outside and below the office. From there, simply by unlocking a door, the escapers would walk out on to the sentry path surrounding the Castle. The plan was based on the fact that German NCOs occasionally came to the storeroom with Polish POWs who were working in the town of Colditz. They brought and removed stores, etc., arriving at irregular hours, mostly in the mornings, sometimes as early as 7 a.m., and seldom coming more often than twice a week.

The escape party was increased to a total of six. Two more officers were therefore selected. They were Stooge Wardle and Lieutenant Donkers, a Dutchman. It was arranged that Lulu should travel with the second Dutchman, and Bill Fowler with van Doorninck. Sentries were changed at 7 a.m., so the plan was made accordingly. Van Doorninck, who spoke German fluently, would become a senior German NCO and Donkers would be a German private. The other four would be Polish orderlies. They would issue from the storeroom shortly after 7 a.m. Van Doorninck would lock up after him. The four orderlies would carry two large wooden boxes between them, the German private would take up the rear. They would walk along the sentry path past two sentries, to a gate in the barbed wire, where van Doorninck would order a third sentry to unlock and let them pass. The sentries—with luck—would assume that the “fatigue” party had gone to the storeroom shortly before 7 a.m. Once through the barbed wire the party would proceed downhill along the roadway which went towards the park.

The plan necessitated the making of two large boxes in sections so that they would be passed through the hole into the storeroom, and yet of such construction that they should be very quickly assembled. This escape was to be a blitz job. The hole would be ready in a matter of three days. Experience was proving that long-term jobs involved too much risk.

The hole was duly made, leaving a little to be knocked out at the last moment. The evening before the “off” (8 September), the six escapers, with myself and Lieutenant Derek Gill (who had been helping me dig the hole), were locked into Gephard's office.

At midnight there was an alarm. Germans were unlocking doors and the voice of Priem was heard in the corridor. He approached Gephard's office door. The night-duty NCO asked: “Shall I open this door, Herr Hauptmann?”

“Yes, indeed, I wish to check everything,” answered Priem.

“It is the office of Oberstabsfeldwebel Gephard, Herr Hauptmann.”

“Never mind. Open!” came the reply.

There was a loud noise of keys and then Priem's voice: “Ah, of course, Herr Gephard has many locks on his door. I had forgotten. Do not open, it is safe.”

Between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. we finished off the hole and carefully conveyed the men and their equipment through. Derek and I then left the office having patched up the hole. A little later Dick Howe reported a perfect take-off.

The morning
Appell
at 8:30 was going to cause trouble. By now, Dick had temporarily run out of inspiration. The Dutch dummies were no more. He might manage to conceal one absence, but six was an impossibility. So he did the obvious thing. He decided to lay in a reserve of spare officers for future escapes. Four officers were concealed in various parts of the Castle. There would be ten missing from the
Appell
. With luck the four hidden in the Castle would become “ghosts.” They would appear no more at
Appells
and would fill in blanks on future escapes. The idea was not unknown to the Germans, but it was worth trying.

The 8 a.m.
Appell
mustered and, in due course, ten bodies were reported missing. By 11 a.m. the Germans had discovered the four ghosts and were beginning to conclude, after their first impression that a joke was being played on them, that six men had in fact escaped.

Dick was satisfied at having increased the start of the six escapers by a further three hours. Later in the day the Jerries, after questioning all sentries, had suspected the fatigue party, and working backwards to the store room, had discovered the hole. There was much laughter, even among the Jerries, at the expense of Gephard, under whose desk the escape had been made! The reader can imagine the disappointment and fury of Priem at the escapers having eluded his grasp so narrowly during the night!

Geoffrey Wardle and his Dutch colleague, Lieutenant Donkers, were unlucky. They were recaught and back in the Castle before the tumult of the roll-call was over. They were noticed by the
Bürgermeister
of a nearby village called Commichau as they passed through. He knew everybody in the village and immediately became suspicious. A local peasant woman found a number of discarded uniforms in a nearby wood and reported this at once. Thus the Germans knew that more than two had escaped. Eventually, they established the correct number at six. Lulu Lawton and Ted Beets were accosted and arrested at Döbeln railway station later in the day. Meanwhile van Doorninck and Bill Fowler carried on and reached Switzerland safely eighty-seven hours after leaving the Castle.

*
Editors were not able to verify further updates to this information as of publication.

Late Autumn 1942

T
HE OKW SHOWED DISTINCT
jitters at this time. Normally by September the “escaping season” was considered by them to be over. Instead it now appeared to be hotting up. General von Schulenburg was sent to tighten up discipline amongst the German garrison and impose stricter discipline on the POWs. “Otherwise,” as he said, “different methods would have to be adopted.” His influence had no appreciable effect. During October and November escapes continued at irregular intervals. Even Hitler's order that all commandos and parachutists were to be regarded as outlaws and to be shot when taken prisoner (which became public knowledge by the end of October) did little to deter initiative or dampen enthusiasm. Eggers reports that the
Kommandant
received Hitler's above orders from the OKW in writing on about 14 October.

Actually, on the evening of 7 October—unbeknown to the prisoners in Colditz—seven commando prisoners from the expedition code-named “Musketoon” arrived in Colditz. The
Kommandant
, taken by surprise and knowing nothing about them, telephoned the OKW for instructions. The commandos were locked up for the night in the guardroom, away from the other prisoners. The next morning they were being photographed in the
Kommandantur
courtyard when Peter Tunstall and Scorgie Price, who had entered the
Saalhaus
overlooking them, called out to them and discovered they were commandos captured in Norway and were en route to another camp. Later Rupert Barry obtained their names through an orderly who took food to them, and the information was passed on in a coded message to MI9 in London.

Two of them, including their leader, the Canadian Captain Graeme Black MC, were taken to cells in the town jail. There Peter Storie-Pugh and Dick Howe managed further conversation with them, and Dominic Bruce did so the following day. The next afternoon Eggers escorted four Gestapo men to the jail and the two commandos were removed.

The seven commandos left Colditz on 13 October. Hitler's order that captured commandos should be shot was not issued in Germany until 18 October, nor in Norway (where the commandos had blown up a hydro-electric power station) until 26 October. Yet at dawn on 23 October all seven were killed by the SS, shot in the back of the neck at camp Sachsenhausen. The German government then told the Swiss that the men had escaped, and Colditz
Oflag
IVC was instructed to return any letters to their senders marked “
Geflohen
,” “escaped.” Six were so returned.

It was a grim episode in the Castle's history. At the Nuremberg trials after the war, where the crime formed part of the indictment against General Jodl, it was seen that the date on the German document recording the executions had been altered from 27 to 30 October in an attempt to disguise their retrospective nature.

This is an appropriate moment to enlarge upon the code system developed at Colditz.

Rupert Barry became OC (Officer Commanding) Codes in Colditz at a very early date. It is generally thought, but not completely documented, that the War Office had already by May 1940 instructed a scattering of officers in the British Expeditionary Force on a code system for communication by letter in the event of their being taken prisoner. For instance, from
Oflag
VIIC at Laufen a message dated 4 March 1941 was received by the War Office on 22 March. However, the first British inmates at Colditz had no such code. Rupert and I set to make our own. I had actually invented a primitive code with my friend Biddy O'Kelly in Ireland. I wrote some letters in this code, but she could make nothing of them. Rupert had much more success. His wife Dodo was a highly intelligent girl who could do the
Times
crossword puzzle while she had her morning cup of tea. The first message he sent was: “Go to the War Office, ask them to send forged Swedish diplomatic papers in shovehalfpenny boards for Reid, Howe, Allan, Lockwood, Elliott, Wardle, Milne and self.” His wife's immediate reaction on receipt of this letter was that he had gone mad, but before long she had decoded it. Rupert says:

At nine o'clock next morning she presented herself at the War Office main door and asked the commissionaire if she could see an officer in the
Military Intelligence Department. She was presented with a form to fill in in which she was asked, among other things, for details of the subject she wished to discuss. This she refused to state, saying that the matter was secret. A violent argument ensued and as it became clear that she was not going to be allowed in, she explained her difficulty to an officer in uniform who came by, and told him that she had come to discuss a secret matter with an officer in Military Intelligence and not with the commissionaire, and could he help her. It so happened that he could, he would, and in fact did help her. My wife was instructed to write back to me in clear saying that she had met an old aunt of mine called Christine Silverman who had not seen me since I was a child and was distressed to hear where I was and that she would write to me. I, of course, had no aunt of that name and, as things turned out, I in fact received “Christine's” letter before my wife told me of her chance but happy meeting. However, it only took me a few seconds to rumble what had happened. We set about the letter with great expectations only to have our hopes destroyed by the message, “The War Office considered the use of Swedish Diplomatic papers to be too dangerous.” Our reply to this was, “We will consider the danger and not the War Office. Would you please expedite.” Suffice to say that after this somewhat unnecessary delay and because shovehalfpenny boards were no longer acceptable to the Germans as they had already found naughty things hidden in them, we never received our Swedish papers! However, communications had been established and these grew and grew.

But this single code could not be secure for long. Soon one coded message told us that some private (not Red Cross) parcels had been sent:

One contained amongst the clothing a packet of Smarties, and the other six handkerchiefs each with a different coloured border. We were further told what we had to do with these, which was to place the yellow Smartie in a mug of water, then place in this water the handkerchief with the green border, stir for a few minutes, take out, read and destroy. The developed handkerchief contained detailed instructions for the operation of two really quite complicated codes. These were immediately taken into use, discarding the previous simple one. [See
Appendix 3
.]

With these codes we could say anything we liked. Our primary need was items for escape kits, and we would suggest ways of concealing these in
private parcels. Later when Dick Howe had perfected his technique for stealing whole parcels before the Germans opened them (in fact inherited from the French—see below) it was only necessary to specify our requirements. We had nothing but admiration for the department of Military Intelligence (MI9) which dealt with us. The department also sent us information about enemy activity on frontiers, sentry positions, and so on. At one point they even boosted our morale by appearing to consider our suggestion that a splendid propaganda
coup
could be achieved by landing a light aircraft on the
Autobahn
near Colditz and so rescuing Douglas Bader.

As the system developed we were able to receive messages in certain BBC programs. We never had a transmitter, however.

Life was full of surprises—for example, we asked for and received from London by the magic handkerchief method a plan of Colditz Castle floor by floor. We required this because at the time we were interested in possible old drainage systems and possible bricked-up cavities in the massive castle walls. Each room was shown under the name of the then occupant, Graf von So-and-So, Gräfin von somebody else. Enquiries after the war revealed that these plans had been obtained from the archives of the British Museum.

On 1 October, thirty-one French officers left Colditz for Lübeck, including “Fredo” Guigues. There were four expert lock-pickers in Colditz, one for each of the four principal nationalities. The Poles had Miki Surmanowicz. The British had me first of all, amateurish, taught by Miki; then Paddon, who was good but did not remain in Colditz long enough to be of much use to escapers. However, Bush Parker, an Australian, took over his role and became very capable. Van Doorninck was the Dutch expert and with Guigues was the king of all the lockbreakers. Fredo succeeded in gaining entrance at will through several locked doors into the parcels office.