The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (25 page)

“You never gave me any maps, Johnny,” Harris insisted.

That’s when Crozier realized they were still in his pocket. The
Germans could quickly determine the routes the other escapers might be taking if they suddenly came into possession of the stencilled maps in Crozier’s pocket. He and Harris had to get rid of them. And fast.

“Fortunately, I had read many thrillers in my boyhood,” Harris
wrote. “We could eat the maps. And that’s just what we did, along with the help of any other prisoners to whom we could surrepti
tiously pass a map. Some of those fellows never spoke a friendly word to Johnny or me again.”
[31]

Nine stencilled maps were the least of the
Kommandant
von Lindeiner’s worries. Inside Room
23
of Hut
104
, a ferret who had entered the tunnel from the exit hole outside the wire had made his way back
to the entrance shaft. With “Harry’s” entire length now exposed and
nothing left to hide, Red Noble opened the trapdoor to let the man
out. Noble and Shag Rees were then ordered outside, where Rub
berneck relished the moment of humiliating his nemeses, tearing off their civilian clothes. Noble and Rees pushed back, ready to fight. Rubberneck reached for his revolver. Von Lindeiner intervened and had the two kriegies marched, in the nude, to the cooler. But the German colonel had yet to face the toughest truth of the entire episode.

“At last an appell was called,” Don Edy remembered, “and every
one was turned out onto the sport field under heavy guard. The Germans were beyond themselves with rage. So we did nothing to
provoke them further.”
[32]

Out came boxes with the name and photograph of every prisoner in the compound neatly catalogued and filed. It took two hours, but every man was identified and accounted for as he stood in the snow. More stressful to von Lindeiner was the process of elimination: Who was missing? As the list of escapers rose eventually to the seventy-six who had managed to get away from the North Compound, George Sweanor watched the
Kommandant
’s face grow pale. Eventually, he left the compound. Von Lindeiner knew that not only had he failed to keep prisoners of war from escaping, but he was also now in danger of violating the
Aktion Kugel
and
Stufe Römisch
III orders by not immediately handing over the four escapers his men had recaptured at the exit hole to the Gestapo.

“Gentlemen,” Hans Pieber said to the kriegies as von Lindeiner left the compound, “you should not have done that to him.”
[33]

After the camp offices had completed the inventory of those pres
ent or absent, all remaining kriegies were dismissed back to their huts, except those from Hut
104
. They stood virtually naked under guard for another hour before the Schmeisser-wielding guards
allowed them to dress and re-enter their block. That afternoon, von Lindeiner learned that sixteen escaped officers had been recaptured and were being held at the Sagan civil police station. In spite of the two German High Command orders to the contrary, he demanded his prisoners be returned to the camp. He placed dozens more phone calls, notifying railways stations, airfields, border crossings, and even port authorities along the Baltic about the breakout.

Meantime, Max Wielen, the head of
Kripo
at Breslau, issued
Kriegsfahndung
, a nationwide manhunt order, and then
Grossfahndung
, the highest alert to police stations across the region, advising them to hold
recaptured prisoners under the
Stufe Römisch
III order. Just as Big X had hoped and expected, the manhunt diverted the energies of police, SS, armed forces, Hitler Youth, the Home Guard Air Raid Precaution personnel, and civilian searchers—some seventy thousand Germans
[34]
—away from the war effort to the recapture of the officers who’d escaped
from Stalag Luft III.
[*]
Later the same day, Saturday, March
25
, the
German counter-intelligence chief, SS Major Brünner arrived at the
Sagan-area prison compound with orders to arrest von Lindeiner in
preparation for his court-martial over the escape. The sixty-four-year-
old colonel suffered a non-fatal heart attack over the matter.

The North Compound experienced an eerie calm after the original storm on Saturday. All the stories of the events of the mass escape the previous night circulated from hut to hut around the camp. However, scuttlebutt about the seventy-six escapers remained scarce. Von Lindeiner was replaced with a temporary
Kommandant
. Initially, that didn’t change things, but the sequence of events that had sealed von Lindeiner’s fate was about to overtake the kriegies and the escapers as well.

A Canadian flying officer from Winnipeg was shot down the same weekend as the breakout. At twenty-six, Gordon Venables was older than most RCAF aircrew, and when he tumbled into a farm field that night he broke his leg. F/O Venables came through the prisoner-of-
war delivery system in the middle of all the post-escape upheaval. Luftwaffe medical staff set his leg, but he was soon on the move to
Stalag Luft III. He was fortunate not to have been swept up and dispensed with in the
Stufe Römisch
order, but still endured a rough passage to the POW camp. German civilians were riled up by increased Allied bombing attacks on their cities and by the highly publicized mass escape.

“I had a broomstick for a cane,”
[35]
Venables said. “We arrived at the train station. People were everywhere. To my surprise, a com
partment was cleared of passengers for [the guard and me. We] had to change trains at Frankfurt. The city had been heavily bombed . . . with severe damage and loss of lives. He told me to stay close to him as the people were very angry and liable to turn on me. He put me in the cab of the engine, away from the civilians [until] we arrived at the POW camp near Sagan.”

On April 1, 1944, exactly a week after the breakout, the Gestapo
arrived at the North Compound and the mass searches of men, belong
ings, and barracks huts resumed. As usual, the Gestapo men appeared
ham-fisted as prison guards, until they started handing out summary
judgments. When they inspected “Harry,” the first thing they spot
ted was the string of lights up the tunnel. They grilled all the Ger
man electricians involved in maintaining the camp, forcing two to
confess that the theft of the wire had gone unreported. Gestapo men
promptly shot the two men. Next they shot the supervisor for not acknowledging the loss and punished two more prison guards for possessing morsels of food that had come from the prisoners’ Red Cross parcels. The newly installed
Kommandant
,
Oberst
Braune,
announced there would be four appells a day. He closed the theatre, stopped all mail in and out, and dumped wagon-loads of raw human sewage down the entry shaft of tunnel “Harry.”
[36]

What kriegies had known as a “spine-tingling sport” at best, and
an uncomfortable existence at worst, was taking a deadly turn.

THE
HATE
CAMPAIGN

T
HE FATE
of the hard-arsers—as Big X had accurately predicted—was pretty much in their own hands. Or, in the case of New Zealand officer Michael Shand and Canadian officer
Keith Ogilvie, their feet. When the guard outside the Stalag Luft III
fence fired his rifle, Shand, who was already in the woods, bolted in one direction while Ogilvie crawled for about a hundred and fifty feet, stood up, and started to run in another direction.
[1]
Whether
from fear of being caught by prison guards and interrogated by the
Gestapo or just from the shock of the late winter conditions on his
system, Skeets kept on running for most of the next forty-eight hours. Perhaps the last kriegie to get away that morning, he had planned to
make his way toward Czechoslovakia, but all that mattered initially
was to get clear of the compound and the search parties that would inevitably be on his trail. He simply ran west, but since snow covered much of the countryside, he tried to find less travelled roads to put
as much distance between himself and the compound as quickly as
possible.

“I ran out of food and it was still wet in the trees and the snow. And you couldn’t sleep,” Ogilvie said. “Bloody miserable.”
[2]

By Sunday night, he’d managed to cover almost forty miles and had reached a major road heading south toward the Czech border. But the moment he left the relative cover of remote roads and forested areas, Ogilvie—dressed in army battledress and a greatcoat—was spotted by members of the German Home Guard near Halbau, Germany, and taken to a local inn. Knowing his escape bid was over, en route to interrogation, he tore up the maps and forged identifi
cation in his pockets
[3]
and discreetly dropped the pieces when the
guards weren’t looking. The inn proved to be a holding cell for sev
eral recaptured kriegies. Before long, Ogilvie was joined by RAF officers Charles Hall and Brian Evans as well as Canadian countryman Tommy Thompson. The three had linked up with another
Canadian, Bill Cameron, outside the wire in the pine woods shortly
after the Germans sounded the alarm at
5
o’clock on the morning of the escape. Within a few hours, Cameron began suffering from exposure to the cold. Hall, Evans, and Thompson wrapped him in all the warm clothing and blankets they could spare, left him some rations, and
pressed on.
[4]
Cameron was soon recaptured near Sagan, the others by the Home Guard in the same region as Ogilvie.

Until early 1944, German police had held very little jurisdiction over recaptured prisoners of war and generally, after brief questioning, returned them to German Armed Forces; in short, the Gestapo could not punish them. In February 1944, however, Heinrich Him
mler’s
Aktion Kugel
, or Operation Bullet, had wrenched control of recaptured POWs from the military, in this case the Luftwaffe at Stalag Luft III, and given it to the Gestapo. Under Bullet, recaptured prisoners other than British or American were to be taken to
Mauthausen concentration camp and exterminated. It didn’t matter
whether the escape occurred in transit, in a mass breakout, or singly—
all recaptured POWs would be turned over to the secret police, not
the military authorities, as quietly as possible.

By coincidence, the same weekend of the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III, the leaders of the German Prisoner of War Direc
torate were en route to Berchtesgaden. They arrived at the Führer’s
Bavarian headquarters in the midst of a tempest. Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Wilhelm Keitel had been conferring since word of the mass escape from the North Compound had arrived. Amid the accusations and laying of blame, Hitler decreed
that all recaptured escapers would be shot. Göring protested. Ulti
mately, the weekend conference at Berchtesgaden decided on the number of Commonwealth air officers to be executed. That night,
Himmler issued the “Sagan Order” to the POW Directorate and
quickly altered the operations at police and military prisons across Hitler’s occupied Europe. Those moves had life and death conse
quences for the prisoners of war detained in them.

The Sagan Order began by describing the increased number of
POW escapes as “a menace to internal security.” Adolf Hitler had
initially demanded all eighty Commonwealth air officers who made it out of the tunnel be shot. Ultimately, however, the Sagan Order decreed that “more than half of the escaped officers . . . after interrogation . . . are to be returned to their original camp and to be shot en route.” Had Hitler’s order been carried out to the letter, the Sagan Order might have meant forty killings. But the arithmetic appeared to be lost in the Gestapo’s eagerness to retaliate. Fifty would be killed. Finally, the order spelled out how the killings would be covered up, by declaring that “the recaptured officers were shot whilst trying to escape.”
[5]

The man given the job of choosing which fifty men would die was
SS Gruppenführer
Arthur Nebe. At age fifty, the former First World War explosives soldier turned police detective had served the Nazi
Party, the state police,
Kripo
, and the SS
Reichssicherheitshauptamt
, or RSHA. Three days after the escape from Stalag Luft III, Nebe began receiving daily telegrams on those kriegies the manhunt had recaptured. He then sat in his Berlin office with each POW’s identity card and his record sheet and played god. The factors influencing Nebe’s decision were the prisoner’s age and life status: middle-aged with a
family, he lived; not too young and unmarried, he died. In addition,
if the POW had led groups of escapers because of his fluency in various languages—a so-called “linguist”
[6]
—the Gestapo considered him dangerous and therefore expendable. The air officer’s place of birth
was a deciding factor too: almost all men of non-British origin and
“an unduly high percentage of men from the Dominions”
[7]
received
Nebe’s death sentence. His decisions were passed to subordinate Gestapo officials, first Max Wielen, the
Kripo
chief, and then to the
chief of the Breslau Gestapo,
Oberregierungsrat
Wilhelm Scharpwinkel. It was up to Scharpwinkel to organize the execution squads and fulfill the Sagan Order.

Late in the evening on Sunday, March
26
, security guards escorted
Keith Ogilvie and thirty-four other escapers to a Gestapo prison at
Görlitz, ironically near the Czech border where so many of them had
been headed. Three days later, Gestapo interrogators there ques
tioned Ogilvie about the escape and its organization.

“I’m a British officer and it’s my duty to escape,”
[8]
he parroted
back, and then remained silent to further questioning.

During his interrogation, an interpreter translated his statements as a female typist recorded them. When the questioning ended, the interpreter turned to Ogilvie and said, “The young lady [typist] said you are lucky. You have escaped in a soldier’s uniform. Therefore you will be tried before a military court. The others will not be so lucky.”
[9]

Tommy Thompson’s interrogation at Görlitz, also on March
29
,
proved more confrontational and frightening over the issue of whether he was who he said he was and the protection of his rights as a military officer. When the Gestapo interrogator demanded information about the breakout, Thompson refused to answer.

“I must warn you,” the interrogator said. “You are not the in hands of military authorities, but . . . the secret service. Anything might hap
pen to you without protection and you may never go back to your
camp.”
[10]

“Despite whose hands I am in, I [am] protected by the Geneva
Convention,” Thompson protested.

The interrogator half laughed, and even when Thompson presented his identity tags the man waved them aside. Ultimately, Thompson managed to convince his questioner that his clothes
were indeed military dress. “You are lucky,” the Gestapo man said finally. “You are recognized as military. The rest are wanted for civil investigation.”

The contradiction of the next hours for Ogilvie, Thompson, and others, proved to be watching Commonwealth officers clearly dressed in the air force battledress (he saw George Wiley in his
Canadian blue battledress and John E. “Willy” Williams in his Australian airman’s
tunic with flight-lieutenant stripes visible) being led away from the prison. Following his interrogation, Keith Ogilvie was returned to
a cell with fellow escapers Charles Hall, Neville McGarr, and Paul Royle; the cell was so small that all four men had to either stand or lie down at the same time. A few days later, Ogilvie spotted a German corporal he knew from Stalag Luft III outside his Görlitz cell.

“Say, Horst, when are you gonna get me out of this place?” he
asked.

“Oh, Mr. Ogilvie, tomorrow morning you’ll go,”
[11]
the guard said. Indeed, the next day Luftwaffe guards arrived and escorted
Ogilvie and seven others back to Sagan. Only one of his cellmates—Australian Paul Royle—was with him; Briton Charles Hall was taken
from Görlitz prison March
30
, and South African Neville McGarr disappeared April
6
. Some time later, the eight survivors of the Gör
litz imprisonment and interrogation learned the fate of the other twenty-eight kriegies held there.

On Thursday, March 30,
Oberregierungsrat
Scharpwinkel and his staff arrived at Görlitz to carry out the Sagan Order. First the Com
monwealth officers—Squadron Leader Ian Cross, Flight Lieuten
ants Mike Casey, Tom Leigh, and George Wiley, and Flying Officers John Pohe and Al Hake—were collected by the dozen Gestapo men in civilian clothes and pushed into three waiting cars. Other recaptured officers looking through prison windows knew Hake was suffering from frostbite and assumed the men in civilian clothes were
escorting the air force officers in the cars to a hospital. They were
actually going to the local
Kripo
headquarters for interrogation.

“I went to Görlitz,” Scharpwinkel
[*]
said, “for the purpose of getting a picture of the prisoners. As I speak English, I put one or two
questions to the prisoners . . . Were they married? Had they children? I did not ask any questions about how the escape was orga
nized, because I was not interested in that.”
[12]

The interrogations of the half-dozen Commonwealth officers went on for three and a half hours.
Kriminalinspektor
Richard Max Hänsel
[*]
, who was in charge of the local Gestapo office at Görlitz,
attended the interrogations. He recalled that interrogators questioned the prisoners one at a time. He said there was no torture, but that the questioning covered name, rank, place and date of birth, previous occupation, unit, targets bombed, where shot down, duration
of captivity, organization of the escape, source of civilian clothing, origin of false papers, names of other escapees, and how each had
been captured. Hänsel said the interrogation included the confiscation of the prisoners’ watches and then a blanket threat from Scharpwinkel directed at everybody—prisoner and guard alike.

“Take care they don’t get away,” he said. “Otherwise something unpleasant will happen to you. Or something unpleasant will happen to them.”
[13]

The interrogations wrapped up at 12:30 in the afternoon, when
the POWs were again pushed into the waiting cars. As there was
insufficient room in the three cars for all the Commonwealth officers and the Gestapo men, Scharpwinkel told Hänsel he would have to drive a service vehicle with two of the POWs and the Gestapo chief to their next destination. The three cars and service truck travelled along the autobahn to a wooded area five miles past Halbau. Scharpwinkel ordered the column of vehicles to stop and the prisoners got
out to stretch their legs. Hänsel said he led the two officers in his
service truck to the head of the column where the others had gathered and returned to the truck to retrieve his lunch from a briefcase. Two of Scharpwinkel’s staff carried sub-machine guns as the Gestapo chief ordered the POWs deeper into the woods.

“The prisoners were placed in position,” Scharpwinkel said, “and it was revealed to them that the sentence was about to be carried out.
The prisoners showed considerable calm, which surprised me very
much.”

The six Commonwealth officers—several of them wearing their air force blue battledress, clearly military POWs—stood stationary,
side by side in the woods. With a hand movement,
Kriminal Obersekretaer
Lux
[*]
gave the order to fire and the execution squad fired a
burst into the unarmed prisoners of war. Lux shot the prisoners as
well, and by the end of the second salvo, the officers were dead.

“While I was eating my slice of bread and butter,” Hänsel said, “several shots were fired. I ran at once to the place in the wood, which was about 150 metres [500 feet] away and learnt . . . that the prisoners
had attempted to escape and had been shot in the attempt. They lay
sprawling in the wood about four or five metres [15 feet] from each other. . . . I myself do not suppose that the prisoners attempted to escape.”
[14]