The Great Escape: A Canadian Story (27 page)

News of the shootings reached Britain in mid-May. Anthony
Eden, the British secretary for foreign affairs, informed the House
of Commons that word of the deaths had come from Switzerland. Then, in late June, he rose in Parliament to announce that official word had come from the German government about the deaths of
fifty officers. The official German note claimed “the escapes were
systematically prepared, partly by the General Staffs of the Allies,
[with] both political and military objectives [that endangered] public security in Germany.” Eden scoffed at Germany’s contention the officers had met their deaths while escaping Stalag Luft III or resisting recapture. He accused Germany of “cold-blooded acts of butchery” and vowed His Majesty’s Government would track down “these foul criminals . . . to the last man. When the war is over,” Eden said finally, “they will be brought to exemplary justice.”
[24]

There were still Stalag Luft III prisoners of war who believed the
trickle of information, the posted lists of dead officers, and even the
Gestapo purge at the camp had all been a bluff to cow the remaining
POWs into total compliance. The Germans couldn’t have stooped to murdering all those air force officers, some kriegies insisted. Then, pieces of military kit, suitcases, and some personal effects the escapers had carried through the tunnel and into the Silesian countryside were delivered to huts in the North Compound. Belongings such as shoes, handkerchiefs, and even bloodstained personal photographs were brought to the SBO. Ultimately, all doubt about the finality of events following the breakout of March
24
–25
were put to rest the day
Kommandant
Braune delivered urns of cremated ashes to Group Captain
Wilson. And it didn’t take the SBO to deduce why the fifty had been cremated. Ashes would offer no evidence of the cause of death.

“[It proved] that this had been a deliberate massacre,”
[25]
George Sweanor wrote. “I could not forget my old school chum, George
McGill, nor the boyish face of Tom Leigh, nor my boss, a man with an envious war record, Tom Kirby-Green. . . . What a terrible loss to humanity.”

McGill’s ashes came from Leignitz, Sweanor remembered, Tom Leigh’s from Görlitz, and Tim Walenn’s from Danzig. He concluded from the locations of the crematoria engraved on the urns that many of the escapers had covered great distances before being recaptured and killed. Sweanor found some solace in knowing that the Germans had expended millions of man-hours away from the frontlines tracking down George McGill, his classmate from St. Clair Public School
in Toronto. Eventually, as if reuniting the dead men with their war
time comrades, the remaining Commonwealth officers gathered and housed the fifty urns in a building inside the wire of the North Compound. One of the kriegies who had created so many of the theatre production sets, Wylton Todd, volunteered to design a permanent memorial and the new
Kommandant
provided stone for the masons among the POWs to build a crypt that would contain the urns.

“A committee was formed to collect the belongings of the fifty and to put all up for auction with the proceeds going to their families after the war,”
[26]
Sweanor wrote. “We gave promissory notes for pay
ments and bid outrageous prices to show our sympathy: $
200
for a
pair of running shoes, $50 for a razor, and $15 for a handkerchief.”

Even Staff Sergeant Hermann Glemnitz, still on duty at the North Compound, attended the highly publicized auction. He got swept up in the spirit of fundraising and could be heard urging the kriegies to
bid higher for the benefit of the dead airmen’s families. Among the auction items that drew particular attention, Tom Kirby-Green’s wooden suitcase went for twenty-five pounds and some of the per
sonal clothing of Canadian airman Pat Langford earned
104
pounds. To commemorate the fifty murdered air force officers, kriegies wore whatever black insignia they could find—black ties,
black hats, black
diamond cutouts sewn to their sleeves—to indicate they were in mourning. Though it was forbidden to sing it, at every opportunity in front of their captors, the kriegies sang “God Save the King,” if only because, as Tony Pengelly put it, “we sang it and felt better.”
[27]
The POWs considered every possible act of stubbornness, inaction, and passive resistance they could conceive as a protest to the killings.

George Sweanor didn’t agree with the tactics, fearing their cam
paign of hatred might bring even more reprisals. He was right. The
tit-for-tat psychological warfare inside the wire continued seemingly without end.
Kommandant
Braune responded to kriegie insolence by
withholding incoming mail for six weeks. When Pieber conducted
his roll calls, the prisoners made life miserable for him, ridiculing his
appell, resisting his demands, and interfering wherever they could. One day, when the innocuous guard looked totally demoralized, George Sweanor took pity on him. They happened to be walking
side by side across the compound.

“Cheer up, Pieber,” Sweanor said. “We can’t keep this up forever.”

Pieber flashed a quick smile, but that was all he could muster.

The spring and summer of 1944 brought a welcome rush of good
news to the inmates of Stalag Luft III, news many of them wished
had come six months earlier; it might have persuaded even diehard
escapers such as Big X to wait out the war. Still, the BBC broadcasts
received by the canary, Dick Bartlett’s wireless radio receiver, gave officers in the North Compound a needed lift. Kriegies learned of the liberation of Rome on June 5, the Normandy landings on June 6, the main Soviet offensive in the Baltic region on June 22, the Chin
dits’ victories in Burma on June
26
, the attempt on Hitler’s life on
July 20, the liberation of Paris on August 25, the Canadian capture of Dieppe on September 1, and, on September 17, the bold airborne Operation Market Garden attempt to catapult the Allies to the enemy’s side of the River Rhine. That same summer, letters addressed to
Stalag Luft III prisoners from fictitious relatives informed kriegies around the North Compound that three Commonwealth air officers had actually completed Roger Bushell’s so-called “home run.”
Per Bergsland and Jens Muller had made it back to Britain via Sweden within a week, while Bob van der Stok had reached his occupied homeland, the Netherlands, within thirty-six hours. He soon pushed
on across the Pyrenees to Madrid and arrived back in Britain four
months after emerging from tunnel “Harry.”

A lot had changed at Stalag Luft III since the March 1944 escape. Von Lindeiner was gone; he would be court-martialled in October for allowing as many as 262 escape attempts during his command of POW camps and for defying the Sagan Order to hand over escapers directly to the Gestapo.
[*]
Von Lindeiner’s nemesis Roger Bushell was
also gone, executed under that same order. What remained, how
ever, was X Organization, which both men had grappled with since April 1943. Bushell had determined and manipulated its objectives,
its tactics, and its timing like a battle force pursuing an enemy. Von
Lindeiner had fought back, trying to destroy its gains and blunt its
resolve with unexpected appells, relentless surveillance by ferrets, and isolation punishment in the cooler. In some senses, both von
Lindeiner and Bushell failed to control the fate of X Organization. True, the organization had delivered Bushell his greatest objective—
a mass escape and a resulting nationwide manhunt—and ultimately von Lindeiner’s Gestapo successors appeared to have buried its
material gains by filling “Harry” with human waste and by exterminating X’s ringleaders with the Sagan Order. And yet the Germans had never found tunnel “Dick,” which still housed tunnelling tools,
bed boards, and wire, and they had not annihilated all of X’s brain
trust—men such as Robert “Crump” Ker-Ramsey, Norman “Conk”
Canton, and Tony Pengelly, who had given up his number on the
escape list expressly so that the escape committee might carry on.

“Immediately after news of the executions reached England,” Pengelly said, “Air Ministry told us over the BBC, via our smuggled
radios, to stop escaping. . . . [But] with the incentive of escape work gone,
many were losing the comparative peace of mind with which we had
lived and endured the long years. Our morale was dangerously low.”

The Normandy invasion in June and the attempt on Hitler’s
life
in July re-inspired the kriegies and breathed new life into a dormant X Organization. Pengelly and what was left of his mapping and
document forgery team decided to reintroduce the war of wits to the
edu
cation room of the North Compound library. They manufactured and posted a huge, detailed map of Europe on the library wall and began sticking in pins (thread strung between the pins
graphically illustrated the front lines of the war). Based on the BBC reports, they updated the location of the pins and thread daily. That spring and
summer of
1944
, the thread lines showed Allied gains in mainland Italy, in Scandinavia, a toehold in France, and significant Soviet
advances along the Eastern Front.

“On the Russian front there were two sets of thread lines, one red and one black,”
[28]
Don Edy recalled. “The one represented German news from the front . . . and the other based on the BBC news, which always showed the Allies closer than the German news. We often saw the German ferrets coming in to take a look at the map, then walking out shaking their heads.”

“It gave us infinite satisfaction to show [the Germans] the ring
drawing ever tighter,”
[29]
Pengelly said.

The war of the pins gave momentary satisfaction, perhaps, but the rapid westward advance of the red thread on the library wall map—
representing victories for the Soviet armies over German armies along the Eastern Front—posed a number of new and potentially
ominous threats to Stalag Luft III’s imprisoned airmen, officers and NCOs alike. The first impact of the declining fortunes of the Ger
man Army in Lithuania, East Prussia, and eastern Poland arrived in
the form of other prisoners of war that summer of 1944. Kriegies
under guard began arriving from POW camps east of Sagan; they described their captors force-marching them ahead of the Soviet
onslaught. With no new huts available for the newcomers, the Germans forced them into existing barracks. They supplied lumber and the loan of tools for the kriegies to convert double bunk beds to triple bunks in existing huts. Rations were halved. Sick parades ballooned. And Red Cross parcels for the original North Compound POWs became few and far between.

If the flight of POWs ahead of the Soviet advance didn’t put the kriegies nerves on edge enough, the sudden arrival of a purge of
Commonwealth and American airmen from a place called Buchenwald certainly did. George Sweanor learned that in previous months
German SS had had rounded up the
168
downed airmen, including twenty-six RCAF aircrew, stripped them of their identities, and
shipped them off to the Buchenwald extermination camp. Starved,
tortured, and bearing the scars of Nazi medical experiments, these
latest additions to the North Compound shocked Sweanor and his roommates with their first question:

“How many do they shoot each day?”
[30]
they asked.

George Harsh discovered that such fears were based more in real
ity than in fiction. Shot down, interrogated, and sent to Stalag Luft III in October
1942
, the American-born RCAF gunner had served X Organization inside the wire as a tunnel security boss. A sudden
purge at the end of February 1944, just weeks before the planned mass escape, had then whisked Harsh and eighteen others away from the North Compound. He had learned about the March 24 breakout and the reprisals of the Sagan Order from their prisoner-of-war huts at Belaria, a satellite compound five miles from Stalag Luft III. Harsh had survived POW imprisonment for nearly two years, but he recognized that his experience on a chain gang in the 1930s had prepared him more than most to live one day at a time. Even so, he admitted that he still lay awake nights worried that Gestapo guards would suddenly descend, line them up, and shoot every tenth man unless the kriegies surrendered the radio the Germans knew was hidden.

“Toward the end of the war,” Harsh wrote, “Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, as a representative of the International Red Cross,
was allowed into the camp. [He] slipped word to us that Hitler had ordered Himmler to have every one of us shot rather than let us be
liberated by the approaching Russians.”
[31]

Such rumours and fears sparked a reconstituted X Organization to a predictable response. In July, those comprising the core of the escape committee gathered at the now reopened North Compound theatre.
Yes, there would be new productions that summer and fall, if the war went on that long. Airman John Casson would produce a version of J. B. Priestley’s
I Have Been Here Before
, while airman David Porter
would rehearse a musical comedy called
Palina Panic
. Since the
Germans had never discovered the repository of all the tunnel sand excavated from “Harry”—in the space beneath the raked floor of theatre seats—the escape committee reopened the theatre’s secret subterranean enterprise. This time, X Organization diggers began
excavating tunnel “George” from beneath the theatre proscenium
eastbound toward the North Compound exterior wire. It was a short
distance from the new tunnel to the sand dispersal site, all under the same roof, and there was still plenty of room to store “George’s”
excavated sand under the same theatre floor.