The Great Escapers

The Ones that Got Away

At Stalag Luft III some of the recaptured prisoners began to trickle back into the camp. The first were Pop Green and Doug Poynter. The news of their recapture came on 29 March when Sagan police station telephoned von Lindeiner’s office and told them they were ready to be returned to the Luftwaffe’s care. But the Kommandant told his aides to reply that if they had wanted so much to be out of the camp, they could stay out. The policeman, a little taken aback, explained as tactfully as he could that they would ‘have a hard time of it’ if the Kommandant didn’t accept them back. Von Lindeiner’s curt response was that they could have a hard time of it for all he cared. It took the intervention, ironically, of an SS interrogating officer to have the two men returned to the camp. The goons told them: ‘You are two of the lucky ones.’ They did not explain what they meant and there was an ominous cloud hanging over Stalag Luft III. One RAF officer, John Casson, was friendly with one of the goons. He was left distinctly unsettled when the German told him that he was glad he hadn’t been one of the escapers because the ones that got out faced an unenviable fate.

It was something of a reassurance when more of the recaptured prisoners began turning up at the camp. Among the early returns were Tony Bethell, Les Brodrick, Dick Churchill, Johnny Marshall, Keith Ogilvie, Paul Royle, Mike Shand and Tommy Thompson. Some were sent for their mandatory two weeks’ solitary confinement in the cooler, although since it was now usually full to capacity, the majority were directed back to their barracks. Von Lindeiner didn’t seem to care what happened to them. Gone now, for the time being at least, was the chivalrous display of gallantry that had marked his stewardship of the camp in the early days. In the days immediately following the escape, he appeared to the prisoners to be spending a great deal of his time supervising the destruction of the tunnel. This time it was filled with raw sewage and sealed at either end with almost three feet of hard concrete. In fact, von Lindeiner was also spending much of his time fielding angry questions from the SS, Gestapo and Reich officials in Berlin and contemplating his own fate.

On 26 March, two Luftwaffe officers arrived at Stalag Luft III with a writ accusing von Lindeiner of incompetence and relieving him of his command. Three days later he collapsed with severe heart palpitations. Thanks to the timely intervention of a doctor, von Lindeiner recovered. Shortly afterwards the colonel retreated to Jeschkendorf Manor to recuperate and prepare for his defence. Presently, the prisoners were told that Colonel von Lindeiner had been relieved of his command. He had offered to resign three times but on each occasion had been turned down. During his 21 months as Kommandant of Stalag Luft III there had been 262 escape attempts, 100 involving tunnels.

The new Kommandant was yet another officer in the chivalrous mould of Major Rumpel and Colonel von Lindeiner. Colonel Braune appeared equally uneasy in his role as a ‘common jailer’ but, presumably, he, like his predecessors, had little choice in the matter. By now any casual joshing about the escape had long gone and the men were seriously concerned about the fate of those comrades still missing. On 6 April, Hans Pieber turned up in the North Compound and requested that Group Captain Massey accompany him over to the Kommandantur to meet with Colonel Braune. When Massey asked what it was about, Pieber replied hesitantly: ‘I cannot say.’

Massey arrived in the Kommandant’s office to find a quiet and distracted Colonel Braune and an uneasy Gustav Simoleit. Massey was accompanied by Squadron Leader Philip Murray, who would act as interpreter. Pieber and Simoleit remained in the room, standing a little uncomfortably, their eyes unable to meet the gaze of the English officers. Braune came swiftly to the point.

‘I am instructed by the German High Command to state that 41 of the escapers were shot while resisting arrest.’

‘How many were shot?’ asked Murray, in disbelief.

Braune appeared distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Forty-one,’ he said, unable to look the RAF officer in the eye.

Murray translated the statement for Massey, whose eyebrows shot up as he listened.

‘Ask him how many men were wounded,’ he demanded.

‘I am only permitted to say by the German High Command that 41 of your men were shot while resisting arrest,’ he replied solemnly.

Once more Massey demanded to know whether any of the men had been wounded.

‘I am only instructed to read from the communiqué,’ said Braune.

Massey angrily ended the conversation by demanding a list of the names of the men shot. He was not to be satisfied for another week. Pieber was shamefaced as he conducted the British officers back to their compound. Very soon everybody in Stalag Luft III knew their worst fears had come true.

At sundown on 15 April a German guard entered the North Compound and attached a list to the bulletin board. It contained the names not of 41 escapers who had been shot, but 47. The Kriegies gathered around in dismay and disbelief. It would be another month before the final three names were added to the list. The day after, in London, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, revealed to the House of Commons the details of the escape and the murders that followed it. It would be another two months before Eden appeared in the House again to issue a statement about the affair.

It is abundantly clear that none of these officers met his death in the course of making his escape from Stalag Luft III or while resisting capture. The Gestapo’s contention that the wearing of civilian clothes by an escaping prisoner of war deprives him of the protection of the Prisoners of War Convention is entirely without foundation in international law and practice. From these facts there is, in His Majesty’s Government’s view, only one possible conclusion. These prisoners of war were murdered . . .

Eden ended his statement vowing that the British government would track down those responsible after the war and bring them to ‘exemplary justice’. It was a statement and a promise that made headlines in Britain and touched a chord around the world. It was only with the hindsight of years that some historians wondered whether the undoubtedly heinous crime had been taken somewhat out of context. Every day for the past several years thousands of Jews and the wretched Untermenschen of Hitler’s bogus racial theories had been consigned to Himmler’s gas chambers. The British government paid scant attention to their fate – or to the disgraceful conditions that many ordinary British servicemen suffered at the hands of the Germans. It seemed to some that some elements of the British hierarchy, in common with von Lindeiner and Braune and Rumpel, were lost in a world where the lives of the well bred and high born were valued more than those less fortunate.

Over the next two months the urns and boxes containing the cremated remains of the 50 were returned to Stalag Luft III. By then Colonel von Lindeiner was at Jeschkendorf Manor preparing for his case. He had the formidable might of the Nazi regime against him and it was difficult in the circumstances to muster a defence. It was a very stressful time for him, but the old colonel found time to think about his former prisoners. He paid for the materials and equipment necessary for them to build a memorial to the 50. On 16 September, von Lindeiner answered an urgent knocking at his door. It was one of his subordinates who had remained loyal to him. He warned him that an order for his immediate arrest and incarceration had been issued in Berlin. Von Lindeiner thanked his visitor and advised him to leave at once. Von Lindeiner did not tell his wife. He packed a bag of toiletries, expecting a knock on the door in the early morning.

The expected knock on the door before dawn did not come, but von Lindeiner and several other members of the Luftwaffe Kommandantur at Sagan were court-martialled on 5 October. The accused included Pieber and Broili, several hapless soldiers and a civil servant. The Reich sought 18 months’ imprisonment for the colonel in a bid to send out a signal to other camp Kommandants judged to be too lenient towards their prisoners. In the end they got 12 months’ imprisonment in a fortress. Von Lindeiner managed to avoid that penalty by taking a leaf out of some of his prisoners’ books. He feigned mental illness and was admitted to an army hospital.

In Stalag Luft III relations between the prisoners and their German guards had reached an all-time low. The goons began shooting at prisoners after little or no provocation resulting, sadly, in the death of a non-commissioned officer in April. Massey told his men that they must take the German warnings seriously and virtually all escape attempts were ended, which was not such a difficult decision given that an Allied victory was by now almost certain. Later on still, some guards confirmed to the men that it was now official policy for all escaped POWs to be shot. Not all escape attempts ended, however. The X-Organisation continued, now under the leadership of Wing Commander John Ellis. Crump Ker-Ramsay and Norman Canton were the chief tunnellers and Alex Cassie took over Dean & Dawson. They started another tunnel, called George, from underneath the theatre, although it was decided that they would only use it if things became a little sticky with the Germans.

Massey was repatriated to England, via Switzerland, on medical grounds. Before he went he urged his men not to do anything silly. His replacement was Group Captain D.E.L. Wilson of the Royal Australian Air Force.

In September the Nazis circulated their infamous poster. It read: ‘The escape from prison camps is no longer a sport!’ It said that certain zones in the Fatherland had been designated ‘death zones’ and any unauthorised persons entering them would be shot on sight. ‘Stay in the camp, where you will be safe!’ implored the poster. In fact, at about the same time it appeared, the prisoners were to be informed via their underground contacts with MI9 that escape was no longer regarded as an officer’s duty.

By November, George had reached under the wire, but further work was postponed until the following spring. By December, work on the memorial to the 50 victims just outside the camp had been completed and shortly after its completion Stalag Luft III witnessed what must have been one of the most extraordinary episodes of the war. On 4 December a memorial service was held. Among the small group present were senior officers of the Luftwaffe Kommandantur and an honour guard made up of German soldiers, Group Captain Wilson, and 15 officers representing each of the nations of the dead. The service was attended by two members of the Swiss Legation, representing the protecting power, and was presided over by an Anglican and a Roman Catholic cleric. At the end a bugler from North Compound sounded ‘The Last Post’ and the German honour guard fired a volley of shots into the cold Silesian sky. There can have been few more moving tributes paid during the Second World War from one side to the other.

As the Escape Committee had predicted, it was the German speakers who ended up having the easiest ride, particularly the indigenous European ones.

In contrast to many of the other escapers, Per Bergsland and Jens Muller encountered hardly any problems. At Sagan station they had boarded the 2.04 a.m. express train to Frankfurt an der Oder without any ado. Following them shortly afterwards were Gordon Brettell, René Marcinkus, Henri Picard and Tim Walenn. The train arrived at Frankfurt at 6 a.m. where Bergsland and Muller alighted. (The others had already got off at Kustrin.) At Frankfurt the two Norwegians aroused no suspicions and they were left to idle the hours away unharassed. At 10 a.m. they boarded a train to Stettin, arriving there shortly after 1 p.m. In Stettin they headed directly for an address in the Kleine Oder Strasse distributed to the Baltic escapers by Roger Bushell. To their horror it turned out to be a brothel for Swedish seamen and they didn’t have the sort of money to squander in such a place. They made their excuses and left. It was only by a stroke of good fortune that the men subsequently made contact with a sailor who promised to help them. He arranged for them to be smuggled onto the docks next to a ship that was bound for Sweden, instructing them to hide near a large stack of crates until he gave them the all clear. Unfortunately, that was the last they saw of him and they were left to watch the ship depart, in utter frustration. They only managed to extricate themselves from the docks by convincing the guards at the gate that they were electricians on shore leave from another Swedish ship, whose name Bergsland had memorised. It was a risky ploy and they were unlikely to have got away with it had they not been able to speak in good German with Scandinavian accents.

Bergsland and Muller laid low that night, checking into an innocuous-looking hotel, and using the familiar ploy of spending the rest of the day in the anonymity of a cinema. When night fell, they made for Bushell’s brothel once more. This time they struck lucky, meeting a couple of Swedish seamen who offered to smuggle the Norwegians onto their ship that night. Again, it was a gamble. The escapers hadn’t got the necessary documents to present to the German guards who would be waiting at the gates, but the Swedish sailors convinced them that the Germans were not always as thorough as they should be. The four men approached the docks affecting the posture of mild drunkenness after a night out on the town. To the surprise of the Norwegians the Swedes proved right. The German guards didn’t bat an eyelid and accepted their story that they had simply left their papers on board before leaving that night.

The Swedish sailors showed them to an enclosure in which the anchor was kept where they could squeeze themselves in and hide. The only problem now was that it would be a day and a half before the ship sailed. However, the Swede shipmates kept bringing little bits of food to pass the time away. It was uncomfortable for the men and disconcerting whenever strange feet approached their hiding place. They knew, too, that the ship would be searched by the Germans before it was allowed to depart. They just crossed their fingers that the search would not be a thorough one. Ultimately, the ordeal they had feared came in the form of the sound of two pairs of jackboots making their way methodically around the foredeck. Bergsland and Muller held their breath as the two German soldiers shone their torches around the compartment in which they were squeezed. At one stage, one of the Germans began feeling his way around the compartment in which the anchor chain was coiled. His hands probed the recess carefully and almost poked Bergsland in the eye.

Thankfully, the German did not register anything unusual and the two men continued to another part of the vessel. To their intense relief, shortly afterwards the Norwegians listened as the ship’s engine spluttered into action. At about 7 p.m. on the evening of 29 March the ship slipped its moorings and began making its way out of the harbour. Four hours later it docked at Göteborg, Sweden, and the men were effectively free. Erring on the side of caution, they waited until the following day when the ship steamed into Stockholm before disembarking and handing themselves over to the British Consulate. It was six days to the day that they had broken out of Stalag Luft III. They didn’t know it then, but they were the first Great Escapers to make a successful home run. Sadly, they would be part of a very exclusive group.

Bob van der Stok was the only other escaper to make a home run. Again, it was undoubtedly his linguistic abilities and familiarity with occupied Europe that helped him gain his freedom. He was, however, at large for many more weeks than the two Norwegians. Van der Stok had made the decision to escape on his own. He thought a partner was more likely to be a hindrance than a help. After his alarming encounter with the German guard in the woods around Stalag Luft III, and the girl on the platform who said she was looking for escaped officers, van der Stok had no further unpleasant surprises. He left on the same 1 a.m. train for Breslau as Gouws, Kidder, Kirby-Green and Stevens. After it pulled into Breslau without incident the Dutchman purchased a ticket to Alkmaar in the Netherlands. The journey would require three changes.

He arrived in Dresden later that day at 10 a.m. and, faced with some 12 hours to kill before his next departure, he had a look around one of the most beautiful medieval cities in Europe before sheltering in a picture house. At 8 p.m. he boarded a train to Hanover, where there would be an hour’s wait before continuing the journey into Holland, crossing the border at Oldenzaal. This would be the most perilous part of van der Stok’s escape because he knew the border checks would be exhaustive. As he had feared, at Oldenzaal, just before the frontier, the train was stopped and everyone was ordered off. The passengers were made to line up in a queue in front of a desk at which a Gestapo clerk inspected their papers. The agreeable feeling of freedom and anonymity that he had experienced in Dresden was quickly disappearing. Van der Stok now felt very conspicuous indeed as the line edged its way slowly forward. It was inconceivable that the tunnel had not been discovered by now. He knew his photograph would have been circulated to every Gestapo bureau in the country. The wait was torturous and as van der Stok felt his pulse quickening he could only have hoped that his alarm did not show up in beads of sweat. Finally, it was his turn to face the inspector.

‘Papiere,’ demanded the Gestapo man.

Van der Stok handed over his train tickets and bogus papers. The Gestapo man flipped the Ausweis over between his fingers.

‘Wohin?’ (Where to?) he demanded.

‘Alkmaar,’ replied van der Stok.

With only the slightest of hesitation, the German initialled the pass and handed it back to van der Stok. The RAF escaper returned to the railway carriage and collapsed in the seat, a heap of nerves as he recalled later in his 1987 memoir War Pilot Orange. But it was not over yet – and he knew it. It was not beyond the wit of the Germans to discover that in the early hours of the morning after the escape a Dutchman had purchased a ticket from Breslau to Alkmaar. There was a risk the Gestapo would be waiting for him at the station when he got off. As the train pulled into Utrecht, the station before Alkmaar, van der Stok decided to get off.

Although van der Stok had spent part of his student life in Utrecht he did not feel at home because the Nazi occupation had changed the city beyond recognition. Van der Stok made his way towards the home of one of his former professors, one of the few men he knew he could trust. The professor was delighted to see him and invited another professor who had known van der Stok over to meet him. The three men reminisced for several hours. The professors told their former pupil of how the German occupation had progressed. Van der Stok told them about flying for the RAF in England and being incarcerated in Stalag Luft III. Eventually, they arranged a safe house for him in Amersfoort.

After Jimmy James’s bleak introduction to Sachsenhausen, he was cheered up slightly, if that was possible in the circumstances, to find that one of his co-captives besides Wings Day was the indomitable Johnny Dodge. There was a mixed bag of prisoners in their compound, Sonderlager (Special Camp) A, including two Irishmen who may or may not have been Nazi collaborators, and a handful of White Russians who had fought with the Germans against the Red Army. There were several Polish RAF crew and a couple of Italian orderlies. The Italians were detailed to clean the officers’ rooms and cook for them. They proved to be masterful cooks, able to work wonders with the meagre rations the men had to share, but it was apparent to the newly arrived Stalag Luft III contingent that it was going to prove difficult knowing whom to trust. It became clear, too, that the small compound next to their own seemed to be reserved for some important prisoners (Prominenten) whom the Germans wanted to keep under wraps and were planning, no doubt, to hold as hostages when the enemy armies arrived at the gates of Berlin.

The first Englishman to greet Jimmy James on his arrival in Sachsenhausen had been Peter Churchill. Now the men discovered that Churchill had had an illustrious war indeed. He was a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) which had been set up by the British Prime Minister and Peter’s namesake to ‘set Europe ablaze’. Peter Churchill was a fluent French speaker who had lived in France and so became an obvious candidate for clandestine operations in that country. He had been caught by the Nazis on his fourth mission across the Channel with the legendary spy Odette Sansom. The courageous Frenchwoman had returned to her country with Churchill to help the Resistance sow havoc and confusion in occupied France. The two had been separated on capture and both tortured horrendously. But both stuck to their story that Peter was Winston Churchill’s nephew and Odette was Peter’s wife. Not knowing what to believe, the Gestapo erred on the side of caution and sent Churchill to Sachsenhausen as a potential ‘Prominenter’.

The British officers found themselves among a colourful cast of characters. Lieutenant General Piotr Privalov was the highest-ranking officer in the Sonderlager, a Tsarist and former university lecturer who had become a highly decorated soldier, having taken part in a number of military adventures. He had been captured by the Nazis while he was in command of an army corps at Stalingrad. Privalov was a modest and quiet soul, in complete contrast to one of his more boisterous compatriots.

Major-General Ivan Bessanov was a former commander of a fighting section of the Russian NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs – the Communist secret police), captured by the SS. Bessanov, a crude but clever man, had saved his neck by posturing as an anti-Communist. The Nazis held him as a potential head of a puppet state and there in Sachsenhausen Bessanov remained even as the Red Army was punching its way towards the German capital, and the chances of Berlin ever ruling Moscow had long since gone. Bessanov still had great ambitions for himself. The British officers were regularly treated to the general’s foul-mouthed lectures about what he would do with Russia once Stalin was deposed.

A week or so after James arrived, the British contingent was reunited with Sydney Dowse, who had been under interrogation since his capture but whose spirits seemed undimmed by the experience. The British officers were vaguely puzzled as to why they had been selected for special treatment out of the 76 escapers from Sagan. Johnny Dodge was obviously there because of his family connection – no matter how tenuous – to Winston Churchill. That was the same reason for Peter Churchill, although in reality he was not directly related to the British Prime Minister. Wings Day had been selected, perhaps, simply because he had been the SBO for most of the war and had proved such a thorn in the flesh of the Germans. But why Sydney Dowse and Jimmy James? Dowse had some fairly distinguished German family connections in the dim and distant past, but James was the modest son of an Indian tea planter. Maybe it was his record of persistent escaping that had condemned him. If so, he was soon going to show the Nazis that sending him to a notorious concentration camp with the implicit threat of death over him was no deterrent.

The Sonderlager was separate from the main concentration compound but British officers were taken into the main camp once a week for a shower. It was the first time any of them were able to witness at close quarters the full obscenity of the Nazis’ killing machine. Emaciated figures in striped pyjamas were regularly beaten and humiliated by their SS guards. A gibbet stood in the centre of the camp, a sinister reminder of the fate that awaited anybody who dared defy his SS masters. Every day the men saw the soul-destroying sight of starving and helpless prisoners being led to the execution area and gas chambers. Every day the crematorium chimney belched its foul smoke into the sky. The frequent rattle of machine-gun fire indicated the death of another poor soul attempting to escape. As the British officers lay in bed at night they listened to distant screams of agony as the SS guards gave vent to their unspeakable sadism.

Within days of Dowse arriving, he and James were discussing possible ways of getting out of this hell on earth. The Germans, with their unwavering faith in the power of bullying and bluster to intimidate people had, as usual, miscalculated. The unpleasant surroundings that the men found themselves in did nothing to diminish their desire to score a bloody blow for freedom against their barbaric oppressors – no matter what the cost. They had quickly concluded a tunnel was the only plausible way out. Yet it was only after Wings Day had had a particularly unsatisfactory encounter with the uncouth Kommandant of Sachsenhausen that he gave the men the go-ahead to plan an escape. The Kommandant had treated Day with contempt and a total lack of respect. He told him sneeringly there was no possibility of escape from his camp so they may as well give up and resign themselves to captivity – or whatever else the fates might have in store for them. The exchange brought out the fighting spirit in the Senior British Officer. Wings returned to the Sonderlager determined to prove the little Nazi wrong. He told James and Dowse they could start digging.

Sonderlager A directly abutted an empty compound next door that the Germans had not finished building. Helpfully, they had left a ladder in it, in full view of the officers. The men would only have to dig about 120 feet to get underneath the wire into the neighbouring unfinished compound. Once in, it would be child’s play to pick up the ladder and scale the 15 feet of unguarded wall beyond, which was the only obstacle to the outside world. The soil underneath Sachsenhausen was hard, which would make tunnelling difficult but at least the tunnel would not require complicated shoring. The tunnel would only need to go five feet under, sinking to about twice that to get under the wire. The trap, they decided, would have to be dug from a corner of the room Dowse and James shared. The tunnel would be a primitive affair with no ventilation or lighting, but the lack of these luxuries, desirable as they were, would at least hasten the digging operation. The men would just have to work in complete darkness, breathing in their own foul air, edging forward like moles.

The escapers had another advantage unwittingly handed to them by their captors. The Germans in their arrogance, and believing that the inmates would be so terrified of the consequences of recapture once more, made the mistake of leaving them to their own devices all day long. There were no ferrets, no emergency Appells, no sudden barrack checks. Dowse and James could happily dig away without the slightest fear of discovery. The only big problem was keeping the tunnel a secret from the prisoners in the compound whom they weren’t sure whether to trust or not. They swiftly decided that the only men who could be trusted were the Stalag Luft III officers and the two Italian orderlies. The Italians had to be trusted – there was no alternative, because they cleaned their rooms out every day. So with the two Italians recruited as stooges, the men cut a trap in the corner of the room in the hope of excavating a tunnel below. They were immediately disappointed to discover that under the trap there was very little room to disperse the soil. As a result, many difficult weeks had to be spent underneath the barrack block digging dispersal trenches, with the men working in shifts.

Despite all the factors in their favour it was a mammoth undertaking. The tunnel would be a third as long as Sagan’s Harry. But instead of a team of 600 toiling away for 12 months, the only active workers in Sachsenhausen’s X-Organisation were Dowse and James, and their only equipment consisted of a kitchen knife and some spoons. Nevertheless, the two men began the arduous task, digging one at a time in two-hour shifts. While one was under the barracks the other made sure he was conspicuous above it. It was murderously slow progress.

At least their morale was boosted virtually every day by the spectacle of Hitler’s Third Reich crumbling before their very eyes. Sachsenhausen was close enough to Berlin to give the men a grandstand view of the American daylight bombardment of the city. The officers stood in awe as day after day wave after wave of American Flying Fortresses and Liberators wheeled over their heads, unleashing their deadly loads on the burning Reich capital below. Halfway through the dig, the men were cheered to hear that the Normandy Landings had been a success. American and British armies now had a firm foothold on Hitler’s Fortress Europe in the west and, with the Russians bearing down on Berlin from the east, it could only be a matter of time before the Nazis capitulated.

However, that July the men received some news that was not quite as welcome. Courtesy of a German newspaper they read Anthony Eden’s House of Commons speech. What none of them could know, but each suspected, was that their own escape partners had been among those executed by the Gestapo. Yet such a possibility merely strengthened the men’s will to hit back at an enemy whose abject depravity they could now see for themselves every day all around them. Wings Day summoned a conference to discuss whether they should continue with the escape. It was the shortest conference of an ‘escape committee’ in memory. James and Dowse continued to dig. Peter Churchill did not feel he could help because he thought if he was found out he would almost certainly be shot. Day and Dodge wanted to contribute, but the older men couldn’t have worked as fast or as nimbly as the younger officers, and it was vital that they kept an RAF presence above ground or the guards might smell a rat.

That same month there were two new arrivals in the Sonderlager. The first, in the form of Nikolai Rutschenko, posed a potential risk to the escape bid. A former Leningrad University lecturer who had become an officer in the Red Army and been involved in a string of extraordinary military actions, Rutschenko appeared a nice enough man but was put in the room next to the trap and his bed was directly above the tunnel. The men weren’t in any position to trust Rutschenko at first, who could very well have been a German plant, given where they had chosen to billet him, and so they had to work very quietly. The second new arrival, however, was a positive plus to their tunnel efforts. He was yet another Churchill – this time the renowned and much-decorated Colonel Jack Churchill. A flamboyant commando leader who always led his men into battle with bagpipes, Churchill had been captured on an island off the Yugoslav coast. The Germans, again assuming he might be related to the British Prime Minister, assigned him to the Prominenten of Sachsenhausen. No sooner had he arrived than Churchill volunteered to help the men build their tunnel. By then they had only just finished the preparatory work of digging dispersal trenches under the barracks. Just as Churchill arrived they were ready to sink a shaft and begin the actual tunnel.

In the meantime, that other Great Escaper was still at large. Bob van der Stok had been in Amersfoort for almost a month. He had discovered that the local resistance movement was unable to help him: it appeared that they had been hit hard by recent Gestapo arrests and they seemed to question whether van der Stok was who he said he was. Eventually, he decided to strike out on his own and try and retrace the route he had taken to escape to Britain in 1940. The resistance gave him directions to a safe house in Maastricht and smuggled him across the Maas River into Belgium. In Belgium, van der Stok found himself alone and without money. Desperate, he walked into a bank and claimed that he had lost his wallet. If they allowed him to phone his uncle in Antwerp, he felt sure he would forward him some money. The gamble paid off. His uncle wired him some funds and gave him the address of a wealthy friend where his nephew could stay. Van der Stok found himself spending the next several weeks in comparative luxury in the Brussels suburb of Uccle. His uncle’s friend was the director of an insurance company and lived in a house that boasted a tennis court, which van der Stok was invited to make liberal use of. Unfortunately for him, though, the local resistance in Brussels was also reluctant to help. Once more the Nazis had made inroads into the resistance movement. There had been arrests, torture and executions. Nobody was to be trusted; least of all a bright young man who seemed to have friends in high places and a less than convincing cover story. Van der Stok was on his own again.

Delighted though he was to have found such a haven of luxury after so many years of deprivation, van der Stok was nevertheless anxious to get back to Britain and continue the fight against Nazi Germany. His host arranged for him to go to Paris with all the appropriate travel permits. There van der Stok headed south for Toulouse and from there to the small town of St-Gaudens, where he had been given the name of a contact by the Belgium underground. He had been told to go to a café but had forgotten the name of the establishment. His contact had merely told him that it would be impossible for a Dutchman to forget the name. So van der Stok found himself wandering around St-Gaudens for hours looking for a café name that would jog his memory. Finally he saw it: Café L’Orangerie. How could he have forgotten it? After presenting himself to the mistress of the Café L’Orangerie he was given a change of clothing and taken to a farmhouse several miles out of town. Van der Stok was now in the hands of the Maquis, the French Resistance. His new home was refuge to several fugitives, including an American, a Canadian and 13 German Jews.

The next day van der Stok listened as the maquisards gave the group directions about how they were all going to escape. They would walk in darkness towards the Pyrenees, climbing in single file towards a pass in the mountains. Anybody who ran or fell out of line would be shot on the spot. The escape would be financed by everybody handing over their money. The refugees put their hands into their pockets and produced all the currency they had. That night they set off. It was a tortuous trip. The weather was freezing cold. The wind became more icy the higher the men and women progressed. Eventually they found a resting place for the night at a farmhouse in the foothills of the mountains. They were all hungry and exhausted. The following day there was a disaster. Van der Stok volunteered to accompany one of the maquisards and the American down to a local village where they would acquire supplies from a café. When they arrived there they found the place had been discovered by the Germans. Several cars full of armed German soldiers descended on the café, machine-guns blazing. The three men escaped unhurt but the group was ordered to quickly transfer to the safer environs of the ruins of a castle. The following morning the group was led over the mountain pass. Once more it was an exhausting experience. On the other side of the mountain, the maquisard pointed to a green mountain pass in the far distance.

‘On the other side of that pass is Spain,’ said their guide. ‘You must make your own way from here.’ And with that simple gesture, the man was gone. The group decided to separate: the German Jews sticking together; and the military officers taking a different route. Some hours later van der Stok was in Spain and heading for the British Embassy in Madrid. He flew back to England via Gibraltar. Within two months van der Stok was back in Britain and soon commanding 322 (Dutch) Squadron of Spitfires flying sweeps over Holland.

By early September the tunnel in Sachsenhausen had advanced 110 feet. The men checked the newspaper weather forecasts and saw that the next moonless night was on 23 September. They had two weeks to prepare for the break-out. Jimmy James and Jack Churchill were going out together. James still had his Sagan break-out kit and Churchill had modified his service uniform to make it look like civilian clothing. But the coarseness of their disguises was no impediment. They were planning to jump freight trains all the way to the Baltic and well-tailored suits would not be the order of the day. Wings Day and Sydney Dowse had civilian suits ‘lent’ to them by the Italian orderlies. They were planning to try and get to France and link up with the underground. Johnny Dodge was going out alone. His plan was simply to walk west and hope to encounter the Allied line.

When 23 September came the five men crawled through the tunnel. There was a slight hiccup due to faulty calculations that meant that James and Dowse had to dig a few extra feet, but after a short delay the men emerged into the disused compound. There they found the ladder had remained faithfully in its place where it had been for the past six months. Within minutes the RAF officers were clambering over the walls of Sachsenhausen concentration camp. All five of them stood at the foot of the wall, hardly able to disguise their excitement – or to beleive the breathtaking simplicity with which the last stage of the escape had been executed. They shook hands and wished one another ‘good luck’ before disappearing into the night. Once more they had defied their captors. This time they did so in the certain knowledge that recapture must surely mean death.

The escape of the five British officers from Sachsenhausen astonished the Germans and prompted yet another Grossfahndung. Posters describing the men and demanding that they be apprehended on sight appeared all over occupied Europe. The notice was broadcast on the radio, twice.

By early October the five Sachsenhausen escapers had been recaptured. Wings Day and Sydney Dowse were the first to be caught, having progressed no further than the outer suburbs of Berlin. They were sheltering in the cellar of a bombed-out house when a suspicious woman betrayed them to the police. Their reception shortly afterwards back at Sachsenhausen was as they had expected. Instead of being taken back to their old barracks in the Sonderlager, they were taken to a notorious prison block or bunker called the Zellenbau (cell block) where they were each dispatched to separate cells. The men knew little about the Zellenbau other than that few of its inhabitants ever emerged from it alive. The next stop, they could only presume, was undoubtedly the gas chamber. The two men were actually chained to the floor of their cells, a seemingly needless cruelty, especially for Day, who had badly injured his knee. The Germans offered him no medical attention and he was in a great deal of pain.

In the meantime, Johnny Dodge had managed to make it all the way to Rostock, walking along the railway line and catching a freight train for 20 miles. He finally holed himself up for four weeks, first in a hayloft and then in a pigsty, which may have brought back wry memories of Roger Bushell’s first failed escape from Dulag Luft’s malodorous goatshed. Dodge had decided the safest bet was to sit it out and await the liberation from the Russians, which could surely not be far away, but he was betrayed by a farmer and handed over to the police. The policeman told him that he had known of his presence for some time and would have been happy to leave him there. Like almost everybody else in Germany he was just longing for the end of the war. Now that Dodge had been betrayed it was more than the policeman’s life was worth not to do anything about it. However, the policeman promised to do Dodge one favour. He accepted from him a list of the men who had been in Sachsenhausen and promised to try and get it to the authorities in London.

Jimmy James and Jack Churchill were the longest on the run, having made it to Poland, where they fell into the hands of the Home Guard. They too were not expecting a warm reception back at Sachsenhausen and found themselves in the Zellenbau – though not treated half as badly as Wings and Dowse. In James’s cell the only amenities were a bucket for a toilet and an iron bunk. The only light came from a barred window seven feet up. He lay down on the mattress. ‘I felt curiously detached,’ he recalled in his memoir, Moonless Night, ‘and began to contemplate what might remain of my life, and what may lie in the life hereafter, with the sanguine hope that my latter period on earth might shorten my stay in purgatory.’

The RAF man’s reverie did not last long. Within hours he was rudely awakened by his SS jailer to be informed that it was strictly forbidden to lie down on the bed during daylight. The man was SS Warrant Officer Kurt Eccarius, known as the ‘Beast of the Bunker’, who was exposed after the war as a sadistic torturer of the worst kind. As Eccarius screamed at James, the Kommandant of the camp stood in the background looking at the prisoner with contempt in his gimlet eyes framed by rimless spectacles. He didn’t utter a word as Eccarius slammed the door on James and left him in peace once more.

The following morning James was reunited momentarily with Churchill when he was taken down to the communal washroom and to his great delight also found Dowse and Day. They could only communicate in hushed whispers and so at the time James knew little of the other men’s experiences at the hands of the Nazi authorities. Later he was to discover that after their return Day was repeatedly interrogated, first by an officer of the SD, and then by what appeared to be a kangaroo court of Kripo and other police, presided over by some sort of lawyer. However, the fact that the police were present gave Day a little comfort. During hours of relentless questioning it was clear that they were trying to get the British officer to incriminate himself as a spy or saboteur, and hand them the excuse they needed to execute all five men. They told him it was a well-known fact that British POWs were in constant contact with British Intelligence. They pressed him to admit that he had been in touch with the underground movement. Wings, despite his exhaustion and the acute discomfort caused by his knee injury, was wary of every trap that was being laid for him and didn’t admit a thing. Instead, he repeatedly expressed his outrage at their disregard for the Geneva Convention. It was a classic confrontation that has gone on in police cells since time immemorial: one side trying to wear the other down with a combination of sympathetic understanding and threats; the other resisting the overwhelming temptation to throw in the towel.

Seeing that they faced a formidable opponent, the inquisitors adopted a different approach. Over the next week Wings was subjected to four more interrogations, two with an SD officer who tried to casually coax a confession out of him deploying the matey, conversational approach that had become a feature of Dulag Luft interrogations. Once more Day did not allow himself to fall into any traps. Finally, he was returned to the kangaroo court.

He later admitted that he was at breaking point. They had succeeded in wearing him down. He was exhausted, becoming confused by their pedantry and in pain. He decided there was no other option left but to go on the offensive. Wings stood up and confronted the panel before him. He angrily pointed out he was a professional soldier who had served in two world wars. He had spent the best part of this one incarcerated in various camps and he would do anything he could to escape back to England. It was his duty as an officer and his fervent desire as a human being. There were, he told them, hundreds of German officers in British captivity who at this very moment would be feeling the same way about their plight. If they attempted to escape and were recaptured they would be treated fairly by the Allies. At that Wings collapsed in his chair, unable to muster another word. He was surprised to hear the president of the panel say, benevolently: ‘We understand, Wing Commander.’

Jimmy James had also been interrogated by an SS officer, but the experience had not been anywhere near as wearing. Subsequently, he was left to ponder his fate in his cell. He had literally been left there to rot, with no exercise privileges and a diet of ersatz coffee, black bread and foul soup. At one stage James admits he began to wonder whether death might have been a welcome release from the sheer boredom he was being forced to endure, but he quickly banished such thoughts from his mind. It took an enormous amount of willpower to overcome the bleakness of his situation. All around there was death and pain. Dowse witnessed three men being hung from gallows outside his window one day. All the men were kept awake by the abominable sounds of screaming and torture.

Shortly afterwards, James and the other prisoners were put under a more relaxed regime. They were allowed to read books and German newspapers. Their diet was improved, albeit imperceptibly and they were allowed to exercise in a little walled garden. It was then that they learnt of Wings’s disagreeable experience at the hands of the kangaroo court. The men concluded that Day’s ill-tempered rant before the panel had probably saved them all from execution, at least in the immediate future. They were all very grateful for his wisdom and strength of character. It might also have helped that Sydney Dowse, under equally harsh interrogation, had told his inquisitors that while he had been a free man he had posted two letters. One to the Kommandantur of Stalag Luft III and the other to the International Red Cross, giving the details of the men’s recapture and detention in Sachsenhausen.

The British officers concluded that they were probably being held now as potential hostages along with a score of interesting characters they found themselves sharing the cell block with. There were 100 or so prisoners in all. They included Pastor Martin Niemoller, the one-time U-boat commander turned anti-Nazi clergyman who was perhaps the most potent symbol of the resistance to Hitler within Germany. Another Prominenter was Captain S. Payne Best, the British intelligence chief kidnapped from Holland by the Gestapo. There was an Austrian general, a former German ambassador to Spain, a prominent Polish agent, and the parents of a German agent who had defected to the Allied cause. There were a handful of British service personnel of more than usual value to the Germans. They were all obviously people the Nazis wanted to keep alive, if only to use as gambling chips when the Allies finally arrived at the gates of Berlin, as everybody by now surely realised they would.

The men settled down to await the end of the war like everyone else in the hell that was Sachsenhausen. Johnny Dodge was as indefatigable as ever and his booming voice could be heard singing songs as he exercised in his cell. But Sachsenhausen was a diabolical place and the men were witnesses to a daily toll of slaughter. They were rarely relieved of the sounds of bestial torture practised on the thousands and thousands of prisoners who were sent to Sachsenhausen to be liquidated. Ironically, one of the new prisoners to be sent to the Zellenbau that winter was General Artur Nebe, the man who had decided which 50 of the 76 airmen should die. His curiously anomalous role as a dedicated member of the German resistance movement had finally been exposed when he was implicated in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. To Nebe’s credit he had survived three months of Gestapo torture without giving anything away. He was not sent to the gas chamber or shot like most of the victims. He was strung up by piano wire to die a long and agonising death, as Hitler decreed all the plotters should do.

Christmas 1944 came and went. The men presented one another with Christmas cards made out of toilet paper and feasted on SS stew. One night they listened to the eerie strains of ‘Silent Night’ wafting over the bleak barrack block roofs of the death camp. The incongruous sound did not make anybody feel any better, but in the heart of each man it intensified his hatred for the Nazis. At least they had the genuine comfort of feeling the intensification of the Allied bombing raids, the cell block shaking as the aircraft of the United States ‘Mighty’ Eighth Air Force bombarded the Reich capital. The New Year came, for once the men happy to be in the relative warmth of the cell block and not at the mercy of the bitter German winter outside. February arrived, however, with a note of apprehension. Johnny Dodge unaccountably and mysteriously disappeared. He went without warning and there was no explanation as to his fate from the SS guards. The men were understandably worried. Shortly afterwards they were summoned out of their own cells by the Kommandant. He told them they were going back to Sonderlager but pleaded: no more escaping.

‘Next time you will be shot,’ were his last words.

In the Sonderlager the men were delighted to find their old friends. Peter Churchill greeted them and told them they had all feared their friends had all been executed. But there was no sign of Johnny Dodge.

On the cold February morning that he disappeared from the Zellenbau, Johnny Dodge had indeed woken up to the ominous presence of two SS guards at his cell door demanding he accompany them. And when they marched him out of the building he could have been forgiven for thinking that his time had finally come. The absence, though, of any handcuffs should have been a little reassuring. For instead of being taken into the main camp to face one of the SS’s many odious methods of liquidation, Dodge was introduced to a pleasant young SS officer who informed the major that he was taking him to Berlin. On the journey to the capital in an SS staff car, the young officer gave no clue as to what Dodge’s fate would be. To the older man’s surprise, however, he was not taken to Gestapo headquarters or to any of the other sinister Reich institutions that flashed through his mind. Instead the car pulled up outside a department store. It was almost a year since the first escapers from Sagan had arrived in Berlin and looked on astonished to see the effect that the massive aerial bombardment had had on the once-great city. Now the sheer scale of the devastation was apparent to Dodge. There was hardly a building standing. Empty shells of apartment and office buildings towered above him. The streets were strewn with fallen masonry and burnt-out vehicles. Palls of black and yellow smoke hung above the ghostly scene.

The SS man ushered Dodge through the doors of the department store, which itself had been bombed and battered but was still standing. He informed him he was to purchase an off-the-peg suit and other items of a civilian wardrobe. Smelling a rat, Dodge demanded to know why. It was only after the SS man assured the British officer that he would not be compromised by wearing the outfit that Dodge selected an agreeable grey suit, crisp white shirt, a fetching tie and socks to match, along with a change of clean underwear. Shortly thereafter Dodge was taken to an opulent apartment, which, he was told, was the home of a senior SS officer and would be at his disposal during his stay in Berlin. By now Dodge was beginning to have an inkling of what might be going on. It was when he was introduced to another Nazi that his suspicions were confirmed.

Dr Hans Thost was a senior member of the German Foreign Ministry. He arrived at the apartment to find Dodge happily ensconced in the apartment, freshly bathed, fragrant (presumably with the SS man’s aftershave), and looking very content in his new grey suit. After expressing solicitous concern for the major’s comfort, Dr Thost suggested they dine at the Hotel Adlon, Berlin’s most exclusive hotel. The Adlon was used throughout the latter part of the war as almost an adjunct to the Chancellery complex for out-of-town VIPs summoned to Berlin, although Dodge had no way of knowing that then. When they arrived at the hotel, Dodge discovered a private room had been reserved for them and in it was another German who was introduced to him as an interpreter. In fact, Paul Schmidt was not just any old interpreter but the Führer’s personal one.

‘We’re sending you home, Major Dodge,’ is one version of the events that rapidly unfolded. ‘We’d like you to be reunited with your kinsman, Mr Churchill.’

So he was to be a peace emissary to his English cousin many times removed. Dodge had actually met Churchill two or three times, and he rather relished the idea of popping across the Channel on such an important and delicate mission, but he could not resist a wry smile at the conditions he was to lay down for the Prime Minister. Schmidt told him that an unconditional surrender was out of the question, and the Führer would only agree to peace terms if Germany’s pre-war boundaries were restored and the balance of power in Europe was maintained. Hitler was not the only senior Nazi to entertain such extraordinary delusions. Himmler had for months been secretly negotiating with the Swedish representative of the Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, in the hope of coming to an arrangement whereby he would rule Germany after the war. And Hermann Göring also believed that he could strike a pact with the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whereby he would succeed Hitler as the head of state of the new Germany. None of them seemed to be able to comprehend the magnitude of the free world’s hatred of them. Time was well and truly up. President Roosevelt was intent on putting the lot of them on trial for war crimes. Prime Minister Churchill would have been quite happy to have Germany razed to the ground, and every last German with it, as indeed he had often said. Nevertheless, Dodge tried to keep a straight face for fear that they might rescind their tempting offer of freedom at last.

Dodge himself almost became a victim of Churchill’s fervent desire to burn every last acre of Germany to the ground. A few days later Thost drove him to Dresden, where the two of them only narrowly missed being caught in the firestorm created by the Allied attack on the ancient city. Thost was taking Dodge to Switzerland, where he finally arrived on 25 April. The two men shook hands, Thost still clearly believing that a deal was possible. In fact, within days Hitler would have committed suicide. His henchmen were already stuffing their bags with Swiss francs and making their getaway plans. The Red Army was about to administer the coup de grâce to Hitler’s Third Reich.

Dodge was debriefed by MI6 in the British Legation in Brest and a week later had been flown back by the usual circuitous neutral route to England. He didn’t get to see Winston Churchill straightaway as the Prime Minister was too busy overseeing the final annihilation of Hitler’s Germany. However, the American ambassador, John G. Winant, eventually managed to arrange a dinner for the two men. Churchill listened with great amusement to the major’s tale over brandy and cigars in 10 Downing Street. Two days later Germany agreed to unconditional surrender. The war in Europe was finally over.