The Great Escapers

The days of the Third Reich were numbered after the success of the Normandy Landings. As 1944 progressed there was rarely any good news for Hitler. In the west, the American, Canadian and British armies faced fierce resistance from the defending Germans and their advance toward the Nazi heartland was slow, but it was sure. In the east, the Red Army was advancing remorselessly on a broad front, raping and ransacking its way towards Berlin. All that remained of the German Navy was its formidable fleet of U-boats, but they had been cornered in the Norwegian fjords and were being hunted down relentlessly by the RAF’s Coastal Command and the Royal Navy. Many of Germany’s cities had been reduced to rubble. Allied fliers were regarded with even more intense hatred than they had been in March. The Allied officers in Stalag Luft III became worried for their own safety. Hints from friendly goons indicated that their captors might consider using the men as hostages or the SS could quite conceivably be ordered by Berlin to wipe them out.

Herbert Massey had been repatriated to England via Switzerland on medical grounds. The new SBO, Group Captain Wilson ordered the men to organise themselves into fighting units, each with a responsibility to perform certain tasks should the worst come to the worst. Some were prepared to disable the goon towers. Others would rush the main gate and occupy the Vorlager and so on. It was a forlorn hope, of course – unarmed and starving men fighting, possibly, against a heavily armed division of SS troops – but the men reasoned it was better to go down fighting than to just accept their fate.

By January 1945, Hitler’s Germany was teetering on the brink of the abyss. Indeed, Hitler himself was soon to effectively give up the fight and abandon his field headquarters in favour of the subterranean world of his bunker in Berlin, a city now virtually razed to the ground. There had been rumours all that winter in Stalag Luft III that something was afoot. The prisoners feared the worst and had increased their preparations for a fight. The tunnel, George, which before it was closed down for the winter, extended just beyond the wire, could be opened quickly as an escape route should the need arise. At the end of the month they were told that the entire camp was to be evacuated westward. The news was delivered in the North Compound in the theatre where the players were rehearsing The Wind and the Rain. ‘Pack up and be ready to move in an hour’s time,’ they were told. In the American South Compound they were playing (appropriately enough) ‘You Can’t Take it With You’ when the Senior American Officer arrived and gave them 30 minutes to pack up and be at the main gate. It came as something of a relief to all the prisoners that they were not going to be cut down one by one by the SS, but the conditions they were to face on the long march west would prove horrendous.

It began on 27 January as six columns of 12,500 prisoners were marched out of the main gate under heavy guard. Their destination was Spremberg, near Cottbus, some 40 miles away. Under normal circumstances, it was hardly a great distance for military men to walk. But these men were half-starved and barely clothed. Their rations on the march were even less than in the camp. Bub Clark was so incensed when one man stole another’s single potato that he put him on report – and took up the case after the war with Washington DC. His superiors were incredulous and refused to pursue the action. ‘They just couldn’t understand what one little potato meant to a man,’ said Clark many years later. The temperatures were below freezing, producing blizzards, ice and a thick layer of snow that quickly turned into a mud bath nurturing germs and lice. Hundreds of men became ill. Scores fell by the roadside exhausted. Many Allied officers and their German guards died.

Despite the agony of the march, a feeling of comradeship grew between prisoners and guards. They were all in the same boat now. The airmen carried the rifles and ammunition of some the goons who were too weak to do so themselves. Glemnitz excelled himself, making sure that whatever deprivations the men suffered they would always – with one exception – sleep under cover at night. The local population came out to offer the men little morsels of food and drink in exchange for items from their Red Cross parcels. One village invited the grateful men into their houses for the night, only to have their generosity rescinded by the SS, who threw the Allied officers back into the streets. Incredibly, some of the RAF men’s minds were still on escape. Bob Stanford-Tuck and a Polish officer, Zbishek Kustrzynski, stayed behind in a barn one morning when the column had continued on. They slogged through the snow and blizzards to the Russian line and arrived triumphantly at the British Embassy in Moscow shortly thereafter.

At Spremberg the prisoners were dispatched in different directions on cattle trains, which provided a momentary comfort to the weary men. The occupants of North Compound were taken to a decrepit naval POW camp at Marlag und Milag Nord, 37 miles north of Bremen, and not far from the North Sea. It was a miserable place but the proximity to England did a great deal to boost their morale. They could almost feel the breeze from the sea which they knew from BBC radio reports was now under the complete control of the Royal Navy. The Americans of the South Compound were sent south to Moosburg, near Munich, and the men from the East Compound were taken to a POW camp near Berlin. Each group was clearly being situated at a location where they would be most useful as bargaining chips to their advancing armies.

Then in early April the RAF men at Marlag und Milag Nord were inexplicably ordered out of their camp and marched eastwards to another near Lübeck. They didn’t mind it so much when the column was strafed by a pack of RAF Tempests as at least that meant their own side was close. But when the senior officers discovered that the camp they were destined for was infested with lice, they ordered the men to stay put. They commandeered a couple of large commercial farming estates and made them their temporary home, festooning the rooftops with banners proclaiming: ‘RAF POWs’. The Germans were too exhausted to do anything to stop them. The end was now in sight. The news of Hitler’s death filtered through shortly after 30 April to whoops of delight from the RAF men and, most probably, relief in the hearts of most Germans. On 2 May a British tank of the 11th Armoured Division rolled into the farm, its bewildered occupants soon to be mobbed by a cheering crowd of bedraggled Kriegies. Five days later Germany capitulated. Shortly afterwards most of the RAF prisoners were flown back to England, where they were deloused before being offered tea and biscuits in a warm if understated welcome by their countrymen.

For Colonel von Lindeiner, as for many Germans who had been forced into a war they did not want, the experience after hostilities had ended was not quite so happy. Like the POWs of Stalag Luft III, their former Kommandant was caught up in the chaos of refugees fleeing the Russian advance. The army hospital in which he was ‘recuperating’ was evacuated two days before Stalag Luft III, but the commanding officer of the hospital told von Lindeiner that he could not take him with them. Instead, the colonel made his way home to Jeschkendorf Manor, where, after a brief reunion with his wife, he reported for active duty to the local military authorities. He was immediately appointed second in command of a division defending Sagan against the overwhelming Russian onslaught. When his superior officer was killed in combat von Lindeiner became the commanding officer only to be wounded in action shortly afterwards, on 12 February. He was shot in the shoulder and foot – serious injuries for an elderly man. Fortunately, though, the advancing Soviet soldiers left him for dead and he was able to crawl away from the battlefront to Sagan. Eventually he was admitted to a military hospital at Harz, whereupon he fell into the hands of first the American Army and then the British. He might have expected to be relieved by the experience but to his acute distress von Lindeiner soon learnt that the British were investigating him for war crimes in relation to the 50 murdered airmen.

Von Lindeiner was treated despicably by the British. At one stage of his imprisonment he was left for two days with nothing more than bare boards to sleep on, and no eating utensils. His demands to know what he had done to deserve such squalid treatment fell on deaf ears and he never received a satisfactory explanation. In August 1945, he was dispatched to the London Cage (actually a small Kensington mansion), where German POWs were sent for interrogation after the war. He remained in British captivity for two years, not returning to the British Zone in Berlin until 1947. By then Jeschkendorf Manor had fallen into Russian hands. The von Lindeiners’ apartment in Berlin had been destroyed by bombing and his wife’s estate in Holland had been confiscated. The colonel’s wife had spent the intervening years surviving by teaching music and language lessons.

Many former prisoners wrote to the prosecuting powers speaking up in favour of the former Kommandant. Some were a little reluctant to do so. Von Lindeiner wrote to Bob van der Stok asking for his help. Van der Stok was sympathetic to his cause but he had returned to Holland after the war to find two brothers had been murdered by the Gestapo, and his father tortured to such an extent that he was blinded. He could not find it in his heart to positively assist anybody linked to the Nazi regime. He wrote back to Colonel von Lindeiner and told him he could not help him, but assured him he would not testify against him. It would be three years before von Lindeiner cleared his name. At his own trial, Hermann Göring said that von Lindeiner was ‘not connected’ with the shootings.

After hostilities had ceased, the RAF stood by Anthony Eden’s pledge to administer ‘exemplary justice’ to the malfeasants who were responsible for the 50 murders. A team of investigators from the Air Force’s Special Investigation Branch (SIB) set about tracking down the perpetrators. It was no easy task. It was some 17 months after the killings in Silesia and many of the minor Gestapo and SS officials involved had disappeared in the chaos of post-war Europe. In any case, many such men had taken their own lives out of fear of the bloody retribution from the Red Army that they knew was sorely justified. Nor did it help that much of Europe was now under Soviet domination. The Communist Bloc powers did not bend over backwards to help the British investigators and sometimes actively hindered them. In some respects they could not be blamed. The murders of 50 Air Force officers paled in comparison somewhat with the Russians’ massive civilian and military casualties and the millions of innocents slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis.

Nevertheless, the SIB men persisted. Many of their leads came from the interrogations of Germans suspected of being involved in war crimes conducted in the London Cage under the supervision of Lieutenant-Colonel A.P. Scotland (who subsequently wrote a book about that intriguing episode of his life). For three years the investigators travelled to every corner of Europe to which they were allowed access. Happily, some of the new Communist governments proved more helpful than others, in particular the Czechs. And the investigators were given valuable clues as to where the airmen were killed by the fact that almost all the urns returned to Stalag Luft III identified the place of cremation. As time progressed, though, the size of the SIB team depleted until there were only a handful of people on the case. In the circumstances their efforts proved to be an extraordinary feat of detective work.

The SIB compiled a dossier of 72 culprits who were directly involved in the murders and, given that Himmler had ordered the killings to be carried out in the strictest of secrecy, it was nothing short of remarkable that the team was able to produce detailed recreations of almost all the killings. They were able to account for all but a tantalising three of the 72 men for whom they went in search. Ultimately, 18 men were brought before the courts and most were prosecuted successfully. The trials began on 1 July 1947 in Hamburg, and eventually resulted in 14 death sentences, although one of the sentences was commuted to life imprisonment. The sentences were carried out, by hanging, in February the following year. Other defendants received hefty prison sentences. One case was dismissed, but that was not the end of the story of the RAF’s ‘exemplary justice’. One case actually came to court as late as 1967, when the defendant was given two years’ imprisonment for his part in the murders.

During the trials, Colonel von Lindeiner was called as a witness. The court wanted to know if before March 1944 he had any direct knowledge of an SS plan to murder escaped officers in the future. Prosecutors were curious about von Lindeiner’s meeting in February 1944 with SS Major Erich Brunner, the head of POW security in the area. They wanted to know why Brunner had not checked the anti-escape measures at Stalag Luft III. Allied investigators suspected that the German High Command had wanted a mass break-out to justify a tough crackdown on escapes. Max Wielen, the chief of the Breslau Kripo, had hinted to them that ‘the shootings might have been discussed in the camp’.

Von Lindeiner had certainly been agitated after the escape, repeatedly telling the Allied officers: ‘You do not realise what you have done.’ He had threatened to shoot the men himself and some officers claimed that they had heard him saying the recaptured men would be handed over to the Gestapo for execution. But at the Hamburg trials, von Lindeiner denied any direct knowledge. He said he had merely sensed a distinct change in the climate regarding escaped POWs and had tried to pass his concerns on to the senior Allied officers. This was certainly true. Reminding him that he had taken an oath of loyalty to the Führer, Colonel von Lindeiner was asked what would his response have been had he received a ‘Hitler Order’ to shoot Allied prisoners of war under his care in Stalag Luft III. He replied: ‘In such a case I would take my own life.’ Most Allied officers who knew von Lindeiner would find it hard to disbelieve that statement. He might have been on the wrong side, but von Lindeiner was a gentleman.

Sadly, von Lindeiner was one of the few gentlemen to appear before the Hamburg court but, poring over the transcripts of those proceedings, it is difficult not to feel a little sympathy for some of the smaller men and minor minions caught up in an atrocity beyond their control. The men who ended up having to do the dirty work were not the big fish that had orchestrated the outrage. They weren’t the masterminds behind the millions of other slaughters of Hitler’s reign of terror. Some were, undoubtedly, the worst sort of Nazi psychopaths. The Gestapo agent who shot Tom Kirby-Green, Erich Zacharias, was implicated in at least two other murders and the rape and killing of an 18-year-old girl. Zacharias was a weasel of a creature and, typical of his sort, attempted to claim he had been tortured in the London Cage by the British into making his confession. The majority of the murderers were otherwise harmless souls, weak and compliant men, and often very stupid people. They found themselves caught up in a terrible situation and had little choice in the matter, and neither the wit nor the imagination nor the courage to do anything about it. One interesting aspect of the SIB investigation for historians is that it illustrated (as in the case of SS General Artur Nebe) the curious anomalous position that ordinary and sometimes good people find themselves in under the all-powerful embrace of a totalitarian state. Alfred Schimmel was a case in point. He was ordered to kill Tony Hayter the day after his capture, which happened to be Good Friday, but Schimmel was a deeply religious man and could not square his conscience with carrying out such a dark deed on the holiest day of the year. He resolved this acute moral dilemma by taking Hayter out and having him shot immediately on the Thursday.

Most of the Gestapo chiefs who received the orders to carry out the killings made sure they delegated them to someone else but Leopold Spann of Saarbrücken Gestapo was different. Spann was the man detailed to murder Roger Bushell and Bernard Scheidhauer. He at least was brave enough to do the dirty work himself, along with a Gestapo agent, Emil Schulz. Spann had been killed in an air raid by the end of the war, but the SIB men found out what had happened to Bushell and Scheidhauer thanks to the testimony of the driver who witnessed their last moments. The RAF officer and his Free French counterpart had been taken from the police jail and driven along country roads for about an hour. Eventually, Spann told them they could get out and relieve themselves if they liked. The two prisoners went off into the bushes. Spann and Schulz followed with their guns drawn. When the men began to relieve themselves Spann gave a signal, both the Germans raised their pistols and shot their helpless victims from behind.

The full details were later confirmed by Schulz at his trial. ‘Scheidhauer fell on his face,’ he testified. ‘I think Bushell crumpled up, fell somewhat on his right side and was lying there turned on his back. On approaching closer I noticed the dying man was in convulsions. I lay on the ground and shot him in the left temple, whereupon death took place immediately.’ Most of the men were killed in this cowardly and deceitful manner, in pairs or shot alone, but not all. A group including Gordon Brettell, René Marcinkus, Henri Picard and Tim Walenn were taken in a lorry, very much as the film depicted, and machine-gunned down at the top of a hillside.

Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, the Breslau Gestapo chief, was more typical than Spann of the men who were handed the responsibility for killing the Allied officers. A slippery, evasive man, Scharpwinkel ordered the killings of James Catanach, Arnold Christensen, Halldor Espelid and Nils Fugelsang. If Spann evaded the RAF’s exemplary justice by getting killed, Scharpwinkel did so by switching sides. After the war he moved to Moscow, where he appeared to be too valuable an asset to the Soviets for them to extradite him to the West. The Russians, though, at least allowed the investigators to interview him, and Scharpwinkel gave them enough information to help them work out exactly what had happened. (Shortly afterwards, the RAF was told by the Russians that Scharpwinkel had died. Had he?) It turned out Scharpwinkel had delegated the job to his deputy Johannes Post and another Gestapo chief, Fritz Schmidt. Post and Schmidt recruited a team of Gestapo men to help them murder the four unsuspecting airmen.

The SIB investigators never found Schmidt, but they tracked down Johannes Post and some of his accomplices. In the men who helped carry out the killings the investigators encountered the familiar phenomenon of post-war denial that existed in Germany. They all insisted they had no idea who the RAF officers were. They had been told they were saboteurs and secret agents – and their executions were therefore entirely ‘legitimate’. It was impossible to get to the bottom of whether they were telling the truth or not. But in the ringleader, Post, the RAF investigators found no such ambiguity. Post was an unrepentant Nazi who harboured no regret for his actions.

Post took upon himself the job of murdering Catanach. He detailed the other men to take care of Christensen, Espelid and Fugelsang. The car loads of condemned men then took off from the prison. On the journey Post engaged Catanach in pleasant conversation. After ten minutes or so he told the Australian that he was going to order the car to pull over in a few more minutes.

‘What for?’ asked Catanach.

‘Because I am going to shoot you.’

Catanach couldn’t tell whether Post was joking or not, which, of course, is exactly what the German intended. He demanded to know why he was going to kill him.

‘Because those are my orders,’ replied Post quietly.

The RAF man objected that it was the duty of all officers to escape, but his words fell on deaf ears. He still did not know whether to take Post seriously or not. Post continued his casual conversation and even ordered the driver to take a diversion so that he could drop off some theatre tickets for his mistress. He was anxious that she didn’t miss the show that night. When they arrived at a quiet cutting along the roadside, Post ushered Catanach out of the car with his Walther 7.65mm pistol. Presumably Catanach still did not believe Post would do what he had threatened to do, because he seems to have willingly gone along. As he began to relieve himself, the German shot him through the back of the chest and the Australian fell to the ground.

Catanach’s body was lying by the side of the road when the other three unfortunate airmen arrived to meet their fate. Seeing what had happened, Christensen, Espelid and Fugelsang made a run for it. Two were cut down and killed immediately. One was only injured. Post walked over to the sprawling body and issued the coup de grâce.

Again, perhaps it is in some grotesque way commendable that after the war Post did not join the legions of Germans denying that they had ever had anything to do with the Nazi Party. Indeed, many people offered to act as character witnesses for him at his trial. (Post had once saved the life of a British pilot.) He refused, however, to even entertain the idea. ‘I could not have been a National Socialist for so many years,’ he explained, ‘and suddenly put in affidavits from Communists or Jews or Freethinkers.’ He described the Allied airmen as Terrorfliegers (terror fliers) and subhumans who deserved to be shot. Post was one of those hanged in February 1947.

Post and Spann were the exception to the rule. Most of the Gestapo agents tried to avoid having anything to do with the executions, going to extraordinary lengths to deputise the work to others. The case of Dennis Cochran is a typical example. He was in the custody of the Kripo at Ettlingen, near Karlsruhe, but it was the local Gestapo that received the instructions to murder Cochran on the morning of 31 March. The chief of Karlsruhe Gestapo was a man called Josef Gmeiner. He promptly deputised the responsibility to a member of his staff, Walter Herberg, who objected but nevertheless went along to Ettlingen police station to pick up the RAF officer with two Kripo men, Otto Preiss and Wilhelm Boschert. Cochran’s death followed a depressingly familiar pattern. In his case the car pulled up near a concentration camp and he was taken to urinate by the side of the road by the two Kripo men and Herberg, but Herberg managed to keep his own hands clean. After giving the instructions to Preiss to kill the handcuffed officer, he turned his back and walked away, unable to bear looking at what was to follow. Preiss shot Cochran twice: once in the back, level with where the heart is, and once in the neck. At his trial Herberg testified that he had considered the possibility of letting Cochran escape, but that the ramifications for him would be awful. He had even considered taking his own life, but that would not have saved the life of Cochran. ‘I did not see any way out,’ said Herberg. Other defendants complained that if they did not carry out their orders, their families faced reprisals. This was undoubtedly true.

Other Gestapo agents resorted to more disingenuous methods to justify their actions. The orders to kill the men were passed from one office to another, the buck being passed down the chain. The Germans were careful to destroy all the paperwork but the SIB investigators in their interrogations of the culprits were able to reconstruct the order which was sent by teleprinter to each individual Gestapo station. Marked ‘top secret’ they originated from the RSHA, and stated that they were by the order of the Führer and the Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler. The order expressly instructed that the shootings were to be carried out in such a way that the prisoners did not know what was about to happen. However, Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, the Breslau Gestapo chief who was responsible for most of the Görlitz Kripo jail killings, claimed that he was told beforehand that the prisoners had been condemned to death by the Führer. Scharpwinkel did not carry out the shootings himself, of course, he delegated that gruesome business to others, but he implied that the men lined up and accepted their fate calmly as men condemned to death often do. Scharpwinkel’s victims included Mike Casey, Al Hake, Johnny Pohe and George Wiley. Was Scharpwinkel telling the truth? Or was he simply trying to legitimise his actions? We will never know.

It is natural to sympathise with men who had been put in an impossible situation and whose own lives were at stake if they disobeyed orders. Most had every reason to fear that they themselves would face the bullet if they did not do what they were told. Worse still, there was the very real possibility that their families would face reprisals. Most of the 72 culprits had wives and children but the RAF officers had families too. When they climbed into their aircraft and taxied down those wet and windy airstrips in Britain, they were well aware of the fact that shortly thereafter they might be dead. If they were lucky they might simply be riddled by cannon fire and die instantly. Or they might perish in a horrendous fireball. Or be smashed into the ground when their parachutes failed to open, but whatever their manner of death, they would no longer see their loved ones again.

Of course they might have been taken prisoner instead. Many who sat the rest of the war out were grateful to have been saved the prospect of having to go into battle once more. And who can blame them? But many continued to fight the war, as Wings Day vowed they would, bringing the battlefront to the Germans in their prisoner-of-war camps. They were men who endured many months, perhaps years, of extreme discomfort and hard toil, before breaking out and facing an unknown fate at the hands of a barbaric enemy. They did so in the knowledge that their next meeting with the Gestapo might mean a swift bullet in the neck. Or perhaps several weeks of unendurable torture. They did so in the knowledge that they might never see their families again and with a stoic lack of self-pity that is in stark contrast to the weasel words of their Nazi oppressors. The words of Jimmy James, thrown into a cell to await his doom, come ringing back. ‘I . . . began to contemplate what might remain of my life, and what might lie in the life hereafter, with the sanguine hope that my latter period on earth might shorten my stay in purgatory.’

Jimmy James’s war ended on a note every bit as remarkable as Johnny Dodge’s. On 1 February 1945, the Kommandant of Sachsenhausen received an order from Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller to liquidate the entire camp. Thankfully, for the sake of Jimmy James and the other British prisoners, not to mention the other 45,000 starving and brutalised inmates, he rejected the idea as impractical. (Little did James know it at the time, but he had conceived the even more diabolical idea of taking the inmates to a Baltic port, putting them in ships and sinking them.) The British prisoners were blissfully unaware of the machinations going on in Berlin, but the massive destruction of the city around them held out hope that the end was near. On 3 April, a local police inspector came to the camp to inform the British contingent that they were being evacuated south. They found themselves on two buses with the Russian Major-General Ivan Bessanov and Greek generals from the neighbouring VIP compound. The thousands of non-VIP occupants of Sachsenhausen were not in for such a comfortable journey. They were herded like cattle towards the Baltic, where the ships that would take them to their deaths awaited. Pushed and prodded by the SS, the lucky ones survived without food and drink for five days. The less lucky were shot in the back by their repulsive guards.

The British officers from Sachsenhausen found themselves in similarly uncouth conditions after a long journey through the devastation of Germany. Past the pleasant hills of the Bavarian Oberpfalz, near the Czech border, they were confronted with the high fences and barbed wire of yet another concentration camp, in this case Flossenburg. The Kommandant presumed they had been sent there for execution and they were only saved, once more, by the intervention of the friendly police inspector, Peter Mohr. Mohr had already been helpful to Wings Day. He told him that the men were VIP prisoners vital to the Reich as bargaining chips with the Allies. The men witnessed some appalling scenes at Flossenburg before being sent with a party of VIPs to Dachau. From there the party was dispatched southwards past Munich towards the Italian border in a convoy of vehicles closely guarded by a troop of trigger-happy SS men just waiting to unleash their weapons on their cargo of Prominenten.

Among the VIPs were Pastor Niemöller, Prince Frederick Leopold of Prussia and the Mayor of Vienna. Dachau was soon host to many other VIPs being sent there as hostages from all over Nazi Germany. Jimmy James encountered Count Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who had been prominent in the resistance and implicated in a plot to kill Hitler. Members of the von Stauffenberg and Goerdeler families who had been implicated in the July 1944 plot to assassinate the Führer arrived. They were known as Sippenhäftlinge (family hostages). Others included Wassili Molotov, the nephew of the Soviet foreign minister, Hjalmar Schacht, the former President of the Reichsbank, Fritz Thyssen, the businessman, Leon Blum, the ex-Prime Minister of France, and senior German officers who had refused to carry out ‘Hitler Orders’ to eliminate innocent people.

But the course of the war was changing rapidly. The prisoners occupied a town in a beautiful part of the Dolomites. They were treated to hearty Italian meals with wine and could come and go as they wished, regardless of the diktats of their SS escort. Soon, some of the German Army officers among the Prominenten were telephoning their old friends who happened to be commanding divisions nearby, asking them to guarantee their safety. Eventually, a group of Wehrmacht arrived and disarmed the SS. They took themselves out of town and were subsequently found to have been hung in the woods by Italian partisans. The Prominenten heard the news of Hitler’s death on the BBC. Jimmy James was attending a Mass of thanksgiving in a pretty church at the foot of the Dolomites when the Americans arrived in town. Shortly afterwards, the British party was flown home to England. They passed over the white cliffs of Dover and landed in Hampshire, the first time some of them had been on their native soil for five years. ‘We had passed through a nightmare experience of what can happen, in any country, when the forces of totalitarianism prevail,’ wrote Jimmy James.

After the war James learnt that he had been a lucky man indeed. After their escape from Sachsenhausen, the five men had provoked Himmler to order that they were all to be handed over to the Gestapo for verschafte Vernehmung (interrogation under torture) and then murdered and classified as ‘escaped but not recaptured’. This was exactly the same fate that befell seven British commandos caught in an operation to blow up a hydro-electric station in Norway. Indeed, Himmler not only ordered the British officers to be shot, he demanded the heads of the Kommandant, his deputy, the officer on duty on the night of 23 September, and – in an illustration of just how psychotic the Nazi leadership was – the architect who designed Sachsenhausen. In the end their death sentences were rescinded, but Gestapo agents were dispatched to the camp to kill the British officers.

Jimmy James is in no doubt that only the intervention of the Kripo saved their lives. After the war he had the pleasure of receiving a letter from the inspector in charge of the investigation, Peter Mohr, by then resident of the London Cage. Mohr wrote that the mass escape from Stalag Luft III had no doubt been the greatest as far as volume went but he said the escape of the five officers from Sachsenhausen surpassed Sagan in one way. ‘It was the most surprising, and for Himmler the most disagreeable, escape of prisoners that caused great confusion and almost severe consequences for both British and German sides.’

Jimmy James was lucky not to be one of the 50. But it wasn’t luck that made him one of the 76, or one of the hundreds and hundreds of other men in Stalag Luft III who fought endlessly to bring the battle to the enemy. It is the choices you take in life that define you and it was James’s choice to do what he did. He was joined by scores of other men from all sorts of different backgrounds and from every corner of the globe. They were bank clerks, lawyers, high-school dropouts and mining engineers. They were intellectuals and aesthetes; artists and musicians; adventurers and sportsmen. The one thing they had in common was their love of living and their hatred of oppression. Jimmy James prefaces his own memoir of that time with a quotation from the Gospel of St Matthew, Chapter 10, verse 28:

And fear not them which kill the body,

and are not able to kill the soul.

Few words can summarise the spirit that drove the Great Escapers better than those written by St Matthew when the world was still young and had yet to lose its innocence. The Great Escapers are an elderly and frail bunch today, but the young have as much to learn from their experiences as they do from the Bible that has shaped our civilisation.