While Holder and Johnson were praying for rain, a new tunnel project was making good progress. A team led by artillery lieutenant William R. “Bill” Cory from Maryland was digging from beneath Barrack Block 3A, one of the three blocks in the former Oflag XXI-B Russian compound.
Unlike Stalag Luft 3, where the wooden barrack blocks sat above-ground on brick foundations with open space between barrack floor and ground, here at Oflag 64 the brick barracks sat on foundations that ran all the way around them. This created an enclosed space between floor and ground, but it could be accessed via a trapdoor, and the ferrets regularly checked these spaces with flashlights. This prevented both the digging of tunnels beneath the floorboards and the disposing of tunnel soil down there. But there was a flaw in the block design at Schubin that enabled the digging of a tunnel from a barrack block. As was the case at Sagan, the blocks’ stoves sat on broad concrete bases that went all the way down to the ground.
Because all the Americans at Schubin ate in the one large mess, stoves in the small kitchens in the middle of each barrack block were rarely used. The Cory team realized, as did Big X Roger Bushell’s tunnelers at Stalag Luft 3, that the barrack stoves’ solid concrete bases could be burrowed through. This the Cory escapologists did, removing the grate beneath the stove and creating a thin new concrete base fitted with handles to cover the tunnel shaft’s entrance. Laboriously chipping down through the solid concrete foundation, Cory and his fellow diggers succeeded in creating a narrow entrance shaft.
They then continued digging down through the earth for some twenty feet—deep enough, they hoped, to avoid German listening devices. Only then did the tunnel begin, heading west toward the wire. The Ferret and the Weasel regularly visited Block 3A, sniffing around with their probes and flashlights, but they never located the cleverly camouflaged entrance to the Cory tunnel in the now unused kitchen.
Dispersing the soil brought up from the tunnel did prove a problem. For one thing, it was a different color than the topsoil. Schubin’s American kriegies quite independently came up with some of the techniques used in the Great Escape at Sagan, and one of these involved spreading tunneled soil on garden beds beside the recreation ground. Tunnel dirt was also spread on the Appell ground and the basketball/volleyball court.
But how could they get the earth from tunnel to gardens and sports fields? The Americans came up with the idea of earth-filled bags suspended inside trouser legs, just as the X Organization did at Sagan, where these soil dispersers were called “penguins.” At Schubin, this method proved to take too long. Plus, there was much more soil than gardens or sports fields could accommodate—56 tons of it. Spreading it in the full view of the guards also proved difficult. Before long, this method was abandoned.
As Cory and his team cast about for other dispersal places, they discovered that Asselin soil had been packed into the space beneath the White House mess hall floor. Meanwhile, the ceiling above the top floor of the White House contained dirt from the old cookhouse tunnel. And then it dawned on the Cory crew that the solution lay right above their heads—between the ceiling and the roof of their own hut. Block 3A, being beside the west wire, was a long way from the front gate and even farther from the Kommandantur. If a ferret came in the gate, there was plenty of time for strategically placed stooges to signal a warning to escapers working in, and under, Block 3A.
But how would they get the dirt up into the roof space? Lieutenant Sid Waldman from Cleveland, Ohio, was a late sleeper and the best pantomime actor in the camp’s Little Theater. He was also diminutive, hence his nickname, “Mouse.” Mouse Waldman crawled up into the ceiling space regularly; a relay of helpers handed up Red Cross boxes filled with earth from the tunnel below. Waldman happily spread earth over the ceiling, but on one occasion he slipped and put a foot through the ceiling. Trapped there, he had to be hauled out. Waldman left a gaping hole, which would have tipped off the Germans, so kriegies quickly repaired the hole and covered the cracks with toothpaste mixed with dust. They got away with the cover-up, too. Digging continued belowground while earth spreading resumed above.
To shore up the tunnel, the escape committee required all kriegies in camp to make a donation of bed boards. Second Lieutenant Billy Bingham, a 168th Infantry officer captured in Tunisia in February 1943, would complain that he was left with just three boards to sleep on. The boards were smuggled to the tunnel entrance and taken underground to line walls and ceiling, as had been the case with the RAF’s Asselin tunnel. Consequently, the claustrophobic tunnel was less than three feet high and three feet across.
Conscientious Hauptmann Zimmermann began to suspect that bed boards were being removed. So he had his assistant quartermaster do a count of every bed board in camp to see if any were missing, and if so, how many. The kriegies easily got around this. While the methodical German was counting boards in one block, the Americans snuck boards into the next one, so that all bunks appeared to have their full quota of boards when he passed through.
The Cory tunnel had the luxury of air-conditioning, courtesy of Second Lieutenant Louis W. Otterbein, the handiest handyman in the camp. He was in charge of creating staging and props for the Little Theater, located right next door to the block containing the tunnel entrance. In James Bond terminology, Lou Otterbein was the Oflag 64 escape committee’s “Q,” the gadget man. Following in the footsteps of the Asselin tunnelers, but independent of his predecessors, Otterbein built bellows to pump air into the tunnel and air lines made from linked Klim milk cans. When the Cory shaft began to fill with water, Lou the “Q” Otterbein built a suction device that efficiently sucked the water out.
Hauptmann Zimmermann was meanwhile convinced that a tunnel was being dug somewhere in the compound, but while his ferrets regularly searched all camp buildings, they never came up with anything. So Zimmermann resorted to drilling ten-foot holes outside the camp perimeter and setting off explosive charges in order to cave in tunnels. This blasting exercise moved progressively around the camp, and when it was opposite Block 3A, the kriegie moles abandoned their hole and crossed their fingers.
The Cory tunnel stood up pretty well to the nearby blast, but men lying on their bunks quickly evacuated 3A when it swayed to and fro, fearing that tons of earth would cascade down onto them from above. The ceiling also held up. As Zimmermann moved on with his explosives, the tunnelers went back to work. Digging was slow, and a projected spring 1944 escape date had to be revised. At their current rate of progress, the Cory team anticipated reaching open ground beyond the western perimeter fence by late summer, before the autumn chill set in at Schubin.
* * *
IN EARLY JULY 1944, Colonel Drake was summoned to Oberst Schneider’s office and informed that fifty Allied airmen had been shot by the Gestapo after they had escaped from Stalag Luft 3. This was the Great Escape.
While they had come from thirteen countries, most of the executed Stalag Luft 3 men were Brits. The others included Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and Poles. Contrary to the story conveyed by the movie version of The Great Escape, no Americans took part in that breakout. Several Americans, including Colonel Albert “Bub” Clark and Major Jerry Sage, had been integrally involved in the break’s preparations, but that was before Americans were removed from Stalag Luft 3’s North Compound. Clark had been Big S, in charge of X Organization security for the compound, while Sage had run diversions.
Once in that camp’s South Compound, Clark became Big X there, and Sage a member of the three-man escape committee, and they set about planning their own mass escape until they learned that their friends from North Compound had been shot by the Gestapo. Men who had busted out of Schubin via Asselin, including Peter Fanshawe and Danny Król, were among those executed. Other Asselin escapers, including Wings Day and American Johnny Dodge, had been among the minority of recaptured Great Escapers to avoid the execution list. That pair was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. They would survive the war.
Oberst Schneider warned Colonel Drake that the Gestapo was now threatening to shoot all recaptured escapees and urged him to pass this information on to his men. Escaping, the commandant said, was now deadly. Drake was shaken by this news and issued an order halting all existing escape schemes and banning any future escapes.
He was not alone. Across the Reich, SAOs and SBOs gave the same order at numerous POW camps. Kriegies were told by their senior officers that they would have to just sit tight and wait for Allied armies to fight their way to their camps and liberate them. Some more pessimistic prisoners didn’t think that would happen anytime soon. Up until that June, Oflag 64’s Billy Bingham had been predicting that the war would not end until 1983. After D-Day, he would revise his forecast to 1950.1
Boomer Holder and Andy Johnson were infuriated by the escape ban. One night, just days after the colonel issued the standing order, Oflag 64 was blanketed by rain, creating the perfect conditions for their gate escape. The members of the Cory tunnel team were similarly crushed by the “no escape” order. Two disappointed young tunnelers, Second Lieutenants Reid F. Ellsworth and John O. Kadar, had their break all planned, right down to their escape route and destination: Hungary.
Ellsworth differed from most Schubinites. He was a B-17 navigator from Idaho serving with the 346th Bomb Squadron, 99th Bombardment Group, and had been captured in Italy that January. As USAAF, not US Army, he shouldn’t have even been at Schubin, but he’d been captured with US ground troops. From the outset he’d teamed up with Kadar, who had also been bagged in Italy in January. They had gone through other camps together on their way to Schubin. Being good soldiers, they, like all budding escapers, obeyed orders and put their ambitions for freedom on hold. For now.
To ram home the message that escape was a dangerous idea, the German authorities subsequently had posters printed in English with the message “THE ESCAPE FROM PRISON CAMPS IS NO LONGER A GAME!” and advising “ALL POLICE AND MILITARY HAVE BEEN GIVEN THE MOST STRICT ORDERS TO SHOOT ON SIGHT ALL SUSPECTED PERSONS.” These posters were distributed to all American and British POW camps. At Oflag 64, the unpopular Weasel and another corporal arrived in the American admin office at the White House to pin up several of the posters. When the German corporals strode into the office, posters in hand, assistant adjutant Second Lieutenant James “Jimmie” Schmitz from Ottawa, Illinois, was sitting at his desk. Before he would permit the posters to be displayed, he demanded to read them.
Once he had taken in the posters’ content, Schmitz objected to them, considering them offensive to American officers because they accused the American government of “gangster warfare.” Telling the two Germans to wait, he hurried away to find the SAO to back him up. The SAO was unavailable, so Schmitz returned with Lieutenant Colonel William H. Schaeffer. A battalion commander captured in Sicily, Schaeffer had suffered a serious leg wound and still needed crutches to get around. Tall and heavy-set, he had a reputation for being ornery at the best of times, and he never lost an opportunity to bait the Germans. At a previous camp, he had more than once waved a crutch at guards. As a consequence, he’d racked up seven weeks in the Cooler there.
Schaeffer was in sympathy with Schmitz and told the Germans so in no uncertain terms. But the posters went up, with an additional line scrawled across the top by the Weasel: “Removing will be punished.” As the Germans turned to leave, a fuming Schmitz stood in the doorway, folding his arms and blocking their way. One of the Germans pushed Schmitz. Reluctantly, he stood aside. And the two guards departed.
The matter seemed to have passed until, several days later, both Schaeffer and Schmitz were summoned by the commandant and charged with “obstructing the functions of the German Reich.” Some months later the pair would be tried in a German civilian court. Defended by a German lawyer, they would be acquitted. Until that trial, Jimmie Schmitz remained at Oflag 64. The troublesome Schaeffer was transferred to Oflag IV-C, the infamous Colditz Castle maximum-security POW camp.
Four more Schubin kriegies were also hauled into a German court during this period, George Durgin among them. They were in a group of kriegies taken to Posen for dental treatment. As they were walking through the city, their guards ordered them off the pavement and into the street. Only German citizens were permitted to walk on the sidewalk. Allied POWs encountered this discrimination until the end of the war. George Durgin and three others refused to leave the sidewalk and, like Schaeffer and Schmitz, were charged with obstructing the functions of the German Reich. Once brought to trial, they, too, would be found not guilty and returned to camp.
All of these cases would be suddenly revived a short time later with terrifying potential consequences.
* * *
THIS SAME MONTH of July, Stefania Maludzińska was walking along Adolf-Hitler-Strasse past Oflag 64. The previous December 31, using the excuse of visiting friends to celebrate New Year’s Eve, Stefania had traveled with Mrs. Łucja Karczewska to the small fishing port and prewar resort of Heisternest (Polish Jastarnia) on the Baltic. Oflag 64’s escape committee had asked the women to help American kriegies then tunneling to freedom—the Cory tunnelers. The women hoped to convince the captain of a particular boat to take the escapees to Sweden once they broke out of the camp. To their regret, they hadn’t been able to gain the cooperation they’d sought.
As Stefania passed the camp now, her thoughts were on the young Americans behind the wire and her failed mission to help them. The usual practice for Poles passing the camp was to keep looking directly ahead. Drivers of horse-drawn vehicles would slap the reins along the backs of their steeds to speed by. Defiantly, Stefania looked in the direction of several young American officers standing outside the White House, not far from the wire. According to Boomer Holder, Stefania was “quite comely,” and the Americans inside the wire gave her a discreet wave. Not so discreetly, Stefania waved back.2
A guard in the Kommandantur was also watching the girl pass, and he saw her wave to the POWs. Guards came on the run, and Stefania was arrested in sight of the Americans. Tried in August for consorting with the enemy—simply because she’d returned that American wave—Stefania would be sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment. The young woman was sent to Hohensalza, the very same prison where Schubin escapees Bill Ash, Eddy Asselin, Frank Aten and Willy Higgins had been locked up after their recapture.
After two months behind bars at Hohensalza, Stefania would escape while working outside the walls. Walking part of the way home, she then hitched a ride on a wagon and then on the back of a bicycle pedaled by a Schubin man. For the final leg, she boldly rode in a railroad car reserved for Germans. Back in Schubin, Stefania went into hiding with distant relatives. During this period, her mother was arrested for giving bread rolls to passing POWs, and sentenced to four months’ solitary confinement. Stefania’s mother never returned from prison.3
* * *
MAJOR JERRY SAGE was a new arrival at the camp in July 1944. Twenty-seven years of age, tall, lean and mean, a graduate of Washington State University, Sage knew all about escapes. He had helped prepare the mass escape at Stalag Luft 3. Five months before the Great Escape occurred, paratrooper Sage had been among 300 Americans transferred out of Stalag Luft 3’s North Compound to the new South Compound.
That transfer had probably saved Sage’s life. Otherwise, he would have been one of the Great Escapers; being a serial escaper, he would almost certainly have been one of the fifty shot by the Gestapo. He shouldn’t have been at Stalag Luft 3 in the first place, for the camp was for air force officers. Because paratroop forces were part of the Luftwaffe in the German military, and the Luftwaffe ran the Stalag Luft camps, Sage had been initially lumped in with the flyboys. Considered a troublemaker, he had subsequently been sent to Oflag VII-B at Eichstätt in Bavaria.
Oflag VII-B was an all-British camp, and when the commandant there offered Sage a transfer to a camp for American ground force officers at Schubin, Sage jumped at the idea. He knew that Schubin was hundreds of miles closer to the Russians than to American forces advancing from the west. Changing circumstances dictated changed plans. Instead of escaping west into Germany, Sage now plotted to go east, link up with the advancing Russkies, and do as much damage to the Nazis as he could in partnership with the Reds.
Sage had been looking for a fresh escape opportunity ever since he was separated from the escape committees at Stalag Luft 3. Jerry Sage was no ordinary prisoner. While ostensibly an airborne division soldier, Sage was in reality “Dagger,” a secret operative of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Captured during a behind-the-lines mission in Tunisia in 1943, Sage was a highly trained silent killer and saboteur, and he had been raring to get out and get to work behind enemy lines ever since. On being welcomed to Oflag 64 by Colonel Drake, Lieutenant Colonel Waters and Major Meacham, Sage was informed of Drake’s new standing order banning escapes. Sage didn’t agree with the order, but he respected it and settled in to await the approach of the Russians.
That July, too, as Colonel Drake called a halt to escapes from Oflag 64, he managed an escape of his own. He was advised that he had satisfied German and Protecting Power doctors that he was sufficiently crippled by his wounds to be repatriated to the United States under the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Drake was shipped out of Schubin on July 27 in the company of a Protecting Power representative. Within a head-spinning ten days, he was back home in the States, soon to be discharged from the US Army. Over the coming months, Drake would write to the families of men he’d left behind at Oflag 64. Craig Campbell’s parents in Texas would hear from him in November. Assuring them that Craig was holding up well and would eventually come home to them, Drake also told the Campbells a little about conditions in the Schubin camp.
On September 8, Leo Fisher, a burn victim, was also repatriated from Oflag 64. He was home by September 18 and soon began to write press articles about the plight of his buddies back at Schubin. Although repatriation was rare, it did offer a way to get home fast, and frustrated tunneler Reid Ellsworth now had an idea. Ellsworth had no serious wound, but one of the grounds for repatriation was severe mental illness.
Many kriegies became clinically depressed behind the wire, often after receiving bad news from home. Then there were the young officers who, questioning their own decisions and courage, fretted about men who had died fighting under them. A few kriegies began to withdraw into their shells. At Schubin, this depression became known as “kriegieitis.” At its worst, it could lead to suicide attempts; a British officer at Schubin when it was Oflag XXI-B had reputedly taken his own life by jumping from the White House roof.
One American kriegie who was determined not to succumb to kriegieitis was Second Lieutenant Edwin O. “Ed” Ward, from Clewiston, Florida. A 1st Division infantryman captured near the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in early 1943, he’d been in the first group of Americans to arrive at Oflag 64. To keep his mind active, he got involved in sports, the theater and camp bridge tournaments. He was also one of five business-minded kriegies who set up and ran the Schubin Merchandise Mart, a popular points-system bartering scheme that operated in the camp schoolhouse one day a week, trading Red Cross food and cigarette allowances.
In a letter home to his young wife, Mildred—they’d married in September 1942—Ed asked for a warm knitted cap for the winter. Months later, a parcel containing a knitted cap arrived from Mildred. As twenty-seven-year-old Ward studied his fine new headwear, he came across a name tag inside: “Jones.”
“Who the hell is Jones?” Ward exclaimed aloud.4
Despite the ribbing of his fellow kriegies, who suggested that his wife might have found herself a boyfriend named Jones, Ed Ward never doubted his wife’s fidelity. But others fell into deep depression or began acting strangely after receiving unsettling news from home or, worse, opening “Dear John” break-up letters from wives or girlfriends.
What if, pondered Reid Ellsworth, he could convince the doctors that he was crazy and win an early ticket home via repatriation? Approaching escape committee deputy chief Major Merle Meacham, Ellsworth put up his scheme, assuring Meacham that he would be able to pull it off. Officially, escape was now off the agenda at Oflag 64. But Ellsworth’s plan, if successful, would see him sent home with the acquiescence of the Germans and without the dangers now associated with being on the run in the Reich.
Meacham gave Ellsworth approval to implement the “insanity project,” as they called it. But for the project to work, said Meacham, none of the American medical officers at the camp could be told that Ellsworth was playacting. To get past the German doctors, Ellsworth would first have to convince American MOs that he had lost his mind. Having seen other men become mentally unstable by degrees, Ellsworth began gradually developing his “symptoms.”
* * *
IT WAS NOW dangerous for American and British POWs, both inside and outside their camps. Earlier in the war, American and British prisoners had been excluded from harsh measures ordered for other troublesome POWs. But by the fall of 1944 the attitudes of Adolf Hitler and his SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, had been hardened by the Great Escape and by the unrelenting bombing of German civilian targets by the USAAF and RAF, whose aircrews were now labeled “terror flyers” and “gangsters” by the German radio and press. Downed Allied aircrews were being lynched and beaten to death by German mobs—frequently led by women in the absence of their menfolk who were at war. Seven American airmen suffered this fate after their B-17 crashed in German territory. Not only did Himmler approve of these murders; German police and soldiers who protected Allied aircrews from such mobs were reprimanded.
That September, there was another mass execution of Allied prisoners. On September 5, forty-six British and Dutch prisoners and one American were taken from various Nazi prisons to the Mauthausen concentration camp fifteen miles outside the city of Linz in Austria. In official SS records, all were listed as “pilots.” They were in fact agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain’s espionage agency, who had been parachuted into Holland and Belgium and caught by German Abwehr counterespionage agents.
All these men had been captured wearing civilian clothes, and all had been imprisoned for up to a year until their transfer to Mauthausen. Upon arrival, they were informed they had been sentenced to death as spies. At 7:00 a.m. on September 6, nineteen of the condemned men were stripped to their shirts and underwear, and, barefoot, escorted to the camp’s stone quarry, dubbed the Vienna Trench. There were 186 steps leading down into the Vienna Trench. Mauthausen inmates called them the Steps of Death.
Down the steps the nineteen men were bustled. Each was given a twelve-pound rock. Ordered to carry their load up the steps, one after the other, they were beaten all the way. It was hard enough for the weak prisoners to walk up 186 steps without pause, let alone do it carrying a heavy load. Some fell under the weight, often toppling onto men behind, sending them falling like dominoes, which the guards thought hilarious. Prisoners were then taken back down into the quarry, made to pick up even heavier stones, and forced to climb the steps again.
This continued until the prisoners could no longer stand. All were then dragged to flat ground above the quarry. Told that freedom awaited them beyond the camp wire, they were told to run, walk, or crawl toward the fence. As they did, they were cut down by rifle and machine-gun fire. All nineteen were dead by 9:00 a.m. The following day, the remaining twenty-eight prisoners suffered the same horrific fate. SS camp records noted that all had been killed while “attempting to escape from their place of work.”5
Mauthausen would be the scene of the execution of more Americans the following January. On December 26, eleven American OSS agents, six British SOE agents, and ace American Associated Press war correspondent Joe Morton would be taken prisoner in Slovakia during the culmination of the largest and most disastrous OSS Central European operation of the war. Although all but two were captured in military uniform, every one of the OSS and SOE agents was sent to Mauthausen. They were brutally interrogated at length by the SS before an execution order came through from Berlin. These men weren’t consigned to the Steps of Death. Senior camp personnel came up with what they considered an even more amusing fate for these prisoners, who were not informed they’d been sentenced to death.
In late January 1945, the eighteen prisoners would be taken, naked and one by one, into a basement room and stood before a camera. They were told by the camp commandant that their details were being taken for the records, after which they would be sent to a POW camp. As each man stood there, expecting to be photographed, an apparent height-measuring device, operated by an SS captain, was slid up behind them. It fired a bullet from a concealed gun into the back of the prisoner’s head. The SS thought their execution device a hoot. German radio would announce that these prisoners had been shot as spies. Three more American OSS agents captured in Austria in February would be executed at Mauthausen. A fourth OSS agent also captured in Austria, a US Navy lieutenant, would somehow survive Mauthausen and be liberated by the US Army in April 1945.
As these cases proved, military uniform was no longer protection for Americans on the run in the Reich, and any escaped POW was on notice that he would be shot. The safest place for American kriegies in 1944 was behind the wire.
* * *
WITH THE DEPARTURE of the repatriated Colonel Drake, Colonel George V. Millett, Jr., took over as Oflag 64’s SAO and was almost immediately thrust into an escape crisis. Lieutenant Harry T. Schultz managed this same month to get out of the camp by exchanging identities with an enlisted man being transferred to Stalag XXI-D at Posen. When Schultz reached Posen, Brits of the camp’s X Organization equipped him with escape clothes and forged ID papers, and on July 14 he had succeeded in breaking out of Stalag XXI-D.
Riding trains in plainclothes as a passenger, Schultz had reached the Czechoslovakian capital, Prague. At Prague station, an alert Gestapo officer found flaws in his forged papers. Accused of being a spy, Schultz was arrested. Instead of being returned to his camp of origin, Oflag 64, Schultz was shunted by the Gestapo from one dungeon cell to another in Breslau, Dresden, Posen and Bromberg, each time getting a little closer to Schubin but always under threat of death.
Hearing of Schultz’s plight from a Protecting Power representative, Colonel Millett lodged a formal protest with Oberst Schneider. As a result, the Gestapo handed Schultz over to the Wehrmacht in Bromberg. He was returned to Oflag 64 in a railroad car fitted out with punishment cells in which it was just possible to crouch. After serving twenty-one days in the Schubin Cooler, Schultz rejoined the kriegie population. He was lucky to be alive, and the harrowing experience in Gestapo hands had cured him of further thoughts of escape.
Three months into Colonel Millett’s tenure as SAO, in October 1944, a more senior colonel arrived with a new batch of prisoners, and the new man immediately took over as SAO. This was the very tall and gangly Colonel Paul R. Goode. Formerly the commander of the 175th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division, fifty-three-year-old Goode, the oldest American in camp and a thirty-one-year army veteran, was from Corvallis, Oregon. Goode’s hair had turned white after an escape attempt had gone wrong the previous August.
Captured in France two months after the D-Day landings in Normandy, Goode had been heading for Germany on a train packed with Allied prisoners when he’d ordered a junior officer to make a hole in their boxcar floor. At the next stop, fifteen officers had escaped via the hole, but 200-pound Goode couldn’t fit through. The 359th Infantry’s First Lieutenant Brooks E. Kleber from Trenton, New Jersey, was due to be next man out after Goode. Hearing submachine guns firing outside, Kleber was glad he hadn’t gotten out.
Two companies of Waffen-SS troops were traveling on the same train, and, as the senior American officer, Goode was hauled out of the boxcar and handed over to the SS unit’s commander. Brooks Kleber saw the colonel lined up beside the train with four other American officers. A shallow grave was dug, and an SS firing squad formed up. Goode, convinced he was about to die, slipped off his cherished West Point ring and passed it to one of his men. The firing squad went through the motions without firing and then stood down. Goode and the others were herded back onto the train.
The SS did shoot a French parachute sergeant who disobeyed the order for all prisoners to lie flat and keep their heads down while Goode’s mock execution took place. Goode lived in fear of being executed over the coming weeks until he arrived at Schubin. In the meantime, his hair had whitened and he’d shed thirty pounds. The experience had aged him so much that the men at Schubin came to refer to him as “Pop” Goode.
Once at Oflag 64, SAO Goode reorganized the senior levels of prisoner staff, appointing George Millet as his executive officer, replacing Johnny Waters in that role. Major Kermit V. Hanson became assistant XO, while Major Merle Meacham retained the role of adjutant and Jim Alger remained S-2. Goode found a new post for Waters—welfare officer, a role he had previously been filling in part as XO. This allowed the popular Waters to continue doing what he did best, keeping up the military spirit and morale of the prisoners.
Apart from senior officers serving as block commanders, the appointments under Colonel Goode included the camp’s medical officers and dentists, as well as officers in charge of all the smaller departments, from the tailor and barber shops to the library. To ensure that all department heads were on their toes, Goode appointed Colonel Fred W. Drury as his inspector general.
The single most important department as far as kriegies were concerned covered food distribution. Under a lieutenant colonel, this encompassed the cookhouse with its boring kriegie diet of soup, potatoes, cabbage, turnips, and ersatz coffee, a little horse meat, and the packaged food from the Red Cross parcels that had been coming into the camp each month until then. When Colonel Goode took charge in October, there was a plentiful store of Red Cross tinned food at Oflag 64, with 350 cans a day being opened. There were also a million cigarettes in store, even cigars and pipe tobacco.
But the tenth of October marked the end of Red Cross food parcel deliveries until December 3. Allied bombing was causing such problems for the German railroad system that millions of dollars’ worth of Red Cross food for POWs was backed up in Switzerland. Without Red Cross food, Oflag 64 MOs found that their kriegies lost an average of nine pounds during this period.6
Goode, like Drake before him, was opposed to escape attempts now that the Germans were known to be shooting escapees. Not only did he reiterate Colonel Drake’s order banning escapes, he shut down the escape committee and ordered those men who had been digging tunnels to immediately fill them in. This order did not go down well with some Schubin kriegies.
Yet Goode’s reasoning was simple and sensible. He knew, as a result of the bloody end to the Stalag Luft 3 escape, that the Gestapo was shooting escapees. Nor were the Germans hiding the fact they would shoot any escapees they caught—the posters now hanging in the camp’s administrative offices made that very clear. More and more, the Germans were imposing group punishments on bunches of kriegies for the infractions of one or two. If a tunnel was discovered at Oflag 64 by the Germans, they would naturally track it to its source. In the current climate, it wasn’t implausible that the Gestapo would shoot all the men in a block where a tunnel entrance was discovered. Pop Goode wasn’t having that on his watch.
As unhappy kriegies transferred earth back from hiding places to fill in tunnels, Bill Cory’s team tunneling from Block 3A rebelled. Deciding to keep their hole in the ground as an insurance policy, they only filled it in partway. The day would come when they would cash in that policy in an unusual but ultimately successful escape.
* * *
IN THE SECOND half of 1944, as the war increasingly turned against the Germans, conditions in POW camps worsened steadily. Apart from the disruption of Red Cross food parcel delivery, both the Americans and their Wehrmacht jailers had to contend with the interference of the Gestapo in their lives. Ever since the Great Escape in April, and the July attempt to blow up Hitler by his own officers, the Gestapo had tightened its grip across the Reich.
Over November 14 and 15, plainclothed Gestapo agents descended on Oflag 64 in force. Looking for tunnels, escape materiel, and contraband, they turned the camp upside down. Wherever kriegies were at the time, they had to stand to attention while the Gestapo rifled through their few possessions and storage places. The previous month, the Americans at Oflag 64 had seen their best combat uniforms confiscated—for German special forces to wear during the Battle of the Bulge, they later learned.
When the Gestapo arrived on this latest occasion, Frank Diggs and several members of his editorial team were sitting in The Item’s office, the small unheated washroom off the Little Theater. Lieutenant Leo W. Fisher was one of those team members. Badly burned and having suffered two compound leg fractures when his Sherman tank was knocked out in Tunisia’s Faïd Pass in May the previous year, Fisher had his name down for repatriation. In the meantime, Diggs was keeping him mentally active by employing his talents as a writer. In the middle of their editorial meeting, one of their colleagues hurried in from the theater.
“The Gestapo are on the prowl!” he warned.
Hearing Germans shouting in the theater, Diggs urged his colleagues to quickly hide their stash of chocolate and cigarettes, which far exceeded the German daily allowance. German voices grew louder.
“Here they come,” said Diggs contemptuously, a cigarette wagging in his mouth as he spoke. “Smell ’em!”
The door burst open, and Weasel the ferret corporal strode in. “Achtung!” he bellowed.
As required by German camp protocol, the Americans came to their feet—casually, as required by kriegie camp protocol. Several Gestapo men in their signature long black leather coats entered the room behind the Weasel, accompanied by a pained-looking Oberst Schneider.
One of the Gestapo men walked up to Frank Diggs and, standing inches from his face, shouted, “You will not smoke when the Oberst is in the room! Understand, you?”
Without a word, Diggs took a drag from his cigarette, then dropped it to the floor and ground it out with his heel.
The Gestapo man took in the layout for December’s upcoming issue of The Item spread on the editorial table. “You are a journalist?” he queried.
“Yes,” Diggs replied.
“Ah, yes, one day a great story you will write! You are indeed fortunate to be in Germany at such a time when history all about you is being made. Isn’t it not so?”
Diggs could only snort in response.
While this was going on, the Weasel had been searching the room. To the delight of Oberst Schneider, his subordinate unearthed the kriegies’ cigarette and chocolate hoard. The prisoners were only allowed two packs of cigarettes and one chocolate bar a day to prevent them from building up stocks to bribe guards or to use during escape bids, which was exactly why the kriegies were saving them. The editorial room stash was confiscated, and the Germans withdrew, on their way to annoy other kriegies.7
* * *
IN NOVEMBER, THE July charges against Lieutenant Colonel Schaeffer and Lieutenant Schmitz were revived by the Germans, this time in a Wehrmacht court-martial, with the accused allowed legal representation by Schubin kriegies and lawyers Clarence Ferguson and Lemund Wilcox. In their December retrial, Schaeffer and Schmitz were found guilty and sentenced to death. Under the Geneva Convention, the Protecting Power had three months in which to appeal on behalf of the condemned men. During the appeal, Schaeffer was returned to Colditz and Schmitz to Schubin.
George Durgin and the other Americans who had refused to walk in the street in Posen were also subjected to Wehrmacht court-martial on the old charges. They, too, were found guilty and sentenced to death. With the same three months’ grace for a Protecting Power appeal, Durgin and his comrades came back to their usual barracks at Oflag 64 to wait out the time. Durgin assured his best friend, Boomer Holder, that he wasn’t worried: he intended to bust out of the train on the way to the eventual appeal hearing. A worried Holder began collecting rations for his buddy’s break.
Meanwhile, all new arrivals were being warned of the fatal consequences of escape attempts. Tank platoon commander Lieutenant Mays W. Anderson from Springville, Utah, had been captured in November during the Battle of the Bulge. After he’d gone through arrival processing at Oflag 64, he received a terse warning from a guard NCO: “Do not attempt to escape. Guards will shoot without warning.”8
Even for the Germans guarding the kriegies at Schubin, by December 1944 life was becoming tough. Rations for the guards were little better than those being given to the prisoners, and the likes of chocolate were a rare luxury for Germans now. There were still hopes in German ranks that the drawn-out German offensive in the Ardennes would turn the war around for them. But with the Russians pushing relentlessly closer every day from the east, not every German at Schubin really believed that Germany could still win the war.
One day that December, Private Gottfried Dietz was on telephone duty in the German Kommandantur across the road from the camp when he put a call through to the commandant. Young Dietz respected old Oberst Schneider and felt a little sorry for him. Schneider came from an old Junker family in Prussia with large landholdings in Pomerania. He had been severely wounded in the leg during World War I. His limp, and his age, had meant that he’d been sidelined to running a POW camp in this war. It wasn’t a job Private Dietz envied. Schneider never expressed sympathies for Nazism within Dietz’s hearing. As far as Dietz was concerned, the colonel did his job to the best of his ability and barely tolerated the security officer, Hauptmann Zimmermann, who had the ear of the Nazi Party.
Dietz knew what this incoming phone call was all about. Two of the camp’s guards had deserted and tried to get home to their families. The private listened in as the colonel was informed that both deserters had been caught and shot.
“They were out of luck,” said Schneider with a sigh before hanging up.9