THE HATE CAMPAIGN
THE FATE of the hard-arsers—as Big X had accurately predicted—was pretty much in their own hands. Or, in the case of New Zealand officer Michael Shand and Canadian officer Keith Ogilvie, their feet. When the guard outside the Stalag Luft III fence fired his rifle, Shand, who was already in the woods, bolted in one direction while Ogilvie crawled for about a hundred and fifty feet, stood up, and started to run in another direction.[1] Whether from fear of being caught by prison guards and interrogated by the Gestapo or just from the shock of the late winter conditions on his system, Skeets kept on running for most of the next forty-eight hours. Perhaps the last kriegie to get away that morning, he had planned to make his way toward Czechoslovakia, but all that mattered initially was to get clear of the compound and the search parties that would inevitably be on his trail. He simply ran west, but since snow covered much of the countryside, he tried to find less travelled roads to put as much distance between himself and the compound as quickly as possible.
“I ran out of food and it was still wet in the trees and the snow. And you couldn’t sleep,” Ogilvie said. “Bloody miserable.”[2]
By Sunday night, he’d managed to cover almost forty miles and had reached a major road heading south toward the Czech border. But the moment he left the relative cover of remote roads and forested areas, Ogilvie—dressed in army battledress and a greatcoat—was spotted by members of the German Home Guard near Halbau, Germany, and taken to a local inn. Knowing his escape bid was over, en route to interrogation, he tore up the maps and forged identification in his pockets[3] and discreetly dropped the pieces when the guards weren’t looking. The inn proved to be a holding cell for several recaptured kriegies. Before long, Ogilvie was joined by RAF officers Charles Hall and Brian Evans as well as Canadian countryman Tommy Thompson. The three had linked up with another Canadian, Bill Cameron, outside the wire in the pine woods shortly after the Germans sounded the alarm at 5 o’clock on the morning of the escape. Within a few hours, Cameron began suffering from exposure to the cold. Hall, Evans, and Thompson wrapped him in all the warm clothing and blankets they could spare, left him some rations, and pressed on.[4] Cameron was soon recaptured near Sagan, the others by the Home Guard in the same region as Ogilvie.
Until early 1944, German police had held very little jurisdiction over recaptured prisoners of war and generally, after brief questioning, returned them to German Armed Forces; in short, the Gestapo could not punish them. In February 1944, however, Heinrich Himmler’s Aktion Kugel, or Operation Bullet, had wrenched control of recaptured POWs from the military, in this case the Luftwaffe at Stalag Luft III, and given it to the Gestapo. Under Bullet, recaptured prisoners other than British or American were to be taken to Mauthausen concentration camp and exterminated. It didn’t matter whether the escape occurred in transit, in a mass breakout, or singly—all recaptured POWs would be turned over to the secret police, not the military authorities, as quietly as possible.
By coincidence, the same weekend of the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III, the leaders of the German Prisoner of War Directorate were en route to Berchtesgaden. They arrived at the Führer’s Bavarian headquarters in the midst of a tempest. Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Wilhelm Keitel had been conferring since word of the mass escape from the North Compound had arrived. Amid the accusations and laying of blame, Hitler decreed that all recaptured escapers would be shot. Göring protested. Ultimately, the weekend conference at Berchtesgaden decided on the number of Commonwealth air officers to be executed. That night, Himmler issued the “Sagan Order” to the POW Directorate and quickly altered the operations at police and military prisons across Hitler’s occupied Europe. Those moves had life and death consequences for the prisoners of war detained in them.
The Sagan Order began by describing the increased number of POW escapes as “a menace to internal security.” Adolf Hitler had initially demanded all eighty Commonwealth air officers who made it out of the tunnel be shot. Ultimately, however, the Sagan Order decreed that “more than half of the escaped officers . . . after interrogation . . . are to be returned to their original camp and to be shot en route.” Had Hitler’s order been carried out to the letter, the Sagan Order might have meant forty killings. But the arithmetic appeared to be lost in the Gestapo’s eagerness to retaliate. Fifty would be killed. Finally, the order spelled out how the killings would be covered up, by declaring that “the recaptured officers were shot whilst trying to escape.”[5]
The man given the job of choosing which fifty men would die was SS Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe. At age fifty, the former First World War explosives soldier turned police detective had served the Nazi Party, the state police, Kripo, and the SS Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA. Three days after the escape from Stalag Luft III, Nebe began receiving daily telegrams on those kriegies the manhunt had recaptured. He then sat in his Berlin office with each POW’s identity card and his record sheet and played god. The factors influencing Nebe’s decision were the prisoner’s age and life status: middle-aged with a family, he lived; not too young and unmarried, he died. In addition, if the POW had led groups of escapers because of his fluency in various languages—a so-called “linguist”[6] —the Gestapo considered him dangerous and therefore expendable. The air officer’s place of birth was a deciding factor too: almost all men of non-British origin and “an unduly high percentage of men from the Dominions”[7] received Nebe’s death sentence. His decisions were passed to subordinate Gestapo officials, first Max Wielen, the Kripo chief, and then to the chief of the Breslau Gestapo, Oberregierungsrat Wilhelm Scharpwinkel. It was up to Scharpwinkel to organize the execution squads and fulfill the Sagan Order.
Late in the evening on Sunday, March 26, security guards escorted Keith Ogilvie and thirty-four other escapers to a Gestapo prison at Görlitz, ironically near the Czech border where so many of them had been headed. Three days later, Gestapo interrogators there questioned Ogilvie about the escape and its organization.
“I’m a British officer and it’s my duty to escape,”[8] he parroted back, and then remained silent to further questioning.
During his interrogation, an interpreter translated his statements as a female typist recorded them. When the questioning ended, the interpreter turned to Ogilvie and said, “The young lady [typist] said you are lucky. You have escaped in a soldier’s uniform. Therefore you will be tried before a military court. The others will not be so lucky.”[9]
Tommy Thompson’s interrogation at Görlitz, also on March 29, proved more confrontational and frightening over the issue of whether he was who he said he was and the protection of his rights as a military officer. When the Gestapo interrogator demanded information about the breakout, Thompson refused to answer.
“I must warn you,” the interrogator said. “You are not the in hands of military authorities, but . . . the secret service. Anything might happen to you without protection and you may never go back to your camp.”[10]
“Despite whose hands I am in, I [am] protected by the Geneva Convention,” Thompson protested.
The interrogator half laughed, and even when Thompson presented his identity tags the man waved them aside. Ultimately, Thompson managed to convince his questioner that his clothes were indeed military dress. “You are lucky,” the Gestapo man said finally. “You are recognized as military. The rest are wanted for civil investigation.”
The contradiction of the next hours for Ogilvie, Thompson, and others, proved to be watching Commonwealth officers clearly dressed in the air force battledress (he saw George Wiley in his Canadian blue battledress and John E. “Willy” Williams in his Australian airman’s tunic with flight-lieutenant stripes visible) being led away from the prison. Following his interrogation, Keith Ogilvie was returned to a cell with fellow escapers Charles Hall, Neville McGarr, and Paul Royle; the cell was so small that all four men had to either stand or lie down at the same time. A few days later, Ogilvie spotted a German corporal he knew from Stalag Luft III outside his Görlitz cell.
“Say, Horst, when are you gonna get me out of this place?” he asked.
“Oh, Mr. Ogilvie, tomorrow morning you’ll go,”[11] the guard said. Indeed, the next day Luftwaffe guards arrived and escorted Ogilvie and seven others back to Sagan. Only one of his cellmates—Australian Paul Royle—was with him; Briton Charles Hall was taken from Görlitz prison March 30, and South African Neville McGarr disappeared April 6. Some time later, the eight survivors of the Görlitz imprisonment and interrogation learned the fate of the other twenty-eight kriegies held there.
On Thursday, March 30, Oberregierungsrat Scharpwinkel and his staff arrived at Görlitz to carry out the Sagan Order. First the Commonwealth officers—Squadron Leader Ian Cross, Flight Lieutenants Mike Casey, Tom Leigh, and George Wiley, and Flying Officers John Pohe and Al Hake—were collected by the dozen Gestapo men in civilian clothes and pushed into three waiting cars. Other recaptured officers looking through prison windows knew Hake was suffering from frostbite and assumed the men in civilian clothes were escorting the air force officers in the cars to a hospital. They were actually going to the local Kripo headquarters for interrogation.
“I went to Görlitz,” Scharpwinkel[*] said, “for the purpose of getting a picture of the prisoners. As I speak English, I put one or two questions to the prisoners . . . Were they married? Had they children? I did not ask any questions about how the escape was organized, because I was not interested in that.”[12]
The interrogations of the half-dozen Commonwealth officers went on for three and a half hours. Kriminalinspektor Richard Max Hänsel[*], who was in charge of the local Gestapo office at Görlitz, attended the interrogations. He recalled that interrogators questioned the prisoners one at a time. He said there was no torture, but that the questioning covered name, rank, place and date of birth, previous occupation, unit, targets bombed, where shot down, duration of captivity, organization of the escape, source of civilian clothing, origin of false papers, names of other escapees, and how each had been captured. Hänsel said the interrogation included the confiscation of the prisoners’ watches and then a blanket threat from Scharpwinkel directed at everybody—prisoner and guard alike.
“Take care they don’t get away,” he said. “Otherwise something unpleasant will happen to you. Or something unpleasant will happen to them.”[13]
The interrogations wrapped up at 12:30 in the afternoon, when the POWs were again pushed into the waiting cars. As there was insufficient room in the three cars for all the Commonwealth officers and the Gestapo men, Scharpwinkel told Hänsel he would have to drive a service vehicle with two of the POWs and the Gestapo chief to their next destination. The three cars and service truck travelled along the autobahn to a wooded area five miles past Halbau. Scharpwinkel ordered the column of vehicles to stop and the prisoners got out to stretch their legs. Hänsel said he led the two officers in his service truck to the head of the column where the others had gathered and returned to the truck to retrieve his lunch from a briefcase. Two of Scharpwinkel’s staff carried sub-machine guns as the Gestapo chief ordered the POWs deeper into the woods.
“The prisoners were placed in position,” Scharpwinkel said, “and it was revealed to them that the sentence was about to be carried out. The prisoners showed considerable calm, which surprised me very much.”
The six Commonwealth officers—several of them wearing their air force blue battledress, clearly military POWs—stood stationary, side by side in the woods. With a hand movement, Kriminal Obersekretaer Lux[*] gave the order to fire and the execution squad fired a burst into the unarmed prisoners of war. Lux shot the prisoners as well, and by the end of the second salvo, the officers were dead.
“While I was eating my slice of bread and butter,” Hänsel said, “several shots were fired. I ran at once to the place in the wood, which was about 150 metres [500 feet] away and learnt . . . that the prisoners had attempted to escape and had been shot in the attempt. They lay sprawling in the wood about four or five metres [15 feet] from each other. . . . I myself do not suppose that the prisoners attempted to escape.”[14]
After the shootings, Scharpwinkel ordered Hänsel to drive the service truck into Halbau to arrange for an undertaker to take away the corpses for cremation. When reports of the shootings leaked to the British Government via Switzerland, Hänsel was ordered to another conference, at which Scharpwinkel told him that they were to say that on March 30 their vehicles had broken down along the autobahn and that “the prisoners used this opportunity to attempt an escape.”[15]
The great escape had ended in murder for these six Commonwealth air force officers. Mike Casey, the brilliant RAF Blenheim pilot who in the camp had managed to hide the priceless forgery tools from the earliest days of the North Compound, died at that roadside. Also killed there was Australian-born Spitfire pilot Al Hake, who mastered technical drawing and metalwork so well that at Stalag Luft III he created the most sophisticated assembly line for the manufacture of compasses ever generated from thin air. Fellow Australian Tom Leigh was also murdered that afternoon. And New Zealand Flying Officer John Pohe, who had maintained a steadfast sense of humour throughout his imprisonment at Sagan by signing all official papers as a Maori tribesman named Porokoru Patapu.[16] British-born Squadron Leader Ian Cross had previously made an unsuccessful escape attempt, but this time paid with his life. As did Canadian George Wiley, who had no valuables for the Gestapo to confiscate that March 30 afternoon since he’d left his watch and a goodbye letter with his roommate back in North Compound the night of the escape. Somehow Wiley sensed it might end this way.
That night, Scharpwinkel’s execution squad made its way back to the Görlitz prison. Through the same evening hours, the undertaker’s vehicles arrived at the roadside where Casey, Hake, Leigh, Pohe, Cross, and Wiley had been shot, and the bodies were carried away to Görlitz to be cremated. Two days later, on April 1, the same group of henchmen, led by Kriminal Obersekretaer Lux, handcuffed ten more Commonwealth air force officers, drove them away from Görlitz, and killed them en route to Sagan in a similar fashion. This group of murdered officers included Flight Lieutenants Edgar Humphreys, Cyril Swain, Charles Hall, Brian Evans, and Flying Officers Wally Valenta, Wlod Kolanowski, and Bob Stewart.
Also killed in this execution were Canadian X Organization committee members George McGill, Pat Langford, and Hank Birkland. McGill was the RCAF navigator told to bail out of his burning Wellington in January 1942 only to learn later that the pilot had managed to get the bomber safely home to Britain; he’d spent twenty-six months behind wire, providing diversions for other escapers, and had co-led the team keeping all three tunnels secure night and day; he was dead at twenty-five. Also twenty-five, Alberta-born Pat Langford had survived severe burns bailing out of his Wellington in July 1942; a self-taught pianist and multi-faceted athlete, he’d served Canada as an air training instructor, a combat pilot, and at Stalag Luft III was the man responsible for keeping tunnel “Harry’s” trap entrance secret and safe for a year. But perhaps none had given as much of himself to the “operational function” of escaping than Manitoba’s Hank Birkland; shot down in his Spitfire in 1941, Birkland had tunnelled at Dulag Luft, Stalag Luft I, and Stalag Luft III, and coped with claustrophobia in a hole, vomiting from lack of oxygen, and the challenge of tearing tons of earth from beneath his captives’ feet to help his air force mates escape. At the end of three years underground, Big Train had tasted only a few hours of freedom for himself.
In total, Lux’s shooters were responsible for murdering twenty-seven of the officers recaptured following the mass breakout on the morning of March 25. Simultaneously, another execution squad assembled at a police prison in Zlin, Moravia, where two more of the Commonwealth officers had been brought for interrogation. Despite being temporarily buried in sand during the cave-in the night of the escape, Tom Kirby-Green had emerged from “Harry” thirtieth on the escape list. Canadian Gordon Kidder came through the exit hole right behind him. The two were masquerading as migrant Spanish workers; both were fluent in German, French, and Spanish, so their linguistic abilities put them high on Nebe’s hit list. They had managed to get through the air-raid blackout at the Sagan station and over the next three days travelled by train unnoticed as far south as Hodonin, in Moravia, where they were recaptured. Severe interrogation went on for twenty-four hours. Then, about 2 a.m. on March 29, under the direction of Polizeiassistant Erich Zacharias, Kidder and Kirby-Green were loaded into two cars, apparently for the trip back to Breslau. One of the two Gestapo drivers, Friedrich Kiowsky, recalled the prisoners being manacled with their hands in front of them.
“As I was driving, I asked [Erich] Zacharias what was going to happen to them,” Kiowsky reported. “Zacharias sat beside me and said nothing, but turned his thumb downwards. . . . At the same time he told me to drive slower and looked around the countryside.”[17]
About six miles from Moravska Ostrava, Zacharias ordered Kiowsky to stop his vehicle at the side of the road. Without realizing it, Gordon Kidder played into Zacharias’s hands by asking if he could relieve himself. Zacharias directed Kidder and Kirby-Green (from the second vehicle) with their guard Adolf Knueppelberg to the curb. It was all going according to the Gestapo plan.
“Knueppelberg raised his right hand holding the pistol, with the barrel pointing in the direction of the back of [Kirby-Green’s] head,”[18] Zacharias said. “I drew my service pistol, which was all ready for firing . . . and fired obliquely in the left side of my prisoner [Kidder] in order to hit his heart.”[*]
To complete his action, Zacharias fired a second shot at Kidder’s head, then crouched to check for a pulse and called to Knueppelberg[**] to make sure that Kirby-Green was also dead. When the first shots were fired, Kiowsky, then lighting the cigarette of the fellow driver, turned to see what had happened. First he saw blood all over the snow, then the two air force officers lying dead in the ditch, and finally the two senior Gestapo officials removing the handcuffs from Kidder and Kirby-Green. Half an hour later, a van from the Czech police force arrived to pick up the bodies. Gestapo higher ups told all those present to report that the two air force officers had been shot while attempting to escape.
“I saw nothing that gave me the impression that the officers had wished to escape or had made the attempt,”[***] Kiowsky said. [19]
Among the other Commonwealth officers murdered outside Hirschberg by Lux, was James Wernham, the Winnipegger who had survived the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne in May 1942 and then the rigours of numerous productions in front of kriegies at the North Compound theatre. Meanwhile, Nils Fugelsang and fellow Norwegian officer Halldor Espelid, who’d been given Canadian pilot Dick Bartlett’s escape number just before the breakout, together had attempted to make their way to Denmark; they were recaptured near Kiel on March 26 and then handed over to a hired Gestapo gunman, SS Sturmbannführer Johannes Post.[*] In a most macabre sequence of events, Post interrogated Espelid, Fugelsang, New Zealander Arnold Christensen, and James Catanach, the Australian bomber pilot decorated with the DFC and promoted to squadron leader in 1942 when he was only twenty.
Following his orders with particular zeal, Post had manacled the four air force officers with handcuffs behind their backs and loaded them into two cars—Espelid, Fugelsang, and Christensen into one vehicle, and Catanach into the other, Post’s own staff car. En route through the city of Kiel, Post had directed his driver stop at a residence so that he could pass on a set of theatre tickets that (because of Post’s orders to execute the prisoners that afternoon) he would not be able to use. Post even chatted to Catanach about the landmarks the vehicle passed, Catanach noting that he recognized them from previous combat operations over Kiel. Suddenly Post remarked, “I am going to shoot you.”[20]
Catanach smiled at what he thought a tasteless joke and countered, “I have an appointment in the cooler at Stalag Luft III.”
“Those are my orders,” Post confirmed. At a field outside of Kiel, the destination Post had chosen to carry out the order, he ordered his prisoner out of the car and repeated his statement, “I have orders to shoot you.” In the awkwardness of moving into the field on the premise of allowing the POW to relieve himself, Post’s nervous assistant gunman accidentally fired a shot from his pistol. Afraid the man might botch the execution, Post pulled out his own pistol and shot Catanach through the heart. Moments later, when the second car arrived, Christensen, Espelid, and Fugelsang were quickly escorted to the same spot and shot at close range. Post later claimed proudly it was he who had killed “these terror-fliers. . . . For the glory of the Führer I have killed any number of sub-humans.”[21]
While the Gestapo squads translated Nebe’s paperwork to physical execution for some, those spared his death sentence were returned to do time in the cooler at Stalag Luft III. First, Bernard “Pop” Green and Doug Poynter arrived from Hirschberg. Alex Neely arrived from Berlin. Next, the first of the Canadians, Keith Ogilvie and Tommy Thompson, came back from Görlitz with Alistair McDonald and Paul Royle. Also transported from Görlitz back to Sagan were Shorty Armstrong, Tony Bethell, Les Brodrick, Dick Churchill, Johnny Marshall, Michael Shand, Bob Nelson[*] and Canadian Bill Cameron. The cooler at the North Compound was so busy following the mass escape, each cell contained four or five men. But the arithmetic quickly became obvious. Of the eighty kriegies who’d emerged from the tunnel the week before, only fifteen were back in the compound. And when the officers emerged from the cooler to share their individual stories, they tried to calculate what had happened to the scores of others they had seen recaptured.
It took nearly two weeks, but the ripple effect of the Sagan Order finally arrived at the North Compound on April 6, 1944. As George Sweanor remembered it, Hans Pieber came into the compound late that morning and summoned Group Captain Massey to a meeting with Oberst Braune at the Kommandantur. Leaning on his cane and accompanied by Squadron Leader Philip Murray, his personal interpreter, Massey accompanied Pieber out of the compound. The two Senior British Officers were inside the Kommandantur less than thirty minutes. Just after noon, word spread that a senior man from every room was expected in the theatre on the double. In minutes, three hundred kriegies occupied the Red Cross crate seats.
“As senior man in my room I left on the run,” Sweanor wrote. “Massey limped onto the stage and came right out with, ‘The new Kommandant has just informed me of the shocking, unbelievable news that forty-one of the escaping officers have been shot.’
“I was half expecting such an announcement. I raced back to my room to report. ‘The bastards have shot forty-one!’ I repeated the SBO’s words.”[22]
One of Sweanor’s hut mates mocked him for being so gullible. He said the announcement was just a bluff to stop the remaining kriegies from attempting another escape. Sweanor hoped his fellow officer was right, but knew the news of the executions had to be true. Amplifying his certainty, Sweanor heard Hans Pieber imploring the kriegies not to blame the Luftwaffe. The shootings were committed by the Gestapo in response to the escape, he emphasized, not by his air force.
When Keith Ogilvie finished his term in the cooler, he immediately ran into Red Noble and got the latest news.
“They shot all those guys,” Noble said, “trying to escape.”
“That’s not so, Red,” Ogilvie retorted. “These guys were fine. I saw them. There’s no way they could re-escape.”[23] Until then, Ogilvie considered his brush with the Gestapo as little more than a fling away from the camp. All he and his mates wanted was to get back to the air force camp and wait for the end of the war.
A few days later, the Germans posted a comprehensive list of the officers shot. Someone counted the names. There were forty-seven names on it, not forty-one! Among the revised list of dead was Big X. Roger Bushell and Free-French officer Bernard Scheidhauer had been captured en route to France at Saarbrücken station and executed nearby on March 29. Also shot that day by the Danzig Gestapo were Gordon Brettell, who had escaped previously with Canadian Kingsley Brown in 1943, and Tim Walenn, the man who had directed many of the camp’s printers, journalists, artists, cartoonists, photographers, and calligraphers in the production of official documents—all perfect forgeries—to ease the passage of his fellow escapers.
News of the shootings reached Britain in mid-May. Anthony Eden, the British secretary for foreign affairs, informed the House of Commons that word of the deaths had come from Switzerland. Then, in late June, he rose in Parliament to announce that official word had come from the German government about the deaths of fifty officers. The official German note claimed “the escapes were systematically prepared, partly by the General Staffs of the Allies, [with] both political and military objectives [that endangered] public security in Germany.” Eden scoffed at Germany’s contention the officers had met their deaths while escaping Stalag Luft III or resisting recapture. He accused Germany of “cold-blooded acts of butchery” and vowed His Majesty’s Government would track down “these foul criminals . . . to the last man. When the war is over,” Eden said finally, “they will be brought to exemplary justice.”[24]
There were still Stalag Luft III prisoners of war who believed the trickle of information, the posted lists of dead officers, and even the Gestapo purge at the camp had all been a bluff to cow the remaining POWs into total compliance. The Germans couldn’t have stooped to murdering all those air force officers, some kriegies insisted. Then, pieces of military kit, suitcases, and some personal effects the escapers had carried through the tunnel and into the Silesian countryside were delivered to huts in the North Compound. Belongings such as shoes, handkerchiefs, and even bloodstained personal photographs were brought to the SBO. Ultimately, all doubt about the finality of events following the breakout of March 24–25 were put to rest the day Kommandant Braune delivered urns of cremated ashes to Group Captain Wilson. And it didn’t take the SBO to deduce why the fifty had been cremated. Ashes would offer no evidence of the cause of death.
“[It proved] that this had been a deliberate massacre,”[25] George Sweanor wrote. “I could not forget my old school chum, George McGill, nor the boyish face of Tom Leigh, nor my boss, a man with an envious war record, Tom Kirby-Green. . . . What a terrible loss to humanity.”
McGill’s ashes came from Leignitz, Sweanor remembered, Tom Leigh’s from Görlitz, and Tim Walenn’s from Danzig. He concluded from the locations of the crematoria engraved on the urns that many of the escapers had covered great distances before being recaptured and killed. Sweanor found some solace in knowing that the Germans had expended millions of man-hours away from the frontlines tracking down George McGill, his classmate from St. Clair Public School in Toronto. Eventually, as if reuniting the dead men with their wartime comrades, the remaining Commonwealth officers gathered and housed the fifty urns in a building inside the wire of the North Compound. One of the kriegies who had created so many of the theatre production sets, Wylton Todd, volunteered to design a permanent memorial and the new Kommandant provided stone for the masons among the POWs to build a crypt that would contain the urns.
“A committee was formed to collect the belongings of the fifty and to put all up for auction with the proceeds going to their families after the war,”[26] Sweanor wrote. “We gave promissory notes for payments and bid outrageous prices to show our sympathy: $200 for a pair of running shoes, $50 for a razor, and $15 for a handkerchief.”
Even Staff Sergeant Hermann Glemnitz, still on duty at the North Compound, attended the highly publicized auction. He got swept up in the spirit of fundraising and could be heard urging the kriegies to bid higher for the benefit of the dead airmen’s families. Among the auction items that drew particular attention, Tom Kirby-Green’s wooden suitcase went for twenty-five pounds and some of the personal clothing of Canadian airman Pat Langford earned 104 pounds. To commemorate the fifty murdered air force officers, kriegies wore whatever black insignia they could find—black ties, black hats, black diamond cutouts sewn to their sleeves—to indicate they were in mourning. Though it was forbidden to sing it, at every opportunity in front of their captors, the kriegies sang “God Save the King,” if only because, as Tony Pengelly put it, “we sang it and felt better.”[27] The POWs considered every possible act of stubbornness, inaction, and passive resistance they could conceive as a protest to the killings.
George Sweanor didn’t agree with the tactics, fearing their campaign of hatred might bring even more reprisals. He was right. The tit-for-tat psychological warfare inside the wire continued seemingly without end. Kommandant Braune responded to kriegie insolence by withholding incoming mail for six weeks. When Pieber conducted his roll calls, the prisoners made life miserable for him, ridiculing his appell, resisting his demands, and interfering wherever they could. One day, when the innocuous guard looked totally demoralized, George Sweanor took pity on him. They happened to be walking side by side across the compound.
“Cheer up, Pieber,” Sweanor said. “We can’t keep this up forever.”
Pieber flashed a quick smile, but that was all he could muster.
The spring and summer of 1944 brought a welcome rush of good news to the inmates of Stalag Luft III, news many of them wished had come six months earlier; it might have persuaded even diehard escapers such as Big X to wait out the war. Still, the BBC broadcasts received by the canary, Dick Bartlett’s wireless radio receiver, gave officers in the North Compound a needed lift. Kriegies learned of the liberation of Rome on June 5, the Normandy landings on June 6, the main Soviet offensive in the Baltic region on June 22, the Chindits’ victories in Burma on June 26, the attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, the liberation of Paris on August 25, the Canadian capture of Dieppe on September 1, and, on September 17, the bold airborne Operation Market Garden attempt to catapult the Allies to the enemy’s side of the River Rhine. That same summer, letters addressed to Stalag Luft III prisoners from fictitious relatives informed kriegies around the North Compound that three Commonwealth air officers had actually completed Roger Bushell’s so-called “home run.” Per Bergsland and Jens Muller had made it back to Britain via Sweden within a week, while Bob van der Stok had reached his occupied homeland, the Netherlands, within thirty-six hours. He soon pushed on across the Pyrenees to Madrid and arrived back in Britain four months after emerging from tunnel “Harry.”
A lot had changed at Stalag Luft III since the March 1944 escape. Von Lindeiner was gone; he would be court-martialled in October for allowing as many as 262 escape attempts during his command of POW camps and for defying the Sagan Order to hand over escapers directly to the Gestapo.[*] Von Lindeiner’s nemesis Roger Bushell was also gone, executed under that same order. What remained, however, was X Organization, which both men had grappled with since April 1943. Bushell had determined and manipulated its objectives, its tactics, and its timing like a battle force pursuing an enemy. Von Lindeiner had fought back, trying to destroy its gains and blunt its resolve with unexpected appells, relentless surveillance by ferrets, and isolation punishment in the cooler. In some senses, both von Lindeiner and Bushell failed to control the fate of X Organization. True, the organization had delivered Bushell his greatest objective—a mass escape and a resulting nationwide manhunt—and ultimately von Lindeiner’s Gestapo successors appeared to have buried its material gains by filling “Harry” with human waste and by exterminating X’s ringleaders with the Sagan Order. And yet the Germans had never found tunnel “Dick,” which still housed tunnelling tools, bed boards, and wire, and they had not annihilated all of X’s brain trust—men such as Robert “Crump” Ker-Ramsey, Norman “Conk” Canton, and Tony Pengelly, who had given up his number on the escape list expressly so that the escape committee might carry on.
“Immediately after news of the executions reached England,” Pengelly said, “Air Ministry told us over the BBC, via our smuggled radios, to stop escaping. . . . [But] with the incentive of escape work gone, many were losing the comparative peace of mind with which we had lived and endured the long years. Our morale was dangerously low.”
The Normandy invasion in June and the attempt on Hitler’s
life in July re-inspired the kriegies and breathed new life into a dormant X Organization. Pengelly and what was left of his mapping and document forgery team decided to reintroduce the war of wits to the education room of the North Compound library. They manufactured and posted a huge, detailed map of Europe on the library wall and began sticking in pins (thread strung between the pins graphically illustrated the front lines of the war). Based on the BBC reports, they updated the location of the pins and thread daily. That spring and summer of 1944, the thread lines showed Allied gains in mainland Italy, in Scandinavia, a toehold in France, and significant Soviet advances along the Eastern Front.
“On the Russian front there were two sets of thread lines, one red and one black,”[28] Don Edy recalled. “The one represented German news from the front . . . and the other based on the BBC news, which always showed the Allies closer than the German news. We often saw the German ferrets coming in to take a look at the map, then walking out shaking their heads.”
“It gave us infinite satisfaction to show [the Germans] the ring drawing ever tighter,”[29] Pengelly said.
The war of the pins gave momentary satisfaction, perhaps, but the rapid westward advance of the red thread on the library wall map—representing victories for the Soviet armies over German armies along the Eastern Front—posed a number of new and potentially ominous threats to Stalag Luft III’s imprisoned airmen, officers and NCOs alike. The first impact of the declining fortunes of the German Army in Lithuania, East Prussia, and eastern Poland arrived in the form of other prisoners of war that summer of 1944. Kriegies under guard began arriving from POW camps east of Sagan; they described their captors force-marching them ahead of the Soviet onslaught. With no new huts available for the newcomers, the Germans forced them into existing barracks. They supplied lumber and the loan of tools for the kriegies to convert double bunk beds to triple bunks in existing huts. Rations were halved. Sick parades ballooned. And Red Cross parcels for the original North Compound POWs became few and far between.
If the flight of POWs ahead of the Soviet advance didn’t put the kriegies nerves on edge enough, the sudden arrival of a purge of Commonwealth and American airmen from a place called Buchenwald certainly did. George Sweanor learned that in previous months German SS had had rounded up the 168 downed airmen, including twenty-six RCAF aircrew, stripped them of their identities, and shipped them off to the Buchenwald extermination camp. Starved, tortured, and bearing the scars of Nazi medical experiments, these latest additions to the North Compound shocked Sweanor and his roommates with their first question:
“How many do they shoot each day?”[30] they asked.
George Harsh discovered that such fears were based more in reality than in fiction. Shot down, interrogated, and sent to Stalag Luft III in October 1942, the American-born RCAF gunner had served X Organization inside the wire as a tunnel security boss. A sudden purge at the end of February 1944, just weeks before the planned mass escape, had then whisked Harsh and eighteen others away from the North Compound. He had learned about the March 24 breakout and the reprisals of the Sagan Order from their prisoner-of-war huts at Belaria, a satellite compound five miles from Stalag Luft III. Harsh had survived POW imprisonment for nearly two years, but he recognized that his experience on a chain gang in the 1930s had prepared him more than most to live one day at a time. Even so, he admitted that he still lay awake nights worried that Gestapo guards would suddenly descend, line them up, and shoot every tenth man unless the kriegies surrendered the radio the Germans knew was hidden.
“Toward the end of the war,” Harsh wrote, “Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, as a representative of the International Red Cross, was allowed into the camp. [He] slipped word to us that Hitler had ordered Himmler to have every one of us shot rather than let us be liberated by the approaching Russians.”[31]
Such rumours and fears sparked a reconstituted X Organization to a predictable response. In July, those comprising the core of the escape committee gathered at the now reopened North Compound theatre. Yes, there would be new productions that summer and fall, if the war went on that long. Airman John Casson would produce a version of J. B. Priestley’s I Have Been Here Before, while airman David Porter would rehearse a musical comedy called Palina Panic. Since the Germans had never discovered the repository of all the tunnel sand excavated from “Harry”—in the space beneath the raked floor of theatre seats—the escape committee reopened the theatre’s secret subterranean enterprise. This time, X Organization diggers began excavating tunnel “George” from beneath the theatre proscenium eastbound toward the North Compound exterior wire. It was a short distance from the new tunnel to the sand dispersal site, all under the same roof, and there was still plenty of room to store “George’s” excavated sand under the same theatre floor.
Kommandant Oberst Braune may well have suspected that news passed along by new kriegies arriving in the North Compound, or indeed from BBC radio reports of Allied successes across Europe, would embolden his prisoners. In September, the new Stalag Luft III administration adorned the walls inside the camp huts with threatening posters. In broken English, the lengthy proclamations first accused Britain of instituting “illegal warfare in non-combat zones in the form of gangster commandos, terror bandits, and sabotage troops even up to the frontiers of Germany.” The poster claimed that a captured British booklet, entitled “The Handbook of Modern Irregular Warfare,”[32] encouraged the English soldier to be “a potential gangster (with) the sphere of operations (to) include the enemy’s own country . . . and neutral countries as a source of supply.” The poster described the areas of Europe in which English soldiers might consider operating as a “death zone.” Finally, if the message wasn’t clear enough, the narrative concluded with a series of warnings to prisoners “against making future escapes. . . . All police and military guards have been given the most strict orders to shoot on sight all suspected persons. . . . Escaping from prison camps has ceased to be a sport!”
But the Kommandant hadn’t finished his propaganda offensive. Soon after the death zone posters went up came another blizzard of proclamations with a provocative assessment of the war and a most peculiar invitation to “soldiers of the British Commonwealth and the United States of America.”[33] The poster began with some apparent revisionist history, turning the retreat of German armies from occupied areas of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe into “the great Bolshevik offensive [crossing] the frontiers of Germany. The men in the Moscow Kremlin believe the way is open for the conquest of the Western world. This will certainly be a decisive battle for us. But it will also be the decisive battle for England, for the United States, and for the maintenance of western civilization. Or whatever today remains of it.”
The posters’ rhetoric painted an even bleaker picture of Europe under Bolshevik domination than under Nazi occupation. Suddenly, German captors appealed to all POWs, “regardless of your rank or of your nationality,” to recognize “the danger of Bolshevik-Communism” and (in bold type) to see “the consequences of the destruction of Europe—not just of Germany, but of Europe—[and what] it will mean to your own country.” Unable to disguise its inherent racism, the document positioned its authors and readers not as captors and captives, but “as white men to other white men.” Then it laid out a specific offer to the kriegies: “Whether you are willing to fight in the front-line or in the service corps, we make you this solemn promise: Whoever as a soldier of his own nation is willing to join the common front for the common cause, will be freed immediately after the victory of the present offensive and can return to his own country via Switzerland.”
And finally, in bold-type exclamation, the poster completed its call-to-arms with, “Are you for the culture of the West or the barbaric Asiatic East? Make your decision now!”
George Sweanor remembered that the German press joined the propaganda initiative as well. Every time a Völkischer Beobachter or Frankfurter Zeitung arrived at the North Compound library, Sweanor devoured every detail, including the one-sided reports of “Soviet atrocities.” Then, during one appell that autumn of 1944, representatives of Kommandant Braune called for volunteers to help the German war effort against the perceived Communist threat.
“We were surprised when one man volunteered,”[34] Sweanor said, “saying he would be glad to help. But we could not conceal our mirth when they asked him his civilian trade. He answered, ‘Funeral director.’”
Bomb-aimer Sweanor had always considered the mass escape plan to be futile. He had served in the protection and completion of the tunnels from the moment he arrived at Stalag Luft III in 1943, but his highest priority was always survival. Consequently, he rejoined the X Organization service, assisting in the completion of tunnel “George” and preparing his fellow kriegies for the kind of chaos the propaganda posters had predicted . . . or worse.
“We knew that as the Soviets advanced there would be bedlam outside our compound. We would have no Red Cross food. The Germans would be evacuating and leaving weapons behind,”[35] Sweanor said. “I joined a group we were training as commandos. I had had some army training, artillery training, and so I was put in charge of a small platoon of people to find German weapons . . . so we could provide an armed united group. . . . We decided to use ‘George’ to store the equipment. The tunnel was considered to be our after-Soviet occupation outlet, our last survival exit.”
As the snows of late November began to accumulate around Sagan, tunnellers under the North Compound at Stalag Luft III brought the face of “George” to a position just beyond the east perimeter wire and within feet of the surface. X Organization planners agreed the tunnel would not be used for another escape attempt, merely, as Sweanor had considered it, an emergency exit from the North Compound, a bolt-hole should either the retreating Germans or advancing Soviets decide to take out their frustrations on the kriegies. Meantime, under SBO Wilson’s direction, the entire compound population was reorganized into sections, platoons, and companies of the commando self-defence force. The Klim Klub, as it was code-named, prepared for an expected final confrontation with either the camp guards or a hostile invading army.
As it turned out, however, there was a more lethal enemy than either the Germans or the Soviets in the final battle to survive Silesia: the natural elements, among the very reasons the creators of Stalag Luft III had located the prison there in the first place.
* Oberregierungsrat Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, chief of the Gestapo at Breslau, was arrested by the Soviet Army on May 10, 1945. In August 1946, the Soviets allowed Captain M. F. Cornish of the British Intelligence Corps to travel to Moscow to interview Scharpwinkel (under Soviet supervision). His voluntary statement (quoted here) was taken September 19, 1946. He died in a prison in Moscow, October 17, 1947.
* Kriminalinspektor Richard Max Hänsel, in charge of the Gestapo sub-office at Görlitz, was in British custody by June 20, 1946, and four days later, the Royal Air Force War Crimes Interrogation Unit took a voluntary statement (quoted here) from him. A war crimes trial began in Hamburg on July 1, 1947, and lasted fifty days. The Judge Advocate General determined there was insufficient evidence to convict Hänsel; he was formally acquitted on November 6, 1948.
* Kriminal Obersekretaer Lux was killed during fighting at Breslau in 1944.
* In 1945, Gestapo officer Erich Zacharias managed to acquire papers from American occupation authorities in Germany identifying him as a Customs official with no Nazi record. He was eventually traced to a refrigeration plant in Wesermünde and arrested; he escaped and was recaptured April 1, 1946. His voluntary statement (quoted here) was taken April 12, 1946. He was found guilty of murder and hanged at Hameln jail on February 27, 1948.
** At the end of the war in Europe, Gestapo NCO Adolf Knueppelberg was in the (Soviet) Red Army Camp 33 , near Brno, and prematurely released. He was never arrested.
*** In the fall of 1945, Gestapo driver Friedrich Kiowsky was arrested by the Czech police. His testimony and February 22 , 1946, voluntary statement (quoted here) implicated Zacharais and Knueppelberg in the murders of Kidder and Kirby-Green, but he was found guilty and executed in Czechoslovakia in 1947.
*Sturmbannführer Johannes Post was executed at Hameln jail on February 27, 1948.
* When Bob Nelson and Dick Churchill considered their good fortune at being sent back to Stalag Luft III and not shot, the two men speculated that perhaps SS Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe recognized their surnames had historical significance to Britons and didn’t want to tempt fate.
* Colonel von Lindeiner was court-martialled and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Reassigned to a mental hospital during the German capitulation, he was shot and wounded by Soviet troops, then handed over to the British. On July 1, 1947, the first of two trials in the Stalag Luft III murders began at the War Crimes Court in Hamburg. Testifying for the defence, Colonel von Lindeiner was asked if under the Aktion Kugel and Stufe Römisch III orders he would have shot the prisoners himself. “I should have put a bullet through my head,” he said. He was exonerated, but remained in prison until November 1947.