Colditz (10 page)

Padre Platt's account must have been written down after the events and their consequences had taken place. If he wrote them before or during the episode, he would be guilty of endangering its success. His written material could be picked up and read at any time by German security, in which event the escape would be compromised.

Eggers' version of the story (in his book
Colditz: The German Story
) ends: “And the guard? He kept his 100 Marks; he got extra leave, promotion and the War Service Cross. It was worth it: our first big success and due solely to the loyalty of one of our men.”

Peter Allan was brought back to Colditz on 31 May—a Saturday. He went straight to cells. He was limping. He had been absent for twenty-three days and everyone thought he had made the “home-run.” It was a sad day and some bitter comments went the rounds when details of his story filtered through the grapevine channels. Peter had extricated himself from his palliasse after being dumped “somewhere in Colditz.” He found himself on the ground floor of a deserted house in the town. He opened the window, climbed out into a small garden and from there to a road.

Peter reached Stuttgart and then Vienna. There he went into a park and fell asleep on a bench. When he awoke in the morning he found his legs paralyzed with cramp. He crawled to the nearest house and was taken to hospital, where his resistance broke down.

There was a heatwave during the last days of May and early June. The courtyard every day was strewn with shining, sweaty bodies in various stages of redness, rawness and suntan. The British orderlies decided to stage a mutiny and refused to serve their officers (it was taken for granted in the Geneva Convention of 1929 that officers were entitled to servants). Lieutenant-Commander Stevenson RN had become Senior Officer while the colonel was in cells. It was a pretty difficult task to get the orderlies in any kind of shape. Rooms were dirty, insolence was frequent, two of them regularly talked for our benefit about revolution and parasites. Stevenson stepped into the arena and if, by methods honored by long usage in the Navy, he made matters worse instead of better, the fault is not his entirely! Having drawn up a list of times and duties he called the orderlies together, and addressed them as though speaking from the bridge with the authority of the Admiralty behind him. But the orderlies declared they would take orders from no one but the Germans. With his bluff called in that fashion, there was just nothing more to be done. He had no power to punish disobedience other than by appealing to German authority, and the orderlies made a pretty shrewd guess that he would do no such thing.

Only three orderlies continued to do anything at all (Goldman was sick and in hospital). The job was far too big for three, so officers shared out the work of laying and clearing tables, sweeping floors, and so on. Padre Platt continues:

Among the officers there has at no time been any lack of discipline. Colonel German has no more immediate authority over officers than over the
orderlies; but, there is an intelligent appreciation of the position, as well as an affection for the Colonel himself. He is precisely the right type of Senior Officer for a P.O.W. camp. There is not one British Officer who does not trust his administration.

An immediate consequence of Stevenson's effort to deal with the wretched orderly position came this afternoon. The orderlies as from noon are quartered on the other side of the
Hof
with the French and Polish orderlies. That will at least excuse us from suffering their insolence, and from their monopolization of the WCs and wash bowls. As from today instead of sharing food with us as hitherto they will draw separate rations and receive Red Cross parcels and other communal parcels on a strictly numerical basis.

The three, MacKenzie, Smith and Wallace, who have declared themselves ready to continue work will come over to these quarters at specified times. The others, led by Wilkins, Doherty and Munn, are forbidden to enter the officers' quarters at any time. The
Kommandant
has been officially requested to return the malcontents to a
Stalag
, and to bring other British soldiers to replace them.

On 31 May a second Frenchman, Lieutenant René Collin, escaped. He was never recaptured.

On 1 June, Eggers was promoted to
Hauptmann
. From that time he was mostly occupied as a camp officer in the
Schützenhaus
, which housed about 150 Russian officers, or at least officers of Russian origin, culled from the Allied armies and enemies of the Bolsheviks. The
Schützenhaus
(“shooting gallery”) was a building with a paddock and range situated about half a mile from the Castle near the river. It was hired by the OKW in 1940 and was easily transformed into a detention camp. The White Russians had been captured while serving as officers, either in the Polish, Yugoslavian or French forces. They or their fathers had left Russia in 1920–1921 after fighting unsuccessfully against the Bolsheviks. They were not unruly and many even asked to be allowed to fight with the German Army in Russia. The OKW initially refused this request, but during the last days of 1941 the decision was reversed and Eggers escorted them to special camps at Zietenhorst and Wutzetz in Mecklenburg.

Morale among the prisoners was a matter of great importance, and one to which the Germans might be expected to give some attention. There had been a large influx of French and Belgians recently, necessitating a change-over of quarters between them and the Poles. In turn the Belgians were separated from
the French. In addition a first contingent of ten Jewish French officers, picked from other prisons, had arrived in April and had been allotted separate quarters, which were immediately dubbed the Ghetto. Alain Le Ray considered that the German intention behind this was to subdue “escapist” morale by introducing diverting and conflicting elements into the community of POWs. They would seek to exploit any counter-assimilation of new elements by the creation of suspicion and distrust amongst the POW community.

Pierre Mairesse Lebrun (whose adventures I recount in
Chapter 5
) states that the French Jewish officers were transferred to Colditz as hostages. Certainly the French banker, Eli de Rothschild, who was among them, would be considered one. Few were escapers, and they were collected together from various camps. By now in mid-June they numbered about sixty officers. Many were doctors, French-born.

There was a morale-booster on 22 June, when the news broke of the declaration of war between Germany and Russia. The Germans had apparently started their invasion on 20 June. Polish officers claimed they had heard the news at 7 a.m. over the radio. The atmosphere was electric all day. Padre Platt records what happened:

All day the atmosphere was charged as though heralding an electric storm. The outlet came immediately after
Lichts aus
[lights out] when, from the other side of the
Hof
… a carolling voice breathed on to the still, confined air the strains of the “Volga Boatmen.” I grinned, as did scores of others—it was a good joke. Within a trice a score of voices wailed the lugubrious “Yoho heave-ho” and within another second not a score but a few hundred songsters leaned from the windows and joined in a dolorous crescendo which reverberated on the age-old walls.

The guards on duty are of a new detachment. They are not yet
au fait
with the drill of an officers' camp, and perhaps on such a day a Russian song made them feel hot under the collar. One of the two pulled himself to his full height and in the interval between the singing of patriotic songs of first one nation then another, he told everyone in plain Deutsch to get to bed. In response to this a couple of hundred and more voices rose and fell in lively imitation of an air raid siren.

Then the storm broke! The whistle of falling bombs, the roar of dive bombers (what lungs some of these fellows have!), and as a soft background, heard only at intervals, the song of the Russian river-folk. For twenty minutes it was a perfectly hideous pandemonium in which
everyone shared! Then someone, with the idea of adding realism to the show, bomb-whistled loudly and from a great height sent a beer bottle crashing on the sets below. It was followed by a second in which the beer had been well shaken, and the crash was appropriately louder. Cries of protest went up from almost every window, and no more were dropped, but the
Hof
was gay with newspaper-folded gliders which shot gracefully across the fifteen or twenty paces to the other side, and then petered out on the ground like falling stars.

Most of us were uneasy about the bottles. They were capable of the worst interpretation; but I am persuaded they were not meant to intimidate the guards, and did not drop near them. One of the Germans, however, went to the guardhouse to seek advice and help. An
Unteroffizier
returned with him, and after examining the smashed glass shouted something that was lost in the infernal din of battle songs, war-machine noises, and screams as of terrified women.

Three officers and several NCOs next arrived, and Priem, after looking at the mess of the broken bottles, called for what was presumably silence, though his voice was lost in the hideous noise. He tried again, with no better result. Then the order to shoot was given and, quick on the draw as the guards were, we were out of the windows and crouching on the floor a good deal quicker. Rifles cracked and bullets ricocheted, spattering the walls and splintering window panes. Silence! It was as still as a grave. Yes, P.O.W.s, more than most men, know the respect due to active fire-arms.

Appell
was called, and we all trooped down to the
Hof
and fell in. Instead of being harangued as we expected, Major Menz, the second-in-command, called upon the Senior Officer of each nationality to line up before him. Then he said, “Throwing bottles at sentries is not gentlemanly behavior. In future you should not expect to be treated as gentlemen.”

He did not address us, the rank and file, but dismissed the parade forthwith. Once back in our quarters the Colonel addressed us and, the typhoon being spent, no one was sorry when ordered to his bunk. The net results so far today are: radios disconnected, no newspapers delivered, all exercise cancelled.

Some time about noon, Micky Surmanowicz, who has just finished his punishment for breaking out of the cells and scaling the vertical wall of the guardhouse, rather than have the whole camp strafed vicariously, confessed to Priem (through Admiral Unrug) that he had dropped the two beer bottles. Courtyard gossip had it that the real culprits have failed to
come forward and Micky has done so
pro bono public
. Courtyard gossip, however, is worth little. He is now back in solitary.

The
Kommandant
had intimated that serious consequences would ensue for all unless the bottle-throwing culprit owned up. He would be court-martialled in July.

On 25 June I was in a group of POWs marching down to the park when an attractive German girl passed by, going up the ramp towards the courtyard. The prisoners whistled their admiration, for she was a veritable bronze-haired Rhine Maiden, smartly dressed and handsome—a fitting consort for a Germanic deity.

As she swept by, her stylish wristwatch fell from her arm to the feet of Squadron-Leader Paddon. The Rhine Maiden did not notice, but Paddon, ever the gentleman, picked it up and shouted: “Hey, Miss, you've lost your watch.”

The girl had already passed out of sight, so Paddon signed to the nearest guard and called out “
Das Fräulein hat ihre Uhr verloren.
” The guard took the watch and, running back up the ramp, shouted to a sentry in the courtyard to stop the girl. As he made to do so, the sentry suddenly noticed something wrong. A moment's scrutiny was enough. By the time our guard arrived panting with the watch, the Rhine Maiden was exposed. Her fine hat and abundant wig were off, revealing beneath the bald head of Lieutenant Boulé, who unhappily neither spoke nor understood German. He was a reserve officer, about forty-five years old, whose baldness and fresh complexion may have been the inspiration behind his disguise.

Loudspeakers in the prisoners' dayrooms were switched on from the guardhouse in the afternoons. POWs were regaled with concert music, news bulletins and propaganda. Lord Haw-Haw's nightly talks in English were treated with contempt. Another entertaining form of propaganda was known as a
Sondermeldung
(special report). The program would suddenly be interrupted. With a crackling sound, extra power would be switched on. A fanfare of trumpets would herald an important announcement. A Liszt prelude would hold the expectant audience for some bars, followed by a tattoo of drums. Then the announcer's voice would report in sonorous tones the latest victory on land, sea or air. Most commonly in 1941
Sondermeldungs
concerned Allied shipping sunk by German U-boats. A brass band would then strike up the war song “
Wir fahren gegen Engeland
.” To the further accompaniment of falling bombs, thunder of artillery and crackle of machine guns, the interlude would culminate with a fanfare heralding victory.

The intention was to demoralize the enemy. In Colditz windows everywhere would fly open. Musical instruments, the louder the better, would emerge and a cacophony of sound would fill the courtyard, reverberating down into the streets of the town. Knowledgeable prisoners calculated that the Germans had sunk the Allied merchant fleets more than once.

Gradually the loudspeakers were silenced one by one: not because of the broadcasts, but because their insides were of use to the escaping fraternity.

Early Summer 1941

L
IEUTENANT PIERRE MAIRESSE LEBRUN
, a handsome French cavalry officer, had succeeded in escaping from Colditz once before, on 9 June. On one of the park outings, a very small Belgian officer, Sous-Lieutenant Verkest, had been hidden during the outgoing “numbering off” parades. He had simply clamped his legs around a colleague's thighs while two others supported him by the elbows. The man in the middle wrapped his coat and some blankets round the Belgian and then nonchalantly unfolded a German newspaper. During the recreation period, Lebrun, aided by a series of diversions, climbed into the rafters of an open-sided pavilion in the middle of the park. He was not missed at the return counts because Verkest of course stood in for him. Nor did the dogs, sent in after each park visit, get wind of him.