Colditz (18 page)

The proceedings were suddenly interrupted by a phone call which put “a hair in their soup” just as it was being served.

Eggers tells the story:

The guard NCO hurried in—“Three French officers have just escaped from the dentist's.”

“Man all telephones. Mousetrap's the word,” and we called up the local alarm network….

That evening, a party of seven were sent down to the town dentist, five P.O.W.s and two guards, because up in the
Schloss
the French officer dentist hadn't the material for more than simple fillings. The patients all came out of our dentist's house together after treatment. Their guard came last. It was very foggy and it was raining too that evening. Three of the party just bolted down the street; Lieuts. Durand-Hornus, de Frondeville and Prot. There was nothing the guard could do about it. He couldn't run three ways at once. He daren't fire blindly into the fog. We could do nothing more either once we had warned everyone. So back we went to our Christmas festivities, but the soup was cold and the spirit of the feast was much watered down. The three in due course got right back to France.

Eggers has claimed that it was only after this escape that the German dentist came up to the Castle to attend his victims. This is incorrect. Prot was the third man in the affair of the dentist's hat and coat, which had been stolen while the latter was working in the Castle dentistry. Indeed Prot actually used the hat and coat in his escape just before Christmas. The fact is that such dental work as the French and German dentists could do in the Castle was very limited and the more serious cases had to progress to the town operating theater.

The escape was Jacques Durand-Hornus' third attempt, Guy de Frondeville's first and Jacques Prot's second. Prot was another Frenchman whose puckishness was irrepressible and whose quick-wittedness won him freedom and later glory.

The two friends, Prot and de Frondeville, separated for safety at Leipzig. Prot, tall, dark, well-built, aged about twenty-six, went through Cologne to Aachen. As he neared the frontier he saw to his horror that his false papers were not at all like those in current use. The frontier station was heavily patrolled and guarded. He closely followed the crowd, mostly Belgian passengers, towards the barrier. He was at his wit's end. Then the light dawned! He grabbed a suitcase out of the hand of an astonished fellow-passenger and took to his heels, through the barrier and away. The psychology behind his move was inspired. For the passenger created a tremendous uproar, attracting everybody's attention for a few minutes—then, as soon as the Germans were fully aware of what had happened, they couldn't care less. An escaping French officer might have been something, but a thief running away with a Belgian's suitcase did not raise the slightest interest. Nine days out from Colditz, Prot arrived in Paris, to the surprise and joy of his family, on Christmas Eve 1941.

He reached Tunis via the French Free Zone in 1942, and joined the 67th Artillery Regiment (Algerian). From Paris he returned the suitcase to the owner, whose address he found inside, and from Tunis he sent to the German dentist a large consignment of real coffee with apologies for the removal of his hat and coat. He fought through the Tunisian campaign to Cassino, where during the first offensive (Mount Belvedere) on 29 January 1944 he gave his life for France.

Winter came in real earnest as the year 1941 ended: heavy falls of snow; ten degrees of frost; snowballing and a slide down the middle of the courtyard.

New Year's Eve was a day of small interest until Hauptmann Püpcke announced that the yard would be open until the time of
Lichts aus
at 1:30 a.m. and that the New Year's morning roll-call would be at 10 a.m. instead of 9 a.m.

The evening was about to close after the “Auld Lang Syne” followed by the national anthem, when the Dutch officers, led by Major Engles, who bore a symbolic broom-at-the-masthead recalling Admiral Tromp's boast in 1666 that he would sweep the British Navy from the sea, swept in and round our day-room, hands to shoulders, in a chanting human chain. On their heels came a bellowing Belgian chain, followed again by a shorter international one. National anthems were sung, and the British had to sing theirs again.

Two hundred POWs linked hands to shoulders then danced out over the snow in the courtyard, on a tour of all the quarters of the
Schloss
. After running up and
down thousands of steps on spiral staircases, through low, narrow passages and rooms filled with tobacco smoke and black-out fug, the human chain of sweating bodies ended up in the yard and the snow again.

Dr. Eggers, who had just entered the main gate, handled the situation at this point with admirable tact. The different nationalities were all now in national groups, some standing silent while one or other group sang fiercely of home, love and liberty. Many were expecting that Eggers would stop them singing and drive them indoors. Had he done so he would have had to call out the guard and to have thrust officers indoors under threat of gun-fire—a bad beginning for the New Year. Instead he paced about until each nation had had its turn, and then stepped forward and said, “Now you have had your songs, it is time to go to your quarters,” and everyone went without incident or ill-feeling.

By the end of 1941, Eggers recorded the following escape figures:

On 2 January 1942, Padre Platt made the following cryptic entry in his diary:

Three weeks ago I introduced Dick to an entry I made in December. He thought there was some mistake and said how hesitant he would be to make such an entry but our conversation gave direction to his observation.

I have waited these three weeks with considerable anxiety; if he failed to observe, and decided against my judgement, my plan to short-circuit the miserable business (a carefully thought-out plan, too) would fall to the ground. However, to my intense relief, he came to me this morning boiling with indignation, having proved the matter against his own wish and will.

He has real influence with a more or less central person in the wretched affair, and is prepared and willing to use it to the utmost. I cannot begin my personal contacts until Dick wins his round.

This was followed by another entry on 5 January:

Dick engaged his man in earnest conversation today. He was frightfully ashamed of his conduct and promised to cut it out. At tea time he asked to
see me and made a frank but shame-faced confession. Now the stage is set, and I must attempt as difficult a task as has yet come my way.

Some of those to whom I propose to speak will deny all knowledge of anything of the kind; while one, I imagine, will tell me to mind my own business. But this happens to be my business; I half wish it were not! The thing I must avoid is direct accusation. At least in the initial stages. I think I will begin by enquiring confidentially of each of the persons concerned if they have observed any homosexual tendencies. What they think of such perversion and of the perverts. The answers will no doubt reveal with what deliberateness or otherwise such indulgences have been embraced.

A severely curtailed version of Padre Platt's diary, edited by Margaret Duggan, was published in 1978. The original written manuscript of the diary was kindly lent to me by the padre's widow in 1983. The above entries and that of 6 December 1941, all of which I have checked against the original, caused a great fluttering in the dovecot of Colditz POWs and Colditz fans. As Dick Howe was named as collaborating with Padre Platt in the latter's aim of excising the cancer, Commander “Mike” Moran, the Colditz ex-POWs organization voluntary secretary, wrote to Dick in 1979 asking for his views on Padre Platt's pronouncements. In his answer Dick regretted that “perversion should be used to pervert the truth.” He was adamant that throughout his three years as escape officer his stooges, who were watching the movements of the Germans twenty-four hours a day in several parts of the Castle, would have noticed any midnight liaisons and reported them to him. He continued:

As for daylight liaisons, I would think it would be easier to have a homosexual relationship in a tube train. Ironically, the only two people who could have had an undisturbed relationship were Padre Platt and Padre Hobling, who were the only two people who had a room to themselves, which was known as the “Priests' Hole.” The rest of us had to suffer the discomfort of something like twenty to a room with not a place in the castle where one could go for a bit of peace and quiet, not even the loo, which if you remember only had half doors….

I can recall as if it were yesterday Don Donaldson saying to Platt in his wise-cracking Canadian way that the only thing Platt could write about was Padre Hobling; as you may recall Platt hardly ever ventured outside the Priests' Hole or the British common-room. Platt used to reply to Don Donaldson that he knew more than most people thought, but then we all
knew Platt to be the leading bullshitter in the camp and Don always told him so—I was more polite! Platt could have kept some pages to himself, but I doubt it, and I have some sympathy for anyone trying to edit what I regarded as rubbish and not very interesting at that.

I would hardly regard Pat Reid's opinion as worth much as he was only there for about a third of the life of Colditz as a POW camp. [He means as a
Sonderlager
. My “opinion” related to an overall approval of the book
Padre in Colditz
and I admit to no knowledge of homosexuality while I was in Colditz]…

I must re-study my old mates to see which ones he is thinking about as I can only think of one individual who had those tendencies but, poor chap, there was nowhere with any privacy to practice them.

Of course there were individuals who found the frustration almost unbearable and I am surprised the slime pedlars have not picked up the incident of the fellow who cut off his penis as he reckoned he would not have any further use for it. To my certain knowledge, there were more cases of self-inflicted wounds due to sexual repression than homosexuality, which I would say was non-existent or so rare as to have missed the attention of my all-embracing stooging system…. Come to think of it, Micky Burn and I could have had a good time when we were locked in the radio cabin for two hours at a time.

*
“Where are the Gemans? / They've fallen in shit, / Where we drive them in—up to the ears.”

Winter 1941–1942

I
T WAS TIME THE BRITISH
had a break. They had had no successes to record during the whole of 1941. So it was exhilarating for the camp to learn on morning
Appell
on 7 January that two British officers and two Dutch officers were missing. Eggers describes it thus:

We ran another of our special searches from 10 a.m. to 2 in the afternoon of that day, keeping over 500 prisoners in the cold of the yard while we did it. The uproar was so loud, unceasing and so threatening, that the
Kreisleiter
[District Organizer, Nazi Party] phoned from the town to ask what was up. He said the townspeople were getting upset! We found nothing….

By then the OKW was getting worried. They began to ask about the “spoil” from an obvious tunnel which we had been reporting off and on for weeks. They bombarded us with questions and advice. One night they rang up, “Is Romilly there? Is Emil there?” We sent [an] NCO to his cell. “Yes, he's there. No, there's not somebody in his place. No, it's not a dummy. We've been in and woken him up.”

Now follows a most significant report by Eggers:

A few days later I found our Emil trotting round the yard. I hadn't seen Romilly taking exercise like this before.

“What does this mean?” I asked jokingly. “In training?”

“Aha!” he replied, “when it's my turn to make the trip I must be fit.”

“Well,” I thought, “that's a smart reaction. If Romilly has it in mind to be away too, the exit must be from inside the Castle and not down in the park. Romilly never leaves the Castle yard.”

Eggers accordingly determined to make a thorough search of every conceivable place where an exit could have been made. But meanwhile the four escapers were travelling quickly away from Colditz. How had they got out of the Castle?