Colditz (40 page)

Pierre Mairesse Lebrun says:

The conception of courage in war is straightforward. A soldier is under orders to act. The action necessitates the demonstration of courage.
A prisoner-of-war is in an individual situation. He is confronted by the options: to attempt to escape, to risk the consequences, or to do nothing. Each man is thereby confronted by a challenge in his own character. Has he the courage to act or has he not? The decision is his, nobody else's. Uniquely, men who become prisoners-of-war have the opportunity to face this challenge.

Pierre believes it is impossible to estimate the potential for courage in any individual. Sometimes the most unlikely people exhibit the greatest courage, and some of them are astonished at their own undreamt-of resources.

Autumn and Winter 1944–1945

T
HE LAST DAYS OF SEPTEMBER
1944 were fateful days for Colditz and ex-Colditz men. The Poles were to suffer great loss. General Bór Komorowski gave up the battle and ended the holocaust that had destroyed Warsaw. He surrendered on 2 October and started on the journey that led him to Colditz on 5 February 1945. On 27 September a tragedy took place at Dössel,
Oflag
IVB, where the Poles from Colditz had ended up.

Jędrzej Giertych was already in his straw-palliassed board-bed at about 9 p.m. in one of the timber barrack blocks of the Polish officers' compound.

There was a single tremendous explosion. It blew the end of his hut clean out. Ten other blocks were more severely damaged, some totally destroyed. In one barrack practically every Pole was killed outright. If an enemy had specifically sought out the Polish contingent with intent to exterminate them he was definitely on the road to success. But why not two or three bombs simultaneously? That would have completed the job satisfactorily. Nobody could ascertain at the time with any degree of accuracy who had perpetrated this wanton carnage. Rumors carried the day; one was that the Germans had vindictively done it. After all it was known they had taken an old ship full of Polish officers battened in the holds and opened the stopcocks of the hulk in the middle of the Baltic Sea and sunk it.

Dominic Bruce carried out research on this episode. It is established that the main bomber force of the British and US Air Force was not in operation that night. From second tactical Air Force records, their planes were not in the area.

No. 8 Group RAF were operating with forty-six Mosquito aircraft (ref: PRO Air 27W 2089 Ops Record Book 139 Squadron). The following targets were
attacked: Kassel (flying times 1914–2350 hours); Aschaffenburg (1851–2254 hours); Heilbron (1933–2340 hours); Karlsruhe (flying times of no significance).

Of these, Kassel is easily the nearest to Dössel—only twenty miles away. That raid was carried out by twelve Mosquitos of 139 (B) Squadron. Their take-off time was 1915–1920 hours; they landed back at 2245–2250 hours—a flying time of about three and a half hours. They would have been over the area at about 2020 hours. Their target was the Kassel marshalling yard. Their bomb-load type was almost certainly the light case 4,000 bomb, known as the “Cookie,” designed to demolish buildings and the people in them. Each plane would carry one bomb. The air crews were experienced pathfinders. Weather conditions were bad, with 8/10–10/10 cloud and cloud tops up to 14,000 feet. All machines bombed and returned safely. Bombing results were described as “difficult to observe.” One target indicator was seen to drop ten miles short of the Kassel target.

The evidence points as certainly as may be to the unfortunate conclusion that the Dössel bomb was dropped by one of our Mosquitos. It is almost impossible to conceive, in the face of weather conditions and the strength and timing of the Allied bomber forces, that a single German bomber carrying a similar bomb load could have been scheduled to take off at a moment's notice on its mission of vengeance and could have achieved it with such deadly accuracy, with full intent to camouflage its bombing as being that of the Allied forces.

Ninety men were killed by the bomb, and about 500 were wounded seriously. Among the killed were nineteen from Colditz, including Adam Niedenthal.

Andrzej Onyszkiewicz (1899–1981) left Colditz direct for Lübeck in April 1942, and moved to Dössel in 1944. He survived the bomb almost miraculously. He was repairing his military overcoat and held it up in his two hands, spread out, just as the bomb exploded. His hut disintegrated and he sailed out, dragged by his overcoat. His sail dragged him for 150 yards along a loose gravel path. When he recovered consciousness his whole body was impregnated with gravel, and his internal organs suffered gravely. He survived and, after the war, came to London, where he edited the Polish periodical
Czyn Katolocki
.

John Arundell, the 16th and last Lord Arundell of Wardour, one of the POWs who had arrived in Colditz from Warburg in June 1943, was transferred to Elsterhorst, to the tuberculosis wing, in June 1944. He had already been in the Colditz
Revier
(sick-bay) for nearly three months.

On 15 October Colditz inmates learned with profound shock that he had died in Chester, England, during his journey of repatriation from Germany. He had succumbed to the disease. The date of his death was 25 September 1944. (On the same day Michael Sinclair had met his end.) He had been wounded
when fighting near Douai in May 1940 and was taken prisoner. The title, created in 1605, died with him and the direct male line of the Arundell family became extinct. The 1st Lord rests in the Parish Church at Tisbury, where the helmet he wore at the battle of Gran and in many other conflicts still adorns the wall of the Chancel; the 2nd Lord, who died fighting for his King in the Civil War and his wife, the heroic defender of Wardour Castle against Cromwell's hordes, lie there too, and the last Lord, as brave as they were, rests nearby.

The position of Lord Arundell of Wardour in Colditz was odd in that he was not designated by the German hierarchy to be a
Prominenter
, although he held the oldest aristocratic title of all of them. This was simply because he had no close relation who was a political or military leader.

In the last days of September the final stages of the Battle of Arnhem were taking place. Colditz was represented in this battle, for Airey Neave was up on the south bank of the Rhine. His story tells, among other things, of an astonishing twist of fate.

A week after the battle the number and location of paratroops hidden behind the enemy lines across the Rhine became known. The power stations in Nijmegen on the Waal and at Ede on the northern bank of the Rhine were linked by private telephone lines which remained intact while the battle raged. The exchanges were controlled by the Resistance and they gave us the information that in the houses and forests of Ede were hidden nearly 140 men. A rescue operation over the Rhine was planned. It came to be known as Operation Pegasus.

On 12 September, Douw van der Krap had gone to Oosterbeek to train a Dutch Resistance group. On the night of 22 October the first Pegasus group were brought back across the Rhine and Douw was with them. He finally reached Allied occupied territory and was hospitalized in Nijmegen. Here, to his delight, he met Airey Neave again. With Airey's help, he was able to get to England where he arrived by plane a few weeks later.

On 29 September it was announced that German camp
Lagermarks
would cease as currency as from 1 October. A chit system was started up, controlled by Mike Moran. Early in October the SBO, according to Eggers, made the following announcement on parade:

It is no longer an adventure to get out of this camp. Anyone escaping will get home too late to take part in the war anyway. Furthermore I disapprove
of kicking a man when he's down. There will be no further demonstrations on parade.

The second statement no doubt refers to Goon-baiting, which was indeed falling out of favor at this time, but one may question the likelihood of both these statements being made at the same parade.

On 14 October there was a new arrival. He had made several escape attempts since his capture on 15 July 1942 in North Africa, and was sent to Colditz as
Deutschfeindlich
. He hated Germans and all things German. He was a solitary man of immense valor, modest to an extreme. His name was Captain Charles Upham VC and Bar, NZEF.

Padre Platt reports the cutting down of rations in his entry for 16 October:

As from today the bread ration is cut by 200 grammes a week, and the potato ration by 150 grammes a day. These are to be compensated weight for weight by millet or peas, or kohlrabi, or something. If the former two are substituted it will be an acceptable exchange, for (a) the bread is pretty terrible, and (b) we have learned to do rather wonderful things with millet; but if kohlrabi or something is the most frequent exchange it will be most unacceptable, for the man who thought of bastardising turnip and cabbage might have expended his genius on producing something less tasteless and insipid. A better cabbage or a better turnip would have been a worthy accomplishment, but why the worst of both?

Sergeant Suza, a Czech, arrived on 27 October. By this time there were seventeen Czechs in Colditz, officers and other ranks. All were Air Force and all were held on charge of deserting from Czechoslovakia after the German occupation.

On 14 August the Czechs Jack Zafouk and Cenek Chaloupka had been suddenly taken to Prague; they were returned safely on the 31st. In Prague they had been handed over to the Gestapo. Only Checko was interrogated at first, but then, on 10 September, Jack was charged with having served with the forces of an enemy power and with having borne arms against the Reich. The penalty was death. Checko was not charged.

It transpired that fourteen new arrivals in Colditz had also been taken to Prague, subjected to the same maltreatment and charged as Jack was. Alan “Black” Campbell prepared the defense for them all, based on constitutional and international rather than criminal law. The highest military tribune in the
country was to try them, but the trial was postponed until after the war and so in fact never took place.

Only recently has it come to light that three more RAF Czech officers (British) who arrived in Colditz in January 1945 had been court-martialed on a similar charge, found guilty and sentenced to death.

Eggers, remarking that the kitchen staff was far too small to have time for cleaning carrots, evokes a pathetic picture in early November:

The carrots—tiny, dirty carrots and as grubby as all carrots seem to be—were cleaned by a volunteer corps, among which I observed a Brigadier, an American Colonel, a Scots Colonel, a Lieutenant-Commander of the Royal Navy, Officers of field rank, officers below, and a Chaplain, all standing in an irregular circle in gusty drizzle, scraping little carrots with pocket knives until their hands were numb with cold, dirt and wet.

Two new
Prominenten
, expected for a week, arrived on 10 November. They were Captain John, the Master of Elphinstone, of the Black Watch, a nephew of the Queen, and Lieutenant F. Max de Hamel, a nephew of Winston Churchill. On the 11th, Armistice Day, Private Bullard sounded the Last Post at 11 a.m. and Reveille at two minutes past. Padre Platt thought it was a more real memorial than the service of previous years. The next day there was the arrival of two more
Prominenten
: Captain Earl Haig, Scots Greys, son of the late Field Marshal, and Lieutenant Viscount Lascelles, Grenadier Guards.

Peter Tunstall was notified on 18 November that the OKW had not confirmed the sentence of his last court-martial, and had ordered a retrial on 5 January 1945.

Padre Platt commented at the end of November that news of the fall of Strasbourg to the French Army Corps had raised hopes of victory before Christmas almost to the point of certainty. A week later, he describes the meager Colditz diet:

Since German rations were cut, and Red Cross parcels cut by half, the usual complete evening meal could be placed without violence into a four-ounce Three Nuns tobacco tin. Breakfast consists of two very thin slices of rye bread, not quite 1/4” thick, spread with prima fat and a little preserve on one piece, with a cup of ersatz coffee. Lunch consists of one small potato and two or three tablespoonsful of boiled vegetable. Two slices of bread are cut into seven pieces and a two-ounce tin of cheese divided between them. Once a week (but not infrequently a week is missed) meat is served at the
usual rate of one-and-a-half ounces each. A cup of Red Cross tea rounds off the meal.

On 6 December a fourth American arrived in Colditz Castle from the camp at Schubin—a man in serious trouble. He was Lieutenant-Colonel W. H. Schaefer, 45th Division, US Army. As acting Senior Officer in Schubin he had supported a Lieutenant Schmidt who had stood in the way of a German NCO trying to post a notice entitled “Escaping is no longer a game.” (The notice confessed, in effect, that the German military could no longer enforce the Geneva Convention rules about escaping prisoners. Civilians—and other elements—were liable to kill runaways on the spot.) Under German military law, any soldier interfering with a German soldier carrying out his order may be court-martialed and sentenced to death. His new captors put him in solitary confinement in a cell outside the regular POW section to await the court-martial.

Duke got permission to take the Colonel his one meal a day. Lieutenant Alan “Black” Campbell, the British barrister in civilian life, framed his defense, which Duke sent off to the OKW. They also notified the Protecting Power. Having by then some idea of how the war might end, the
Kommandant
took no initiative in the matter.

André Perrin, the tough little Frenchman, who had spent eleven weeks in solitary in Colditz, had gone to Lübeck with the other French in the summer of 1943. He had promised his English friends, among them Bader and Romilly, that he would bring news of them to their relatives in England before the end of the war. He kept his promise.