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(#litres_trial_promo) After a few minutes, Neave gave up the unequal struggle and brought from under his shirt the metal disc identifying him as Prisoner of War No. 1198. His enthusiastic but ill-prepared bid for freedom was over. Had his grasp of German been better, or his exhaustion not so complete, he might have bluffed his way through. It was not to be.
Pandemonium broke out. Forbes was brought back into the guardhouse, and another official woke from his sleep and joined in the general clamour. Neave’s co-escaper tried manfully to cope with their accusations. ‘You are not Englishmen, but Polish spies,’ they cried. ‘This is a matter for the Gestapo.’ Neave’s accuser gabbled down the telephone, his dog-tired prisoners barely understanding what was being said. They were then marched back to Itow by a soldier, who, conscious of their condition, did not hustle them. Neave noticed Forbes discreetly tearing up his map of Graudenz aerodrome, which might suggest they were indeed spies, and panicked. Where had he put the other copy? From the police station at Itow they were driven back under guard to Plock, which turned out to be a down-at-heel town swarming with SS. Their lorry dropped them outside a modern block and Neave’s heart missed a beat. By the door, he saw a board carrying the legend ‘GESTAPO’. Their worst fears had been realised.
The two men were taken to a small room where an SS officer and an interrogator in plain clothes asked them more questions and ordered them to empty their pockets. Pitiful remnants of their bid for freedom – bits of chocolate and bread, scraps of paper, a match box disguising a compass – spilled on to the table. The plain-clothes interrogator sorted through these items disdainfully and then seized on a small, folded piece of paper from Neave’s wallet. It was the map of Graudenz aerodrome. ‘So, my friends, you are from the Secret Service!’ he said triumphantly. Unbeknownst to Neave, Graudenz was a bomber station, from which the Luftwaffe would attack the Soviet Union at the outset of Operation Barbarossa only two months later.
Neave was taken to an upper floor where a young, uniformed SS officer questioned him closely in English, while a typist took down his answers. Years later he confessed, ‘I was in great terror, though I tried to appear calm and innocent.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Neave insisted to his interrogator that he had got the idea from other prisoners, working near Graudenz, which was half true. He had been inspired by the Canadian flying officers at Thorn and had planned to escape by stealing an aeroplane, because Forbes was a pilot. ‘You are lying,’ said his inquisitor. ‘You are a spy. You were taking this to the Russians.’ Neave maintained that they were not, and told the curious officer that they were trying ‘the same game’ as the Canadian escape, of which his captor was unaware. The SS officer telephoned Thorn camp and received verification that there had been just such an escape bid, and that prisoners Neave and Forbes were indeed missing. Gradually, the tension eased. They were joined by another SS man, and began talking more casually about the war, referring to a map on the wall. Neave’s brave sally that Britain would win the war prompted cynical laughter. They asked if Polish peasants had helped their escape, and Neave, still wearing his peasant’s corduroy trousers, diverted the questioning to German mistreatment of the Poles. The SS men showed utter contempt for the Poles and their Catholicism, but they ceased interrogating him about spying. Neave’s composure gradually returned. He asked his blond young interlocutor what he had been doing before the war, and, with his resentful admission that he had been at university studying for his doctorate of philosophy, the interrogation ended. Neave and Forbes were marched through the streets of Plock under armed guard to the town prison and put into solitary confinement. Their pathetic civilian disguises were exchanged for coarse grey prison clothes. Neave slept for several hours before being roused for his evening ‘meal’, a bowl of swill containing bad potatoes and swedes. The Polish orderly boy, in prison clothes, whispered that the other inmates knew their identity, and managed some patriotic sentiments before continuing his round.
But Neave’s ordeal was not yet over. Above the door of his cell a notice identified him as ‘Neave, Airey. Spion’. For two days, he recovered in his cell, sleeping most of the time between ‘lunch’ of bread and turnip soup and a half-hour exercise period. Separated with Forbes from the other inmates, he hobbled round the prison courtyard, quietly exchanging details of their interrogation. To Neave’s relief, Forbes had given the same story about the aerodrome map. They had already concocted an agreed version of their escape from the camp, exonerating British other ranks. Neave’s reverie was interrupted some days after the initial interrogation by his gaoler’s curt insistence: ‘The Gestapo wants you.’
Back in the Gestapo building, he had a new, more vicious interrogator, this one with close-cropped black hair and a scarred face. He was just finishing questioning a defiant Polish woman, to whom Neave offered a sympathetic smile. ‘Go on, smile you English officer,’ raged his Nazi debriefer. ‘You started this war. You brought these Poles into it. Both of you are spies! Spies! Spies!’ The SS man glowered at Neave, with, as he thought, ‘murder in his eyes’, and challenged his cover story. The Graudenz map, he shouted, must have come from a Pole. Neave reiterated that it had come from a British prisoner of war. Who? He refused to say. Then, English gentleman, added the plain-clothes SS man, he would remain a guest of the Gestapo until he thought better of his obstinacy. Suddenly the officer softened, becoming for a moment a soldier like Neave. The prisoner should not think, he said, that just because he was in civilian clothes he had not fought like the lieutenant. In fact, he had seen action on the Polish Front, and a small ribbon in his button denoted an award for bravery. ‘Go, Herr Neave, and think things over,’ he admonished.
Back in his prison cell, Neave contemplated his position. He trembled at the prospect of further interrogation, fearing that if physically tortured he would reveal more of the truth. He felt defenceless and alone, anxious lest he face execution like the Polish officer in the cell opposite sentenced to death for killing a Gestapo agent. He prayed, cursed and patrolled his cell agitatedly. ‘I closed my eyes, and despair came over me like a great fog,’ he wrote later.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘I could not see a way out of the darkness.’ In his dreams he was tramping through swamps of dark, stagnant water on the road to Russia, the way marked with the bones of former travellers. The next morning brought relief; he was awoken by the warder who addressed him as Herr Leutnant, and told him he was going back to Thorn ‘with Oberleutnant Forbes’. Once again, he was a British officer. The attitude of his gaolers changed markedly. They were handed back their civilian clothes, including the hated rucksack with its remaining sardines and condensed milk. Neave also retrieved his pipe, tobacco and the box of matches with its concealed compass. With Teutonic thoroughness, everything had been returned, except the map that almost cost him his life. He had memorised the layout of Graudenz, however.
After ten days, the escapers were taken back by train from Plock to Thorn, along the north bank of the Vistula that had been their bearing for Warsaw. They talked amiably of the war to their guards, who knew less than they did. The POWs at Thorn had a radio receiver smuggled in in a medicine ball from Spangenburg. Their welcome at Thorn was less agreeable than their departure from the clutches of the Gestapo. A furious German officer, whose guards had allowed them to escape, drew his revolver and marched them ‘Hande hoch’ to windowless dungeons in the outer wall of the fortress. When they protested at the pigsty conditions a sentry thrust his gun down the ventilation hole into Neave’s cell. ‘If you are swinehounds, you must expect to be kept in pigsties,’ he yelled. Neave threatened to report his filthy language to the Kommandant and the gun was hastily withdrawn.
After a night in appalling conditions, they were locked in a room above the keep, without furniture but for two beds, while weighing over their failed escape bid. They came to one maddeningly simple, but vitally important, conclusion. They had tried to cross the Polish countryside too quickly and without method. ‘We had, as it were, charged the barricade of the General-Government frontier without calculation,’ he decided. And yet they had got so close to Warsaw. It would have been comparatively simple to skirt the ill-defined border through the woods and make their way to the capital. Moreover, in such inhospitable terrain, an escaper had to understand the strain his vulnerability would place on his spirit. ‘Loneliness and physical stress undermine the most resolute,’ he wrote.
(#litres_trial_promo) The escaper must conserve his forces by lying up in the warmth for long periods. The lessons of this failed escape bid were not lost on him.
On being sent back to his room in the fort, Neave found that his short period of freedom had given him fresh strength. He went back to the novels of Victorian England that reminded him so much of home, and found an inner peace. One night, after he had finished Mrs Henry Wood’s sentimental melodrama, East Lynne, he was roughly roused by a German guard and told that he was being moved immediately. ‘We have had enough trouble with you,’ said the guard. Gathering his few belongings in a bundle, he joined a small party of prisoners among whom he recognised Forbes. ‘Where the hell are we going?’ asked Neave. ‘To the Bad Boys’ Camp at Colditz,’ came the reply.
5 Colditz (#ulink_a35ae17f-778b-5512-90cc-3fa79e6c4125)
High above the Saxony town of Colditz broods an impregnable castle surrounded on three sides by sheer rock precipices, approached only by a narrow cobbled causeway over a deep moat. Infuriated by the frequent escapes of Allied officers, the Nazis decided to concentrate here, in a Sonderlager, or punishment camp, the most recalcitrant of the ‘bad boys’ from other camps in Occupied Europe. Colditz was thought to be escape-proof, and indeed it had proved to be so in the First World War when it housed Allied POWs. The logic was understandable but erroneous. By putting all the most determined officers together in Oflag IVc, the German High Command effectively established an escape academy, which scored an impressive number of ‘home runs’ in the five and a half years of its existence. ‘We made things better for our prisoners by cramming Colditz with new escape material week after week,’ confessed the camp intelligence officer in a frank post-mortem. Every new arrival brought knowledge of new methods of escape, of fresh routes, or documents, of checks on trains and the like. ‘In this castle, the prisoners had the interior lines of communication, and the initiative as well.’
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This did not seem to be the case at all when the first British officers arrived in the autumn of 1940. Captain Patrick Reid, the chairman of the British escape committee, recollected that the prisoners could see their future prison almost upon leaving the station: ‘beautiful, serene, majestic and yet forbidding enough to make our hearts sink into our boots’. Schloss Colditz towered over the town of the same name and the River Mulde, a tributary of the Elbe. The castle was rebuilt on much older foundations, dating back to 1014, in the early eighteenth century by Augustus the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony (known as ‘the Strong’ because of his tireless sexual drive: he is supposed to have fathered 365 children). The castle had seen many sieges and sackings and even its name betrayed its fortunes. Colditz is a Slav word-ending, dating from the time it was occupied by the Poles. Its original name was Koldyeze. The town, essentially an overgrown village, was situated in the centre of a triangle formed by the big cities of Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz. The land surrounding the castle was hilly and wooded, known locally as ‘little Switzerland’, and levelled out northwards into a fertile agricultural plain. It was buried deep in the Reich, 400 miles from the nearest neutral territory, Switzerland.
Since its abandonment by the Saxon royal family in 1800, Colditz had housed prisoners of one sort or another. In the 1920s it was a mental asylum, and when he came to power in 1933 Hitler used the castle to incarcerate his enemies, real or imagined, and to train the Hitler Youth. Its outer walls were 7 feet thick, resting on a rock face that rises 200 feet above the river. The inner courtyard, where the English officers were to live, rose a further 60 feet. Their cells were six storeys high with iron bars on the windows. Searchlights played on the walls all night, and in these early days at least there were more guards than prisoners. It was a truly forbidding place, designed to dishearten would-be fugitives.
The first prisoners of the Second World War were Polish officers, who arrived in the autumn of 1939 when Colditz was no more than a transit camp. With the outbreak of war in Western Europe the following year, it was designated a Special Camp, and French and Belgian officers started to arrive. The first British officers reached the castle in early November 1940. This advance guard of three Canadian RAF flying officers was boosted by a group of six army officers recaptured after escaping from a camp near Salzburg.
Colditz was designated Oflag (Offizierslager) IVc and came under the command of Werhmacht Group Four, based in Dresden. The Germans derived their authority to establish a special camp from Section 48 of the Geneva Convention which permitted strict surveillance, though without loss of any other prisoners’ rights as provided by this agreement. ‘In effect, this camp had a greater number of searches, roll-calls and so on than in the normal camps, and much less room to move around in – just a forty-yards square courtyard, and no open space except the park outside, which might only be visited for short and fixed periods daily under some restriction and much surveillance,’ wrote Reinhold Eggers, latterly in charge of security at the prison.
(#litres_trial_promo) Oberst Prawitz was the Kommandant during Neave’s spell there. The German guards were mainly drawn from middle-aged and even elderly men called up to serve their country, though some had seen action in the First World War.
The prospect of moving to Colditz, of which he knew virtually nothing (not even where it was), contrarily lifted Neave’s spirits. The atmosphere of public school and university still permeated officers’ lives, and the idea of ‘a camp for naughty boys, a sort of borstal’ did not disturb him. He was flattered to be singled out so early in his POW career as a nuisance to the enemy. ‘I was like a boy who, flogged by the headmaster, proudly displays the stripes on his backside,’ he confessed later. As the British contingent passed across the drawbridge of Thorn fortress before dawn that late spring morning, he even looked forward to new adventures.
To begin with, a long train journey offered another opportunity for escape. As they travelled slowly south, the prisoners scanned the countryside and looked for weaknesses in their armed escort, but they were heavily guarded and even accompanied when they went to the lavatory. It was not a pleasant trip. When they changed trains at Posen, the POWs were spat upon. Neave cultivated the guard sitting next to him, a garrulous, middle-aged toyshop keeper from the Dresden area who had been called up for military service. Hoping to give his well-meaning guard the slip en route, Neave so shamelessly played on his feelings of homesickness that tears came to ‘his stupid blue eyes’. It was not perhaps an attractive thing to do, but his manipulation of the guard showed just how obsessive the idea of escape had become.
At Dresden they changed trains again. Here, Neave took the opportunity to study the master race off guard: waiting for trains, dozing, wolfing down Wurst and margarine sandwiches, showing their tickets and papers to the railway police. It was a useful chance to reconnoitre the railway system. Prisoners and guards alike slept with their heads on the waiting-room tables, but an alert Neave kept up the conversation with his toy merchant. They fell into a serious discussion about what would happen after the war. The shopkeeper said there were many Communists in Dresden, and they would simply change their brown shirts for red. He asked Neave for his address in Britain, and took him to a secluded part of the waiting room where railway workers were drinking morning coffee and the conversation flowed freely. Neave was surprised at how amenable they were to his seditious propaganda. As the discourse deepened, he edged away unnoticed on his chair towards the door. He was within a yard of an impromptu escape when his guard turned round and asked: ‘More coffee, Englishman?’ He could not refuse and his chance had gone. Soon after they were herded out on to the platform for the train to Colditz. In later years, Neave thought often of the toyshop soldier, so genuine in his hatred for the war and his captive’s tribulation. In his classic account of his wartime experiences published eleven years after that morning in Dresden, Neave wrote: ‘Now I feel almost ashamed of my attempt to take advantage of his good nature.’ In 1946, the shopkeeper wrote to the address Neave had given him, complaining of his fate under the Russian occupation of Eastern Germany, and asking for help. Neave replied in the most general terms to avoid exciting the attention of Communist censors. This incident provoked an unusual outburst of personal philosophy from Neave: ‘Some hypocrite has called this the century of the Common Man,’ he remarked, ‘but in no age have common men suffered more for being human and kindly.’
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On the short, crowded train journey from Dresden, Neave studied his fellow passengers. In his compartment, a German officer took in the sight of British POWs in battledress uniforms and muttered nervously to his gargantuan Hausfrau Hilde: ‘Kriegsgefangener!’ (prisoners of war). She spent the journey complaining loudly about the flight of Hitler’s right-hand man, Rudolf Hess, on 10 May. Why did the Führer not stop him? Where did he get the plane? This was news indeed. Hilde was very cross. Hess had apparently parachuted into Scotland from a Luftwaffe plane, bearing a message of reconciliation to the Duke of Hamilton, and had promptly been interned. (Neave would later meet him in a cell at Nuremberg, where he served war crimes charge papers on him.) On this morning, however, the mere mention of Hess’s name in front of the enemy prompted the browbeaten officer to silence his wife. The prisoners broke into smiles. Neave lit his pipe and winked at his comrades-in-arms.
The party of five ‘bad boys’ arrived at Colditz in the early morning of 14 May 1941. They were drawn up at the station and marched across the cobbled Bahnhofstrasse and up Badergasse, crossing the shallow but fast-flowing River Mulde by a wide, modern bridge 50 yards long. From here, they skirted the main square and trooped up the short, cobbled access road to the castle, across the moat bridge and through the great gates of the inner courtyard. ‘I felt the battlements close in, enfolding us, so that I looked round in fear,’ Neave recalled later. ‘White faces peered at me from the windows, and men in strange clothes paced up and down in the shadows.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Then he spotted John Hyde-Thomson, an officer of the Durham Light Infantry who had also escaped from Thorn, clattering along the cobbles in clogs to welcome him. He was quickly made to feel at home, not just with the contingent of twenty British prisoners but with the polyglot community of Poles, French, Belgian, Dutch and Serb POWs. After the depression of Thorn, Colditz, for all its forbidding appearance, was like escaping from a turgid political meeting to ‘a salon filled with wit and self-confidence’.
Incredibly, among the small British company were three clergymen from the Chaplains’ Department. One, J. Ellison Platt, an army Methodist chaplain who had chosen to stay with the wounded at Dunkirk rather than get away, observed the newcomers. In his diary, published long after the war, Platt recorded on the day of Neave’s arrival that the camp was rapidly filling up. The French contingent numbered two hundred ‘and the British increase by ones and twos daily’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The padres led the latest intake up a stone staircase to a large hall on the first floor, where all but the most senior British officers lived. Neave felt as if he were being ushered by masters to a school for waifs and strays. After a meal of hot stew, German bread and lard, they were escorted to smaller rooms off the mess hall where they were allocated bunks. Neave immediately fell into a deep sleep.
He was roused at 7.30 the next morning by the shouts of ‘Aufstehen’ (get up) by German NCOs walking through the dormitories. Thereafter he was inducted into the daily routine. Breakfast, of ersatz German coffee made from acorns, bread and margarine, was brought up to their quarters half an hour later by British orderlies. At 8.30 all the prisoners assembled in their national contingents in the courtyard for Appell – roll-call. After much laborious counting and saluting, the prisoners were allowed to get on with their hobbies: reading, music lessons, language lessons and exercise. The daily routine altered little, until the escapes began in earnest, when the Germans instituted more roll-calls to reduce the opportunities for getting out. ‘Lunch’, usually a thick barley gruel very occasionally containing pork skin, was served at 12.30, and the final roll-call took place at 9.00 p.m. Soon after, they were locked into their cells for ‘lights out’. For undergraduates of Colditz academy, however, this was simply the signal to start a night shift of intense activity.
Perhaps with some overstatement, Neave later insisted that every single officer in the castle had but a single thought – to escape. Lord Campbell of Alloway QC, then plain Alan Campbell, a young army officer who was one of the first to be sent to Oflag IVc, remembers: ‘One spent most of one’s time trying to escape. We were always planning escapes or doing escapes.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Campbell occupied the bunk below Neave and so observed him at close quarters. ‘We never quarrelled. I found him agreeable, amusing. But I never got to know him. He was a withdrawn, distant character, with a slightly isolationist, ruthless streak.’ Ken Lockwood, a stockbroker in civilian life who looked after the British ‘shop’ and supplied would-be escapers with German money, comments that Neave in particular was keen to get out, but points out: ‘We couldn’t all escape. One accepted that. But the object of the exercise was to get somebody out of the camp and if possible get them away successfully.’ He concurs with Alloway’s assessment that Neave was ‘very quiet, very much his own man. I don’t think any of us got to know him really well.’
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The prisoners engaged in a restless battle with the ‘goons’, as the hapless German guards were known, and they were endlessly busy looking for anything that might aid themselves, or others, to get out. Neave plunged himself into this hive of industry with relish, delighted that he no longer had to fear the mild disapproval of fellow inmates content to live out the war that he had experienced in previous camps. Eggers deplored the attitude of his recalcitrant charges. ‘Indiscipline, I can truly say, was the unspoken order of the day on their side: indiscipline often amounting to plain personal insolence, or at least studied offhandedness.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He singled out the British as being particularly obstreperous. They even used occasional excursions to the town football ground to show off how well turned out and disciplined they could be while marching through the streets, giving chocolate to the children, until this privilege was stopped. The Germans realised they were mounting a magnificent piece of counter-propaganda, at their own expense.
Neave was not involved in the first serious attempt at a British breakout, which took place only a month after he arrived. Twelve officers, including two Poles, tunnelled their way out of the canteen, having successfully (as they believed) bribed a German guard 700 Reichsmarks to look the other way when they made their exit on to a small patch of grass beneath the parapet. The sentry accepted the down payment of 100 marks, and promptly betrayed them to the Kommandantur. The sentry was allowed to keep the money, promoted, sent on leave and given a War Service Medal.
Watching this botched escape from his window at two in the morning, Neave brooded on the shortcomings of tunnels as the best way to get out. Escapers, he concluded, must pit their wits against something frailer than the castle walls – the Germans themselves, as the last escapers had in part tried to do. The gap in their defence seemed to lie in the hope that the guards would be deceived by a bold attempt to leave by the front gate dressed in German uniform. While he pondered this plan, Neave joined ‘the board’ of an international tunnel, comprising British, French, Polish and Belgian officers. He had scant confidence in the project, but in a schoolboyish way he felt he had a place in the second eleven. The tunnel was started under a bed in the sick bay and went through the floor of the Red Cross parcel room below. From there, the international consortium argued about what direction to take. Nonetheless, they worked with a vigour, using broken knives, forks, door latches – anything metal they could lay their hands on – until four months later the tunnel stretched for 20 feet beneath the Red Cross room floor. Neave had no faith in its success, but he believed in the self-discipline that all escaping activity encouraged. It strengthened the spirit of POWs, occupied their mind and reduced the tedium that could otherwise drive them to distraction.
Two nights a week, Neave toiled flat on his stomach, a handkerchief over his mouth to keep out the choking dust. Disposal of the debris was the most difficult thing for most of the obvious hiding places had already been bagged by other tunnellers. Neave and his crew stored great piles of dust and stones in the loft of the building, which eventually gave way, breaking a water pipe that showered French prisoners as they slept. While he worked away at this forlorn occupation, Neave continued to develop his own project. Through their ‘goon watch’, the prisoners knew all about the movement of German personnel throughout the castle. They now learned that everyone who entered the inner courtyard that housed the prisoners had to collect a numbered brass disc at the guardhouse, present it to the sentry on the inner gate, and return it to the guardhouse. Peter Allan, a second lieutenant in the Cameron Highlanders, bribed a visiting civilian painter to part with his brass pass, which went into the British cache of escaping material. However, the workman was obliged to report his ‘loss’, and the German officers warned their guards to be on the lookout for the missing disc.
Most importantly, Neave had to fashion for himself a ‘German’ military uniform that would be sufficiently convincing to get him past the guards. He had also to equip himself with civilian clothes capable of sustaining his disguise as a foreign worker all the way to Switzerland, the nearest neutral country 400 miles to the south. He thought first of bribing the very German guards he was attempting to fool to acquire a complete uniform, but he concluded that this might take years, and he was impatient to be free. So he resolved to make his own, despite admitting that he was hopeless with his hands.
Neave sacrificed a month’s supply of Red Cross chocolate to buy from a Polish officer what he later described as ‘an ancient tunic … in a remote sort of way it resembled in length and design that worn by German private soldiers’. It was the wrong colour – khaki rather than field-grey – and although he contemplated dyeing the tunic, this was beyond him. Instead he employed less subtle means: he applied layers of green paint normally used for making the scenery in the camp theatre. A Polish tailor sewed fake insignia, fashioned from cardboard and painted silver, on to the left breast. Dark green cloth epaulettes with the white numerals of an infantry regiment, a forage cap fashioned from a piece of Polish uniform, white piping and an amateurish cardboard badge with eagle’s wings completed this improbable disguise. He planned to wear RAF trousers for the escape, and lastly equipped himself with a pair of handsome jackboots bought from a Polish orderly with Red Cross provisions. Neave realised that his mock uniform would never pass muster in daylight. Even with the precious brass disc, he would have to pass through three sentry posts, and might also meet other soldiers who would see through his disguise.
Ellison Platt, the Methodist chaplain, noted in his prison diary for 28 August: ‘For weeks Anthony Neave has had no thought for anything but tailoring and dyeing.’ (After his first diary entry for 14 May, in which he uses Neave’s correct first name, Platt invariably wrote ‘Anthony’, a clear indication that this was how Neave was known, and wished to be known, in the camp.) Platt observed that Neave’s scheme was one of great audacity, adding: ‘It consisted of passing out of the main gates in the uniform of a German soldier. Since the time the maggot first entered his brain, every minute has been dedicated to “getting ready”.’ His first idea was to steal a uniform, which might be done ‘at a pinch’, but could prove very unpleasant if caught in an abortive escape. ‘So, on reflection, it would be better to take the long route and make it: during the period of making, nothing else has existed in the world. With an unethical fertility of invention he got hold of a mixture of several incredible substances which produce a lightish green field if applied to a khaki material.’ Not quite near enough for daylight, but, under artificial light, quite indistinguishable from the real thing, he noted. ‘The dyeing experiments have occupied a full three weeks.’ His swastikas, woven on tunic and hat, were extraordinarily well done, as was the belt, ‘a creation in tin and cardboard that deserved a better fate’.
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Neave was less convinced, later admitting: ‘I was only too aware of the fancy-dress appearance of my uniform, fit only for amateur theatricals,’ he wrote. ‘Prisoners, however, develop a blind faith in the most impracticable means of escape. They underestimate the risks, believing that some kindly Providence will surely aid them. For me, escaping was still a schoolboy adventure reminiscent of the books of G.A. Henty. I had yet to learn that success can only be learned by a minute mastery of detail and a study of the mind and methods of the enemy.’
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For now, he had only the haziest idea how he would get back to Blighty. He imagined himself stealing a bicycle from the outer courtyard and pedalling across the moat bridge to freedom in a hail of bullets. Pat Reid was unimpressed by Neave’s fake uniform but did not order him to abandon the project. It was agreed that he should go out at night, trusting to the darkness to mitigate his Gilbert and Sullivan appearance.
Then there was the problem of his ‘rifle’. German guards always carried a rifle and bayonet, even the lance-corporal, or Gefreiter, whom he was seeking to imitate. Neave decided that making a fake weapon would be too difficult, so he determined to be a soldier on special duty reporting to Hauptmann Priem, the camp’s duty officer. Even for this unlikely duty, he would need a bayonet in a scabbard. An officer in the Royal Tank Regiment, Scarlet O’Hara, carved one for him from a bed board, and decorated it with a buckle of tin foil on a cardboard belt. For civilian clothes, he dyed an RAF tunic in a vat of the lead from indelible pencils. He spent days, too, making a Tyrolean trilby, only to endure the mortification of it being seized during one of the regular German searches for escape materials. He had to make do with a sham ski cap. For the journey he believed was imminent, Neave equipped himself with a rough map of the Swiss frontier and a makeshift foreign worker’s identity card. He also had a small amount of German money, around 50 Reichsmarks (the equivalent of just over £3 at the wartime exchange rate). These he was instructed to carry in a Cellophane wrapping inserted into his rectum. His attempts to practise this manoeuvre gave his fellow officers much entertainment.
He was now ready, indeed restless, to go. The project had taken over his life. Daytime was spent in a frenzied round of preparation. By night, he dreamed of being on the run to freedom. 28 August 1941 was chosen for the break – little more than three months after he had entered Colditz in fear. The weather was very hot. Neave attended the nine o’clock roll-call wearing his British army greatcoat over his amateurish Gefreiter uniform. When the German officers gave the order to dismiss, the prisoners scattered to their quarters, while the guards lined up to go off duty. A fellow officer quickly removed Neave’s greatcoat. Jamming the sham forage cap on to his head, he walked briskly to the massive courtyard door. There was not much light at the gate, Reinhold Eggers recalled later, for the searchlights tended to be shone on the walls above, rather than on the gate. The German guards were in a hurry to get back to the guardroom and the German NCO on duty only looked casually at the numbered passes pushed into his hand.
Here was Neave’s chance. He presented his brass disc to the Unteroffizier at the gate and went through his carefully rehearsed lines. ‘I have a message for the Kommandant from the duty officer.’ He was allowed through the half-open door. As Neave turned quickly left and marched on down to the outer gate, a giddy sense of relief flooded through him. He walked quickly, his jackboots resounding with a military ring on the cobbled stones. In a virtual delirium, he imagined himself acting in a theatre without an audience, giving a performance for his own pleasure. The first archway through which he had to pass loomed up ahead.
Then, a brutal return to reality. Neave had gone left, not right, to the guardroom with the other German soldiers. And the NCO was not sure about his face. He looked again at the disc. It was the Number 26 about which he had been warned. According to Eggers, the sentry yelled ‘Halt!’, but ‘Number 26’ walked on. Other guards joined in the shouting, but ‘Number 26’ merely quickened his step.
Neave tried to ignore the shouts but then committed a fatal error. He turned round, and in the arc lights the painful inadequacy of his comic opera costume was plain for all to see. The scenery paint on his tunic and the forage cap of which he was so proud glowed in the artificial light. ‘I was a figure of the underworld, a demon king under the spotlights in a Christmas pantomime,’ as he later confessed.
(#litres_trial_promo) Neave turned back and ran towards the archway and the bicycle that was to take him to freedom. But from the archway came a second, firmer voice: ‘Halt, or I fire.’
Realising that further resistance was pointless, Neave turned back again towards the guardroom and put his hands in the air. The archway guard stuck a rifle in his back and all the soldiers in the guardroom gathered round in great excitement, shouting, gesticulating, waving rifles and revolvers as if caught up in a major military incident. One Unteroffizier, enraged at Neave’s audacious impersonation, screamed: ‘This is an insult to the German army! You will be shot!’ The mayhem died down with the arrival of the Kommandant, Oberst Prawitz. The impeccably dressed Prawitz looked Neave up and down disdainfully, took in the details of his amateurish uniform, remarked on the impertinence of the escape bid and ordered that he be taken away to the cells.
Chaplain Platt argued that Neave’s failure lay not in his comic opera uniform but in the way he behaved in trying to escape. Once outside the gates, the German guards stood about waiting to fall in and march back to their quarters. ‘Neave couldn’t possibly do that,’ Platt wrote in his diary. ‘His only hope for success lay in an unobtrusive disappearance from the immediate scene, and then to walk rapidly down the causeway to the outskirts of the village.’ Alas, his quickstep departure aroused suspicion. Neave had not made sufficient distance to warrant making a hit-or-miss dash for the open country, Platt commented. ‘There wasn’t a chance in a million that he would get twenty yards without being shot. So failed a very worthy effort.’
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In the cells Neave was thoroughly searched – ‘more thoroughly than usual’ according to Eggers. They discovered the Cellophane container stuffed with money, which was a disconcerting find. It showed that the prisoners had access to German currency, an invaluable aid to escaping. Neave was led roughly away to solitary confinement, where he took off his makeshift cardboard belt and wooden bayonet and hurled them to the floor in a fit of temper. It was hours before he could sleep. Years later, he would reflect on his dejection at being caught, on his fall from self-made hero to a sad joke in a burlesque German uniform. Perhaps he was too hard on himself. It was not his uniform that had given him away, nor necessarily his behaviour, but the brass disc that the British contingent had coaxed out of the civilian painter. Had they copied the disc, and engraved a different number, the ruse might have worked. Even so, and as Chaplain Platt observed, Neave had not thought through his tactics after getting over the first big hurdle, the castle gate. His passion for flight was the rage of youth. He was still only twenty-five, perhaps older than his years but still lacking in a strategic grasp of the science of escape. Neave had proved he could get out of Colditz, but not clear away from Nazi Germany. Being a loner was his nature, and it was not enough. It never would be. He needed others, allies with a greater instinct for the long range.
In the morning after his failed bid, the guard brought him the usual ersatz coffee. Gravely, he warned Neave that he was about to be court-martialled and shot. Neave snorted with derision. He was no longer afraid. He felt only foolish and unaccountably ‘liverish’. Later in the morning, he was frogmarched to the Kommandant’s headquarters, where in a formal, wood-panelled gallery, he was inspected by Colditz officers one by one. The reactions to his uniform varied from derision to wrath. Kommandant Prawitz ordered him to stand to attention and salute, German fashion. Neave was beside himself with rage and made a poor show of a German salute. Prawitz ordered him to do it again, this time properly. The other officers sniggered and Neave saluted again. It was a humiliating experience. He was made to stay in the gallery, under guard, for the rest of the morning. From time to time, police officers from the village and soldiers came in to gape at him as if he were an exhibit in a zoo. Then, an elderly photographer from the town was brought in to take his picture. Neave posed for the camera, perspiring profusely beneath his lurid uniform. ‘I had reduced all escaping to a ridiculous farce, a music-hall turn,’ he raged. ‘I grew crimson with mortification as the old man doddered about the gallery exchanging feeble jokes with the soldiers. It seemed hours before the comedy was over.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The photograph he took survives to this day and it does Neave more credit than he realised at the time. He stands, half at ease, left arm behind his back so that the scabbard for his ‘bayonet’ is clearly visible. He stares coolly at the camera and it is impossible to imagine him thinking anything but: ‘You may have got me this time, but there will be another.’
After the embarrassing charade of being photographed, his fake uniform was removed, thereafter to take pride of place in the Kommandant’s personal museum. The threat of court martial for impersonating a German officer was quietly dropped. Instead he would serve the customary indignity of imprisonment in the town gaol when a cell became available, there being constant pressure on accommodation due to frequent escape bids.
Neave’s humiliation was not complete. At the evening roll-call, Hauptmann Priem, the officer to whom Neave was supposed to be taking a message during his escape, announced to the crowded courtyard: ‘Gefreiter Neave is to be sent to the Russian Front.’ Everyone joined in the laughter. ‘It was friendly towards me,’ recalled Neave, ‘but it was not music to my ears.’ Eggers remembers the incident slightly differently, recording that Priem announced: ‘Gefreiter Neave is posted to the Russian Front.’ Eggers also recalled: ‘There was an almighty roar of laughter. Lieut. Neave looked very rueful. Six months later, though, he had the last laugh.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Following Neave’s daring bid, the camp authorities tightened security. All escapers and new arrivals were subject to mouth and body – i.e. rectal – examination. All military personnel had to carry a printed pass, signed and stamped by the camp adjutant, which was to be shown to all sentries. However, not even the German guards observed such Teutonic thoroughness. They were often too deferential to higher ranks and the rule was never completely observed. Roll-calls, too, were extended, and a new system of counting introduced to make deception harder.
Before the year was out, Neave was caught once again, this time in the Polish orderlies’ quarters on top of the old sick bay when he should have been in bed. German guards who picked Neave and a fellow prisoner up on the night of 23 November assumed, wrongly, that the miscreants were helping an escape bid by two Canadians found on the roof. Chaplain Platt noted enigmatically in his diary: ‘Actually, they were pursuing interests of their own.’ They were thrown into the Schloss prison, but, gaol space being at such a premium, Neave was locked in an unheated double cell with two fellow officers. Their cigarettes were confiscated and ‘they thought themselves to be holy innocents exposed to the harsh winds of a cold, hard and unjust world’. They determined on a protest notice, which read ‘Achtung! Dieser Tat ist eine Schandtat’ (Attention! This is a scandal). Reasoning that it was of little use to write out so high-minded a notice unless it could be suitably displayed, the trio picked the lock of their cell door, pinned the notice at eye level on the outside, then locked themselves in again and went to sleep. Episodes like these, amusing though they were, drove the German guards to despair.
6 Escape (#ulink_8f03209b-f1d7-5536-8445-a4c812cab5d0)
Neave was sentenced to the usual twenty-eight days’ solitary confinement for his escape attempt. Several weeks elapsed before he could serve his term in Colditz town gaol, and he spent the time staring disconsolately from the British quarters as the weather turned colder. In early October he was taken under guard along the route by which he had tried to reach freedom. The sentries joked that the new white barrier at the final gate was a tribute to his audacious bid. His books and tobacco wrapped in a blanket, Neave was in no mood for entertainment.
Then, by his own account, he spotted another way out of the castle. Looking over the parapet of the moat bridge, he noticed a rough pathway leading across the tumbled stones of the dry moat towards the German married quarters. A small wicket gate stood half open in the moat bridge wall. If he could gain access to this gate, he was free of the barbed wire, with only a fence round the married quarters and a 12-foot high wall around the park beyond to negotiate. Excited, Neave crowed with delight, puzzling his guard with his air of elation. Neave’s version of events is contested by Pat Reid, who said he himself had spotted the small garden gate on his arrival at Colditz a year earlier. The energetic Dutch, always on the lookout for escape possibilities, also claimed to know of its existence.
Banged up in his municipal cell, Neave still thought of escape. The tiny barred window was beyond reach. He climbed on to the massive East European-style stove and contemplated cutting through the ceiling, breaking out of the roof and letting himself down to the gravel courtyard with a blanket rope. Thus occupied with thoughts of flight, he was surprised by the gaoler who roared with laughter: ‘So soon, Herr Leutnant! You must stay with us a few days longer.’ Next day, they moved him to a cell on the ground floor. He endured his spell of confinement remote from the worsening fortunes of the war, smoking on his bunk in the company of Jane Eyre and the Duchess of Wrexe. On his way back to the castle twenty-eight days later, he noticed again the little wicket gate, which by now appeared in his dreams as ‘the gateway to the land beyond the Blue Mountains’.
Some weeks earlier, Pat Reid had also had an inspiration. A trained engineer, he understood architectural drawings and had the happy knack of mentally being able to take buildings to pieces and put them back together again. It occurred to Reid that the wooden stage of the camp theatre, on the second floor of a building occupied by the most senior Allied officers, offered escape potential. It was constructed over a room leading to the top of the German guardhouse outside the prisoners’ courtyard. This corridor was sealed off from POW quarters by heavy locked doors and bricked-up windows, but it might be accessible from above. Together with ‘Hank’ Wardle MC, a Canadian in the RAF, he reconnoitred the theatre and found that by removing wooden steps from a dressing room he could move freely about under the heavy stage. There were no floorboards, only rubble on top of a lath-and-plaster ceiling over the corridor.
Reid and Wardle sawed a 2-foot square through the ceiling and found the room below disused and empty. To disguise their activity, they constructed an ingenious device known as ‘the shovewood’. This was a plaster-covered hatch fixed from above with turnbuckles resting on the ceiling joists. It was virtually invisible from below, and in any event no guards ever went there. This was Neave’s ‘magic entrance’. As Reinhold Eggers later lamented: ‘We had left the prisoners a very simple barrier, no more than a floor-ceiling between their quarters plus a door into a passage on our side to get through.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Reid clambered down on a rope made from a mattress cover, padded down the corridor in carpet slippers and picked the lock of the door. Beyond, a passage ran over the courtyard gate – the most difficult barrier to negotiate – and ended at another locked door. This yielded easily to his skills and Reid found himself at the top of steps leading into an attic above the guardhouse. The sounds of laughter and noisy drinking drifted up from the German Officers’ Mess below. If an escaper could disguise himself as a German officer, the guards at the gate would scarcely give him a second glance, because this time he would be approaching from the right direction.
What is more, the prisoners were planning to put on a Christmas pantomime within weeks, offering the perfect opportunity to mount an escape. Reid began a search for the right officers. He quickly whittled his list down to six, including Neave. He told them ‘casually’ that he could get them out of Colditz if they could acquire convincing German officers’ uniforms. Neave and Lieutenant John Hyde-Thomson, who had already tried to get out in a consignment of palliasses, were finally chosen to make the break, in company with two Dutch officers.
There were compelling reasons for cooperation with the Dutch. First, their command of German was much better than that of the British, second, their long blue-green army greatcoats bore a striking resemblance to the Wermacht uniform, and third, they were inveterate escapers. They had already made four ‘home runs’ via Switzerland. This Anglo-Dutch entente had been operating for some months through Reid and his opposite number, Captain van den Heuvel, invariably known as ‘Vandy’. He finally settled on a brave young officer of the Netherlands East Indies Army, Second Lieutenant Toni Luteyn, to accompany Neave. In 1940, the Dutch army had capitulated to the invading Germans. Its officers were required to sign an oath of non-combatance, or face internment for the rest of the war. Virtually all signed, with the exception of a contingent of sixty-seven colonial army cadets who had just passed out of Breda Military Academy. Luteyn, aged twenty-three, was one of them. He was interned in a camp at Zossi on the Dutch – German border, but when one of them escaped they were moved deeper inland to Oflag VIIIc in Poland. After more escapes, the whole lot was dispatched to Colditz in July 1941, arriving soon after Neave. Until now Neave and Luteyn had scarcely met. They were thrown together by calculation rather than friendship. Despite being the younger of the two – he was only twenty-four – Luteyn was the senior partner because of his command of German. ‘We had some exercises, because Neave did not speak German, except jawohl,’ Luteyn said years later, ‘but going through the guardroom there was quite a chance somebody would talk to us, and they would talk to the highest ranking officer. So I was “promoted” to Hauptmann and he was a first lieutenant. We practised that exercise for a week in the courtyard. He had to march on my left-hand side. If he didn’t wheel to my left, I shouted at him.’
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Meanwhile, both would-be escapers were rehearsing for the camp pantomime, Ballet Nonsense. Neave later dismissed the ‘pathetic futility’ of the entertainment, insisting that although such performances keep prisoners from brooding on their fate, the actual performances were ghastly. But at the time he threw himself energetically into the show, writing and producing a three-act sketch with the improbable title ‘The Mystery of Wombat College’, which was clearly based on his experiences at Eton. Neave played the principal character, the unpleasant headmaster Dr Calomel. The other parts were equally nasty, as befitted the obscene dialogue and cynical performance. The chaplains complained about the ‘unsuitability’ of the sketch and Neave thought it a ‘wretched little piece’ but it brought the house down in Oflag IVc.
A photograph of the full cast shows him striking a pose in gown and mortar board of black paper and steel-rimmed spectacles, made up to look like a beetle-browed, leering Groucho Marx. While Neave busied himself on stage, Reid and Wardle were hard at work beneath his feet creating the ‘shovewood’ escape route through which they planned to send several Anglo-Dutch teams. Neave and Luteyn would go first, followed twenty-four hours later by Hyde-Thomson and Luteyn’s fellow officer Lieutenant Donkers. At one point in rehearsals, when Neave was pacing the boards in a scene where Dr Calomel expels the son of a duke, Reid and Wardle emerged from beneath his feet, covered in dust.
Neave acquired a Netherlands Home Army uniform overcoat, which he hid, wrapped in sacking, beneath the floorboards. The prisoners had hundreds of these hides, some of which are still giving up their secrets today, sixty years later. With the help of camp experts, he then set about converting it into a German officer’s uniform. Epaulettes, fashioned from linoleum cut from the bathroom floor, were painted silver to match the officers’ silver braid. He gave himself a gold regimental number. Neave promoted himself to Oberleutnant Schwarz and Scarlet O’Hara carved gold wooden stars to denote his rank. O’Hara was one of the unsung heroes of Colditz who sat in their primitive quarters day after day helping others to escape. The selflessness of men like him helped twenty officers to escape from the ‘impregnable’ fortress, eleven of them British – the best escape record of any camp in Nazi Germany.
Then came the problem of the buttons. O’Hara and Neave went to Pat Reid in some distress. Neave told him the project was running short of lead. O’Hara’s reserves of lead piping – ‘thin German stuff’ – had been used up. As they spoke O’Hara eyed longingly the alcohol still that the British officers were using to make their Christmas booze. Reid took fright: ‘What are you looking at? I hope you’re not hinting.’ O’Hara demurred but pointed out that the only other source of lead piping was in the lavatory block. With only three lavatories to serve forty officers breaking one up might trigger a revolt, so the still’s lead coil was removed, melted down and poured into white clay moulds carved by a Dutch officer. ‘Oberleutnant Schwarz’s’ belt and leggings were made from cardboard, as was his revolver holster, stuffed with nothing more dangerous than newspaper. The finishing touch, a cap of an Offizier of the Third Reich, was converted from Neave’s own dress uniform cap by Squadron Leader Brian Paddon. It was an impressive sight: the shiny black peak bent Nazi-style, with a design of leaves, a red and white roundel, eagle’s wings and a swastika on the front, all made from linoleum, the whole thing finished off with white piping sewed to the edge of the brim. Neave was delighted. ‘With such a uniform I could face the arc lights once more with confidence,’ he remembered.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even Reid was impressed. At a passing-out test, he complimented Neave and his helpers. The uniforms would pass in any conditions other than broad daylight at close quarters.
Neave was by now impatient to go. He harried Reid about the readiness of the escape route and was told to keep his hair on. Meanwhile, rehearsals for the pantomime went ahead. Providentially, Luteyn was in the camp orchestra. Neave remembered him as a drummer, but Luteyn insists he played the double bass, which he bought from an English officer. A unique photograph of the show’s line-up confirms that in this performance he played the double bass. The escape was planned to take place a few days before Christmas. The weather was deteriorating rapidly and Neave was anxious to avoid freezing to death on a German hillside. A combination of circumstances, however, forced a delay. According to Neave, their uniforms and false papers were not quite ready but Luteyn recollects that the postponement was due to a seasonal increase in train controls because so many German soldiers were going home for Christmas. Either way, the escape bid was postponed until the new year. Ballet Nonsense was a huge success; it included a new scene at Wombat College in which Dr Calomel gave a burlesque Nazi salute three times, to the discomfiture of German officers in the audience. Chaplain Platt noted in his diary: ‘After the interval, Anthony’s [Neave’s] public school farce delighted the British and fogged the foreigners … The public school farce was redolent of masters’ perceived interest in small boys, though one could plainly see that the intention was a take-off of a well-known schoolmaster.’
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After the pantomime, sloshed on bootleg alcohol, the men danced, fell dead drunk to the floor or vomited. In the midst of this revelry, a German officer came in to wish them a Happy Christmas: ‘The laughter ceased abruptly and there was a silence so deliberate and terrible, that it struck the German like a blow in the face,’ related Neave. ‘He looked blankly about him, saluted and disconsolately withdrew.’
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Escape day was set for 5 January 1942; the phoney uniforms and civilian clothes had already been concealed beneath the stage. Reid decided to send out two pairs of escapers on successive nights, immediately after the change of sentry in front of the guardhouse, so the guard would be ignorant about officers’ movements during the previous two hours. The break would take place after the nine o’clock Appell. Snow was falling during the roll-call, but Neave was roasting under his usual combination of battledress and sweater over civilian clothes, plus RAF trousers – and the black-painted cardboard leggings. Looking over to the Dutch contingent where Luteyn was similarly attired, Neave had an overpowering sense that this was his last evening in the castle.
On the order of dismissal, Neave and Luteyn mingled with senior officers as they moved into their quarters and went straight up to the theatre above. Fumbling their way in the dark, they ducked below the stage. Reid carefully opened the ‘shovewood’ trapdoor, and the three let themselves down noiselessly on a mattress-cover rope into the room below. There the escapers discarded their British uniforms and dusted down their German disguise. Reid led the way in stockinged feet through the first door until they were across the bridge and outside the final barrier: the locked entrance to the loft above the German guardhouse. Here, the escapers put on their boots and waited, fear and exasperation mounting, while Reid fought with the obstinate lock, at one point even admitting: ‘I’m afraid I can’t get it open.’ But after he fiddled for ten minutes with his patent wire pick-lock, the heavy door creaked open.
Reid told Neave they must not move for exactly eleven minutes, the time it would take him to retrace his steps to the theatre. Neave accepted the order but warned he would not ‘hang around’ after that. The pair would take the first opportunity of a quiet spell in the guardhouse below. Reid reminded them of their ‘escape theatre’: on reaching the guardhouse door, they were to stop in full view of the sentry, calmly pull on their gloves, swap casual remarks and walk smartly down the cobbled ramp to the outer gates. ‘We waited ten or fifteen minutes, and went down the stone stairs,’ recollected Luteyn. ‘On the first floor, where the officer of the guard was quartered, someone had just put on the radio. The door was ajar, but he didn’t hear us, and couldn’t see us because we nipped through very quickly. If he had seen us, it would have been finished. When we came out of the guardroom, the soldiers jumped up and stood by the door. A sergeant opened the door for us. Our hearts were pounding!’
(#litres_trial_promo) Their cameo German performance was unnecessary.
They strode out to the snow-covered outer wall, Neave doing his best to adopt a Prussian military manner. Unfortunately, despite all the practice, he still marched with his hands behind his back, every inch a British officer. Luteyn hissed: ‘March with your hands at your sides, you bloody fool.’ By the gate into the outer courtyard, the first sentry saluted and said ‘Nothing to report.’ They thanked him and walked on to the second sentry by the outer gate. Luteyn ordered him to open the door which he did. They were now outside the main castle, on the moat bridge, from which the wicket gate led down into the moat and up the other side towards the German married quarters. By now it was snowing heavily and as they stumbled down a German soldier came towards them. He halted, staring at the ‘officers’. Neave hesitated and was ready to make a run for it, a reminder of his earlier sense of panic once beyond the castle gate. Luteyn, with great presence of mind, demanded forcefully: ‘Why do you not salute?’ Open-mouthed, the soldier did as he was told and the escapers hurried on up the other side of the moat and round the married quarters to a high oak fence. Surmounting this, they were at last in tree cover. Neave’s cardboard belt was ripped apart in the climb and his ‘holster’ disappeared into the snow.
The final obstacle was a high, moss-covered stone wall, overlaid with snow and ice. ‘Here, we made our first mistake,’ remembered Luteyn. ‘I helped Neave up with my hands so he could sit on it and pull me up. We should have done it the other way round, because I was much bigger and more powerful.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Every time Neave tried to pull his companion, he fell backwards in a confusion of snow and stone. Eventually, he caught Luteyn under the arms and they struggled to the top, panting heavily. They sat on the coping for a minute, then jumped 12 feet to the broken ground below. Neave was bruised, shaken and frightened. They leaned against the trees, breathing in the sharp, cold January air before Neave urged them on. They tore off their lovingly prepared fake uniforms and threw them into the river that wound its way below the woods.
In his diary entry for 5 January, Chaplain Platt recorded: ‘Anthony Neave and a Dutch officer, Second Lieutenant Luteyn, escaped ten minutes ago. It was a scheme requiring the boldest initiative and at least eight weeks’ preparation. It was carried out with the utmost secrecy, and already they are outside the castle.’ During 1941, only two British officers succeeded in getting clear of the castle, and they had both been recaptured. ‘The British are due for a success, and the seven people who so far know of Anthony’s break are fairly confident that this is it.’
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Clear of the castle, Neave and Luteyn set off to walk to the town of Leisnig, six miles away. They would be less noticeable in this manufacturing centre than in the town of Colditz, where they risked recognition. The plan was to take an early morning workmen’s train to Leipzig, thirty-five miles to the west. Thence, they would proceed south by train via Ulm and Nuremberg to Singen on the Swiss border, where they would walk to freedom. The imaginative Dutch had bribed a Colditz guard to secure a railway timetable, so the escapers knew that the first train left at 5.00 a.m. They thus had seven hours to kill in the freezing dark. Mercifully, although the thermometer read minus 17 degrees Celsius, the snow was abating and the moon aided their progress across frozen fields until they reached the country road to Leisnig. With rising confidence, they struck out for the station. Neave was dressed in a blue jacket. Fashioned from an officer’s uniform of the Chasseurs Alpins, this was the gift of Capitaine Boris, a Jewish reserve officer in the French regiment, in recognition of Neave’s support of the small Jewish contingent in Colditz. His RAF trousers were turned down over his Polish boots and the civilian guise was completed by a ski cap made from a blanket.
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