Crucified (10 page)

GERMANY, 1944

At five o'clock in the morning, the windy, cold night began to give way to the dull gray light of a winter dawn. Skinny pines with naked trunks packed together around the prisoner-of-war camp, shutting out the world and increasing the sense of isolation. Earlier, yet another RAF raid on Berlin, a hundred miles to the northwest, had plunged Stalag Luft III into blackout. But with the all-clear, the lights had returned, and now, after an uneventful yawn of guard duty, the Nazi in the "goon box"—what the prisoners called the watchtowers around the camp—was cold, tired, and bored.

Glaring south like a stilt-legged Cyclops with a ray-beam eye, this goon box was the central tower on the north perimeter. From up here, the sentry shone the searchlight over a barbed-wire fence into the
Vorlager,
an oblong yard stretching the width of the camp from the guardroom and the gate in the northeast corner. Left to right, the yard held the hospital, "the cooler," and the coal shed. The cooler was the camp's solitary confinement block, a prison within a prison for
kriegies
who tried to escape.

Kriegie
was short for
Kriegsgefangene.

Prisoner of war.

Here, in the north compound of Stammlager der Luftwaffe No. 3—Stalag Luft III—the prisoners were officers who flew with Fighter and Bomber Command.

The searchlight roamed the
Vorlager
and crossed swords with the beams of other watchtowers. A pair of fences, nine feet high and five feet apart, confined the area where the POWs should be sleeping. Between the fences, coils of barbed wire bristled spikes.

Beneath the fences, buried microphones listened for sounds of digging up to fifteen feet below. Beyond the fences, a German shepherd trained to leap for the throat prowled with his
Hundfiihrer.
Inside the fences, fifteen wooden huts were raised above the snow-covered ground on piles, with only the concrete under the stove and the washroom touching the earth. In the middle of the front row was Hut 104. Briefly, the searchlight lingered on that one-story barracks, then it moved on.

The sentries didn't know it, but the
kriegies
weren't asleep.

Tonight was the night of their great escape—the culmination of a year's labor on three tunnels dubbed Tom, Dick, and Harry.

Harry, the only one they finished, was the work of 650 men. It burrowed horizontally for 336 feet at 30 feet below ground. For hours, the 200 airmen selected for the break had stood crammed together in the rooms and halls of Hut 104, each waiting for his turn to go.

Deceptive escape costumes disguised this motley crew—trilby hats and plus-fours and smart business suits; ratty coats and workers' trousers and moth-eaten berets. Two were even flaunting mock "goonskins," their German uniforms topped off with belts made of paper and pistols carved from wood. All carried forged papers and escape rations: a concoction of oatmeal, chocolate, and raisins touted to provide enough calories for two days.

"Next," called a voice from the escape room.

The next airman's number was in the seventies. Unforeseen snafus had slowed the pace of escape, and with dawn streaking the horizon, the man feared missing the cutoff. The hut was divided into eighteen rooms, each fifteen feet square, with bunk beds and a corner stove. The hole down to Harry was hidden beneath the stove so the shaft could descend through the concrete block under the hut. To trick the "ferrets"—the guards with the job of detecting escapes—the men kept the stove burning night and day. Using wooden handles and a flexible pipe, the POWs could open and close the hole in twenty seconds.

"Go," said the topside controller, having inspected the airman for bulk that might jam the tunnel.

Wooden rungs guided him down the claustrophobic, thirty-foot shaft to the sand-dispersal chamber, the workshop, and the pump room. "Penguins"—named for the way they walked with bags slung inside their pants—had scattered the dug-out sand around the camp. The workshop had tooled bed boards into tunnel struts. The pumper rowed back and forth on a sliding seat to squeeze the canvas bellows that pushed fresh air along the tunnel through a pipeline of powdered milk cans.

"Lie flat on your belly," said the traffic controller at the mouth of Harry.

Holding his suitcase in front of him, the would-be fugitive stretched out on a flatbed trolley and gave the rope a tug to let the man at the other end know he was ready to be pulled.

During the digging, this shuttle had carted boxes of sand, but now it was transporting men. Strips of blanket had been nailed over the first fifty feet of wooden track so the wheels would make no noise. A sensation of speed thrilled the POW as he rumbled along the hundred-foot haul with his nose three inches from the earth. The tunnel was lit by stolen wiring the men had lapped into the camp's electrical circuit. The air-raid blackout had slowed the escape to a crawl, but now the POW could see the lights of Piccadilly Circus—the name of the first of two transfer points on this underground railway—closing fast.

"Move it!" the sweating hauler snarled in the cramped bulge of the tunnel. The POW scrambled across blankets that had been laid down to keep his escape clothes clean and pulled back the trolley from halfway house number two. Another tug and he was on the move again, flying through the earth toward Leicester Square, where a second changeover launched him to the end of the line. The final fifty feet of track were also muffled with strips of blanket.

Hanging blankets deadened noise and screened light from the tunnel. Worming through, the POW reached the bottom of the exit shaft. Gazing up, he saw stars framed by the opening twenty feet above. Climbing the ladder to a rope tied to the top rung, he yanked and waited for the tug that meant all was clear. When it came, he clambered out onto the frozen snow.

Now for the tricky part: the open-air crawl from the escape hole to the woods. The Germans had cut the forest back so tunnelers would have no cover unless they extended their digging a hundred feet beyond the wire. That was the plan for Harry, but a miscalculation meant that when the last few feet of the exit shaft were dug away, the POWs found the hole
wasn't
in the woods.

Oh shit!

Plan B called for the POW to follow the signal rope to a heap of brushwood just inside the trees. The controller who kept track of the guards patrolling outside the compound would direct him from there to the meeting point in the forest, and then he and those he was traveling with would head for freedom.

Crunch . . .

Crunch . . .

Crunch . . .

More trouble!

The goon box in the center of the northernmost fence was just forty-five feet to the south, on the other side of the road to the camp's gate. With his back to the escape hole, the sentry pointed his searchlight south at the barracks. The hole was in the open, but darkness was its protector as long as the sentries pacing back and forth outside the fence didn't veer across the road to walk the edge of the woods.

Crunch . . .

Crunch . . .

Like now!

A thick column of steam rose out of the open hole. Wind whistled through the dim line of trees. The sentry had yet to adjust from the fence lamps and searchlight beams to this gloom. Was the detour just a change to cope with boredom, or was he looking for a spot to urinate? His boots crunched methodically across the snow, and the silent shadow came toward the POW lying prone beside the hole.

Twenty feet . . .

Ten feet. . .

Five feet away . . .

The sentry wore a greatcoat with belts crossing his chest. His rifle stuck up behind his square helmet. He missed the hole by inches, but his boot grazed the POW's elbow. That stopped him in his tracks, and he looked around, finally spotting the broad, black trail of slush left by the seventy-six POWs who were on the run.

Shrugging the rifle off his shoulder, the sentry raised it to his face, about to fire.

A POW behind the brushwood knew the jig was up, so he jumped from hiding and called out,
"Nicht schiessen, Posten!

Nicht schiessen!"
Don't shoot, Sentry!

Bam!

The shot went wild.

Whipping out his flashlight, the sentry shone it down the hole and saw the next escaper on the ladder. Fishing out his whistle, he gave it a shrill blow.

Now the guard in the goon box was on the phone, and that drew a rush of soldiers with machine guns. On reaching the exit from the tunnel, they fanned out into the woods.

+ + + 

In the guardroom by the gate, the red-faced commandant screamed at the
kriegies
his men had caught near the hole.

Meanwhile, his underlings were frantically placing telephone calls. When the chief of the criminal police in Breslau heard how many POWs had escaped, he ordered a
Grossfahndung.
The highest level of search in Germany, it raised the hunt nationwide.

So much smoke billowed through Hut 104 that the barracks seemed as if they were on fire. Forging papers was a serious offense, but phony IDs were the only option for "hard-arses,"

those unable to bluff by speaking German. With the escape blown, they burned their fake documents as fast as the stove would take them. Others crushed makeshift compasses and tore civilian buttons off their disguised uniforms, or gobbled escape rations to store away enough nourishment to survive on weeks of bread and water in the cooler.

Bam!
Periodic shots cracked outside as thwarted fugitives tried to dash back to their huts through the groping fingers of the searchlights.

"Ferrets!" warned the "stooges" at the windows of Hut 104.

The first to burst in was the
Hundfiihrer
with his Alsatian.

The dog sniffed about the stove that hid the shaft to Harry.

Then troops in full riot gear marched into the compound to shutter the windows of every hut and aim machine guns at the doors.
"Raus! Raus!"
the ferrets shouted as they hauled the POWs out one by one and made them strip in the lightly falling snow. "Cooler!" ordered the commandant for every POW whose clothes had been modified to look like civilian wear. Even he used the English slang for the
Vorlager
prison.

Eventually, so many were jailed that the cooler ran out of room.

Outside the camp, the search for the fugitives broadened by the minute. As German radio broadcast the national alert, the SS, the armed forces, the Hitler Youth, the home guard, and all police units were called out. Old men and young boys for miles around rushed from their homes to watch over fields and lanes. Factories emptied. The Gestapo swarmed airports, set up roadblocks, and worked through moving trains, checking papers. Hotels and farms were searched.

In ports like Stettin and Danzig, the Kriegsmarine watched for stowaways trying to slip across to neutral Sweden.

Czech, Swiss, Danish, and French borders were secured.

Before long, five million Germans were involved in the greatest manhunt of the war.

Against that maelstrom of activity, a deadlier threat to the Reich drove up the road toward Stalag Luft III. The guards in the front of the car were glued to the radio, itching to drop off their prisoner and join the search. They wanted to be sure that those loose in the countryside couldn't escape to the Allies and attack in bombers again. But the real peril to the Nazis was actually in the back seat. Their prisoner would hold the key to the outcome of the war.

"Roadblock," said the driver.

"How does that make sense?" the guard beside him asked.

"We're heading
to
the camp, not away from it."

The terror-flier in back understood every word they spoke, for though he appeared to be English, his mother—long dead—had been German. His proficiency in her language was one of the reasons Bomber Command had chosen him to smuggle the Judas package back to Britain.

The roadblock was just a single car. It was parked on the shoulder, not across the road. As the vehicle carrying the RAF

airman braked, the person manning the feeble roadblock hurried over to the driver's window.

"We're coming to you," the driver said, obviously recogniz-ing the uniformed man, who looked more like a paper-pushing bureaucrat than a soldier.

"I came to intercept you. Seconds count. The Gestapo needs every available man at Sagan train station. Transfer the prisoner to my car and join the hunt."

So far, the Judas agent had followed his plan to the letter.

After bailing out of the
Ace of Clubs,
he'd parachuted down to a moonlit field, where he'd shucked and buried his flying suit and his sergeant's uniform to switch identities like a chameleon.

Sporting the uniform and carrying the papers of an RAF officer, he'd quickly surrendered to the local Gestapo. Now, days later, he was on his way to Stalag Luft III, the chief camp for shot-down Allied air force officers. Judas would know where to find him when the time was right to smuggle the traitor's package out of Germany.

So what was this?

A snafu?

S
ituation
n
ormal:
a
ll
f
ucked
u
p.

Eager for action, the guards hauled him out of one car and shoved him into the other. Having passed his papers and the key to his shackles to the bureaucrat, they sped off through the smudge of dawn and left him at the roadblock.

"Do you like Beethoven?" the new man asked in German.

The Judas agent tensed.

That was the code that would introduce him to his contact from the anti-Hitler conspirators.

"The
Moonlight
Sonata?" the German asked. "You bring death by moonlight."

"I prefer the
Pastoral
Symphony," the airman replied in German. "It's—how should I put it?—"

"What we all long to return to," said the bureaucrat, finishing the code Judas had provided.

Instead of driving up the road toward the camp, the German pulled the car off into the woods. Undoing the shackles, he told the Judas agent to strip to his skin and don the Nazi uniform he fetched from the trunk.