I shouldn’t think so. I believe only one German POW successfully escaped from Allied custody during the war (from Canada to the USA while it was still neutral). Britain being an island made escape much more difficult.
They Have Their Exits is Airey Neave’s excellent account of how he got out of Colditz (eventually).
Basically, he (and the Dutch officer he was with) pretended to be guest workers and with a helluvah lot of luck (and experience built up on a previously failed attempt) managed to make it to Switzerland. He was the first British Officer to make a “Home Run” from Colditz.
Neave then had a key role in setting up and helping to run MI9 - the Escape & Evasion department of Military Intelligence - for the rest of the war.
His second book Saturday At MI9 is a brilliant account of how Escape and Evasion was managed in WW2. It’s also full of accounts (and praise) of both the airmen who made it out, and the civilians who helped them (often paying the ultimate price for doing so). Interestingly, he doesn’t always reveal the real names of civilians involved - a reminder that the Cold War was in full swing when he wrote and the possibility existed that those civilians may have been called on to help once again.
Unfortunately, it’s incredibly hard to find a copy of the second book these days (no you’re not having mine :D). In fact its tricky finding anything good about MI9 at all.
Neave is an all-round fascinating character - at the war’s end, he found himself (as a German-speaking Lawyer who also held Military rank) involved in the Nuremburg trials. He was even given the honour of reading the indictments to the Nazi leadership. After that, he became a Conservative MP and eventually managed Margaret Thatcher’s successful leadership campaign.
Sadly he was assassinated by a car bomb under his car at the Palace of Westminster (Parliament) in 1979.
The INLA (Irish Republican Terrorists) claimed responsibility* - Neave was the Shadow Secretary for Northern Ireland and would have certainly been in Thatcher’s cabinet had he survived long enough to see her elected.
*For a loooooooooooong time there were (obviously almost certainly false) rumours that it was actually carried out by “friends” of MI6. Neave had been very vocal in his insistence that both MI5 and MI6 had become a law unto themselves - especially in Ireland - and were riddled with corruption. Given his previous experience and proximity to Thatcher, so the rumour went, MI6 were shit-scared that if/when she won the election Neave would be tasked with sorting them out.
I remember that forging the numerous travel documents (required for a civilian to travel within Nazi Germany) was an awesome task-not only were the documents dated, but many of them carrier multiple signatures. Just having one wrong signature would get you arrested.
That guy who walked at night-I have forgotten his story-but he basically walked at night to avoid supsicion, and broke in to houses to get food. Travelling on trains was not easy-you had to have your documents in order, and the police were monitoring rail stations.
A question: how heavily guarded was the swiss border? If you climbed a mountain, could you cross in an area with no guardposts?
If I remember, Neave (in his account) says that it was quite heavily patrolled by both the Swiss and the Germans at anywhere that presented a reasonable crossing point. On the German side, the local Hitler Youth made patrols close to the border as well (they were stopped once near the border by such a patrol, but managed to bluff their way out of it).
Once he made it over, however, he found the Swiss guards very welcoming and was heavily congratulated for having “made it.”
That’ll be Oberleutnant Franz von Werra. Another fascinating bloke. Escaped to the US and then was smuggled out via Mexico. Sadly he was lost over the channel after returning to duty in 1941.
Stick The One That Got Away on your rental list if you want to see him get the Cinematic treatment.
Franz wasn’t the only one to get out on the German side of things either - Walter Manhard made it as well, although no one knew it at the time!
He was assumed to have drowned during a swimming activity at a camp in Canada, but in fact he had actually escaped. He eventually made his way to New York where he decided to hideout until the war was over. He eventually settled there and even married a female officer in the US Navy. He finally (and belatedly!) turned himself in in 1952.
Of course when it comes to escapes, for sheer goddamn balls you can’t do better than Lt. James of the Royal Navy.
He was shipwrecked and captured in Holland in 1943. Having escaped from his camp in full dress uniform, he proceeded to bluff his way to the Baltic Coast, still dressed in full uniform and telling anyone who queried it that he was called I Bagerov and was an officer in the Bulgarian Navy.
He almost made it, but was captured at the Port of Lubeck.
Not to be deterred (and this time equipped with maps supplied by MI9) he escaped again, this time claiming to be a Swedish sailor. He made it to Danzig, where some real Swedish sailors smuggled him out!
A Prisoner’s Progress is his account of it all, but again its almost impossible to find.
He wasn’t the first to use that method, by the way, Wellington’s legendary exploratory officer Colquhoun Grant did something similar in 1813.
Having been captured by the French, he was taken to Paris for interregation. He escaped and eventually made his way back to Wellington’s forces in Spain. Not before spending a few days living the high life in Paris though. Wearing his full British uniform, he simply told anyone who got suspicious (civilian or military) that he was actually a US Officer (the US being French allies at the time).
If an escaped POW did make it to Sweden or Switzerland or Spain, would that make it a “home run”? My understanding was that the neutral countries didn’t return Axis or Allied military personnel to their home countries. Wouldn’t he just be interned for the duration of the war?
In Switzerland, yes. After crashlanding there my father was interned by the Swiss. At first it was at a hotel in, I believe, Zurich, and they had the run of the city during the day, but he and his crew were to be transferred to a proper [del]prison[/del] internment camp. Dad and his pilot took a day trip to close to the French border and got across, met up with the Resistance who got them to Spain and then back to England.
Two of their gunners tried it, too, but one was killed by the Swiss and the other, upon arriving in England, apparently assumed his identity! See, he had a troubled past he wanted to escape and they looked similar and, well, all that melodramatic stuff.
Ireland secretly returned its Allied internees to UK territory in 1943 or 44. In some cases, allied airmen were transported to UK territory without being interned at all. On the other hand, the British internees were under orders not to violate their parole, and I heard that when one of them did cross the border into the north, the British authorities sent him back!
For internees from both sides, it was apparently a very cushy way to sit out the war, with no food rationing (unlike almost anywhere else in Europe), and freedom to travel wherever they liked during the day.
I have a book buried someplace that includes the story of one airman who travelled across France pretending to be a POW on a work detail. He stole a shovel and, when stopped and asked where he had come from, would wave somewhere generally behind him and say, “Back there.” “Where are you going?” was answered by a pointed finger forward and an, “Over there.” It worked but, as I recall, this was after D-Day and France was pretty chaotic.
A friend of mine, my old rural mail carrier, a fighter pilot based first in England and then just behind the beaches, was shot down over Normandy in July, 1944. He was picked up by a farm family and hidden (explained to the German Army as an idiot and mute brother-in-law) until British/Canadian troops overran the farm.
His biggest fear was that he would be ID by his GI boots – his feet were to big for any of the family’s shoes. He went back for the 50th Anniversary of the invasion and had a great time with the survivors of his rescuers and protectors. He was pretty well treated by the village as their own private WWII hero.
He was in the greatest danger, he said, when he tried to enter the British/Canadian lines. The squadies on the front line were inclined to shoot first and ask questions at the inquest.
There were regular passenger aircraft flights between Portugal and the UK during WWII, for the most part the Germans did not shoot down civillian passenger aircraft (although there were some exceptions), and AFAIK the Portugeuse pretty much left anyone who got there to their own devices, which usually involved repatriation.
Similarly, Turkey did not intern escaped POWs who made it across their borders, but I don’t know of many who got that far.
Did the Irish also return any Germans to Germany ?
De Valera observed strictly even-handed neutrality in the early years, which meant nobody got sent back. Later on, with Germany clearly loosing, they bent more the Allied way. There was no advantage to be gained by returning the small number of German aviators who must have got lost and ended up in the Irish Republic. German agents (such as Dr Herman Goertz) who had arrived to co-operate with the Irish Republican Army, were interned until the end.
De Valera was so even-handed he paid a personal visit to the Germany Embassy in Dublin to express his condolences at the death of Adolf Hitler !
And there is a documentary on the History Channel about how Ireland harboured some Nazis- with Govt complicity -after WW 2 (if not complicity, being less than thorough into finding out who they were). That is OT though.
All great books but they don’t tell the whole truth. They were mostly written soon after the war and they deliberately supressed some of the details, particularly about the work of MI9, just in case there was a new war and the same techniques could be used. POWs received maps, timetables, examples of passes, military uniforms ready for conversion to civilian clothes, etc, etc. It wasn’t all done with old blankets and rubber stamps made from potatoes!
From what I’ve read, although distance to a border was important, time was the main factor. You needed to quickly move out of the search area - presumably catching a train asap - and this could determine the direction you headed. I’m at work and I haven’t got my books to hand but I believe the successful escapes were split fairly evenly between getting to Sweden, Switzerland, and to western Europe (France or Belgium and then making contact with an organised escape line).
As others have said, whichever way you went, your chances were small.
This varied from country to country and at different periods of the war. I believe Switzerland had different rules for escaped POWs from evaders or crash landed airman who had never been captured - the latter were interned while the POWs were free to move about. (Again, this is from memory. I will try and look it up this evening.)
Even if you were free to move about it was hard to get back from Switzerland as it was surrounded by Axis and defeated countries. Some internees were exchanged but others had to rely on escape lines running across Vichy France to Spain and then on to Portugal. Almost as difficult as the original trip for the camp to Switzerland.
Another book I can recommend is Shot Down And On The Run by Air Commodore Graham Pitchfork (I kid you not!).
The book was published in 2003 by the National Archives and its ISBN is 1-903365-53-8.
To quote the blurb :-
Based on special first-hand interviews and official debriefing documents held at the National Archives, many of these accounts have never been published before. Featured throughout are the roles of local resistance groups and other helpers, and the Military Intelligence body MI9 that masterminded the training, support and organization of escape and evasion.
How did so many people manage to escape to Sweden?
I get the others, since there’s a land-border, but there’s quite the bit of water between Germany and Sweden. This almost certainly implies assistance of the German Underground movement - or how did they do it?
According to the above book most escaping aircrew got to Sweden overland via Denmark and then by a short canoe journey (operated by the Danes) across the Kattegat. Using this same method the Danes also managed to transport over 7,000 Danish Jews to Sweden.
The book says German troops were sparsely distributed in the Danish countryside, most Danes were anti-German and most spoke English. Downed airmen were advised to seek help from priests or doctors.
Indeed. Pat Reid says much the same thing in his books. There was a debbate about whether they should tell all this, and risk compromising the “secrets” of escape, or tell it so that this would be one way that future potential prisoners would learn abiout these. As it developed, it was pretty much moot – there wasn’t another situation similar to British or Americans held in German camps – Korea and Vietnam were completely different. (Although I suppose that, had we gone to war with Russia, things might be similar.)
The thing is, more recent books that I;'ve seen haven’t really added anything to my knowledge – the aforementioned Stalag Luft Drei really doesn’t tell you any more about the techniques of escaping. I’ll have to look up that MI9 book.