Charles Whiting - The Great German Escape

First published in Great Britain in 1992 as The March On London and reprinted in this format in 2009 and 2010 by

PEN & SWORD MILITARY

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Charles Whiting, 1992, 2009, 2010

ISBN 978 1 84884 032 4

eISBN 9781844684588

The right of Charles Whiting to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Baron Freiherr von der Heydte came from the Bavarian Altadel , the old aristocracy (p. 10).

Where it all started: Le Marchant Camp, Devizes, now officially known as Camp 23 (p. 40).

The London Cage was a cream-coloured Georgian building at No.8, Kensington Palace Gardens (p.35).

Soldiers of the Big Red One find an abandoned parachute near Mont Rigi.

These two German soldiers, taken prisoner in the Ardennes, indicate the extreme youth of the reserves upon which Hitler was drawing by the winter of 1944/45.

Swift justice is meted out to German soldiers found behind the Allied lines dressed in US uniform.

The prisoner-of-war camp, Thirkleby, North Yorkshire.

Eden Camp, Malton, is now a tourist attraction.

INTRODUCTION

They are not fools, however much we try to persuade ourselves to the contrary. But supposing they had got some tremendous sacred sanction some holy thing, some book or gospelsomething which would cast over the whole ugly mechanism of the German war the glamour of the old torrential raids.

John Buchan

In March, 1945, with only two months of the war to run, some sixty British, French and Belgian officers, plus one Pole, were kicking their heels impatiently at Dormie House at Wentworth, the mock-Tudor premises of Sunningdale golf course. They were all highly experienced members of the SOE, (Special Operations Executive) who had parachuted into Occupied Europe repeatedly to organize resistance to the Germans. The women among them had set up escape routes and had acted as wireless operators. Others had kidnapped a German general in Crete, smuggled arms into Albania, transported V-l and V-2 secrets right across Germany back to Britain. Most of them wore the bright upturned wings and parachute of men and women who had made three or more operational jumps into enemy territory. A week or two before, the authorities had become alarmed at the fate of Allied POWs in German hands. In London, they knew from the MI9 network in POW camps that the Germans had moved the great majority of British and American prisoners to the narrow section of land in Central Germany still under Nazi control. From there the POWs, according to their own secret reports back home, expected to be moved to the Bavarian and Austrian Alps, where it was assumed that the fanatical Nazi rearguard would make its last stand.

In particular, the Allied authorities were worried about the fate of the Prominenten, as the Germans called their most important prisoners. What would the Nazis do with them when they realized the war was lost? Would they use them to blackmail the victorious Allies into concessions? Or would they shoot them out of hand as a last act of spite? Allied Intelligence already knew that Hitler had declared vehemently, Erschiesst sie alle! (Shoot the lot of them).