Robert Verkaik - The Traitor of Colditz

In the name of my father

Contents

And what does anyone know about traitors,
or why Judas did what he did?

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

I first learned of Walter Roy Purdy from fleeting and often inscrutable references found in the memoirs and interviews of some of the POWs held at Colditz. Such was the sensitivity surrounding the events that take place in this book that many of the contemporary accounts only refer to Purdy by an alias, if at all. Long after the war had finished, both Captain Reinhold Eggers, the head of security at the castle, and Captain Julius Green, the MI9 spy who was working against him, felt duty-bound to refer to him only as Lieutenant Grey. Even Purdys German girlfriend only ever knew him by a pseudonym.

The most candid accounts of Purdys time in Colditz are those written by Lt Colonel Gris Davies-Scourfield, the only POW to speak freely about Purdys treatment by the other inmates, and Lt Commander James Mike Moran who refused MI5s request to give evidence against Purdy at his trial. Both these versions of events begged far more questions than they answered.

The more I dug, the more it became clear there was a conspiracy of silence about what really transpired between Lt Walter Purdy and the hardened POW escapers locked up together at Colditz in the final year of the war.

Equally intriguing was why so little is known about Battery Quartermaster Sergeant John Brown, the self-taught MI9 double agent whose extraordinary bravery helped save the lives of scores of British servicemen and uncovered the activities of at least 20 British traitors in Berlin.

When I discovered that the secret work of John Busty Brown was also inextricably linked to Colditz and Walter Purdy, I knew I was on to a story that had never been told before.

All I had to do was chase it down.

My enquiries took me from the Imperial War Museum in London to the National Archives in Kew, where there are more than 1,500 recently declassified pages relating to the Purdy case and many more concerning the spies and traitors he came into contact with.

Then it was on to Germany and the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) in Koblenz and Berlin before heading to Ludwigsburg which houses the former West German Nazi war crimes investigation centre. From Germany I sought access to the Red Cross files in Bern, Switzerland, and then finally to the world-famous Colditz castle itself where I spent five days and nights retracing the disturbing events of March 1944 that took place in the dark corridors and attics of the most secure prison camp of the Second World War.

The Hanging Party

High above the sleepy German town, the twilight gave way to darkness as a detachment of purposeful soldiers strode through the castle corridor. They stopped at a door and, after exchanging knowing glances with the men keeping guard, entered the room. Acting in military unison they placed their hands on the prisoner, pulled him to his feet and marched him up the spiral stone staircase, which wound its way to one of the attic rooms at the top of the most famous prisoner-of-war camp of the Second World War.

On either side of the accused stood a soldier ready to hold him up if he collapsed. A dozen more men silently filed into the room and waited for the senior officer to give the order. The prisoner, a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, was visibly shaking as he tried to come to terms with the desperate circumstances in which he now found himself.

This was not a Nazi court; the men gathered in that half-lit room at the top of Colditz Castle on 11 March 1944

They knew there were strict rules for the discipline of service-men accused of breaking British military and civil law. And it was Howe who had arranged for the defendant to be pulled from his bed and placed before the clandestine tribunal.

Howe, a captain in the 3rd Battalion Royal Tank Regiment, had gallantly served with the British Expeditionary Force during the French campaign. Captured in June 1940, along with many of the other long-standing Colditz POWs, he had fought a desperate rearguard action in the evacuation of British and French troops from the French port of Calais for which he had been awarded the Military Cross.

After his capture, Howe was sent to Laufen Castle, south eastern Bavaria, which the German Army had turned into an officers prison camp, Oflag (short for Offizierslager) VII-C. Within two months, Howe and five other British officers, including the legendary WWII escapee Major Patrick Reid, had dug a 24-foot-long tunnel from the prison basement to a small shed adjoining a nearby house. The six British prisoners, dubbed the Laufen Six, escaped on 5 September 1940 only to be recaptured five days later in Radstadt, Austria.

These were men for whom it was their duty, like every British officer, to try to escape. The determination of the Laufen Six to pursue freedom at almost any cost had earned them a transfer to Colditz Castle in eastern Germany, the first British officers to be sent there. One of their first acts upon arriving at the castle was to appoint Pat Reid to the position of escape officer. But Reid had no wish to spend the rest of the war helping other prisoners escape. He wanted his own chance at freedom. So when in the spring of 1942 a reluctant Howe agreed to replace him as the British man in charge of escapes, Reid and three other British POWS waited just four months before slipping through the Colditz kitchens into the castle yard, forced their way into a cellar, squeezed through a narrow slit window, dropped down a grass bank, scrambled up a steep earthen terraced wall and ran free out of the prison grounds.

All four made successful home runs back to Britain, not forgetting to send a postcard to their comrades in Colditz once they had reached the safety of Switzerland. They would be the last British officers to escape from Colditz Castle. Many tried to follow them but were thwarted before leaving the castle grounds or were later captured and returned to the camp. Others made it no further than the perimeter walls. And one British officer was shot dead after clambering over the barbed-wire fence and running for the wood.

As escape officer it was Howes job to personally approve all these plans, but by the spring of 1944 such a lamentable escape record weighed heavily on his shoulders, particularly as he had an agreement with the senior British officer in the camp that he would not escape himself until 10 British officers had made home runs.

After more than two years of helpless watching as each of his meticulously organised escapes were foiled by the suspiciously well-informed Germans, Richard Howe was determined that nothing would upset his latest and most ambitious plan.

So now Howe found himself looking at a British naval officer who he believed intended to reveal to the Germans all the current crop of British escape plans, including the secret tunnel that had taken six months of back-breaking work to complete, which scores of men were now counting on as their best bet for rejoining the war.

Howe stood and gestured for silence before reading out the charge of treason and then reminding the assembled group that Lieutenant Walter Purdy was a spy sent by the Germans to betray his country. He added that when Purdy was confronted with these allegations Purdy had admitted to being a traitor and a rat.

But there was more at stake than just escaping. The Nazis had long suspected that the British POWs detained at Colditz had also established a secret communications system to transmit vital intelligence to London as they crossed occupied Europe trying to make it home.