Escape From Germany by Crawley Aidan

Author:Crawley, Aidan
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty – Stalag Luft III, Sagan: East Compound, April 1942-March 1943

In April, 1942, Goering’s much vaunted camp, known as Stalag Luft III, was opened at Sagan in Lower Silesia, about eighty miles south-east of Berlin. It was intended to house all air force prisoners, and by the end of the summer of 1942 all but a few had been concentrated there; but as the numbers being shot down always exceeded German expectations, other camps had soon to be built or re-opened. Stalag Luft III, however, remained the chief camp for British and American Air Force officers until January, 1945. From its original two compounds, housing about 2,500 officers and N.C.O.s, it grew to six compounds, housing some 10,000 officers and about 300 orderlies. Air Force N.C.O.s were evacuated in the summer of 1943 and thereafter had a separate history.

Sagan is a historic place. It was the seat of a Duke of Courland in the days when Courland was a Russian province, and the site of a battle where the Russians defeated Frederick the Great. During Napoleon’s reign it came into the hands of a French family, and a Due de Sagan was still the owner of the chateau, which was built in French eighteenth century style, when the war broke out in 1939. The Germans respected his title to ownership but requisitioned the property during the war.

Round the chateau had grown up a small and rather uninteresting town, important mainly as a railway junction. The surrounding country is dead flat, the horizon broken only by pinewoods. It is perhaps the ugliest part of the North German plain and produces little but wheat and timber. South of the town of Sagan is a forest of fir which runs unbroken for between twenty and thirty miles towards the Czechoslovakian frontier and spreads about the same distance east and west. It was on the northern edge of this forest that Goering’s camp was situated. A great clearing had been made in the trees, and over the tree-stumps wooden huts had been erected.

Had the numbers in the compounds at Sagan ever been kept down to the level intended, the camp might have passed ordinary military standards. But rooms intended to hold six officers almost invariably had to house ten and sometimes twelve; and in barracks which might reasonably have held between eighty and a hundred N.C.O.s there were normally twice that number.

Wooden hutments are the same the world over. Pre-fabricated, erected in sections but united by the tarred felt over their roofs, they were divided into rooms if intended for officers, and divided in half if intended for N.C.O.s. Each barrack measured 160 feet by 40 feet and officers’ rooms were normally 16 feet square. In the early compounds each barrack contained a small auxiliary kitchen in which tinned food could be heated and water boiled, and a primitive night urinal, but there was neither running water nor drainage. The walls were double with a three-inch space between them; and the floors, also double, were of wood laid on low piles about a foot clear of the ground.

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