The Volunteer by Jack Fairweather

Author:Jack Fairweather
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780062561428
Publisher: HarperCollins

IV

Chapter 17

Impact

GENEVA

NOVEMBER 1942

Napoleon finally gave up waiting on the legation in Switzerland to sort out his visas and on November 7 he traveled to Geneva, on the French border, to meet a smuggler who swore he had the necessary papers. But the man took his money and then disappeared. Napoleon crossed the border that night by himself and was picked up by French gendarmes a few hours later. The French police released him a week later without charge, perhaps accepting his story of being a Wehrmacht soldier returning to his unit. But during his stay in jail Hitler had moved to occupy the rest of France and seal the border with Spain in reaction to the Allied invasion of North Africa. German troops filled the streets of southern French cities and the Gestapo hunted for Jews and resisters.1

Napoleon made it to a safe house in Perpignan in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where the local guide demanded double to smuggle him over the mountain passes to Spain. He had no choice but to pay, only for this man to also disappear. Napoleon struggled over the mountains alone before finally reaching Barcelona a week later, on November 24. Napoleon planned to stay a few hours and then head south to the British protectorate of Gibraltar. But the city was under heavy police control and he was arrested again. Spain was not officially allied with Germany, but General Francisco Franco, a fascist, was sympathetic to the Nazis’ cause. This time there was no quick release.2

The Spanish police interned Napoleon for two months in a cell and then transferred him to the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp in Castille, where other foreign nationals caught crossing the border were kept. He arrived at the camp in early January 1943 to join five thousand poorly clothed and ill-fed inmates who spent their days lifting rocks from a nearby riverbed for road construction. Napoleon considered various schemes for escaping, before opting to stage a hunger strike over camp conditions. He persuaded the contingent of several hundred Polish inmates to join, and together they demanded a consular visit from the British, who oversaw Polish affairs in Spain. After two weeks of fasting, the Spanish authorities summoned the British ambassador from Madrid to negotiate. It seems Napoleon arranged a meeting with the diplomat and persuaded him that he was in fact a British-trained agent, thus securing his release.3

Napoleon arrived in Gibraltar on February 3, 1943, shortly after news of Germany’s catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad broke: some ninety thousand German soldiers had surrendered on the Volga, and a further hundred thousand were lost and presumed dead. Soviet forces had clawed back all the German gains of the previous year and were poised to launch a major counteroffensive. The tide of war was turning.4

Napoleon caught one of the merchant ships that sailed regularly between the British enclave and the Firth of Clyde in Scotland, a major hub for Allied shipping, and spent a tense week skirting German U-boat patrols. He finally arrived in the United Kingdom on February 19.

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