Public Servant, Secret Agent: The elusive life and violent death of Airey Neave

Neave was taken to an upper floor where a young, uniformed SS officer questioned him closely in English, while a typist took down his answers. Years later he confessed, ‘I was in great terror, though I tried to appear calm and innocent.’7 Neave insisted to his interrogator that he had got the idea from other prisoners, working near Graudenz, which was half true. He had been inspired by the Canadian flying officers at Thorn and had planned to escape by stealing an aeroplane, because Forbes was a pilot. ‘You are lying,’ said his inquisitor. ‘You are a spy. You were taking this to the Russians.’ Neave maintained that they were not, and told the curious officer that they were trying ‘the same game’ as the Canadian escape, of which his captor was unaware. The SS officer telephoned Thorn camp and received verification that there had been just such an escape bid, and that prisoners Neave and Forbes were indeed missing. Gradually, the tension eased. They were joined by another SS man, and began talking more casually about the war, referring to a map on the wall. Neave’s brave sally that Britain would win the war prompted cynical laughter. They asked if Polish peasants had helped their escape, and Neave, still wearing his peasant’s corduroy trousers, diverted the questioning to German mistreatment of the Poles. The SS men showed utter contempt for the Poles and their Catholicism, but they ceased interrogating him about spying. Neave’s composure gradually returned. He asked his blond young interlocutor what he had been doing before the war, and, with his resentful admission that he had been at university studying for his doctorate of philosophy, the interrogation ended. Neave and Forbes were marched through the streets of Plock under armed guard to the town prison and put into solitary confinement. Their pathetic civilian disguises were exchanged for coarse grey prison clothes. Neave slept for several hours before being roused for his evening ‘meal’, a bowl of swill containing bad potatoes and swedes. The Polish orderly boy, in prison clothes, whispered that the other inmates knew their identity, and managed some patriotic sentiments before continuing his round.

But Neave’s ordeal was not yet over. Above the door of his cell a notice identified him as ‘Neave, Airey. Spion’. For two days, he recovered in his cell, sleeping most of the time between ‘lunch’ of bread and turnip soup and a half-hour exercise period. Separated with Forbes from the other inmates, he hobbled round the prison courtyard, quietly exchanging details of their interrogation. To Neave’s relief, Forbes had given the same story about the aerodrome map. They had already concocted an agreed version of their escape from the camp, exonerating British other ranks. Neave’s reverie was interrupted some days after the initial interrogation by his gaoler’s curt insistence: ‘The Gestapo wants you.’

Back in the Gestapo building, he had a new, more vicious interrogator, this one with close-cropped black hair and a scarred face. He was just finishing questioning a defiant Polish woman, to whom Neave offered a sympathetic smile. ‘Go on, smile you English officer,’ raged his Nazi debriefer. ‘You started this war. You brought these Poles into it. Both of you are spies! Spies! Spies!’ The SS man glowered at Neave, with, as he thought, ‘murder in his eyes’, and challenged his cover story. The Graudenz map, he shouted, must have come from a Pole. Neave reiterated that it had come from a British prisoner of war. Who? He refused to say. Then, English gentleman, added the plain-clothes SS man, he would remain a guest of the Gestapo until he thought better of his obstinacy. Suddenly the officer softened, becoming for a moment a soldier like Neave. The prisoner should not think, he said, that just because he was in civilian clothes he had not fought like the lieutenant. In fact, he had seen action on the Polish Front, and a small ribbon in his button denoted an award for bravery. ‘Go, Herr Neave, and think things over,’ he admonished.

Back in his prison cell, Neave contemplated his position. He trembled at the prospect of further interrogation, fearing that if physically tortured he would reveal more of the truth. He felt defenceless and alone, anxious lest he face execution like the Polish officer in the cell opposite sentenced to death for killing a Gestapo agent. He prayed, cursed and patrolled his cell agitatedly. ‘I closed my eyes, and despair came over me like a great fog,’ he wrote later.8 ‘I could not see a way out of the darkness.’ In his dreams he was tramping through swamps of dark, stagnant water on the road to Russia, the way marked with the bones of former travellers. The next morning brought relief; he was awoken by the warder who addressed him as Herr Leutnant, and told him he was going back to Thorn ‘with Oberleutnant Forbes’. Once again, he was a British officer. The attitude of his gaolers changed markedly. They were handed back their civilian clothes, including the hated rucksack with its remaining sardines and condensed milk. Neave also retrieved his pipe, tobacco and the box of matches with its concealed compass. With Teutonic thoroughness, everything had been returned, except the map that almost cost him his life. He had memorised the layout of Graudenz, however.

After ten days, the escapers were taken back by train from Plock to Thorn, along the north bank of the Vistula that had been their bearing for Warsaw. They talked amiably of the war to their guards, who knew less than they did. The POWs at Thorn had a radio receiver smuggled in in a medicine ball from Spangenburg. Their welcome at Thorn was less agreeable than their departure from the clutches of the Gestapo. A furious German officer, whose guards had allowed them to escape, drew his revolver and marched them ‘Hande hoch’ to windowless dungeons in the outer wall of the fortress. When they protested at the pigsty conditions a sentry thrust his gun down the ventilation hole into Neave’s cell. ‘If you are swinehounds, you must expect to be kept in pigsties,’ he yelled. Neave threatened to report his filthy language to the Kommandant and the gun was hastily withdrawn.

After a night in appalling conditions, they were locked in a room above the keep, without furniture but for two beds, while weighing over their failed escape bid. They came to one maddeningly simple, but vitally important, conclusion. They had tried to cross the Polish countryside too quickly and without method. ‘We had, as it were, charged the barricade of the General-Government frontier without calculation,’ he decided. And yet they had got so close to Warsaw. It would have been comparatively simple to skirt the ill-defined border through the woods and make their way to the capital. Moreover, in such inhospitable terrain, an escaper had to understand the strain his vulnerability would place on his spirit. ‘Loneliness and physical stress undermine the most resolute,’ he wrote.9 The escaper must conserve his forces by lying up in the warmth for long periods. The lessons of this failed escape bid were not lost on him.

On being sent back to his room in the fort, Neave found that his short period of freedom had given him fresh strength. He went back to the novels of Victorian England that reminded him so much of home, and found an inner peace. One night, after he had finished Mrs Henry Wood’s sentimental melodrama, East Lynne, he was roughly roused by a German guard and told that he was being moved immediately. ‘We have had enough trouble with you,’ said the guard. Gathering his few belongings in a bundle, he joined a small party of prisoners among whom he recognised Forbes. ‘Where the hell are we going?’ asked Neave. ‘To the Bad Boys’ Camp at Colditz,’ came the reply.

5 Colditz

High above the Saxony town of Colditz broods an impregnable castle surrounded on three sides by sheer rock precipices, approached only by a narrow cobbled causeway over a deep moat. Infuriated by the frequent escapes of Allied officers, the Nazis decided to concentrate here, in a Sonderlager, or punishment camp, the most recalcitrant of the ‘bad boys’ from other camps in Occupied Europe. Colditz was thought to be escape-proof, and indeed it had proved to be so in the First World War when it housed Allied POWs. The logic was understandable but erroneous. By putting all the most determined officers together in Oflag IVc, the German High Command effectively established an escape academy, which scored an impressive number of ‘home runs’ in the five and a half years of its existence. ‘We made things better for our prisoners by cramming Colditz with new escape material week after week,’ confessed the camp intelligence officer in a frank post-mortem. Every new arrival brought knowledge of new methods of escape, of fresh routes, or documents, of checks on trains and the like. ‘In this castle, the prisoners had the interior lines of communication, and the initiative as well.’1

This did not seem to be the case at all when the first British officers arrived in the autumn of 1940. Captain Patrick Reid, the chairman of the British escape committee, recollected that the prisoners could see their future prison almost upon leaving the station: ‘beautiful, serene, majestic and yet forbidding enough to make our hearts sink into our boots’. Schloss Colditz towered over the town of the same name and the River Mulde, a tributary of the Elbe. The castle was rebuilt on much older foundations, dating back to 1014, in the early eighteenth century by Augustus the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony (known as ‘the Strong’ because of his tireless sexual drive: he is supposed to have fathered 365 children). The castle had seen many sieges and sackings and even its name betrayed its fortunes. Colditz is a Slav word-ending, dating from the time it was occupied by the Poles. Its original name was Koldyeze. The town, essentially an overgrown village, was situated in the centre of a triangle formed by the big cities of Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz. The land surrounding the castle was hilly and wooded, known locally as ‘little Switzerland’, and levelled out northwards into a fertile agricultural plain. It was buried deep in the Reich, 400 miles from the nearest neutral territory, Switzerland.

Since its abandonment by the Saxon royal family in 1800, Colditz had housed prisoners of one sort or another. In the 1920s it was a mental asylum, and when he came to power in 1933 Hitler used the castle to incarcerate his enemies, real or imagined, and to train the Hitler Youth. Its outer walls were 7 feet thick, resting on a rock face that rises 200 feet above the river. The inner courtyard, where the English officers were to live, rose a further 60 feet. Their cells were six storeys high with iron bars on the windows. Searchlights played on the walls all night, and in these early days at least there were more guards than prisoners. It was a truly forbidding place, designed to dishearten would-be fugitives.

The first prisoners of the Second World War were Polish officers, who arrived in the autumn of 1939 when Colditz was no more than a transit camp. With the outbreak of war in Western Europe the following year, it was designated a Special Camp, and French and Belgian officers started to arrive. The first British officers reached the castle in early November 1940. This advance guard of three Canadian RAF flying officers was boosted by a group of six army officers recaptured after escaping from a camp near Salzburg.

Colditz was designated Oflag (Offizierslager) IVc and came under the command of Werhmacht Group Four, based in Dresden. The Germans derived their authority to establish a special camp from Section 48 of the Geneva Convention which permitted strict surveillance, though without loss of any other prisoners’ rights as provided by this agreement. ‘In effect, this camp had a greater number of searches, roll-calls and so on than in the normal camps, and much less room to move around in – just a forty-yards square courtyard, and no open space except the park outside, which might only be visited for short and fixed periods daily under some restriction and much surveillance,’ wrote Reinhold Eggers, latterly in charge of security at the prison.2 Oberst Prawitz was the Kommandant during Neave’s spell there. The German guards were mainly drawn from middle-aged and even elderly men called up to serve their country, though some had seen action in the First World War.

The prospect of moving to Colditz, of which he knew virtually nothing (not even where it was), contrarily lifted Neave’s spirits. The atmosphere of public school and university still permeated officers’ lives, and the idea of ‘a camp for naughty boys, a sort of borstal’ did not disturb him. He was flattered to be singled out so early in his POW career as a nuisance to the enemy. ‘I was like a boy who, flogged by the headmaster, proudly displays the stripes on his backside,’ he confessed later. As the British contingent passed across the drawbridge of Thorn fortress before dawn that late spring morning, he even looked forward to new adventures.

To begin with, a long train journey offered another opportunity for escape. As they travelled slowly south, the prisoners scanned the countryside and looked for weaknesses in their armed escort, but they were heavily guarded and even accompanied when they went to the lavatory. It was not a pleasant trip. When they changed trains at Posen, the POWs were spat upon. Neave cultivated the guard sitting next to him, a garrulous, middle-aged toyshop keeper from the Dresden area who had been called up for military service. Hoping to give his well-meaning guard the slip en route, Neave so shamelessly played on his feelings of homesickness that tears came to ‘his stupid blue eyes’. It was not perhaps an attractive thing to do, but his manipulation of the guard showed just how obsessive the idea of escape had become.

At Dresden they changed trains again. Here, Neave took the opportunity to study the master race off guard: waiting for trains, dozing, wolfing down Wurst and margarine sandwiches, showing their tickets and papers to the railway police. It was a useful chance to reconnoitre the railway system. Prisoners and guards alike slept with their heads on the waiting-room tables, but an alert Neave kept up the conversation with his toy merchant. They fell into a serious discussion about what would happen after the war. The shopkeeper said there were many Communists in Dresden, and they would simply change their brown shirts for red. He asked Neave for his address in Britain, and took him to a secluded part of the waiting room where railway workers were drinking morning coffee and the conversation flowed freely. Neave was surprised at how amenable they were to his seditious propaganda. As the discourse deepened, he edged away unnoticed on his chair towards the door. He was within a yard of an impromptu escape when his guard turned round and asked: ‘More coffee, Englishman?’ He could not refuse and his chance had gone. Soon after they were herded out on to the platform for the train to Colditz. In later years, Neave thought often of the toyshop soldier, so genuine in his hatred for the war and his captive’s tribulation. In his classic account of his wartime experiences published eleven years after that morning in Dresden, Neave wrote: ‘Now I feel almost ashamed of my attempt to take advantage of his good nature.’ In 1946, the shopkeeper wrote to the address Neave had given him, complaining of his fate under the Russian occupation of Eastern Germany, and asking for help. Neave replied in the most general terms to avoid exciting the attention of Communist censors. This incident provoked an unusual outburst of personal philosophy from Neave: ‘Some hypocrite has called this the century of the Common Man,’ he remarked, ‘but in no age have common men suffered more for being human and kindly.’3

On the short, crowded train journey from Dresden, Neave studied his fellow passengers. In his compartment, a German officer took in the sight of British POWs in battledress uniforms and muttered nervously to his gargantuan Hausfrau Hilde: ‘Kriegsgefangener!’ (prisoners of war). She spent the journey complaining loudly about the flight of Hitler’s right-hand man, Rudolf Hess, on 10 May. Why did the Führer not stop him? Where did he get the plane? This was news indeed. Hilde was very cross. Hess had apparently parachuted into Scotland from a Luftwaffe plane, bearing a message of reconciliation to the Duke of Hamilton, and had promptly been interned. (Neave would later meet him in a cell at Nuremberg, where he served war crimes charge papers on him.) On this morning, however, the mere mention of Hess’s name in front of the enemy prompted the browbeaten officer to silence his wife. The prisoners broke into smiles. Neave lit his pipe and winked at his comrades-in-arms.

The party of five ‘bad boys’ arrived at Colditz in the early morning of 14 May 1941. They were drawn up at the station and marched across the cobbled Bahnhofstrasse and up Badergasse, crossing the shallow but fast-flowing River Mulde by a wide, modern bridge 50 yards long. From here, they skirted the main square and trooped up the short, cobbled access road to the castle, across the moat bridge and through the great gates of the inner courtyard. ‘I felt the battlements close in, enfolding us, so that I looked round in fear,’ Neave recalled later. ‘White faces peered at me from the windows, and men in strange clothes paced up and down in the shadows.’4 Then he spotted John Hyde-Thomson, an officer of the Durham Light Infantry who had also escaped from Thorn, clattering along the cobbles in clogs to welcome him. He was quickly made to feel at home, not just with the contingent of twenty British prisoners but with the polyglot community of Poles, French, Belgian, Dutch and Serb POWs. After the depression of Thorn, Colditz, for all its forbidding appearance, was like escaping from a turgid political meeting to ‘a salon filled with wit and self-confidence’.

Incredibly, among the small British company were three clergymen from the Chaplains’ Department. One, J. Ellison Platt, an army Methodist chaplain who had chosen to stay with the wounded at Dunkirk rather than get away, observed the newcomers. In his diary, published long after the war, Platt recorded on the day of Neave’s arrival that the camp was rapidly filling up. The French contingent numbered two hundred ‘and the British increase by ones and twos daily’.5 The padres led the latest intake up a stone staircase to a large hall on the first floor, where all but the most senior British officers lived. Neave felt as if he were being ushered by masters to a school for waifs and strays. After a meal of hot stew, German bread and lard, they were escorted to smaller rooms off the mess hall where they were allocated bunks. Neave immediately fell into a deep sleep.

He was roused at 7.30 the next morning by the shouts of ‘Aufstehen’ (get up) by German NCOs walking through the dormitories. Thereafter he was inducted into the daily routine. Breakfast, of ersatz German coffee made from acorns, bread and margarine, was brought up to their quarters half an hour later by British orderlies. At 8.30 all the prisoners assembled in their national contingents in the courtyard for Appell – roll-call. After much laborious counting and saluting, the prisoners were allowed to get on with their hobbies: reading, music lessons, language lessons and exercise. The daily routine altered little, until the escapes began in earnest, when the Germans instituted more roll-calls to reduce the opportunities for getting out. ‘Lunch’, usually a thick barley gruel very occasionally containing pork skin, was served at 12.30, and the final roll-call took place at 9.00 p.m. Soon after, they were locked into their cells for ‘lights out’. For undergraduates of Colditz academy, however, this was simply the signal to start a night shift of intense activity.

Perhaps with some overstatement, Neave later insisted that every single officer in the castle had but a single thought – to escape. Lord Campbell of Alloway QC, then plain Alan Campbell, a young army officer who was one of the first to be sent to Oflag IVc, remembers: ‘One spent most of one’s time trying to escape. We were always planning escapes or doing escapes.’6 Campbell occupied the bunk below Neave and so observed him at close quarters. ‘We never quarrelled. I found him agreeable, amusing. But I never got to know him. He was a withdrawn, distant character, with a slightly isolationist, ruthless streak.’ Ken Lockwood, a stockbroker in civilian life who looked after the British ‘shop’ and supplied would-be escapers with German money, comments that Neave in particular was keen to get out, but points out: ‘We couldn’t all escape. One accepted that. But the object of the exercise was to get somebody out of the camp and if possible get them away successfully.’ He concurs with Alloway’s assessment that Neave was ‘very quiet, very much his own man. I don’t think any of us got to know him really well.’7

The prisoners engaged in a restless battle with the ‘goons’, as the hapless German guards were known, and they were endlessly busy looking for anything that might aid themselves, or others, to get out. Neave plunged himself into this hive of industry with relish, delighted that he no longer had to fear the mild disapproval of fellow inmates content to live out the war that he had experienced in previous camps. Eggers deplored the attitude of his recalcitrant charges. ‘Indiscipline, I can truly say, was the unspoken order of the day on their side: indiscipline often amounting to plain personal insolence, or at least studied offhandedness.’8 He singled out the British as being particularly obstreperous. They even used occasional excursions to the town football ground to show off how well turned out and disciplined they could be while marching through the streets, giving chocolate to the children, until this privilege was stopped. The Germans realised they were mounting a magnificent piece of counter-propaganda, at their own expense.

Neave was not involved in the first serious attempt at a British breakout, which took place only a month after he arrived. Twelve officers, including two Poles, tunnelled their way out of the canteen, having successfully (as they believed) bribed a German guard 700 Reichsmarks to look the other way when they made their exit on to a small patch of grass beneath the parapet. The sentry accepted the down payment of 100 marks, and promptly betrayed them to the Kommandantur. The sentry was allowed to keep the money, promoted, sent on leave and given a War Service Medal.

Watching this botched escape from his window at two in the morning, Neave brooded on the shortcomings of tunnels as the best way to get out. Escapers, he concluded, must pit their wits against something frailer than the castle walls – the Germans themselves, as the last escapers had in part tried to do. The gap in their defence seemed to lie in the hope that the guards would be deceived by a bold attempt to leave by the front gate dressed in German uniform. While he pondered this plan, Neave joined ‘the board’ of an international tunnel, comprising British, French, Polish and Belgian officers. He had scant confidence in the project, but in a schoolboyish way he felt he had a place in the second eleven. The tunnel was started under a bed in the sick bay and went through the floor of the Red Cross parcel room below. From there, the international consortium argued about what direction to take. Nonetheless, they worked with a vigour, using broken knives, forks, door latches – anything metal they could lay their hands on – until four months later the tunnel stretched for 20 feet beneath the Red Cross room floor. Neave had no faith in its success, but he believed in the self-discipline that all escaping activity encouraged. It strengthened the spirit of POWs, occupied their mind and reduced the tedium that could otherwise drive them to distraction.

Two nights a week, Neave toiled flat on his stomach, a handkerchief over his mouth to keep out the choking dust. Disposal of the debris was the most difficult thing for most of the obvious hiding places had already been bagged by other tunnellers. Neave and his crew stored great piles of dust and stones in the loft of the building, which eventually gave way, breaking a water pipe that showered French prisoners as they slept. While he worked away at this forlorn occupation, Neave continued to develop his own project. Through their ‘goon watch’, the prisoners knew all about the movement of German personnel throughout the castle. They now learned that everyone who entered the inner courtyard that housed the prisoners had to collect a numbered brass disc at the guardhouse, present it to the sentry on the inner gate, and return it to the guardhouse. Peter Allan, a second lieutenant in the Cameron Highlanders, bribed a visiting civilian painter to part with his brass pass, which went into the British cache of escaping material. However, the workman was obliged to report his ‘loss’, and the German officers warned their guards to be on the lookout for the missing disc.