The Willow Wren by Philipp Schott (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📕

The following Sunday was rainy and cold. Again Papa did not come to Colditz, which made it four weekends in a row. I understood why though, as at camp we had been hearing a lot of news, both through formal announcements and rumours. It seemed the war was drawing nearer to Germany itself. The Allies had finally bumped up against the Siegfried Line, which was the fortified western border of the Reich. They had tried to jump over it with paratroopers, but we defeated that attempt just last week. They could not cross the Rhine!

More ominously, and this was of course from the rumours, not the news, we heard that most of the civil authorities in Aachen had fled during an intense Allied assault. These were the equivalents of Papa and his colleagues at the Ortsgruppe. Aachen was the westernmost city in Germany and was very important, not so much from a military perspective as from a symbolic one: it would be the first German city to fall and it was the capital of the “First Reich,” founded by Charlemagne over a thousand years ago. I heard that the top officials were executed for their cowardice and that everyone else who fled was stripped of their ranks and sent to the Russian front as privates, which was in essence a delayed form of execution. I wondered, “When they get to Leipzig, what will Papa do?”

But although it was inexorably coming closer, the major land war still felt safely distant. Of more immediate interest were the goings-on in the castle. As soon as I had taken my wet coat off and wiped my muddy shoes on the mat, I asked Mama whether she had spoken to Herr Rittman.

“Yes, Ludwig, I did. He told me an interesting story. Apparently a well-known British officer named Lieutenant Sinclair was killed. There have been several dozen escape attempts, but no one had been shot dead before. Our guards are good at shooting to injure or frighten, rather than to kill.”

“Why do they not want to kill them?”

“They are too valuable. They can be used to trade for our own officers. Also their good treatment ensures the good treatment of our men. It is said that we even have Prime Minister Churchill’s nephew in there and that Hitler has said that anyone who harms him in the slightest way will pay for it with their head!”

“Wow!”

I remember how pleased Mama was that I was enjoying the story so far. In retrospect I realize that she loved to gossip, and this, I suppose, counted as a sort of gossip.

“Sinclair had made five previous escape attempts. Twice from another prison and three times from Colditz. On two occasions he was caught again very near the border. Imagine how frustrating that must have been for him! Herr Rittman told me of one attempt where the lieutenant and his confederates carefully copied Rothenberger’s uniform. Rothenberger is one of the top guard’s officers. Imagine this: they even melted down bits of lead pipe from the bathroom to pour into handmade clay moulds to make copies of the buttons and eagle insignia! They also recreated his moustache and carefully cut Sinclair’s hair in the same style as Rothenberger. Sinclair was the size and shape of Rothenberger, and he spoke fluent German. He then spent months before this attempt carefully observing Rothenberger’s mannerisms. I think you can guess what the plan was. When it was dark, Sinclair, disguised as Rothenberger, marched up to one of the sentries at the gate and demanded it be opened. The prisoners had paid attention to the sentry rotation schedule and had picked this one because he was the newest and seemed the least confident. They were mistaken. The sentry replied that he was under strictest orders not to open the gate for any reason at this hour. Only the commander, Oberst Prawitt, could override it. Sinclair was relentless though. He kept demanding and then began shouting, threatening court martial. This attracted the attention of other guards, including the real Stabsfeldwebel Rothenberger!”

I gasped.

Mama chuckled. “That was, as you can imagine, the end of that attempt. Then last week he tried again. The sixth time. He had his friends create a diversion by pretending to try to escape out the far side of the castle while he rushed the wall. There are actually several rings of walls on the side we can’t see, away from the big cliffs. He got over the first when they fired the warning shot. He kept running to the second wall. He was killed by the next shots. After all those creative and carefully thought-out plans, this one seemed silly and doomed. It was especially silly since the prisoners have homemade radios in there, according to Herr Rittman. They know what’s going on. They know the Allies will come eventually. Perhaps he was going mad with frustration and impatience to get out. Herr Rittman said that they gave him a proper funeral with full military honours. Our guards even sewed a British flag for the coffin.”

This level of respect between combatants who would happily kill each other on the battlefield seemed strange to me, but also wonderful and moving. The adult world and how people in it related to each other was complicated and I feared I would have trouble understanding the rules when I got to that age. If I got to that age.

Chapter Twenty

December 26, 1944

The second day of Christmas, 1944. This is not a Christmas story though. I will explain, but to do so I need to start with what happened in July.

A very serious, almost successful, assassination attempt had been made on Hitler on July 20. That, combined with the Allied breakthrough out of Normandy, changed many things, most of which I did not learn about until later, but one of which was presented in a proclamation by Hitler Youth leader Artur Axmann in late September (just after Sinclair’s death as it happens), read