This looks interesting
1 Like
Link
It’s true though, bible was banned,
Mandatory 10 year jail sentence for those caught smuggling them
He did spend time here
That guy Joseph is married to a Christian and living in Derry for years
I knew he lived in Ireland, I know he rescued Mussolini and was obviously a dangerous fucker.
But a Nazi Mossad agent?
V mixed up place after the war
The Strange Case of a Nazi Who Became an Israeli Hitman - Holocaust Remembrance Day - Haaretz.com
The ForwardMar 27, 2016
On September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. The basic facts were simple: Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home.
The only other salient detail known to police in Munich was that Krug commuted to Cairo frequently. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been hired by Egypt to develop advanced weapons for that country.
HaBoker, a now defunct Israeli newspaper, surprisingly claimed to have the explanation: The Egyptians kidnapped Krug to prevent him from doing business with Israel.
But that somewhat clumsy leak was an attempt by Israel to divert investigators from digging too deeply into the case — not that they ever would have found the 49-year-old scientist.
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We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossadofficers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt.
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Moreover, the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s personal favorites among the party’s commando leaders. The Führer, in fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, for leading the rescue operation that plucked his friend Benito Mussolini out from the hands of his captors.
Otto Skorzeny with the liberated Mussolini – 12 September 1943.Credit: Wikimedia Commons /Toni Schneiders
But that was then. By 1962, according to our sources — who spoke only on the promise that they not be identified — Skorzeny had a different employer. The story of how that came to be is one of the most important untold tales in the archives of the Mossad, the agency whose full name, translated from Hebrew, is “The Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions.”
Key to understanding the story is that the Mossad had made stopping German scientists then working on Egypt’s rocket program one of its top priorities. For several months before his death, in fact, Krug, along with other Germans who were working in Egypt’s rocket-building industry, had received threatening messages. When in Germany, they got phone calls in the middle of the night, telling them to quit the Egyptian program. When in Egypt, some were sent letter bombs — and several people were injured by the explosions.
Krug, as it happens, was near the top of the Mossad’s target list.
During the war that ended 17 years earlier, Krug was part of a team of superstars at Peenemünde, the military test range on the coast of the Baltic Sea, where top German scientists toiled in the service of Hitler and the Third Reich. The team, led by Wernher von Braun, was proud to have engineered the rockets for the Blitz that nearly defeated England. Its wider ambitions included missiles that could fly a lot farther, with greater accuracy and more destructive power.
According to Mossad research, a decade after the war ended, von Braun invited Krug and other former colleagues to join him in America. Von Braun, his war record practically expunged, was leading a missile development program for the United States. He even became one of the fathers of the NASA space exploration program. Krug opted for another, seemingly more lucrative option: joining other scientists from the Peenemünde group — led by the German professor Wolfgang Pilz, whom he greatly admired — in Egypt. They would set up a secret strategic missile program for that Arab country.
In the Israelis’ view, Krug had to know that Israel, the country where so many Holocaust survivors had found refuge, was the intended target of his new masters’ military capabilities. A committed Nazi would see this as an opportunity to continue the ghastly mission of exterminating the Jewish people.
The threatening notes and phone calls, however, were driving Krug crazy. He and his colleagues knew that the threats were from Israelis. It was obvious. In 1960, Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief administrators of the Holocaust, in far-off Argentina. The Israelis astonishingly smuggled the Nazi to Jerusalem, where he was put on trial. Eichmann was hanged on May 31, 1962.
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Otto Skorzeny (2nd from left), 3 October 1943.Credit: Wikimedia Commons
It was reasonable for Krug to feel that a Mossad noose might be tightening around his neck, too. That was why he summoned help: a Nazi hero who was considered the best of the best in Hitler’s heyday.
On the day he vanished, according to our new information from reliable sources, Krug left his office to meet Skorzeny, the man he felt would be his savior.
Skorzeny, then 54 years old, was quite simply a legend. A dashing, innovative military man who grew up in Austria — famous for a long scar on the left side of his face, the result of his overly exuberant swordplay while fencing as a youth— he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS. Thanks to Skorzeny’s exploits as a guerrilla commander, Hitler recognized that he had a man who would go above and beyond, and stop at nothing, to complete a mission.
The colonel’s feats during the war inspired Germans and the grudging respect of Germany’s enemies. American and British military intelligence labeled Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe.”
Krug contacted Skorzeny in the hope that the great hero — then living in Spain — could create a strategy to keep the scientists safe.
The two men were in Krug’s white Mercedes, driving north out of Munich, and Skorzeny said that as a first step he had arranged for three bodyguards. He said they were in a car directly behind and would accompany them to a safe place in a forest for a chat. Krug was murdered, then and there, without so much as a formal indictment or death sentence. The man who pulled the trigger was none other than the famous Nazi war hero. Israel’s espionage agency had managed to turn Otto Skorzeny into a secret agent for the Jewish state.
After Krug was shot, the three Israelis poured acid on his body, waited awhile and then buried what was left in a hole they had dug beforehand. They covered the makeshift grave with lime, so that search dogs — and wild animals — would never pick up the scent of human remains.
Otto Skorzeny (left) and Adrian von Fölkersam (right) in Budapest, 16 October 1944.Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The troika that coordinated this extrajudicial execution was led by a future prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, who was then head of the Mossad’s special operations unit. One of the others was Zvi “Peter” Malkin, who had tackled Eichmann in Argentina and in later life would enter the art world as a New York-based painter. Supervising from a distance was Yosef “Joe” Raanan, who was the secret agency’s senior officer in Germany. All three had lost large numbers of family members among the 6 million Jews murdered by the cruel, continent-wide genocide that Eichmann had managed.
Israel’s motivation in working with a man such as Skorzeny was clear: to get as close as possible to Nazis who were helping Egypt plot a new Holocaust.
The Mossad’s playbook for protecting Israel and the Jewish people has no preordained rules or limits. The agency’s spies have evaded the legal systems in a host of countries for the purpose of liquidating Israel’s enemies: Palestinian terrorists, Iranian scientists, and even a Canadian arms inventor named Gerald Bull, who worked for Saddam Hussein until bullets ended his career in Brussels in 1990. Mossad agents in Lillehammer, Norway, even killed a Moroccan waiter in the mistaken belief that he was the mastermind behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the terrorist group known as Black September. Ahmed Bouchikhi was shot down in 1973 as he left a movie theatre with his pregnant wife. The Israeli government later paid compensation to her without officially admitting wrongdoing. The botched mission delayed further Mossad assassinations, but it did not end them.
To get to unexpected places on these improbable missions, the Mossad has sometimes found itself working with unsavory partners. When short-term alliances could help, the Israelis were willing to dance with the proverbial devil, if that is what seemed necessary.
But why did Skorzeny work with the Mossad?
He was born in Vienna in June 1908, to a middle-class family proud of its military service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From an early age he seemed fearless, bold and talented at weaving false, complex tales that deceived people in myriad ways. These were essential requirements for a commando officer at war, and certainly valuable qualities for the Mossad.
He joined Austria’s branch of the Nazi Party in 1931, when he was 23, served in its armed militia, the SA, and enthusiastically worshipped Hitler. The führer was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then seized Austria in 1938. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II broke out, Skorzeny left his construction firm and volunteered — not for the regular army, the Wehrmacht, but for the Leibstandarte SS Panzer division that served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard force.
Otto Skorzeny in Pomerania visiting the 500th SS Parachute Battalion, February 1945.Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Skorzeny, in a memoir written after the war was over, told of his years of SS service as though they were almost bloodless travels in occupied Poland, Holland and France. His activities could not have been as innocuous as his book made them seem. He took part in battles in Russia and Poland, and certainly the Israelis believed it was very likely that he was involved in exterminating Jews. The Waffen-SS, after all, was not the regular army; it was the military arm of the Nazi Party and its genocidal plan.
His most famous and daring mission was in September 1943: leading commandos who flew engineless gliders to reach an Italian mountaintop resort to rescue Hitler’s friend and ally, the recently ousted Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and spirit him away under harrowing conditions.
This was the escapade that earned Skorzeny his promotion to lieutenant colonel — and operational control of Hitler’s SS Special Forces. Hitler also rewarded him with several hours of face-to-face conversation, along with the coveted Knight’s Cross. But it was far from his only coup.
In September 1944, when Hungary’s dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy, a Nazi ally, was on the verge of suing for peace with Russia as Axis fortunes plunged, Skorzeny led a contingent of Special Forces into Budapest to kidnap Horthy and replace his government with the more hard-line Fascist Arrow Cross regime. That regime, in turn, went on to kill or to deport to concentration camps tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who had managed to survive the war up to that point.
Also in 1944, Skorzeny handpicked 150 soldiers, including some who spoke fair to excellent English in a bold plan to fend off the Allies after they landed in Normandy on D-Day in June. With the Allies advancing through France, Skorzeny dressed his men in captured U.S. uniforms, and procured captured American tanks for them to use in attacking and confusing Allied troops from behind their own lines.
The bold deception — including the act of stealing U.S. soldiers’ property — plunged Skorzeny into two years of interrogation, imprisonment and trial after the war ended. Eventually, Allied military judges acquitted him in 1947. Once again, the world’s newspapers headlined him as Europe’s most dangerous man. He enjoyed the fame, and published his memoirs in various editions and many languages, including the 1957 book “Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Autobiography of Hitler’s Commando Ace,” published by Greenhill Books. He spun some tall-tale hyperbole in the books, and definitely downplayed his contacts with the most bloodthirsty Nazi leaders. When telling of his many conversations with Hitler, he described the dictator as a caring and attentive military strategist.
There was much that Skorzeny did not reveal, including how he escaped from the American military authorities who held him for a third year after his acquittal. Prosecutors were considering more charges against him in the Nuremberg tribunals, but during one transfer he was able to escape — reputedly with the help of former SS soldiers wearing American military police uniforms.
Otto Skorzeny Waiting in a cell as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, 24 November 1945.Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Skorzeny’s escape was also rumored to have been assisted by the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Office of Special Services, for which he did some work after the war. It is certainly notable that he was allowed to settle in Spain — a paradise for Nazi war veterans, with protection from the pro-Western Fascist, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In the years that followed he did some advisory work for President Juan Peron in Argentina and for Egypt’s government. It was during this period that Skorzeny became friendly with the Egyptian officers who were running the missile program and employing German experts.
In Israel, a Mossad planning team started to work on where it could be best to find and kill Skorzeny. But the head of the agency, Isser Harel, had a bolder plan: Instead of killing him, snare him.
Mossad officials had known for some time that to target the German scientists, they needed an inside man in the target group. In effect, the Mossad needed a Nazi.
The Israelis would never find a Nazi they could trust, but they saw a Nazi they could count on: someone thorough and determined, with a record of success in executing innovative plans, and skilled at keeping secrets. The seemingly bizarre decision to recruit Skorzeny came with some personal pain, because the task was entrusted to Raanan, who was also born in Vienna and had barely escaped the Holocaust. As an Austrian Jew, his name was originally Kurt Weisman. After the Nazis took over in 1938, he was sent — at age 16 — to British-ruled Palestine. His mother and younger brother stayed in Europe and perished.
Like many Jews in Palestine, Kurt Weisman joined the British military looking for a chance to strike back at Germany. He served in the Royal Air Force. After the creation of Israel in 1948, he followed the trend of taking on a Hebrew name, and as Joe Raanan he was among the first pilots in the new nation’s tiny air force. The young man rapidly became an airbase commander and later the air force’s intelligence chief.
Raanan’s unique résumé, including some work he did for the RAF in psychological warfare, attracted the attention of Harel, who signed him up for the Mossad in 1957. A few years later, Raanan was sent to Germany to direct the secret agency’s operations there — with a special focus on the German scientists in Egypt. Thus it was Raanan who had to devise and command an operation to establish contact with Skorzeny, the famous Nazi commando.
The Israeli spy found it difficult to get over his reluctance, but when ordered, he assembled a team that traveled to Spain for “pre-action intelligence.” Its members observed Skorzeny, his home, his workplace and his daily routines. The team included a German woman in her late 20s who was not a trained, full-time Mossad agent but a “helper.” Known by the Hebrew label “saayanit” (or “saayan” if a male), this team member was like an extra in a grandly theatrical movie, playing whatever role might be required. A saayanit would often pose as the girlfriend of an undercover Mossad combatant.
Internal Mossad reports later gave her name as Anke and described her as pretty, vivacious and truly flirtatious. That would be perfect for the job at hand — a couples game.
One evening in the early months of 1962, the affluent and ruggedly handsome — though scarred — Skorzeny was in a luxurious bar in Madrid with his significantly younger wife, Ilse von Finckenstein. Her own Nazi credentials were impeccable; she was the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s talented finance minister.
They had a few cocktails and were relaxing, when the bartender introduced them to a German-speaking couple he had been serving. The woman was pretty and in her late 20s, and her escort was a well-dressed man of around 40. They were German tourists, they said, but they also told a distressing story: that they had just survived a harrowing street robbery.
They spoke perfect German, of course, the man with a bit of an Austrian accent, like Skorzeny’s. They gave their false names, but in reality they were, respectively, a Mossad agent whose name must still be kept secret and his “helper,” Anke.
There were more drinks, then somewhat flamboyant flirting, and soon Skorzeny’s wife invited the young couple, who had lost everything — money, passports and luggage — to stay the night at their sumptuous villa. There was just something irresistible about the newcomers. A sense of sexual intimacy between the two couples was in the air. After the four entered the house, however, at a crucial moment when the playful flirting reached the point where it seemed time to pair off, Skorzeny — the charming host — pulled a gun on the young couple and declared: “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and you’ve come to kill me.”
The young couple did not even flinch. The man said: “You are half-right. We are from Mossad, but if we had come to kill you, you would have been dead weeks ago.”
“Or maybe,” Skorzeny said, “I would rather just kill you.”
Anke spoke up. “If you kill us, the ones who come next won’t bother to have a drink with you, You won’t even see their faces before they blow out your brains. Our offer to you is just for you to help us.”
After a long minute that felt like an hour, Skorzeny did not lower his gun, but he asked: “What kind of help? You need something done?” The Mossad officer — who even now is not being named by colleagues — told Skorzeny that Israel needed information and would pay him handsomely.
Hitler’s favorite commando paused for a few moments to think, and then surprised the Israeli by saying: “Money doesn’t interest me. I have enough.”
The Mossad man was further surprised to hear Skorzeny name something that he did want: “I need for Wiesenthal to remove my name from his list.” Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Vienna-based Nazi-hunter, had Skorzeny listed as a war criminal, but now the accused was insisting he had not committed any crimes.
The Israeli did not believe any senior Nazi officer’s claim of innocence, but recruiting an agent for an espionage mission calls for well-timed lies and deception. “Okay,” he said, “that will be done. We’ll take care of that.”
Skorzeny finally lowered his weapon, and the two men shook hands. The Mossad man concealed his disgust.
“I knew that the whole story about you being robbed was bogus,” Skorzeny said, with the boastful smile of a fellow intelligence professional. “Just a cover story.”
The next step to draw him in was to bring him to Israel. His Mossad handler, Raanan, secretly arranged a flight to Tel Aviv, where Skorzeny was introduced to Harel. The Nazi was questioned and also received more specific instructions and guidelines. During this visit, Skorzeny was taken to Yad Vashem, the museum in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Nazi was silent and seemed respectful. There was a strange moment there when a war survivor pointed to Skorzeny and singled him out by name as “a war criminal.”
Raanan, as skilled an actor as any spy must be, smiled at the Jewish man and softly said: “No, you’re mistaken. He’s a relative of mine and himself is a Holocaust survivor.”
Naturally, many in Israeli intelligence wondered if the famous soldier for Germany had genuinely — and so easily — been recruited. Did he really care so much about his image that he demanded to be removed from a list of war criminals? Skorzeny indicated that being on the list meant he was a target for assassination. By cooperating with the Mossad, he was buying life insurance.
The new agent seemed to prove his full reliability. As requested by the Israelis, he flew to Egypt and compiled a detailed list of German scientists and their addresses.
Skorzeny also provided the names of many front companies in Europe that were procuring and shipping components for Egypt’s military projects. These included Heinz Krug’s company, Intra, in Munich.
Raanan continued to be the project manager of the whole operation aimed against the German scientists. But he assigned the task of staying in contact with Skorzeny to two of his most effective operatives: Rafi Eitan and Avraham Ahituv.
Eitan was one of the most amazing characters in Israeli intelligence. He earned the nickname “Mr. Kidnap” for his role in abducting Eichmann and other men wanted by Israeli security agencies. Eitan also helped Israel acquire materials for its secret nuclear program. He would go on to earn infamy in the 1980s by running Jonathan Pollard as an American Jewish spy in the United States government.
Surprisingly flamboyant after a life in the shadows, in 2006, at age 79, Eitan became a Member of Parliament as head of a political party representing senior citizens.
“Yes, I met and ran Skorzeny,” Eitan confirmed to us recently. Like other Mossad veterans, he refused to go on the record with more details.
Ahituv, who was born in Germany in 1930, was similarly involved in a wide array of Israeli clandestine operations all around the globe. From 1974 to 1980 he was head of the domestic security service, Shin Bet, which also guarded many secrets and often conducted joint projects with the Mossad.
The Mossad agents did try to persuade Wiesenthal to remove Skorzeny from his list of war criminals, but the Nazi hunter refused. The Mossad, with typical chutzpah, instead forged a letter — supposedly to Skorzeny from Wiesenthal— declaring that his name had been cleared.
Skorzeny continued to surprise the Israelis with his level of cooperation. During a trip to Egypt, he even mailed exploding packages; one Israeli-made bomb killed five Egyptians in the military rocket site Factory 333, where German scientists worked.
The campaign of intimidation was largely successful, with most of the Germans leaving Egypt. Israel stopped the violence and threats, however, when one team was arrested in Switzerland while putting verbal pressure on a scientist’s family. A Mossad man and an Austrian scientist who was working for Israel were put on trial. Luckily, the Swiss judge sympathized with Israel’s fear of Egypt’s rocket program. The two men were convicted of making threats, but they were immediately set free.
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, however, concluded that all of this being out in public was disastrous to Israel’s image — and specifically could upset a deal he had arranged with West Germany to sell weapons to Israel.
Harel submitted a letter of resignation, and to his shock, Ben-Gurion accepted it. The new Mossad director, commander of military intelligence Gen. Meir Amit, moved the agency away from chasing or intimidating Nazis.
Amit did activate Skorzeny at least once more, however. The spymaster wanted to explore the possibility of secret peace negotiations, so he asked Israel’s on-the-payroll Nazi to arrange a meeting with a senior Egyptian official. Nothing ever came of it.
Skorzeny never explained his precise reasons for helping Israel. His autobiography does not contain the word “Israel,” or even “Jew.” It is true that he sought and got the life insurance. The Mossad did not assassinate him.
He also had a very strong streak of adventurism, and the notion of doing secret work with fascinating spies — even if they were Jewish — must have been a magnet for the man whose innovative escapades had earned him the Iron Cross medal from Hitler. Skorzeny was the kind of man who would feel most youthful and alive through killing and fear.
It is possible that regret and atonement also played a role. The Mossad’s psychological analysts doubted it, but Skorzeny may have genuinely felt sorry for his actions during World War II.
He may have been motivated by a combination of all these factors, and perhaps even others. But Otto Skorzeny took this secret to his grave. He died of cancer, at age 67, in Madrid in July 1975.
He had two funerals, one in a chapel in Spain’s capital and the other to bury his cremated remains in the Skorzeny family plot in Vienna. Both services were attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate to give the one-armed Nazi salute and sing some of Hitler’s favorite songs. Fourteen of Skorzeny’s medals, many featuring a boldly black swastika, were prominently paraded in the funeral processions.
There was one man at the service in Madrid who was known to no one in the crowd, but out of habit he still made sure to hide his face as much as he could. That was Joe Raanan, who by then had become a successful businessman in Israel.
The Mossad did not send Raanan to Skorzeny’s funeral; he decided to attend on his own, and at his own expense. This was a personal tribute from one Austrian-born warrior to another, and from an old spy handler to the best, but most loathsome, agent he ever ran.
Dan Raviv, a CBS News correspondent based in Washington, and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman are co-authors of five books about Israel’s espionage and security agencies, including “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars” (Levant Books, 2014). Contact them at feedback@forward.com
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Here’s a podcast on his time in Ireland
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Interesting.
2 Likes
Dramatised podcasts. Informative.
You’d wonder what else made it there
Steve McQueen and the ‘repellent, horrific’ truth about The Great Escape
The 1963 film is an undisputed classic. But what really happened to the POWs who fled Stalag Luft III would have made for grim viewing
ByTom Fordy19 June 2023 • 2:02pm
Steve McQueen in The Great Escape CREDIT: Alamy
In the opening minutes of The Great Escape, “the Kommandant” (Hannes Messemer) of the Stalag Luft III prisoner-of-war camp warns Captain Ramsey (James Donald) against trying to escape. Ramsey’s rabble of captured Allied airmen are prolific, well-known escapers – but the Kommandant wants a quiet life. Ramsey, however, is having none of it. As the senior British POW, he tells the Kommandant straight: “It is the sworn duty of all officers to try to escape.”
It’s those words that set the tally-ho, sticking-it-to-Jerry tone of The Great Escape – the indomitable spirit that bobs along to the sound of its much-whistled theme tune.
The film, now celebrating its 60th anniversary, is a tremendous, undisputed classic. It’s the stuff that bank holiday afternoons were made for – all machismo, schoolboy pluck, and belly-firing derring-do. The Great Escape is also well known for its flagrant, Hollywood-friendly fabrications, best personified by Steve McQueen’s Captain Virgil Hilts – a wholly invented motorcycle rebel. Starring alongside McQueen is in a line-up of based-loosely-on-fact or fictional POWs: Richard Attenborough’s mastermind; Donald Pleasence’s almost-blind forger; James Garner’s fast-talking scrounger; and Charles Bronson’s claustrophobic digger. The Great Escape plays as much like a heist as a prison break.
For the most part, however, it’s a broadly accurate retelling of how, in March 1944, 76 POWs tunnelled their way out of Stalag Luft III. According to historian Guy Walters, author of The Real Great Escape, it’s the tone that’s wrong.
In truth, there was no duty to escape. There was an expectation, perhaps, that POWs would attempt it – and the God-given right to have a jolly good go – but no actual duty. Also, senior POWs were warned repeatedly to not attempt a mass escape. And not just because German guards wanted a quiet life – because the repercussions would be severe. And indeed they were.
Only three of the 76 escapees made a “home run”. The others were recaptured. Fifty of them – under direct orders from Hitler – were killed by the Gestapo. In the film, even this tragic end has an air of glory. “What people need to realise is that the story of the Great Escape is far darker than the film makes out,” says Guy Walters. “At its heart, it’s a story of recklessness and murder.”
The Great Escape is based on the book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, an Australian pilot, POW, and author. Brickhill, who also wrote The Dam Busters, was shot down over Tunisia and sent to Stalag Luft III in April 1943.
Accounts often describe the camp as escape-proof. It’s true, as claimed in the film, that Stalag Luft III was built specially to hold Allied airmen. Located near Sagan, Lower Silesia (then Nazi Germany, now Poland), it was run by Luftwaffe officers and employed significant measures to prevent escape. Undeterred, some of the Allied airmen – calling themselves “X Organisation” – persevered with a plan to dig three tunnels, codenamed “Tom”, “Dick”, and “Harry” from under their barrack huts.
The operation was led by South African-born pilot Roger Bushell – aka “Big X” – the basis for Richard Attenborough’s character, Bartlett. Paul Brickhill was involved in the operation but didn’t participate in the escape. Bushell debarred Brickhill from escaping because he suffered from attacks of claustrophobia.
Stalag Luft III prisoners, circa 1943 CREDIT: Getty
Brickhill’s book was published in 1950. Director John Sturges read the story the following year and immediately saw the cinematic potential. “It was the perfect embodiment of why our side won!” he later said. Sturges was a veteran himself – he made documentary films for the US Air Corps during WW2.
He was also the foremost action director of his day and spent more than a decade trying to get The Great Escape made. As described in Glenn Lovell’s biography of Sturges, Escape Artist, the director initially pitched the film to Sam Goldwyn at MGM. “What the hell kind of escape is this?” said Goldwyn. “Nobody gets away!” Sturges’ assistant director, Robert E. Relyea, said similar: “It’s about a bunch of guys in a prison camp who eventually get executed. That’s a tough sell.”
It would also be expensive, and had no female characters. “We have nary a woman,” Sturges said. “They have no place in this story.”
Following the success of The Magnificent Seven – another manly, Sturges-directed ensemble starring Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Steve McQueen – the Mirisch Company greenlit The Great Escape. But Sturges had to convince another key person: Paul Brickhill. The author had resisted offers to sell the rights. Brickhill didn’t want the story to become a Hollywood romp full of stars-and-stripes glory.
A scene from The Great Escape CREDIT: Alamy
Sturges met with Brickhill and persuaded him, using Hollywood schmooze, a gift of mink gloves, and promises of staying faithful to the real events. Brickhill also sought permission from the escapees’ families. But the script was still two years in the making, with 11 drafts and more than half a dozen writers (Harry – the tunnel through which the airmen escaped – took around a year, including a break during the winter months).
Despite assurances of sticking to the real events, both Sturges and the film’s producers wanted to include American stars. And Steve McQueen’s character, Hilts – with his baseball mitt and don’t-give-a-monkey’s charm – couldn’t be more American. Nicknamed the “Cooler King” (for how much time he spends in solitary confinement), Hilts is certainly cool. It’s true that Americans were involved in the early stages of the tunnelling operation, but they were moved to another compound within the camp by the time of the escape in March 1944.
If anything, the film should have more nationalities. “It was very much a multinational effort,” says Guy Walters. “Only 50 per cent of the escapees were British or Commonwealth. There were Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs… you name it.”
Among the more faithful characters is Richard Attenborough’s Bartlett, based on Bushell. (Richard Harris was originally cast but dropped out.) “Attenborough captures that steeliness,” says Walters. “He’s a cold and austere figure to begin with. What I don’t think it captures is that Bushell was quite arrogant. He alienated a lot of people. He was pretty bombastic and reckless.”
Indeed, Walters’ book is critical of Bushell for pushing forward with an operation that was “unsound, doomed, dangerous and superfluous to the war effort”.
In the film, the point of the escape isn’t just to, well, escape, but “to confound and confuse the enemy” – i.e., to force the Nazis to waste valuable resources hunting them down, draw manpower from the frontlines, and hurt the Nazis overall. This was part of Bushell’s reasoning from plotting the escape, and it’s often repeated as fact.
A trolley used to build the ‘Harry’ tunnel at Stalag Luft III, Poland CREDIT: PA
Walters calls this “bunkum”. A mass escape would simply cause the Nazis to increase security, find the escapers, and find people escaping from elsewhere in the Third Reich in the process. “And at no cost to their war effort,” says Walters.
Warnings from the German guards were born out of genuine concern for the POWs’ wellbeing. “The German guards repeatedly warned Bushell and the senior officers,” says Walters. “A mass escape would piss off the Nazis so much that the retribution would be horrific – so don’t do it. They were told, if you’re going to escape, escape in twos and threes. The German guards told them this out of friendliness.”
The film captures the relationship between the POWs, known as Kriegies, and the guards – a sort of cordial understanding that escape is a bit of gamesmanship.
“The German captors were in their forties and fifties, and the prisoners of war were all young men,” says Walters. “There was a schoolmasterly, avuncular, father-son type relationship. A lot of the German guards and officers had fought in the previous war and had children the same age. This wasn’t Auschwitz. By and large, prisoners of war were treated reasonably well by the Germans.”
John Sturges planned to film The Great Escape in California, but problems with the Screen Extras Guild forced them to look elsewhere. Instead, the film was shot at the Bavaria Film Studios in Geiselgasteig, outside Munich. “Guess what Germany looks like?” Robert Relyea told Sturges after finding the location. “It looks like Germany!”
Steve McQueen in The Great Escape CREDIT: Alamy
A replica of Stalag Luft III was constructed just outside of the studio. Donald Pleasence called it “an exact reproduction of a prisoner-of-war camp, and just as frightening.” Pleasence certainly knew what he was talking about – he was an RAF wireless operator/air gunner during WW2. Brought down over France in August 1944, Pleasence saw out the war in Stalag Luft I on the Baltic Sea. With the help of technical advisor Wally Floody, a Canadian pilot who had dug the tunnels in the real Great Escape, cross sections of Harry were built on the studio soundstages.
The actual digging itself is accurately portrayed. As described by Bartlett, Harry was dug 30ft down and more than 300ft in length (actually 344ft) from the hut in the north compound and into the surrounding forest (Harry went from hut 104, not 105 as seen in the film). In reality, the “trap” (or entrance) for Harry was set under the stove; in the film, it’s under the washroom drain. This was actually the trap for Dick. The drain, however, was an inventive idea and worth showing in the movie: it could be resealed and filled with water, so diggers could stay underground and avoid detection while the drain worked as normal.
The engineering of Harry is close to the real thing, too, with slats from the POWs’ beds used to support the tunnel (indeed, the Kriegies slept uncomfortably), makeshift air pumps, and wheeled trollies. There were also “halfway house” spaces – resting points along the tunnel – nicknamed “Piccadilly” and “Leicester Square”. The techniques were borrowed from other POW escapes.
Stalag Luft III in 1942 CREDIT: Getty
What isn’t portrayed – understandably for a 1963 war picture – is that due to the sweat and muck, the diggers worked naked. With poor diets and dodgy constitutions, they had to dig through each other’s excrement. “It was no joke when someone had a dicky tum down there in the tunnel,” explained Ken Rees, a Welsh wing commander.
In the film, members of X Organisation disperse the tunnel dirt by wearing little bags hidden under their trousers, which release the dirt out of the bottom of the leg and onto the ground. This was one of several methods used. Other POWS devised a system of wearing two trousers, with dirt packed into the inner trousers and released onto the ground, or stuffed it in rolled-up towels then thrown out when they unfurled the towels for a spot of sunbathing. As Walters details, they made an estimated 18,000 dispersal trips. In fact, there was so much sand in the Kriegies’ gardens that the German guards began searching for possible tunnels.
Also seen in the film is X Organisation’s system of deceiving the guards – almost a production line of distractions, secret signals, and cover stories. “If a German appeared at one part in the camp,” says Walters, “within ten seconds the guys in the tunnel would know about it through a system of re-laid messages.” Even some of the escapers didn’t know the exact location of Harry until the actual night.
Something omitted from the film is the fact that only about a third of prisoners at Stalag Luft III wanted to escape. “Two thirds had the attitude of ‘I’ve done my bit, I’m safe behind this barbed wire, I don’t want to get in a plane again,’” says Walters. “You have to remember – nearly every man in that camp had been in a plane crash. Getting in a plane again was a terrifying prospect. They’d seen their friends plummet to their death. They’d seen people burn alive in cockpits.”
It’s not quite in the do-or-die spirit of the film, which plays out like a jolly old caper as they amass forged papers, disguises, maps, and other items. The real X Organisation modified uniforms, towels, sheets, and clothes sent via the Red Cross. They also forged documents, and made a printing press with jelly. But not all of it was up to scratch. The passes didn’t stand up to inspection, which led to some of the Great Escapers being recaptured while on the run.
Richard Attenborough and Steve McQueen in The Great Escape CREDIT: Alamy
The film also underplays the German assistance. Walters calls the real escape “the greatest Anglo-German cooperation since the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert”. In the film, James Garner’s charismatic scrounger bribes a gullible guard, Werner (Robert Graf), to procure key items. Certainly, members of X Organisation – who were well stocked with Red Cross-sent goodies – used bribery and blackmail. “Some Germans had two cigarettes a day, the POWs had 10,” says Walters. “If you’re five times richer than your guards, that’s going to happen.”
Other German guards, some of whom were anti-Nazi, helped willingly by supplying the Kriegies with goods and intelligence. “There were Germans who got their wives to type up false documents,” says Walters.
Production of the film – like the real Great Escape – was blighted by bad weather, one of several reasons that its budget escalated from just over $2 million to $4 million. There was another problem: Steve McQueen.
Six weeks into production, Sturges screened dailies footage for the cast. According to Donald Pleasence (who thought the film looked like a turkey) McQueen stormed out. He was unhappy with his role and demanded rewrites. McQueen was especially irked by co-star James Garner for nabbing the best material and coming across as a bigger star. McQueen went AWOL and refused to return to production.
Garner and James Coburn (playing an Aussie POW) met with McQueen to discuss how they could beef up the Hilts character. But McQueen turned down every idea. “Steve wanted to be the hero but he didn’t want to do anything heroic,” recalled Garner. Sturges threatened to write McQueen out of the film entirely and McQueen called in his agents. They brought in a writer to work on McQueen’s scenes. The character was a loner, that was the point – sat in solitary, throwing a ball against the wall, and saying “I wouldn’t do that for my own mother” when the Brits ask him to help. But script rewrites made him an integral part of the operation.
An original poster for John Sturges’s The Great Escape CREDIT: Moviepix
McQueen also caused trouble on the Munich roads. Reports on McQueen’s high-speed hi-jinks vary. McQueen biographer Marc Eliot details how the actor received 37 tickets and wrapped a car around a tree. Actor Tom Adams went further and claimed McQueen “wrote off six or seven cars out there”. Other actors were reported to be speeding along the Munich roads too – but McQueen was the fastest. “We have stopped a lot of your friends this morning, Herr McQueen,” said a policeman in one amusing story. “But I must tell you, you have won the prize.”
According to Eliot’s biography, the film studio lawyers had to work overtime to keep McQueen out of jail. They resorted to telling German officials that if McQueen was locked up, production would stop – which meant no money for the local economy.
McQueen wasn’t the only actor causing behind-the-scenes drama. As detailed in Glenn Lovell’s Escape Artist, Charles Bronson began an affair with Jill Ireland, the wife of co-star David McCallum. Ireland had suffered a miscarriage while McCallum was back in London. Assistant director John Flynn described how Bronson sat by her bedside and “was on her like an animal” as soon as she recuperated.
The real Great Escape took place on the night of March 24 and 25 1944. In the film’s recreation, it’s a balmy evening. In reality, the conditions were “bloody freezing”, says Walters. “The prisoners escaped wearing hopelessly ill-suited clothes for tramping around in snow, ice, freezing mud, slush, muck, you name it.”
A scene from The Great Escape CREDIT: Alamy
In the film, McQueen pops his head out of the tunnel and discovers they’re 20ft short of the forest, leaving them exposed to the nearby watchtowers as they clamber out. That really did happen – a detail given some dramatic spin in Brickhill’s book and embellished in subsequent retellings. “It doesn’t seem to have been an enormous problem at the time,” says Walters. “They were still a significant distance from the guard tower and there was snow on the ground.”
In the movie’s retelling, there’s a stroke of luck when an air raid forces all the lights out, allowing a number of POWs to escape out of the tunnel under the cover of darkness. There was indeed an air raid, but the blackout caused problems for the escapees trying to find their way through the trees – some of them got lost. It created problems inside the tunnel too, which was plunged into darkness.
There were also collapses, caused by too many escapees trying to squeeze through. Others panicked and forgot to send the cart back and pull the next man through, creating more delays and chaos. Two-hundred men had been selected to escape, but only 76 made it out. “Within 24 hours, most of them had given up or been recaptured,” says Walters. “They were understandably but hopelessly ill-prepared.”
The film’s post-escape scenes are the most fantastical. In their efforts to flee the country, the disguised POWs are seen jumping from a train, stealing a plane, and – of course – trying to leap over the German-Swiss border on a stolen motorcycle.
The motorcycle chase, entirely fictional, was added at McQueen’s suggestion – a way to show off his skills and, most likely, a means of placating his fragile star ego. But McQueen wasn’t allowed to perform the iconic leap himself. Instead, McQueen’s pal (and stuntman) Bud Ekins performed both the jump and slide into barbed wire, a manoeuvre that sees Hilts recaptured.
Robert Relyea, however, recalled that McQueen and Tim Gibbes, a motocross rider brought in for some of the bike stunts, also performed the jump on camera. Though Ekins performs the jump in the film, Relyea claimed it could have been any of them. McQueen – who was a better motorcyclist than the German stuntmen – also played a Nazi soldier in the sequence, so he’s effectively chasing himself on motorcycle.
Incredibly, Relyea performed the film’s most dangerous stunt himself, which comes when Garner and Pleasence crash a stolen plane (another fictional detail) into a field, cutting one of its wings clean off. Relyea, who had a pilot’s licence, got in the cockpit for the crash. The impact knocked him out cold and left him with injuries.
One of the film’s best-known moments comes shortly after, when Bartlett and Mac (Gordon Jackson) are recaptured after a slip of the English tongue. They try to board a bus while posing as Frenchmen, but a Gestapo officer tricks Mac into speaking English. “Good luck,” says the Nazi, to which Mac replies “thank you”. The scene is based on something that may have happened. According to a report by a Gestapo officer, Roger Bushell and his travelling partner, a Frenchman named Scheidhauer, were arrested when one of them answered “yes” instead of “oui”. If it did happen, says Walters, it seems plausible that Bushell made the mistake. “Of those two men, who’s more likely to answer in English?” asks Walters.
In the film, the three men who escape to freedom are an Australian, Brit, and Pole – the characters played by James Coburn, John Leyton, and Charles Bronson. In reality, the three successful escapees were Norwegian, Jens Müller and Per Bergsland, and Dutch, Bram Vanderstok.
If it’s the tone of The Great Escape that’s wrong, it’s best encapsulated in the climax as Bartlett and other recaptured POWs are rounded up and driven (supposedly) back to camp. Given a moment to stretch their legs, Bartlett declares that the tunnel digging “kept me alive” and “I’ve never been happier”. At that point, they’re gunned down. But it’s still triumphant. It’s their defiance in the face of evil that really matters.
The real killings were even more chilling. After Hitler gave the order to have most of the escapers killed, the head of the Kripo went through the names of the recaptured men and decided which of them would be killed. Gestapo officers then drove the recaptured men away in pairs or small groups – under the pretence that they were being transported back to the camp. They were offered a pee break along the way, or led into a field, at which point the Gestapo shot them from behind. False statements were then made and the bodies were cremated. “Bushell was shot in that way,” says Walters. “And he was shot badly. He was writhing on the ground and had to be shot again. It’s incredibly undignified – it’s repellent, it’s horrific. Had the film had ended like that, people would have left the cinema feeling different.”
The Great Escape – which premiered in London on June 20 1963 – has mythologised the events. The film – even just the tear-in-the-eye theme – is imbued with a stirring, rousing magnificence.
For Guy Walters, the events stick in the memory because of the grisly end. Indeed, there were other escapes that are less well remembered. He points to a breakout of 65 POWs from Oflag VIIB in Eichstätt in June 1943. “There were other great escapes from other camps,” Walters says. “There were greater escapes than the Great Escape. Why are we interested in this one? Ultimately, The Great Escape is a murder story. The escape is not unique. The murder is unique.”
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On another forum I frequent there’s a lad married to an Austrian lass who’s grandfather’s house was recently renovated (he was a nazi) and a hape of old photos were found in a shoebox in the attic.
1938 Graz, Austria. Following the annexation of Austria to Germany, Hitler visits Graz
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The final Nuremburg rally which celebrated the new Anschluss between Austria and Germany
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Mental stuff. Hard to believe much of what happened in the world at the time. Forget where I saw it recently but there was an American couple on their honeymoon in Austria at the time the Nazis marched in and they had a camera and documented it in letters, the frenzy people whipped up into in a short space of time and the violence against jews. The people lined the streets to welcome the Nazis when they marched in, the couple legged it out of the place. The documentary the US and the Holocaust on rte recently was very good.
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