Saturday 25 June 2022 11:57 PM ROBERT VERKAIK: Why did the Traitor of Colditz Walter Purdy escape the gallows ... trends now

Saturday 25 June 2022 11:57 PM ROBERT VERKAIK: Why did the Traitor of Colditz Walter Purdy escape the gallows ... trends now
Saturday 25 June 2022 11:57 PM ROBERT VERKAIK: Why did the Traitor of Colditz Walter Purdy escape the gallows ... trends now

Saturday 25 June 2022 11:57 PM ROBERT VERKAIK: Why did the Traitor of Colditz Walter Purdy escape the gallows ... trends now

High above the sleepy German town, the twilight gave way to darkness as a detachment of soldiers strode purposefully through the castle corridor. They stopped at a door and, exchanging knowing glances with the men keeping guard, entered the room. Acting in military unison, they placed their hands on the prisoner, pulled him to his feet and marched him up the stone spiral staircase that wound its way to the attic rooms at the top of the most famous prisoner-of-war camp of the Second World War.

The prisoner, a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, was visibly shaking as he tried to come to terms with the desperate circumstances in which he now found himself.

This was no Nazi court: the men gathered in that half-lit room at the top of Colditz Castle on March 11, 1944, were all British officers, bent on a rough kind of justice.

They had good reason to believe that the man before them, Lieutenant Walter Purdy, was a spy sent into Colditz by the Germans to betray his countrymen.

Purdy intended to reveal British escape plans to his German handlers, including a secret tunnel that had taken six months of back-breaking work to complete, and which scores of men were now counting on as their best bet for rejoining the war. The tunnel was the 15th to be built, and the most technologically advanced yet; constructed to defy detection by the German ‘tappers’ whose job it was to locate suspicious voids in the castle’s structure.

Purdy told the British interrogators who now surrounded him that he had made a terrible mistake; he had stupidly backed the wrong side, and pleaded for leniency.

The men gathered in that half-lit room at the top of Colditz Castle on March 11, 1944, were all British officers, bent on a rough kind of justice

The men gathered in that half-lit room at the top of Colditz Castle on March 11, 1944, were all British officers, bent on a rough kind of justice

But surveying the vengeful faces of the British officers, he must have realised there could be no reprieve, and the best he could wish for was a quick death.

Finding a suitable rope for the grisly task was no trouble – in a prison obsessed with escaping, rope-making was a common pastime. All that was left was to find a man willing to be hangman.

But despite the horrors of war all had witnessed, none of the soldiers that day was prepared to kill, in cold blood, one of their compatriots – no matter his crimes.

Reluctantly, they handed Purdy back to the Germans. And that act of mercy left him free to cause considerably more harm.

There was more at stake at Colditz than just thwarting escape plans. The Nazis had long suspected that the British PoWs detained at the notorious prison had also established a secret communications system to transmit vital intelligence to London.

The Colditz commandant and his head of security, Captain Reinhold Eggers, working closely with German military intelligence, the Abwehr, and the feared secret police, the Gestapo, had invested substantial resources in cracking this system, including planting French and Polish spies and using clandestine listening devices.

But the Germans had been unable to stop the flow of secret messages leaking out of the castle.

A key reason for this was a new branch of British military intelligence, MI9, which had been given the task of aiding Allied escapers and evaders in occupied Europe.

It set up a cell of British coders operating from within the prison under the nose of the commandant, using encrypted codes hidden in letters written to their families.

MI9 intelligence officers devised ingenious methods to smuggle in escape equipment in parcels, clothes and letters including maps, compasses, blades and metal files, as well as intelligence to help the PoWs with their clandestine work. These were all put to good and enthusiastic use.

This valuable communication line fed intelligence to the War Office, identifying RAF bombing targets, German air defences, U-boat bases, troop movements, and the whereabouts and identities of a group of VIP prisoners whom the Nazis had secretly brought to Colditz as hostages.

But the stakes were high. If the Germans broke the codes, the Allied prisoners risked being shot as spies. Two escape tunnels dug over seven months had been uncovered, so the British PoWs were convinced there was a ‘stool pigeon’ in their midst.

The Germans’ hunt for suitable collaborators among the PoWs, and the British efforts to smoke out the collaborators, consumed a great deal of time and energy on both sides. Each PoW had his own personal theory about who might be a camp spy: the officer caught having a quiet word with a German guard in one of the dark castle corridors; the prisoner who had come into possession of a box of fresh eggs; the bolshie orderly who wouldn’t take orders; or maybe the officer who had no interest in escaping. A prisoner didn’t have to do very much to raise the suspicions of his fellow captives, especially if his face didn’t fit.

But by 1944, Captain Eggers still didn’t have the key intelligence he was looking for. He needed a personal spy, someone who could insinuate himself into the heart of the British security structure in the castle. The Gestapo knew just the man, one who had already shown willing to betray his country: Walter Purdy.

Purdy was a working-class fascist sympathiser from London’s East End who, as a teenager, had attended Oswald Mosley’s rallying speeches. He had also met leading lights of the British Union of Fascists, including William Joyce, nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw.

He hadn’t asked to join the Royal Navy, or expected to find himself bearing arms against the Germans. But as a junior mechanic on the Blue Star Line cruise ships, he was hastily pressed into the service of the King when war broke out in 1939, and transferred to the Royal Navy troop transport ship HMS Vandyck as a sub-lieutenant.

The ship was sunk off Norway in 1940 and the surviving crew, including Purdy, were captured and taken to the newly built Marlag PoW camp near Sandbostel, in northern Germany. Prison life was not to Purdy’s taste. He stood out, freely speaking about his desire for a fascist regime to replace the British Government, and told everyone who cared to listen that Britain was weak and heading for a calamitous defeat.

The camp’s Scottish dentist, Julius Green, who was carrying out secret work serving British Military Intelligence, had noticed Purdy and considered him a jumped-up rabble-rouser.

Green, who was Jewish, had devised a form of invisible ink from chemicals the Germans had given him to carry out his dental procedures, which helped him send messages back to London.

He was also one of only a handful of trusted covert British operatives who knew the most up-to-date MI9 communication codes – so he had more pressing matters to attend to than Purdy.

When he was transferred to another camp, Blechhammer in Nazi-occupied Poland, he needed an ally to carry on his secret intelligence work – and he found it in John ‘Busty’ Brown.

The 6ft gunner, a battery quartermaster, had received training from MI9 in how to carry out clandestine activities after capture. Brown had cosied up to the German guards by bartering Red Cross luxuries. In return, he was allowed on unescorted visits to nearby foreign labour camps, and was permitted to write an article about life in a German PoW camp that was warmly received by Joseph Goebbels’s office of propaganda.

Purdy intended to reveal British escape plans to his German handlers, including a secret tunnel that had taken six months of back-breaking work to complete

Purdy intended to reveal British escape plans to his German handlers, including a secret tunnel that had taken six months of back-breaking work to complete

This ruse was so successful his own room-mates were suspicious of him, and believed he was anti-British. In fact, Brown was escape-planning; making lists of helpful contacts and safe houses across Europe that would form the basis of a secret escape line for Allied PoWs. What he did not have were the communication codes.

So when he was summoned to Berlin as personal thanks for his article, it was a real chance to gather crucial intelligence and strike back at the heart of the Nazi citadel.

Green reasoned that Brown could be a unique asset, so spent many hours teaching him the codes.

But the Nazis, as it turned out, had plans of their own for Brown. In Berlin, he was taken to meet Alexander Heimpel, a officer with the Abwehr, whose job was to turn Allied collaborators into spies to work

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