The Final Curtsey by Margaret Rhodes Read Free Book Online Page B

people in the villages they passed smuggled
    them scraps of food and fruit, having heard by bush telegraph that les Anglais were passing through. In Holland boy scouts bought them cakes and honey. Their destination was Munich and
    Oflag VIIC. Thereafter John spent five and a half years in captivity. In the later stages of the war he was incarcerated in Colditz Castle, with a group of prisoners known as the
    ‘Prominente’, regarded by Hitler as being of special value because of their relationship to prominent Allied figures. The group included Giles Romilly, the nephew of Winston
    Churchill; Michael Alexander, a relative of Field Marshal Alexander; Viscount Lascelles, the King’s nephew; George Haig, the son of Earl Haig, the British First World War commander, and
    Charles Hopetoun, the eldest son of the Marquess of Linlithgow, the then Viceroy of India.
    I have preserved John’s letters, always written in pencil on German-provided POW forms, from various Oflags. I have also kept his own typewritten detailed account of his final days as a
prisoner. A mural John painted is still on the walls of Colditz Castle. The Nazis, faced with defeat, grabbed at any bargaining ace they could pull from their sleeves. My brother and his fellow
‘Prominente’ were one such bargaining ace, and he and the other members of the group were shuttled across Germany, from Colditz to Austria, in a bid by the German High Command to avoid
their liberation by the rapidly advancing Allies.
    John’s account is set out in full below. My brother described the atmosphere as ‘gangster-like’ and above anything, he dreaded falling into the hands of the more extreme
factions of the SS. If that had happened, the ‘Prominente’ may not have survived. John’s state of mind was not improved when he discovered that Himmler, the head of the SS, was
taking a personal interest in the operation. John’s account sets out the trials and tribulations and eventual liberation through the intervention of the Swiss ministers, reaching the American
lines and freedom:
    LAST DAYS OF CAPTIVITY
    CHRONICLE OF SPECIAL PRISONERS FROM
    OFLAG IVC
    BY
    THE MASTER OF ELPHINSTONE
    For some months in Oflag IVC the Germans had been keeping under special surveillance the small group of officers and one civilian concerning whose further moves this
     account is written. Under roughly the same conditions was also a group of 13 Polish officers headed by General Bor and consisting of high staff officers captured after the battle of Warsaw.
     The German camp authorities refused to give explanation of this state of affairs other than by saying that the orders came from ‘the highest sources’.
    On the night of 12–13 April, at 11.30 pm, we were roused from our beds in the room in which we were locked up every night and told that we and the Polish officers were to be ready to
     leave in two hours. Armed guards in the passages and courtyards made any reasonable scheme for getting away to a ‘hide’ impossible, and in due course, at 1.30 am, we were marched
     out into the waiting buses. The American troops were at this time only some 20 miles away, and reached the camp area 24 hours later. In the morning, we arrived at the fortress of Konigstein
     on the Elbe, where we were lodged in the German quarters of the camp and allowed no contact with the other prisoners of war in the fortress.
    Two members of the party were ill and, after some difficulty, it was agreed by the German Kommandant, after telephoning to Berlin, that these two officers, with one British orderly, should
     remain there until well. Since we could hear from the fortress the guns on the Front, we all thought it likely that, within a very short time this camp, too, would be liberated — an
     event which unfortunately took very much longer to materialise than we expected.
    Next morning, the rest of the party were motored down through Czechoslovakia, seeing frantic efforts being made on all roads to make