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

Most importantly, Neave had to fashion for himself a ‘German’ military uniform that would be sufficiently convincing to get him past the guards. He had also to equip himself with civilian clothes capable of sustaining his disguise as a foreign worker all the way to Switzerland, the nearest neutral country 400 miles to the south. He thought first of bribing the very German guards he was attempting to fool to acquire a complete uniform, but he concluded that this might take years, and he was impatient to be free. So he resolved to make his own, despite admitting that he was hopeless with his hands.

Neave sacrificed a month’s supply of Red Cross chocolate to buy from a Polish officer what he later described as ‘an ancient tunic … in a remote sort of way it resembled in length and design that worn by German private soldiers’. It was the wrong colour – khaki rather than field-grey – and although he contemplated dyeing the tunic, this was beyond him. Instead he employed less subtle means: he applied layers of green paint normally used for making the scenery in the camp theatre. A Polish tailor sewed fake insignia, fashioned from cardboard and painted silver, on to the left breast. Dark green cloth epaulettes with the white numerals of an infantry regiment, a forage cap fashioned from a piece of Polish uniform, white piping and an amateurish cardboard badge with eagle’s wings completed this improbable disguise. He planned to wear RAF trousers for the escape, and lastly equipped himself with a pair of handsome jackboots bought from a Polish orderly with Red Cross provisions. Neave realised that his mock uniform would never pass muster in daylight. Even with the precious brass disc, he would have to pass through three sentry posts, and might also meet other soldiers who would see through his disguise.

Ellison Platt, the Methodist chaplain, noted in his prison diary for 28 August: ‘For weeks Anthony Neave has had no thought for anything but tailoring and dyeing.’ (After his first diary entry for 14 May, in which he uses Neave’s correct first name, Platt invariably wrote ‘Anthony’, a clear indication that this was how Neave was known, and wished to be known, in the camp.) Platt observed that Neave’s scheme was one of great audacity, adding: ‘It consisted of passing out of the main gates in the uniform of a German soldier. Since the time the maggot first entered his brain, every minute has been dedicated to “getting ready”.’ His first idea was to steal a uniform, which might be done ‘at a pinch’, but could prove very unpleasant if caught in an abortive escape. ‘So, on reflection, it would be better to take the long route and make it: during the period of making, nothing else has existed in the world. With an unethical fertility of invention he got hold of a mixture of several incredible substances which produce a lightish green field if applied to a khaki material.’ Not quite near enough for daylight, but, under artificial light, quite indistinguishable from the real thing, he noted. ‘The dyeing experiments have occupied a full three weeks.’ His swastikas, woven on tunic and hat, were extraordinarily well done, as was the belt, ‘a creation in tin and cardboard that deserved a better fate’.9

Neave was less convinced, later admitting: ‘I was only too aware of the fancy-dress appearance of my uniform, fit only for amateur theatricals,’ he wrote. ‘Prisoners, however, develop a blind faith in the most impracticable means of escape. They underestimate the risks, believing that some kindly Providence will surely aid them. For me, escaping was still a schoolboy adventure reminiscent of the books of G.A. Henty. I had yet to learn that success can only be learned by a minute mastery of detail and a study of the mind and methods of the enemy.’10

For now, he had only the haziest idea how he would get back to Blighty. He imagined himself stealing a bicycle from the outer courtyard and pedalling across the moat bridge to freedom in a hail of bullets. Pat Reid was unimpressed by Neave’s fake uniform but did not order him to abandon the project. It was agreed that he should go out at night, trusting to the darkness to mitigate his Gilbert and Sullivan appearance.

Then there was the problem of his ‘rifle’. German guards always carried a rifle and bayonet, even the lance-corporal, or Gefreiter, whom he was seeking to imitate. Neave decided that making a fake weapon would be too difficult, so he determined to be a soldier on special duty reporting to Hauptmann Priem, the camp’s duty officer. Even for this unlikely duty, he would need a bayonet in a scabbard. An officer in the Royal Tank Regiment, Scarlet O’Hara, carved one for him from a bed board, and decorated it with a buckle of tin foil on a cardboard belt. For civilian clothes, he dyed an RAF tunic in a vat of the lead from indelible pencils. He spent days, too, making a Tyrolean trilby, only to endure the mortification of it being seized during one of the regular German searches for escape materials. He had to make do with a sham ski cap. For the journey he believed was imminent, Neave equipped himself with a rough map of the Swiss frontier and a makeshift foreign worker’s identity card. He also had a small amount of German money, around 50 Reichsmarks (the equivalent of just over £3 at the wartime exchange rate). These he was instructed to carry in a Cellophane wrapping inserted into his rectum. His attempts to practise this manoeuvre gave his fellow officers much entertainment.

He was now ready, indeed restless, to go. The project had taken over his life. Daytime was spent in a frenzied round of preparation. By night, he dreamed of being on the run to freedom. 28 August 1941 was chosen for the break – little more than three months after he had entered Colditz in fear. The weather was very hot. Neave attended the nine o’clock roll-call wearing his British army greatcoat over his amateurish Gefreiter uniform. When the German officers gave the order to dismiss, the prisoners scattered to their quarters, while the guards lined up to go off duty. A fellow officer quickly removed Neave’s greatcoat. Jamming the sham forage cap on to his head, he walked briskly to the massive courtyard door. There was not much light at the gate, Reinhold Eggers recalled later, for the searchlights tended to be shone on the walls above, rather than on the gate. The German guards were in a hurry to get back to the guardroom and the German NCO on duty only looked casually at the numbered passes pushed into his hand.

Here was Neave’s chance. He presented his brass disc to the Unteroffizier at the gate and went through his carefully rehearsed lines. ‘I have a message for the Kommandant from the duty officer.’ He was allowed through the half-open door. As Neave turned quickly left and marched on down to the outer gate, a giddy sense of relief flooded through him. He walked quickly, his jackboots resounding with a military ring on the cobbled stones. In a virtual delirium, he imagined himself acting in a theatre without an audience, giving a performance for his own pleasure. The first archway through which he had to pass loomed up ahead.

Then, a brutal return to reality. Neave had gone left, not right, to the guardroom with the other German soldiers. And the NCO was not sure about his face. He looked again at the disc. It was the Number 26 about which he had been warned. According to Eggers, the sentry yelled ‘Halt!’, but ‘Number 26’ walked on. Other guards joined in the shouting, but ‘Number 26’ merely quickened his step.

Neave tried to ignore the shouts but then committed a fatal error. He turned round, and in the arc lights the painful inadequacy of his comic opera costume was plain for all to see. The scenery paint on his tunic and the forage cap of which he was so proud glowed in the artificial light. ‘I was a figure of the underworld, a demon king under the spotlights in a Christmas pantomime,’ as he later confessed.11 Neave turned back and ran towards the archway and the bicycle that was to take him to freedom. But from the archway came a second, firmer voice: ‘Halt, or I fire.’

Realising that further resistance was pointless, Neave turned back again towards the guardroom and put his hands in the air. The archway guard stuck a rifle in his back and all the soldiers in the guardroom gathered round in great excitement, shouting, gesticulating, waving rifles and revolvers as if caught up in a major military incident. One Unteroffizier, enraged at Neave’s audacious impersonation, screamed: ‘This is an insult to the German army! You will be shot!’ The mayhem died down with the arrival of the Kommandant, Oberst Prawitz. The impeccably dressed Prawitz looked Neave up and down disdainfully, took in the details of his amateurish uniform, remarked on the impertinence of the escape bid and ordered that he be taken away to the cells.

Chaplain Platt argued that Neave’s failure lay not in his comic opera uniform but in the way he behaved in trying to escape. Once outside the gates, the German guards stood about waiting to fall in and march back to their quarters. ‘Neave couldn’t possibly do that,’ Platt wrote in his diary. ‘His only hope for success lay in an unobtrusive disappearance from the immediate scene, and then to walk rapidly down the causeway to the outskirts of the village.’ Alas, his quickstep departure aroused suspicion. Neave had not made sufficient distance to warrant making a hit-or-miss dash for the open country, Platt commented. ‘There wasn’t a chance in a million that he would get twenty yards without being shot. So failed a very worthy effort.’12

In the cells Neave was thoroughly searched – ‘more thoroughly than usual’ according to Eggers. They discovered the Cellophane container stuffed with money, which was a disconcerting find. It showed that the prisoners had access to German currency, an invaluable aid to escaping. Neave was led roughly away to solitary confinement, where he took off his makeshift cardboard belt and wooden bayonet and hurled them to the floor in a fit of temper. It was hours before he could sleep. Years later, he would reflect on his dejection at being caught, on his fall from self-made hero to a sad joke in a burlesque German uniform. Perhaps he was too hard on himself. It was not his uniform that had given him away, nor necessarily his behaviour, but the brass disc that the British contingent had coaxed out of the civilian painter. Had they copied the disc, and engraved a different number, the ruse might have worked. Even so, and as Chaplain Platt observed, Neave had not thought through his tactics after getting over the first big hurdle, the castle gate. His passion for flight was the rage of youth. He was still only twenty-five, perhaps older than his years but still lacking in a strategic grasp of the science of escape. Neave had proved he could get out of Colditz, but not clear away from Nazi Germany. Being a loner was his nature, and it was not enough. It never would be. He needed others, allies with a greater instinct for the long range.

In the morning after his failed bid, the guard brought him the usual ersatz coffee. Gravely, he warned Neave that he was about to be court-martialled and shot. Neave snorted with derision. He was no longer afraid. He felt only foolish and unaccountably ‘liverish’. Later in the morning, he was frogmarched to the Kommandant’s headquarters, where in a formal, wood-panelled gallery, he was inspected by Colditz officers one by one. The reactions to his uniform varied from derision to wrath. Kommandant Prawitz ordered him to stand to attention and salute, German fashion. Neave was beside himself with rage and made a poor show of a German salute. Prawitz ordered him to do it again, this time properly. The other officers sniggered and Neave saluted again. It was a humiliating experience. He was made to stay in the gallery, under guard, for the rest of the morning. From time to time, police officers from the village and soldiers came in to gape at him as if he were an exhibit in a zoo. Then, an elderly photographer from the town was brought in to take his picture. Neave posed for the camera, perspiring profusely beneath his lurid uniform. ‘I had reduced all escaping to a ridiculous farce, a music-hall turn,’ he raged. ‘I grew crimson with mortification as the old man doddered about the gallery exchanging feeble jokes with the soldiers. It seemed hours before the comedy was over.’13 The photograph he took survives to this day and it does Neave more credit than he realised at the time. He stands, half at ease, left arm behind his back so that the scabbard for his ‘bayonet’ is clearly visible. He stares coolly at the camera and it is impossible to imagine him thinking anything but: ‘You may have got me this time, but there will be another.’

After the embarrassing charade of being photographed, his fake uniform was removed, thereafter to take pride of place in the Kommandant’s personal museum. The threat of court martial for impersonating a German officer was quietly dropped. Instead he would serve the customary indignity of imprisonment in the town gaol when a cell became available, there being constant pressure on accommodation due to frequent escape bids.

Neave’s humiliation was not complete. At the evening roll-call, Hauptmann Priem, the officer to whom Neave was supposed to be taking a message during his escape, announced to the crowded courtyard: ‘Gefreiter Neave is to be sent to the Russian Front.’ Everyone joined in the laughter. ‘It was friendly towards me,’ recalled Neave, ‘but it was not music to my ears.’ Eggers remembers the incident slightly differently, recording that Priem announced: ‘Gefreiter Neave is posted to the Russian Front.’ Eggers also recalled: ‘There was an almighty roar of laughter. Lieut. Neave looked very rueful. Six months later, though, he had the last laugh.’14 Following Neave’s daring bid, the camp authorities tightened security. All escapers and new arrivals were subject to mouth and body – i.e. rectal – examination. All military personnel had to carry a printed pass, signed and stamped by the camp adjutant, which was to be shown to all sentries. However, not even the German guards observed such Teutonic thoroughness. They were often too deferential to higher ranks and the rule was never completely observed. Roll-calls, too, were extended, and a new system of counting introduced to make deception harder.

Before the year was out, Neave was caught once again, this time in the Polish orderlies’ quarters on top of the old sick bay when he should have been in bed. German guards who picked Neave and a fellow prisoner up on the night of 23 November assumed, wrongly, that the miscreants were helping an escape bid by two Canadians found on the roof. Chaplain Platt noted enigmatically in his diary: ‘Actually, they were pursuing interests of their own.’ They were thrown into the Schloss prison, but, gaol space being at such a premium, Neave was locked in an unheated double cell with two fellow officers. Their cigarettes were confiscated and ‘they thought themselves to be holy innocents exposed to the harsh winds of a cold, hard and unjust world’. They determined on a protest notice, which read ‘Achtung! Dieser Tat ist eine Schandtat’ (Attention! This is a scandal). Reasoning that it was of little use to write out so high-minded a notice unless it could be suitably displayed, the trio picked the lock of their cell door, pinned the notice at eye level on the outside, then locked themselves in again and went to sleep. Episodes like these, amusing though they were, drove the German guards to despair.

6 Escape

Neave was sentenced to the usual twenty-eight days’ solitary confinement for his escape attempt. Several weeks elapsed before he could serve his term in Colditz town gaol, and he spent the time staring disconsolately from the British quarters as the weather turned colder. In early October he was taken under guard along the route by which he had tried to reach freedom. The sentries joked that the new white barrier at the final gate was a tribute to his audacious bid. His books and tobacco wrapped in a blanket, Neave was in no mood for entertainment.

Then, by his own account, he spotted another way out of the castle. Looking over the parapet of the moat bridge, he noticed a rough pathway leading across the tumbled stones of the dry moat towards the German married quarters. A small wicket gate stood half open in the moat bridge wall. If he could gain access to this gate, he was free of the barbed wire, with only a fence round the married quarters and a 12-foot high wall around the park beyond to negotiate. Excited, Neave crowed with delight, puzzling his guard with his air of elation. Neave’s version of events is contested by Pat Reid, who said he himself had spotted the small garden gate on his arrival at Colditz a year earlier. The energetic Dutch, always on the lookout for escape possibilities, also claimed to know of its existence.

Banged up in his municipal cell, Neave still thought of escape. The tiny barred window was beyond reach. He climbed on to the massive East European-style stove and contemplated cutting through the ceiling, breaking out of the roof and letting himself down to the gravel courtyard with a blanket rope. Thus occupied with thoughts of flight, he was surprised by the gaoler who roared with laughter: ‘So soon, Herr Leutnant! You must stay with us a few days longer.’ Next day, they moved him to a cell on the ground floor. He endured his spell of confinement remote from the worsening fortunes of the war, smoking on his bunk in the company of Jane Eyre and the Duchess of Wrexe. On his way back to the castle twenty-eight days later, he noticed again the little wicket gate, which by now appeared in his dreams as ‘the gateway to the land beyond the Blue Mountains’.

Some weeks earlier, Pat Reid had also had an inspiration. A trained engineer, he understood architectural drawings and had the happy knack of mentally being able to take buildings to pieces and put them back together again. It occurred to Reid that the wooden stage of the camp theatre, on the second floor of a building occupied by the most senior Allied officers, offered escape potential. It was constructed over a room leading to the top of the German guardhouse outside the prisoners’ courtyard. This corridor was sealed off from POW quarters by heavy locked doors and bricked-up windows, but it might be accessible from above. Together with ‘Hank’ Wardle MC, a Canadian in the RAF, he reconnoitred the theatre and found that by removing wooden steps from a dressing room he could move freely about under the heavy stage. There were no floorboards, only rubble on top of a lath-and-plaster ceiling over the corridor.

Reid and Wardle sawed a 2-foot square through the ceiling and found the room below disused and empty. To disguise their activity, they constructed an ingenious device known as ‘the shovewood’. This was a plaster-covered hatch fixed from above with turnbuckles resting on the ceiling joists. It was virtually invisible from below, and in any event no guards ever went there. This was Neave’s ‘magic entrance’. As Reinhold Eggers later lamented: ‘We had left the prisoners a very simple barrier, no more than a floor-ceiling between their quarters plus a door into a passage on our side to get through.’1 Reid clambered down on a rope made from a mattress cover, padded down the corridor in carpet slippers and picked the lock of the door. Beyond, a passage ran over the courtyard gate – the most difficult barrier to negotiate – and ended at another locked door. This yielded easily to his skills and Reid found himself at the top of steps leading into an attic above the guardhouse. The sounds of laughter and noisy drinking drifted up from the German Officers’ Mess below. If an escaper could disguise himself as a German officer, the guards at the gate would scarcely give him a second glance, because this time he would be approaching from the right direction.

What is more, the prisoners were planning to put on a Christmas pantomime within weeks, offering the perfect opportunity to mount an escape. Reid began a search for the right officers. He quickly whittled his list down to six, including Neave. He told them ‘casually’ that he could get them out of Colditz if they could acquire convincing German officers’ uniforms. Neave and Lieutenant John Hyde-Thomson, who had already tried to get out in a consignment of palliasses, were finally chosen to make the break, in company with two Dutch officers.

There were compelling reasons for cooperation with the Dutch. First, their command of German was much better than that of the British, second, their long blue-green army greatcoats bore a striking resemblance to the Wermacht uniform, and third, they were inveterate escapers. They had already made four ‘home runs’ via Switzerland. This Anglo-Dutch entente had been operating for some months through Reid and his opposite number, Captain van den Heuvel, invariably known as ‘Vandy’. He finally settled on a brave young officer of the Netherlands East Indies Army, Second Lieutenant Toni Luteyn, to accompany Neave. In 1940, the Dutch army had capitulated to the invading Germans. Its officers were required to sign an oath of non-combatance, or face internment for the rest of the war. Virtually all signed, with the exception of a contingent of sixty-seven colonial army cadets who had just passed out of Breda Military Academy. Luteyn, aged twenty-three, was one of them. He was interned in a camp at Zossi on the Dutch – German border, but when one of them escaped they were moved deeper inland to Oflag VIIIc in Poland. After more escapes, the whole lot was dispatched to Colditz in July 1941, arriving soon after Neave. Until now Neave and Luteyn had scarcely met. They were thrown together by calculation rather than friendship. Despite being the younger of the two – he was only twenty-four – Luteyn was the senior partner because of his command of German. ‘We had some exercises, because Neave did not speak German, except jawohl,’ Luteyn said years later, ‘but going through the guardroom there was quite a chance somebody would talk to us, and they would talk to the highest ranking officer. So I was “promoted” to Hauptmann and he was a first lieutenant. We practised that exercise for a week in the courtyard. He had to march on my left-hand side. If he didn’t wheel to my left, I shouted at him.’2

Meanwhile, both would-be escapers were rehearsing for the camp pantomime, Ballet Nonsense. Neave later dismissed the ‘pathetic futility’ of the entertainment, insisting that although such performances keep prisoners from brooding on their fate, the actual performances were ghastly. But at the time he threw himself energetically into the show, writing and producing a three-act sketch with the improbable title ‘The Mystery of Wombat College’, which was clearly based on his experiences at Eton. Neave played the principal character, the unpleasant headmaster Dr Calomel. The other parts were equally nasty, as befitted the obscene dialogue and cynical performance. The chaplains complained about the ‘unsuitability’ of the sketch and Neave thought it a ‘wretched little piece’ but it brought the house down in Oflag IVc.

A photograph of the full cast shows him striking a pose in gown and mortar board of black paper and steel-rimmed spectacles, made up to look like a beetle-browed, leering Groucho Marx. While Neave busied himself on stage, Reid and Wardle were hard at work beneath his feet creating the ‘shovewood’ escape route through which they planned to send several Anglo-Dutch teams. Neave and Luteyn would go first, followed twenty-four hours later by Hyde-Thomson and Luteyn’s fellow officer Lieutenant Donkers. At one point in rehearsals, when Neave was pacing the boards in a scene where Dr Calomel expels the son of a duke, Reid and Wardle emerged from beneath his feet, covered in dust.

Neave acquired a Netherlands Home Army uniform overcoat, which he hid, wrapped in sacking, beneath the floorboards. The prisoners had hundreds of these hides, some of which are still giving up their secrets today, sixty years later. With the help of camp experts, he then set about converting it into a German officer’s uniform. Epaulettes, fashioned from linoleum cut from the bathroom floor, were painted silver to match the officers’ silver braid. He gave himself a gold regimental number. Neave promoted himself to Oberleutnant Schwarz and Scarlet O’Hara carved gold wooden stars to denote his rank. O’Hara was one of the unsung heroes of Colditz who sat in their primitive quarters day after day helping others to escape. The selflessness of men like him helped twenty officers to escape from the ‘impregnable’ fortress, eleven of them British – the best escape record of any camp in Nazi Germany.