Airey Neave. Colditz Castle, Germany
Airey Neave was a British officer serving in the Royal Engineers when he was captured by the Germans in France in May 1940. He proved to be a slippery prisoner to hold onto and after his several failed attempts to escape back to England (lacking proper travel papers and disguise) the Germans sent him to their equivalent of a maximum security facility for POWs – Colditz Castle in Saxony – officially known as Oflag IV-C. Neave made another attempted from escape from Colditz in late 1941, failing to clear the grounds of the camp before detection by the German guards.
The failed escape served the purpose of both identifying weaknesses in the German security and better means of exploiting them. Neave joined with a fellow POW, an officer of the Dutch Army named Antony Luyten, to prepare more accurately detailed German uniforms and a better route out of the Castle complex and by January 1942 they were ready to make their break.
Both escapees wore three sets of clothes, their own uniforms covered by civilian clothes, these covered by the uniforms of officers of their German guards, and exited through a trap door in the camp theater into the German guardhouse. There the enlisted off-duty Germans routinely sprang to attention as the pair of “officers” passed through before exiting the compound through an outdoor exercise park, lightly guarded.
Shedding their German uniforms they traveled by train to Leipzig, working their way towards Switzerland. In Augsberg they were arrested by local police; they escaped after the police took them to a local union hall to check on their story that they were Dutch union workers in the area. After fleeing on foot they worked their way to near the Swiss border.
Stopped again by suspicious German workers, they again managed to escape and survived the last few days of their journey on chocolate and the water from chewing snowballs. Spotted near the border, they sprinted the last few yards to Switzerland. Both made it. Airey Neave returned to England and joined MI9, the British Intelligence executive responsible for developing escape aids for captured Allied airmen. After the war he became a prominent politician in the United Kingdom. He was assassinated by a car bomb in March 1979, an act for which the Irish National Liberation Army claimed responsibility.