29. Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire
Mikhail Devyataev was not content to sit out the rest of the war as a POW and sought to escape, get back to his side, and get back into the fight. He dug a tunnel to try and get out of the Lodz concentration camp, but it was discovered by guards and he was caught on August 13, 1944. The attempted escape got him packed off to the even more hellish Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Brandenburg, Germany. As he recalled decades later: “When we came through the front entrance, two corpses were hanging on it [the gallows] … It shocked me. I thought, ‘What place have I come to?’”
There, Devyataev figured that his odds of survival as a Soviet pilot were slim – Nazi guards treated them with extra brutality. So he stole the identity of a dead Red Army infantryman named Nikitenko. Bad as Sachsenhausen was, things got worse for Devyataev in late 1944 when he and about 500 other inmates were packed like sardines into cattle cars on the first leg of a tortuous journey. At least 30 prisoners perished in his railcar. Their destination was Peenemunde on the island of Usedom in the Baltic Sea. It was the test site for Germany’s V-1 and V-2 rockets, and the new arrivals were to replenish the stock of slave laborers who were routinely worked to death.