Description
STALAG LUFT III POW “GREAT ESCAPE” DIARY. A richly illustrated diary kept by the Belgian-born, British Royal Air Force officer, JOSEPH M. J. (“JOE”) GUEUFFEN (1914-2009), a POW at the Luftwaffe’s Stalag Luft III. Our well-preserved volume documents prison life and various aspects of World War II’s famous “Great Escape,” detailing its aftermath in which 50 British escapees were executed by the Nazis as well as the forced march of 2,000 POWs to another camp as the war drew to a close. 113pp. 8vo. Sagan, September 1944 to February 1945. A YMCA “Wartime Log for British Prisoners” (1944) belonging to Gueuffen, an RAF pilot in Block 109, which played an integral part in the “Great Escape,” containing texts, maps, diagrams, and 43 cartoons and drawings by Gueuffen and other captives.
During World War II, the Nazis constructed more than 1,000 prisoner of war camps across Germany and Nazi-occupied territories. Among the Stammlager (abbreviated “Stalag”) Luft, or Main Camps for Airmen, was a compound in Lower Silesia near Sagan (modern Żagań, Poland), known as Stalag Luft III. The camp, run by members of the Luftwaffe unfit for active service, housed nearly 10,000 captured allied airmen. Opened in 1942, the prison camp was constructed on sandy soil to prevent escape through tunneling and included microphones embedded into the ground to detect any possible activity.
For the most part, internees were treated in accordance with the 1929 Geneva Convention. With the assistance of the Red Cross and international Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), prisoners were adequately fed and able to organize theater groups, newspapers, radio stations, classes, and lectures. The YMCA supplied books for a library, instruments for a band and orchestra and even diaries distributed to prisoners to record their thoughts during their incarceration. Our copy of Gueuffen’s book is such an example.
Although some prisoners welcomed the opportunity to sit out the war, many felt it was their duty to escape from the camps and cause as much disruption to the enemy as possible. New prisoners were subjected to a rigorous system of vetting by allied prisoners to guard against German infiltrators and a highly organized system was devised to monitor the movements of the German guards, dubbed “goons” by the prisoners. With these checks in place, inmates devised ingenious ways to disguise their tunneling activity. The first successful attempt to escape from Stalag III took place in October 1943, when three prisoners (two British and one Canadian) tunneled their way to freedom underneath improvised gymnastics equipment that had blocked their excavation from view, hid their tools and masked the sound of tunneling. Their escape came in the midst of a much larger plan to evacuate 200 prisoners from the North Compound housing mostly British POWs – a “great escape” – devised in March 1943 by RAF Squadron Leader Roger Joyce Bushell and overseen by the camp’s Senior British Officer, RAF Group Captain Herbert Martin Massey.
The highly coordinated, top-secret operation involved digging three deep tunnels, dubbed “Tom,” “Dick” and “Harry.” Using wood scavenged from beds and other furniture for reinforcement and tools and ventilation ducts fashioned from tin food cans, prisoners laboriously dug out and redistributed the sand in camp gardens, the “Dick” tunnel after it was abandoned due to a change in the camp layout, and even under the floor of the camp’s theater. The entrance to “Tom” was discovered in September 1943 but work on “Harry” continued while prisoners amassed civilian clothes, maps, train schedules, and forged papers, much of which was obtained by bribing guards with excess Red Cross provisions.
As Nazi scrutiny of planned escapes from prison camps increased, the date of the evacuation was moved forward to March 1944, when, on the moonless night of March 24, and aided by a number of German guards, prisoners began to slowly move through “Harry,” the entrance to which was underneath the floor of Block 104, directly in front of Gueuffen’s Block 109. However, the tunnel’s exit fell short of the tree line and put the escapees at risk of being discovered by the sentries. The shortfall, freezing temperatures, a sudden collapse in the tunnel, and other factors slowed the flow of escaping prisoners so that only 77 of the planned 200 had exited the tunnel by morning, at which point they were spotted by the guards. The 77th escapee surrendered and of the remaining 76 who continued their escape through the wintery countryside, 73 were recaptured. The enormity and daring of the escape infuriated Hitler and he ordered the execution of 50 of the airmen (representing 13 different countries, none from the US) and had their ashes returned to the prison, an action denounced by the British government as a war crime and investigated as such after the war. In the wake of the escape, Nazi officials appointed a new camp commandant who allowed the prisoners to build a memorial to those executed, one of the only structures left standing on the site of Stalag Luft III, which was razed after the war. In January 1945, as the Soviet army marched through Germany and neared the camp, the remaining prisoners were forcibly evacuated by their captors and were ultimately liberated from the Bavarian prison camp Stalag VII-A by the US 14th Armored Division in April 1945.
The 1963 film The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen, James Garner, and Charles Bronson, depicted a highly fictionalized account of the escape, loosely based on the book of the same name authored by Stalag Luft III prisoner and escape participant Paul Brickhill. Brickhill’s book was published with illustrations by Ley Kenyon (1913-1990), who contributed a detailed drawing of a bomber pilot and crewman to our diary. During the escape’s planning stages, Kenyon made six drawings of the tunnel codenamed “Harry,” which are now housed at London’s Royal Air Force Museum. Kenyon was also known for the nose art he executed on the fuselages of planes.
Diary entries executed by Gueuffen and other prisoners documenting life in Stalag III and the subsequent forced march include:
A form letter to “Dear Friend” from the War Prisoners’ Aid of the YMCA sending the logbook, A Wartime Log for British Prisoners, owned by Gueuffen who has entered his name in German Fraktur and added the camp’s official name “Of[fiziers]lag[er] Luft 3.”
1) Pencil sketch of a prisoner in a cell dreaming of a pin-up girl;
2) A colored pencil drawing of Gueuffen (?) in uniform, holding his “War Log book,” being welcomed to paradise by St. Peter who asks, “How long have you been down?” Signed by Gueuffen, “JMG, 23-9-44;”
3) A colored pencil caricature of an elderly, bearded and bespectacled hiker, entitled “One point of view about a German leaflet” upon which a torn piece of paper is pasted that states “The escape from prison camps is no longer a sport. Germany has always kept to the Hague Convention and punished with minor disciplinary punishments. Germany will still maintain the principals of international law,” Signed by Gueuffen, “JMG 23-9-44;”
4) Nine unsigned colored pencil cartoons captioned with RAF flight terms that play on contrasting images including “Visibility Zero,” which shows a drunk in a bar; “Putting up a Black,” (making a serious mistake) showing a half-dressed woman speaking to a black man with a bed in the background; “Second Dickey” (a co-pilot for on board training) portraying a man flirting with a woman as another man changes her car’s tire; “Snappy… take off,” illustrated by a woman undressing; “Finger trouble,” (procrastinating) showing a young man and woman at opposite ends of a couch, etc.
5) Hand-drawn world map and a list of the 78 countries represented by POWs in the North Compound, the location of Gueuffen’s Block 109;
6) Two-page colored pencil drawing of a woman in a swimsuit standing atop a map of the United Kingdom facing a prisoner wearing swimming trunks and soaking his feet in an imaginary swimming pool with a barrack, barbed-wire fence and pine forest in the background;
7) Pencil drawing of an army physical;
8) A colored pencil drawing of a pin-up girl tearing pages off a calendar showing the flight of time from 1939 to 1945 and holding a “?” in her right hand;
9) A pencil and color wash sketch entitled “Mail up!” showing several men fighting to get their hands on letters carried into a room by an officer;
10) Nine detailed pencil drawings of Gueuffen’s Block 109’s 24 rooms (drawn to scale) whose residents were instrumental in preparing for the “Great Escape,” by occupying the beds of the escapees assembled in Block 104 to fool the “goons,” followed by detailed renderings of three successive cells entitled, “Sagan: Our Room from November 1943 to July 1944,” “Our living room! Bed room! Dining room! July 1944 to January 1945” followed by several sketches of the interior of the cells. One of the drawings depicts a small room captioned “Stalag Luft III at Tarnstedt (sic. Tarmstedt) from February 1945 to…” referring to the room in Tarmstedt following the evacuation (in advance of the Russian Army) of 2,000 POW’s from the North Compound in late January 1945;
11) A detailed plan, in pencil, of the Stalag III North Compound theater whose auditorium could seat 360 people and had a projection room to show movies;
12) A page of two women’s heads, a blond and a brunette, drawn in water color and entitled “Messalina,” a reference to the sexually promiscuous wife of Roman emperor Claudius; signed and dated 1-10-44;
13) A pencil drawing of Mickey Mouse, Porky Pig and Donald Duck holding hands and dancing;
14) A pencil profile of Gueuffen drawn in Tarmstedt on February 20, 1945, with the caption, “Brother Joseph – (but as only I see him) the best tin basher & handiest handyman I’ve met in Gefangenschaft (captivity) Neville.” The artist was probably Neville Smallwood (1922-2004), an RAF air-gunner shot down in February 1942. Smallwood worked in the North Compound’s theatre making wigs and costumes, and “was also active in the tailoring department of the X Organization, making cloth caps for men going out as workers, and gun holsters for those posing as German guards. He made such disguises for two major attempts – the mass Delouser Party walk-out in the summer of 1943 and the famous Great Escape of March 1944,” (IMDb database).
15) Drawings of flight insignias from different countries including the USA, France and Norway;
16) A tipped-in colored pencil drawing of a brunette signed with initials by Gueuffen and dated 30-8-40 (two weeks after his arrival in Stalag II-B in Hammerstein, Germany, and probably retained by him throughout the war);
17) A finely rendered pencil drawing of a bomber pilot and another crewman by Ley Kenyon described above;
18) A finely executed watercolor of the camp guard’s “goon box” by John Cordwell (1921-1999), dated January 25, 1945, inscribed to “Joe” (Gueuffen) and annotated “just 2 days before moving,” referring to the forced march out of Stalag III to Tarmstedt. Cordwell was a British flight lieutenant who later became a city planner in Chicago (responsible for Carl Sandburg Village, Presidential Towers and owner of the Red Lion Pub), whose exploits as a forger and tunnel digger at Stalag III inspired Donald Pleasence’s character (Flight Lieutenant Colin Blythe) in the movie The Great Escape;
19) List of the 50 “Officers shot when trying to escape on the 29-3-44” and a drawing of the permanent memorial for them by Belgian RAF pilot Bobby Laumans (1920-2014), musician, artist and forger who was one of the original 200 POWs originally chosen to escape Stalag III, but not part of the first group. The drawing is dated “15-3-45;”
20) Bobby Laumans’ pencil stage design for “French for Love,” the last play performed at the North Compound theatre in January 1945, produced by Rupert “Pud” Davis, who later starred in the BBC’s TV series “Maigret;”
21) A Bobby Laumans pencil drawing of a sultry blonde seated at a bar and dated “15-2-45;”
22) A Bobby Laumans pencil drawing of a room in the barracks at the POW camp at Ma[r]lag, about 19 miles northeast of Bremen, dated “29-3-1945;”
23) A four-page handwritten entry in pencil detailing the 100 km “Epic Retreat from Sagan,” the story of Stalag III’s North Compound evacuation, beginning in late January 1945 until the prisoners’ arrival in Spremberg on February 4, 1945, with a hand-drawn map;
24) a six-page penciled list of camp rations and the contents of packages sent by various countries’ aid agencies, including the British Red Cross;
25) An unpublished six-stanza poem entitled “Escape:” “If you can quit the compound undetected / And clear your tracks: nor leave the smallest trace / And carry out the programme you’ve selected / Nor lose your grasp of distance, time & space / Escape,” followed by another six- (of seven) stanza poem beginning, “Here we are at Stalag III,” (see: and known as “You Said It.” The poem’s authorship is credited to an unknown English flyer in Stalag III’s North Compound.
26) Two pages of extracts from letters read by POWs, “From girl friend!” (“I have married your brother & I am so happy to be in your family as I’ll be able to see you often…”) “From wife!” (“I have had an affair with a Canadian airman & he is having cigarettes & parcels sent you from Canada.”) “From Complaining Wifes [sic.]” (“Had I known the scarf would reach a skulking POW I would not have sent it to the Red +”);
27) A humorous watercolor cartoon of an airman speaking with a German asking for assistance;
28) Forty-four names and addresses of prisoners from around the world who were friends of Gueuffen, written out by him in the shape of visiting cards, including two American members of the 351st Bomb Group in Polebrook, England;
Gueuffen joined Belgium’s 2nd Régiment d'Aéronautique in 1933 and rose through the ranks prior to World War II. With Hitler’s invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940, formerly-neutral Belgium was dragged into the conflict and the Allies scurried to organize deployment of its armed forces. Gueuffen found himself fighting in France in May 1940, Morocco in June and, by September, was a prisoner of war in Stalag 2B in Hammerstein, Germany. It was there that he executed the drawing of a woman tipped into our diary. Sent back to Nazi-occupied Belgium in July 1942, Gueuffen fled through Spain into Portugal and eventually reached Great Britain in December 1942, where he became one of many Belgians to organize under the British military as Free Belgian Forces. Belgian Prime Minister in Exile, Hubert Pierlot, had called for the establishment of an army-in-exile, and so many servicemen heeded the call that by 1943 there were more Belgian pilots in the RAF than there had been in the Belgian air force in 1940. Over the course of the war, nearly 2,000 Belgians served in the RAF and other British Commonwealth air forces. Gueuffen joined No. 609 RAF fighter-bomber squadron in July 1943 only to be shot down less than three months later. He spent the remainder of the war as a POW, being returned to England in May 1945 and being mustered out as a captain in 1946.
Bound in grey-blue, slightly warped, linen covered boards with part of the spine somewhat separated from the binding; overall the condition is excellent considering the provenance.
A remarkable, unpublished and un-researched record of one of the most memorable events of World War II, offered for sale on the 75th anniversary of “The Great Escape.”
