The Wonderful Tools for Escaping from a POW Camp

A compass hidden inside a walnut.
Photo sourced from  pegasusarchive.org.

One of the stories that is not looked upon as often as compared to the life and death struggles of combat during World War II is the life and death struggle of prisoners of war. In Germany, there were large numbers of Polish, French, Belgian, Dutch, British, Russian, Greek, Czech, and later American prisoners all over the place. These men were duty bound to escape, and they had some of the most ingenious tools to do it.

In previous posts on The Great Escape from Stalag Luft III and Colditz Castle, I talked about the two most famous and glorified accounts of POW life in Germany. However, one aspect that hasn't been touched on were the escape aids. These were tools vital to escape, such as saw blades, money, compasses, and identity papers, hidden in such a way that the Germans couldn't find them, at least in theory.

A record containing German money.
Photo sourced from theescapeline.blogspot.com

These tools were the products of MI9, a branch of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, and the man who made them, Christopher Hutton, was a master of disguising contraband as harmless items. There were maps hidden as handkerchiefs, magnetic clips on pens so that they could be balanced on the tip to make a compass, spare uniforms that were specially designed to easily convert to civilian clothes, money hidden inside records, and even compasses hidden inside walnuts!

These were hidden in Red Cross care packages, and over the course of the war the Germans found most, but not all of these clever inventions, which only inspired MI9 to be even more clever, a war of wits if you will. These are the kinds of things usually seen in spy novels, but in reality, and it still makes a good story. Until next time take care, and thanks for reading.

(Facts from Wikipedia on MI9 and "Colditz: The Untold Story of WWII's Great Escapes" by Henry Chancellor).