ARIZONA
The Escape Fiasco
How did 25 German prisoners escape a Phoenix POW camp during WWII?
During World War II, the U.S. held half a million captured enemy combatants in prisoner-of-war camps on American soil. Three thousand men from the German navy were housed at Camp Papago Park in Phoenix. Their story illustrates how boredom breeds mischievousness and how physical and psychological blind spots allow risks to become catastrophes.
On December 24, 1944, rain poured down as two corporals conducted the four p.m. roll call at Compound 1A, the unit that contained 62 troublemaking officers and high-ranking enlisted men. But they counted only 39 men. The missing, they assumed, must have remained in their barracks to avoid the rain. It was inconceivable any prisoners had escaped. They searched the compound and couldn’t locate any stragglers. Roll calls at other units failed to surface the absent prisoners, and the count at Compound 1B, which lodged enlisted men, was short by two. Now, there were 25 missing prisoners. That, they thought, couldn’t possibly be true. Recently, an Army colonel inspecting Camp Papago Park declared that the facility would never suffer an escape: the soil, he said, was hard as rock.
Nevertheless, Captain Cecil Parshall, the assistant to the camp’s head of security, alerted the FBI. The base commanders organized search parties and telegraphed their Army superiors.
Captain Parshall had opposed the decision by the camp commandant, Colonel William Anthony Holden, to house the least cooperative U-boat commanders and their crews in one unit. An ex-police detective and one-time bank robber, he knew a thing or two about the criminal mind. Parshall had pointed out that Compound 1A had a blind spot that wasn’t visible from the security towers.
How had the men escaped?
As I investigated the answer to that question, I discovered that the unique landscape of Phoenix played a significant role in the story. Unraveling the knotted narrative, I encountered distracted Army commanders, playful but shrewd prisoners, and arrogant overconfidence from all involved. Both the German prisoners and the American officers behaved so clownishly that circus music played in my head as I wrote.
I’ve unknowingly driven by Camp Papago Park hundreds of times on my way to or from Scottsdale. My freeway exit, McDowell Road, traverses red sandstone buttes that rise several hundred feet from the flat desert into the sky and form a natural gateway between Phoenix and Scottsdale. A botanical garden, zoo, and hiking trails lay south of the road. I’d noticed the National Guard complex on the north side, but I had no idea it occupied part of a former POW camp.
Though little remains of the WWII facility, I wanted to visit the officer’s club, the camp’s only surviving building. Today, it houses the Scottsdale Elks Lodge. Not being an Elk, of course, I didn’t try to venture inside. But that’s where Parshall was playing poker when he first heard of the escape.
Nearby, parts of the camp have become a sports complex, with softball and baseball fields, an archery range, and an orienteering course where beginners can learn how to navigate complicated terrains. Other swaths of land were developed for homes in the 1960s. Just east of the houses is a narrow canal that links the wider Arizona Canal to the north with the Salt River to the south. Reservoirs collect seasonal flows from nearby mountains, and the canals channel their water into Phoenix.
Parking near the homes, I walked along the canal until I found the bronze medallion I was looking for. Embedded into the concrete, it marks where the 25 German prisoners crawled out of the tunnel they’d built for their escape.
Prisoners at the camp had a lot of idle time on their hands, and their minds wandered. One German officer recalled, “You stare at that fence for hours on end, try to think of everything and anything that can be done, and finally realize there are only three possibilities: go through it, fly over it, or dig under it.”
As the summer heat subsided in 1944, the prisoners in Compound 1 decided to dig a tunnel. Army guards noticed that their spirits had elevated and their barracks were neater. The soldiers concluded that the prisoners had adjusted to captivity.
Digging began at the structure in Compound 1A closest to the camp fence, the bathhouse, precisely where Parshall had identified the blind spot. The Germans pointed the tunnel toward a utility pole just beyond the second fence perimeter. They threw a rock-weighted string from the fence line to the pole. Adding the length of that string to the distance from the bathhouse to the fence, they calculated that they would have to dig 178 feet.
At night, teams of three entered the bathhouse as if to shower, exited surreptitiously through a loosened wallboard, and slipped into the three-foot-square shaft for 90-minute shifts. Working six feet below the surface, the excavators made a couple of feet of progress each night under a light bulb powered by an extension cord from the bathhouse.
Disposing of the dirt presented the main challenge. At first, the prisoners collected it in their pockets and dropped it into latrines, flower beds, or remote corners. But when it became too much, a cocky Prussian U-boat captain asked Lieutenant William S. Watson, who was responsible for the compound, and base commandant Colonel Holden if they could build a volleyball court for recreation. Splendid idea, Watson and Holden thought. They wanted to keep the prisoners occupied and ordered their men to provide shovels to the Germans. Guards ignored the growing dirt piles as the prisoners leveled the sloping, rocky ground.
One German officer later said, “The tunnel became a kind of all-consuming sport. We lived, ate, slept, talked, whispered, dreamed ‘tunnel’ and thought of little else for weeks on end.” Some prisoners gathered food for the escape. They hated American white bread, but they toasted it and packed the crumbs into waxed paper salvaged from cereal boxes. Others forged identification papers. Money was obtained by selling Nazi military paraphernalia to guards.
One group scavenged lumber and built a kayak that would fit through the tunnel in pieces. They gathered tar and canvas by convincing Lieutenant Watson that the roof of their barracks was leaking. Marveling at German efficiency, Watson was thrilled the prisoners were willing to make the repairs themselves.
On December 20, the men began digging upward. After reaching the surface, they attached a small rag to a stick. German spotters at the barracks saw it and cheered quietly. Once the exit was completed and braced with lumber, the men covered it with plywood and dirt.
Now, they needed to divert the guards’ attention.
On Saturday, December 23, a party erupted in Compound 1B. Fueled by homemade schnapps and stolen beer, prisoners shouted, sang Nazi marching songs, and waved a German flag. When an Army lieutenant told them to knock it off, even the men who’d previously acted as interpreters pretended not to understand English. The lieutenant confiscated the alcohol and threatened tear gas if the revelry re-erupted.
To prevent the disturbance from spreading, commanders assigned patrols to the fence between Compound 1B and Compound 2. While the soldiers focused on that area, 25 men from Compound 1A began escaping through the tunnel in teams of two or three.
As rain fell, the first men through lifted the plywood and exited the tunnel on the far side of the fence. Shrubs hid the opening from the view of the guard towers, where searchlights rotated every night. The last group got through at about two in the morning. They were a pair from Compound 1B who’d cut the fence between the compounds to join the escape. A remaining prisoner sealed the tunnel and camouflaged the entrance and exit.
In small groups throughout the night, the 25 escapees stripped down and waded for a quarter-mile through the canal. Theoretically, their goal was to return to Germany via Mexico. The canal connected to rivers that led to the border. The more pragmatic prisoners, though, knew that reaching Mexico was likely impossible. Expecting to be recaptured, most escapees simply wanted to experience life outside the camp for a while.
The escapees changed into clean clothes behind creosote bushes and trekked in various directions. For some, the adventure ended on its first night. One hitchhiking German caught a ride with a civilian who, suspicious of his accent, drove directly to the sheriff’s office. Two POWs knocked on the door of a home in Tempe and surrendered. Two more POWs told another Tempe resident they were so cold and wet they wanted to return to camp. Before Christmas dinner, if possible, please. Another was arrested at the Tempe railway station.
The day after Christmas, Parshall interrogated three of the recaptured men. The first refused to talk. The second fabricated a story about escaping through a cut fence. Hoping for leniency, the third revealed the tunnel’s location.
One pair of escapees followed railroad tracks east and slept in culverts and stables. Two teams discovered that Roosevelt High School was empty over the holidays. They broke through a basement window and celebrated Christmas there.
Most of the POWs hiked south toward Mexico. One pair made it to Casa Grande, halfway to Tucson, but a foot injury made further progress impossible. They surrendered to a rancher on January 1. Another pair got within 30 miles of the border but was captured by members of the Tohono O’odham Nation on their land, which abutted Mexico. Other members of that tribe caught five more POWs in the succeeding days. Army guards apprehended three escapees near Tucson and another pair within a half-mile of the border.
The trio with the kayak, who’d found the canal and the Salt River too visible to search parties, set out on foot for the Gila River. They reached it on December 28 but were immediately disappointed. Narrow and shallow, the Gila looked nothing like the rivers of Europe.
With the rains gone, only a muddy trickle remained. Occasionally, the men encountered sections deep enough to float the kayak. But mostly they portaged. Deciding progress would be faster without the kayak, they destroyed it. “We should have known that the Gila wasn’t much of a river,” one said. “Of course, everyone who lives in Arizona knows that. We didn’t.” At Gila Bend, where the river juts south before resuming its westward flow, some cowboys spotted the men’s camp, and they were captured.
That left only three POWs on the loose, including Captain Jürgen Wattenberg. At 44, Wattenberg was the oldest and most senior prisoner. Before his capture by the British navy in the Caribbean, Wattenberg had commanded a German U-boat and sunk 14 enemy vessels in one year. Tall and austere, with jutting cheekbones, Wattenberg’s gaze seemed to focus on the horizon.
Wattenberg told the two petty officers who’d served on his submarine, Johann Kremer and Walter Kozur, that he had no intention of trying to get to the Mexican border, at least not yet when search teams would be combing the state. He wanted to hide in the mountains until the frenzy died down. “We will live like Indians,” he told his comrades.
The men hiked north through the undeveloped desert toward the mountains and followed a ravine into Crown Canyon, where rocky boulders promised concealment. They found an overhead outcropping and stacked small rocks to create a cave-like shelter.
The three men lived in their cave for several weeks. For water, they tapped an orchard irrigation pipe at the bottom of the mountain. When the two petty officers hiked seven miles into downtown Phoenix and returned with stolen fruit, a map, and newspapers, Wattenberg learned that all the other escapees had been recaptured.
Before the escape, Wattenberg had asked an electrician from his ship to hide a cache of food outside the POW camp. The electrician repaired Army vehicles at a lightly guarded arsenal nearby. He concealed food and cigarettes in an abandoned car. When Kremer retrieved the goods, a note said the drop-off location would move 500 meters because some Italian POWs had become suspicious. But when Kremer returned, he couldn’t find the new supply drop.
Kremer then decided to try something audacious. He hiked to a farm where a POW work detail picked cotton. He blended into the group, swapping places with another enlisted man and assuming that man’s identity. The guards, not paying much attention, didn’t notice. Kremer returned to the POW camp and gathered news and food. The next day he rode back out with the work detail and slipped away. After several such forays went undetected, he was finally caught. When Kremer didn’t return, Kozur tried finding the arsenal food cache. Two soldiers apprehended him. That left Wattenberg as the only remaining fugitive.
Wattenberg worried for three days before deciding to venture into town. He changed into his best clothes, a yellow checkered sports shirt and Army-issued wool trousers he’d dyed to obscure the PW stencils on the legs. With little money left, he imagined getting a dishwashing job or asking for assistance from a priest.
Exhausted upon his arrival downtown, Wattenberg searched for a hotel. He had 75 cents, enough for a cheap room. But servicemen had overwhelmed the city, and there was no vacancy anywhere. He lounged among other visitors in the ample, ornate lobby of the Hotel Adams. But around midnight, he noticed a desk clerk eyeing him skeptically.
With his stomach growling, Wattenberg found the nearby American Kitchen restaurant open and busy. It offered Chinese-American dishes and traditional American fare. Wattenberg chose a late-night breakfast of oatmeal with raisins, a soft-boiled egg, toast, and tea. Afterward, he ambled the sidewalks, not sure what to do.
At 3:30 a.m., he approached a man sweeping gutters. Hoping to find Phoenix’s Japanese colony, Wattenberg inquired how to get to Van Buren Street. The man told him he was already on it. The street sweeper, struck by Wattenberg’s accent and geographical confusion, shared the incident with a passing police officer, who caught up with Wattenberg.
“Excuse me, sir, where do you live?” asked the patrolman.
“I am a rancher in town for the weekend,” Wattenberg replied.
“Yes, sir, but where do you live?”
“In Glendale.”
“Glendale, California, or Glendale, Arizona?”
“Glendale back east.”
“I see. Sir, could I please see your Selective Service registration card?”
Wattenberg smiled and shrugged.
“I might as well tell you. The game’s up and I lost. I am the man all of you fellows are looking for. I am Captain Jürgen Wattenberg, the escaped prisoner of war from Papago Park.” The officer dragged Wattenberg to police headquarters a few blocks away.
The POW escape led newspapers to question the Army’s management of Camp Papago Park. Syndicated columnist Walter Winchell accused the War Department of coddling German prisoners. The resulting Army inquiry revealed a number of damning discoveries. Head counts were conducted inconsistently. Kremer had ventured into and out of the camp without detection. Having been told that solid rock below the desert surface would make tunneling impossible, the commanders chose not to look for signs of excavation. The base leaders then provided the POWs with digging tools and allowed them to construct the volleyball court with the dirt from the tunnel.
The Army allowed Camp Commander William Anthony Holden to retire for medical reasons. Parshall’s boss, a major who served as director of intelligence and security, was removed from his post.
In early February, the captured escapees were ordered to assemble at the camp. Wattenberg feared they would be shot. Germans had recently killed 84 American POWs. The prior year, 76 American men tunneled out of a German POW camp. (They later became famous in The Great Escape). On Hitler’s orders, fifty of those American escapees had been executed.
The Americans’ punishment of the German prisoners, however, was surprisingly gentle. The men were separated from others at the camp and restricted to bread and water for the number of days each had been on the lam.
When the war ended, all the prisoners were repatriated. Wattenberg and several other Germans came back to Arizona in 1985, invited by their Army captors for a reunion. A lone protester at that event pointed out that these men were Nazis and should not be honored in any manner. That is, indeed, true. But it doesn’t make their story any less fascinating.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
