The Not-So-Great Escape: German POWs in the U.S. during WWII
By Ronald H. Bailey

World War II  | 7 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

On January 1, 1945, a pair of escaped officers decided they could go no further. Captain Kraus and his second watch officer on U-199, Lt. Helmut Drescher, had been covering up to ten miles a night, but Drescher now had a swollen foot and hobbled along using a forked stick as a crutch. In the morning they approached an isolated ranch house and knocked. When a twelve-year-old boy trailed by two much younger siblings answered the door, Kraus explained who he and Drescher were and said that they wanted to surrender to local police. The boy said his parents were away but should be home soon.

The Germans made themselves at home. They brewed coffee, shared their remaining chocolate with the children, and then regaled the kids with stories about life on a U-boat. When the parents came home around eleven that morning, they found everyone sitting in the kitchen. Their son hurriedly explained the situation. The father pulled from his pocket a folded sheet of the newspaper with mug shots of the escapees. He took out a pencil, looked at Kraus and then Drescher, and drew a big X through each of their pictures.

That same day, a Papago Indian discovered another pair of prisoners as they were sleeping, less than thirty miles from the Mexican border. Four days later, bounty-hunting Papagos caught another pair asleep in the same area, and an army patrol from the POW camp at Florence nabbed three more.

The following day, the two captains who had been first out the tunnel—Quaet-Faslem and Guggenberger—were awakened by a group of Indian scouts. “And Captain Quaet-Faslem,” asked one of the scouts, “did you have a good sleep?” Quaet-Faslem was astonished to see that it was one of the same men who had captured him in Mexico eleven months earlier. With the capture of yet another pair of Germans two days later on January 8, only a half dozen POWs—two three-man teams—remained at large.

One of the teams consisted of the “three mad boatmen,” Clarus, Günther, and Utzolino. They thought they had made good use of their boat’s canvas skin on their first day of freedom by sleeping under it and staying dry in the rain. But when they reached the banks of the Gila River four days later and started to assemble their craft, they discovered the canvas had shrunk in the rain. Then, after they shortened the wooden struts to accommodate the shrunken canvas, they found that the Gila, which had looked so large and inviting on their maps, was more mud than water. As soon as they loaded their gear into it, the boat sank to the muddy bottom. “We should have known that the Gila wasn’t much of a river,” Clarus said later. “Of course, everyone who lives in Arizona knows that.”

Over the following two nights, they succeeded in floating the craft for only short stretches of the river. Finally, the trio abandoned the plan that had sustained them through so many weeks of labor back in camp. They destroyed the craft and set out on foot. A week or so later, near Gila Bend, some cowboys spotted one of them washing his underwear on the bank of an irrigation canal and called the police.

For the next fortnight the whereabouts of the final trio of escapees remained a mystery. The team consisted of Capt. Jürgen Wattenberg and two of his crewmen from U-162, Walter Kozur and Johann Kremer. Wattenberg had been the senior ranking officer in the compound and quickly built a reputation as the leading troublemaker by submitting extensive lists of complaints about camp food, recreation, and anything else he could think of. The Papago Park commander referred to him as “the No. 1 Super-Nazi of this camp.”

After his escape, Wattenberg delayed heading south and explored the area. Kozur and Kremer even ventured into Phoenix one night, visiting a bowling alley and enjoying a few beers. The trio holed up in a shallow cave on a slope in the mountains north of the camp almost within view of Papago Park. From there Kremer pulled off the most bizarre caper of the entire escape. Every few days he joined up with one of the work details sent outside Papago Park. He exchanged places with a friend who spent the night in the cave while Kremer sauntered back into the camp with the work detail. There, he gathered news and food. He would then either join a work detail to get out of camp, or send food out with a member of the detail and remain in the barracks.

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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