They Have Their Exits

The Best Selling Escape Memoir of World War Two

Airey Neave

• Publisher: Leo Cooper
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781781594728
• eBook ISBN: 9781783379439
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

The author of Saturday at M.I.9 and former British soldier recounts his escape from Nazi captivity during World War II in this military memoir.
Wounded and captured at Calais in May 1940, Second Lieutenant Airey Neave wasted little time before attempting to escape. Always a thorn in his captors' sides, he earned his place in the "escape-proof" Colditz Castle. Undeterred, he had the distinction of being the first British officer to make a "home run," via Switzerland, Vichy France, and Spain.
Soon back in France working with the French Resistance as a member of M.I.9, rescuing Allied airmen, he found himself playing a leading role saving stranded survivors of 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem.
Neave's extraordinary memoir continues even after Germany's surrender. Having arrested the directors of the mighty Krupp empire, he served with the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal where he came into personal contact with leading Nazis, gaining a unique insight into their characters and deeds.
If ever there was a great and true story well told, it is They Have Their Exits. Reprinted once again it is a fitting memorial to a man of exceptional energy, initiative, and courage.
Praise for They Have Their Exits
"One of the best escape memoirs to emerge from the Second World War, combining the adventure story of most with a deeper examination of the mental impact of captivity and escape, and the stresses and risks all the way along the escape routes." —History of War

Chapter I

The man I had come so far to meet was waiting for me. He stood with his back to the window of his cell in the autumn sunlight. He was tall and grey and with tired eyes he watched our little group as it entered the cell. It seemed that his mouth quivered as he waited at attention until Colonel Andrus, the Governor of the Nuremberg Prison, had taken his place beside the bed.

“Wilhelm Keitel?” I said.

“Yes.”

“I am Major Neave, the officer appointed by the International Military Tribunal to serve upon you a copy of the Indictment in which you are named as Defendant.” From somewhere in the prison came the clink of keys. A door was slammed with sudden fierceness. The General Secretary of the Tribunal, the American Prison Chaplain, the Psychiatrist and a group of white-helmeted military policemen crowded the entrance to the cell. They waited eagerly to play their part in the making of History.

I watched the man gather his courage. His square head was held high and he stood there immovable and military, yet utterly woebegone. It was the hour of retribution for General-Fieldmarshal Keitel, Chief of the High Command of the German Armed Forces, member of the Secret Cabinet Council, member of the Council of Ministers for the Defence of the Reich.

Standing before him I was reminded of the words of his countryman, von Logau, describing the slow grinding of the mills of God. It was my duty to set in motion the great proceedings which were to end in his execution as a common murderer.

His field-grey tunic was shorn of decorations and badges of rank and he wore a General Officer’s grey breeches with a red stripe. Then suddenly I saw his feet. They were swathed in felt slippers many sizes too large. I wanted to laugh my head off. But at least he was not forced, as I had been, to wear clogs or stand with his feet bare on the stone floor of a Gestapo prison. In spite of his ridiculous appearance, he wore a better uniform than the one in which I tried to escape from a German prisoner of war camp. I could not suppose that Keitel would remember the incident. I was only a Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery aged 24, one of the thousands who lingered in the prisoner of war camps under his command. He had never heard of me or known that I was hungry, cold and friendless and of no account. Yet I had often seen his hard features in German newspapers and wondered about the all-powerful Keitel in those hopeless days. He was a man I had long wanted to meet. I had never thought that I should see him as my prisoner and be an official of the Court which tried him for his crimes.

Keitel did remember. In the last days of October 1945, when the Nuremberg defendants were awaiting their trial, I used to interview them in a room in the Palace of Justice. It was my task to arrange for them to be represented by German lawyers. One morning American guards brought Keitel to me to discuss his choice of counsel. I sat at a table and bade him take a chair in front of me. There was no one with us save the guard and an interpreter as my thoughts returned to that counterfeit German uniform which I had devised with such care and patience but which had suffered such an ignominious end. It was coloured with scenery paint from the camp theatre which, while of an authentic field-grey in the dim light of my prison quarters, shone a bright emerald green under the arc lamps outside. I looked more like a demon in a pantomime than an escaping prisoner. The sentries laughed when they caught me and led me off to the cells. I told the sad Field-Marshal of my theatrical attempt to escape from the camp at Colditz in Saxony. He smiled a little and studied my new service dress and Sam Browne.

“Ach so!” he said. “Yes. I remember that camp. Your comrades in Colditz were a trouble to us.”

I did not smile. As I looked at Keitel, this strange reversal of fortune brought other memories. I had heard of Mike Sinclair shot down as he tried to escape from the Castle of Colditz, of the murders at Stalag Luft III, and gallant gentlemen in green berets shot without trial. It was this man sitting before me who had carried out those brutal orders. Keitel, the toady to Hitler, the time-serving Staff Officer, the square-headed murderer. No crocodile tears for Keitel. The interview was over.

The discussion which I had with Keitel about his choice of counsel occurred some days after I gave him his copy of the indictment. On that October afternoon in 1945 when I first entered his cell my thoughts were of my own escapes. I looked at the bare white walls, the barred window high above Keitel’s head and I felt again that urge to break out. It had always been with me since my two unsuccessful and one successful attempts in twenty months of imprisonment to escape from Germany. When the door slams and the keys are quiet there is time for reflection on infinite possibilities of success. The simplest object in the cell takes on the significance of life and death. The fragment of wire, the nail painfully extracted from the wooden frame of the bed, the smallest morsel of glass or metal, all can become instruments of precision, studded with diamonds, in the hands of the escaper. The escaper is a man who must never admit defeat. He is always ready to attempt the unknown and to achieve the impossible with the minimum of aid.

Keitel never tried to escape from Nuremberg, for escape is not only a technique but a philosophy. The real escaper is more than a man equipped with compass, maps, papers, disguise and a plan. He has an inner confidence, a serenity of spirit which makes him a Pilgrim. For Keitel there was no Promised Land to seek.

Colonel Andrus grunted impatiently, and now I saw that once more Keitel’s lips were quivering. He has had his day, I thought, this broken martinet. He has only his memories. A Field-Marshal’s baton from the Fuehrer; victory in the West and Deutschland Über Alles at the Potsdamer Bahnhof; all the pomp and glory of Prussian militarism in the service of a maniac. I had my memories too, though Keitel was old enough to be my father. I remembered the big grey tourer that brought Goering to Calais in the summer of 1940, passing the British wounded in a cloud of dust. The little German under-officer at the Transit Camp at Alost in Belgium, crimson with anger and wounded pride, shouting at captured British officers as they laughed defiantly at the mildew covering their ration of coarse brown bread.

“Stop laughing, English gentlemen!” Hands on hips, he roared in emulation of the Fuehrer.

“We have no colonies!”

All the tragedy of German inferiority was in that parrot-cry. That night the British officers were made to sleep on stone floors and wait for their bread until coloured soldiers from the French Colonial Army were served.

The wheel had turned a full circle. Could I forget the Jew pushed from the pavement by the S.S. men, his hat spinning in the wind? Or the silence of great dark Polish forests as I crouched among the pine trees in the bitter night? Or the moment when the sentry turned his back before I crossed the frontier into Switzerland at the end of my third escape? Or in later years, the old Frenchwoman who refused to betray hidden British pilots to the Gestapo? Or the Dutch Resistance with whom I worked so long after the Battle of Arnhem?

Defeat had come to the scarecrow remains of Hitler’s 1,000-year Reich. Generals, admirals and politicians, they waited for me that autumn day. Perhaps there was on Keitel’s lips the well-worn cry of the defeated German.

“We are all soldiers!”

We were not the same sort of soldiers, Keitel and I. Keitel had taken the soldier’s oath of allegiance to his Imperial warlord the Kaiser and to Corporal Hitler. I had received a registered envelope from the War Office in 1935 containing a parchment which informed me that His Majesty, King George V, sent greetings to his trusted and well-beloved

Airey Neave

and appointed him to a commission as Second Lieutenant in his Territorial Army.

Keitel began his training in some Prussian military school amid the rigid discipline and efficiency of the Kaiser’s Army. I began mine among the Wiltshire Downs at an annual camp with an Infantry Battalion. The sun beat down upon my Platoon as we hid from the enemy behind the chalk hills and listened expectantly for the sound of blank cartridges. I lay on my back beside a wooden Lewis gun. God was in his heaven and the crickets chatted merrily in the dry grass. A Small Copper, a Fritillary and even a Clouded Yellow flew past me. Nearby the men were laughing happily, clustered around the lip of a chalk pit. We were not prepared for war. We never are.

Out of that blue sky an enemy appeared, with a red and black armband designed to inspire terror. Then came another, and finally, more awful than all, a real live Brigadier. He had a sour, yellowish face. He was dressed as if for manoeuvres before the First World War, with leggings and a panoply of leather cases and belts and straps. He glared in my direction as I began to rise gingerly from the turf. My ridiculous plus-fours and puttees, the only nether garments the War Office could design for infantry subalterns, were covered in chalk and bits of grass.

“Lie down there!” shouted the Brigadier.

I could see his glasses glinting angrily in the sun. In a few minutes the last blank was fired, the flags representing Hitler’s forces were pulled up and little groups began to converge upon the chalk-pit to discuss the battle. The officers stood in a circle looking apprehensive. I could see the Brigadier and the Colonel looking in my direction. The Brigadier’s glasses flashed menacingly, and the other subalterns began to take pity on me. My plight gave them courage as they exclaimed eagerly,

“What has Neave been doing?”

There is a maxim in the law that he who voluntarily submits himself to the risk of serious injury is not to recover damages. It seemed to me that my Territorial service was entirely governed by this principle. Why had I condemned myself to be tortured by this Brigadier? He began to speak, working himself slowly into a cold, terrifying anger at the conduct of my platoon. A position had been chosen that could be seen for miles around. He had seen the men in the chalk-pit with his own eyes from his imaginary headquarters. Soon his oratory took on the style of Sergeant Buzfuz. He declared that he had never seen such ridiculous positions. As for my platoonsergeant in the chalk-pit, his left flank was entirely unprotected. Why had not—

I rose to my feet.

“There was an imaginary platoon on his left flank, Sir, I posted it there.”

Even on Salisbury Plain you could have heard a pin drop. My Colonel, white in the face, stared at the ground. The Brigadier gulped.

“Now perhaps I may continue with what I had to say.”

But the spell was broken. Congratulations rained on me in the Mess and the old songs were sung far into the night. This was the manner of my preparation for the gathering storm when I was nineteen.

In those days Joachim von Ribbentrop called the British decadent. His foreign policy, conducted on this assumption, earned him the title from Hitler of the second Bismarck. According to his standards my upbringing unfitted me for any form of manly conflict whatever. I had, in the first place been educated at Eton. Eton was an institution which exercised a strong fascination for Nazi philosophers. I remember the enormous significance that an S.S. interrogator attached to this revelation when he was asking me how I had succeeded in escaping from a prison-camp in Poland. Eton to him was not merely decadent and snobbish, it was mysterious, sinister and incalculable. In Nazi teaching, Old Etonians were soft but cunning and should therefore be carefully watched and reports compiled about their activities. Their conversation was regarded as unintelligible and possibly conducted in code. They spoke in a dialect of their own, known as the Oxford accent. The wearing of top hats by young aristocrats was of more than social or class importance. It indicated something deeper, possibly connected with the science of astrology. Had not Heinrich Himmler himself ordered a department of the Reich Security Main Office to conduct research into the wearing of this headgear by Eton boys?

I looked again at Keitel’s blank, miserable Prussian face and thought of the year 1934, when it was fashionable in some quarters to declare that no one but a very stupid undergraduate would fight for his King and Country. This was an Oxford where a few brave spirits still tried to emulate the joyful irresponsibility of the ’twenties. In the ’thirties the shadows lengthened and the voice of Adolf Hitler threatened across the waters but it had little effect upon my undergraduate world. To be a Territorial was distinctly eccentric. Military service was a sort of archaic sport as ineffective as a game of croquet on a vicarage lawn and far more tiresome. “Playing at soldiers”: I have heard that phrase so often, and yet within a few short years the decadents, the fantastics and the intellectuals were fighting for their very lives.

Von Ribbentrop, who occupied a cell near Keitel, was too shaken by a fate that put him under lock and key at the hands of the degenerate Anglo-Saxon “business men” to discuss with me his former theories. And yet my Oxford career would have served as a good illustration of his basic assumptions. I did little academic work for three years and then was obliged to work feverishly at the law in order to get a degree. I made three speeches at the Oxford Union, in one of which I found myself discussing the motion of the week before. My failure to understand the merits of the fashionable intellectual notions of Socialism was regarded as a sign of mental deficiency by the dons. The climax of my “Oxford education” was a champagne party on top of my College tower when empty bottles came raining down to the grave peril of those below. The College showed great forbearance and even kindliness throughout this dismal performance. I shall always be grateful to them. From Oxford, I went to London to read for the Bar. Few cared about Hitler and even less about his ambassador, von Ribbentrop. Debutantes “came out” and went their way. It was fashionable to be almost inarticulate on any serious subject.

When the war broke out I was no longer an infantryman and my tasks in the Territorial Army were unromantic. The operation of searchlights, however bright, is not, in my opinion, a shining form of warfare. It did not conform to my desire to be in the field with Rupert Brooke and other heroes of the past. It so happened that after six months in a muddy field in Essex, I was posted to a searchlight training regiment at Hereford. I had now become a “gunner”, a very comprehensive term in the British Army. From Hereford I crossed to Boulogne in February 1940, in charge of an advance party of rugged old veterans of the first war. In France, the searchlights were treated by everyone with meagre respect. An officer of the Guards described them to me as “quite Christmassy”. I kept my counsel and waited for the underdogs to show their mettle.

The dark green helmet of Colonel Andrus, as he stood in Keitel’s cell in 1945, reflected a pin-point of sun beside the coat of arms emblazoned on its face. This coat of arms, designed by the worthy Prison Governor and his staff, comprised a key ending in a broken swastika with scales of Justice above a shattered German eagle in heraldic flames. These symbolic flames seemed a little inappropriate. Had I not seen the great black cloud of smoke which darkened the horizon over Dunkirk and billowed out across the Channel? I had come with my battery from Arras to Calais to take part in the last stand before Dunkirk. Along the straight roads past Vimy Ridge and St. Omer to a village outside Calais called Coulogne, the straggling columns of refugees choked every road. Led by their priests, they wandered like a forlorn crusade. Spies and deserters, refugees from Hitler, filled the little village square to an accompaniment of shrieks from the dying. And we, voluntary soldiers and conscripts of His Majesty, ready to die, or at any rate expecting to die, stood amid this turmoil with two anti-tank rifles to meet the might of Rommel’s panzers. Hopefully, we dragged tables and chairs from the school, placed the village hearse across the road and waited.

I sat under the chestnut tree in front of the Mairie on that hot afternoon of May, 23rd, 1940. Was it possible for human beings to have created such nightmare disorder, or was this a glimpse of the real hell? Then I thought of my expensive education and laughed, and as I dozed, I saw a room in the Temple where I had been a pupil in the Chambers of an eminent barrister, and a volume lay open at the title “The Fatal Accidents Act.”

The mortar bomb was nearly fatal. It burst on the roof of the Mairie and showered tiles and pieces of chestnut at my feet. Several followed, bursting with great accuracy among the refugees. Beside each wall were little huddled groups sheltering from the fire and above, in a clear blue sky, droned a Fieseler Storch light aeroplane as happy as a lark. I fired at it wildly with a rifle, but it flew away like a victorious partridge and disappeared behind a captured hospital train where the mortars were busy. Beside me on the pavement lay the dead body of my despatch rider, thrown from his machine to the other side of the road. I took his papers and looked down at him. He had been a cheerful man. He still had a smile that even a mortar bomb could not efface.

Towards evening we were ordered to retire from the vill...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Maps and Diagrams
• Foreword
• Author’s Note
• Chapter I
• Chapter II
• Chapter III
• Chapter IV
• Chapter V
• Chapter VI
• Chapter VII
• Chapter VIII
• Chapter IX
• Chapter X
• Chapter XI
• Chapter XII
• Chapter XIII
• Chapter XIV
• Chapter XV
• Chapter XVI