Hello,

I have some information about German POWs in America but rather in Arizona, U-Boat men were the masterminds of many daring escape attemtps in the US and Canada throughout World War II. The Greatest ace of them all, Otto Kretschmer of U-99 which was sunk on March 14 1941, Kretschmer was later incarcerated in Camp 30, Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada.

On April 19, 1940 the keel of the Type IXC long range German submarine U-162 was launched at Deutsche Schiff-und Maschinenebau AG. On the 1st of March 1941 the near completed U-Boat was launched and on September 9th 1941 was commissioned. First based at Stettin as a part of Underseeboot 4.Flottile. After training for five months the crew prepared to make the trip from Stettin to Lorient France to join the 2nd U-Flottile. With Kapitanleutnant Jürgen Wattenberg as the commanding officer.

Jürgen Wattenberg was born on December 28, 1900 in Lübeck Germany. He entered the German Navel Academy in the class of 1921. In the early 1930’s he was Cadet Training Officer aboard the cruiser Emden during the time the German fleet embarked on a ‘Round-the-world cruise. His cadets referred to him as “The Watchmaker” because very little detail had to be absolutely correct. During a train ride in Japan, headed for a formal ceremony, his cadets all sat at stiff attention while Wattenberg stood at attention - so not to cause a wrinkle or crease in his starched whites.

At the beginning of the war Wattenberg was among the crew of the famous pocket battleship Graf Spee as a navigation officer. The Graf Spee was scuttled off Montevideo, Uruguay in December 1939. Escaping through Argentina, Wattenberg returned to Germany in May 1940. Where he was treated as a national hero in October 1940 he joined the Ubootwaffe (submarine force). He served aboard U-103 from April 1941 to July 1941 before being given command of U-162.

On Wattenberg’s first patrol (While sailing from Kiel to Lorient) he sank the 4,365ton British tanker White Crest on February 24th, 1942. On his second patrol, which started on April 4th and ended on June 8th, he sank nine ships!

Wattenberg was very proud of his new boat and its crew. So he crossed the Atlantic with great expectations. And indeed caused damage sinking four more allied ships. In one case, the Parnhyha sunk by Wattenberg in May 1942 livestock actually survived the sinking, the crew rescued them and the cook served the meat. Unlike many other U-Boats, which during their service lost men due to accidents and various other causes, U-162 did not suffer any casualties (that are known of) until the time of her loss. In total Wattenberg and the crew of the U-162 sank 82.027 GRT.

Three days after the sinking of the Parnhyha Wattenberg sank the Florence M Douglas, a 119 ton sailing vessel. Once the ship slipped under the waves, Wattenberg’s crew sighted two pigs swimming about the debris. These were quickly brought aboard and one was, like the other livestock, sent directly to the cook for the evening meal while the other was given a reprieve and named Douglas for the ship from whence he came.

When the patrol ended, Wattenberg handed the pig over to his Flotillenchef as a gift, and so Douglas became yet another casualty of war - in the kitchen pot.

On July 7th 1942 U-162 departed Lorient on what would become it’s last voyage.

During his Caribbean patrol, Wattenberg even had a favorite spot off the island Barbuda where he would flood down and let U-162 lie on the sandy bottom at about 180 feet during the day where repairs could be made and his men could rest before they went hunting at night.

But on September 3rd 1942 Wattenberg’s dreams were shattered. His soundman picked up the propeller noise of an approaching ship. Jürgen brought the boat to periscope depth and he saw a lone British destroyer and judging by the direction from which he was coming, Wattenberg concluded that this a replacement destroyer coming from England with a green crew. He fired two torpedoes at this ‘lone’ destroyer but the torpedo broached, giving the destroyer ample time to change course and avoid the torpedo, but now the location of U-162 was known.

As fate would have it, this was not one lone destroyer with an untested crew coming from England- this was a group of three destroyers returning from dropping off a convoy and certainly were not green! These were the battle hardened destroyers HMS Pathfinder, HMS Quentin and HMS Vimy. They wasted no time in giving U-162 a tremendous beating. It didn’t take long for Wattenberg to realize that his stricken submarine was to badly damaged to survive. He knew that if he did not surface him and his entire crew would die. He ordered the submarine to surface and all the hands to abandon ship. Only two men were lost, the remainder taken prisoner. After a warm shower and new British clothes the 49 survivors were taken into custody and confined first at Port of Spain, Trinidad, before being transferred to American custody. They were flown from Trinidad to Miami Florida, then went by train from Miami to Washington, D.C. After a brief stay in Fort Meade, Wattenberg, his officers, and his men were interrogated at Fort Hunt, Virginia. The officers and a lot of the crew of U-162 were then sent to Crossville, Tennessee where Wattenberg became camp spokesman.

That would have been the end of the war for most men, but Wattenberg was not going to just sit out the war in a allied POW camp.

Wattenberg soon began to make trouble with his American captors. There was one significant incident; In February 1943, during a routine “property check” in which the guards searched prisoners quarters for contraband and signs of escape plots, he, and a group of officers refused to depart the recreation field, as was the normal practice. Wattenberg refused to relay the guards orders because he hoped to provoke an uprising to embarrass his captors.

As spokesman, Wattenberg considered any acts of cooperation by his subordinates to be treason. According to camp authorities reports, he demanded that prisoners let him censor their letters, and he threatened collaborators with capital punishment. He also encouraged fellow prisoners to “pester” their guards by taunting them and running laps around the stockade perimeter to confuse them. Such behavior exhausted the patience of Crossville’s authorities, who began to request for his transfer as early as July 1943. Finally, in January 1944, he departed Crossville for Papago Park, Arizona.


As soon as he arrived at the camp, Wattenberg was put into compound A-1. It was a special place established for hard core troublemakers. A lot of them were his crewmembers from U-162. He was considered a “Super Nazi” because he had caused trouble everywhere he was sent. True to his reputation as a troublemaker, he would try to figure out a for his surviving crew and other U-Boat men to escape.

Papago Park POW camp was rich with fanatics. In one case a prisoner named Werner Drechsler was beaten and hung by fellow crewmen from the submarine he had served on, the U-118. All five of his murderers were hanged themselves by U.S. authorities after the war. One could consider Papago Park in a relative state of siege because of riots, murders and escapes. The Americans may have owned the camp but the Wattenberg and the Germans ran it.

In early 1944 it was decided to consolidate 6,286 navy men into four camps: Camp Blanding, Florida; Camp McCain Mississippi; Camp Beale, California and Papago Park Arizona.

Lt. Berndt von Walther und Croneck, a crewman of the U-162 was among eight others who were loyal Germans but anti-Nazis that were transferred to Camp Blanding, Florida for their protection. Walther and his comrades from Papago Park, however, were shocked and stunned by the reception they received at the new camp to which they were assigned. “I had a terrible time there,” Walther later said. “The camp was full of reds, criminals and traitors. I slept each night with a large stick by my bed, fearing for my life. We adamantly refused to go into the compound and eventually persuaded the commanding officer to erect a ‘dead line’ separating us from the ‘anti-Nazis’ so-called”

While a POW Wattenberg was promoted to the rank of Kapitan Zur See on April 1st 1943.

Along with the high-ranking Wattenberg the captains and officers of other German submarines would also later figure prominently in the Papago Park great escape: Kapitanleutnant Friedrich Guggenberger U-513, Hermann F. Kottmann commander of U-203 and Hans Ferdinand Johannsen U-569, both were captured when their U-Boats were sunk off of Newfoundland. U-203 on April 25 and U-569 on May 22, 1943. Kottmann became captain of U-203 after the former commander died in a unique accident in September 1942. The commander (Kapitanleutnant Rolf Mützelburg) fell to his death when attempting a dive off the tower of the submarine into the ocean, somehow the boat moved and he hit the saddle tank being badly wounded. He died the next day. After the sub returned to port Kottmann was put in control.

U-595, operating out of Brest in Brittany, had entered the Mediterranean, but was bombed and immobilized by British aircraft. Ultimately running aground on shoals about seventy miles northwest of Oran, Algeria and scuttled. The crew escaped to the shore. Shortly afterwards the entire crew was captured by an American tank and its accompanying GI’s. The tank unit had the peculiar distinction of being the first ground unit to capture the crew of an enemy submarine. They were driven to Oran for interrogation then loaded onto USAT Brazil for transport to the United States. There was more questioning at Fort Hunt. Capt. Jürgen Quaet-Faslem and several of his officers would later join Wattenberg and his U-162 people at Papago Park and in their Great escape.

The 1929 Geneva Convention states: that escape is legal, unlike a civilian criminal who is under legal and moral obligation to serve out a sentence in which society has deemed suitable, a captive soldier on the other hand is not a criminal-since he was acting as an instrument of his country’s martial policies-and is under no legal obligation to remain incarcerated. More then that, the captured soldier, regardless of nationality, (just as American, British, Canadian and other allied servicemen did in German custody) is charged by his oath of service to resist his captors and to escape at every opportunity.

The German government did not neglect to inform its captive soldiers in allied camps of these facts, both through the offices of the International Red Cross and the American War Department in a memorandum addressed to the Germans “German captives are reminded to keep physically strong, to make themselves fully familiar with their rights, and to take every opportunity to escape.‘ Some prisoners, as a result, did exactly as ordered one was Jürgen Wattenberg.

Wattenberg took his duty very seriously. But the Papago Park prisoner of war camp was so isolated in the desert that the camp authorities considered escape all but impossible. They were certain that the rocky, caliche ground was too hard for any attempts at escape by tunneling out. But that’s exactly what the Germans did.

The three perpetrators had made a trial run all the way from the POW camp, 130 miles, to the Mexican border. They were more then 40 miles into Mexico when they gave themselves up and were returned to the camp with all the information required later for the mass escape. Although Mexico declared war on Germany on May 28, 1942 several German POWs believed they could escape to Mexico then easily make their way to South America then back to Europe. Digging began in sometime in September 1944. Prior to the digging, the officers had had scoured the camp grounds for two areas which would be blind spots, places where the guards couldn’t readily see them. The entrance and exit to the tunnel were out of view of the two guard towers on the east side of the compound.

Quaet-Faslem talked with Colonel Will Holden and asked for permission to create a volleyball courtyard. innocently obliging, Holden provided them with digging tools. From that point on two men were digging at all times during the night hours. They located the tunnel entrance behind the camp bathhouse. Leutnant Zur See Walter Kozur built two shallow wooden boxes to hide the entrance. He planted tufts of grass and watered them regularly, so soon the grass filled the boxes. When they were fitted over the entrance, it was completely hidden. But the Germans could only usually dig a few inches or a foot at the most because of the rocky soil.

Civilian and merchant marine clothing was made from the limited supplies in the camp by the tailors. Some of the prisoners stole electric wire, sockets, and light bulbs to light the tunnel. For electric power they simply plugged the tunnel wire into the bathhouse socket.

A four wheeled cart was rigged up to travel along tracks to take the dirt out. Now a big problem arose, how to get rid of the tunnel dirt. Quaet-Faslem talked to Holden, who gave them permission to level off the sports area for the volleyball court. The camp engineer agreed to truck in some extra dirt to help. Every day the Germans would work to level the area, leaving a large pile of dirt, but every night they would secretly spread it around the compound. Then at midnight, new dirt was hauled out from the tunnel and was formed to be the same size and shape as the other pile. American guards got used to seeing a pile of dirt sitting on what they thought would become a volleyball court. They never realized that it was a different pile everyday. Also the men stuffed the dirt in their pant pockets which had holes in the bottom, then shuffled the dirt out along the ground as they walked about the compound. In addition , they flushed a huge amount of dirt down the toilets. They labeled their escape route “Der Faustball tunnel” (The Volleyball Tunnel).

They dug the 178 foot tunnel with a diameter of 3 feet. The tunnel went 8 to 14 feet below the surface, under the two prison camp fences, a drainage ditch and a road. The exit was near a power pole in a clump of bush about 15 feet from the Cross Cut Canal. To disguise their plans, the men built a square box, filled it with dirt and planted native weeds in it for the lid to cover the exit. When the lid was on the tunnel exit, the area looked like undisturbed desert. Wattenberg ordered the men in the adjutant compound to throw a noisy party the evening of December 23, 1944. They weren’t told why, but many of them guessed and silently wished their comrades luck. Besides, they were happy to celebrate the good news of Germany’s final offensive, The Battle of the Bulge. On the evening of December 23, 1944 beginning at about 9:00pm, prisoners started crawling out along the tunnel in teams of two or three men. Friedrich Guggenberger was in a very awkward and embarrassing position. His clothing ripped, dirty and wet with sweat. He was gasping for breath as the air was stale.

Guggenberger was exhausted because of crawling on his stomach, hands and knees for 178 feet. He was worried he might stumble upon a diamond back rattlesnake, coiled to strike. Guggenberger had made an earlier attempt himself. On February 12 1944 he, along with four others escaped from Papago Park. Guggenberger was later picked up in Tucson, Arizona. In the tunnel close behind Guggenberger was Jürgen Quaet-Faslem, as the men were traveling together in pairs. The next person to emerge from the “Faustball Tunnel” was Wattenberg. With him were Johann Kremer and Walter Kozur, both held the rank of Leutnant Zur See and were members of his U-162 crew.

They crawled through the dark tunnel together and slipped into the cold waist-deep canal. They were the fifth of ten teams to leave the tunnel that night. They smiled at each other as they heard the sounds of the riot being raised on their behalf in the NCOs compound, diverting the guards attention elsewhere. Rising silently from the water, they took a generous swig from their schnapps, homemade hooch from distilled potatoes and citrus.

In the next compound their comrades sang, broke beer bottles, waved flags, and fought amongst themselves, trying to make the biggest possible racket they could. Each escapee carried extra clothing, food, forged papers, cigarettes and medical supplies, plus anything else they had been able to save up in the pass several months. Some were carrying packs of nearly 100 pounds. Wattenberg had managed to procure the names and addresses of people in Mexico who might help them get back to Germany from his earlier reconnaissance.

Three men had a very unusual but daring plan. The idea was to float down the Cross Cut Canal, then to the Salt river, to the Gila River and on to the Colorado River which would take them to Mexico. The three of the men had constructed a canoe which could be taken apart and carried in three pieces. They had blocked up the drains in the shower room to test it for water tightness. These three prisoners were clearly daring and inventive but coming from wet Northern European climates, It never occurred to the Germans that in dry Arizona a blue line marked “river” on a map might be filled with water occasionally. The three men with the canoe were disappointed to find the Salt River bed merely a mud bog from recent rains. Not to be discouraged, they carried their canoe pieces twenty miles to the confluence with the Gila river, only to find a series of large puddles. They sat on the river bank, put their heads in their hands and cried out their frustration.

By 2:30 a.m., December 24, all twelve officers and thirteen enlisted German submarine men were on their way. Their efforts have been described as the largest POW escape in the United States. The POW camp’s security officer, the late Army Maj. Cecil Parshall, insisted in 1978 that 60 Germans actually escaped that night. He stated that the only reason 25 prisoners were counted as escapees was because that’s how many were caught and returned to the camp. The rest were ignored in a government cover-up. Wattenberg himself, as well as other German prisoners that where in the Papago Park POW camp have said only 25 escaped.

Wattenberg stated later that few of the men had high hopes of actually escaping from the United States and returning to Germany. But once they conceived of the tunnel plan, they were enthusiastic about trying it anyway. Although the men left in the wee hours of Christmas Eve, the camp officials were blissfully unaware of anything amiss until the escapees began to show up that evening.


The first to return was an enlisted man, Herbert Fuchs, who decided he had been cold, wet and hungry long enough by Christmas evening. Thinking about his dry, warm bed and hot meal that the men in the prison camp were enjoying, he decided his attempt at freedom had come to an end. The 22-year old U-Boat crewman hitched a ride on East Van Buren Street and asked the driver to take him to the sheriff’s office where he surrendered. Much to the surprise of Colonel William A. Holden, and the rest of the officers at the camp, the sheriff called and told them he had a prisoner who wanted to return to the camp.

Shortly after the sheriff’s call, a Tempe woman called in to tell them two prisoners had knocked on her door and surrendered to her. The phone rang again, this time a Tempe man who said he had two escaped prisoners to be picked up.

The highest ranking officer, Jürgen Wattenberg and two of his U-Boat crewmen, Walter Kozur and Johann Kremer hurriedly settled their gear on their backs and set off north-west through the desert. By 2:00 a.m. they huddled, dripping and cold in a citrus grove where they ate their breakfast. After they settled down to try to sleep in the continuing drizzle. They found a abandoned shack by sunrise the next morning and spent the day taking turns sleeping and guarding. By evening Kremer remarked, “it’s Christmas Eve.” He took out his harmonica and softly played, Stille Nacht- “Silent night.”

By evening they enjoyed a dinner of canned meat and milk, dried bread crumbs, and chocolate bars hoarded from the daily rations in the camp. They talked of their loved ones, and of their other comrades. They spoke of how proud they were of their escape and how well it had gone so far. Then sat in silence. By dawn they had reached an area that today would be along Stanford Drive and between 32nd and 44th streets of Phoenix. They hid out in the gullies, concealed throughout the day and exploring the mountains to the north after dark. The American guards back at the POW camp were not having a merry Christmas at all. They had been called back from holiday leave to beef up the guard at the camp, certainly a rather late effort. In addition, personnel at the Ninth Service Command, Fort Douglas, Utah; the Provost Marshal General’s office in Washington, D.C.; the FBI and other government agencies were arriving for intensive investigation.



Several days passed before American Army PFC Lawrence Jorgenson , on a search detail, discovered the camouflaged escape hatch and solved the mystery of how the POWs escaped. Wattenberg was obviously a very cleaver, resourceful and above all daring young man. Instead of heading for Mexico he went north into the mountains with his two comrades.

In their reconnaissance of the area, the three German escapees finally found a jagged channel that numerous cloudbursts and gully washers had carved into the slope near the Squaw Peak area. One of the many eroded alcoves had an overhang of six or seven feet. Desert weeds on top of the ravine helped to conceal the shallow cave. They rolled a few large boulders across the opening. Then they cut brush and propped it in front of the cave to obscure their activities. It was an adventure for them, “We will live the way the American Indians do” Wattenberg remarked. Later they even took Indian names from books they read as children. Kremer scooped out a pit for a fire and their first pot of coffee was brewing by sunrise.

For the next two nights Wattenberg and his two men scouted their environs. On the second night they went to the area east of the Arizona Biltmore resort. Creeping through a citrus grove they heard voices and a dog began to bark. They stopped and crouched low. Finding an irrigation pipe, they filled their canteens, returning to their cave with citrus and fresh water.

By the end of the first week of January, 1945, Wattenberg, Kozur and Kremer resolved to find out what had happened to their fellow escapers. Kremer and Kozur slipped into Phoenix at nightfall. As the eastern sky was turning pink the two men returned with their bounty, one sack full of fruit and another full of newspapers. They also hoped to find a map but had no luck.

The headlines screamed “WHOLESALE NAZI ESCAPE SCREENS BIG SHOT’S FLIGHT”. Wattenberg was amused at being labeled a “Big shot” previous to this his description had been “the chief troublemaker.”

Another Phoenix newspaper read, “TWO NAZI’S APRHENDED AT MEXICAN BORDER” referring to the capture and near shooting of Reinhard Mark and Heinrich Palmer south of Sells, Arizona before they were rescued by American authorities.

The day after the escape six prisoners were picked up only a few miles from the camp. Two weeks after the escape, January 6th 1945, Friedrich Guttenberger and Jürgen Quaet-Faslem were only miles from potential freedom. The two were tired and hungry but in high spirits. A roadside sign read “Mexico 10 Miles” “We will take a short nap, for soon we will be free,” Quaet-Faslem shouted joyfully. It must have been a shock to wake up in handcuffs! They were spotted by an Arizona Border Patrolman sleeping in the ditch.

By the end of their month-long outing, Wattenberg and his two men became bolder. Prior to the escape, Wattenberg had informed one of the men who was not in the escape party of his intention to remain in the mountains to the north until he could manage to escape further. He had drawn a sketch of the landscape and marked it an area for a possible food drop when the group was outside the camp on a work detail. On January 18 1945, Wattenberg gave Kremer a note thanking their comrades for the food. After dark, Kremer went to the agreed-upon place, an abandoned, dismantled vehicle. He left the note and returned with lifesaving fruit and several packs of cigarettes. Their remaining food was by now depleted.

Kremer decided on an extraordinary bold plan. He decided to sneak back into the camp by infiltrating one of the work details. There he could get the news of the other escapers, as well as procure more food before slipping back out from another work detail the next day. But unfortunately for them there was a surprise inspection on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 23, Kremer was discovered and caught. But he had been in the camp undetected for three days.

The next day Walter Kozur came down from the cave in the hill and was met by three soldiers. Soon Wattenberg realized that he, alone, was still free.

As Saturday dawned, Wattenberg decided that he would go into Phoenix and perhaps get a job as a dishwasher. He also considered hopping a freight train, hoping to arrive at some faraway location that hadn’t heard of the POW escape; perhaps a farm where he might get a job. He again looked through the newspapers from which he clipped articles about the escape. His attention was drawn to some church notices. Perhaps he could get help from a Catholic priest, while being protected by the privacy of confession. He cut out the section of church addresses and folded them neatly, adding them to the collection of clippings in his rucksack.

After sundown he walked for two hours into Phoenix to East Van Buren. No one seemed to notice him as the cars moved along the busy thoroughfare. The red, white and blue lights from casinos and hotels of Phoenix’s nightlife amazed Wattenberg. He passed numerous motels where Americans in uniform were spending the weekend on passes. He ducked his head and quickly passed the crowds of soldiers.

Walking into the central business district of Phoenix, Wattenberg stepped into a Chinese kitchen restaurant. In a voice as devoid of accent as he could manage, he ordered noodle soup with beef, with a beverage familiar to a German: beer. Wattenberg then went to several small hotels and asked about a room for the night. They were all full. He entered the Hotel Adams. The front desk clerk told him that they were all full for the night, but a room would probably be open up in the morning after checkout. Wattenberg, tired and discouraged, noticed a vacant chair in the lobby. He sank into the soft cousins and opened a newspaper which had been discarded. Within minutes he was sleeping soundly.

About an hour later, the escapee awoke and noticed that the bellhop was watching him with more passing interest. Wattenberg suddenly wondered if his picture had appeared in the newspapers. He also felt very conscious of his U.S. Army issue khaki trousers dyed blue. He decided to leave. The bellhop, Ken Vance, reported later that Wattenberg left the hotel at 1:30a.m., Sunday, January 28 1945.

Wattenberg left the Hotel Adams and headed north. At central and Van Buren, he stopped Clarence V. Cherry, a City of Phoenix street foreman, and, in heavily accented English, asked for directions to the railroad station.

“I need to know where East Van Buren street is? The Forman looked very puzzled, “this is East Van Buren Street…your standing right in the middle of it!”

By this time, perhaps he was willing to be caught, but just didn’t want to surrender. When Wattenberg turned to walk on down the street, Cherry caught the attention of Sgt. Gilbert Brady of the Phoenix Police Department. He told the policeman that a tall man with light hair in a yellow checkered shirt had just spoken to him in a heavy German accent. Brady caught up with Wattenberg at Third Avenue and Van Buren.

“Sir, could I see your Selective Service registration?” the police officer asked.

“I left it as home.”

“Where is home?” Brady asked.

“I am a rancher in town for the weekend.” Jürgen said

“You may be a rancher but I want to know where your from?” Brady asked

“Why, can’t you tell that I’m from Glendale?”

“Glendale, Arizona, or Glendale California?” Brady asked again

“Glendale-uh, Glendale, back east,” Wattenberg replied.

“You’ll have to come with me to the police station,” Brady ordered Then offered his fugitive a cigarette.

Wattenberg lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and exhaled with force and resignation. “The game’s up and I lost,” he admitted quietly. At the police station the police found that Wattenberg had with him 50 cents in coins, a blank notebook, and several newspaper clippings-some about the escape, others of restaurant and nightclub advertisements, and the Saturday directory of churches.

When Wattenberg was returned to the Papago POW camp he was taken to the hospital where he was served a Sunday dinner of beef broth, roasted chicken, vegetables and ice cream. It had to last him awhile, since his punishment for escape was bread and water rations for fourteen days.

He had spent Christmas, his birthday and New Years on the run in the hills around Phoenix. In February, 1946 Wattenberg was transferred to Camp Shanks, and from there back to Germany near Münster before being released. On June 16, 1946, recently decommissioned Kapitan Zur See Jürgen Wattenberg returned to his hometown on the Baltic Sea. He later became manager of the Bavaria & St.Pauli Brewery. Wattenberg passed away on November 27, 1995 at the age of ninety-four.

Note: not all of the prisoners of these vessels were interned at Papago Park.
List of (Known) U-162 crew members that became Prisoners of War
Bruno Bischoff
Lothar Bohm
Berndt Croneck
Paul Eisebraun
Paul-Kurt FrÖhlich
Seppl Gerstner MtrGfr
Heinrich Griesse BtsMt
Helmut Grosse MaschGfr
Rolf Heineck MaschGfr
Paul Hetzeit MtrGfr
Walter Holz
August llg
Walter Jager
Georg Kittle
Helmut Klingler
Walter Kozur
Johann Kremer
Wolfgang Mizgaslski
Peter Oldhaber
Brinkfried Pawlowski
Gunter Petzold
Helmut Rebbe
Johann Schmidt
Hans Schobel
Rudolf Schulze
Heinz Schuttle
Heinz Simon
Rudolf Smyzek
Ernst Waldau
Jürgen Wattenberg
Gunther Westphal

* Walter Jager was shot dead while trying to escape from Camp Roswell in New Mexico on Febuary 13th 1943.

**Wolfgang Mizgaslski also served aboard U-99, commanded by Otto Kretschmer the top U-Boat ace, who was once a cadet of Wattenberg.

Otto Kretschmer's escape was extraordinary; he would escape by tunnel but if it weren’t for the love of a garden by another POW he may have gotten away. Kretschmer sat waiting in the tunnel for the right moment to go under the wire. Then moments before Kretschmer was to surface and make his getaway, another POW, not aware of the tunnel, went out behind his barracks in search of some topsoil for his garden.

The man dug while he talked to some friends. When his shovel broke through the soil, he suddenly found himself shoulder deep in the ground. The prisoner had broken through into the tunnel and Kretschmer’s escape was over.

He was to rendezvous with a German submarine, U-563 at Pointe Maisonnette, New Brunswick. He later sent a lone man, Kapitanleutnant Wolfgang Heydaof U-434, who had been captured on 18 Dec, 1941 in the North Atlantic north of Madeira, Portugal, to meet the waiting U-boat but Heyda was captured by Canadian soldiers near the beach. If he had eluded them for just a few hours more he would have been rescued.

The two crewmembers who did not survive the sinking of U-162 were Ernst Dettmer and Edgar Stiewaldt.

Several German Prisoners of war, including a fair amount Kreigsmarine, and as far as I know even several crewmembers of the Battleship Bismarck were interned in Camp 132 and Camp 133 in Lethbridge and Medicine Hat Alberta Canada, it may be possible that some of these German prisoners traveled by train through my hometown in Saskatchewan.



Jackie wrote:

> Hello,
> I am an independent documentary filmmaker in the Marquette,
> Michigan area. My co-producer and I recently finished producing
> a documentary film on 1,000 German POWs that were held captive
> in this area during WWII. The title is "The Enemy In Our
> Midst." We have interviews with two former POWs that currently
> live in the U.S. as well as a former POW camp guard, and the
> wife of a former camp commander. We feel the film really brings
> out a closer, more personal look at such an interesting time in
> history. Just thought I'd pass along the information in case
> anyone is interested. If you'd like more information, please
> feel free to email me or click on the links below. Thank you,
> Jackie
> jackiechandon@hotmail.com
>
> [www.nmu.edu]
> [www.nmu.edu]