Great Escape hero’s battle for post-war payout from Nazis
AMONG all the heroes in the daring breakout from a Nazi camp that inspired the film the Great Escape, he was perhaps the greatest escaper of them all.
Lieutenant Bertram ‘Jimmy’ James survived at least 13 breakouts and the threat of execution.
So when the Government tried to deny him and his fellow survivors compensation from the Germans, he was not going to give up the fight.
The RAF pilot’s application for compensation for Nazi persecution is among newly declassified Foreign Office files released by the National Archives at Kew, South-West London.
Lt James’s petition is one of nearly 1,000 released today on the 50th anniversary of the end of an agreement between Britain and Germany to compensate British victims of the Nazis.
About 4,000 applied, many survivors of camps in occupied Guernsey. Around 1,000 applications were granted. The compensation pot was worth £1million – about £16.8million now. Lt James’s
‘Lived under threat of execution’
ordeal began on June 5, 1940, when his aircraft was shot down over the Dutch coast and he was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany.
He embarked on a number of unsuccessful escape attempts. In spring 1943, he was sent to Stalag Luft III, near Sagan, Poland, and joined work on the three famous tunnels, Tom, Dick and Harry. The following year, Harry was chosen for the 75-man dash for freedom. Almost all were recaptured and 50 were infamously shot on Hitler’s orders.
The astonishing feat was made famous by the 1963 Hollywood epic The Great Escape, although some survivors were less than impressed with the film’s loose treatment of some of the facts.
The survivors were sent to the Sachsenhausen death camp, from where Lt James escaped and was recaptured. He was moved to Dachau shortly before its liberation by the Americans in 1945.
Awarded a Military Cross, Lt James said his exploits were ‘our contribution to the war effort’. He published Moonless Night, an account of his experiences, in 1983 and died in 2008, aged 92. In his 1964 compensation claim, he wrote: ‘During most of this time [in captivity] I was under threat of execution.’
But the Foreign Office would not compensate him because his suffering did not meet the definition of Nazi persecution in the Bonn Settlement of 1954.
It said he was not held in a ‘concentration camp proper’.
But describing it as an ‘extermination’ camp, he recalled ‘ i nmates being beaten and worked to death ... at the rate of 50 a day’.
The Government relented only after a parliamentary inquiry and paid him £1,192 (£18,647 today) in 1968.
Also released by the National Archives is the account of an Austrian who sheltered two British soldiers, saving them from her German army officer husband by turning his gun on him and tying him up. He denounced her to the Gestapo.