Kind: captions
Language: en
but in 1941 this didn't deter a group
we arrived Dutch prisoners who thought
they'd spotted a weak link in the German
ring of Steel several times a week
prisoners were escorted down to a small
park next to the castle for exercise
although the park was heavily guarded
the Dutch saw this as a chance to escape
they record here and discovered that
there was a manhole heavily bolted down
with steel boats and they became
convinced that this offered an
opportunity they played down there on
the exercise area a game like rugby it
was extremely violent and it resulted in
being seething masses of scrum urging
Dutch officers which was a perfect
opportunity for two of their number to
make their way into the manhole
two guys got in and one of them had the
original boats with him
a third man part of the scrum quickly
put in place a fake bugs which was
actually made of glass when the scrum
ended there was no apparent change to
the manhole the German guards noticed
nothing exercise time ended and the
Dutch marched back up to the castle
leaving two men under an apparently
completely locked manhole the men naval
officers hands la Riva and Francis
Steinmetz
waited until darkness fell and the
nearest sentries were over a hundred
metres away that's when the glass bolt
came in
they bothered to put the real bar back
because they thought they might be able
to use this particular place again and
they did twice successfully altogether
six Dutchman took the manhole route to
freedom and four made it all the way to
neutral Switzerland each time the
Germans hadn't even realized they were
missing the Dutch were masters of
ingenuity to cover their escapes but he
used dummies to answer the names of the
escaped ATS the frequent roll calls and
when the Germans did a head count though
all the heads were there the dummies
were extraordinarily lifelike and I mean
this photograph taken after a dummy had
been discovered the Dutchman holding him
is is justifiably very proud of what
he's got there because this worked on
several occasions
you