The Road to Interrogation

After three days in the Amsterdam jail cells, Jim Hoel and the other three B-26 Marauder survivors were taken into a room and joined by a fifth man, a British P47 pilot who had also been shot down on May 17, 1943. The five men were incarcerated there alone until six German guards entered. These guards were Luftwaffe (meaning air corps), not SS guards and they all had rifles and two of them had potato mashers, which were hand grenades with big wooden handles on them, crossed in their belts.

Jim and the others sat around the edge of the room with a table in the middle and in came an officer and he had a package in his pocket. He opened up the package and which was full of paper containers of gunpowder. The enlisted men then stood up, took off their potato mashers, went over to the table, opened them up, and put in a charge of the explosive powder (dynamite perhaps). They then put the potato mashers back in their belts. Jim was sure this was to arm them so that if they needed to use them, they would; but on the other hand, Jim thought it was to leave a good psychological impression on the Allied airmen to let them know that that the Germans were not fooling at all.

With that, they put the five prisoners in a truck and took them to the railroad station. In May of 1943, there had been little or no bomb damage done anywhere in this area. It was a beautiful spring day. They were taken into a typical European train with the long hallway all the way down one side of the train and then compartments off of that; each compartment probably held six people. Jim and the other prisoners occupied, with the guards, two of the compartments.

The train trip ran from Amsterdam, Holland, down the Rhine River to Frankfurt, Germany, and it was an absolutely beautiful, gorgeous trip. There had been no bombing of any kind along the Rhine River. From this vantage point, one wouldn't have know there was a war going on. (Much later, at the end of the War, Jim travelled this route in the other direction and the region was devastated and unrecognizable from the subsequent bombing.)

The train stopped at Cologne for some time and there seemed to be a lot of commotion in the railroad yards; a great deal of confusion; many people moving around and shouting. It turned out that the previous night, the RAF had bombed Cologne and hit it pretty hard. The men were told that one of the bombs hit the back of the cathedral at Cologne and did severe damage which the Allies claimed never said happened, but in truth, Jim believed it had been hit.

As they were waiting, the German guards who had traveled with Jim and the other prisoners, seemed to relax, undo their belts and weren't as attentive to the airmen as they had been before. Jim figured the reason for was that the Germans knew they would have no way or nowhere to go if they tried to escape now.

About that time, while the train was parked in the "marshaling" yards of Cologne, an SS officer (SS stands for Schutzstaffel which literally means 'protective squadron') came into the compartment. Jim can’t remember what his rank was, but from the minute he entered he was mad and he was mean.

He saw the relaxed way these guards were guarding the airmen and he started sailing into them. He got all of the men, Germans and Allies alike, to stand up, get out in this long train corridor and berated the whole group up one side and down the other. Jim gathered that he was just mad because of the bombing the night before and he was going to take it out on somebody.

Jim was standing next to him and hadn't had a bath for a few days; hadn't combed his hair; and hadn't shaved, so Jim didn't suppose he looked very respectable. At any rate, the SS officer was spit and polish in dress, and as he was waving his arms around, he hit Jim's jacket and suddenly stopped and stood dead still. He looked at the sleeve of his uniform that had brushed against Jim and he brushed it off just as though he had just touched a pig or something or other. And with that, he took a swing at Jim and knocked him down in the aisle.

Jim was pretty mad at this point, pent up with frustration from the crash, the loss of his friends and the last three days in captivity and he didn't know what he was going to do; but one of the guards who was standing right there put his foot out so that Jim couldn't get back anywhere near the SS officer. Jim believes that this guard knew that if Jim had approached him, the SS officer would likely have pulled out his pistol and killed Jim on the spot.

They continued down this beautiful trip until they arrived in Frankfurt, Germany, and this time were placed in the central "gulag", where again, the now five airmen were isolated; each one put in an individual cell. This place was really a jail, and it was pretty sophisticated. If they had to use the bathroom, they pulled a little cord and a guard would come to the door and escort them to the latrine, never saying a word. Nobody talked to us at all.

Eventually, Germans of all ranks began coming in one at a time to Jim’s cell and the interrogation process began.

Tomorrow – The Interrogations