Dan Snow's History Hit - The Real Great Escape with Commander Steve Foster

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

Commander Steve Foster relates the extraordinary story of one of the most audacious escape attempts of the Second World War.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Now, there's a lot of new listeners out there. We've received millions more listens, even since the lockdown began at the beginning of 2020. And so nearly all of you will not have heard this podcast. This is one of the absolute gems from our back catalogue, a little piece of gold that I'm rescuing from the past. This is a podcast with Commander Steve Foster. He discovered, after his father died, he discovered that his father, Sergeant Frederick Foster, was part of one of the most remarkable escape attempts in the whole of the Second World War. Together with his friend, Lieutenant Corporal John Anthony Coulthard, the two of them travelled across Europe, went for a beer in the Munich Beer Hall,

which Hitler once attempted his putsch, and got, well, I won't ruin it, but got, you know, so close to the Swiss border that you're not actually going to believe it. You're going to listen to this podcast. It's very emotional. This podcast actually led to tangible things in the real world. Steve got a book contract out of this podcast, and I'm so proud that we were able here at History Hit to give this story the prominence and attention it deserves. If you want to listen to other back episodes of this podcast, I can really advise you do that.

And the place to do that is at History Hit TV, the new digital history channel we've set up, the best in the world, no aliens. You're going to love it. Full of history, proper history. If you go to historyhit.tv, use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free, and then you get a second month for just one pound, euro, or dollar.

So go and do that. Join the revolution. In the meantime, here is Steve Foster. Enjoy. What did you know about your dad's wartime service? I knew very little, really. I knew that he'd served in the war and that he had fought in Norway and been wounded and captured in Norway and then went to Poland and was a prisoner of war there for five years.

And I knew he had escaped once, and that's all I knew. And then what started you off on this extraordinary adventure? Well, right of passage of all retirees, I decided when I retired to trace my family tree. And I remembered there was a suitcase in the loft which had all of my father's papers in it. And I took it down and started to read. And I very quickly got diverted from family tree issues onto this amazing story that came out of letters that I found in the suitcase. We've got the suitcase here in front of me. Describe what it looks like. Was it wartime or slightly post-war? I would say slightly post-war, battered cardboard pretending it's leather suitcase. Typical of the

1940s, I guess. And it's absolutely stuffed with papers and documents. So what did you find in there? Well, Dad was a clerk by trade, so he was a prolific typer and also collector. But what I found was a series of letters. The one that attracted me was one from him to military intelligence, typed in 1945, describing an escape he and his good friend made from Poland all the way to the Swiss border. And I read with incredulity. So let's just start again. They managed to escape from northern Poland to the Swiss border. I mean, this is an escape story up there with any in World War II. It appeared to be, and they took their time. They decided that it would do it right.

His friend was an Oxford linguist, and they decided that he would teach dad German for 18 months so that they could escape as German businessmen. And after having worked, it was a working camp, Coulthard, his friend, Lance Corporal Anthony Coulthard, taught my father German for three hours every night for 18 months. Let's go back to the beginning here. So let's talk about these two remarkable men. Let's start with Coulthard first. What was his background? He was an academic. He came from a middle class family. He went to private school in Southampton, came over to the sixth school, and he went up to Oxford University and gained a degree in modern languages. He got a first, and he did so well there, he got a scholarship to continue his master's degree in Germany, in pre-war Germany, which is where he was between 1937 and 1939. Then he signed up, but didn't become an officer, oddly, given that that sort of background you

expect a man to have if he was going to the officer corps. Correct. He refused a commission. He joined the infantry as a private. They saw the potential, offered him a commission. He said no. And so I guess to use his linguistic skills, he was transferred to what was to become the intelligence corps.

And he was transferred to France to be part of the British expeditionary force there as a lance corporal. And his war wasn't very long, was it? It wasn't. He was captured almost within days of arriving in France. He was on an intelligence gathering mission on a motorcycle in Amiens, northern France. The German blitzkrieg had started, and he motorcycled straight into a German motorcycle patrol, superior in numbers. Right, so that's Coulthard in a prison of all camp in what is today Poland. What about your dad? Dad was a territorial. He volunteered six months before

the war started, and by the time his battalion went to Norway, which is where he fought, he was a sergeant, an infantry sergeant. The background to the fighting in Norway was that the British government responded to a Norwegian plea for help. The Germans were advancing north, and they sent a territorial battalion to try and hold a German armoured division, and he was wounded and captured in the fighting. And so they meet, and they strike up, well, possibly an unlikely friendship.

Certainly, very unlikely. I would think that in normal life they would never have met. One was from the Midlands, one from the south. Father had left school at 14, was a solicitor's clerk, and Anthony Coulthard was an academic who was busy getting his master's degree in Germany at the time. How did it work in these camps? How did they decide

to escape together and why were they chosen by the rest of the prisoners to support them and help them get away? Well unlike the films it was a there were only soldiers in the camp there were no officers but the hierarchy was much the same as in the films there was an escape committee and it was decided they had a good chance with Coulthard's linguistic skills, providing they'd put the work in to get the preparations right, they decided it could work. So Coulthard, as a linguist, was able to choose a mate to go along with him. They went and pitched it to the committee. The committee said, yep, you guys, you're top of the list.

We're going to try and help you escape. Probably a little more than that. I think most of the inmates of Stalag 28, it was a work camp, they were on starvation rations, probably didn't want to escape and had given in to the circumstance and the situation. But these two had decided they were going to do it. And so their eagerness to escape brought them together, I think. Coulthard had to teach your dad German, though.

He did. There was a strange anecdote to this, that my father left school at 14 and certainly would never have been taught German at school and when I was on holiday with him in Germany as a boy it never registered to me as he spoke to the Germans that he could speak perfect German. It's only after I discovered the story I realised why and so for 18 months, three hours a night after they had worked, Cotard taught my father German. And we've actually remarkably got some pictures here of them in the prisoner of war camp, which is weird.

And why did the Germans let them have cameras? Well, it is an amazing situation, really. The Germans, as the reputation suggests, were hard masters and hard enemy. But for some reason, they allowed the prisoners in the prisoner of war camp to have a canteen. They allowed them Red Cross food parcels. They allowed them to use German money to have a camp magazine. And they allowed them photographs. And the photographs, I think, would have probably been propaganda

because each one of them had a stamp on the back with a Stalag Kipruft stamp, meaning that it had been formally authorised by the camp. And it was probably a means of them saying, when they went back with the letters, that we're looking after the English well. So these photographs could be sent back to families via the Red Cross. Look, we're all doing fine. Encourage the rest of your brothers and nephews and things to surrender, because you'll all have a nice life in the German camp.

It could probably well be that they look very relaxed in the photographs. They do don't they it's amazing is this a German that they're posing with here as well and there's one yeah so it looks not the kind of absolute Spartan regime that you might think. No I think the food rations were actually quite small and they were supplemented by red cross parcels but as relaxed as they look, it was a work camp and so all this activity would have gone on, this relaxed activity, probably at the weekend or after work. And now your dad here looks like he's...

What's he up to in this photograph here? The plan for the escape was that while Cotard taught Dad German, Dad would do all the forging and the administrative work of trying to get the escape organized. And for any escape to work, they had to have the necessary paperwork. And one of the key bits of paper they needed was a piece of paper called an Ausweis, which is a German word for passport, basically. And they had to forge that. And they had to forge two letters of authority. They had to forge that, and they had to forge two letters of authority, and they decided they were going to escape as Siemens representatives, and they had to have a letter saying that they were representatives of the firm Siemens, and they had authority to travel right across Europe.

Because Siemens at that time had factories right across Europe, it would have been quite normal for staff to travel around see how it was all going I guess so they were masquerading as um as salesmen and marketing people and they were off to one of the Swiss families factories to see how things were there of course they were just off to Switzerland mate yeah so he managed to get a job on the camp newsletter or something he did the only way that the forging could go ahead is that they had to have a German typewriter because the keystrokes and the keyboard was totally different with the various German accents and so they couldn't do it on a British typewriter and so he had to somehow get the use of a German typewriter and the camp magazine had that very thing and so he got himself to the position of editor of the camp magazine. Right good on him so the has come. What date are we at now? We're up to August 1942 now. Their material preparations are ready.

They've got their paperwork. They've bribed guards for travellers' coupons. They've managed to get into the camp two civilian suits, two hats, shirts, ties and underwear and shoes. And this was all supplied by poles from the outside the wire in exchange for precious Red Cross parcels. Hence the time, the 18 months preparation time it took to get all of this stuff arranged and hidden within the camp.

And now what's very special about this? We don't want to ruin the end of this story. What's very special about this? You actually have incredibly detailed letters from your dad, which we're looking at here. What I love about about it he's actually drawn a sketch map as well of the escape and when you found this you must have just been electrified it's extraordinary it is and dad was a good typo and there's a 12 page type letter describing the escape from beginning to end and in the middle of it is actually a diagram, a handwritten diagram that

Dad had produced for the letter, showing their escape route. And it's all there. As always, guys, I'm going to put this on Facebook, so you'll be able to see some photographs of this. If you want to go down to know his history on Facebook, put it on the Instagram as well. History Hit. It's worth seeing some of these amazing photographs and maps as well. So you can see from this map that it's very detailed. He sort of threw that building and round the side of the parcel store and then into the stables. Why this particular route?

It was a stealth route, basically. They decided on a route that would give them a place to get changed so they could get into their civilian clothes and then get out of a pre-cut hole in the wire, which had been done some days before, which was out of sight of the guard tyres. And so the plan was that Cotard, who was on a working party, Dad by now was working in the Stalag headquarters,

would join him by masquerading as being poorly, and he didn't go to work, he went to sick parade, and he fell in with Dad for the afternoon work party to the Stalag headquarters. When they got in with Dad for the afternoon work party to the Stally headquarters. When they got in there, when the coast was clear, out the back, across some waste ground and into a stables where they had pre-placed all of their escape clothing. They didn't put them on yet. They put them in bags and they had to walk past the camp sergeant major's house, which unfortunately for them, to their horror, they found that he was in the garden with his wife, and so they masqueraded that they were on a work party, skirmishing leaves off the ground, which the German sergeant major appeared to agree with,

and nodded, walked past his house and into a second stable, where they changed into their escape clothes, jumped out of a top window, brushed themselves down, and then walked straight past the German barracks and round the corner to the road to the station in Torren. Is this now in broad daylight? All in broad daylight. And if you read Dad's letters, various German soldiers marched past and gave the dreaded Heil Hitler, and they had to return the Heil Hitler salute. OK, so they get to the station, and what happens then? Well, this would be the first test, really, of all of their organisation. Well, Dad read the, pretended to read the timetable, which they'd memorised now and they knew.

They ordered tickets to the next big town to the west, to Poznan, for the two o'clock train to Poznan. Cotard went up to the counter, ordered them, and was given the two tickets, and he handed over the money. And it was as simple as that, and they waited on the station. And let's be clear about the money. So how did they get the money? Did the whole camp have a sort of whip round, or certain jobs paid within the camp? It seems unlikely now, but they did have the use of German money within the camp. We know that the magazine cost 10 pfennigs, and the escape committee had a build-up of German

money that they kept for the escape committee to use, and they would have been given that money by the escape committee. Bizarre. Okay, so they're getting on a train. On the train, it pulls in, the two o'clock train to Poznan, on time, and they get in and they find themselves in a train full of German soldiers. Didn't seem to set Cotard back at all. He got straight in and the plan was that Dad would only speak when he was spoken to because his German wasn't so good as Cotard, and Cotard would converse as a normal German would. And he found himself in conversation with German soldiers about the war, the conduct of the war, politics, anything they

wanted to talk about. Why on earth did they decide to go from northern Poland to Switzerland when they could have just headed a couple of hundred miles north to the Baltic and the coast? It's the early part of the letters discusses that and they said that most of those escape bids to the north ended in failure because the Gestapo had put in a network of informers, mainly Italian dock workers actually, who were allied to the Germans, who pretended to make friends with the escapees

and then decided to tell the Germans that they were there. And so they were always recaptured due to betrayal, and they decided that they would tough it out all the way to Switzerland. And tough it out they did. So they're chatting away with the German soldiers. I suppose the more brash you are and the more confident, you just get away with it. So I suppose it's a lesson of life.

They seem to get more and more brash you are and the more confident, you just get away with it. So I suppose it's a lesson of life. And they seemed to get more and more brash. As the train pulled into Berlin, they got off. Well, before the train got to Berlin, Cotard had sat on a German soldier's suitcase and had nodded off. And he was sat on it asleep for two or three hours. And when the train came into Berlin, the German soldier, Sergeant Major, came out and pulled Cotard off with a roar, opened the case, and it was full of black market eggs and butter, very precious to wartime Germany. And Cotard's body temperature and weight had crushed and ruined the lot. And they were about to be set on by these German soldiers, so they rushed off the train,

down the platform, and tried to get out of their way. Brilliant. It is just one of the most remarkable wartime stories I've ever heard. So they're running away now from German soldiers, not because the German soldiers think they're prisoners or escapers as well, but just because they're pissed off that they've broken up their eggs and butter. Yes. And get away from those who are asking questions,

why are men of military age shirking like you lot? And they get to the main station in Berlin Station, and the same routine, Dad pretends to read the timetable, and Coulthard goes to buy the tickets for the further journey onwards. While he was reading the timetable, in his words, an elderly grey-haired lady came up to him and asked if he was with the guy that was buying the tickets, and Dad said yes, they were, and thought no more of it. As Cotard came back with the tickets, a German man came up, a well-dressed German man in a suit, produced an identity card which said Berlin Kriminalpolizei, and said, my colleague has said you're acting suspiciously. Can I see your passes? And they thought the game was up, but they bluffed it out. They got their passes out,

holding their breath, handed them over to the German Gestapo agent who looked at them, looked carefully at them, looked at the men and said, I do apologize, gentlemen, but we have to do these things. Can I direct you to anywhere in particular? Cotard feigned indignance, said, nein. Why should you do this to one of my Hungarian colleagues? And they marched off, feigning indignance, and they got away with it. I mean, I feel nervous. My heart's beating just thinking about it, let alone actually being there, being questioned by the Gestapo in Berlin.

I mean, it's crazy. So what did they do then? Well, they had three or four hours to kill, and Antony, by now, Antony Cotard, was getting cheeky, so he decided to take Dad on a sightseeing tour of Berlin by foot. And when you think about it, it's quite amazing. Two British soldiers loose in the heart of Nazi Germany. It's amazing. They walked past the SS headquarters,

Gestapo headquarters, Hitler's chancelry. They went to the shopping street of Unter den Linden and taking note of all the anti-aircraft positions and all military establishments. They then got on an underground train, went out to Wonse, which is on the outskirts, and they sat and wrote up all of their

notes in shorthand, my father did, for intelligence use when they got home. Brave guys. Remind us how old your father is at this point? My father went to war at 24, and this is two years later, so he'd be 26. Land a Viking longship on island island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the

poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits.

There are new episodes every week. Did they get back to the station in time for their train south? They did. They got on the train and it seemed to go quite well. They got to Magdeburg to the south. They had to stop for two hours to change trains. And just coincidentally, Magdeburg was where Antony was studying for his master's degree in Germany. And they considered the idea, they went to have a look at the name boards of the tutors and the professors,

and all of his tutors were still there. And they did consider giving themselves in and to be hidden until the war was over and decided it was too great a risk. So instead of doing that, he had the cheek to show Dad around his old university. Back on the train? Back on the train. Next stop, Munich in Bavaria now, to the south. Another two or three hours.

So instead of just looking round, they then went into the Bürgerhof, Bürgerbrau beer cellar, which was the very epicentre of Nazism and where Hitler made all of his speeches. And they sat and had a beer. So they really were strutting at this point. They must have been. They must have been gaining confidence by the hour. And I suppose, interestingly, talking German all the time.

All the time. Yes, they made this discipline and they were to do that. And I think part of Dad's training was to be asked questions in English and to make sure he answered in German. They're getting quite near the Swiss border at this point. Switzerland, of course, is neutral, so if you made it to Switzerland, could they be repatriated or would you stay in Switzerland for the rest of the war? I think it was quite a long process to get back to UK, but once they were in Switzerland, they were free,

and the British Embassy would take them under their under guard and they would be flown back as and when it was safe to do so I think but they would have got back to UK. How did the journey from Munich go? Well they they got more and more related as a train headed southwest towards Switzerland and they could see the mountains of Switzerland approaching and they in my father's words they could have shaken hands and clapped each other because they could see Switzerland and the Swiss mountains. And Antony Cotard got so excited that he broke into English and had to stop himself very quickly.

Keep going. Well, the train rolled into Lindau, which is the border town between Switzerland and Germany on Lake Constance, or as the Germans call it, Bodensee. And the timetable plan was that the train would stay for two hours while it was thoroughly searched by Germans, as it was now going to go into neutral territory through the border. And their initial plan was that they would sit on the train and wait. But I guess the pull of seeing neutral Switzerland was too great I visited the very same station with my wife and the border is only 50 yards away

and dad doesn't say in his letters why but they changed plan and they decided to walk across the border into Switzerland there Coulthard went first as ever and he produced his pass talked in perfect German to the border guards on both the German and the Swiss side, and he walked across. He was a free man in neutral Switzerland. He'd got out of Germany. He looked back for Dad and saw him being talked to, not interrogated, but being talked to quite closely by a German border guard and by a Gestapo agent.

And Cotard made the decision, and he didn't have to, to walk back into Germany to try and help Dad because he knew his German was better. And they'd made a solemn promise to each other that if one made it, he should continue and not come back. And in my father's words, he said he was astounded when he saw his good friend walk back into Germany to try and help him. Cotard walked up to the German border guard and quite brazenly said, what's the matter?

He's my colleague. We work for Siemens. We're on our way to Switzerland. We have authority. And the border guard said, could i just see your pass again please and your letter of authority and at that point after he'd studied them both he got his pistol out told him to put their hands up and they were marched down to the border guard police station where their passes and letter were put under a microscope the game was up walking back into

january i mean that's bravery, isn't it? Yeah, I believe it's true bravery, and no-one would have blamed him if he'd continued, but I guess it's more than bravery, I think it's comradeship as well. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week And then, well, after a few different turns here and there, they end up back in prison of all camps in Poland. Were they separated at that point? They were interrogated for two days in the local Gestapo headquarters where they were captured, and they were interrogated harshly, and I think they were beaten, and they were charged with espionage. The Germans could find

no evidence that they were British or any other nationality and Cotard's German was so good that they assumed they were some form of spies. And Dad got the message when they were weighed, measured and formally charged with espionage that their time was up. And he managed to persuade Cotard to admit they were British soldiers. The Gestapo didn't believe him. There was nothing there to say they were British. And it was only when my father said to the Gestapo agent, if you ring Poland, if you ring the prisoner of war camp and ask to speak to the commandant,

he will confirm that Sergeant Foster and Lance Corporal Cotard are missing and have been for two days, which he duly did. And they were taken home, taken back to the camp? They were. At the point of a pistol, they refused to... They were asked not to escape again, which they refused, and they sat at the point of a pistol for two days. And when they got into the camp,

a book I've read by an actor called Sam Kidd describes the escape, and the prisoners of war clapped and cheered as they were brought back into the compound. That's worth pointing out that this isn't your dad just making up a story. It's actually been corroborated in completely independent sources. It has, yeah. That's quite remarkable. Another prisoner who was in the camp then, yeah.

Yeah, my father's good friend who who became an actor after the war. And there's a three-, four-page passage about the escape. Were they allowed to remain together in the camp, or were they separated? No, they got two weeks in the cooler, in solitary, individually, in separate cells. And Dad was then transferred to Bavaria, to Stalag 383, which was a camp to the south for sergeants. And by now, in 1942, the Germans were obeying the Geneva Convention where

sergeants and above did not have to work. So they went to a non-working camp. He did. Cotard, being a lance corporal, remained in the camp. And how did their wars go from there? in the camp. And how did their wars go from there? Well, Cotard, it was just the grinding same as a Nazi work camp. The rations got worse and letters to his parents talked of the hard work, the awful rations, and that people were slowly starting to starve to death and being worked to death. Despite that, he escaped another eight times. And it's documented, I have a document by MI9, which is the military intelligence section for prisoners of war, written after the war, saying that he was a serial escapee, and he made it, had a go nine times.

The most prominent of which, he went to Gdynia and actually got onto a neutral ship, a Swedish ship, and was in the boiler room in the Stokehold when he was betrayed by an Italian dock worker, and they came and got him out. So there were other attempts at escaping that might have been as dramatic as this, but we just don't have the same documentation for it? No. All of the documentation I found, not only in my father's letters, but in the National Archives, had to be really searched for to find. There were many, many files on what went on in the various prison camps.

But luckily I found a document with my father's name on it and cult hearts. And then your father was liberated by the American Assembly? By the American Sixth Army in April 1945. But unfortunately what happened in the North was as the Soviet Army advanced from the East, the German authorities made the decision that all the prisoner war camps were to be vacated and the prisoners marched to the West in front of the advancing Soviet front. And they had hard times. They had been prisoners, most of them, for five years. They were in the original battle dress they were captured in. They'd been on austerity rations for five years. They were on the verge of starvation anyway.

And they had 800 miles to march to the west in front of the advancing Soviets. It was done in one of the harshest winters on record, minus 20 degrees, in the whole of January. And on January 20th, they set off from Stalag 20a in very small groups. Antony was in a group of 800. And did he make it to the west? No, he didn't. In that particular group of 800, 30 POWs died through either starvation or dysentery, or in some cases through beatings by the guards.

And he was the last to die. He died just as they reached the River Elbe, which became the dividing line between East and West Germany, on March 24th. I can't understand why, but the guards decided to make all of the remaining prisoners of war, and it was still freezing, jump into the River Elbe. And it could be for hygiene reasons, that's all I can think of. They'd probably been marching in the same uniform for months. And Cotard was in no fit state for it. The records show that not only had he got dysentery,

but he'd also got TB. And the records show that he died of a heart attack. He didn't die immediately. His friends got him out of the river and took him back to the barn they were going to stay in overnight, and there he died at two o'clock in the morning. So the man who'd walked on neutral Swiss soil walked back into the Third Reich and then was buried there? He was buried there. His friends buried him. The guards had no time for anything,

and they said, you've got to bury him as quick as you can. It's called a cortege in the records, but he was actually four skeletal men, carried his skeletal remains to the next village, which had a civilian cemetery called Quickbourne. And there, a very brave staff sergeant, Staff Sergeant Aitken, who had recorded every death in the column, asked the local Burgermeister to make sure that the records were there

and the cross was put over his grave. And that's where he remained. Your father returned to Britain, and when he returned, we've got this letter here. This would have been the first, perhaps the first he'd heard. It was waiting for him at his home. It was waiting for him at his home. It was. Dad got home to Newark in May,

after he'd been freed by the American army. Waiting for him in his father's house, he was married by then, and my mother and father were waiting for him, was a letter from New Milton in Hampshire. It was a postmark, and it reads, and it was signed by Mrs WM Coulthard. So his great friend Coulthard's mother. Mother had written to my father and it was waiting,

so it had been written on the 22nd of May and my father probably got home a few days after that. Dear Sergeant Foster, I suppose you know Anthony Coulthard, or the professor from Stalag 28, perished on the way home on one of those torture marches from Poland. I would particularly have liked to see you, The reason we have all this information is your father then wrote a series of letters to her trying to explain what had happened. Do you think he had survivor's guilt? He would have known about this death for only one day when he wrote this letter.

And so I guess what went through all prisoners of war mind was a certain degree of survivor's guilt. I can only surmise Dad never talked to me about it. But knowing that his good friend, who sacrificed his own freedom to come back into German soil to try and help Dad, had died and Dad hadn't, I would imagine that it weighed heavy with him. As you're talking, I'm still struggling to come to terms with the fact that you and your father never talked about this, even though he died in 1990. 1990, at the age of 74.

How does that feel, knowing that he carried this extraordinary story with him his entire life, and just it never came out? Well, I would imagine that his entire life he would have relived those few words by Mrs. Coulthard, I'm sure. But towards the end of his life, I was in the Navy and I was interested in military issues. I asked him about his war, and he talked mainly about fighting in Norway in the snow against armour with rifles and how difficult it was. And he did say when the Great Escape came on now and again at Christmas what rubbish it was and that it was never like that.

But he never really sort of expanded on how it never was like that. But he did tell me that he escaped. And my mum, after dad died, dad died before mum, had said that he'd made a very big escape, but I didn't bother to follow it through. And luckily, eventually, I found the story. But you've gone further than that because you've also discharged, in a way, a duty that your father had concerning Coulthard's final resting place. Yes, the letters that Mrs Coulthard wrote to Dad made it clear that his grave had never been found. It was believed he actually was buried on the eastern bank of the River Elbe in Domitz,

which, as you know, became eastern Germany after the war. The River Elbe was the Iron Curtain. And so the searcher parties weren't allowed into Domitz, and it was believed he was buried there, and so it became stalemate. And once I decided that I would try and find his grave, I needed to find a methodology, and I wrote to many, many authorities, to his school, to the Ministry of Defence to get his army records, where Domitz again was stated. And Mrs. Cotard's letter said he was buried in Domitz. I then turned to the intelligence corps, his corps, historian, a retired major in Chicksands, and I asked if I could go and see what records he had. And he found a letter, the official letter to Mr Cotard, explaining that Anthony had died on the 4th March. And in it, he said he had died in a village called Kaltenhof.

Domitz wasn't mentioned. And I immediately got a map out and discovered that Kaltenhof was on the western bank of the River Elbe and not the eastern bank. And so they'd been looking in the wrong place. And you went out there, you met remarkably some people that remembered the incident. I did. And found the grave. Yeah, I was very, very lucky. I got hold of the German tourist board who got hold of a local doctor of history who decided he would help me find the

grave. And he put an advert in a local paper saying, does anybody know anything about the Lance Corporal Cotard that died in the village of Kaltenhof? And an 83-year-old man came forward, Herr Hermann Appitz, who said, yes, I do, because that barn he died in was my father's barn and I found the body and we went to interview him and he was a very sprightly 83 year old who said the Germans had taken over the barn because it would the river Elbe in the area had become severe fighting it become the Elbe bridgehead as it was called in 1945 and he and his family had been sent to the cellar to live, and that on the 24th of March, 200 men, ragged men, came across the River Elbe and stayed in his barn for two days. He was playing in the farmyard on the second morning when a group of British soldiers came up to him and said, one of our members has died, showed him the body, which he was aghast at, a 13-year-old,

and said, can you get your father or the guards? And he remembered it vividly. And he took us to the spot where Anthony's body was lying. And here on the table as well, we've got a great picture. You've managed to get the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to put a proper headstone marking Anthony Coulthard's body. So was that a very proud moment? Did you feel that you'd helped to sort of, I don't know, close the circle with your father and this entire story? I think that's a very good way of putting it down, actually,

closing the circle. I suppose, in a way, I was paying a debt of gratitude to Coulthard on behalf of my father. And it was a very proud moment. And the army, as they always do, did it so very well. And it was a very proud moment, and the army, as they always do, did it so very well. And there was a lot of Coulthard relatives there. They came from Australia and from England, his two nieces, and it was a very, very moving moment. What's remarkable about this is it's just one story of the millions and millions of stories of that terrible war. People and young people, people involved on all sides, and yet this one is just superbly well documented, thanks to your father.

When you dig into it, a story on this level just gives you a sense of the enormity of it all. It does, and that was proved to me when I went to the National Archives on a weekly basis. And the number of files there were on atrocities during the 4th March, and I was actually giving up hope of finding anything. There was files upon files of MI9 trying to find the missing, and there was thousands of them. And then, luckily for me, the very last file I found had an affidavit by a Staff Sergeant Aitken

who wrote a very moving affidavit of the conditions and even identified who the officer in charge was and that he should, in fact, be found guilty of murder. And what he did, not only did he write down what happened on the events, but he kept a diary of events and a diary of the 30 who died. And I was actually thinking that I would never find any positive ID of Cotard. and I was actually thinking that I would never find any positive ID of Coulthard. And on the very last line of the annex to the affidavit,

there it was, the first thing I'd seen in writing of the death of Antony Coulthard. And again it said Kaltenhof, there was the village again, not Domitz. And it identified what day he died, and that he died of heart attack and TB, and he also had dysentery. So these men were all in poor state. And some of them actually died through beatings by guards. So it wasn't... The way they were looked after on that long march was terrible. A young man, he's very brave, managed to escape so many times,

only to die days before the end of world war ii days before the end um he yes if he just hung on that particular column that staff sergeant aiken was in charge of was um relieved by that was found by the british army some two weeks later and what i discovered was that of the 30 23 had been exhumed by the authorities after the war and reburied in Berlin Cemetery by what became the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. But seven remained and found. And Coulthard was the last to be not found. And all the seven were memorialised under Dunkirk Memorial.

And so what I'm doing now for the rest of my life, I'm going to try and find the remaining six. And I've already found Private Thompson and he gets, his grave gets rededicated in April of this year. Good on you. Well, thank you so much for sharing what is truly one of the most remarkable stories I've ever come across. hi everyone it's me Dan Snow just a quick request it's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this but now I'm doing it and I hate myself please please go on to iTunes wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a review it really helps basically boosts up the chart which is good and then more people listen which is nice so if you could, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV

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