Dan Snow's History Hit - Walter Purdy: The Traitor of Colditz

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

In the Second World War, the Germans liked to boast that there was 'no escape' from the infamous fortress and POW camp Colditz. However, the elite British officers imprisoned there were determined to prove the Nazis wrong and get back into the war; since then the fortress became just as famous for its escape attempts. As the officers dug tunnels, removed bricks and got lines of communication to the outside world the Gestapo were determined to uncover their secrets and planted a double agent- Walter Purdy in their midst. It was a race against time for the British officers to expose Purdy for the traitor he was.Drawn from unseen records, Robert Verkaik tells Dan this extraordinary never-before-told story and tries to make sense of why, despite committing treason, Purdy was able to escape the gallows, not once but twice.Robert's book is called 'The Traitor of Colditz'.The producer was Mariana Des Forges and the audio editor was Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Roy Walter Purdy was one of the greatest British sympathisers for Germany in the Second World War. He served very briefly on a Royal Navy vessel, he was captured and then he turned collaborator. He passed information from British prisoners of war camps over to German commandants and led to the breaking up of various plots and plans. Plots and plans that the British had, including many to escape. In later life, he was described as crafty as a rat. And that's definitely the sense you get from the brilliant new book written by Robert Verkaeg.

He told the story of Purdy and particularly how he broke up an escape plan in Caldick's Castle and how Purdy escaped the hangman's noose on two separate occasions. This is an amazing story, one that I hadn't heard too much about. Us Brits don't like talking about traitors too much during the Second World War. It doesn't fit the narrative. So Purdy is an uncomfortable reality for many of us here in Britain. He was a fascist, a man who worked actively to secure Germany's victory in the Second World War. Thank you, Robert, for coming on the pod. Fascinating stuff. Enjoy. Robert, thanks very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan. Thanks very much for inviting me. Very kind.

Let's start with this extraordinary character. Who was Roy Walter Purdy? engineering. But as soon as he got his first job, he suddenly found himself into money. He was enticed by the delights of Soho and got into some pretty seedy joints. And with the money and the sort of seedy contacts, he got lured into fascism because he was attracted to what Moseley was saying about young men and how he was going to give young men a future in Britain. He was going to make Britain great. And Purdy loved this. He got very wound up in the whole fascist idea in sort of 1930s Britain. And as a result, he visited the British Union fascist headquarters in Chelsea

and later met William Joyce, who later became Lord Hall. And we're not sure how close he was to Joyce, but he certainly knew him. And whether Joyce was impressed with him as he was impressed with William Joyce is difficult to determine, but probably not. Anyway, once he'd established his sort of fascist credentials. He ended up working as an engineer, junior officer in the Merchant Navy on Blue Star Line on a ship called the Van Dyke. But this was very early 1939. So by September, the Van Dyke was commissioned into the Royal Navy and became a light cruiser, and suddenly Purdy found himself in the Royal Navy, junior officer, fighting the German fascists. And almost as quickly as he joined, he was a prisoner because his ship was sunk during the Narvik evacuations in Norway.

So he was a prisoner, June 1940. As far as Purdy was concerned, the outlook was pretty bleak and boring, and he didn't like it. And there's no suggestion that sort of Purdy was actively, well, a fascist, sympathized about, perhaps sabotaging his own vessel or anything like that. There's no suggestion he went that far. No, I mean, he may have been a reluctant officer in the Royal Navy, but there was no suggestion that Van Dyck was sunk by the Luftwaffe. So there was no indication that there was any sabotage. He found himself in the hands of first the Narvik police,

ran him over to the German police, and then he was a prisoner of war. When did he start to speak openly or let people know that he was friendly towards the German cause? Quite early on, the MI5 files show that when he was in Malik prison of war camp in North Germany, it was at this time that he started telling people about his love for fascism and how much he could see Britain would benefit from a fascist government. It became pretty awkward and quarrelsome. And because the Nazis were looking for people like him,

when they started sort of touring the camp, looking for potential collaborators, he did stand out. They approached him and he approached the senior officer of Malik, Captain Wilson, who was actually the captain of the Van Dyck. So Wilson knew him pretty well. And as soon as he came to him toik, Captain Wilson, who was actually the captain of the Van Dyck. So Wilson knew him pretty well. And as soon as he came to him to say, you know, I'd quite like to perhaps be given permission to go to Berlin and do some other work, Wilson slapped him down and said,

no one's going to be a collaborator on my watch, so you'd better find something else to do. But Purdy persisted. The Nazis were interested in him. Once Joyce found out that Purdy was in the prison of war camp, he sent him his book, Twilight Over England, which he'd just written, which was treaties on the state of Britain. And Purdy was flattered by this. And so he was enticed to Berlin. This time,

all Captain Wilson could do to stop him was to send a couple of officers with him to accompany him to Berlin to make sure he didn't commit any acts of betrayal or serious collaboration. Purdy ended up in a very different kind of prisoner of war camp in Berlin, part of Stalag III, called Commando 999, which was a propaganda camp for officers. Well, that's how it started out. That's how the Germans presented it. They presented this as a sort of free holiday for British prisoners of war, who they thought would be easily drawn into the sort of Nazi program. They thought these were, you know, give them a few beers, many fags as they could smoke. They even gave them tours of Berlin by bus, river cruises. All this was an attempt to sort of get them to join the Nazis. And most of them obviously didn't. They saw it for what it was, which is a sort of very poor attempt to recruit them.

Some of them took all the food and the free trips and then eventually clearly weren't going to collaborate and were sent back to their camps. Others even tried to escape. I mean, it was pretty cack-handed stuff. But one or two fell for it, and Purdy was one of these and Joyce recognized this and Joyce persuaded him to come and join him in the Olympic sports arena in Berlin where they had the German radio station Germany Calling where Joyce had already established himself as Lord Hawthorne

and Purdy became a sort of mini Lord Hawthorne. He'd come from the East End. He reckoned he knew the British working man better than William Joyce. He reckoned he could persuade them of the powers of fascism. And so he was allowed to sort of let rip with his nasty anti-Semitic spiel, blaming British Jewish industrialists for the war and saying that the Jews were going to benefit because they were going to profit.

He went under the name of Bob Pointer, and all his broadcasts were picked up in Cavicham by the BBC monitoring unit. So we've got pretty good detail of exactly what he was saying at this time. So we're into 1943 now. This is Purdy, the collaborator broadcast, the acolyte of William Joyce and all the other British globorati,

if you like, in Berlin. He was given his own flat. He even had a German girlfriend. He was paid 400 marks a month, which was more than most German radio announcers were, so he was doing pretty well. You couldn't block this off. Could people tune in in the UK and listen to this?

They could, yeah. There was good access to it. There were reports of hundreds of thousands of people tuning in to the German radio propaganda. They called it the New British Broadcasting Service, propaganda. They called it the new British Broadcasting Service. And they pretended that they were speaking from inside Britain to their fellow countrymen. And lots of British people listened to it because it was just a little bit more interesting than the staid old BBC reports. You did get a free kind of insight into what the Germans weren't necessarily thinking,

but what they wanted you to think they were thinking. And it was the first time that a lot of British people heard the F word on the radio airwaves. The German speakers were quite happy to use a explicit, which hadn't been heard in Britain on the airwaves before. It had an audience. It had a British audience, certainly. Tell me, how did he come to be in Colditz Castle? And tell me about Colditz itself, the legendary facility for storing the worst of the worst of the POWs. The famous, yeah, legendary Colditz Castle.

It came into being about 1939 when the first Polish prisoners arrived. It wasn't until the following year, 1940, when Wehrmacht decided they needed a very secure prison to house some of the more serious, escape-minded prisoners. And they chose Kolditz Castle, a sort of medieval castle on top of a rocky outcrop above the river M mauled, East Germany, 30 miles from Dresden. And they believed it was, as Goering thought, it was escape-proof. You couldn't get out from cold.

It's because the walls were six feet wide, extraordinarily long drops once you even got over the first walls, perimeter fences, ditches, barbed wire, machine guns, dogs, a very unfriendly colditz population. They thought it was going to be escape-proof. So this is where they sent the most, they would say, prisoners who had a track record of escaping. But they also sent some people there who they thought were important, potential pawns, hostages, perhaps, later on in the war.

These are VIP prisoners, like Winston Churchill's nephew, Giles Romilly, was housed there. Also, the king's nephew was also kept there later on in the war. So it was a place where they could keep prisoners who were always trying to escape and also VIP prisoners that they would use perhaps later as bargaining chips as the war progressed. But it wasn't as secure perhaps as they first thought because very quickly, it was the French who first escaped from the coldest grounds, really. The first British prisoner was Ernie Neve, who escaped the beginning of 1942. He dressed up as a German officer

in this fake uniform. He escaped in a hole that he dug in the theater room and dropped down to the guardhouse, appeared suddenly as this German officer. No one batted an eyelid. And he was very quickly running free. 400 miles later, he was in Switzerland. And within the month, back in Britain, working for MI9, who was this newly born British intelligence agency, which was solely established to support British prisoners of war escapes

and people who were on the run, evaders. So by the time Purdy rocks up, 1944, by now Purdy is not just a very good broadcaster. He's also found himself useful to the OBOI, the German Military Intelligence Service. They think that he would make a very good spy. And in fact, he's already been sort of eavesdropping on his other collaborators. And the chap who, in 1944, was head of counterintelligence of all prisoner of war camps for the Oboe War. He was a guy called Alexander Heimpel. And he, along with the security officer at Kolditz, called Reinald Eggers,

thought that what they needed to do was plant someone inside Kolditz so that they could find out not just what the prisoners were doing in terms of escape, but also, and this was much more important to them, was to break the communication line between Kolditz and London through MI9. And Kolditz was also in contact with British spies in Berlin as well. So it was obvious to the Kolditz commandant and the security officer, Eggers, that British prisoners were somehow communicating with London and they needed someone inside the castle, someone they could trust, someone who would find out exactly what was going on, how they were doing it. And they knew that the British were still in contact with

London because obviously they'd censored all the letters. And this is how they communicated. They wrote in code back to London. They knew that they were still in contact with London because every now and again, they'd uncover a cache of escape tools. And it was clearly that these weren't just random escape tools. These were made to measure tools. These were compasses, maps, made-to-measure for the prisoners. But they seemed to have no way of stopping this relationship between Colvitz and London. Purdy's job was to establish exactly how they were doing that. So March 1944, he arrives in Colvitz. And is he being sent there in his own name, or is he now an agent who's assumed a different identity?

Does everyone know who he is when he arrives there? You've identified the fatal flaw in the German plan there, yeah. He turns up as Lieutenant Walter Pody from the Royal Navy. And there'd be no point in him changing his name, although he had an alias when he was running around Berlin. He was Robert Wallace, a Wernherzerian businessman. But when they put him in cold, they have to give him his name because people do recognize it.

And so if you had an alias, it would look very odd to me. Very quickly, he is recognized by some of the men as being a sort of bolshie, awkward fascist who was causing trouble in Malik. And one of the people who recognizes him is the coldest dentist, Captain Julius Green. He's an extraordinary brave soldier, Jewish, who's concealing his Jewish face and realizes what a threat that Purdy poses to the camp. But unfortunately, he's not recognized and all the alarm bells don't ring for a couple of days. So he's given the run of the camp for two days. And in that time, he comes across one of the prisoners emerging from a hatch just above the Keller house near the clock tower on the side of the castle. And this is the entrance to

a tunnel that the British, they've been tunneling away for eight months. And it is, to many of the prisoners, this is their best chance of getting back into the war. And for many of them, they desperately do want to get back into the war because all these officers, their duty is to escape. And lots of them, all of them, they don't want to have to return to Britain as prisoners of war with lots of interesting, but not very military worthy stories about their time inside Colditz Castle. They want to make their country's war. So this tunnel is vital to the British, but Purdy has identified it. Once Julius Green passes on the word that Purdy might be someone they should take a little bit

more interest in, it's already too late because Colditz, as a British senior officer, has set up a security committee, which their job is to vet all people who arrive in the camp, especially if they have suspicious stories to tell. And Purdy's story was quite extraordinary. He claimed that he was picked up in Berlin during a police roundup after he'd escaped from a prisoner of war camp. None of it makes sense. He even says he's got a German girlfriend. I mean, none of it makes sense. But it's too late. The British officers identify him as a spy. They say, look, your story is absolute rubbish. No one believes it. Cock and ball. We know you're working for the Germans. He comes clean. He says, yeah, I am working for the germans he comes clean he says yeah i am working for the germans sorry lads do forgive me i don't think he actually appreciates how serious a predicament he's in because not only does he know where the tunnel is being built he also knows where

the british have stashed a lot of their uh contraband escape tools and some of their currency. But perhaps more serious than anything, Green has, thinking that Purdy's time in the castle won't be very long because the British are going to have to deal with him, he loses his temper, perhaps, tells Purdy that he knows all about him because an agent in Berlin who he's been in contact with through MI9 has warned him about Purdy already. And he says, we know all about you. We know what you've been working for the Germans. So you haven't got much time. And he assumes that the commanding officer, British commanding officer, Willie Todd is going to sanction some sort of execution.

It had been done before or it had been attempted before. The Poles had a problem with a traitor. They tried to execute him. The French had a traitor. He actually was whisked out of the castle before anything could happen to him. But Green is pretty confident that they've got Purdy where they want him, and an accident can be arranged. Once word starts to spread that Purdy is this traitor and he's coughed to it, the security committee and the other prisoners start to think about what they're going to do about it, what retribution. Because Purdy is questioned by Willie Todd and he tells Todd if he's returned to the Germans, he can't guarantee he won't tell them about the tunnel because he is so in love with this German girlfriend that if they try and separate them in return for the information,

he's going to spill the beans. So the British are put in an intolerable position. They can't do anything but deal with him. So a sort of ad hoc court martial is arranged and birdie is found guilty he's marched up to the attic and they arrange to hang him he's been found guilty if they release him he's also going to do more damage at other camps so they feel they've got no choice. They've got to get rid of him and they've got to kill him. Unfortunately, when the officer in charge of the court-martial asks for volunteers to carry out the hanging, who's going to put the rope around his neck? Who's going to kick the stall away? The British become rather squeamish. No one is prepared to volunteer for that job. And so Todd has to return Purdy back to the Germans. Five days later, Colonel Todd sees the German

commandant, demands a meeting, says, you've put a spy in the camp. We've found him. I can't be held responsible to what we're going to do to him. So you must return him. Otherwise, his safety is at risk. So Purdy is back with the Germans. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about one of Britain's greatest traitors. More coming up. Millions dead, a higher proportion of civilian casualties than in the Second World War. America, Britain, Russia and China all involved in a conflict that technically remains active to this day. So why is the Korean War of 1950-53 called the Forgotten War? This July, we're dedicating a special series of episodes to finding out what this unique conflict was all

about. Join me, James Rogers, throughout July on the Warfare podcast from History Hit, as we remember the war the world forgot. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Amazingly, though, he then is tried after the Second World War, very quickly after the Second World War, isn't it? In December

45. And he's found guilty again. After Kolditz, Purdy is sent back to Berlin, where he continues to work for the Gestapo. He's snooping in the prison camps, hunting down British spies. But the MI9 agent who he implicated while he was in Colbitts turns the tables on him. So John Brown, who's the Royal Artillery quartermaster sergeant who the Germans have entrusted to run a holiday camp, like the one Purdy was originally in, he is in fact working for MI9. He's an MI9 agent and he's making sure these holiday camps do not do what the germans intend them to do that is create a sort of legion of british traitors and he gets wind of what purdy's up to so he starts trailing purdy in berlin and he searches purdy's flat and he

finds incriminating evidence linking purdy to colditz and trying to break the Colditz codes. And he warns London about Purdy and says he's a real danger, a threat to Britain's war effort. So Britain know all about Purdy. But before Brown can do anything to eliminate Purdy, Purdy is sent to the Western Front. He joins an SS unit, which is involved in propaganda and sabotage. And he spends a couple of months on the Western Front, perhaps involved in the Battle of the Bulge, as one of the propaganda, sabotage, English-speaking units. as one of the propaganda sabotage English-speaking units. And then he's sent back to Berlin for a week's leave where he's reunited with his German girlfriend

and in fact turns up just as she's giving birth to their son. Almost while he's still got the baby in his arms, SS headquarters tell him that he's being transferred this time to the Italian front around about February 1945, where he is again serving with an SS unit in the Germans' large-ditch defense of the Italian front. By now, even Purdy recognizes that the Germans aren't going to win the war.

So he decides to switch sides, and he jumps on a motorbike, escapes from the SS unit, and presents himself to the Americans as a genuine escapee. The Americans treat him as such, and he eventually gets passed back through the Royal Navy, who know about him, but let him return to Britain because MI5 have said they're building this case against him so he turns up in London May 1945 where he is detained but very quickly becomes apparent thatophiles do not have enough evidence to hold it because

the critical witnesses particularly brown and the coldest dentist julius green haven't been traced they can't find this still in germany somewhere so they have no real sort of direct evidence against purvey i can't prove his treachery And it looks like he's going to escape all punishment for his crimes. But soon the Colditz POWs start to file back from Germany. And obviously, they're very keen that Purdy is tried for his crimes, having failed to hang him in Colditz. They really want him to be prosecuted in Britain. So he is arraigned at the Old Bailey on charges of high treason during the famous Traitor Trials.

This is where William Joyce, quite his colleague from Germany, Lord Hawthorne, and John Amory, the son of a cabinet minister who was involved in creating a British freak or a sort of union of British collaborators. And one other man who was part of the SS,

British-born SS fighter. All these four all pull on trial, the old Bailey. Two of them hang. William Joyce is hanged. So is John Amory. When it comes to Purdy's trial, even though they have by now managed to find Brown and Green, who give telling evidence against him, Purdy is reprieved at the last minute. He's convicted of treason, and the judge sentences him to hang. But because Colonel Todd, who was the senior officer in

Caldick, changes his testimony to the effect that Purdy did not betray the prisoners and did not pass on intelligence and information to the Germans, he is only convicted on two of the three charges. And arguably the most serious is that he did pass on this intelligence to the Germans, betrayed his fellow POWs and risked the life of British agents working in Berlin. So he is reprieved. The Home Secretary sentences him to life imprisonment. And in fact, he only actually serves nine years in the end. Why do you think he was reprieved? Why do you think he got that sort of last minute reprieve? The $64 million question, yeah, is why did Colonel Todd change his mind? Why did he say,

having been very clear at the time that Purdy had betrayed the British and that's why he'd returned him to the commandant of Cold Colditz. Why did he change his mind? I think there are probably two possible explanations for this. So there was no evidence in the case regarding the court-martialing Colditz and the attempt to hang Purdy. I think that one of the reasons is that at the end of 1945, December, when Patey's been put on trial, the idea that British POWs were going to hang one of their own in this sort of rather rushed court-martial is quite a sort of grubby business and casts the British POWs in cold, it's and a poor light, especially as we were kind of at the time trying to hold ourselves up to a much higher standard than the Nazis. I remember this was about the time that

we were putting the Nazis on trial in Nuremberg. So if all this came out in court, then it would perhaps present the Nazis and the rest of the world with a sense that the British weren't behaving fairly and it took the moral high ground away from them. Another reason might be that Todd, by handing Purdy back to the Germans, knows that he's failed to deal with a security issue because when Purdy does go back to the Germans, he causes a lot of damage. He passes on all the information about the tunnels, the communication system in Kolditz. And of course, he endangers the life of John Brown, who's faced this interrogation by the Gestapo and only just escapes by the skin of his teeth from this brutal torture and execution. So it doesn't look good for Todd that Purdy is put through this court martial and

then handed back to the Germans because Todd's role is to uphold the security of the prison camp in terms of British position. It's possible that a deal was done between Purdy and Sir Hartley Shawcross, the attorney general who was prosecuting the case at the time. It might be that, there's no direct evidence for this, but it might be that in return for Purdy's lawyers not putting the court martial and the attempted hanging into their defence, the Home Secretary is prepared to look more kindly on his appeal. I mean, the only evidence really is that Purdy's lawyer does make an appeal, but he strangely drops it after only a few days.

And then Purdy gets this news that he was sitting in prison at Christmas 1945, expecting to be hanged with Amory and his old friend, William Joyce. And he gets the news that he's in fact been reprieved at the very last minute. So it's not clear what's going on here. And we may never know the truth of why Purdy manages to escape the hangman for, as you say, the second time. Well, let's give the last word to the Home Office memo in the mid-1950s. How did they describe our man?

Yes, the Home Office described Purdy, MI5, described Purdy as the greatest rogue unhung. I think that's how they feel about him because what he's done is treason. He's put British lives at risk. He's betrayed his fellow POWs and he has acted against the interests of Britain, and he gets a nine-year prison sentence, or I guess life prison. He's released after nine years. When he's in Wandsworth Prison, and this is his comeuppance, I think,

he plots an escape from the laundry room in Wandsworth Prison, but the plot is discovered after another prisoner informed on Purdy, and this prisoner was paid 28 penny pieces. So the Judas is betrayed by another Judas eventually. In his second prison, the governor of Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wye describes Purdy as a devious twister of the worst kind who pretends to cooperate, but is really not. And he's always trying to reopen his case. He's anti-British and he stirs up trouble. So he really is the leopard who doesn't change his spots. And even when he's released from prison, he changes his name quite provocatively. He changes his name to Robber Pointer, which is the name that he used

when he was making his broadcasts from Germany. And he gets a job working in the Ford factory in Dagenham as a motor inspector. One of his colleagues there describes him as not a very nice man who was always trying to drop people in in fact he says he's as crafty as a rat Purdy dies peacefully in 1982 in Southend after a short battle with lung cancer what a character if Hitler had run them all he might have ended up director general of the BBC or something terrifying Terrifying thought. Thank you very much indeed for coming on the pod. What's your book called? The Talbot book is The Traitor of Coldance.

Thank you very much. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all of our gods.