Jurgen Wattenberg, 94, P.O.W. Who Escaped (original) (raw)
U.S.|Jurgen Wattenberg, 94, P.O.W. Who Escaped
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/04/us/jurgen-wattenberg-94-pow-who-escaped.html
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- Dec. 4, 1995
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Jurgen Wattenberg, a U-boat commander who engineered the largest and most spectacular escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in the United States in World War II, died on Nov. 27 at a nursing home in Hamburg, Germany. He was 94.
On the night of Dec. 23, 1944, 25 German prisoners made their way through a makeshift tunnel from the Navy's Papago Park prison in Scottsdale, Ariz., and captured the grudging imagination of the American public.
Even in wartime, Americans could recognize and appreciate ingenuity and daring when they saw it, especially because the widely publicized escape turned out well from the American perspective. All 25 escapees were recaptured. But not before they had created a merry legend.
The escape was similar to an earlier and larger Allied breakout from a German prison, an event that inspired the 1963 movie "The Great Escape." But in some respects the German plan was even more daring and imaginative.
The Germans not only spent almost five months painstakingly digging a 178-foot tunnel under two fences and a road, but they also strung the tunnel with electric lights, fashioned civilian clothes to replace their prison uniforms, built a three-person kayak to help escape to Mexico by river and even built a lake in the prison camp to test it.
Like the irrepressible American escape artist portrayed by Steve McQueen in "The Great Escape," Captain Wattenberg took the sworn duty of an officer to escape to extremes. Indeed, he was transferred to the new camp in Arizona in the summer of 1944 precisely because the authorities had learned that he had been plotting to dig an escape tunnel from a prison in Tennessee.
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