Whether your understanding of how to escape from a prisoner-of-war camp comes from specialized military training or binge-watching Hogan’s Heroes, there are certain things that seem essential to the checklist. Dig a tunnel. Keep the guards distracted. Acquire food, clothing, and maps. Decide where to go once you are outside. If your getaway plan involves a boat, we would also suggest verifying the existence of water, although we recognize that this last item may sound like unnecessary micromanagement.

On December 23, 1944, twenty-five German prisoners at Camp Papago Park, near Phoenix, Arizona, staged what became known as the Great Papago Escape. They executed an astonishingly successful breakout through a tunnel they had spent months constructing. They slipped beneath the perimeter fence and vanished into the night. Several even had a plan to travel by boat along Arizona’s rivers toward Mexico. The maps showed an enticing network of waterways. The Germans were naval men. Everything seemed to be coming together.

There was, however, a problem with the waterways. Much of the water had declined to attend.

So maybe keeping the part about matching up the boat with water on the checklist isn’t micromanagement, after all.

The Most Unusual Resort in Arizona

By 1944, the United States had become an unlikely destination for German soldiers and sailors who had never planned to visit. The U.S. military maintained prisoner-of-war camps throughout the country, many of them far from any coast or international border. This was not accidental. A prisoner who escapes a camp in the middle of a continent has accomplished something impressive, but he still has a continent-related problem.

Camp Papago Park, established in 1943 near Phoenix, initially housed Italian prisoners before becoming a center for German captives, particularly members of the navy. By late 1944, it held thousands of prisoners in a complex of barracks, fenced compounds, guard towers, bathhouses, workshops, and recreation areas.

Compared with the horrors inflicted on Allied prisoners in many Axis camps, life at Papago was remarkably comfortable. Prisoners could participate in sports, attend movies, study, and receive medical care. There were opportunities for work, though German officers could not be compelled to perform it under the applicable prisoner-of-war rules. Some captives cultivated gardens. Others found creative ways to make the most of a situation that was admittedly less than ideal but considerably better than being depth-charged in the Atlantic.

And then along came one particular German officer with a demonstrated tendency to regard confinement as more of a suggestion than a permanent arrangement.

Meet Jürgen Wattenberg, Repeat Customer of the Escape Business

Jürgen Wattenberg had an impressive résumé, if one’s preferred qualifications include naval combat and getting away from people assigned to keep an eye on you. He had served as navigation officer aboard the German warship Admiral Graf Spee, which was scuttled off Uruguay in December 1939. After being interned in Argentina, Wattenberg escaped in 1940 and found his way back to Germany.

That alone ought to have earned him a prominent entry in somebody’s file marked “Do Not Leave Unattended.” Instead, he returned to naval service and eventually commanded the submarine U-162. In September 1942, British warships sank the submarine near Trinidad, and Wattenberg was captured. A wartime interrogation report recorded his earlier escape and naval career. This was not a man for whom a locked gate represented the end of a discussion.

At Papago Park, Wattenberg became a leading figure among the naval officers. He was resourceful, disciplined, and determined to get out. We should not mistake that determination for harmless mischief. The camp had its ugly side: in March 1944, German prisoner Werner Drechsler was murdered by fellow prisoners after his cooperation with American intelligence became known. Seven men were convicted of the killing and later executed. The ideology and brutality of the war did not disappear simply because its participants were behind American fences.

Digging a Tunnel While Pretending to Play Volleyball

Wattenberg and his fellow prisoners identified an area near a bathhouse in Compound 1A that was poorly covered by the guard towers. The plan was straightforward in the way that building a secret underground passage beneath an armed military installation can be called straightforward. They would dig from beneath a concealed entrance, pass under the security perimeter and patrol road, and emerge beyond the camp beside the Arizona Crosscut Canal.

The work began in September 1944. Over the following months, the prisoners excavated a tunnel approximately 178 feet long. The soil was hard, the workspace cramped, and the tools improvised. Every shovelful of earth had to be removed without alerting guards who were presumably paid, among other things, to notice when the prison population started operating a mining enterprise.

And this is where the volleyball court comes in.

The prisoners had requested permission to improve a recreation area. Tools obtained for the project, and the resulting earthworks, provided a wonderfully innocent explanation for some otherwise suspicious activity. Excavated soil could be concealed in clothing and distributed around the court. To an observer, the Germans appeared to be enthusiastic supporters of physical fitness. In reality, they were undertaking a public-works project whose chief objective was to make Papago Park’s population decrease by twenty-five people.

We particularly admire the bureaucratic elegance of the arrangement. The prisoners asked the authorities for tools. The authorities supplied the tools. The prisoners used them to dig their way out of the authorities’ jurisdiction. Somewhere in the paperwork, there was probably an approving notation about improved prisoner morale.

Ingenious POW projects were hardly unique to Arizona. At Colditz Castle in Germany, Allied prisoners went so far as to build a glider inside their supposedly escape-proof prison. World War II apparently generated a remarkable concentration of people whose reaction to confinement was to take up an advanced engineering hobby.

The Christmas Party With an Unusual Guest List

On the evening of December 23, 1944, the prisoners put their plan into motion. A noisy celebration in a neighboring compound helped distract the guards. Singing, shouting, and general commotion were not especially unusual just before Christmas, although the Americans might have become suspicious if anyone had realized that the festivities were synchronized with a subterranean evacuation.

Ten teams of prisoners passed through the tunnel. Wattenberg left with two former members of his U-boat crew, Walter Kozur and Johann Kremer. They emerged beside the Crosscut Canal, waded through its cold water, and headed away from the camp. There had been recent rain, which made the night particularly unpleasant. For a man expecting the dry, sun-baked Arizona of tourist brochures, winter could offer a surprise subscription service.

But the escape had worked. Twenty-five men had crossed the perimeter without going anywhere near a gate. No alarm had sounded. The guards did not discover an open tunnel or catch the fugitives as they climbed out.

The Escapee Who Informed the Army That There Had Been an Escape

On Christmas Eve, Herbert Fuchs, a young German U-boat sailor, decided that freedom was overrated, at least in its current wet, cold, hungry configuration. He managed to obtain a ride in Phoenix and asked to be taken to the police. Around seven that evening, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office telephoned Camp Papago Park to report that one of its prisoners had presented himself for return.

This must have produced an interesting moment at headquarters. The Army had not reported a missing prisoner. The sheriff was reporting a recovered prisoner. One imagines a brief and awkward exchange devoted to the question of whether a person could be both securely confined and standing in the sheriff’s office several miles away.

Fuchs would not reveal how the escape had been accomplished. A subsequent count established that the problem extended beyond one homesick sailor. Twenty-five prisoners had departed without authorization, and the staff had to organize a manhunt during Christmas.

On December 26, a soldier named Lawrence Jorgensen found the concealed tunnel exit near the canal. At last, the Army understood how the Germans had gotten out. Understanding where they intended to go would prove another matter.

Gentlemen, I Have Good News and Bad News About the River

Several of the escapees had made the sensible decision that walking hundreds of miles across Arizona was a poor method of international transportation. Three naval prisoners therefore devised a plan to use a boat. They would reach the local river system and follow the waterways westward toward the Colorado River and, eventually, the Gulf of California and Mexico.

Viewed on a map, the scheme had a certain elegance. Arizona has a Salt River. It has a Gila River. The Gila joins the Colorado, which flows toward the Gulf of California. A man tracing the route with his finger could almost imagine himself already at the Mexican border, assuming he did not become distracted by the numerous geographical complications between the finger and the border.

The escapees prepared a portable craft or rafting materials for the journey. Accounts differ on the exact design and how much of the boat was assembled in advance, but the central plan is well established. This was to be an aquatic getaway, devised by men who knew their way around boats. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the water.

Arizona’s rivers do not necessarily behave the way the rivers of central Europe behave. Their flow is affected by rainfall, season, dams, and irrigation diversions. A blue line on a map may identify a river that is little more than sand, stones, and the fond memory of water having once passed through. The Salt was barely flowing where the men needed it, and the Gila was no more accommodating.

At this point, the reader may reasonably ask why nobody checked the river before constructing a boat. The research staff of the Commonplace Fun Facts Department of Dry Rivers, Honest Politicians, and Other Oxymorons has been unable to answer that question, but we would like to believe that somewhere in the planning meetings a junior officer suggested it and was overruled by someone with a particularly impressive naval rank.

There was water in the Crosscut Canal; the men escaping through it had been thoroughly soaked. So this was not a case of every waterway in Arizona vanishing. The problem was that the route required a continuous, navigable river. The desert had other ideas. It is difficult to conduct an amphibious escape when the amphibious portion has been canceled.

According to one recollection from a former camp worker, the boat-builders carried boards out with the intention of assembling a raft, only to discover that the river contained no useful water. The men were reportedly embarrassed enough to laugh about the experience later. This seems a reasonable response. After carrying boat-building supplies through a 178-foot tunnel, what else is there to do when you arrive at a dry riverbed?

A Small Digression About Maps That Lie—and Maps That Don’t

We’ve heard a story that German wartime propaganda deliberately made the United States look smaller on maps, leading some escaping prisoners to believe they were much closer to the coast than they really were. It would fit this story beautifully. So beautifully, in fact, that we dispatched our team of woefully underpaid interns highly trained professional researchers to look for proof instead of simply passing it along. That is the irritating thing about historical research: every so often it insists on interfering with a perfectly good anecdote.

We have not found reliable documentation that Nazi authorities deliberately shrank the United States on maps for that purpose, or that a specific group of escaped POWs sprinted toward an imaginary nearby coastline. There were genuine misconceptions about America’s size, but the dramatic map story remains unverified. And there is no good evidence that the Papago prisoners themselves were victims of doctored maps. Their mistake was expecting real rivers to behave like the neat lines printed on ordinary ones.

There is, however, a verified anecdote almost as entertaining. At a POW camp in Kansas, an American officer posted a map of the United States, circled the camp’s location, and added a note asking, “What are you going to do about it?” The map demonstrated, more effectively than a lecture, the rather discouraging amount of America standing between the prisoners and a useful international boundary.

Of course, wartime cartography really did have a distinguished history of deception. Britain once helped put a forged Nazi map into Franklin Roosevelt’s hands, while Allied prisoners could receive secret escape maps concealed inside playing cards. In those cases, the trick was in the map. At Papago Park, there is no evidence that the maps were deliberately deceptive. The river, on the other hand, was unquestionably the unreliable party.

Arizona Launches Its Own Counteroffensive

Once news of the escape spread, military personnel, sheriff’s deputies, federal investigators, and local residents joined the search. The fugitives had divided into small groups, most with limited supplies. Their options were not encouraging. Going south meant traversing unfamiliar desert toward a border that remained a substantial distance away. Heading west or north offered hiding places but no simple way out of the United States. Remaining in populated areas increased the odds of meeting someone who would notice the accent.

The Tohono O’odham, whose knowledge of the region went back generations, assisted in tracking escapees. One can only imagine what an experienced desert tracker thought of the notion that a handful of German sailors might make an effortless dash across this landscape. It was the sort of plan that could seem entirely practical in a room full of maps and considerably less practical after the second night without a proper meal.

Several escapees surrendered, including men who discovered that the camp’s food and beds had suddenly acquired a nostalgic appeal. Others were captured in communities south and west of Phoenix. Some reached much farther, but nobody made it to Mexico.

Among the odder episodes was the recapture of a German officer who had stopped near an irrigation canal to wash his underwear. Accounts of that incident describe a local resident noticing the fugitive and helping bring him into custody. As a general principle, we support maintaining proper hygiene even under difficult circumstances. But if an army is searching for you, well, there is more than one reason we are cautioned against airing our dirty underwear in public.

The Captain Who Decided Not to Go Very Far

Wattenberg took a different approach. Instead of making a desperate march toward Mexico, he and his companions, Kozur and Kremer, headed north into the rugged Phoenix Mountains. They found a sheltered rocky alcove, concealed its entrance with brush and stones, and made it their temporary headquarters. Apparently the captain’s experience with submarines had persuaded him that living inside a small enclosed space was not necessarily a reason to surrender.

On Christmas Eve, while the men were hiding and thinking about their families, Kremer played “Silent Night” on a harmonica. It is one of the more poignant details of the escape, and a reminder that even a story containing questionable river logistics took place during a brutal world war, among people thousands of miles from home.

For weeks the trio survived by scouting after dark, finding water, and obtaining supplies. They sometimes ventured astonishingly close to familiar surroundings. Wattenberg even went fishing during a New Year’s Eve excursion to a reservoir north of Phoenix. We realize this sounds less like an escape from a prisoner-of-war camp and more like a particularly ill-advised camping holiday, but the captain evidently found the arrangement satisfactory.

Meanwhile, the fugitives had arranged for sympathetic prisoners assigned to outside work details to leave food and other supplies at designated locations. Unfortunately, the system eventually became unreliable, and Kremer decided to sneak back into the camp to straighten things out. Consider the extraordinary reversal involved. Most escapees spend their time figuring out how to get out of prison. These men had to figure out how to sneak back in without being caught. Somewhere, the whole concept of a guarded perimeter had become hopelessly confused.

That arrangement could not last. Kremer was discovered during an inspection on January 23, 1945. Kozur was caught the following day. Wattenberg was now the last of the twenty-five fugitives still at liberty, though his freedom had become increasingly difficult to distinguish from homelessness with an unusually active police search.

The Last Fugitive Falls Victim to the Town of Glendale

On January 27, Wattenberg abandoned his mountain hideout and headed into Phoenix. He hoped to find work, shelter, or some means of continuing his journey. He ate at a downtown restaurant and visited the Hotel Adams, where he fell asleep in a lobby chair before deciding it might be wiser to leave. A fugitive who has spent more than a month hiding in the mountains is not necessarily at his sharpest when confronted with upholstered furniture.

In the early hours of January 28, he stopped a city street foreman, Clarence Cherry, and asked directions to the railroad station. Cherry noticed his German accent and alerted police Sergeant Gilbert Brady, who approached the stranger and requested his Selective Service registration. Wattenberg said he had left it at home.

When asked where home was, he answered Glendale. Brady reasonably wanted to know whether he meant Glendale, Arizona, or Glendale, California. Wattenberg hesitated and said, in effect, that he meant a Glendale somewhere back east.

Now, we are not suggesting that every American must know the precise locations of our numerous Glendales. Frankly, the country has far too many communities with repeated names, and most of us are simply pretending to have them sorted out. But when a police officer is examining your explanation of where you live, it helps to select a location that exists in approximately the direction you have indicated.

Brady took him to the station. Wattenberg admitted his identity. The final escapee was back in custody thirty-five days after crawling through the tunnel. The military had spent weeks hunting him through mountains and deserts, and the decisive blow had come from a city employee asking an entirely sensible question about local geography.

It seems fitting. Geography had been winning this contest from the beginning.

Did the Great Papago Escape Accomplish Anything?

As a feat of engineering and stealth, the answer is unquestionably yes. Twenty-five prisoners constructed a long tunnel beneath an active military prison, escaped undetected, and triggered a major manhunt. From that perspective, the breakout deserves its place among the remarkable POW escape attempts of World War II.

As a method of returning to Germany, however, the results were less impressive. Every participant was recaptured, the last on January 28, 1945. The great journey ended where it had begun, except that the prisoners had acquired some practical knowledge of the Arizona landscape and the American authorities had acquired a strong interest in inspecting recreation-area improvements.

There was a serious legal distinction between their treatment and what happened to Allied prisoners who escaped from Nazi camps. After the famous breakout from Stalag Luft III in 1944, fifty recaptured Allied airmen were murdered on Hitler’s orders. At Papago, the Germans faced disciplinary confinement rather than execution merely for having escaped. Article 50 of the 1929 Geneva Convention provided that prisoners recaptured before successfully escaping the captor’s territory or rejoining their own armed forces could receive only disciplinary punishment for the escape itself. That protection did not excuse independent crimes committed during an escape attempt. Wattenberg was placed in a more restrictive stockade after his capture.

Years later, one participant, Heinrich Palmer, described his escape as a youthful adventure rather than a mission to harm Americans. His perspective cannot be assumed to represent every man involved, especially the more committed Nazi officers. Still, it helps explain why so many surrendered when reality became less agreeable than the fantasy of freedom.

A Monument to the World’s Least Cooperative Getaway River

Most of the old prison camp has vanished beneath the modern Phoenix metropolitan area, but traces survive. A former officers’ club remains, along with some guard-tower foundations and a historical marker near the tunnel’s exit. A detailed 1945 map of the camp, rediscovered years later, helps explain the ingenious route the prisoners used. This time, happily, the map is being used to understand history rather than to plan a river journey.

What stays with us about the Great Papago Escape is not simply the contrast between the perfect tunnel and the imperfect getaway. It is the magnificent difference between what human beings can accomplish through determination and what they can overlook while congratulating themselves on their cleverness. These men spent months defeating fences, guards, hard soil, and the logistical inconvenience of hiding excavated dirt. They had planned with such care that twenty-five prisoners escaped before the Army even noticed a problem.

Then somebody got to the river.

Geography, alas, can be an unforgiving mistress.

If there is a lesson in all this, we suppose it is that even the most elaborate plan benefits from a little practical verification. Before you dig a 178-foot tunnel, build a portable boat, and risk being hunted across the Sonoran Desert, it might be worth asking a local resident whether the river is running. Or, failing that, whether there is a bus.

The Germans had mastered the difficult art of escaping from prison. Unfortunately, nobody had thought to confirm that Arizona would cooperate with the rest of the escape route.

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