Franz von Werra was a captain in the German Luftwaffe and a Knight's Cross recipient when his Messerschmitt Bf 109 was shot down over Britain in September 1940. He was captured, interrogated -- famously refusing to answer any questions about his unit -- and eventually transported to Camp 30, a POW compound in Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada. He was twenty-six years old. He had no intention of spending the war in Canada.
Von Werra was not an ordinary officer. He had studied at the University of Leiden, spoke four languages, and possessed the kind of aristocratic confidence that made him believe fate was something to be negotiated with rather than accepted. Within weeks of his arrival at Camp 30, he had begun planning his escape.
His first attempt, in November 1940, failed when a rope he was using to descend a wall snapped and he fell, breaking his ankle. He was recaptured within hours. But the failure only sharpened his resolve. While recovering from his injury in the camp hospital -- where he charmed the nurses and was allowed unusual freedoms -- he mapped the camp's defenses in his head and cultivated contacts among the guards.
His second attempt came on January 5, 1941. Posing as a Dutch civilian named Alex Coutie, von Werra walked out the camp's main gate with a group of civilian workers who had been granted day passes. He boarded a train heading east. For six days he moved through Ontario, hiding by day and traveling by night, using forged identification papers he had prepared while in the camp. He made it to the town of Prescott, on the St. Lawrence River, where he convinced a local fisherman to take him aboard his boat.
The boat was bound for the United States, but von Werra had other plans. When the fisherman stopped at a port near the American border, von Werra slipped away and made his way to the port of Hoboken, New Jersey, where he boarded an Italian merchant ship, the Ligure, bound for neutral Italy. He worked as a deckhand for the three-week voyage, concealing his German accent behind fluent Italian.
The Ligure docked in Genoa in March 1941. Von Werra walked off the ship, caught a train to the German border, and crossed into the Reich -- having traveled from a Canadian POW camp to the heart of Germany entirely on forged papers and sheer audacity.
He was feted by the Nazi propaganda machine, which publicized his escape as evidence of German superiority. Von Werra, to his credit, was uncomfortable with the political exploitation of his story. He requested a return to active duty and was killed in action over the North Sea on October 25, 1941, when his aircraft was shot down by a British fighter.
He was twenty-seven years old. He remains the only German POW of World War II to successfully escape from North American custody and return to active service.