Prisoner and forger at Stalag Luft III who created passports and other official documents for those who took part in the Great Escape
The subject of several books and a Hollywood film, the Great Escape of Allied airmen from the German prison camp Stalag Luft III at Sagan, Silesia, in March 1944, is renowned for the tenacity of those who dug the escape tunnels and notorious for the murder — on Hitler’s order — of 50 of the 76 who escaped. Less has been published about the prisoners providing the back-up for the escape: the map makers, forgers and those who turned uniforms into civilian clothes.
Alex Cassie was a forger working in the escape department nicknamed “Dean & Dawson” after the British travel agency. Escapers disguised as foreign workers needed passports, work and travel permits, together with letters from employers and wives or girlfriends to give authenticity to their cover story. The print and typescript on every official document had to be painstakingly drawn by hand, using thin paint brushes and Indian ink. Although a typewriter was eventually provided by MI9 (the War Office department responsible for fostering escape and sending equipment concealed in parcels), it did not arrive until mid-1944.
The forgers needed good light in which to work, obliging them to sit near hut windows where they were vulnerable to detection by the camp “ferrets” who would sneak up to peer through windows in the hope of catching forgers and map makers at work. In haste to hide their work, the forgers could easily ruin documents that had taken weeks or months to make. In December 1943 ferret activity became so intense that it was obvious they suspected an escape was being planned and the forgers were twice obliged to change huts.
As insurance against discovery, three tunnels were started, codenamed “Tom”, “Dick” and “Harry”. In January 1944 “Tom” was discovered from traces of sand found near the entrance point hut. From then on, all effort was concentrated on “Harry”; “Dick” was used only for the storage of escape clothing and equipment.
On the night of the escape, March 24-25, all officers living in the hut from where the tunnel began, who were not among those who had drawn lots to escape, moved to other huts to make space for those ready to go. The tragic aftermath of the escape is well known. Of the 200 men selected to escape, 76 got out of the tunnel before the alarm was raised. Of these, only three reached safety and of those recaptured 50 were shot by the Gestapo, including the organiser of the escape, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, and four of Cassie’s roommates.
Alexander Cassie joined the RAF Volunteer Reserve in October 1940 and after training as a bomber pilot joined No 77 Squadron, based at Leeming, Yorkshire. During the summer of 1942 the squadron served with Coastal Command, searching the Bay of Biscay for enemy shipping and U-boats. In the early hours of September 2, 1942, Cassie’s Whitley bomber was hit by anti-aircraft fire, forcing him to ditch. He and his four-man crew were picked up by a French fishing boat, but when it put in at Concarneau, Brittany, the Germans were waiting.
During training, Cassie attended lectures by officers who had escaped from German prison camps. Consequently he was “escape minded”, a useful attitude in Stalag Luft III that had been declared “operational” by the Senior British Officer.
As an accomplished artist Cassie was recruited by the escape committee and taught the art of forgery by Flight Lieutenant “Tim” Walenn, who had acquired his skills in the army prison camps at Lübeck and Warburg in 1941-42.
By the time the tunnel was ready in March 1944 the forgers had produced more than 400 documents. Every escaper had at least one and those with elaborate cover stories had as many as six, complete with wallets made from covers ripped off books or from boot leather.
After the escape, the escape organisation was re-formed, and Cassie took over as head of Dean & Dawson. Little work was done from then on however, as MI9 sent messages to all camps that it could reach by clandestine methods, releasing prisoners from their obligation to escape. One officer did break out from Stalag Luft III in September 1944 equipped by the new organisation. He was recaptured within an hour and returned to the camp.
On January 28, 1945, as the Red Army approached Sagan, the prisoners were evacuated westwards to an abandoned naval prison camp at Westertimke, near Bremen. On April 10 they were moved towards Lübeck, where they were liberated by the British 2nd Army on May 2.
Alexander Cassie was born in 1916, in Cape Province, South Africa, to where his Scottish parents had emigrated. After attending Queenstown School he sailed to Scotland and studied psychology at Aberdeen University, graduating in 1938. He was working as an industrial psychologist in Edinburgh when he applied for the RAFVR.
After demobilisation he joined the Civil Service as a psychologist and developed psychometric tests for potential RAF aircrew. Later, as a senior psychologist at the Army Personnel Research Establishment, Farnborough, he developed exercises for candidates applying for a regular commission. On retirement in 1976 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Psychological Society.
In common with other veterans of Stalag Luft III, in 2000 he began appearing in television documentaries on camp life. A selection of his on-the-spot drawings of the camp and portraits of fellow prisoners is available in the Reading Room of the Imperial War Museum, Lambeth.
In 1949 he was married to Jean Stone.She predeceased him. He is survived by a son and a daughter.
Alexander Cassie, bomber pilot, prison camp forger and psychologist, was born on December 22, 1916. He died on April 5, 2012, aged 95
The Duke of Atholl
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South African land surveyor who suddenly inherited a Scottish dukedom and command of a private army
John Murray had spent his life in South Africa, where he had made a long and successful career as a land surveyor. So nothing had prepared him for the sudden acquisition of a Highland title and a dukedom. But when it fell to him, as a distant cousin, to take on the mantle as 11th Duke of Atholl, inheriting a string of Scottish earldoms into the bargain, and finding himself at the head of the only private army in Europe, he did not shirk it.
Great as the shock was, Murray accepted that there was an obligation to carry on a dynasty, and so, every year, he travelled from his home in South Africa’s Northern Province to don the kilt, bonnet and uniform of Colonel of the Atholl Highlanders, and take the salute at the annual parade of this army of part-time soldiers, whose role as ambassadors, tourist attraction, and military anomaly is as highly valued on tours abroad as it is in its native Perthshire.
He made it clear that, for all the romance and glamour associated with the title, he was at heart a South African and not a Scot. “I respect and honour Scotland as the land of my origins,” he said, “but I would never want to live there. I am a South African, not a Scotsman. My heart and my mind are in this country.”
Nevertheless, he performed his Highland duties so well that local people called him “the popular Duke”, while he insisted that everyone should refer to him simply as John. On learning that the future of the Atholl Highlanders might be in doubt, he insisted that they must carry on so long as he was responsible.
John Murray was born in Johannesburg in 1929, the son of a Royal Artillery officer, Major George Murray, and his wife Joan. His father was killed in action in 1940. He grew up in the mountains of The Downs, in the Wolkberg, where his parents encouraged in him a love of nature. He attended preparatory school in Parktown under the strict guidance of retired army officers-cum-teachers who, clad in raincoats and gumboots, and armed with canes, used to scrub the boys in a large communal bathhouse.
He completed his high schooling at Michael House where he was forced to do an extra year of school, as he was too young to be allowed to leave, although he had completed his exams at the age of 17. He was an accomplished cricketer and amateur poacher, being once beaten for being the gun bearer in a successful buck-hunting expedition in the school grounds.
Going on to the universities of Witwatersrand and Rhodes, he read engineering, and also met and married his wife, Peggy Leach, a reflexologist, in December 1956. Their marriage was a long and happy one.
His chosen profession as land surveyor led him into remote areas of southern Africa where he left, unwittingly, countless modest monuments to himself in the form of the trig beacons which he built, as well as roads and dams. He mapped farm boundaries and the subdivisions of residential areas across the country. This frequently involved him in outdoor adventures, including encounters with wild animals or sleeping on top of a trig beacon to avoid scorpions. But he also acquired an extensive knowledge of the countryside and an abiding love of the beauty of nature.
He was 67, and had retired, when he learnt that he had inherited the title, but not the land and property, as Duke of Atholl.
The Murrays, Earls and then Dukes of Atholl, had played a significant role throughout Scottish history. Their ancestral home, the 13th-century Blair Castle, near Pitlochry, stands at a pivotal point on the route between the Lowlands and the Highlands; seizing it was often a key to taking control of both.
One branch of the family had leaned to the Jacobites, with Lord George Murray commanding Charles Edward Stuart’s rebel army in 1745. However, it was a Marquis of Atholl, who, in 1703, was given the dukedom by Queen Anne, following his support for William III, and who held various government posts in Scotland.
Down the generations the Atholl Murrays were less successful at producing heirs and had to look to cousins or nephews to maintain the succession. The 5th duke, who died unmarried, was succeeded by his nephew. The 8th duke had no children, so was succeeded by his brother. The 9th duke died unmarried in 1957, when the title passed to a distant cousin, Iain, a descendant, seven generations on, of the 3rd duke, who had died in 1805.
Iain Atholl, the tenth duke, also died without children. Thus, in 1996, the dukedom passed to John Murray in South Africa, another descendant of the 3rd duke. By then, the land and much of the property — the castle and 120,000 acres of magnificent hill country, stretching from Strathgarry into the Grampians — had been placed in a charitable trust to maintain it for the future, so Murray inherited only the title, as well as the ceremonial obligations that went with it.
It was an arrangement that suited both sides. The new Duke of Atholl had no intention of moving to Scotland. But he took his duties seriously. These included not just taking the salute at the annual parade, but also maintaining close relations with the community, and, of course, ensuring the continuity of the Atholl Highlanders, who had been given the privilege of being a private army by Queen Victoria in 1844.
He asked for a committee of senior officers to assume responsibility for running it, and wrote: “Both Bruce, my son, and I, feel that their continued existence is imperative ... Their demise would be unthinkable.”
After retirement, he and Peggy lived quietly in the family home in the small village of Haenertsburg in the mountains of South Africa’s Northern Province. He leaves his wife, a daughter, and two sons, who hold the rank of lieutenant and corporal in the Transvaal Scottish regiment, whose soldiers wear the Murray of Atholl tartan.
He is succeeded in the title by his son Bruce, Marquis of Tullibardine.
John Murray, 11th Duke of Atholl, land surveyor, was born on January 19, 1929. He died on May 15, 2012, aged 83
