He was allowed to continue wearing his own clothes, the guards were quite friendly, the food passable, the hut into which he was put clean and the wire-net bed he was given comfortable. The only hardship imposed was a prohibition against talking, and to enforce this guards kept the prisoners under observation both day and night. This constant surveillance convinced Gregory that escape was next to impossible, but he soon found that when out on exercise or in the washhouse neighbours managed to exchange whispered sentences.
By these means he learned that among the prisoners in his but were Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Professor Edouard lessen and General von Rabenau; while in other huts were Baron Karl von Guttenberg, Judge Hans von Dohnanyi, the Christian Democrat Deputies Adolf Reichwein and Theodore Haubach, Prince Philip of Hesse, who before quarrelling with Hitler had been a prominent Nazi, the Socialist leaders Julius Leber and Wilhelm Leuschner, Generals Stieff and Lindemann, Counts Moitke and Matuscha and many other distinguished Germans.
At first, on finding himself among such people, several of whom might know Prince Hugo, Gregory was greatly alarmed that his imposture would be discovered. But on arrival at the camp two pieces of cloth, each bearing the letter P and a number, had been sewn on to his coat and trousers, and after being for only a short time in the hut to which he was allotted he found that the guards always addressed the prisoners by their numbers. Thus, as Number 541, his identity was screened from his companions and he swiftly decided to keep it so by refusing to give them any information about himself. As most of them had something to hide and they all believed that stoolpigeons had been put in among them, when he replied to their whispered enquiries only by a shake of the head none of them showed any resentment; and soon he had made friends of several of them.
As is the case in all prisons a mysterious grapevine existed by which news of the outside world regularly trickled into the camp, and this was frequently augmented by new arrivals. A number of them, like many of the prisoners already there, had first been confined for some days in cells under the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. All of these had been subjected to a greater or lesser degree of torture in an attempt to force them to admit their guilt and incriminate others. But they all maintained that they had managed to stand up to it; and that, although in its early stages the pain had seemed to become unbearable, there came a point at which the human mind could not only accept it but ignore it until relieved by unconsciousness.
Towards the middle of August the fate of the Generals in the 20th July plot became known. Field Marshal Witzleben, Generals Hoeppner, Fellgiebel, Hase, Thomas, and several officers of less senior rank had been dragged before a `People's Court' and shamefully exhibited there, unshaven, in old clothes and without braces or belts, so that they had had to hold their trousers up. They had then been condemned to death. The manner of their death had been personally decreed in detail by the fiendish Hitler. They had been stripped naked, hanged, cut down and revived, then hung up again with butchers' meat hooks in their backs until they expired in agony.
General Fromm, too, had not escaped. In spite of his having endeavoured to save himself by ruining the conspiracy, he had shared the fate of the colleagues he had from cowardice refused to aid. Kaltenbrunner who, with the possible exception of Grauber. was Himmer's most brutal-minded Lieutenant, had seen to that, because he was furious that Fromm had had von Stauffenberg and the other most active conspirators shot, instead of simply arresting them and handing them over to be tortured.
War news was also coming through. After over two months on their Normandy beach-head without launching an offensive the Allies had at last broken out. Towards the end of July the Americans, under General Bradley, had driven through to St. Loo on the coast of Brittany and simultaneously the Canadians had made a determined assault up the Falaise road against Caen. The Russians, meanwhile, had arrived at the gates of Warsaw and, although they were the hereditary enemies of the Poles, many thousands of Poles- had risen in rebellion at dawn on August 1st with the intention of annihilating the German garrison and so enabling the Russians to enter their city.
During this time, and particularly at night before going to sleep, Gregory frequently concentrated his thoughts on Erika and did his utmost to assure her that he was safe and well. At times he seemed to get through and see her clearly at Gwaine Meads; but she looked ill, and he knew that was from worrying about him.
Once, in the third week of August, he spontaneously contacted Malacou. The Jew was sitting in a prison cell. Whereabouts Gregory had no idea, but it was clear that the occultist had been caught. Yet he conveyed a strong impression that he was not in the least worried about his situation.- Why that should be Gregory could not imagine, but he had no doubt at all that his old associate was perfectly content to be where he was.
At the end of the month there was an influx of new prisoners: Dr. Karl Goerdeler, Ambassadors von Hassell and von der Schulenburg, Admiral Canaris, General Hans Oster, the Police Chiefs Count Helldorf and Artur Nebe, the ex-Finance Minister Johannes Popitz and several others. All of them had been arrested in the last week in July or early in August, on suspicion of having been concerned in the plot to assassinate Hitler. They had since been confined in the Gestapo headquarters, but no evidence against them being forthcoming they had now been sent to Sachsenhausen.
Gregory was particularly interested in Admiral Canaris, as he knew the little man to have been the pre-war head of the German Secret Service and to have continued in that capacity until the previous winter. Only then had Himmer’s inordinate ambition to control everything he could lay his hands on enabled him to secure the Admiral's dismissal and absorb the old regular-officered Secret Service into the much greater Foreign Intelligence Department UA-1, that had been built up for him by his own man, Gruppenfьhrer Grauber.
Rumour in the camp had it that Canaris had been anti-Hitler from the beginning, and had even deliberately withheld Intelligence because he wanted the Allies to win the war quickly so that Germany might escape the terrible punishment that was now being inflicted on her. It was said, too, that his second-in-command, General Oster, who had been kept on after the Admiral had been sacked, had stubbornly continued to thwart the Nazis whenever possible; so that either of them should still be alive was a miracle.
Early in September, further news of Germany’s rapidly deteriorating situation percolated through the camp. In mid August the Allies had made another landing in the South of France. Soon afterwards Bradley and Montgomery had succeeded in encircling and destroying a great part of the German Army in the West, in the neighbourhood of Falaise, while another American Army under General Patton had reached the Seine at Fontainebleau.
Then the 23rd of the month had proved a truly black day for Germany. King Michael of Rumania had carried out a coup d'etat, disarmed the German troops in Rumania and gone over to the Allies. Simultaneously there had been a rising against the Germans in Slovakia and on General Le Clerc reaching Paris with an armoured spearhead the population of the French capital had risen and set about massacring its German garrison. A few days later the Finns, who, with extraordinary bravery, had for five years fought as Germany’s ally and kept a large Russian Army occupied on their front, had at last thrown in the sponge and asked for an armistice.
It was clear that Hitler's `Europa' was cracking right and left, if not yet in the centre. But Gregory's mind was by then more seriously occupied about his own situation. Admiral Canaris had been put in his hut and, being greatly interested in the little Admiral's career, Gregory had taken special pains to cultivate him. It had, however, transpired that, even while confined at Sachsenhausen, the ex-Chief of Abwehr Intelligence had special sources of information. One day when they were employed in their morning chore of cleaning out the hut, the Admiral had whispered: