A Grisly Christmas Tale

On the road which runs out of Devizes, Wiltshire, towards the Marlborough Downs, there's a stern brick building which looks a bit like a prison. In fact, it's a barracks, but it was at one time a prison; and there, 60 years ago, a plot was devised which in the dreams of its authors was set to change the course of the second world war.

The sense was building at this time that Hitler was finished and the war would soon be over. But that was not how it looked to a group of dedicated devotees of the Fuhrer locked up in Le Marchant barracks. Their plot was timed for a day in Christmas week - according to some accounts, Christmas Eve - when the place would be lightly staffed and their custodians (they hoped) distracted. (Escapes were not unusual: 97 Italian prisoners broke out of a camp near Ayr in the same month, though, as regularly happened, they were quickly recaptured.)

The Devizes plotters had found a weakness in their prison's defences through which they would make a mass escape, commandeering first vehicles on the car park and then tanks down the road at an army depot. So equipped, they would make for other camps, storming them and releasing their prisoners, thus building up an army of fighting men to come to Hitler's rescue when collected by boats being sent from Bremen. But the plot was detected. The plotters and others suspected of collusion were rounded up and sent to a camp at Comrie in Perthshire, where the toughest Nazis were held and security was famously tight.

But someone had blundered. Among the contingent packed off to Comrie was a man called Wolfgang Rosterg who, far from being one of the plotters, was hostile to the whole project. Only the bravest and rashest prisoners dared to speak ill of Hitler or National Socialism in the camps, but Rosterg did so. He had seen enough of the world, he said, not to support such a system. The plotters believed (wrongly, according to British intelligence) that Rosterg had blown their plot at Devizes, and they thought he'd been sent to Comrie to spy on them. They told other prisoners that papers had been found in Rosterg's possession which established that while serving in France he had given advice and equipment to the French resistance and police.

What happened next, in the early hours of December 23, was the subject of evidence given at the subsequent trial of eight of these men - all young NCOs - for the murder of Rosterg. Their quarry was savagely beaten and kicked. A man called Koenig - the son of a former professor at the university of Vienna who, though one of the youngest involved, was taken to be the ringleader - tied a rope round Rosterg's neck. He was then made to face a "trial", at the end of which he was dragged away to be hanged. In fact, by the time they reached their makeshift gallows, poor Rosterg was already dead, but they went on and hanged him anyway, hoping - as some of them later testified - to be able to claim he had hanged himself.

Their case came before a military court in the following autumn, by which time the war in Europe was over. Though they pleaded not guilty, most insisted in court that Rosterg was a traitor who deserved to be hanged. The British deputy judge advocate, who superintended the trial, accepted that, from the German point of view, Rosterg was not a good soldier, and deserved "from any good German" contempt and dislike. And the British officer (a barrister who later became a judge) who defended Koenig and two of the others, said the accused were aware of a case in a PoW camp near Breslau where British officers had convicted and executed one of their fellow officers whom they believed had betrayed their plot to escape. Yet the German authorities had taken no action to punish them: "They [his clients] do not appreciate even now why they are being treated differently from British prisoners in Germany," he said.

Of the eight young men brought to the court, two were cleared during the trial, one was sentenced to life imprisonment, and the rest were condemned to death by hanging, a sentence carried out at Pentonville in October, constituting the last such mass execution in Britain. No one seems to have asked how it was that Rosterg had been allowed to fall into their hands at Comrie. Which makes it seem all the more right to remember him now on this 60th anniversary of his death.