25 Germans Escaped an American Camp — Not One Was Caught by the Army

4:00 in the afternoon, Christmas Eve, 1944. Hard rain. Two American corporals counted the men of compound 1A. The roster said 62. 39 were standing in front of them. 25 German prisoners were gone. Finding them would not be the army’s doing. It would come down to Arizona ranchers, a street sweeper, and a line of washing on a bush.

Six weeks earlier, north of Phoenix, on a ranch in Maricopa County, Newton and Verna Cooper began most mornings the way ranch families did in 1944, early, with children underfoot, and work that did not wait for a war. Maricopa County then was Phoenix and a ring of farm towns. Tempe, Glendale, Gila Bend, Casa Grande, down the road in Pinal.

Cotton fields, irrigation canals, and desert that started where the last watered furrow stopped. Cotton was the county’s war work. The 1944 crop needed picking, and the young men who would have picked it were in Europe and the Pacific. Arizona farmers were short of hands. At home, the war was arithmetic. Sugar, coffee, meat counted, rationed, and short in every kitchen from Phoenix to Casa Grande.

Hold on to that. It matters the moment these men come back. Six miles east of the city stood a set of low red buttes called Papago Park. Phoenix had set the ground aside as public recreation land in 1914. By 1944, it was fenced. Inside were five compounds holding roughly 3,000 German prisoners, most of them Navy men, watched by fewer than 400 Americans.

The surviving figures disagree with each other, and none of them are comfortable ones. Two of those Americans were Larry Jorgenson, a young guard, and his wife Dorothy, who worked as a camp secretary. They were both still in the Phoenix Valley more than 50 years later. Her work was paperwork, supply requests out of the compounds, signed and passed along.

Picks, shovels, coal for the bathhouse stove. Nobody in that office read them twice. The provost marshal was Captain Cecil Parshall, a former police detective out of Kansas, and a decorated veteran of the First War. He was the one man on the post who worried out loud. On the evening of the 23rd of December, 1944, it started to rain across Maricopa County.

Within a day, Arizonans who had never seen the inside of that camp were answering their doors to it. Phoenix knew about the camp the way towns know about installations. Partly. What people saw were prisoners on trucks going out to farms and cotton fields under light guard, and coming back at evening. In September 1944, about 200 Papago Park prisoners started picking cotton.

By October, the state expected 5,000 German prisoners working Arizona fields. The harvest got in because of them, and everybody in the county knew it. In May 1944, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had held Papago Park up as a model camp. Its discipline, its food, its order. That was the public picture of the place, printed and circulated.

Prisoners who worked were paid 80 cents a day in canteen script, the same as an American private. Of roughly 3,000 men at Papago Park, only about 700 volunteered for it. In April, 1944, J. Edgar Hoover had gone public with a warning to civilians about escaped prisoners. He said he wanted to warn the civilian population against the potential menace.

In Arizona, it was not an idle warning. In February, 1944, five German submarine captains had walked out of Papago Park hidden in an army truck. Two were caught in Tucson. Another prisoner got more than 30 miles into Mexico. By late 1944, there had been 13 breakouts from Papago Park alone. Colonel William Holden, the commandant, answered that by putting every man who had ever escaped into compound one together.

Holden was not worried about tunnels. He had watched work crews blast the decomposed granite under the camp to put in septic tanks. He believed men with hand tools could not get through it. Captain Parshall disagreed. Months in advance, he named the one place the guard towers could not see, a strip of ground between two buildings in compound 1A.

Nothing was done about it. Come back to that afternoon. Two corporals, 62 names on a roster, 39 men in the mud, and rain coming down hard enough to explain it. They assumed the rest were inside, out of the weather. On that particular afternoon, that was a reasonable assumption to make. They went through the barracks anyway.

The buildings were empty. Parshall had been at the officers’ club when the word reached him. By around 7:00 that evening, he was certain of the number, 25 men gone, and he picked up the telephone to the FBI. He was still on that line when the other phone rang. It was the Maricopa County Sheriff.

Before the army had told anyone anything, Arizona was already calling the army. On Christmas morning, the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette carried it on the front page. The Republic reported that the men had climbed an 8-ft fence. That was the story the camp gave out. By the 28th of December, the Gazette called it, in its own words, the greatest manhunt in Arizona history.

19 men were still out. Almost none of them would be found by soldiers. A driver outside Phoenix picked up a hitchhiker on Christmas Eve, did not like his accent, and kept driving past the man’s stop, straight to the sheriff’s office with him still in the passenger seat. His name was Herbert Fuchs. He was 22, wet through, and he had asked to be taken to jail.

Then a woman in Tempe telephoned. Two men had knocked at her door and surrendered. Then a man in Tempe called. Two more had given themselves up to him. Then the Tempe railroad station, where Helmut Gucker was waiting. Six were back before any search had properly begun. The weather did most of that. Phoenix took 9/10 of an inch of rain on Christmas Eve, 1944, a record for that date that stood for the next 77 years, until 2021.

On the 26th, Partial questioned three of the men already back. Dorothy Jorgenson typed the transcripts. Helmut Gucker told them what nobody at the camp had worked out for themselves. There was a tunnel. Corporal Larry Jorgenson found the far end of it in a field outside the wire. Two shallow boxes of dirt and grass laid over a hole.

Then he was told to go through it. He crawled all 178 ft of it in the wet on his stomach. A bare bulb on frayed wire somewhere overhead. It came out under the bathhouse behind a coal box. The diggers had measured it at 178 ft. The newspapers printed 175, then 200. The Park Service later settled on 176. The number moved with each retelling.

Outside the search was already civilian. $25 was posted for each man. Ranchers and Tohono O’odham trackers went out with newspaper clippings of the prisoners’ faces folded into their shirt pockets. They were reading ground the army could not read. As the last men worked south toward the border, the recaptures stopped happening near Phoenix and started happening at ranch houses, water pumps, and canals.

New Year’s Day, 1945. Two Germans came up to the Cooper ranch and knocked. Leroy Ashmore opened the door and let them in. Newton and Verna Cooper were out for the evening. By one account, the two men brewed coffee in the kitchen, handed out the last of their chocolate to the children, and told submarine stories until the parents got home around 11:00 at night.

One of the prisoners had a cactus injury, chafe in the leg. Newton Cooper did not drive them into town and hand them to a crowd. He drove them to the army himself. Far to the south, a Tohono O’odham tracker walked up on two more asleep on open ground, less than 30 miles from Mexico. They did not wake up as he stood over them.

On the 2nd of January, villagers at Cockle reported two men seen at the community water pump. Reinhardt Mark and Heinrich Palmer were picked up near Cells that day on the strength of that report. They were not put in a cell. They were held at the home of Fred Tully, a customs patrol officer, whose wife gave them dinner at the family table.

Then the neighbors were let in to look at them. In the same account, a disabled local boy was brought to the house because he wanted a game of chess with a German officer. On the 4th of January, O’Odham scouts found Martin Reese and Jürgen Schröder near Cells. Both men were asleep. The pattern by now was not pursuit.

It was somebody local seeing something wrong. On the 5th, a patrol under Sergeant Theodore Stockton brought in three more. The border was close enough to see from where some of them were taken. None of them reached it. Two of the senior officers were woken by scouts a few days later. One of the trackers had taken the same German prisoner in Mexico 11 months earlier.

He recognized him on sight. By the 8th of January, another pair were in custody. Six men were left. Three of those six had walked out of the tunnel carrying a boat in pieces on their backs. They had planned to float the Gila to the Colorado and out to the Gulf. Accounts differ on what the boat was made of, canvas and timber in most tellings.

It did not matter. The blue line on an Arizona road map is not a river for most of the year. At Gila Bend, they found sand, mud, and a channel that would not carry a loaded boat. What finished them was laundry. Cowboys near Gila Bend saw washing spread out to dry on a mesquite tree. One of the men was found at a canal washing his underwear.

The three were taken between the 9th and the 11th of January. Newspapers in Phoenix had been running their photographs for a fortnight. In the end, it came down to washing left out on a bush. Johann Kramer was found inside the camp. He had been walking back in with work details repeatedly and out again and nobody counting the columns had noticed.

A surprise inspection in late January caught him. Walter Kozur had a food cache hidden at an abandoned car out in the desert. When he walked to it in late January, three armed American soldiers were sitting there waiting for him. Jurgen Wattenberg had been camped in Crown Canyon within sight of the camp itself.

On the 27th of January, he shaved, put on a clean shirt, and walked into Phoenix with 75 cents. He ate at a downtown counter. One account says oatmeal with raisins, a soft-boiled egg, toast, and tea. Another says soup and a beer. Then he sat for a while in the lobby of the Hotel Adams. At about half past 3:00 in the morning, he asked a man sweeping the gutter for directions to Van Buren Street.

The street sweeper flagged down a patrolman, Sergeant Gilbert Brady, Phoenix police. Brady asked him for his draft registration card, offered him a cigarette, and took his autograph. One account puts the arrest in the Adams lobby instead. Wattenberg’s line, as Brady reported it, “The game’s up and I lost.” 36 days, 25 men, all of them back, nobody shot.

And then Arizona opened the bags they were carrying and what was inside them turned the state against its own army. While that was going on, Arizona had been seeing Germans everywhere. 14 Boy Scouts were reported in San Diego. A hobo in Atlanta was held for the wrong accent. Two Flagstaff teenagers in letter sweaters were stopped.

The sightings ran well past Maricopa County and well past the state line. Almost none of them were real. The real ones came from people who lived on the ground the men crossed. The editorials came fast. On the 26th of December, the Tucson Citizen attacked the way the prisoners were being treated. On the 29th, the Casa Grande Dispatch called the whole compound arrangement a mistake.

What the recaptured men were carrying did not help. Cigarettes by the carton, chocolate, coffee, sugar, 10 lb of pork fat, all of it out of an American camp canteen in a rationed county. A letter to the Arizona Republic at the end of December put the objection plainly. The writer said Phoenix families could not get, in her words, a single slice of bacon for weeks on end.

That was the real temperature of it, not fear of sabotage, resentment at what the enemy was eating 6 mi east of town while the people guarding him queued with ration books. There was amusement in it, too. The press had the men going over an 8-ft fence, then through a tunnel of three different lengths, and at one point escaping in a boat that could not have fitted.

The worst of it came from a no comment. Major Eugene Teague declined to answer a Gazette reporter, and the paper ran the story that the submarine ace Gunther Prien had escaped. Prien had been dead since 1941. And there was something else in it, harder to place. The people who took these men in mostly fed them first.

Fred Tully’s neighbors came to look at them, then went home. Captain Partial, who had named the blind spot months before and been ignored, was asked later what he made of the prisoners. His answer, “Those Germans were a fine bunch of men, smart as hell. The punishment handed down was bread and water.

One day for every day a man had been gone. For the man who was out 36 days, that was 36 days of it. The papers were not finished. In the middle of February, the Casa Grande Dispatch wrote that the steady stream of escapes from Arizona camps was without excuse. By then, the army had already moved. A board of officers sat, and outside investigator, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander O’Rourke, recommended court-martials.

What came out were findings of dereliction and letters of reprimand. Nobody was tried. The reason was the cotton. 5,000 prisoners were working Arizona fields that season. Washington was not going to put that program on trial in the middle of a harvest the farms could not do without. On the 13th of February, the Arizona Republic reported that Colonel Holden had been replaced by a commander brought in from Tule Lake.

Holden retired weeks later for medical reasons. And the prisoners went back to the fields. The cotton still needed picking, and the men who had walked to the Mexican border in December were on Arizona farms again by spring. The camp kept running. Prisoner labor worked Arizona farms through 1945, and the last German prisoners were shipped home from Arizona in 1946.

Then the fences came down, and the trucks stopped coming. Papago Park went back to being what it was in 1914, public ground east of Phoenix, red buttes, picnic tables. Part of it is a military reservation. Almost nothing above ground says what happened there. A 1945 map of the camp survived because Elks Lodge number 2148 kept it.

It is now held by the Arizona State University Library. That is how most of this survived, locally, by accident. The Arizona Military Museum on the old reservation keeps a permanent display about the escape. The Arizona Historical Society has one, too, built around material collected by Steve Hoza. Both are small rooms in buildings people drive past.

Hoza spent years taking first-person accounts from both sides, guards, secretaries, ranchers, prisoners, and published them in 1995. Most of the Americans in the story are in there somewhere. In 1985, there was a reunion at Papago Park. Jürgen Wattenberg came back, 85 years old, as guest of honor. The last man taken, 40 years earlier.

By one account, a single protester turned up. The press errors outlived the escape. Dorothy Jorgensen, who had typed the interrogations, said flatly in later years that the tunnel had never been wide enough to get any boat through it. Heinrich Palmer, one of the two men taken near cells, was interviewed in Arizona in 2001.

He still remembered the reward paid to the men who turned him in and thought it small. $25 a man was the posted figure. Across 5 weeks, from Tempe doorsteps to the country round cells, that is roughly what the recaptures cost. Most of it went to civilians. Larry Jorgensen stayed in the valley and retired in Scottsdale.

In 2001, he sat down with a Phoenix reporter and talked about the day he was sent into the tunnel. 178 ft of it, on his stomach, in the wet. What he said about it more than 50 years later was this. You’ve really got to want to get out of somewhere.

25 Germans Escaped an American Camp — Not One Was Caught by the Army

4:00 in the afternoon, Christmas Eve, 1944. Hard rain. Two American corporals counted the men of compound 1A. The roster said 62. 39 were standing in front of them. 25 German prisoners were gone. Finding them would not be the army’s doing. It would come down to Arizona ranchers, a street sweeper, and a line of washing on a bush.

Six weeks earlier, north of Phoenix, on a ranch in Maricopa County, Newton and Verna Cooper began most mornings the way ranch families did in 1944, early, with children underfoot, and work that did not wait for a war. Maricopa County then was Phoenix and a ring of farm towns. Tempe, Glendale, Gila Bend, Casa Grande, down the road in Pinal.

Cotton fields, irrigation canals, and desert that started where the last watered furrow stopped. Cotton was the county’s war work. The 1944 crop needed picking, and the young men who would have picked it were in Europe and the Pacific. Arizona farmers were short of hands. At home, the war was arithmetic. Sugar, coffee, meat counted, rationed, and short in every kitchen from Phoenix to Casa Grande.

Hold on to that. It matters the moment these men come back. Six miles east of the city stood a set of low red buttes called Papago Park. Phoenix had set the ground aside as public recreation land in 1914. By 1944, it was fenced. Inside were five compounds holding roughly 3,000 German prisoners, most of them Navy men, watched by fewer than 400 Americans.

The surviving figures disagree with each other, and none of them are comfortable ones. Two of those Americans were Larry Jorgenson, a young guard, and his wife Dorothy, who worked as a camp secretary. They were both still in the Phoenix Valley more than 50 years later. Her work was paperwork, supply requests out of the compounds, signed and passed along.

Picks, shovels, coal for the bathhouse stove. Nobody in that office read them twice. The provost marshal was Captain Cecil Parshall, a former police detective out of Kansas, and a decorated veteran of the First War. He was the one man on the post who worried out loud. On the evening of the 23rd of December, 1944, it started to rain across Maricopa County.

Within a day, Arizonans who had never seen the inside of that camp were answering their doors to it. Phoenix knew about the camp the way towns know about installations. Partly. What people saw were prisoners on trucks going out to farms and cotton fields under light guard, and coming back at evening. In September 1944, about 200 Papago Park prisoners started picking cotton.

By October, the state expected 5,000 German prisoners working Arizona fields. The harvest got in because of them, and everybody in the county knew it. In May 1944, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had held Papago Park up as a model camp. Its discipline, its food, its order. That was the public picture of the place, printed and circulated.

Prisoners who worked were paid 80 cents a day in canteen script, the same as an American private. Of roughly 3,000 men at Papago Park, only about 700 volunteered for it. In April, 1944, J. Edgar Hoover had gone public with a warning to civilians about escaped prisoners. He said he wanted to warn the civilian population against the potential menace.

In Arizona, it was not an idle warning. In February, 1944, five German submarine captains had walked out of Papago Park hidden in an army truck. Two were caught in Tucson. Another prisoner got more than 30 miles into Mexico. By late 1944, there had been 13 breakouts from Papago Park alone. Colonel William Holden, the commandant, answered that by putting every man who had ever escaped into compound one together.

Holden was not worried about tunnels. He had watched work crews blast the decomposed granite under the camp to put in septic tanks. He believed men with hand tools could not get through it. Captain Parshall disagreed. Months in advance, he named the one place the guard towers could not see, a strip of ground between two buildings in compound 1A.

Nothing was done about it. Come back to that afternoon. Two corporals, 62 names on a roster, 39 men in the mud, and rain coming down hard enough to explain it. They assumed the rest were inside, out of the weather. On that particular afternoon, that was a reasonable assumption to make. They went through the barracks anyway.

The buildings were empty. Parshall had been at the officers’ club when the word reached him. By around 7:00 that evening, he was certain of the number, 25 men gone, and he picked up the telephone to the FBI. He was still on that line when the other phone rang. It was the Maricopa County Sheriff.

Before the army had told anyone anything, Arizona was already calling the army. On Christmas morning, the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette carried it on the front page. The Republic reported that the men had climbed an 8-ft fence. That was the story the camp gave out. By the 28th of December, the Gazette called it, in its own words, the greatest manhunt in Arizona history.

19 men were still out. Almost none of them would be found by soldiers. A driver outside Phoenix picked up a hitchhiker on Christmas Eve, did not like his accent, and kept driving past the man’s stop, straight to the sheriff’s office with him still in the passenger seat. His name was Herbert Fuchs. He was 22, wet through, and he had asked to be taken to jail.

Then a woman in Tempe telephoned. Two men had knocked at her door and surrendered. Then a man in Tempe called. Two more had given themselves up to him. Then the Tempe railroad station, where Helmut Gucker was waiting. Six were back before any search had properly begun. The weather did most of that. Phoenix took 9/10 of an inch of rain on Christmas Eve, 1944, a record for that date that stood for the next 77 years, until 2021.

On the 26th, Partial questioned three of the men already back. Dorothy Jorgenson typed the transcripts. Helmut Gucker told them what nobody at the camp had worked out for themselves. There was a tunnel. Corporal Larry Jorgenson found the far end of it in a field outside the wire. Two shallow boxes of dirt and grass laid over a hole.

Then he was told to go through it. He crawled all 178 ft of it in the wet on his stomach. A bare bulb on frayed wire somewhere overhead. It came out under the bathhouse behind a coal box. The diggers had measured it at 178 ft. The newspapers printed 175, then 200. The Park Service later settled on 176. The number moved with each retelling.

Outside the search was already civilian. $25 was posted for each man. Ranchers and Tohono O’odham trackers went out with newspaper clippings of the prisoners’ faces folded into their shirt pockets. They were reading ground the army could not read. As the last men worked south toward the border, the recaptures stopped happening near Phoenix and started happening at ranch houses, water pumps, and canals.

New Year’s Day, 1945. Two Germans came up to the Cooper ranch and knocked. Leroy Ashmore opened the door and let them in. Newton and Verna Cooper were out for the evening. By one account, the two men brewed coffee in the kitchen, handed out the last of their chocolate to the children, and told submarine stories until the parents got home around 11:00 at night.

One of the prisoners had a cactus injury, chafe in the leg. Newton Cooper did not drive them into town and hand them to a crowd. He drove them to the army himself. Far to the south, a Tohono O’odham tracker walked up on two more asleep on open ground, less than 30 miles from Mexico. They did not wake up as he stood over them.

On the 2nd of January, villagers at Cockle reported two men seen at the community water pump. Reinhardt Mark and Heinrich Palmer were picked up near Cells that day on the strength of that report. They were not put in a cell. They were held at the home of Fred Tully, a customs patrol officer, whose wife gave them dinner at the family table.

Then the neighbors were let in to look at them. In the same account, a disabled local boy was brought to the house because he wanted a game of chess with a German officer. On the 4th of January, O’Odham scouts found Martin Reese and Jürgen Schröder near Cells. Both men were asleep. The pattern by now was not pursuit.

It was somebody local seeing something wrong. On the 5th, a patrol under Sergeant Theodore Stockton brought in three more. The border was close enough to see from where some of them were taken. None of them reached it. Two of the senior officers were woken by scouts a few days later. One of the trackers had taken the same German prisoner in Mexico 11 months earlier.

He recognized him on sight. By the 8th of January, another pair were in custody. Six men were left. Three of those six had walked out of the tunnel carrying a boat in pieces on their backs. They had planned to float the Gila to the Colorado and out to the Gulf. Accounts differ on what the boat was made of, canvas and timber in most tellings.

It did not matter. The blue line on an Arizona road map is not a river for most of the year. At Gila Bend, they found sand, mud, and a channel that would not carry a loaded boat. What finished them was laundry. Cowboys near Gila Bend saw washing spread out to dry on a mesquite tree. One of the men was found at a canal washing his underwear.

The three were taken between the 9th and the 11th of January. Newspapers in Phoenix had been running their photographs for a fortnight. In the end, it came down to washing left out on a bush. Johann Kramer was found inside the camp. He had been walking back in with work details repeatedly and out again and nobody counting the columns had noticed.

A surprise inspection in late January caught him. Walter Kozur had a food cache hidden at an abandoned car out in the desert. When he walked to it in late January, three armed American soldiers were sitting there waiting for him. Jurgen Wattenberg had been camped in Crown Canyon within sight of the camp itself.

On the 27th of January, he shaved, put on a clean shirt, and walked into Phoenix with 75 cents. He ate at a downtown counter. One account says oatmeal with raisins, a soft-boiled egg, toast, and tea. Another says soup and a beer. Then he sat for a while in the lobby of the Hotel Adams. At about half past 3:00 in the morning, he asked a man sweeping the gutter for directions to Van Buren Street.

The street sweeper flagged down a patrolman, Sergeant Gilbert Brady, Phoenix police. Brady asked him for his draft registration card, offered him a cigarette, and took his autograph. One account puts the arrest in the Adams lobby instead. Wattenberg’s line, as Brady reported it, “The game’s up and I lost.” 36 days, 25 men, all of them back, nobody shot.

And then Arizona opened the bags they were carrying and what was inside them turned the state against its own army. While that was going on, Arizona had been seeing Germans everywhere. 14 Boy Scouts were reported in San Diego. A hobo in Atlanta was held for the wrong accent. Two Flagstaff teenagers in letter sweaters were stopped.

The sightings ran well past Maricopa County and well past the state line. Almost none of them were real. The real ones came from people who lived on the ground the men crossed. The editorials came fast. On the 26th of December, the Tucson Citizen attacked the way the prisoners were being treated. On the 29th, the Casa Grande Dispatch called the whole compound arrangement a mistake.

What the recaptured men were carrying did not help. Cigarettes by the carton, chocolate, coffee, sugar, 10 lb of pork fat, all of it out of an American camp canteen in a rationed county. A letter to the Arizona Republic at the end of December put the objection plainly. The writer said Phoenix families could not get, in her words, a single slice of bacon for weeks on end.

That was the real temperature of it, not fear of sabotage, resentment at what the enemy was eating 6 mi east of town while the people guarding him queued with ration books. There was amusement in it, too. The press had the men going over an 8-ft fence, then through a tunnel of three different lengths, and at one point escaping in a boat that could not have fitted.

The worst of it came from a no comment. Major Eugene Teague declined to answer a Gazette reporter, and the paper ran the story that the submarine ace Gunther Prien had escaped. Prien had been dead since 1941. And there was something else in it, harder to place. The people who took these men in mostly fed them first.

Fred Tully’s neighbors came to look at them, then went home. Captain Partial, who had named the blind spot months before and been ignored, was asked later what he made of the prisoners. His answer, “Those Germans were a fine bunch of men, smart as hell. The punishment handed down was bread and water.

One day for every day a man had been gone. For the man who was out 36 days, that was 36 days of it. The papers were not finished. In the middle of February, the Casa Grande Dispatch wrote that the steady stream of escapes from Arizona camps was without excuse. By then, the army had already moved. A board of officers sat, and outside investigator, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander O’Rourke, recommended court-martials.

What came out were findings of dereliction and letters of reprimand. Nobody was tried. The reason was the cotton. 5,000 prisoners were working Arizona fields that season. Washington was not going to put that program on trial in the middle of a harvest the farms could not do without. On the 13th of February, the Arizona Republic reported that Colonel Holden had been replaced by a commander brought in from Tule Lake.

Holden retired weeks later for medical reasons. And the prisoners went back to the fields. The cotton still needed picking, and the men who had walked to the Mexican border in December were on Arizona farms again by spring. The camp kept running. Prisoner labor worked Arizona farms through 1945, and the last German prisoners were shipped home from Arizona in 1946.

Then the fences came down, and the trucks stopped coming. Papago Park went back to being what it was in 1914, public ground east of Phoenix, red buttes, picnic tables. Part of it is a military reservation. Almost nothing above ground says what happened there. A 1945 map of the camp survived because Elks Lodge number 2148 kept it.

It is now held by the Arizona State University Library. That is how most of this survived, locally, by accident. The Arizona Military Museum on the old reservation keeps a permanent display about the escape. The Arizona Historical Society has one, too, built around material collected by Steve Hoza. Both are small rooms in buildings people drive past.

Hoza spent years taking first-person accounts from both sides, guards, secretaries, ranchers, prisoners, and published them in 1995. Most of the Americans in the story are in there somewhere. In 1985, there was a reunion at Papago Park. Jürgen Wattenberg came back, 85 years old, as guest of honor. The last man taken, 40 years earlier.

By one account, a single protester turned up. The press errors outlived the escape. Dorothy Jorgensen, who had typed the interrogations, said flatly in later years that the tunnel had never been wide enough to get any boat through it. Heinrich Palmer, one of the two men taken near cells, was interviewed in Arizona in 2001.

He still remembered the reward paid to the men who turned him in and thought it small. $25 a man was the posted figure. Across 5 weeks, from Tempe doorsteps to the country round cells, that is roughly what the recaptures cost. Most of it went to civilians. Larry Jorgensen stayed in the valley and retired in Scottsdale.

In 2001, he sat down with a Phoenix reporter and talked about the day he was sent into the tunnel. 178 ft of it, on his stomach, in the wet. What he said about it more than 50 years later was this. You’ve really got to want to get out of somewhere.