The Runner

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At nine o’clock, on a warm July evening in the Bavarian Alps, Erich Seyss stepped from the doorway of his assigned barracks and walked briskly across the grass towards the burned out stable that housed the prisoners’ latrine. He wore a shapeless gray uniform that carried neither rank nor insignia. No cap adorned his head. Only his arrogant gait and undaunted posture remained to identify him as an officer of the German Reich. In the distance, the sun’s last rays crowned snow-capped peaks with a hazy orange halo. Closer, and less angelic, twin barbed wire fences and a succession of spindly-legged watchtowers surrounded a five acre enclosure, home to three thousand defeated soldiers.

POW Camp 8, as it was officially designated by the United States Army of Occupation, sat in a broad meadow on the western outskirts of Garmisch, a once chic resort that in 1936 had played host to the Winter Olympic Games. Until three months earlier, the compound had served as the headquarters of the German Army’s First Mountain Division. Like Garmisch, it had escaped the war unscathed weathered, perhaps, but untouched by a single bomb or bullet. Today, the assembly of stout stone buildings and low slung wooden cabins housed What Seyss had heard an American officer refer to as “the scum and brutes of the German army.”

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