Escape Artist

With all its other worries, the U.S. Department of State last week was worried about the answer to two questions: Where in the world was Baron Franz von Werra? Who had helped him to skip the U.S., jump his $15,000 Federal bond?

The first question was fairly easy. According to report, the talkative German war flier was in Berlin bragging of a seven-month, 16,000-mile flight from his British captors.

As to the second, the State Department thought it had the answer, too, and was pondering effective diplomatic action against three unnamed German consular officials who had provided Werra with the phony Swiss passport on which he sailed from the U.S.

Werra parachuted into British hands last September when his Messerschmitt was shot down over Croydon Airport. Interned in Hyde Park, the 26-year-old airman was surprised while burrowing his way out, shipped off to a Scottish prison camp. There he promptly escaped again, was picked up after six days when he tried to board a boat for Eire.

Faced with such persistence, British authorities in January shipped Escape Artist von Werra to Canada. Thinking he was bound for Winnipeg, he had already plotted a route from there to New Orleans by the time he landed in Halifax.

Instead the prison train went north from Montreal into the Laurentian Mountains, and Werra, seeing his plans upset, dived out the train window into a snowbank. Speaking French fluently, he had no difficulty hitching lifts with habitants for about 140 miles, through Ottawa to the St. Lawrence. He paddled across to the U.S. at night in a stolen boat, landing near Ogdensburg, N.Y. with his ears badly frozen.

Arrested by U.S. authorities on a technical charge of illegal entry, Werra was sent to New York City, placed in the custody of the German consul on bond. He stayed in New York about a month, touring nightclubs, telling tall tales to bug-eyed and sympathetic ladies from the German settlement in Yorkville.

In March Werra started south on a "hunting trip," did not stop till he hit Peru. Thence he went to Bolivia, where he found what he was hunting for--a German-controlled airline to fly him to Rio de Janeiro, an Italian plane from there across the Atlantic, a German airliner back home to Berlin.

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