BEAT THE GUARDS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 44, 21 February 1940, Page 13

BEAT THE GUARDS

GERMAN INTERNEE. MYSTERIOUS ESCAPE. i HAS CRIMINAL RECORD. (Frren Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, February 15. Alfred Fritz Yackels, alias Joseph Alfred Schmidt (40), has achieved notoriety as the first man to escape from an internment camp in Australia in this Trar. His escape was discovered at breakfast on Sunday when other interfaces reported that he was missing. The camp was immediately searched and 'spaces under floorboards prodded by guards' bayonets, but there was no sign of the missing man. Tie camp is surrounded by a double barbed wire fence, about 9ft high,, with another barbed wire fence outside that again, and it is considered that it would bare been impossible for Yackela to get through these barricades without being seen by sentries. It was, therefore, thought that ho must have escaped by clinging to the undercarriage of a sanitary wagon, which was the only vehicle which entered the camp on Saturday night, but two guards reported that they believed they had seen Yackels in the eamp after the cart had left. Escape from Black Maria. Yackels, who is known to the police as a professed Nazi sympathiser, has been in Australia for 20 yean. He ha* a criminal record dating from 1915 and including horse stealing, house breaking, malicious damage and embezzlement. In 1930 he escaped from a Black Maria by tearing up the floorboards and dropping to the road while the van was held up in a traffic block. Police believe that an explosion in the electric sub-station at Warwick Farm, on January 13, was a previous attempt by some of Yackels' friends to enable him to escape. The , 'station supplies light to the camp, which was consequently plunged into darkness, but the plotters evidently did net know that the camp had an emergency power light set, mounted on wagons. The emergency lights were immediately turned on, the guards doubled and the camp inspected. Bemuse of Yackela' notoriety his hut waa one of the first visited. He was appar- | ently sound asleep. It is eaid that some of the internees lave formed a Gestapo squad in the camp to compile secret reports on all the internees. Meetings are held in.the :. m mm mill" or Horat Weasel hut, at which the political views of internees sts discussed. Members of the Gestapo squad try to lead the internees Into conversations which will reveal their political views, the Nazis in camp being convinced that Hitler will win the war and that they will then be able to use the information which they are now acquiring. 7t is not impossible that they might erven be able to get some information to Germany now, by devious methods, in which case the relatives in Germany of the denounced men would suffer.