Capture By Germans
On 18 July 1943 he was captured by the Germans and placed in the custody of the Sicherheitsdienst (or SD) in Dijon before being transferred to Fresnes prison in Paris (where he was shot attempting to escape, and then tortured), and eventually to the Paris headquarters of the SD at 84 Avenue Foch.
Several of his fellow-prisoners at the Avenue Foch suspected him of collaboration with the enemy although he made a failed escape attempt (according to his own account) together with another SOE prisoner, Noor Inyat Khan and a French Colonel named Léone Faye. He remained at Avenue Foch until 1944 when he was transferred to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen near Berlin.
Many British prisoners at Sachsenhausen were executed by hanging, and according to his own account he avoided the same fate because of a quarantine resulting from a typhus outbreak within the camp, and the opportunity which arose to smuggle himself into a group of prisoners who were being transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz in Upper Austria.
Read more about this topic: John Renshaw Starr
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