Word: nigstein
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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General Henri Honoré Giraud recalled happily in Washington how he renewed an old German acquaintance. A year after he had slipped out of Germany's Königstein prison, he encountered a bunch of prisoners in North Africa, discovered among them his old jailer...
...mystery of France's big, beloved old General Henri Honoré Giraud was no longer a mystery. When the 63-year-old general said he had escaped from Germany's Königstein fortress-prison by letting his ponderous body down 60 feet of self-made rope (TIME, May 11), the out-side world raised an eyebrow, suspected that Germany might have some use for a great French hero of both World Wars...
...sexagenarian general's rope trick was, however, no illusion. He wanted to help France. But when he reached Vichy he found a France quite unlike anything he had heard about within Königstein's walls. Marshal Pétain embraced him, then gave him a paper to sign, which among other things pledged him never to take up arms against Germany. General Giraud balked. Then Pierre Laval slyly suggested that the general could do France a mighty service by offering to return to prison in exchange for 400,000 married French war prisoners. General Giraud was amenable...
Fancy Story. General Giraud was imprisoned with many other high French officers in Saxony's grim, moated Königstein Fortress on a mountainside 750 feet above the Elbe. There, it was said last week, he managed to obtain German maps, timetables. From gift boxes he assembled a suit of civilian clothes.* As to the actual escape, stories differed. One version said that for months, when the General and his fellow prisoners were given airings in the nearby fields, they casually picked strands of hemp, until finally they had enough to weave a long rope. Another version, attributed...