ESCAPED GERMAN

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 92, 15 October 1940, Page 11

ESCAPED GERMAN

FOUR DAYS OF LIBERTY

RECOGNISED BY ESCORTED PRISONER

(By Trans-Tasman Air Mail, from "The Post's" Representative.) SYDNEY, October 5. A German who escaped from an internment camp was recaptured after I four days' liberty, being . recognised in remarkable circumstances. Civil and military police had sought the internee, Siegrid Carl Kast, 25, vainly until he boarded a train at Shepparton (Victoria) for Melbourne. He entered a carriage and sat beside a plainclothes constable escorting a prisoner. After gazing at the escapee for some time, the prisoner asked the constable for his notebook. He wrdte in it, "That guy opposite looks like the escaped German you are after," and handed it back. The constable questioned Kast, who denied in broken English that he was the missing German. When the train made its next stop, a military policeman who had previously acted as escort to Kast failed to recognise him. The constable then searched the train to see if anybody had a photograpn of Kast. He found the conductor had one. He asked Kast to take his hat off, and Kast said: "I give in, that's me."

Kast said he had had nothing to eat for two days because of the suspense of knowing he was being hunted. His hands were rough and torn. He said this was caused when he wrenched a bolt off the prison door the night he escaped.