Johann Tillmann

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Johann Tillmann (1921-) was a German Naval Officer who served in the Second World War

Johann was born in Danzig, East Prussia, Germany in 1921. He was an avid sailor and as a young man sailed small craft on the Baltic Sea, off the coast of Germany. He enlisted in the German Navy in the Second World War, and attained the rank of Bootsmann (Boatswain). He later was selected for membership in the German special forces (naval), due to his expertise in sailing.

[edit] Service during the Second World War

While serving for the Third Reich in Norway, he single-handedly killed nine British soldiers with his service knife, earning an Iron Cross 1st class. Johann Tillmann earned the prestigious award from action occurring near the 19th November 1942, when Operation Freshman was launched by the British. This operation was to destroy a heavy water plant that the Germans were using in Norway, which the British believed was being used to eventually develop German atomic weapons. The British raid followed with the gliderborne landing onto the frozen lake Møsvatn near the plant. However the thirty-four Royal Engineers of the 1st British Airborne Division, together with the crews of two Airspeed Horsa gliders and one Handley Page Halifax bomber, died when their aircraft crashed into mountains during poor visibility.

The Norwegian resistance were unable to reach the crash site in time, and many of the survivors were executed by the Gestapo under Hitler's infamous Commando Order. A dozen or so other British survivors were killed by Tillmann and his men, as he lead a squad of German special forces, in pursuit of the survivors, as they were trying to escape overland through the wilderness to neutral Sweden.

[edit] Post War

Tillmann was arrested after the war and the British intended to try him as a war criminal, however just hours before his trial he managed to escape from a Norwegian prison by an elaborate tunnel system, which he had been secretly working upon for months. His Norwegian born girlfriend also was believed to have assisted him in escaping, as she was not seen again after his escape. Prison guards found a note left behind by him, stating that they would never find him, and on this he was proven right, as he was never seen or heard from afterward. Some reports indicate that he may have fled to eastern Canada, where there was an unofficial sighting of him circa 1955.