Papago Escape Tunnel

On the night of December 23, 1944, twenty-five German prisoners, most of them U-boat sailors, crawled out of a 178-foot tunnel here and vanished into the desert in the largest Axis prisoner escape on American soil. Led by Captain Jürgen Wattenberg, they had studied a map showing the Salt River and planned to raft down to the Gila, the Colorado, and Mexico. What they found at the canal was a dry bed of rocks. Cold and hungry, they scattered and were recaptured within weeks, Wattenberg last of all, a month later in downtown Phoenix.

What the plaque says

World War II Prisoner of War Escape Tunnel. German POWs dug a tunnel three feet in diameter and 178 feet long from the Papago camp to this spot. The escape was inspired by a map showing the Salt River flowing through the Valley; the POWs planned to follow the canal to the Salt, then raft down the river to Mexico. Twenty-five men crawled through the tunnel and emerged here on the banks of the Cross Cut Canal. When they reached the river they found only a bed of rocks. Cold and dejected, the men scattered and began turning themselves in.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heard Museum — 7.7 mi
  The Native Southwest, told in the first person
• Phoenix — 8.0 mi
  The fifth-largest US city, built on the canals of a thousand-year-old one
• Taliesin West — 11 mi
  Frank Lloyd Wright's desert masterwork, grown from the ground it stands on

More markers nearby

• How I Came to be Here — 0.8 mi
• Our Lady of Perpetual Help — 1.5 mi
• Sterling Drug Store — 1.5 mi
• The Little Red Schoolhouse — 1.6 mi