Free When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain by Giles Milton

carcass at the site. But recent scientific evidence has thrown doubt on this theory.
    Other suggestions include vitamin A poisoning from eating polar bear liver, lead poisoning from the food cans or carbon dioxide poisoning from their Primus stove.
    By the time they struggled ashore they were living off scant quantities of canned goods from the balloon stores, along with portions of half-cooked polar bear meat.
    They were suffering from foot pains and debilitating diarrhoea and were constantly cold and exhausted. Indeed they were so weary on their arrival at Kvitøya Island that they left much of their valuable equipment down by the water’s edge.
    Nils Strindberg, the youngest, was the first to die. His corpse was wedged into a crack in the cliff. Analysis of his clothing suggests he was killed by a polar bear.
    The other two men seem to have weakened dramatically in the days that followed Strindberg’s death. As the Arctic winter struck in earnest, they lost the will to live.
    It will never be known how many days they survived in their makeshift Arctic shack. By the time they were eventually found, all that remained was their diaries, a few spools of undeveloped film and a heap of bleached bones.

 
    20
    Escape from Alcatraz
    It was a routine inspection by the prison warders. On the morning of 12 June 1962, the guards at Alcatraz high security prison made their morning check on the prisoners in their cells.
    When they came to Cell Block B, they quickly realized that something was not quite right. The men were in their beds, but they were showing no signs of life.
    The guards unlocked the cells and were stunned by what they found. Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin were missing; in their place were elaborately made papier-mâché heads with real hair and painted eyes. Three of Alcatraz’s most dangerous prisoners had escaped.
    Neither the guards nor the other prisoners could believe that they’d managed to get away. Alcatraz, after all, was one of the world’s most closely guarded prisons. Situated on a rocky island in San Francisco Bay, it was washed by cold and hazardous waters, making escape almost impossible.
    In its twenty-nine years as a federal prison, from 1934 to 1963, no one had ever made it out alive. Forty-one inmates tried. Of those, twenty-six were recaptured, seven were shot dead and at least three were known to have drowned.
    This proved no deterrent for the three new escapees. In fact, they saw the island’s isolation as a challenge.
    All three men were hardened criminals. Frank Morris had first been convicted at the age of thirteen. Since that time, he’d been involved in a number of serious crimes ranging from armed robbery to dealing in narcotics. He had been transferred to Alcatraz in 1960.
    John Anglin was also an infamous criminal. He’d robbed the Columbia Alabama Bank in 1958, together with his two brothers. It had earned him a thirty-five-year prison sentence.
    Clarence Anglin had been involved in a number of other bank robberies and had also been caught escaping from the Atlanta State Penitentiary. It was decided to send him to Alcatraz, in order to prevent him from making any more escape attempts.
    All of the men were highly resourceful and extremely motivated. They discovered that there was an unguarded three-foot-wide utility corridor behind their cells. This led to an air vent and thence to the outside world. The prisoners began to chisel away at the moisture-damaged concrete. For tools, they used metal spoons stolen from the canteen and an electric drill that they improvised from the motor of a stolen vacuum cleaner. They did most of the work during music hour, when the noise of accordions covered the sound of their hacking at the concrete.
    They also made dummy heads from soap, toilet paper and real hair in order to fool the guards; there were constant checks on the prisoners throughout the night.
    It took a year to tunnel through the wall of