In History’s Lost and Found, One Soldier’s Watch

Gaunt, unwashed and lice-ridden, Lieutenant Woehrle checked the new Patek Philippe watch on his wrist and noted the time. The watch was stainless steel — an uncommon luxury at the time — with a hand-stitched alligator strap.

From the camp’s position in the foothills of the Alps, Lieutenant Woehrle and his fellow prisoners watched as men from Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army lowered the Nazi flag above the town square and raised an American flag in its place. Using the shorthand he had learned in college — indecipherable to his captors — the lieutenant scrawled some notes on the back of an envelope containing a letter from his mother, all the while referring back to the watch.

“American flag raised over Moosburg at 12:40,” he wrote. “At gate U.S. flag was raised at 1:03,” he scribbled. Later: “Sherman tank enters compound at 2:04.”

General Patton was just behind, donning his iconic ivory-handled pistols and riding trousers. Prisoners cheered, wept and swarmed the tanks.

 The following month, the lieutenant planted his first footsteps back on home soil in New York City, the same watch ticking on his wrist.

German captors, forced marches and a prison barter economy that could have fetched anything for that watch — perhaps even his freedom — had not separated him from his Patek Philippe. But decades later, a burglar in St. Paul did.

Call it a homecoming, or perhaps the best story of brand loyalty ever told. When Mr. Woehrle, now 94, arrived in New York again last week, this time to receive a replacement for his beloved watch, it was just the latest improbable twist in an Odyssean saga that has bound war prisoner to watchmaker for 67 years.

By the summer of 1944, Lieutenant Woehrle had been a prisoner at Stalag Luft III (later made famous by the 1963 film “The Great Escape”) for more than a year. A bombardier aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress, he had already beaten some incredible odds. His plane was shot down by German flak the previous May over the Bay of Biscay. Four of his crew members were killed when a group of Focke Wulf 190 fighters strafed the burning plane. A faulty parachute fractured his jaw and dislocated his shoulder.

Compared with the Gestapo camp where he was interrogated, Stalag Luft III, in what is now western Poland, could have been much worse. Most prison camps were. But Stalag Luft III, for aviator officers only, was run by the Luftwaffe, and its administrators generally treated captives with the respect common among airmen.

Still, it was a prison. Despite the Red Cross packages, the men were always hungry. Lieutenant Woehrle lost 30 pounds. Young men who once talked about pinup girls instead fantasized about favorite recipes.

 Around that time, Lieutenant Woehrle came across a Patek Philippe advertisement. He had given his old watch to a camp chaplain, who he decided needed it more than he did.

“I knew that they were expensive because Patek Philippe was a name I had seen in Harper’s Bazaar or Esquire,” he said. He knew it was a long shot, but he tore out an order form anyway, and mailed it with a note promising to pay the watchmaker once he was freed.

Months passed; he forgot about the watch. To his surprise, one day it arrived. Camp administrators were reluctant to give it to him. They feared he might use it to bribe a guard. They relented when a ranking American colonel promised that the lieutenant would do no such thing.

“It was an electrifying experience for the whole camp,” Mr. Woehrle said. (Patek Philippe said its Geneva archives reveal no other instance of a watch sold to a prisoner of war.) “I had lines of fellows out in the hall knocking on my door, waiting to see the watch.”