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For twelve years Hohenbrunn had been home, and by 1937 the extended family there consisted of Koelz, Claire, Claire's daughters Sieglinde, Ortrud and Klothilde, the couple's son Siegfried, and now their baby daughter Ava, nearly one year old. The idyll was shattered for ever one afternoon in August, when Koelz arrived at Munich Police Headquarters to renew his exit papers for a trip to Italy.
He was escorted at gunpoint to an office in the basement. He recognised his interviewer. They had last seen each other when
Koelz had rescued the then Corporal Muller at Douamont twenty-one years before. Now Inspector Muller of the Secret State Police, he was holding a warrant for Koelz's arrest on the charge of "spreading pacifist propaganda". Putting it in the drawer of his desk Muller said, "it will stay there for forty-eight hours. Goodbye and good luck, Captain".
Koelz immediately made plans for escape.
The triptych could not be left behind; if it was found the
authorities would certainly destroy it and Koelz's relatives and
friends would be at risk. He took "Thou shalt not kill" to the nearby Putzbrunn sawmill and there a terrified Andreas Knappich, son of the owner, helped him to cut his masterpiece into fragments, trying to direct the saw-cuts so that individual images survived intact.
Of the twenty plus fragments into which the triptych was cut, Sieglinde hid all but one in a woodman's shed until trusted friends and relatives could collect them for safekeeping.The final piece - the image of an elderly couple - went into Koelz's rucksack.
They escaped just in time. Claire and Ava were hiding in a neighbour's house when the SS raided their home. Koelz set out alone to reach the Austrian border. From here he sent a coded postcard telling Claire to follow and the next day the family, under the noses of Border Guards and stormtroopers, crossed the river Riss into Austria.
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