Scottsdale’s most retold story happened on the second-to-last night before Christmas. On the night of December 23, 1944, twenty-five German prisoners of war — Kriegsmarine men, led by U-boat commander Jürgen Wattenberg — slipped out of Camp Papago Park through a 178-foot tunnel dug with small hand tools and hidden under a bathhouse. It was, and remains, the largest escape of Axis prisoners on U.S. soil.
The desert did most of the guarding. Several escapees planned to raft the Salt and Gila rivers to Mexico, having studied maps that showed a confident blue line — and found the riverbed bone-dry. Cold, hungry, and out-argued by the landscape, the fugitives were rounded up one by one, several after knocking on Valley ranch-house doors to ask for food. All twenty-five were back in custody within about a month; Wattenberg himself held out until late January, hiding in the hills before venturing into Phoenix and being recognized.
The escape is the year’s headline, but the backdrop matters too. Thunderbird Field II, north of town, had closed on October 16, two months earlier, after graduating about 5,500 cadets; the prison camp would hold its Germans until 1946, almost half of it inside what is now south Scottsdale. And the men who had trained in the Valley would soon start coming back to stay; the 1930–1951 politics chapter follows the town they came back to. The night itself is told in full at December 23, 1944, and the manhunt’s last act at January 28, 1945.