It was a routine bed check. That is, until a note was found on the bunk where a German prisoner was supposed to be asleep Up North in a Minnesota lumber camp housing Nazi prisoners of war near the shores of Lake Winnibigoshish. 
 
 A second bed, belonging to Nazi Cpl. Heinz Schymalla, 22, was also empty at 9:45 p.m. on Sunday night, Oct. 29, 1944, at Algona-Branch Camp No. 4 near Bena, Minn. 
 
 The lightly secured stockade in the woods was one of the World War II prison work camps established in Minnesota, joining facilities in Owatonna, Faribault and Fairmont. 
 
 They all used prison labor to offset worker shortages left when lumbermen and farmers were siphoned off to battlefields in Europe and the Pacific. Schymalla and his 21-year-old, note-writing comrade, Walter Mai, were among 208 Germans cutting timber for Minnesota’s pulp industry. 
 
 Make that 206. 
 
 “Our Fatherland, Our Homeland are now in a very difficult position and needs all available sons,” Mai wrote in German. Mai and Schymalla had been captured in Tunisia in May 1943. 
 
 Gone without a trace?: Two Nazi escapees baffled searchers for five days after they disappeared from a Minnesota lumber camp near Lake Winnibigoshish that was housing prisoners of war. They had plans to paddle down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where they hoped they could find sympathy and a way back to Germany. 
 
 Prisoners of war like Schymalla and Mai earned 80 cents a day in canteen coupons for their sawing and chopping. They also received mail. One letter — detailing how his 60-year-old father and brother had been conscripted to join the beleaguered Nazi military — sparked Schymalla to make his dramatic jail break. 
 
 A sense of duty compelled him to hatch a getaway plan to get back to the front. When he whispered his intentions to Mai, they agreed to make a joint run for it. 
 
 Mai and Schymalla found some unmarked extra clothing in a supply room to replace their prison garb. They each sneaked bacon, bread and sausages from their daily meal allotments and accepted similar gifts from fellow prisoners. 
 
 Armed with a small map, they realized that Lake Winnibigoshish connected with the Mississippi River. If they could make it to New Orleans, they hoped, maybe a neutral ship would ferry them home. 
 
 “The assumptions that led the men to such hopes were absurd, but their small maps apparently gave no understanding of the distances involved,” historian George Lobdell wrote in a 1994 Minnesota History article. 
 
 The key to their escape was some scrap wood camp officials allowed prisoners to fashion into boats for swimming in the middle of the lake. 
 
 Along the lakeshore, Schymalla and Mai covertly hid one of the boats, christened Lili Marlene No. 10 after a popular German folk ballad. The camp gate stayed open until 10 p.m. for workers coming and going. For a couple nights before their breakout, they sneaked supplies to the boat. They didn’t pack lightly, smuggling out a suitcase, blankets, pillows, a cigarette-rolling machine, matches, a dictionary, aspirin — and even a chess set. 
 
 They chose a Saturday night, after the 11 p.m. bed check, knowing there would be no Sunday morning head count. 
 
 After the only guard made his rounds about 11:15 p.m., Mai and Schymalla dug beneath the wire fence and pulled some strands apart, escaping to Lake Winnibigoshish and their boat. 
 
 They had to push their makeshift skiff because its weight threatened to capsize the vessel. 
 
 FBI and local law enforcement agents swarmed into the woods by 2:30 a.m. Monday — more than a day behind. Max’s goodbye note, which mentioned the frozen Bering Strait and its proximity to Japanese allies, threw off the searchers. So did a count of the boats that erroneously determined that none were missing. 
 
 Traveling at night, by water, the pair made it more than a dozen miles down the Mississippi the first three nights. Late on Oct. 31, Night 4, they floated beneath the Hwy. 2 and Great Northern Railroad bridges to a bend just south of Ball Club Lake — another 8 miles, but still nearly 1,500 miles from the Gulf of Mexico. 
 
 Finally, Minnesota weather — what else? — walloped their plans. A windy snowstorm slowed progress that Wednesday. They made it 4 miles Thursday but took a wrong turn into Jay Gould Lake on Friday, missing the Mississippi turnoff. A resort owner named J.G. Shoup followed them, catching up to them as they cooked sausages for lunch. 
 
 Just resting, they explained. Shoup called Itasca County Sheriff Otto Litchke, who made a slow search. Schymalla and Mai hid in bushes 15 yards from the sheriff. 
 
 Not wanting to get shot, they finally stood up with their arms high and shouted: “Hello, Hello. We are here.” 
 
 At a hearing, they were sentenced to 30 days in confinement, including 14 with only bread and water. 
 
 All told, 13 German prisoners made brief escapes from work camps in Minnesota during World War II — including three who slipped away from an Owatonna stockade Aug. 16, 1945 — just as the war ended. The trio went to the Steele County Fair and rode the Ferris wheel before being recaptured. 
 
 Curt Brown’s tale on Minnesota’s history appears each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com.﻿ ||||| He and many other young men in his town, Piadyki, were forced by the Nazis to be guards, he said, noting they were kept on a troop base converted from a farm and made to work night tours patrolling roads and bridges. 
 
 ''They came and took me when I was 18,'' he said. ''We knew they would kill me and my family if I refused. I did it to save their lives, and I never even wore a Nazi uniform. They made us wear gray guards' uniforms and had us guarding bridges and rivers.'' 
 
 Mr. Palij insists he never set foot in any camp and never took part in any killings or atrocities during the war. And indeed, federal officials do not accuse him of that. Rather, they say that he, by cooperating as a Nazi guard, ''directly contributed to their eventual slaughter'' by either forcing prisoners to work or preventing them from escaping. 
 
 Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of a special investigation unit for the Justice Department, called Mr. Palij ''an essential component in the machinery of annihilation'' at the camps. 
 
 ''He took part in the persecution of Jewish inmates at Treblinka and ensured that they could not escape, and the end result was that as many as 7,000 people were individually massacred,'' Mr. Rosenbaum said. 
 
 ''He was very loyal and very capable and served until April 1945, the last weeks of the war, while other soldiers were deserting right and left,'' he said. 
 
 In 1949, Mr. Palij emigrated here at age 26 as a refugee of World War II. In 1957, he was granted United States citizenship. Mr. Palij, a retired draftsman with no children, lives in a rear rental apartment on 89th Street in Jackson Heights, a quiet Queens street lined with old brick row houses. He lives on Social Security checks. After two strokes, he is in frail health and takes care of Maria, 72, his wife of 43 years, who now has Alzheimer's disease. 
 
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 In recent months, however, he has gone from being seen by neighbors as a polite old chap who constantly tinkers with his 1980 Oldsmobile, to a man being portrayed as a Nazi death camp guard with blood on his hands. Jewish demonstrators marched outside his home, calling him a butcher. ''There were 200 Jewish kids out there,'' he said. ''I called the precinct, and the cop told me: 'Leave them alone, and they'll leave. Don't say anything, or you might get a rock through your window.' '' 
 
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 He has begun entering his home by the alley behind it. 
 
 ''We get phone calls, people yelling, 'You Nazi!' It scares the hell out of my wife,'' he said. 
 
 In July, a federal judge stripped Mr. Palij of his citizenship for falsely claiming in his immigration papers in 1949 that he worked on his father's farm in Poland and at a German factory during the period when he was actually serving the Nazis. Mr. Palij insists that he did this to enter the United States ''to save my life.'' 
 
 ''I spent five years in a refugee camp in Germany, and I had nowhere else to go but America,'' he said. 
 
 ''These Jewish groups want to hunt down all the living Nazis, and I don't blame them,'' he said, ''but they know I never worked in a camp. They have proof of that.'' 
 
 Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which helps bring former Nazi war criminals to justice, dismissed Mr. Palij's denials. 
 
 ''Every time they find a guard like this, he says he was forced into service,'' he said. ''To work at those camps, you had to be eager to be there. They only took people they knew were loyal and brutal and not sympathetic to pleas of the inmates. 
 
 ''The most vicious guards at these camps, they all have this line that they were just the short-order cook or something, when they were actually trained to do nefarious and horrible things.'' 
 
 Justice Department officials say that since 1979, their investigations have resulted in 73 former Nazis' being stripped of United States citizenship, with 59 of them deported. 
 
 But Mr. Palij said Wednesday, ''Let them come and get me.'' 
 
 ''I'm not running. What will they do? Shoot me? Put me in the electric chair? Where are they going to deport me to? What country is going to take an 80-year-old man in poor health?''
– Nazi Cpl. Heinz Schymalla, 22, and fellow captive Walter Mai, 21, were among some 200 Germans cutting timber for Minnesota's pulp industry in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1944. Both captured in Tunisia in May 1943, they gained momentary notoriety when, moved to act in part by news that Schymalla's 60-year-old father had been conscripted to join the withering Nazi forces, they managed to escape by boat. Having dug their way under a wire fence just before midnight on a Saturday in late October, they set off from Algona-Branch Camp No. 4 near Bena, Minn. Their plan: Follow Lake Winnibigoshish to the Mississippi River to New Orleans, where they hoped to catch a ride home, reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune. They had a head start in their journey thanks to the lack of a Sunday-morning count; the search began more than 24 hours after their escape. In a 1994 article for Minnesota History magazine, historian George Lobdell wrote that having been in the state since February, the men knew they needn't fear "wild animals or Indians." Unfortunately, the three small maps they found in a dictionary "apparently gave no understanding of the distances involved" (as evidenced by the great number of things they packed, including shoe polish and a cigarette-rolling machine). They made it 20-odd miles south in the first few days, then hit a snowstorm and ultimately took a wrong turn into Jay Gould Lake on Friday. There they were spotted by a resort owner who called the county sheriff, and they were ultimately caught hiding in bushes. Their punishment: 30 days in confinement. The men were among 13 German POWs who escaped during WWII in Minnesota. (A "Great Escape" survivor told of his attempted WWII escape.)