Escape #7: April 5, 1919
After the two shootings and deaths, it would be nine months before another escape would happen. Perhaps the shootings acted as a deterrent, but eventually either the graveness of it wore off, or the desperation of "barbed wire disease" became too great, or both. A 43-year-old prisoner name Herman Seibert was discovered to be missing at the 5pm roll call. The War Prison Barracks administration- Col. Penrose's office- notified the local Justice Department officials, who immediately set up their dragnets.
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(The prisoner's name is reported as both Seibert and Seidendorff. Variations on spelling were a frequent occurrence in the prison escape releases. For our purposes here, we will generally use the first reported name.)
Initially, informants told reporters of wildly fantastic stories that the guards had discovered a tunnel that the prisoners had dug to the outside world, and that they had shot and killed two prisoners attempting to escape. Other informants had said there were several prisoners that got away. However, there was little corroborating evidence of any of this. Col. Penrose's office only released the physical description for Seibert. The tunnel part did come up again in a later article and may have been true but there is no evidence that prisoners other than Seibert escaped. What did happen was that Penrose asked Fort Oglethorpe for assistance, and regular soldiers from the 11th Cavalry Regiment were dispatched some distances from the fort to set up checkpoints along roads, while others patrolled the field, forests, and roads nearby. The standard $50 reward was offered.
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Seibert enjoyed six months of freedom before he was captured. On October 28, 1919, he was returned to Col. Penrose's custody at War Prison Barracks No. 2 after being found in Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal reported that Seibert was from Colblenz, Germany, and had been in America fourteen years prior to his internment. He was captured at Terminal Station in Atlanta and claimed to traveling across country. He did not speak English, so the police brought in a local merchant from Decatur Street named Sig Abelman to translate. The Atlanta Constitution reported that Seibert claimed he went over the fence at Oglethorpe, not through a tunnel. He told police that he had wandered through every state in the south, and his goal had been to find ship's passage as a stowaway to return to Germany. His clothes were tattered and he had not eaten in several days. ​​​​
Chattanooga Daily Times