by Read, Simon
On the night of the escape, as nervous men again checked their forged travel documents, repeated whatever German phrases they had learned, and hoped their civilian disguises passed muster, Kirby-Green took a break from the frantic last-minute preparations and penned another letter home:
March 24, 1944
My beloved adored darling,
I hope you are well and Colin too. My sweetheart, I am thinking so much of you now and I long so hard for you with every part of my soul and body. I am so lonely in my heart and a burning fire consumes my body longing to cool in the heat of yours, my darling lovely girl. I live only for the moment when I shall take you in my arms which have been so sadly bereft of the softness of your waist and hips and thighs, as hungry have my lips been for yours and your lovely body. No love in the world can compare with ours, Maria. Darling love, how feeble are my words, how hard to express the wild tumult of my heart when I think of you. I feel so grateful for your love and tenderness and so humble, my girl, my darling love, and I shall be able to make the world a paradise for you with God’s help, if love and adoring passion can bring joy for you and for Colin. God bless you and keep you Maria. I love you, darling, what more can I say?
Kisses to you,
Your Thomas
Kirby-Green and Kidder were among the first two dozen men to make it through the tunnel. Posing as Spanish laborers, the pair hoped to make it to Hungary and establish contact with friends of Kirby-Green’s. Once Kidder had been pulled through the tunnel, Kirby-Green crawled onto the shaft’s flatbed trolley. He lay on his stomach and held his suitcase out in front of him. Calamity struck when, more than halfway through the shaft, the trolley slipped off the rails. When Kirby-Green tried to fix the problem, he inadvertently knocked a shoring plank out of place and brought three feet of tunnel crashing down on him. It took an hour to pull him free, excavate the dirt, repair the damage, and situate the trolley back on the rails.
Despite the setback, the two men eventually emerged from underground and made their way through the pine forest to the Sagan train station. It was after midnight. Both men saw a number of fellow escapees hanging about the platform, trying to look anonymous. Unfortunately, they also noticed some off-duty guards from the camp waiting for a train. Among them was a female officer who took a sudden interest in Kirby-Green and Kidder. She approached them and demanded, in a barking tone, to see their papers. The other escapees milling about tried to ignore the scene. The two men presented their travel passes and explained to her in Spanish they were foreign workers. The guard told them to stay where they were and ran off to show their papers to a military police officer on duty at the station. The policeman gave the passes a quick looking over and nodded his approval.
The pair, much relieved, boarded the 1 A.M. train to Breslau. They took their seats and felt a flicker of hope as the train pulled away into the night. The journey passed without incident, and they arrived at the Breslau station an hour and a half later. In the booking hall, the men purchased two tickets to Czechoslovakia. They got as far as Hodonin in southern Moravia, where they were arrested on March 28 and taken to a prison in Zlín.
Wing Commander Wilfred “Freddie” Bowes was broad of beam, powerfully built, and possessed a jovial disposition and forceful nature. At forty-two, he had served in the RAF since 1918, the year it was established as the world’s first independent air force. His weathered face conveyed the dual nature of his personality, quick to smile at an off-color joke but just as prone to flash anger at the stupidity of others and what he perceived to be bureaucratic meddling. He never hesitated to speak his mind, caring little for what others thought of his opinions and making good use of profanities when he deemed a situation worthy of blunt language. In his subordinates, he instilled fear, respect, and a fierce loyalty. He did not suffer fools gladly and could harshly dress down those who failed to meet his expectations, but he bristled at the thought of anyone else reprimanding those who served under him.
By early December, Bowes had been promoted to chief of the Special Investigating Branch, British forces, Occupied Germany. He arrived in Germany that month to assume overall command of the investigation. McKenna, also in line for a promotion, was made squadron leader, which gave him greater pull when requesting help from senior officers. The two men admired each other but approached their work differently, one’s personality and methods serving as a good counterbalance to the other’s.
On January 24, 1946, the letter written by van der Bijil—delayed by diplomatic protocol and intelligence assessments—reached Bowes in Germany, along with a directive from SIB headquarters in London:
We can now accept as an established fact that the department charged with the responsibility for carrying out these murders was the Gestapo. The apprehension…of Ziegler and the heads of the Gestapo-stellen at the various places where officers are known to have met their deaths becomes a Category A priority.
Bowes—opting to pursue the lead himself—left Germany for Czechoslovakia on February 12, 1946, accompanied by the newest member of the team. Twenty-eight-year-old Flight Lieutenant A. R. Lyon was quiet by nature and prone to losing himself in thought. He was tall and thin, and enjoyed smoking a pipe, which gave him a professorial air. In civilian life, he distinguished himself as a top student at the Hendon Police Staff College before working his way up the ranks of the Metropolitan Police Service to detective-inspector. He eventually joined the RAF and put the expertise he had acquired questioning criminal suspects to good use with the Air Directorate of Intelligence. His job was to question captured Luftwaffe scientists and learn what he could about Germany’s highly evolved aeronautical technology. Returning to England from one such interrogation, Lyon found himself delayed by weather in Brussels. At the hotel bar he struck up a conversation with one Major Pancheff, deputy commander of the London Cage. During their talk, Lyon mentioned the fact he spoke fluent German. Pancheff suggested Lyon transfer to the RAF’s SIB, which he did shortly thereafter.
Bowes and Lyon arrived in Prague on February 16 and established themselves at the British Embassy. There followed a series of meetings with officials from the Ministry of Defense and Third Army Intelligence in which various permissions were obtained to interrogate members of the Gestapo now in Czech custody.
The men traveled by train to Brno on February 18 and reached the local prison that afternoon. They were given a tour of the facilities and set up an interrogation room in an empty office. Throughout the day, prisoners—malnourished, their skin a sickly pallor—were led into the room at gunpoint. They had all served in varying capacities with the Gestapo. Some were guilty of nothing more than filing paperwork; others had carried out more ominous duties as field agents. Lyon translated Bowes’s questions into German, but their queries only met with defiant stares. Even in the dank confines of Brno Central Prison and most likely facing death at the end of a rope, the onetime Gestapo men refused to cooperate. If anyone had information on Ziegler, the Gestapo chief who oversaw the Kirby-Green and Kidder murders, they were keeping it to themselves. The hours ticked slowly by with nothing to show in the way of progress. Finally, the guards brought in Franz Schauschütz. Bowes quickly glanced over the man’s file. In November 1942, the thirty-three-year-old Schauschütz—having previously served with the criminal police in Berlin—joined the Brno Gestapo as an inspector. His superior was a major named Hugo Roemer. Bowes made note of the name and asked Schauschütz if he knew anything about the Sagan murders or the whereabouts of Hans Ziegler.
Schauschütz pushed a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles up his nose and considered the question. Eyeing the two armed guards who stood on either side of the door, he seemed resigned to his fate and, unlike those before him, started talking. In the middle of March 1944, he said, Roemer dispatched him to Zlín as temporary head of the local police station. The station’s regular commanding officer, Hans Ziegler, was due for leave. Schauschütz, who claimed he knew nothing of the killings, said he arrived in Zlín the morning of March 29 and relieved Z
iegler. He spent the following two weeks tending to routine police business and overseeing a manhunt for two enemy agents allegedly dropped into the area during a nighttime air raid. On the evening of April 13, Roemer visited the station for an update on the search. That same night, a senior Gestapo official from Brno, Adolf Knuppelberg, also made an appearance. Because the station was equipped with a run-of-the-mill teleprinter, it could not receive secret messages from Berlin; classified communiqués had to be hand-delivered. And so it was that Knuppelberg arrived with a secret message in hand for Roemer. Sitting in Schauschütz’s office, Roemer opened the sealed envelope, read the document, and shared its contents.
“As he handed me the documents in question, he said briefly that two English fliers, who were to have been transferred to Moravska Ostrava, had been shot on the way in compliance with orders from high quarters,” Schauschütz said. “The facts had to be reported in an incident report to Berlin in such a way as to show that both the English fliers had attempted to escape while relieving themselves on the journey and had therefore been killed.”
It was, Schauschütz said, the first he knew of the murders. Now in the know, he was ordered to write a formal report stating the airmen had been shot while attempting to escape. Knuppelberg, who gunned down one of the fliers, told Schauschütz the airmen had been let out of the car during the journey to relieve themselves but took off running into the woods. Knuppelberg and another Gestapo officer—the name of whom Schauschütz could not remember—were forced to draw their sidearms and open fire.
Schauschütz prepared a report for Berlin, which Roemer and Knuppelberg approved without alteration.
“I had nothing further to do with the affair,” Schauschütz said, angling for merciful treatment. “Right up to the end of the war, I never heard of a case when local Staatspolizei or Sichereitspolizei chiefs ever received authority to decide questions of life and death in respect to prisoners of war.”
“Do you know who else may have been involved in this incident?” Lyon asked.
Schauschütz listed the usual suspects: Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s deputy at the Central Security Office, and Gestapo Chief Müller. At the regional level, he named Wilhelm Nöelle, head of the Gestapo in Brno and last seen in Prague in November 1944. Depending on the rumor one chose to believe, said Schauschütz, Nöelle was imprisoned somewhere in the French Zone or was dead—executed for defeatism in the dying days of the war.
“Nöelle would have had to transmit the orders received from Berlin to the departmental head in question,” Schauschütz explained. “In this case, it was Kriminalrat Roemer. On receiving the orders from Nöelle, Roemer would seek a suitable man to carry out the job. He chose Knuppelberg. I know definitely that another official was involved, but I cannot recall his name.”
“Did Erich Zacharias play a role?” Bowes asked through Lyon.
Schauschütz shrugged. “I can only say that is quite possible,” he said. “I know Zacharias too little to pass an opinion as to whether he was a suitable person for carrying out such an affair.”
At the time of the shootings, Schauschütz said, several Gestapo drivers were employed in Zlín. He provided their names, listing among them Friedrich Kiowsky.
“I have been told that driver Fritz Schwarzer was also involved,” he said. “I can say that I consider this extremely possible. Fritz Schwarzer was Roemer’s personal driver. He’s an extremely safe driver and has a reputation for keeping his mouth shut.”
The interrogation done, Bowes motioned the guards to remove Schauschütz from the room. Bowes considered the man intelligent and believed he would make an eloquent witness when the case went to trial. More importantly, he was able to detail the general channels through which the orders sanctioning the murder were transmitted. Over the course of two days, Bowes and Lyon questioned another one hundred prisoners. One inmate shed light on the possible whereabouts of Fritz Schwarzer, saying rumor placed him in the northern Czech town of Teusing, where he worked as a mechanic. Bowes made a note to follow up on the lead.
As Bowes and Lyon continued their line of inquiry, they were partnered with one Captain Vaca of Czech Army Intelligence, an expert on local Gestapo activity. The captain, eager to assist the British investigation any way he could, felt compelled to shed light on the Nazi atrocities perpetrated in his homeland and took the two investigators to the prison at Pankratz. He led them down a dank, stone-constructed hallway lined on either side by fifteen cramped cells. Here, Vaca explained, the Gestapo imprisoned enemies of the Reich before placing them on trial. Through an arched doorway at the end of the hall, the three men entered the courtroom. Behind the judge’s bench, a black curtain stretched the length of the room. The verdict of those brought before the judge, Vaca explained, was never in doubt. The trials were merely for show. The guilty verdict rendered, the condemned was shoved behind the curtain. Vaca pulled the black cloth aside and revealed a number of nooses dangling from a moveable rail. The Gestapo could efficiently hang one prisoner after the other and move the bodies along the rail, disposing of them accordingly. Through another door, Vaca led Bowes and Lyon into a small room, its only furnishing a guillotine in the far corner. The blade still bore evidence of its bloody work. The RAF men stared at the contraption. Bowes, a man whose vocabulary could rise to any occasion, said nothing.
That evening, Vaca took Bowes and Lyon to a watering hole frequented by members of the local Gestapo during the war. The three men ordered beer at the bar. Bowes took a long pull of his drink and eyed the place over the rim of his glass, noticing for the first time a large mural on one of the walls. In a scene both whimsical and, to Bowes, strangely sinister, determined satyrs pursued naked nymphs through a forest of flowers and tall grass. The satyrs appeared serious about the task at hand, their pointy faces devoid of any joviality or humor. One, its expression particularly intense, with narrowed eyes and furrowed brow, chased a well-proportioned nymph riding atop an angel-winged pig. Bowes put down his glass and approached the wall, struck by an odd sense of familiarity. Closer inspection revealed the satyrs to be more than simply the figment of an artist’s imagination. In the mural, members of the local Gestapo had been rendered by the painter’s brush into randy cherubs. There was Schauschütz and Ziegler, and other men Bowes recognized from various mug shots he had seen. He gave voice to his astonishment and ordered another pint of lager.
“This is Knuppelberg,” said the bartender, jabbing his finger at one cherub in particular. “They never paid a bill in five years.”
Bowes took a picture of the mural, believing it might come in handy at some point. On the morning of February 22, he and Lyon proceeded to Uherske Hradiste and met with Judge Molovsky, a magistrate with the local People’s Court, who granted the RAF men access to Friedrich Kiowsky. The interrogation took place in Molovsky’s office, wood-paneled and elegant; not the sort of place one associated with such proceedings. Kiowsky was forty years old and appeared thin and frail when guards led him into the room. Seeing the RAF uniforms worn by Bowes and Lyons, he swallowed hard and cast a fearful glance at the judge. The guards placed him in a chair, his wrists shackled, and retreated to a corner of the room. A German typist sat off to one side, her fingers poised and ready.
Lyons, speaking German, introduced himself and Bowes and stated the nature of their business. “You are obliged to say nothing,” Lyons said, “unless you wish to do so. Anything you do say could be used in evidence.”
Asked if he understood his rights, Kiowsky answered yes and began talking. Instead of an official Gestapo branch, Zlín had the Frontier Police, with whom Kiowsky had been employed as a driver since June 1939. The police took their orders from the Gestapo office in Brno. On the evening of March 28, 1944, while working the night shift, Kiowsky’s superior, Kriminalrat Hans Ziegler, summoned him to a meeting.
“I entered his office and saw Ziegler, Zacharias, and a Gestapo official from Brno,” Kiowsky said. “I recognized the Gestapo official but don’t know his name.” Bowes silence
d Kiowsky with a raised hand. He reached for a folder and placed a number of photographs on the table.
“Do you recognize any of these men?” Bowes asked through Lyons.
Kiowsky sifted through the images.
“This is the man,” he said, tapping a picture of Knuppelberg.
Resuming his statement, Kiowsky said Ziegler ordered him to retrieve two English airmen from the local prison, bring them to the police station for interrogation, and then transport them to Breslau. Sworn to secrecy, Kiowsky left the office and readied his car. He drove to the prison with an interpreter and took charge of the two airmen. He remembered both men wore sports jackets. They sat in the backseat and said nothing on the return journey to the station.
“Both officers were handcuffed,” Kiowsky said. “We drove into the garage, and then Erich Zacharias and I accompanied them to the cells. The larger of the two was then brought out and led into interrogation room number three.”
