Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen

by Read, Simon

  “Schneider proposed after long hesitation that he would carry out the matter with a machine-pistol,” Geith said. “He was certain of himself and would also guarantee there would be no mistake. Schermer agreed to Schneider’s solution, and Weil and myself were also content with this solution. Every one of us took an equal part in this plan.”

  Following the hour-long meeting, Geith said he and Schermer retrieved the prisoners from the local police station and brought them back to the Palais for interrogation. One of the prisoners spoke broken German, while Weil—present in the room—spoke schoolboy English. Their combined language skills enabled the two sides to communicate in an effective, if not efficient, manner. The process, however, appeared to wear on Schermer’s nerves. Working his way through one cigarette after another as the prisoners gave their statements, he harried them to keep it brief.

  “Nothing,” said Geith, “went quickly enough for him.”

  During the interrogation, Geith said, the prisoners made it clear they were British airmen and provided personal information, a few scant details about the escape, and the towns they had passed through in their bid for freedom. The prisoners signed their statements, which did not survive the war, and were then ordered to strip. Geith inspected the men’s armpits; Weil looked elsewhere. The search complete, the prisoners were ordered to dress and were chained together at the wrists. Sometime between five and five-thirty that morning, the airmen were bundled into a car for what they believed was the return journey to Stalag Luft III. Geith and Weil each wore a Walther pistol in a holster on his right hip, with a round loaded in the breech. They sat in the back with the airmen and faced them on two fold-out chairs.

  They drove through the northern suburbs of Munich and pulled onto the autobahn. They clocked no more than twenty-five miles before stopping on the right shoulder, alongside a meadow that sloped gently upward into a pine forest. Geith said he and Weil got out of the car and led the prisoners into the field, away from the main road. Once satisfied that passing motorists could not see them, they signaled the prisoners to stop and relieve themselves.

  “In my opinion, it could only have been a matter of seconds that the prisoners stood there,” Geith said. “Then, there were two short bursts of fire—one immediately following the other. The two prisoners collapsed forward on their knees onto the ground without making a sound. We—Schermer, Schneider, Weil, and I—hurried to the fallen men.”

  One of the airmen lay twitching on the ground.

  “I’ll see to that,” said Schneider, still clasping the submachine gun, and fired two shots into the prisoner’s head.

  Geith knelt beside the bodies and undid the chain that bound the two men together. The shackle had been lightly fastened so as not to leave any trace of a bruise. As Geith unlocked the restraint, Schneider removed and pocketed a wristwatch worn by one of the dead officers. The men quickly gathered branches and fir green from the nearby woods and covered the bodies.

  “After all this had happened,” Geith said, “Weil and I fired a few shots with our service pistols in the direction of the forest, aiming mainly at a telegraph pole in the direction of the wood, so as to leave on it marks of the so-called pursuit shots.”

  The coroner, summoned to the scene, gave the bodies a quick going over.

  “Yes,” he said, “there is certainly no more to be done here.”

  The bodies were loaded into a wagon and taken to the crematorium at the Eastern Cemetery in Munich to be destroyed. Returning to Gestapo headquarters, Geith said, he and his compatriots were “inwardly excited” by Schermer’s insistence that an Allied inquiry into the murders would likely follow. They inventoried the victims’ personal items back at the office and divvied up a pack of cigarettes found on one of the bodies. Once Schermer filed his incident report several days later in Berlin, Geith considered the matter closed. Schäfer again swore all participants to secrecy and threatened them with death should even the “smallest detail” come to light. Not long thereafter, the Sagan killings made international headlines. Geith, sitting down one evening to read a newspaper in his Munich flat, found British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden staring up at him from the front page. The article detailed Eden’s recent speech denouncing the German explanation that prisoners had been shot while trying to escape.

  “I was compelled to agree without question that the animadversions of Mr. Eden conformed to the truth,” Geith said. “The explanations of the Offices of the Reich stank and lied on all points.”

  Geith approached Schermer several days later and voiced his concerns. “This is one hell of a business,” he said.

  Schermer said nothing and simply walked away. The two men never discussed the matter again. In the wake of the Normandy invasion, as the Allied armies pushed deeper into Germany, Weil told Geith all records pertaining to the murders would be destroyed.

  Geith had now reached the end of his story.

  “I did not take part in the happenings of my own free will, or out of personal interest,” he said. “It was an order for me. I could have refused this order, but I am quite convinced that a refusal would have had the severest consequences. I think I can maintain that no other official would have dared to refuse the order, just as I did not do so, and also did not happen in the case of Weil and Schneider.”

  He paused, momentarily distracted by some inner disturbance.

  “I can give an assurance that in my thoughts I feel the most unhappy man since this happening,” he said. “If I have kept quiet so far, which again was a big mistake on my part, then I did this for personal reasons for the sake of my little daughter, the only member of my family still left to me from this tragic war—not least cause of this was also the fact known to me that Schneider possesses a family of many children.”

  Despite the satisfactory progress his team had made thus far in closing the Munich investigation, Courtney remained frustrated by his failure to locate Munich Gestapo chief Oswald Schäfer. Numerous leads, courtesy of information provided by various inmates who claimed to harbor some knowledge as to the man’s whereabouts, had been followed up without success. One such source pointed Courtney’s team to the Bavarian village of Utting, where the father of Schäfer’s onetime secretary now lived. It was rumored that Schäfer had fathered a child with young Fräulein Lore Hebberling—a rumor the girl’s father strongly denied. He said his daughter now worked as an interpreter with the 44th Air Depot, U.S. Army Air Corps, in Schordorf. When questioned several days later, Hebberling confessed to being friends with Schäfer but stressed that their relationship had been strictly platonic. She said she had resigned from her secretarial job seven months before the Americans took Munich and had not heard from Schäfer since. She couldn’t say for sure whether the man was even still alive. It seemed to Courtney that the girl had no reason to lie.

  The hunt for Schäfer would continue.

  EIGHT

  A DEATH IN THE MOUNTAINS

  Dennis Cochran joined the Royal Air Force in 1940 after a Luftwaffe raid on London’s East End killed two close friends. The resulting hatred for all things Teutonic fueled a fierce desire to get airborne, which impressed his senior officers—but his war, at least in the skies, proved to be a short one. Enemy fire downed his Whitley bomber in late 1942. Cochran was processed at Dulag Luft, the Luftwaffe transit camp through which most Allied airmen passed following their capture. For the young and impatient flying officer, captivity was akin to torture. One might as well have died in battle than languish helpless and prostrate on the sidelines. Not long after his internment, he tried his hand at escape. He and two other prisoners donned German uniforms, acquired through bribes, and armed themselves with wooden rifles made by a fellow inmate. Feeling sufficiently confident, they stomped toward the main gate and presented the on-duty guard with false identity papers. The guard allowed the men to pass through after giving the documents only a cursory glance. Free of the camp, the men split up, with Cochran going off on his own. His two comrades were recaptured almos
t immediately when they were spotted and recognized at the local train station. Cochran, however, managed to board a train, only to be caught by an alert soldier several hours later. Not long after this brief adventure, Cochran was transferred to Stalag Luft III.

  In Sagan, Cochran was known for his quiet, brooding attitude; a solitary figure who kept mostly to himself, often times lost in a book. All the while, he contemplated escape. His desire to break free became all-consuming when he received word of his mother’s sudden death in July 1943. Because he spoke fluent German, Cochran was number sixteen in the tunnel on the night of the escape. He planned to travel from Sagan alone and believed a partner would only hinder his progress or put him at unnecessary risk. His RAF uniform was altered to resemble the nondescript clothes of a simple day laborer. Once free of the tunnel, he made his way to the station at Sagan and boarded the 1 A.M. train for Breslau. His objective—like many other escapees’—was Switzerland, which he hoped to enter through Basle on the Rhine. It was an ambitious journey of nearly six hundred miles, but he made good progress. On the afternoon of Sunday, March 26, Cochran was spotted by another escapee sweeping a street in Frankfurt with a group of French laborers. Four days later, he had made it to Lörrach, a city in southwest Germany close to the French and Swiss borders, but his forged travel papers failed to pass inspection at a German checkpoint. Cochran, with freedom visible just across the Rhine, was taken into custody by the Kripo and imprisoned in Ettlingen.

  Eight weeks later, Cochran’s ashes arrived at Stalag Luft III. On the urn was notated the place of cremation: Natzweiler concentration camp.

  In August 1944, Britain’s Special Air Service launched Operation Loyton. The mission called for operatives of SAS 2 Regiment to drop behind enemy lines in the Vosges Mountains, make contact with the French Resistance, and identify targets for future military action. The agents just happened to land at the same time the Germans were reinforcing the area against advancing U.S. forces. The British operatives—realizing their mission was compromised—wreaked havoc behind enemy lines. They sabotaged German patrols and employed guerilla tactics, making use of the heavily wooded landscape and deep stony ravines that snaked their way through the mountains. Suspecting local residents of assisting the British, the Germans entered the village of Moussey and rounded up every male between the ages of sixteen and sixty. The villagers said nothing under interrogation and were subsequently shipped off to concentration camps. Only 70 of the 210 men and boys ever returned home.

  An airdrop in September reinforced the SAS team with additional men and six machine gun–mounted jeeps. German supply convoys and staff cars carrying senior personnel now came under heavy fire. One morning, several jeeps sped through Moussey just as an SS commander called his troops out for inspection. The jeeps’ gunmen opened fire with their Browning machine guns and cut down a number of Germans before fleeing into the mountainous terrain beyond the village. So startled was the enemy garrison in town, the commander evacuated 250 of his men out of fear that a much larger British force was on the offensive.

  Initially scheduled to last two weeks, the SAS incursion dragged on for two months. The British fought not only the Germans, but encroaching starvation due to dwindling supplies. Of the ninety-one agents who took part in the operation, only sixty eventually made it back to Allied lines. The fate of the missing remained a mystery until July 1945, when military officials in the French Zone unearthed the bodies of thirty British servicemen in the town of Gaggenau. The victims were identified as SAS agents.

  Charged with investigating the matter was Major Bill Barkworth of 2 SAS War Crimes Investigation Team. An experienced field operative who spoke fluent German and French, Barkworth traveled to Gaggenau with a dozen agents and established his command post in an old villa near Karlsruhe, where the local Gestapo had based its operations. Barkworth and his team set about canvassing the French internment camps, intent on interviewing former Nazi officials and Gestapo personnel. French disorganization, however, which had thus far hampered the RAF’s efforts, plagued the SAS investigation. Corruption also stonewalled the inquiry. It slowly emerged that a number of French officials had released former Nazis from captivity—or expunged their names from camp records—under threat of being exposed as German collaborators.

  Barkworth made slow but substantial progress. Through persistent detective work and forceful interrogation, he learned the men were murdered by the SS at Natzweiler concentration camp. Built high in the Vosges Mountains, surrounded by electrified barbed wire, its barracks overrun with lice and typhus, the chimney above its crematorium constantly belching acrid smoke into the mountain air, Natzweiler was the only facility of its kind built on French soil. Between 1941 and 1945, disease, hunger, routine barbarity, and the gas chamber claimed nearly twenty-two thousand lives. It was at Natzweiler that eighty-six Jewish men and women were gassed to provide anatomical specimens for the Jewish skeleton collection, an exhibit the Nazis hoped to display at the planned Reich University of Strasbourg to highlight the physical inferiority of the Jewish race.

  Over the course of his investigation, Barkworth interviewed former members of the Karlsruhe Gestapo, now in French custody. One man questioned was forty-year-old Walter Herberg, a law student turned sports editor who joined the Gestapo in 1934. He was now being held in a prison in Wuppertal. Although Herberg knew nothing about the SAS murders, he told Barkworth he had information regarding the shooting death of an RAF officer in the vicinity of Natzweiler. On June 7, 1946, Barkworth forwarded Herberg’s name to the Royal Air Force.

  McKenna received the news lying in a hospital bed in Rinteln. The investigation had taken a physical toll and forced him to seek treatment for exhaustion. On doctor’s orders, he was confined to a bed—a situation not to his liking. Now, with a possible lead into Cochran’s murder, he found his circumstance intolerable. Deciding he had rested enough, he snuck out of the hospital one afternoon. Lyon, in on McKenna’s plan, waited in a car outside. The two men drove to the prison in Wuppertal to interrogate their suspect. Herberg told McKenna that he had taken leave from work in late March 1944 to visit his parents in Mainz. While out one day in the country—he couldn’t recall the exact date—he encountered a number of police officers patrolling a local lane. Herberg asked one officer, who demanded to see his identity papers, what had prompted such a strong police presence in the area. The officer told Herberg a number of British Air Force officers had recently escaped from a prison camp in Silesia.

  Herberg decided to cut his leave short and returned to Karlsruhe two days early. He arrived home to find his telephone ringing. On the end of the line was local Gestapo chief Josef Gmeiner’s secretary asking him to report for duty. Gmeiner handed Herberg a teleprint when he arrived at the office. It was addressed to “The Head of the Office of the State Police HQ, Karlsruhe, Oberregierungsrat GMEINER.” It read:

  By order of the Reichsführer SS, the British RAF Officer Cochran, who has been recaptured inside the area of that Department, is to be moved in the direction of Sagan immediately by car. During this move, he is to be shot. The body is to be handed over for cremation to the nearest crematorium after having been released by the State Attorney in question. The death certificate is to be sent here. Only a restricted number of persons may have knowledge of the contents of this teleprint. These persons are to be especially bound to silence by hand-clasp.

  It was signed, “Müller, Gruppenführer.”

  “After I had noted the contents of this letter,” Herberg told McKenna, “Gmeiner explained to me that I was to carry out this order. Greatly shocked by this order, I begged him to entrust someone else with it. I was told that I had nothing to do with the matter itself. All I had to do was negotiate with the crematorium and the State Attorney.”

  “I’m still on leave,” Herberg said.

  “You’ll get another day off for this,” replied Gmeiner.

  The matter seemed set, though issues of practicality remained. Herberg told Gmeiner the order would be
impossible to carry out. No state attorney, he said, would issue a death certificate under such circumstances. Gmeiner gave the matter some thought and reluctantly agreed. Instead of transporting the prisoner east, in the direction of Sagan, it was deemed more convenient to head west, toward the concentration camp at Natzweiler. The body could be destroyed there without questions being asked. En route, the car would stop and the prisoner would be told to get out and stretch his legs. Otto Preiss, a fellow agent, would pull the trigger and Herberg would see to it that all evidence was consigned to the furnace. Satisfied with the plan, Gmeiner shook hands with Herberg and committed him to the deed. As Herberg left the office, Preiss and driver Wilhelm Boschert walked in for their briefing.

  At seven the next morning—March 31—the men piled into a green V170 Mercedes and drove to the prison in Ettlingen. The car pulled into the prison yard shortly after eight-thirty. Herberg, Preiss, and Boschert entered the administrative office and stated their business. A guard retrieved Cochran from his cell. The airman, Herberg guessed, was twenty-one and roughly six feet tall, his frame slender after two years in captivity. The long face was pale and slightly freckled beneath reddish-blond hair. He wore a uniform dyed lilac-violet and free of insignia that might betray him as an officer or soldier. When spoken to, he responded in fluent German.

  “You are to be taken to a camp,” Herberg told Cochran. “From there, you will be returned with other recaptured officers to Stalag Luft III.”

  The Gestapo men escorted Cochran out to the car and put him in the backseat alongside Preiss. Up front, Herberg took a map from the glove box and served as navigator while Boschert drove. They took the road out of Ettlingen toward Strasbourg, where they turned in the direction of Natzweiler. Both Preiss and Herberg engaged the airman in casual conversation, Preiss going so far as to offer Cochran peppermints and cigarettes. When Herberg asked about the breakout, Cochran’s relaxed manner became one of sudden defiance.