by Read, Simon
Lyon got to his feet and watched the doctor wage a losing battle. The color had already drained from Schmidt’s features. For several frantic minutes, the doctor remained hunched over the prisoner’s prostrate form, before surrendering to the inevitable. Franz Schmidt was dead. A disgusted Lyon left the cell and ordered guards to retrieve Oskar Schmidt and Jacobs for further interrogation. Both men, as they had done during the first round of questioning, claimed they couldn’t bring themselves to fire and stood a good six or seven yards back from the prisoners when Franz Schmidt and Post shot the men at point-blank range. Oskar Schmidt detailed how one of the fallen officers tried to get back on his feet, only to be shot in the head by Post. The following morning, Schmidt said, he was summoned to Chief Fritz Schmidt’s office and reprimanded for not following orders.
“He told me that he would merely believe I missed my target, such was his regard for my family,” Schmidt said. “He said he would accept such an excuse, otherwise he would have to report the matter to the SS Polizeigericht. I uttered my disgust about the shooting and Post’s behavior, but Schmidt interrupted by ordering me to leave his room.”
Sweating in the interrogation chair, Jacobs also played innocent. He, too, expressed his revulsion at Johannes Post’s brutality and the shooting of the wounded officer. He claimed to have been so disturbed by the callousness of the act that he turned his back on the whole bloody scene. He said he then heard Post shoot the remaining three RAF men in the head one last time for good measure.
“I wish to emphasize that I am willing to swear upon the fact that I myself did not shoot,” he said. “My conscience did not agree with the shooting at all, and I most definitely condemn it. I regret to have been obliged to take part in the shooting.”
Kaehler, however, said the two Schmidts and Jacobs—along with Post—were directly behind the RAF men with Walther pistols in their hands and willingly took part in the killings. Post, he said, took considerable pleasure in the act.
“All of the prisoners fell forward on the ground after the shots were fired,” Kaehler said. “Post noticed that one of the executed men, namely the one who, according to my memory, was lying on the extreme right of the group, still moved. Post shouted at me that I should fire a shot on this still-living man and, seeing my hesitation, took the carbine out of my hands and fired a bullet into the head of the prisoner. This shot made one single head wound from which blood and brain came protruding.”
For each interrogation, Lyon arranged on the table between himself and the prisoner photographs of the four murdered men. Kaehler pointed to the picture of James Catanach and told Lyon he specifically remembered the young airman because of his proficiency in German.
“I can just as well recall the prisoner Fuglesang,” said Kaehler, picking up another mug shot. “I remember him because of the gaudy woolen socks that he was wearing.”
He detailed attempts by the Kiel Gestapo to cover up the crime and thwart any ensuing investigation by the Red Cross. He concluded with a familiar refrain.
“I wish to finish this statement,” he said, “by emphasizing the fact that I myself did not fire one single shot from either the carbine issued to me or the duty pistol in my possession.”
Lyon made arrangements to transfer the men to the London Cage, where Lieutenant Scotland’s interrogation techniques would undoubtedly elicit full confessions. Before being shipped to Britain, Oskar Schmidt volunteered one final statement and conceded, perhaps to garner goodwill, that he may have fired one of the fatal shots.
“If Kaehler says that I shot, it is possible that in the shock of the moment I was not conscious of having done so,” Schmidt said. “I am, however, still of the opinion that I never shot.”
In the days that followed, Lyon tracked down the two drivers. Wilhelm Struve had returned to his hometown of Preetz after the war. Denkmann was confined by illness to a hospital bed in Kiel. Lyon placed an armed guard at his door until he was well enough to be transferred to Minden. Struve told Lyon he drove Oskar and Franz Schmidt, Jacobs, and three of the British officers to the killing field in a six-seat Adler. Denkmann drove Post, Kaehler, and Catanach in a Mercedes 231. Struve said he pulled in behind Post’s car at the intended spot and watched the two Schmidts and Jacobs escort the prisoners from his backseat into a meadow on the opposite side of the road. When the men disappeared behind a hedgerow, Struve drove his car a short distance down the road to stop passing traffic. As he opened his car door to get out, he heard the sound of gunfire. The shots seemed to occur simultaneously, resulting in “one loud detonation.” Struve drove back to the meadow. Oskar Schmidt approached the driver’s side window, pointed at the hedgerow, and said, “They are lying there.” A quick glance over the hedge revealed four bodies side by side in the damp grass. Post and Denkmann returned to Kiel, Struve said, while the others stayed put until the undertaker retrieved the corpses an hour later.
“On the return journey,” Struve said, “I learned from conversation in the car that Post had acted once again with particular brutality, for which he was already known. Apart from this, Oskar Schmidt mentioned that Post intended to go to the theater that same day.”
Lyon now turned his full attention to locating Post and Fritz Schmidt. A progress report on the Kiel investigation sent to the provost marshal of the Air Ministry on November 18, 1946, declared: “Sturmbannführer Schmidt and Kriminalkommissar Post, both men of very bad reputation, are still at liberty.… The evidence obtained as to the identity of the four officers, the manner in which they were murdered and the Gestapo officials responsible for the murders is conclusive. When Schmidt and Post are located, this particular angle to the case will be complete.” Lyon launched his manhunt in Hamburg. Winter had by now set in and pushed temperatures well below zero. All he had at his disposal for getting around Germany was a canvas-topped jeep, which he now took to, wrapped in multiple layers of clothing. “I believe this was the most-bitter winter of the century,” Lyon later noted. “Fuel for heating was almost non-existent, and the undernourished Germans were dying like flies. In Hamburg, the authorities constructed what they called heating halls where people could go to warm up. Between Christmas 1946 and March 1947, the temperature in Germany never rose above zero.” Lyon traversed the country in conditions he called “appalling” to pursue whatever leads came his way.
Temperatures in Germany dropped that winter to thirty below zero. The conditions proved fatal for roughly twelve thousand people who lacked food and shelter. Circumstances hardly improved for those with a roof over their heads: many had insufficient coal and fuel to heat their homes. “Whenever I think of the winter of 1946 to 1947,” one German would later write, “I always recall the glitter on the walls and in the interiors of houses, that I must have seen a hundred times in German homes and which resembled the sparkly sheen of the unpolished side of a granite block. It was the glitter of a wafer-thin layer of white frost, an icy blast of damp; the frozen moisture in the atmosphere created by men, sweat, coughing and breathing; men whose clothing was sometimes soaked through with snow, and who dried out slowly when they got home.”
Lyon’s hunt in these miserable conditions took him to Denmark, where he hoped to interview former Gestapo agents imprisoned in Aalborg, in the far north of the country. The trip almost proved his undoing. “I shall never forget that drive,” he wrote. “Although there was only one main road to Aalborg, it became almost untraceable. The snowstorm increased until it was something out of Scott of the Antarctic. The road was utterly deserted, and I do not remember passing or being passed by any other vehicle the whole way. The surrounding landscape appeared utterly desolate. The surface of the road was solid ice, and the snow was beginning to deepen on it. To top everything, well before the halfway mark, the windscreen wiper packed up and I was forced to lower the windscreen. The lights on the jeep were not too good, and it was extremely difficult to make out where the roadway ended and the ditches and fields at the side began. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Dickie, my
boy, if you ditch this jeep, you’re bloody well going to freeze to death.’ ”
Lyon drove through the night with both hands clamped tightly on the wheel. Almost frozen to his core, he reached Aalborg after what seemed endless hours on the road. He visited several internment camps and interviewed a number of captured Gestapo officers, none of whom had any worthwhile information to share. Frustrated, before returning to Germany, he drove to Copenhagen. There, a policeman friend introduced Lyon to a young, blond actress of statuesque build and considerable charm. “After the rigors of the winter,” he later wrote, “and an accumulation of unclaimed leave, this meeting resulted in my return being delayed rather longer than had been originally scheduled.”
He arrived back in Germany several days later, adequately refreshed and ready to resume the hunt. At Neuengamme, he located a former Gestapo driver named Baumann who had traveled briefly with the two wanted men after the war. He told Lyon that Post and Schmidt, fleeing the advancing Allied armies, arrived in Flensburg on May 2, 1945, and used their contacts in the SS to land jobs with the German Customs Police. Post went to work under the alias Pohlmann; Schmidt went by Schmundt. The men were posted three days later to a customs office in Kappeln. They remained employed as customs officials for the better part of a month before deciding to move on. Each man possessed identity papers under his false name. They acquired a yellow Ford V-8 truck and drove to Hamburg, where they filed a movement order with local custom officials. According to the order, the men planned to travel to Itzehoe, roughly thirty miles northwest of Hamburg. They arrived in Itzehoe at three-thirty on the afternoon of June 12. Baumann, who had accompanied Schmidt and Post on their travels, now parted ways with the two men. He landed a job as a farm laborer just outside the town, where a war crimes unit eventually picked him up. From that point forward, the whereabouts of Post and Schmidt remained a mystery. Both men had mentioned their desire to use the Ford to establish a truck rental business in the Russian Zone.
Schmidt grew a mustache in an effort to avoid capture. He was thirty-eight, with a stocky build, thinning hair, and a wrinkled forehead. Although Baumann said he last saw Schmidt wearing the uniform of a customs official, he did possess civilian clothing, including a garish leather coat with a thick fur lining that often attracted stares from passersby. Schmidt, who prior to the war had been a lawyer, was single and had little family. His father was dead, but his mother was believed to be living near the Bodensee, a lake at the northern foot of the Alps. Baumann told Lyon her address could be obtained from one of Schmidt’s former shorthand typists, who lived in Kiel. Post, the same age as Schmidt, was more physically imposing: broad of shoulder, with a heavy walk more akin to stomping. He was married with three children, ages four to eight, but the union was not a happy one. Post had long enjoyed the company of Marianne Heidt, his shorthand typist from Gestapo headquarters in Kiel, and had little to do with his family. Baumann said there was still a chance Post maintained contact with his mistress. The woman’s father worked as an inspector with the War Damage Office in Kiel and lived at Hanastrasse 8. One of Heidt’s girlfriends also lived nearby. Either one of them, Baumann said, might know where to find her.
It was here Lyon’s hunt came to an end. In April 1947, his discharge orders came through and he was shipped back to England for demobilization, leaving McKenna to pick up the trail. Despite the information Baumann had passed along, the search for Post and Schmidt proved to be a frustrating one. McKenna, with armed backup, raided the house of Heidt’s parents. They were shaken, but cooperative, and said they hadn’t heard from their daughter in some time. They gave McKenna a snapshot of Marianne and Post on a skiing holiday in the Harz Mountains. The pair made for an attractive couple, fit and smiling, with snowcapped trees crowding the background. Also from the parents, McKenna obtained the addresses of those Heidt considered friends and acquaintances. In Kiel, the RAF stormed several houses and turned up correspondence that suggested Heidt might be found in the Wesermünde area. In Hamburg, McKenna interviewed Frau Inge Stege, Heidt’s cousin. Stege told McKenna that Heidt had spent three weeks at her house in August 1945 but left without providing a forwarding address. Three months later, a man showed up on Stege’s doorstep and inquired as to Heidt’s whereabouts. When McKenna asked Stege what this random caller looked like, she described a man who matched Johannes Post’s physical description. In the event Stege spoke with Heidt again, the man had left a mailing address: Kiel Post Office, Box no. Jo.P. Intrigued by the initials, McKenna contacted 91 Field Security Section, Kiel, and asked them to intercept anyone who accessed that particular box at the post office.
That night, McKenna studied the picture of Post and Heidt on their skiing holiday. He was struck by Post’s apparent normalcy: the hint of a smile, the relaxed posture of a man enjoying several days away from it all. It was a dichotomy he had encountered multiple times throughout the course of the investigation: how could someone capable of such barbarity be normal in other aspects of his life? It was a question that he, as a police officer, often pondered. Hitler’s executioners had wives and children; they expressed concern for their family and loved ones, yet displayed a total disregard for the fathers, brothers, and sons of others. How did one compartmentalize such differing mind-sets? McKenna knew he would never wrap his brain around it. As the war neared its end, the Nazi regime had only grown more barbaric, liquidating at a frantic rate those it deemed subhuman. The average German citizen was also made to suffer. War-weary Germans who did not display adequate enthusiasm for the Nazi cause, who expressed their lack of faith in final victory and refused to fight, were executed. Three months before the German surrender, Kaltenbrunner effectively gave all local police commanders free rein to murder. “From all police offices,” he wrote in a February 1945 order, “[I] expect the highest state of readiness, responsibility, robust action, no hesitation. Ruthlessly eliminate any defeatism in one’s own ranks with the harshest measures.” The German military was not immune to Nazi brutality. Fanatical SS men lingered behind the front lines and shot soldiers whom they believed to be deserting. In Berlin, where the Red Army was closing in, the SS made a public display of those it deemed defeatist, shooting such people in the street or hanging them from trees with signs around the necks of the deceased identifying them as cowards.
On the Western Front, following the Normandy invasion, there had been acts of barbarity that went far beyond the scope of traditional warfare. Indeed, along with the Sagan murders, the British were investigating a rash of war crimes perpetrated against Allied soldiers in France. Details had crossed McKenna’s desk as part of the routine information swap that such investigations entailed. One document listing various crimes made for disturbing reading:
June, 1944—A Canadian prisoner of war who was being marched through Caen saw the bodies of British soldiers lying in rows beside the road. He was informed by the Germans that all had been wounded and then tanks had been run over them to kill them. (Reported by the eye witness who subsequently escaped.)
June, 1944—A party of one Canadian officer, 23 Canadian other ranks and two British other ranks were shot at Chateau d’Audrieu by members of the 12th S.S. Reconnaissance Battalion of the 12th S.S. Panzer Division (Hitler Jugend). (The facts of this case have been established by a Court of Enquiry convened by Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force).
July, 1944—A British fighter pilot made a forced landing at Champs Rabats and broke his leg. He was found by a German officer who shouted at him, “You swine, you are still alive,” and shot him. (Reported by a German prisoner of war who was an eye witness.)
July, 1944—24 American soldiers in a crater were surrounded by S.S. troops. They were ordered by an S.S. officer to surrender and throw down their arms. This they did. The S.S. officer then shot all 24 himself. (Reported by a German prisoner of war who was an eye witness.)
August, 1944—A party of 8 prisoners of war from the S.A.S. Regiment were taken to a wood near Noailles by German soldiers in charge of two S.S
. officers and one Gestapo official. Sentence of death was read out and the German escort opened fire. (Reported by two of these prisoners of war who escaped.)
How had so many succumbed to such murderous fanaticism? That was a question the investigation would never answer. Some of the men questioned by McKenna and his team said they only pulled the trigger to save their families from the torturous SS. Was this a valid excuse? McKenna did not believe that Emil Schulz, most likely to hang for killing Roger Bushell, was a monster. Nevertheless, he shot an unarmed man in the back of the head. A husband and father could not be faulted for wanting to protect his family, but that did not legitimize murder. So what alternative did that leave? It was an uncomfortable question.
Based on Baumann’s information, McKenna found Fritz Schmidt’s mother living in a small house near the Bodensee. The setting seemed a world removed from the shell-shocked cities and crowded internment camps McKenna had come to know so well over the previous months. Frau Maria Schmidt—“very old and and an imbecile”—smiled when McKenna mentioned her son’s name. She seemed to have no inkling of her son’s wartime activities and could only tell McKenna she had last seen him three weeks ago. She was unsure when he’d be home for another visit. McKenna—sitting in the woman’s living room, looking at the glistening mountain vista beyond the window—suspected Schmidt’s visits home were now a permanent thing of the past. He thanked the woman for her time and left. The search for Schmidt would continue for another two decades.
The weeks slowly passed without leads on Schmidt or Post. All the while, demobilization thinned the ranks of the investigation team. By May 1947, the RAF had one wing commander (Bowes), one squadron leader (McKenna), one warrant officer, and three Dutch interpreters assigned to the case. The investigation had now taken on a “spasmodic” quality, the result—McKenna explained in a progress report—“of information given to various officials in the countries visited, who, from time to time, obtain information on persons still wanted in connection with these murders.”
