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

by Read, Simon

  Indeed, the investigation appeared to be winding down. The RAF—since launching its inquiry in September 1945—had tracked down 329 suspects, twenty-three of whom were directly complicit in the Sagan murders. Two of those individuals—Seetzen and Franz Schmidt—were dead by their own hand, and one—Friedrich Kiowsky—was in Czech custody. Currently, twenty-one suspects sat in cells in London and Minden awaiting trial. The British, hoping to charge and try Scharpwinkel, were still negotiating his release with the Russians. Venediger of the Danzig Gestapo remained on the run, as did Munich Gestapo chief Schäfer. The hunt for Hans Ziegler, head of the Gestapo in Zlín, continued. His seventy-two-year-old mother was traced to a house at Katzmeyerstrasse 71 in Munich, where she lived with her daughter and three-year-old grandson. Flight Sergeant Daniel raided the premises but found no physical evidence suggesting Ziegler had been there recently. The mother and daughter were questioned in separate rooms, the younger woman making no secret of the hatred she felt toward her interrogators. If she had information, she refused to part with it. Her husband, a former Gestapo agent, now languished in an Allied internment camp. The mother tried to placate Daniel and his interpreter and told them she had last seen her son three weeks prior. Daniel asked his interpreter to speak with the grandson, who sat playing in another room under the eye of a military policeman. The boy, when questioned, said Ziegler had come to visit the previous Sunday—a mere four days ago. Ziegler’s mother said nothing when Daniel pressed her further. Where, Daniel asked, was her son? The woman insisted she didn’t know.

  With no strong leads to go on, it was now a waiting game. McKenna spent his days working the phone and traveling to various internment camps to check on recent arrivals. On May 19, 1947, the commandant of the holding facility in Minden called McKenna and told him the North West Europe War Crimes Unit had just brought in a man named Johannes Pohlmann. A witness had recognized Pohlmann—working as “a haulage contractor” in the town of Celle—as Johannes Post. He was arrested “in connection with the murders of 300 people at the notorious A.E.L. Nordmark Concentration Camp” near Kiel. Formal charges had yet to be filed. The man was still insisting a case of mistaken identity had been made. McKenna traveled to Minden on May 21 to see the prisoner for himself. After checking in with the facility’s commandant, he walked to cell no. 4 and peered through a spy hole in the cell door. The prisoner was sitting on a small cot, staring in McKenna’s direction, his features haggard. McKenna pulled from his tunic the picture he had of Marianne Heidt and Johannes Post on their skiing holiday. True, the face was thinner—but the eyes and prominent chin left no doubt. He peered into the cell once more and knew the search for Johannes Post was at an end.

  He placed an urgent call to the head of the North West Europe War Crimes Unit and obtained permission to interrogate the prisoner. A guard unlocked the cell door and stood watch as McKenna dropped the photograph on the man’s lap. Pohlmann hardly glanced at the image. “That’s me,” he said, neither surprised nor disturbed. “I am Post.” McKenna asked the guard to bring an interpreter to the cell. Post, his cover blown, freely admitted to knowing all about the Kiel murders and added with apparent pride that he was in command of the execution squad. McKenna listened as Post detailed the murders of Catanach, Espelid, Fuglesang, and Christensen. Post mentioned, with some amusement, how Catanach balked when told he would soon be shot, and Post described the young airman’s puzzlement when he realized Post had not been joking. “Why?” had been the last word Catanach uttered, according to Post, who shot him through the back without dignifying that simple and desperate question with a response. The bullet pierced the airman’s heart. Over the course of the investigation, other suspects had expressed—even if untrue—remorse for their actions. They acknowledged that their deeds were wrong. McKenna now sat looking at Post, waiting to hear some word of regret—but none was forthcoming.

  “How could you do such a thing as this?” McKenna finally asked. “How could you be so inhuman?”

  McKenna listened to the translator convey the question to Post.

  “Inhuman! I was dealing with sub-humans,” Post spat, “yet I always gave them a full night’s warning before I shot them, so that they could prepare to meet their fate. For the glory of the Führer, I have killed any number of sub-humans. I have liquidated non-Aryans, gypsies, vagrants, Jews, and politically unreliables. The Führer has shown his appreciation by personally awarding me the highest political decoration in the realm. For the glory of the Führer, I only regret that I have not killed more. People like you. I wish I had had the chance to wipe out more people like you, who have left our cities in ruins and killed our women and children. These terror-fliers I disposed of were of no more good to the Reich than to all the other sub-humans whom I sent on their journey to Heaven for the glory of the Führer, who has presented me with the Order of the Blood.”

  McKenna, his hunt all but over, left the cell sickened. The RAF charged Post with murder the following month, after the Nordmark case went nowhere. With Fritz Schmidt the only man wanted in connection with the Kiel murders, McKenna and Bowes considered the matter closed. On June 30, 1947, Bowes penned a report to SIB headquarters in London:

  It has now been established where all [50] RAF officers were murdered and, in most cases, the names of the Gestapo officials involved. At Hamburg on the 1st July, 1947, the trial will commence of 18 accused Gestapo officials in connection with the murder of these officers. Two others have committed suicide following their arrest; the death of another has been definitely established; one has been executed by the Czech authorities and another is held in custody by them and will almost be certainly sentenced to death for war crimes against Czech nationals. One is still at the London Cage and Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, chief of the Gestapo at Breslau and organizer of the murder squad responsible for the death of 29 of those officers, is held by the Russians at Moscow. So far, all efforts to effect his transfer to British custody have been unsuccessful, but it is still possible that he will be handed over and stand trial for his part in these murders. In all, 25 actively concerned in the death of these officers have been accounted for.

  Bowes read what he had written and made a few minor changes before adding the closing line: “This can be considered the final report on this case.”

  FOURTEEN

  REMEMBRANCE

  There were thirty-eight men still being sought by the RAF. Throughout July and August 1947, McKenna met with occupation authorities in the American, British, and French zones, distributing more than ten thousand photographs of the wanted men. Among those still unaccounted for were former Munich Gestapo chief Dr. Oswald Schäfer and onetime head of the Zlín Gestapo Hans Ziegler. McKenna traced Schäfer’s wife to an address in the town of Braunfels. Lisalotte Schäfer told McKenna she had neither seen nor heard from her husband in two years and believed he was dead.

  The photographs were disseminated throughout the Allied armies and agencies investigating Nazi atrocities. The U.S. Army published the photos in Rogue’s Gallery, a widely circulated sheet profiling those being sought for war crimes. The new wave of publicity led to Ziegler’s apprehension in late 1947. He was shipped to the London Cage to answer questions regarding the Kirby-Green and Kidder murders. On the night of February 3, 1948, a guard looking into Ziegler’s cell saw the man lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood. The tin dinner tray he used to slice his throat lay beside him.

  Eighteen defendants in the Sagan case went on trial at the British Military Court in Hamburg on July 1, 1947. Presiding over the trial were a major general, three army officers, and three representatives of the Royal Air Force. Charges against all eighteen men were read into the record:

  (i) “Committing a war crime in that they at diverse places in Germany and German-occupied territory, between 25 March, 1944, and 13 April, 1944, were concerned together with SS Gruppenführer Müller and SS Gruppenführer Nebe and other persons known and unknown, in the killing in violation of the laws and usages of war of prisoners of w
ar who had escaped from Stalag Luft III.

  (ii) Committing a war crime that they at diverse places in Germany and German-occupied territory, between 25 March, 1944, and 13 April, 1944, aided and abetted SS Gruppenführer Müller and SS Gruppenführer Nebe and each other and other persons known and unknown in carrying out orders, which were contrary to the laws and usages of war, namely, orders to kill prisoners of war who had escaped from Stalag Luft III.”

  Additional charges of murder were leveled against the defendants for their role in the killings of individual POWs. Emil Schulz and Walter Breithaupt were charged with killing Squadron Leader Roger Bushell and Lieutenant Bernard Scheidhauer; Alfred Schimmel was charged with shooting Flight Lieutenant Anthony Hayter; Heinrich Boschert, Josef Gmeiner, Walter Herberg, and Otto Preiss were charged in the death of Flying Officer Dennis Cochran; Eduard Geith, Johann Schneider, and Emil Weil were charged in the shooting deaths of Lieutenants Johannes S. Gouws and Rupert J. Stevens; Walter Jacobs, Oskar Schmidt, and Wilhelm Struve faced murder charges in the deaths of Lieutenants Hans Espelid and Nils Fuglesang and Pilot Officer Arnold J. Christensen; Erich Zacharias was charged in the slayings of Flying Officer Gordon Kidder and Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green; Artur Denkmann, Hans Kaehler, and Johannes Post were charged with shooting Squadron Leader Catanach, Pilot Officer Christensen, and Lieutenants Espelid and Fuglesang.

  The first two charges, faced by all defendants, were charges of conspiracy to commit murder. The chief defendant, Max Wielen—the former head of the Breslau Kripo who sounded the national alarm following the escape—was brought to trial on these charges alone and was not charged with participating in any particular killing. Wielen was the only Kripo official in the defendant’s dock; the other seventeen men represented six regional Gestapo offices. All eighteen defendants pleaded not guilty. The prosecution’s underlying argument was simple: “Owing to the Grossfahndung (the nation-wide search), notified to every police headquarters, all policemen in Germany must have known that prisoners of war were at large and that therefore the accused, being members of the Gestapo, could not be heard to say that they did not know the identity of the prisoners they went out to kill.”

  The defense had a much tougher case, as it had to prove the defendants were unaware of their victims’ identities or the illegality of their actions. Lawyers representing Post wanted to call character witnesses who would testify that the ardent Nazi had once saved a British airman from an outraged mob. Post bluntly refused. “I could not have been a National Socialist for so many years,” he said, “and suddenly put in affidavits from Communists or Jews or freethinkers.” The main foundation of the defense’s case, however, was “the plea of superior orders”—orders the defendants were powerless to disobey. The defense argued that, “according to laws prevailing in Germany at the time of the offense,” orders issued by Hitler were legal; disobeying them was not. International law, however, deemed the following of such orders to be illegal. “International law,” defense attorneys proclaimed, “must not place the subject in an insoluble dilemma where he has only two possible courses of action, both of which are criminal, thus leaving him ‘no way out.’ In order to be able to say that a person has committed an offense, there must be an alternative course open to him, which does not constitute an offense.”

  Post testified to this issue while on the stand.

  “My attitude is quite clear,” he said. “If I received an order as I received it then—that is, if I had been told by order of the Führer four British prisoners are to be shot—this would be a violation of international law, but for the officer who carried it out it would be an entirely legal action. I will prove this. We live in an authoritarian state headed by a Leader, and there can be no doubt that an order given by an authoritarian Head of State is law.”

  The argument lacked obvious merit in the eyes of the court. While it could be argued that countless Germans assumed what Hitler said to be law, there was no “statute or decree…to the effect that a spoken command of the Head of the State had legal force, or as some counsel suggested, replace the finding and sentence of a court of law.” Furthermore, the prosecution, in countering the plea of superior orders, cited the case of the Llandovery Castle, “a British hospital ship which was sunk by a submarine” during the First World War. The submarine’s commander, Lieutenant Helmut Patzig, ordered his men to kill all the survivors. Torpedoes sunk two of the ship’s three lifeboats and killed all on board. Patzig and two of his lieutenants were eventually arraigned on war crimes. Patzig fled Germany and escaped prosecution, but his two subordinates were tried and found guilty. “Patzig’s order does not free the accused of guilt,” said the Sagan prosecutor, quoting the court’s findings in 1918. He referenced the German Military Penal Code, which states that a subordinate who obeys an order he knows to be an “infringement of civil or military law” is “liable to punishment.”

  Multiple other arguments put forward by the defense came up short, including one that stated only combatants—and not civilians—could commit war crimes. The prosecution countered by reading into the record an excerpt from chapter 14 of the Manual for Military Law: “The term ‘war crime’ is a technical expression for such an act of enemy soldiers and enemy civilians as may be visited by punishment or capture of the offenders.” Despite the shortfall of various defense arguments, the prosecution’s case wasn’t necessarily clear-cut, relying, as it was, “on the uncorroborated evidence of an accomplice or of accomplices and that one accused cannot corroborate another.” In short, the defendants could only be convicted on the corroborative statements of their onetime comrades if the court was convinced “that the evidence given was true.” The defendants took the stand in their own defense and expressed in their testimony everything from remorse to pride in their actions. The interrogation tactics employed at the London Cage were also put on trial. On the stand, Erich Zacharias claimed that he confessed to the killings of Thomas Kirby-Green and Gordon Kidder only after Lieutenant Colonel Scotland tortured him by shoving an electrical probe up his rectum.

  Taking the stand to refute the defendant’s account, Scotland said he neither tortured Zacharias nor sought a murder confession from the man. What he wanted, he testified, was “information on Gestapo hot-iron methods of torture in Czechoslovakia.” Scotland said Flight Lieutenant Lyon had at one point visited the London Cage to interrogate Zacharias, something Scotland acquiesced to with a measure of reluctance. In questioning the prisoner, Lyon learned that Scotland had made Zacharias strip to the waist and kneel for hours on a cement floor. Beaten down, Zacharias confessed to murdering the two RAF men.

  “I can only die once. I will tell you the truth,” he said. “The officers were murdered. I am sorry. They were handcuffed. They did not try to escape. The officers were killed under Ziegler’s orders.”

  Now, on the stand, Scotland said he was angered by the confession.

  “I did not want Lyon to be successful,” he said.

  “Why not?” asked Frau Dr. Oehlert, defense counsel for Zacharias.

  “I thought that the torture story was a very much more important one from Zacharias than a confession of shooting guilt,” Scotland said. “If I had a confession of shooting, I could not get a confession of torture.”

  Oehlert grilled Scotland on the methods employed at the London Cage.

  “Surely, as a British soldier,” she said, “you are familiar with the types of Army punishment?”

  “The only army in which I have served for any length of time is the German Army,” Scotland testified. “I do not know the punishments in the British Army.”

  “When were you a member of the German Army?”

  “I served in the German Army from 1903 to 1907.”

  “Have you ever heard of the punishment of cleaning up a room with a toothbrush?” Oehlert asked.

  “It sounds very stupid,” said Scotland. “I have not heard of it.”

  “I am very surprised that you, with four years’ service in the German Army,
do not know anything about that,” said Oehlert, her tone incredulous. “Would you be astonished that my client alleges that such singular punishments were given in the London Cage?”

  Scotland kept a straight face: “Yes.”

  Oehlert told the court that Zacharias complained of being severely beaten on several occasions while at the London Cage. He also accused guards of denying him food for days at a time and depriving him of sleep. Oehlert asked Scotland if he cared to address the accusations. Scotland’s response lacked conviction. “If that were true,” he said, “he should have made a complaint and we would have done something about it.”

  Other allegations of torture at the Cage put forward during the trial included incidents of hair pulling and electrocution. One defense lawyer accused Scotland of telling Nazi prisoners they would die at the end of a rope and their wives “would become common property” in Siberia. Scotland dismissed them all as “manufactured tales” and worried the accusations of torture would soon overshadow the trial and “the brutal fate of those fifty RAF officers.”

  Zacharias, called once more to the stand, now said his confession at the Cage had been a lie—an attempt on his part to actually spare the reputation of the German people. Asked by his attorney to explain, he said, “I did not make this statement upon oath, so I did not regard it as too important. I left quite important facts out, of which the most important was the Sagan Order, the fact that the killings had to take place on higher orders, which I assumed to be Hitler.… Secondly, I felt that because of the interests of my own colleagues and because of the reputation of the whole German people, I really could not make such a damaging revelation as this reference to Hitler’s orders to kill the fifty.”