Churchill's Band of Brothers

by Damien Lewis

  There was one other key aspect to the plan. Quietly, the fightback against the scrapping of the SAS had already begun. A Regimental Association had been formed, with Churchill as its patron, David Stirling as its president, Franks as its chairman, and Paddy Mayne as vice president, amongst others. Prime amongst its objectives was this: ‘To provide a means by which the Regiment can keep in touch with one another and maintain esprit de corps.’ Prior to the war, Colonel Franks had served as the manager of the Hyde Park Hotel (today’s Mandarin Oriental), in Knightsbridge, London. He was returning as the managing director, now that the SAS was ‘no more’. From there he planned to run a shadow SAS headquarters, ‘requisitioning’ a couple of rooms from which to do so.

  Churchill, Stirling, Franks and others were determined that come what may, the SAS would rise again, phoenix-like, from the ashes. Barkworth’s team was a key element of their survival plan, and they should expect to get the odd message on Hyde Park Hotel notepaper, from Franks. Wearing the distinctive SAS beret and cap badge, Barkworth’s team would operate in the shadows until the time was right for the regiment to be re-formed, thus keeping its memory and spirit very much alive.

  ‘They weren’t mercenaries,’ Galitzine would remark. ‘They were being paid by the War Office; we were paying them alright.’ But by October 1945 only a handful of those in the know were even aware of the existence of this unit, which would become known as ‘the Secret Hunters’.

  On 21 September 1945 the Belgian Independent Parachute Company (5 SAS) – which consisted mostly of Belgian volunteers –was subsumed into that nation’s armed forces; days later the French SAS regiments also left the SAS family; and on 6 October, 1 and 2 SAS paraded before their commanding officer for what they believed would be the last time. No one knew why special forces were being got rid of, and so decisively and so quickly. It was simply a case of thank you very much, you’re on your way. Men who had fought together and bled together for years swapped addresses, exchanged signature books and bade their farewells.

  George ‘Bebe’ Daniels – one of the SAS’s original training instructors, a tough, no-nonsense individual – handed his notebook to a distinctive, redheaded individual: Ginger Jones. In it Jones scribbled: ‘Let’s hurry up and get outta here, because I’m going to blow the bloody lot, Cheerio, Bebe, and all the best.’ It typified the overarching, uncomprehending sense of loss felt by all. Is this what it all came down to? Is this what it had all been for? Fortunately, perhaps, Serge Vaculik missed the collapse of the SAS; this falling apart. He was in France, hobbling on his wounded leg with the aid of a stick and recuperating at his family’s Brittany home. Little did they know it yet, but for each of these two men who burned for a reckoning, justice was coming.

  Regardless of the snuffing out of the SAS, the Secret Hunters continued their work. If anything, they relished their newfound ‘black’ role. Now they could truly spread their wings, released as they were from all official constraints. Shortly the hunt would reach as far south as Italy, where SAS Captain Henry Parker would track the killers of several men, who had been captured on a sabotage mission behind the lines. Parker would demonstrate that old habits die hard. ‘It is now two in the morning and I’ve been working the last two days on the Barkworth system . . . a mixture of whisky, Benzedrine and no sleep,’ he would report to Franks, at his Hyde Park headquarters.

  Even as Galitzine’s Eaton Square office issued a missive, claiming that ‘Major Barkworth will be winding up the investigation during December,’ and ‘Confirmed we agree disbandment of Major Barkworth’s team,’ the Secret Hunters were actually recruiting. By the turn of the year, Barkworth would have a team of twenty-four working under him, and a second house was commandeered in Gaggenau to furnish extra accommodation. In the coming weeks they would trawl POW camps across Austria, Czechoslovakia and France, and into the Russian zone of occupation, in search of the war criminals. Mostly, they would seek little official permission, blagging their way in their war-weary jeeps, which were averaging some 200 miles per day.

  Fresh recruit Sergeant Peter Gervase Drakes – a veteran both of SAS Operation Keystone in the Netherlands and of the liberation of Belsen – was set to work scouring the length and breadth of northern Germany. Drakes had only just turned twenty-two when he joined the Secret Hunters, having falsified his age when signing up to the army: he’d been just short of his fifteenth birthday, but had claimed to be several years older. Further north still, Barkworth had men in Norway, seeking some of the key players in atrocities in the Vosges, who were posing as the crew of a surrendered U-boat. Day by day the cellars of the Villa Degler were filling up.

  One of the star captives was Hauptscharführer Peter Straub, the Natzweiler camp executioner. Straub had, by his own admission, ‘put four million people up the chimney’, at Auschwitz and then Natzweiler. At the latter camp his victims had included four female SOE agents, Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Sonia Olschanezky and Diana Rowden – the first such to be executed by the Nazis. After being given a supposedly lethal injection, one of the four had been placed in the camp crematorium while still alive. She’d reached up and raked her nails across Straub’s face, in a desperate last act of resistance. It was that which would lead Dusty Rhodes to Straub.

  Barkworth had been given an address in Mannheim. The city lay some 60 miles north of Gaggenau, inside the American zone. Knowing all systems were leaky, Rhodes took to his ageing jeep in the dead of night, flitting through darkened back streets and circumventing all checkpoints, dodging heaps of rubble and bomb craters. Upon his arrival at 1 a.m., the heavily armed SAS sergeant climbed the steps at the address, rapping on the door of the apartment. A woman answered, clearly surprised and shocked to find a British soldier calling at this hour. Behind her Rhodes spied a figure that just had to be Straub. Much as the man might wave fake papers under Rhodes’s nose, the SAS sergeant was not to be denied. Straub ‘still had the marks of that woman’s fingernails’ on his face. Still protesting his innocence, he was bundled aboard the jeep at gunpoint and whisked away to the Villa Degler’s cells.

  Rhodes was quite ready to fight fire with fire, at one point noting: ‘Running and screaming by party who turned traitor on Sgt Neville’s party – a few rounds from T SMG soon brought them to their senses.’ ‘T SMG’ stood for the Thompson sub-machine gun – the ‘Tommy gun’ so popular with SOE agents, Commandos and SAS alike. Sergeant Neville was one of the eight SAS who’d been in Lieutenant David Dill’s party, the rear guard taken captive in the Vosges. Dill, an officer, had been separated from his men, and had ended up being shot at Gaggenau. Sergeant Neville and his fellow captives had been driven into a patch of remote woodland in the Vosges, and executed. The last to die had turned to his captors and told them simply: ‘We were good men.’

  Following the arrest of Straub, Rhodes’s next note read: ‘Dr Rhode Natzweiler.’ Werner Rhode, the concentration camp doctor who had administered the supposedly lethal injections, had been tracked to the US zone of occupation. Working to a relentless and frenetic schedule, Rhodes and his team hunted down Oberscharführer (SS Company Leader) Max Kessler, who was wanted for the shooting and alleged burning alive of three SAS men in the Vosges. He was discovered hiding in a laundry basket in the cellar of a relative’s home.

  As the weeks flew by, Dusty Rhodes realised how many ‘war crimes . . . were committed not only to SAS, but to Americans, Australians, New Zealanders – the reports on war crimes and the people who had suffered leads the SAS team into some bizarre places, also [to] some strange people’. No place proved stranger or more macabre than Strasbourg’s main prison, where Rhodes was forced to inspect hundreds of body parts ‘all preserved in formalin, in tanks’, to ensure they weren’t from any of their missing men. The bodies had been taken from Natzweiler and preserved by the Nazis in Strasbourg, as some kind of twisted ‘medical’ experiment.

  But perhaps no undertaking was more bizarre than the snatch mission that Rhodes executed in the American zone, which would lead t
o Rhodes himself going into hiding. ‘Fight in street,’ Rhodes noted. ‘This man . . . altered his rank and name and started work for the American legal department. Arrested when walking home. Dusty Rhodes put him on wanted list.’ Again Rhodes had staked out the suspect’s address covertly, arresting the wanted man as he walked home from the office. But as the captive had been working for the US authorities as a lawyer, and as the snatch mission had been executed with no clearance, Rhodes himself was forced to go into hiding, as the American sought to arraign him.

  As for ‘Stuka’ Neuschwanger, the sadistic Nazi torturer and killer, Barkworth and Rhodes not only tracked him down, but they also took him back to the scene of his crimes – the Erlich Forest killings. There Barkworth forced him to look into the crater into which the bodies had tumbled – Major Reynolds, Captain Whately-Smith, Lieutenant Dill, Captain Gough and Troopers Griffin and Ashe, amongst twenty-two others. ‘So, what do you feel now about the murders that took place here?’ Barkworth demanded. When Neuschwanger refused to show the slightest hint of any remorse or regret, Rhodes cracked, unleashing a punch that knocked the SS lieutenant into the bottom of the crater. ‘He was fortunate, because he was coming out again,’ remarked Rhodes.

  By the first months of 1946, dozens of the chief suspects of the Vosges killings had been dragged into the Villa Degler cells. By then Barkworth was tracking the killers of US airmen, French Resistance fighters, Commandos and Jedburgh team members, as well as the SAS – more than a hundred war crimes suspects in all. The more he studied the growing stacks of files, the more he realised there was one factor that bound them all together – the Kommandobefehl, Hitler’s Commando Order.

  ‘All the cases of War Crimes . . . investigated by this team, have in one way or another derived from the Commando Order signed by Hitler on 18 Oct. 1942,’ Barkworth noted.

  How, he wondered, had such a thing come to pass, which was so obviously illegal, in a country that was otherwise so regimented? Many were the suspects who would use the Commando Order as the key plank of their defence: they were only following orders from the Führer. But ‘only the slow-witted, the indifferent or the hidebound allowed reports of the capture of Commando men to be forwarded to Higher HQs,’ reported Barkworth, knowing what would follow. Once such reports had been sent, ‘the inexorable cogs of the German military machine, oiled with the emulsion of subservience and severe discipline, were set in motion by the touch of a button from above, and there was nothing to stop them.’ Once a report was filed up the chain of command, the captives were basically dead men.

  Barkworth calculated that a staggering number of men and women had fallen victim to the Kommandobefehl. ‘In all, the death[s] of at least 160 British parachutists and Commando men . . . have been a direct result of the Commando Order. Were the total of cases concerning Allied troops and the cloak and dagger British “Special Forces” to be added, the total would be over 250.’ The ultimate responsibility lay at one individual’s door. ‘Perhaps the person most profoundly affected by Commando assaults was the Führer, who appeared to take them as a personal attack unworthily directed against himself. The war was his war, victory to be his victory, gained in the teeth of his generals and in spite of his people, who he was even then beginning to despise.’

  The SAS major was also aware of the depths of subterfuge layered around the Commando Order, which suggested that its authors knew of its blatant illegality. In May 1943 the British government had protested to the German authorities about the killing of fourteen captured Commandos at Egersund, in Norway. They had been taken prisoner in November 1942, when their glider had crash-landed during Operation Freshman, an attempt to sabotage a vital part of Nazi Germany’s nuclear programme. The protest resulted in an ‘unseemly scramble’ to formulate a suitable response, one to which ‘Hitler gave directions for the main points’ to be raised.

  The Freshman raiders were British troops serving in full uniform and engaged in a military operation, but under the Commando Order they had been shot out of hand. The response from Nazi Germany involved creating a tissue of obfuscation and lies. ‘The whole atmosphere that surrounded the production of this German answer was apprehensive, secretive and mendacious, ’ Barkworth noted. The Kommandobefehl’s authors spoke of how things ‘could become very uncomfortable,’ should the truth about the Commando Order get out.

  Worse still, Barkworth himself had fallen victim to the falsehoods fabricated on high concerning the Kommandobefehl. When SAS Lieutenant James Quentin Hughes had escaped from captivity in Italy in May 1944, Barkworth had rightly treated his reports of being threatened under a ‘Commando Order’ with all due seriousness. He’d taken his concerns to London, but owing to the earlier Nazi lies and subterfuge over the Op Freshman victims, ‘the sand lay thick in Whitehall’s eyes’. The Nazi hierarchy had successfully duped London into believing that no such murderous Kommandobefehl might exist, and so Hughes’s report was summarily dismissed.

  Under the Kommandobefehl, prisoners – some of whom had been wounded during the process of their capture – were to be done away with ‘in circumstances which were as disgusting as they are obscure’, Barkworth noted. Sadly, the issue of the Commando Order had begun to be taken seriously only ‘when dead bodies of murdered prisoners had been found in France’, as Allied troops had liberated that country. Rarely was that more the case than in the Noailles Wood killings, one of the files that sat most heavily on Barkworth’s conscience, in his ‘unsolved’ ledger.

  In the febrile atmosphere of the Villa Degler, anything was possible as far as Barkworth was concerned, especially when all leads had come to naught. Not only would no stone be left unturned, as Rhodes had promised, but no means was beyond bounds to hunt down the killers. At times when all seemed hopeless – and there had been many such times – Barkworth was happy to consult the spirits of the dead, to see if they might lend a hand. Galitzine had been caught up in one of Barkworth’s Ouija board sessions, at first prudishly objecting to such a recourse, even in extremis.

  ‘You can’t mean you did this! I mean it’s ridiculous,’ Galitzine had objected.

  ‘Well, why not?’ Barkworth countered. ‘If people were killed, I mean presumably they want to tell us what happened to them.’

  Galitzine couldn’t argue with the logic of that. That evening they set out the tools of the Ouija trade – numbered playing cards, the letters of the alphabet, plus the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’. What the board told them that night would lead the Secret Hunters to more unmarked graves in the Vosges, and to another German posing as an innocent being unmasked by Barkworth and dragged into custody. Back in his Eaton Square offices, Galitzine would be upbraided most royally when the use of the Ouija board came to light. He was called before three senior War Office figures, some of the few who were ‘in the know’ about the Secret Hunters.

  ‘How dare you do anything like this!’ they remonstrated.

  Galitzine held his ground. ‘But sir, we’ve got two bodies and a prisoner.’

  ‘Well, if you hadn’t got two bodies and a prisoner you’d be court martialled,’ they concluded, threateningly.

  ‘He had a very open and enquiring mind,’ Amy Crossland, Barkworth’s daughter, would remark of her father, ‘a willingness to examine all possibilities . . . including that of life after death . . . When I was a teenager I remember asking him about seances, and he said it was not an advisable thing to do as you never knew who you might get!’ There spoke the voice of experience.

  Fortunately, perhaps, Barkworth would need no help from beyond the grave to get his first break on the Noailles Wood case. While Kieffer – the mastermind of the Noailles Wood massacre, plus the murders of Captain Whately-Smith and Major Reynolds – had seemingly disappeared without trace, one of Kieffer’s acolytes would fall into Barkworth’s grasp, and all because he made the schoolboy error of returning to visit his wife and children. As Barkworth noted: ‘The easiest Germans to find were those who stayed at home.’

  For days on end and
often wearing cunning disguises, Barkworth would have his men stake out the known addresses of his most wanted, in order to ‘arrest him bei Nacht und Nebel’ –by total surprise. That was how they got ‘Stuka’ Neuschwanger. Having heard that he’d been seen in Göppingen, a town in southern Germany, Barkworth and his team had removed their SAS berets and regimental flashes, and dressed as locals. ‘I wish you could have seen me,’ Barkworth wrote to Galitzine, ‘wandering around Göppingen in civilian clothes, with a pair of trousers belonging to the local chief of police, and which were big enough to hold me twice over.’

  So it was that one of Kieffer’s deputies blundered into Barkworth’s clutches. ‘Karl Haug of Gruppe Kieffer in 4 Civil Internee Camp Recklinghausen,’ Barkworth reported via radio to the Secret Hunters’ Eaton Square headquarters, having arrested the Gestapo man at the family home. ‘Has given statement on shooting SAS Noailles in which he took part . . . Haug knowledgeable and willing witness.’

  Haug, the former POW of the British from the First World War, was once again in British custody. Not only was he cooperating, but he was to prove the route via which to get to Kieffer. After their stint at Avenue Foch and then in the Vosges, SS Sturmbannführer Hans Josef Kieffer and Hauptscharführer Karl Haug had gone into hiding as the Third Reich had collapsed into fire and ruin. The two men had been childhood friends from when they’d been members of the same gymnastics club, and Haug was the godfather to one of Kieffer’s children. After the war they had made some kind of unholy pact to help shield each other from the Allies. Thankfully, on Haug’s side it proved far from unbreakable.