Churchill's Band of Brothers

by Damien Lewis

  No amount of realpolitik or pragmatism in light of the onset of the Cold War could justify the shielding from justice of such a man. The fact that Kopkow’s safeguarding was achieved only via high-level deception and intrigue – Kopkow was cosseted by a veritable bodyguard of lies – reflects the fact that had the British, American and French public become aware of how he was being protected, there would have been an unholy outcry. If nothing else, the families of the many hundreds of disappeared – the victims of the Nacht und Nebel – were seeking to discover what exactly had happened to their loved ones, and to see some form of justice being done.

  In Horst Kopkow’s case, due to the moral bankruptcy of (some of) those in power in Britain, justice was forever denied. In the process, the memories of those incredibly brave and spirited SOE, OSS and Russian agents, plus the special forces who served at their side, were besmirched by a few who judged that it was somehow right and proper to shield Kopkow from any kind of a reckoning, which begs the question, on what and whose authority was this done? Did the British SIS have the right to spirit away whoever it chose to be shielded from justice, no matter the depth and breadth of their crimes, and at their sole discretion? Does it still have that right today?

  Either way, immediately after the Second World War the Western powers geared up for the Cold War, and in the process amoral pragmatism often triumphed, but it did so deep in the shadows. Had there been a poll at war’s end of the British and Allied public, to assess if they supported the shielding of war criminals like Kopkow, the overwhelming response would have been ‘no’. After all, it was largely as a result of public outcries over the Nazi concentration camps, and the mass of related atrocities coming to light, that the British government had been forced to act and institute war crimes trials in the first place. The powers that be were only ever sceptical and reluctant participants.

  Kopkow’s case is sadly not an isolated one. In 1945 the US authorities had issued guidance to their military commanders that they must arrest and hold all suspected Nazi war criminals. However, there was one caveat: ‘In your discretion you may make such exceptions as you deem advisable for intelligence and other military reasons.’ In other words, if senior US commanders believed a Nazi war crimes suspect might furnish more assistance to the Allied cause by not being put on trial, so be it. In due course Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen, Nazi Germany’s former intelligence supremo for the Eastern Front, was brought into the Allied fold, along with his extensive files on the Soviets, and he duly recruited many of his former associates to work for the Allies.

  What became known as the ‘Gehlen Organisation’ made extensive use of former SS and Gestapo men, especially those with widespread experience on the Eastern Front. In 1949 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – formed out of the OSS –took full control of the Gehlen Organisation and would run it as an adjunct of the CIA and with Gehlen at the helm for the next several years. In 1950 Gehlen was formally appointed as the head of the West German intelligence service, what would become the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND.

  In 1972 Gehlen would publish his memoirs, called simply The Service. The title of the book’s prologue gives a sense of the contents: ‘From Hitler’s Bunker to the Pentagon’. The book was trumpeted as ‘the . . . memoir of General Reinhard Gehlen, legendary spymaster-in-chief, Hitler’s head of military espionage in Russia, who, as war ended, transferred his mammoth files and network of spies to the United States’. But mostly, the recruitment by the CIA and other US agencies of war crimes suspects would be revealed under the 1988 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which compelled the CIA, OSS and other US agencies to release millions of pages from files that pertained to the recruitment of Nazi war criminals.

  And that is the key point: this is an American act of law. Under it, some eight million pages have been declassified and the work is ongoing. As a result Nazi war criminals and SS commanders including Walter Rauff, Willi Krichbaum, Dr Franz Six, Alois Brunner, Klaus Barbie and many others have been shown to have been shielded by the US intelligence community. Nazis who served at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Dachau and other concentration camps were also recruited. But there is no equivalent act in Britain and neither is there any sense that one is even being mooted.

  We know most of what we know about the Nazi war criminals who worked for the CIA due to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. We know precious little about the equivalent programme in Britain, a part of which was codenamed Operation Darwin. The fate of Kopkow has only been revealed as the result of a clutch of MI5 files being made available. Even those indicate that heavy redactions of the most sensitive information have been made. There are seven files, containing dozens of documents, that are all marked in handwritten scrawl: ‘Destroyed 9/1/62’. Clearly somebody went through the Kopkow files in 1962 and removed those documents deemed too sensitive, decades before there was even any hint of these files being opened to the public.

  Without a release of the relevant wartime and immediate post-war files held by SIS, we will never know how extensive was the British programme to recruit and shelter Nazi war criminals. In this sense, the American government is to be commended for legislating in favour of transparency and a proper reckoning. The British government, by contrast, appears wedded to a diet of blanket secrecy, despite the passage of time. It is seventy-five years since the end of the Second World War. This policy is well past its use-by date, especially because in many cases the living descendants of those who perished in the Nacht und Nebel are still hungry to learn the full facts of what happened to those who paid the ultimate price, in freedom’s cause.

  There were so many. Some 300 British agents went to their deaths at Kopkow’s hands. Then there were the American, Russian and numerous other Allied nationals – Norwegians, Belgians, Poles and Czechs, to name but a few – who fell victim to the Nacht und Nebel policy, especially as Britain was largely the headquarters for the formation and training of agents of all free nations who stood against Nazi Germany, and for dispatching those agents into enemy-occupied lands. For long months, the majority of agents of all nationalities sent behind the lines were dispatched from British shores. Then there were the special forces victims – SAS, Commandos, Jedburghs and others.

  The overall achievements of the SAS in France have been dealt with in the main body of this book, but the high costs they paid deserve fuller mention. Of the hundred or so SAS captured after D-Day, only six survived the war. By Barkworth’s own reckoning, only fifteen captured 2 SAS men returned from enemy captivity throughout the entirety of the conflict. The vast majority were consigned to the night and the fog. Thankfully, the SAS itself did not fall victim to a similar termination, as those in high places had been so adamant should be the case at war’s end.

  For Winston Churchill, David Stirling, Blair Mayne, Brian Franks, Yurka Galitzine and others, the work of the Secret Hunters had achieved an associated, yet deeply cherished aim: their very existence until summer 1948, operating across Europe and wearing the winged-dagger cap badge and regimental insignia, had kept the spirit and essence of the SAS alive long enough for its resurrection to get underway. In July 1947 the storied Artists Rifles regiment – a volunteer light infantry unit formed in 1859 – merged with the supposedly ‘defunct’ SAS to form the 21 Special Air Service Regiment (Artists) (Reserves). Although this was a reservist, territorial unit, nevertheless it represented the much-strategised partial resurrection of the SAS.

  It was only right and proper that the first commanding officer of the newly constituted regiment should be Lieutenant Colonel Brian Morton Forster Franks, MC, DSO, Croix de Guerre and Légion d’Honneur, the one man who had schemed, plotted and striven most tirelessly to ensure that the supposed demise of the SAS in October 1945 would prove far from permanent. Appointed as an honorary colonel in that role, he would remain in command of ‘21 SAS’, as it would become known, until the refounding of the Special Air Service in the 1950s, when it became clear that the new kind of warfare Britain faced – chie
fly the Malayan Emergency – called for the unique skillsets of the SAS.

  Brian Franks would be appointed as colonel commandant of the newly reformed regiment, and fittingly, many of those who refounded the SAS were veterans of its Second World War operations. And the rest, as they say, is history. Colonel Franks would go on to marry and have two children, and he would pass away in 1982, in Suffolk, of natural causes.

  Once the Secret Hunters had been disbanded, in summer 1948, Bill Barkworth struck out for new shores. After emigrating to Australia, he would end up building a business there and marrying his German secretary from the days of the Villa Degler operations. They would have three children, all of whom were girls – Catherine, Amy and Camilla. Barkworth’s wife had been living in England prior to the war, working as a governess, and had been interned as an ‘enemy alien’ at the outbreak of hostilities. In 1944 she had been returned to Germany and served in an administrative role, providing provisions to frontline troops.

  Amy Crossland, the middle of their three children, would write to me about her mother, saying: ‘These were difficult times for her, but she had the brightest, sunniest, optimistic personality which must have helped get her through.’ Of her father’s work on the Commando Order, and of the sidelining of escapee Lieutenant James Hughes’s earliest warnings about it, she would remark: ‘I think Pa was annoyed the matter was not taken more seriously at these high levels.’ One of her father’s greatest qualities was that he was extremely loyal to the men of the SAS, so their safety would have been foremost in his mind. Denying the Commando Order went against all that, of course.

  On her father’s life in Australia, she would write: ‘Pa was the director of the Good Neighbour Council, a government-funded body set up to assist post-war migrants settle into the community. Pa’s language skills helped him greatly here. He would often be called in the middle of the night to interpret at a hospital for migrants with sick children . . . he always wanted to ensure no one was disadvantaged through lack of English . . . I remember being in the office once and a Frenchman came in, saying he needed to speak again to “the Frenchman” (Pa)!’ Barkworth would die on 18 July 1985.

  Sergeant Fred ‘Dusty’ Rhodes returned to his native Barnsley after the work of the Secret Hunters was done, taking up work again with the local parks department as a gardener. Rhodes would return to France and Germany often, to commemorate those brave SAS who had lost their lives, and also the villagers of the Vosges who had paid such a heavy price for sheltering, feeding and aiding the SAS during Operation Loyton. In particular, the village of Moussey, which above all paid the heaviest price, has become something of a living memorial to those who died in the Vosges – French villagers, French Resistance and SAS alike. Several of the Operation Loyton Nacht und Nebel victims are buried in the Moussey church graveyard, which likewise has become a regular place for the commemoration of such wartime courage and valour.

  Some years after the war, Rhodes granted a series of interviews, some of which are held by the Imperial War Museum, regarding his service on Operation Loyton and thereafter as a Nazi-hunter. In them he made clear the level of dissatisfaction and frustration he felt that the official files concerning their war crimes work had been closed by the British Government for such an inordinately long time. ‘Why they put a seventy-five-year restriction on that I really don’t know,’ Rhodes remarked.

  The files of the Secret Hunters had been closed for seventy-five years. They were not to be opened during Rhodes’s lifetime, and the very existence of the SAS War Crimes Investigation Team remains something of a closely guarded secret until today. The SAS’s official diary for the war years, published in the last few years, contains just a brief entry concerning their extraordinary work. ‘In October 1945, the SAS was disbanded. Franks came to an unofficial arrangement with one individual from the War Office and the [war crimes] unit continued. It operated totally openly, as if it was official. The unit ended its hunt in 1948, three years after the SAS was disbanded.’

  If Barkworth, Rhodes and the rest of the Secret Hunters had not endured until summer 1948, it is without doubt that the Noailles Wood killers would never have been tracked down or brought to trial. Rhodes was able to attend his last Vosges reunion in 1988, and he was to die two years later. As his son, Phil Rhodes, was able to tell me, he was in the process of writing a book about his war years when sadly he passed away. It was never finished, but thankfully Phil was able to share with me his father’s handwritten notes of his wartime and post-war work, which had been a key source for his own book.

  Of the SABU-70 patrol, six men survived the war: Lieutenant Wiehe, Corporals Vaculik and Jones, and Troopers Morrison, Norman and Castelow. Of those who perished, the graves of the five murdered men are ranged in line in the Marissel French National Cemetery in Beauvais, 40 miles north of Paris. Along with graves from the First World War there are 158 burials from the Second World War, four of which are unidentified. Under Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones lie Patrick Garstin, Paddy Barker, Thomas Varey, Joseph Walker and William Young, in that order. The cemetery is situated on the east side of the Rue d’Amiens (D1001), just to the north of Beauvais city centre.

  There is also a memorial plaque in Randalstown, Northern Ireland, which, beneath a winged dagger motif, reads: ‘Trooper William Pearson Young (Billy), 14 Kemmilhill Park, Randalstown. 9.8.1944 Aged 22 Years. Posthumously awarded the Croix De Guerre.’

  In 1960 the French government proposed giving the Croix de Guerre to all five of the Noailles Wood murder victims, in recognition of their valorous acts. Inexplicably, the British government refused the offer, stating that it was not their policy to accept foreign decorations more than five years after the acts being honoured. In the case of Trooper Young at least, it appears that the high-valour medal was subsequently secured, and according to newspaper reports, Trooper Walker’s parents went to France in person, both to visit the place of his death and to ‘receive the Croix de Guerre which the French government has posthumously awarded their son’.

  It remains unclear whether the families of Garstin, Barker or Varey got to receive the posthumous Croix de Guerre on behalf of those who had perished. What is very clear is the way in which the memory of their sacrifice is remembered and cherished on the ground in France. A number of memorials stand at the key sites – at the La Ferté-Alais drop-zone and at the location of their deaths. Many are in French, but one that is (mostly) in English reads: ‘Here, on August 9th 1944 British Paratroopers of the 1st SAS Regiment . . . Captain P. B. Garstin MC 26 Ans, Sergeant T. Varey 30 Ans, Private T. J. Barker 21 Ans, Private J. Walker 22 Ans, Private W. P. Young 22 Ans were brutally murdered by the enemy.’

  In October 1965 Captain Patrick Garstin’s widow, Susan, would write to the Foreign Office, from the family’s Canterbury home, which she had shared with their son, who was by then around twenty-one years old, but of course had never got to know his father. ‘My husband was imprisoned at Gestapo headquarters Avenue Foch Paris. He was in the 1 SAS and captured on the night of 4/5 July. He had three wounds in his back and two in his neck. I believe he was first taken to hospital, where the Germans refused him any sort of medical attention. I understand he was made to change into civilian clothes and on 9 Aug. 1944 was taken with the rest of his troops . . . to the grounds of a chateau near Noailles and shot.’

  In June 1964 the British and German governments had reached an agreement over compensation to be paid to UK nationals who had fallen victim to Nazi war crimes. Garstin’s widow’s letter was in connection with that. In December 1965 she was given a ‘death grant’ for the loss of her husband – ‘one of the Noailles cases’ – of £2,293, around £40,000 at today’s values.

  Of those from Captain Garstin’s patrol who survived, Lieutenant Wiehe would be paralysed for life and would neither marry nor have any children. Taking solace in a religious life, plus the companionship of his dog, Titch, he was able to forgive those who had injured and mistreated him, and for a time he was reasonab
ly independent, driving a Morris Minor motor car specially adapted for a wheelchair user.

  On 11 June 1960 Wiehe gave his precious rosary – the one that had sustained him through his darkest times in the war – to his godson, having already drawn up a will in which he left much of his worldly possessions to Sister Ruscoe, the English nurse who had accompanied him to Mauritius, and had stayed there to become his lifelong nurse. Having been on morphine medication ever since sustaining his injuries, on 9 September 1965 Wiehe would pass away in Mauritius, aged forty-nine, and would be buried in the family graveyard. He is commemorated to this day not only as a courageous soldier, but also as a man of faith who gave his all in freedom’s cause, and as one who bore his injuries with extraordinary forbearance and good grace until the very end of his days.

  In the lush gardens of the Labourdonnais Estate, the Wiehe family home in Mauritius, there is a memorial to Wiehe’s life. It reads: ‘In homage to Uncle Hyacinthe, who lived in the gardens of Labourdonnais, war-wounded in 1944. Through his bravery and his heroism, he was an example to his family and friends. His suffering, his fervent faith, his courage and his holiness, his sweetness and his humility, mark him as one of a select few worthy of praise and admiration. He liked to be surrounded by trees and birds, in his quest for the absolute. Father J. J. Adrien Wiehe, Priest of the Diocese of Port-Louis, Mauritius.’ The Wiehe family shared with me Lieutenant Wiehe’s wartime diaries and other family archival materials, which were hugely useful in fleshing out his story.

  Of the two survivors of the massacre at Noailles, having first been threatened with prosecution by the French authorities, Serge Vaculik would eventually be awarded the Croix de Guerre by them. However, he too would be dogged by his wartime injuries. He was also discomfited at winning his own decoration for valour, for he pointed out that most of the ‘Commandos and parachutists were lucky if after desperate missions and hair’s-breadth escapes they managed to get a bronze star – they were more likely to get a wooden cross.’ In 1954 Vaculik published his life story, in French, which would subsequently be translated into English, and published under the title Air Commando. That text has proven a primary source of inspiration and information for this book.