by Read, Simon
HUMAN GAME
HUMAN
GAME
The True Story of the “Great Escape” Murders
and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen
SIMON READ
BERKLEY CALIBER, NEW YORK
BERKLEY BOOKS
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Copyright © 2012 by Simon Read
Jacket design by Daniel Rembert
Photos of the murdered POWs on pages viii and ix are
courtesy of the Imperial War Museum: HU1591 and HU1592
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First edition: October 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Read, Simon, date.
Human game : the true story of the ‘great escape’ murders and the hunt for the Gestapo gunmen / Simon Read.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61158-6
1. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, German. 2. Great Britain. Royal Air Force—Officers—Crimes against. 3. Stalag Luft III. 4. Criminal investigation—Germany. 5. War criminals—Germany—History—20th century. 6. War crime trials—Germany. 7. Great Britain. Royal Air Force Police. Special Investigations Branch. 8. McKenna, Francis P., 1906–1994. I. Title.
D804.G4R356 2012
940.54’7243812—dc23 2012005330
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
To my son, Spencer,
with love.
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?”
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY,
LAYS OF ANCIENT ROME
“Who is in the right? The murderers who expect humane treatment after their cowardly attacks or the victims of those foul and cowardly attacks who in their rage seek their revenge?…We owe it to our people, which is defending itself with so much honesty and courage, that it not be allowed to become human game to be hunted down by the enemy.”
NAZI PROPAGANDA
MINISTER JOSEF GOEBBELS URGING GERMANS
ON MAY 27, 1944, TO ATTACK DOWNED ALLIED AIRMEN
CONTENTS
LIST OF CHARACTERS
PREAMBLE: THE GREAT ESCAPE
PROLOGUE: SUNDAY, MARCH 26
1. “Those Are My Orders”
2. Cold Case
3. Vengeance
4. Zlín
5. The London Cage
6. Prime Suspects
7. Munich
8. A Death in the Mountains
9. Saarbrücken
10. Danzig
11. Finding Scharpwinkel
12. Alone
13. The Order of the Blood
14. Remembrance
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
APPENDIX A: THE FIFTY
APPENDIX B: A SURVIVOR’S TALE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SOURCE NOTES
INDEX
LIST OF CHARACTERS
ROYAL AIR FORCE INVESTIGATION TEAM
Squadron Leader Francis P. McKenna
Wing Commander Wilfred “Freddie” Bowes
Flight Lieutenant Stephen Courtney
Flight Sergeant H. J. Williams
Sergeant Wilhelm Smit
Flight Lieutenant Harold Harrison
Flight Lieutenant A. R. Lyon
Flight Sergeant R. M. Daniel
Squadron Leader W. P. Thomas
Sergeant J. Van Giessen
Flying Officer D. J. Walker
UPPER NAZI HIERARCHY
Adolf Hitler
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring
Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler
AT THE CENTRAL SECURITY OFFICE (RSHA) UNDER HIMMLER
SS Obergruppenführer and General of Police Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner
Gestapo SS Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller
Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) SS Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe
REGIONAL KRIPO AND GESTAPO PERSONNEL
BRESLAU
Dr. Wilhelm Scharpwinkel: Head of the local Gestapo
Max Wielen: Head of the local Kripo
Dr. Gunther Absalon: SS captain charged with prisoner-of-war security in Sagan region
Dr. Ernst Kah: Head of local SD, intelligence agency of the SS
Heinrich Seetzen: Inspector of local Security Police
Hans Schumacher: Senior officer with local Kripo
Max Richard Hansel: Kriminal Inspektor with the Görlitz Gestapo
Lux: Breslau Gestapo agent and chief executioner
Knappe: Breslau Gestapo agent and member of Scharpwinkel’s murder squad
Kiske: Breslau Gestapo agent and member of Scharpwinkel’s murder squad
Robert Schröder: Scharpwinkel’s driver
Erwin Wieczorek: SS officer present at the shooting of four captured airmen
Laeufer: Breslau Gestapo agent and member of Scharpwinkel’s murder squad
BRNO/ZLÍN
Hans Ziegler: Head of the Zlín Frontier Police, which served as an auxiliary to the Brno Gestapo
Wilhelm Nöelle: Head of the Brno Gestapo
Franz Schauschütz: Inspector with the Brno Gestapo
Hugo Roemer: Section chief in the Brno Gestapo
Adolf Knuppelberg: Senior Brno Gestapo official, who shot Thomas Kirby-Green
Friedrich Kiowsky: Driver for the Zlín Frontier Police (Gestapo)
Fritz Schwarzer: Hugo Roemer’s personal driver
Erich Zacharias: Officer with the Zlín Frontier Police (Gestapo), who shot Gordon Kidder
Otto Kozlowsky: Brno Gestapo lawyer
DANZIG
Dr. Günther Venediger: Head of the local Gestapo
Erich Graes: Depu
ty director of the local Kripo
Kurt Achterberg: A deputy in the local Gestapo
Reinhold Bruchardt: Venediger’s right-hand man
KARLSRUHE
Josef Gmeiner: Head of the local Gestapo
Walter Herberg: Local Gestapo agent assigned to the murder squad
Otto Preiss: Local Gestapo agent assigned to the murder squad
Heinrich Boschert: Local Gestapo agent assigned to the murder squad
Otto Ganninger: Deputy commandant of Natzweiler concentration camp
Magnus Wochner: Camp registrar at Natzweiler
KIEL
Friedrich (Fritz) Schmidt: Head of the local Gestapo
Johannes Post: Deputy in local Gestapo and chief executioner
Oskar Schmidt: Agent with the local Gestapo assigned to the murder squad
Hans Kaehler: Inspector with the local Gestapo
Franz Schmidt: Agent with the local Gestapo assigned to the murder squad
Walter Jacobs: Agent with the local Gestapo assigned to the murder squad
Artur Denkmann: Driver with the local Gestapo
Wilhelm Struve: Driver with the local Gestapo
LIBEREC
Bernhard Baatz: Head of the local Gestapo
Robert Weyland: Local Gestapo agent and suspected gunman
Robert Weissmann: Local Gestapo agent and suspected gunman
MUNICH
Dr. Oswald Schäfer: Head of the local Gestapo
Anton Gassner: Agent with the local Kripo in charge of Munich search operations
Greiner: Head of the local Kripo
Johann Schneider: Local Gestapo agent assigned to the murder squad
Emil Weil: Local Gestapo agent assigned to the murder squad
Martin Schermer: Local Gestapo agent assigned to the murder squad
Eduard Geith: Local Gestapo agent assigned to the murder squad
STRASBOURG
Alfred Schimmel: Head of the local Gestapo
Heinrich Hilker: Local Gestapo agent and gunman
Max Dissner: Section head of local Gestapo and suspected gunman
PREAMBLE
THE GREAT ESCAPE
Stalag Luft III sat in a clearing of dense pine forest just south of Sagan, some five hundred miles north of the Swiss border and two hundred miles south of the Baltic coast. Two fences measuring ten feet high, crowned in barbed wire, encircled the compound. The seven-foot space between the fences was a no-man’s-land of additional barbed wire. Thirty feet inside the interior fence, strung no more than eighteen inches high, was a single strand of barbed wire that prisoners were forbidden to cross. Breaching the wire was likely to result in a deadly burst of machine-gun fire from one of the guard towers, which were strategically placed every 330 feet along the outer perimeter fence. At nightfall, guards in the towers swept the camp grounds with wide-beam spotlights.
Built on Hermann Göring’s orders, the camp—its full name being Stammlager Luft III, or Permanent Camp for Airmen 3—was designed to be escape-proof. The compound’s location was chosen, in part, because of the ground: yellow sand beneath a thin layer of gray, gravelly dirt. The soil’s lack of solidity would make tunneling virtually impossible. If an intrepid group of men considered digging their way out, the tunnel’s necessary length would most likely dissuade them from pursuing their scheme. The barrack blocks were set at least one hundred feet back from the fence; to reach the cover of the forest, a tunnel would have to stretch at least two hundred feet. The barracks, 160 feet long by 40 feet wide, with tarred roofs and timber-panel sides, were built with trapdoors in the floors and ceilings, allowing guards to make spot inspections to ensure prisoners weren’t secretly stashing away contraband to assist in escape. In past breakouts from various camps, prisoners had tunneled their way out by removing the flooring of their barracks and digging into the ground directly underneath. Because the barracks at Stalag Luft III were set on stilts, this was not possible. Concrete pilings that served as foundations for the washroom and kitchen in each block, however, were dug into the earth. Through these, prisoners would have to dig before they even hit soil.
If such a task were possible, the next dilemma faced by a tunnel crew would be hiding the excavated dirt. The gray topsoil in the compound, the Germans believed, would thwart any attempt to discard and hide the yellow sand that was dug up from underneath. Little, however, was left to chance. The Germans sunk microphones ten feet underground to pick up the sounds of any subterranean activity. In addition to the guards in the towers, “ferrets”—as the prisoners called them—routinely patrolled the camp grounds and stalked the edge of the woods. Canine units covered the perimeter along the outer fence. During the summer months, the sun baked the camp and rendered the ground dry as bone. Winter brought temperatures below zero, heavy snow and torrential rains, turning the soil into a thick, sticky sludge. It was here to Stalag Luft III, the largest of six “main camps” built in Germany, that prisoners began arriving in March 1942. Squadron Leader Roger Joyce Bushell was thirty-two years old when he arrived in the autumn of that year. He had already been a prisoner of the Reich for two years.
His Spitfire was knocked from the sky on May 23, 1940, in combat over Dunkirk, when a Messerschmitt 110 challenged him head-on. Machine guns blazed, and both pilots found their mark. The Messerschmitt spiraled to earth, while Bushell—his cockpit filling with smoke—was forced to make an emergency landing. He brought the plane down in a field and escaped the fiery wreck with only a fractured nose. Not long thereafter, he was taken into custody and shipped off to Dulag Luft, the German reception center for captured Allied airmen, outside Frankfurt. The Germans quickly found out that Bushell was not a man content to sit out the war in relative safety.
He was born in South Africa, the son of an English mining engineer, but educated in England. He read law at Cambridge, where he excelled at academics and more physical pursuits, landing a place on the university’s skiing team. His passion for speed earned him a reputation for fearlessness on the slope and the ranking of fastest British downhill skier on record in the early 1930s. During a competition in Canada, he suffered a nasty spill, the tip of one ski tearing at the corner of his right eye. The stitches required and the resulting scarring left him with a permanently drooped eye, giving him a somewhat sinister look. Scarred or not, Bushell could be an intimidating presence, an amalgamation of high intelligence, powerful build, and forceful personality. Such attributes served him well as a defense lawyer in the courtroom before the war and would prove an even greater asset in captivity. He joined the Royal Auxiliary Air Force in 1932 and was posted to 601 Squadron, where—just as on the slopes—he built his name on risk-taking, going so far on one occasion as to land his plane at a country pub for a pint. In October 1939, one month after the war’s outbreak, he was promoted to squadron leader and charged with creating a night-fighter squadron on England’s south coast. By the time Hitler unleashed his Blitzkrieg on France and the Low Countries in May 1940, Bushell’s squadron was taking to the skies in Spitfires. It was shortly thereafter that he found himself in enemy hands.
By the time he arrived at Stalag Luft III, Bushell was a seasoned escape artist. His most recent adventure entailed jumping from a train while being transferred from one camp to another. Accompanied by a fellow escapee—a Czech officer with the RAF—he had made his way to Prague, where he and his compatriot were caught hiding in the apartment of a local resistance member. The two men, ratted out by a porter in the apartment building, were turned over to the Gestapo, who subjected both men to brutal interrogations. The Czech family that dared house the escapees was butchered. After failing to elicit confessions of sabotage, the Gestapo shipped both men off to separate camps: the Czech officer to Colditz, Bushell to Sagan. Although Bushell never revealed what happened to him while in Gestapo custody, those who knew him beforehand noticed a harder edge to his personality upon his arrival at Stalag Luft III. In the camp already were numerous prisoners Bushell had conspired with in various compounds d
uring his years of captivity. What the Germans believed to be sound policy, putting their most troublesome wards all in one camp, would prove a great asset to the determined Bushell. Assuming command of the camp’s escape committee, dubbed “X-Organization,” Bushell—codenamed “Big X”—hatched a plot to break out 250 inmates.
The audacious plan called for the simultaneous digging in the north compound of three tunnels named Tom, Dick, and Harry; speaking the word “tunnel” would be strictly forbidden. To avoid the camp’s underground microphones, vertical shafts to each tunnel would be dug thirty feet down before horizontal digging commenced. Tom would cut west from Hut 123, which, of the three barracks selected, was closest to the wire but the farthest away from any guard tower. Dick would head in the same direction from the next hut over, number 122, slightly farther away from the camp’s perimeter fence. Harry would start under Hut 104, directly opposite the camp’s main gate, and cut a northern line into the woods. Elaborate trapdoors were devised to hide the entrance to each tunnel.
Tom was concealed in a dark corner of a hallway near the kitchen, above the stove’s concrete foundation. The trapdoor was a mere eighteen inches square, just wide enough for a man to climb in and out. The entrance to Dick was in the washroom, beneath a grille-covered drain, which usually had several inches of wastewater sitting at the bottom, offering the perfect camouflage. To create the tunnel entrance, the prisoners drained the water, chiseled away a slab of concrete from one side of the drain and substituted their own manufactured replacement that could easily be lifted in and out. A sealant made of clay, soap, and cement was used to waterproof the slab’s edges before the drain was filled again. A cast-iron stove in the corner of a room in Hut 104 was chosen to hide the vertical shaft that would grant access to Harry. The stove sat on a square bed of tiles, which had to be individually removed to access the hut’s stone foundation beneath. The tiles were fitted into a special four-foot-square frame, which could be removed as one whole piece to gain entrance. The stove was always kept hot, so to remove it from the tile base, a set of lifting handles were made out of bed boards. A pipe extension, made of empty milk tins, was used to keep the stove attached to the hut’s chimney when it was off the base.