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

by Read, Simon

  “Shoot them!” Post roared. “Shoot them! Why don’t you shoot them?”

  Three gun reports echoed across the meadow in the evening gloom. Two of the airmen fell lifeless alongside Catanach; the third hit the ground in apparent agony and made a feeble attempt to get back up. He struggled, his wrists still chained behind his back, and opened his mouth as though wanting to speak.

  “He is still alive!” Post screamed. “I shall shoot him.”

  He rushed at Kaehler and snatched the rifle from his hands. He approached the airman and put a bullet in his head. Satisfied the job was done, he ordered Kaehler to accompany him back to Kiel and told the others to guard the scene. Oskar Schmidt watched Post and Kaehler leave before turning his gaze to the bodies in the grass.

  “He was not mine,” he said. “Mine died instantly.”

  “And so did mine,” said Franz Schmidt.

  Post still hoped to make the theater on time. The Mercedes sped north, back up the Hamburger Chaussee toward Kiel. Coffins were needed to transport the corpses to the local crematorium. Post directed his driver to Tischendorf’s, an undertaker at Karlstrasse 26. It was six o’clock when Post and Kaehler entered the establishment and spoke with Wilhelm Tischendorf, the proprietor. From the leather coats and long boots the men had on, Tischendorf presumed his customers were Gestapo.

  “I need you to collect some prisoners who have been shot in the vicinity of the Rotenhahn,” Post said by way of greeting, flashing his identification.

  “What prisoners are they?” Tischendorf asked.

  “French. Shot whilst trying to escape.”

  Post said no more and returned to his waiting car. He left Kaehler to handle the details. Suspicious of Post, Tischendorf asked Kaehler who the prisoners were.

  “They’re British airmen,” Kaehler said.

  “Are they some of the seventy-six airmen I have read about in the papers?”

  Kaehler answered in the affirmative.

  “I shall have a car ready to leave in half an hour,” Tischendorf said.

  Kaehler went outside and told Post, who nodded his approval. He ordered Kaehler to see the job through to its conclusion before demanding the driver return him to the apartment on the Hansastrasse, where his mistress waited with theater tickets.

  The hearse—and two lidless, tin coffins—was ready sooner than expected. Tischendorf directed Kaehler to a parking lot behind the building, where he found two mortician laborers waiting in a burial van. Kaehler got in the front passenger seat and ordered the driver to get moving. The three men drove mostly in silence; Kaehler, giving directions, was the only one who spoke. As the van approached the right-hand bend on the Hamburger Chaussee, near the Rotenhahn, an inn and pub, Kaehler told the driver to slow down. The Adler was still parked on the right-hand side of the road, opposite the meadow’s entrance. Kaehler pointed to the gate, which was open, and ordered the driver to turn left into the field. He did not want passersby on the carriageway to witness the bodies being loaded. The driver, Wilhelm Boll, although worried the van’s wheels might get stuck in the damp earth, did as instructed. In the meadow, as he cut the van’s engine, Boll saw three men—one armed with a rifle—standing several feet off to his left.

  Kaehler climbed out of the van. He ordered Boll and the other laborer, Artur Salau, to retrieve the two coffins from the back of the vehicle. The men did as they were told without comment and placed the caskets alongside the four bodies. Oskar Schmidt, charged with ensuring the victims were properly disposed of, ordered the bodies be stacked two to a coffin. The Gestapo men simply stood and watched as Boll and Salau commenced the morbid task. The bodies, both laborers noticed, were dressed in what appeared to be new civilian suits. Two of the dead men had bullet wounds to the head.

  “If the Russians get here, they’ll do the same to us,” muttered one of the Gestapo agents.

  Boll and Salau, wanting only to be done with the job, heard the comment but did not respond. They placed the bodies in the coffins and loaded the caskets into the back of the van. Oskar Schmidt ordered the bodies be taken immediately to the crematorium in Kiel. The journey back to the city was made in two cars. Boll and Salau drove the burial van, while the Gestapo agents followed close behind in the Adler. At the crematorium, on-duty engineer Arthur Schafer knew better than to question official Gestapo business. It was six-thirty when the four agents arrived, accompanied by two undertakers hauling four bodies in a pair of cheap coffins. It was Oskar Schmidt who did the talking.

  “Here are four corpses to be cremated.”

  “Do you have the necessary documents?” asked Schafer.

  “Berlin has ordered it.”

  Schafer opened the crematorium’s leather-bound register and reached for a pen.

  “You will not make any entries.”

  Although notified in advance that such a visit was likely, Schafer found the circumstances peculiar. Regulations, he said, dictated that names of the deceased be recorded. Schmidt told Schafer to enter each body in the register only as a Roman numeral I through IV. The bodies were not to be assigned cremation numbers, nor were any notes to be made of the date.

  “The corpses are those of prisoners who were shot whilst on the run,” Schmidt said.

  Schafer did as instructed and asked the undertakers to carry the coffins to the furnace. Before consigning the bodies to flame, Schafer gave each one a cursory glance. All four victims were dressed in civilian clothing, wearing woolen underwear, woolen stockings, and woolen pullovers. He didn’t see any visible wounds. The four Gestapo men stayed until the bodies had been destroyed and the ashes relegated to four urns, each labeled with a Roman numeral I through IV. Walter Jacobs took possession of the urns, which were to be sent to Stalag Luft III for burial. By nine o’clock the agents were back at local Gestapo headquarters, their work done. Boll and Salau returned the burial van and checked in with their boss.

  “Everything in order?” Tischendorf asked.

  “Yes,” Boll replied.

  “What kind of bodies were they?”

  “They were all shot from the back.”

  In another part of town, sitting with his mistress in a darkened theater, Johannes Post enjoyed that evening’s operatic performance. He had made the show on time.

  As senior British officer at Stalag Luft III, Group Captain Herbert Massey had approved plans for the mass breakout. It was, after all, the sworn duty of every captured officer to “harass, confuse, and confound the enemy.” Had he not been crippled with a bad leg, perhaps he, too, would have crept under the wire—but merely strolling the compound was enough to cause the old wound to flare. He had permanently damaged his leg in a crash during the First World War but continued to fly. He suffered another grievous injury to the same limb in 1942 when enemy fire downed his Stirling over the Ruhr. He now walked with a cane, but it did little to improve his mobility.

  It was Thursday, April 6, two weeks since the escape. Six men had thus far been returned to the camp and marched directly into “the cooler,” the solitary confinement block. The fate and whereabouts of those still on the run remained a mystery to the men inside the camp. It was hoped, of course, that some would make it back to England, though most of the prisoners knew such optimism had no foundation in reality. German authorities once estimated that only 1 percent of all escape attempts actually proved successful—so why bother? Duty was too simplistic an answer. Perhaps youth had something to do with it. Most of the escapees were not yet in their mid-thirties; a vast number were still in their twenties. Young men, all of them, deprived of women, liquor, and their freedom; beyond the wire, life and the war were passing them by. A first-line defense against boredom, the planning and plotting of escape distracted one’s mind from the banalities and deprivations of imprisonment. For men trained and eager to fight, but frustrated by captivity, escaping was their one means of striking at the enemy from behind the lines.

  Now, on this Thursday morning, Hans Pieber, one of the camp’s administrative officer
s, knocked on Massey’s door with a summons from the kommandant for an eleven o’clock meeting. Pieber, generally a man of happy disposition, appeared solemn. In the days following the breakout, prisoners had been denied their Red Cross care packages and use of the camp’s theater. Such reprisals, the prisoners had agreed, were minor by German standards. Presently, Massey wondered aloud if the kommandant had decided upon a more severe form of retribution. Pieber, his brow creased, said he only knew the kommandant had some “terrible” news.

  At the prescribed hour, Massey left his barracks accompanied by his personal interpreter, Squadron Leader Philip Murray. Fellow prisoners watched the two men walk slowly across the compound. The camp’s rumor mill had wasted little time generating numerous dark theories as to what hardships would soon befall the inmates. At the main gate, armed guards escorted the two men to the kommandant’s hut. Inside, they were led to a small office and took seats opposite the kommandant’s desk. Oberst (Colonel) Braune greeted the men with a silent nod, but remained standing. Pieber stood in one corner of the room, averting his gaze. Braune held a single sheet of paper in his hand and stared almost helplessly at the words typed across it.

  “I have been instructed by my higher authority to communicate to you this report,” Braune said, his voice quiet. “As a result of a tunnel from which seventy-six officers escaped from Stalag Luft III, north compound, forty-one of these officers have been shot while resisting arrest or attempting further escape after arrest.”

  Murray, translating for Massey, stopped mid-sentence.

  “How many were shot?” he asked, disbelieving.

  “Forty-one,” Braune said, failing to meet Murray’s gaze.

  Murray struggled to keep his emotional response in check. He turned to Massey, who, upon hearing the translation, took in a sharp breath and repeated the same question asked by Murray.

  “How many were shot?”

  “Forty-one,” Murray said, his voice thick in his throat.

  Massey sat momentarily stunned, lost in the tumult of his thoughts. He fixed his eyes on Braune but addressed Murray when he finally spoke.

  “Ask him how many were wounded.”

  Braune, now wringing his hands, said the “higher authority” allowed him only to disclose the shooting of forty-one officers. Massey, unmoved, asked Murray to repeat the question.

  “I think no one was wounded,” Braune said.

  Massey leaned forward in his chair, anger laying waste to his calm reserve.

  “Do you mean to tell me that forty-one men can be shot at in those circumstances and that all were killed and no one was wounded?”

  Braune had no answer.

  “Do you have a list of names?” Massey asked.

  Again, Braune struggled, saying he knew nothing more beyond the details already relayed.

  “I would like to have the names as soon as it is possible to get them,” Massey said and rose from his chair.

  Braune agreed without protest before pleading his case.

  “I am acting under orders,” he said. “I may only indulge what I’m instructed to by my higher authority.”

  “What is this higher authority?”

  “Just a higher authority,” said Braune, his voice dropping to a near whisper.

  Before turning to leave, Massey asked that the bodies be returned to the camp for proper burial arrangements and the disposal of personal effects.

  “I demand that the Protecting Power also be informed,” he said in reference to the International Red Cross, which routinely visited the camp to ensure standards adhered to the Geneva Convention.

  Braune agreed to Massey’s demands but warned he could only arrange whatever the “higher authority” permitted.

  Massey and Murray left the office and stepped outside, with Pieber following close behind.

  “Please do not think the Luftwaffe had anything to do with this dreadful thing,” he said, clearly distraught. “It is terrible.”

  Massey called the camp’s three hundred senior officers—one for every room in each barrack—to a meeting in the compound’s theater. The men received the news in quiet disbelief, and word of the atrocity quickly spread throughout the camp. That same day, eight more escapees returned under armed Luftwaffe guard and were put in the cooler. Massey, in his room, his game leg elevated on a chair, tallied the numbers at day’s end. Out of seventy-six men, forty-one were dead; another fourteen were back behind the wire, and the fate of twenty-one men remained unknown. Massey’s fate, however, was clear. In the weeks prior, the Germans had made arrangements to repatriate him back to Britain on medical grounds. He left the camp on April 11, bound for Switzerland on the first part of his return journey to England. In his place, Group Captain D. E. L. Wilson of the Royal Australian Air Force became senior British officer at Stalag Luft III.

  In the early evening hours of April 15, a list identifying the victims appeared on the camp’s notice board. A crowd quickly gathered and listened as the names were read aloud in a somber roll call. Quiet expressions of grief gave way to cries of outrage when it became apparent the list contained not forty-one names, but forty-seven. Two days later, Gabrielle Naville, a representative of the Swiss Protecting Power, visited the camp on a routine welfare inspection. Wilson pulled Naville aside, detailed recent events, and provided a copy of the list. Among the dead were twenty-five Britons, six Canadians, three Australians, two New Zealanders, three South Africans, four Poles, two Norwegians, one Frenchman, and a Greek. The Swiss government in May reported the killings to the British government. On May 19, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden addressed the House of Commons. After relaying the basic facts of the case and voicing the outrage of His Majesty’s government, he demanded Germany provide through Switzerland “a full and immediate report on the circumstances in which these men met their death.”

  In the weeks that followed, the Swiss learned of three additional victims, bringing the total number of those murdered to fifty. If some prisoners at Stalag Luft III remained skeptical of the news, the ashes brushed aside any lingering disbelief. Throughout May and July, the cremated remains of the deceased were delivered to the camp in forty-six urns and four boxes. On each container was engraved the city in which the prisoner had been shot. Braune allowed a group of prisoners to construct in a nearby cemetery a stone memorial in which the ashes were placed.

  Eden made a second statement to Parliament on June 23, disclosing the new casualty figure. Germany, he said, had communicated through Switzerland its reasoning for the killings, asserting the victims were involved in sabotage operations that endangered the German public. Eden dismissed the accusation. “No orders,” he said, “have at any time been given to British prisoners of war to take part, in the event of their escape, in any subversive action as is alleged in the German note.” Regardless of the circumstances, he continued, there was no viable excuse for executing fifty men.

  “His Majesty’s Government must, therefore, record their solemn protest against these cold-blooded acts of butchery,” he said in conclusion. “They will never cease in their efforts to collect the evidence to identify all those responsible. They are firmly resolved that these foul criminals shall be tracked down to the last man, wherever they may take refuge,” swore Eden. “When the war is over, they will be brought to exemplary justice.”

  *No relation to Friedrich Schmidt.

  TWO

  COLD CASE

  Frank McKenna eyed the pile of documents on his bureau and pondered, not for the first time, the immensity of the task. More than a year had passed since the commission of the crimes detailed in the mountainous stack of folders and overflowing envelopes. He knew full well of Anthony Eden’s promise to bring the killers to justice, but a politician’s pledge was something one often accepted with a healthy amount of skepticism. On this evening in late August 1945, sitting in the cramped bedroom he rented from a police officer widowed during the Blitz, McKenna harbored his fair share of doubt.

  He held the rank of flight serge
ant, having joined the Royal Air Force and volunteered for bomber crew. At thirty-seven, he was an old man by aircrew standards but was nevertheless compelled by a fervent sense of duty. He was tall and lean, with sharp features. A well-defined chin and angular jaw gave him a somewhat hardened appearance; his pale eyes and thin mouth were not prone to easy laughter. A devout Catholic, he had been driven all his life by rigid ideals of right and wrong and doing what needed to be done. He believed in hard justice and the need to atone for one’s sins. Such views propelled him in his civilian career. Before the war, McKenna had worked his way up to detective-sergeant in the Blackpool Borough Police. His physicality and dedication to police work earned him, among his fellow detectives, the sobriquet “Sherlock Holmes.” He could have spent a relatively safe war ensconced in his police work, but that would have gone against McKenna’s dutiful nature.

  He flew thirty operations as a flight engineer on Lancasters with No. 622 Squadron and completed his tour of duty by Christmas 1944. His operational commitments met, McKenna joined the RAF Police and secured a posting with the Special Investigating Branch (SIB), headquartered at Princes Court Gate, South Kensington, London. He spent the better part of 1945 investigating routine crimes within the service, crimes that hardly differed from those he tackled as a copper on “Civvy Street.” Stolen property and cases of assault were typical fare that neither challenged McKenna nor necessarily bored him. It was simply police work and appealed to his sense of righteousness. When Britain’s Judge Advocate General’s Office assigned the Sagan case to the Royal Air Force, Group Captain W. V. Nicholas, the head of SIB, knew McKenna’s puritanical work ethic would prove a defining quality. And so, when the file hit his desk, he had sent McKenna off to review it and render an opinion.

  It took McKenna a week to slog his way through the documents. They included an account of the Stalag Luft III breakout, many details of which had not yet been made public. He marveled at the escape’s complexity and the audacity of those who’d planned it. But of the seventy-six men who made it through the tunnel, only three had managed to get back to England: Peter Bergsland and Jens Muller, lieutenants in the Royal Norwegian Air Force, and Dutch Flight Lieutenant Bram Van der Stok. Bergsland and Muller had made their way to Stettin, where Swedish sailors smuggled them aboard a ship and hid them in the chain locker. On the morning of March 30, the ship arrived in Stockholm. The two men—sore, but alive—disembarked and sought refuge at the British Consul. Their odyssey had lasted six days; Van der Stok’s journey to freedom took four months. He traveled by train from Sagan to the Netherlands, where he went underground for several weeks and stayed with an old college professor. He next cycled into Belgium and dropped off the grid with the help of an uncle. Through a family friend, he acquired an address in southwest France and traveled by rail to St. Gaudens, where he made contact with the French Resistance. There followed an arduous trek across the Pyrenees into Spain. From there, it was on to Portugal and then England.