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

by Read, Simon

  “The next morning, when I went to the office, I immediately phoned the police prison and enquired after the officers,” Graes said. “I learned to my immense surprise that they had been taken away by officials of the Gestapo in Danzig and had not been brought back.”

  Calls were placed to the Danzig Gestapo chief, a man named Dr. Günther Venediger, who said the matter was classified “Top Secret” and could not be discussed. Graes said his superior officer, visibly upset, informed him several days later the Gestapo was transporting the cremated remains of the officers back to Breslau. He could only conclude that the Gestapo had shot the prisoners. In recounting the story, Graes nervously tapped his fingers while he spoke. He said he learned shortly thereafter the Gestapo had executed “forty-three or forty-seven” Sagan escapees. Several months after the killings, he picked up a Swiss newspaper and read an account of Anthony Eden’s promise to Parliament. Graes drove that day to Gestapo headquarters and confronted Venediger in his office. He slapped the newspaper down on Venediger’s desk and pointed to the article. “Is this true?” he asked. “Were these men murdered?”

  “We do not do that sort of thing in Matzkau,” Venediger said, brushing the newspaper aside.

  “Matzkau?” asked Courtney.

  “It’s a rather distant suburb of Danzig,” Graes explained. “There was a penal camp there for persons who had been sentenced by the SS and police courts. As far as I know, there was an average of 10,000 prisoners there.”

  Graes’s tone and expression took on sudden anger.

  “I am at any time ready to substantiate my statements on oath before the court,” he said. “It is a question of an action that can never be justified.”

  Courtney nodded. “What can you tell me about Venediger?”

  “He’s big and elegant looking and holds himself well. Somewhat aristocratic,” Graes said. “He’s slim and about six feet tall, has very dark—almost black—hair with a parting on the left. No mustache, thirty-eight years old. His home was in Danzig, but he’s rumored to have been seen in Hamburg after the capitulation. He might be found in Magdeburg, as his wife’s parents live there. He’ll certainly have false papers.”

  Dr. Venediger now joined the ranks of the hunted.

  McKenna and his men continued the arduous task of canvassing Allied prison camps in the British and American sectors for leads. It was a painstaking process that offered no alternative. At one camp after another, they reviewed countless prisoner files and dossiers, the pages of many stained with details of atrocities so heinous one could not help but feel physically ill. At No. 4 CIC near Recklinghausen in the British Zone, two of McKenna’s team reviewed the records of eight thousand internees. Named in the files was a onetime Gestapo agent who appeared on the RAF’s wanted list for his alleged involvement in the murders of Squadron Leader Roger Bushell and Lieutenant Bernard Scheidhauer in Saarbrücken. Possessing “the manners and appearance of a thug,” the man confessed to knowing of the crime but denied direct involvement. He identified Saarbrücken Gestapo chief Dr. Leopold Spann, number forty-two on the RAF’s list, as the mastermind and—possibly—the gunman.

  While the investigation made slow but steady progress in the British and American zones, efforts were under way to uncover leads in the French sector. Records at the French War Crimes and Political Prisoners Bureau in Paris were poorly organized—a result of the French frequently moving prisoners from one camp to another. The French were busy dismantling their smaller camps and transferring prisoners to larger facilities. Not until the process was complete and the smaller camps had been abolished was there any hope of the files being properly organized. In their sector, the French had assumed the role of conqueror and did little to hide their disdain for the vanquished population. As far as they were concerned, being a German—regardless of whether or not one was a Nazi—was crime enough. They had a grudge to settle. In the latter stages of the war, French forces—following behind the Americans—marched into Stuttgart and raped an estimated three thousand women and eight men. Likewise, in the small town of Freudenstadt, they raped women as old as eighty, burned homes, and shot civilians. It was the sort of behavior one associated more with the Red Army, which, in the vast areas of Germany it overran, unleashed a frenzy of “looting, destruction and rape.” Noted one Danish journalist, “It was not that a sex-starved Russian soldier forced himself upon a girl who took his fancy. It was a destructive, hateful and wholesale act of vengeance. Age or looks were irrelevant. The grandmother was no safer than the granddaughter, the ugly and filthy no more than the fresh and attractive.”

  Help from the Russians was nonexistent outside the Berlin area, but McKenna hoped to establish a personal contact through the British-Russian Liaison Authorities in the German capital. Both McKenna and Bowes believed the Russian Zone “held the key” to the Sagan investigation, seeing as the majority of murders took place in what was now Soviet-controlled territory. Despite the Russian stonewalling and French disorganization, McKenna allowed himself a measure of satisfaction with the progress made thus far. “The enquiry,” he wrote in a report to Bowes, highlighting recent developments, “appears to be opening up on lines which promise to track down the actual killers of the murdered officers.”

  Mystery still surrounded the whereabouts of Breslau Gestapo chief Dr. Wilhelm Scharpwinkel and the SS captain charged with prisoner-of-war security in the Sagan region, Dr. Gunther Absalon. Last seen in Hitler’s bunker days before the Red Army claimed Berlin, Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller—national head of the Gestapo—remained a top priority for the Allies. Rumors surrounding his fate were plenty, and McKenna’s men heard most of them while canvassing the internment camps. Some believed him to be dead, killed by the Russians or his own hand. Others claimed he had gone underground with false papers and fled Germany for South America.

  Five of the executed men from Stalag Luft III—Squadron Leader John E.A. Williams, Flying Officers Reginald Kierath and John Stower, Flight Lieutenants Lester Bull and Jerzy Mondschein—were captured on the German-Czechoslovakian border. British Intelligence knew the men had been held in Liberec, a fourteenth-century city sixty miles north of Prague surrounded by the snowcapped peaks of the Izera Mountains. Bull, Mondschein, Williams, and Kierath were believed to have been executed together. Inscriptions on their urns indicated the men were shot in Liberec and cremated in Brüx. The location of Stower’s death remained a mystery. He had escaped from Sagan in the company of Flight Lieutenant I. P. Tonder, who, although captured and imprisoned with the other men prior to their deaths, had not been marked for execution. It was Tonder’s affidavit taken by the RAF in late 1945 that provided some insight into what happened at Liberec. Bowes, returning to Czechoslovakia with Lyon to work the case, read the document during the flight to Prague.

  Tonder and Stower were numbers twenty-one and twenty-two, respectively, out of the tunnel. They planned to catch the 1 A.M. train from Sagan to Laubau but were late to the platform. Not wanting to hang around until six in the morning, they decided to take their chances and walk. They set off to Halbau, a town twelve miles away, and kept to the woods for cover. A thick layer of snow covered the ground and hampered their progress. Dressed only in civilian suits, they were ill-equipped to handle the near-freezing temperatures. They reached the town by daybreak but, fearful of capture, spent the day sleeping in the woods. They woke that evening cold and aching, their suits wet from lying in the snow, and struggled onward. They walked for two days before reaching the town of Kohlfurt.

  They by now realized the futility of their situation. Traveling by foot would get them nowhere. They broke cover and made their way to the town’s train station, where they purchased food and two tickets to Liberec. They changed trains at Görlitz and continued on their way. Some miles past the town of Sittau, as the train approached its final destination, two plainclothes policemen from the Liberec Kripo made their way through the carriage to check papers. Tonder and Stower showed the agents their forged travel documents, whic
h passed inspection. Their clothes, however, proved their undoing. Although there was nothing out of the ordinary in their appearance, the suits they wore were strikingly similar in style and color to the tailored clothing worn by other recently captured escapees.

  The agents took the two RAF men to Kripo headquarters in Liberec. They were photographed, stripped of all their personal possessions, and placed together in a cell. From a Kripo official who processed their arrival, the two men learned that Bull, Kierath, Mondschein, and Williams were also in custody in the same building. After Tonder and Stower had been questioned individually, they were moved to a cell upstairs and locked up with the other four escapees. The men told the new arrivals they had caught the 6 A.M. train out of Sagan. They had got as far as the Czech frontier and were seized by a military patrol while crossing the mountains on the Silesian Czechoslovak border.

  The following day, a Kripo official informed the prisoners they were being handed over to the Gestapo. The men were ushered downstairs, where two Gestapo agents sat waiting. Bull, Kierath, Mondschein, and Williams were asked to sign some paperwork. “During this time,” Tonder told RAF investigators, “Stower and I had the impression that S/L Williams had learnt something about his fate. He was not normally a nervous man, but he was clearly pale and scared. I have no reason to suppose that he had behaved in a provocative manner during his interrogation or that there was any cause for him to be more alarmed than the others. After this, we were taken back to our cells. Stower and I continued to share a cell, and the others were nearby. We were not badly treated, and we were able to talk through the walls.”

  The next morning, Wednesday, March 29, Tonder and Stower were allowed to use the washroom. They were joined by a Russian prisoner who told them he’d seen the Gestapo taking the other airmen away at four that morning. Tonder asked a guard what had happened to his comrades. They had been shipped back to Sagan, the guard said. The men were not seen alive again. As Tonder sat on a cot in his cell that evening, the heavy iron door swung open and the two Gestapo agents from the previous day walked in.

  “You are a Czech and a traitor,” one of the agents said, before he and his partner turned and promptly left.

  Tonder told Stower through his cell wall that he expected the worst. Should Stower make it back to Stalag Luft III, he was to report Tonder’s fate to the proper officials. At eight on the morning of Friday, March 31, a Gestapo agent appeared outside Stower’s cell and said he was being escorted back to Sagan. Tonder remained in Gestapo custody for another six months before ending up in Colditz, where he sat out the rest of the war. Urns bearing the names of Bull, Kierath, Mondschein, and Williams arrived at Stalag Luft III on March 29. Stower’s ashes arrived two days later in an urn stamped only with the date of execution: March 31.

  Bowes closed the file. The RAF Dakota banked through heavy clouds and landed in Prague on a wet and gray afternoon. Bowes and Lyon checked into their hotel, finished the day with a drink in a bleak watering hole, and commenced their inquiries the following morning.

  Checking with local military officials, the RAF men were dismayed to learn there were no members of the Liberec Gestapo in Czech custody. The Czech Security Police, however, had raided Gestapo and Kripo headquarters in Liberec at the end of the war and seized a number of documents. The men traveled by rail to the town and were granted access to the paperwork. Sifting through folders and cartons, Bowes and Lyon found the cremation order for Williams, Kierath, Bull, and Mondschein. It was dated March 28, 1944, and signed by Obersturmbannführer Baatz, chief of the Liberec Gestapo. The Prisoners Record Book from Kripo headquarters revealed that the men did not leave the building until the early morning hours of March 29, meaning the cremation order had been signed a day before the executions. No records for Flying Officer Stower were found.

  “This,” said Bowes, turning to Lyon, “is conclusive proof of premeditation of the crime.”

  Bowes and Lyon visited the crematorium in Brüx. The attendant they found on duty, Anton Sawerthal, expressed little surprise when the two RAF investigators presented themselves. He had a story to tell and had always known he would have the opportunity to someday share it. On the morning of March 29, 1944, shortly after seven o’clock, Sawerthal’s boss called him at home and told him to report to work. The Gestapo had four bodies it wanted cremated. Sawerthal arrived just minutes before five Gestapo officials showed up with the bodies in the back of a truck.

  “As the bodies were being unloaded, I heard the Gestapo officials speaking German with a high German accent and therefore gained the impression they were born and bred in Germany,” Sawerthal said. “One of the Gestapo officials told me that the dead men had been shot, but I did not see the wounds personally. They were cremated in their clothes without coffins.”

  “Do you have a record of the cremation?” Bowes asked.

  Sawerthal nodded and pulled from his desk drawer a leather-bound ledger. He flipped through its yellowed pages and turned the book around on his desk so Bowes and Lyon could read it. When they examined the entry dated 29/3/1944, this is what they saw:

  Kierath, Reginald 6923

  Williams, John 6925

  Bull, Leslie 6926

  Mondschein, Jerzy 6927

  The cremation number, Sawerthal explained, corresponded to the number on the urns. An entry at the bottom of the page read, “Shot while attempting to escape.” It had been assumed that Stower was gunned down with his comrades, though records and Sawerthal’s statement now seemed to disprove that theory. Nevertheless, Bowes and Lyon theorized the same parties were responsible for all five murders. Sawerthal could not recall if any of the Gestapo men referred to one another by name. “The two chief Gestapo officials wore four stars on their lapels,” he said. “The other three had either one or two stars.”

  Four stars, Bowes told Lyon, denoted the rank of Sturmbannführer, the equivalent of a major. They traveled to Liberec, where the prisoners had been held prior to execution, and obtained from town officials a list of men who had once served in the local Gestapo. Only two men, Robert Weyland and Robert Weissmann, had achieved such a rank. Their names—along with Baatz—were promptly added to the RAF’s wanted list.*

  “It is possible,” Bowes conceded to Lyon that evening over drinks, “that one of the Sturmbannführers present at the cremation of the officers came from Brüx, having been contacted by the Liberec Gestapo for assistance.” Bowes pondered the bottom of his glass. For now, there was nothing more to go on. He returned to his hotel in a despondent mood but was buoyed by a message from the British Embassy in Prague. Polish authorities—responding to an earlier request—had authorized Bowes and Lyon to pursue their investigation in and around Breslau, where twenty-seven of the fifty Sagan escapees had been shot. The Polish now controlled the region, but the Russians continued to exert a heavy influence in the area. The two RAF men picked up their visas the next day from the Polish Consul in Prague and arrived in Warsaw on April 13, 1946. Two days of meetings followed with various local officials, who let it be known they cared little for the British presence in Poland. It took another ten days and the intervention of the British Foreign Office to sort things out and move the inquiry forward.

  A meeting with the Polish colonel in charge of the local security police secured a promise of cooperation. Bowes handed over a Polish translation of the RAF’s wanted list. Sitting behind a cluttered desk, the colonel eyed the document and assured Bowes all Gestapo and Kripo personnel in Polish custody would be made available for interrogation. On April 23, Bowes and Lyon—accompanied by a security officer—left Warsaw by jeep and arrived in Breslau early the following day. The city was indistinguishable from the countless others they had seen in Germany: a wasteland of rubble and shattered architecture. Cramped and tired from their overnight journey, they forewent checking into their lodgings in favor of meeting with the attorney for the district. The encounter proved short and disappointing. The man met Bowes and Lyon in his office and spoke through an apologetic smile.
The security officer translated, saying no members of the Kripo or Gestapo were—or ever had been—in local custody. Bowes, who, until now, had maintained his temper for the sake of diplomacy, shed his English reserve and unleashed a verbal broadside. He told the attorney that officials in Warsaw had promised to cooperate with the investigation. The attorney simply shrugged. How could he produce prisoners who simply weren’t in custody? Bowes, feeling his physical restraint slipping, stormed from the office.

  Bowes and Lyon spent another ten days in Breslau, attempting to garner some sort of lead. At every turn, they met with resistance. When Bowes sought permission to travel to Görlitz, Hirschberg, Oels, Liengitz, and other towns in the region, he was denied. When he requested a meeting with General Siedwidski, the area’s military commander, he received a curt reply saying such a meeting would not be possible. While Bowes found the Polish in Breslau to be uncooperative, the local German populace found them unforgiving. Members of the local Polish police had no qualms beating Germans and “extort[ing] food and money.” One Breslau resident later remembered standing “in a queue of expellees in front of the railway station. The Poles who were doing their jobs there took what they liked from our baggage and threw the things they took onto a large pile. They also took from us what we were carrying. My father had a satchel with our birth certificates. They took these from him and threw them with the papers on the pile.”

  A visit by Bowes and Lyon one afternoon to what remained of Stalag Luft III underscored the depressing nature of their recent inquiries. The Luftwaffe evacuated the camp on the night of January 27, 1945, with the Red Army rapidly approaching from the east. More than two thousand inmates were forced to march nearly fifty miles in temperatures well below zero. After spending the night in barns, sheds, makeshift tents, and anything else that might shelter them from the freezing elements, the exhausted, frostbitten men arrived in the town of Spremberg. There, the Germans loaded them into the backs of trucks and shipped them off to new camps. American prisoners were dispatched to a compound just outside Munich. The inmates from North Compound, from which the escape took place, were taken to a facility near Bremen. They remained there until April 9, when their captors again decided to evacuate and forced them to march nearly one hundred miles to a camp outside Lübeck. The barracks were so overrun with lice, rodents, and filth, the prisoners were held in two neighboring farms instead, until their liberation by British troops on May 2.