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

by Read, Simon

  “I can’t talk about that,” he said. “I gave my word of honor to the British Camp Senior to keep silent on all the circumstances of the escape.”

  The men drove on without another word. Neither Herberg nor Preiss, reluctant to follow their orders, suggested pulling the car over to allow the airman a brief respite. Instead, they gazed out the window, lost in thought, as the Mercedes followed a winding route up into the Vosges Mountains. Having now abandoned the map, Herberg left Boschert to navigate the mist-shrouded road on his own. The car eventually reached the crest of a hill stripped of trees. Here, the road led to a compound of squat, single-story buildings surrounded by razor wire. A guardhouse and a large wooden gate crowned in wire marked the entrance to the Natzweiler camp. The sight snapped Herberg and his companions out of their grim reverie. Quickly, Herberg told Boschert to turn the car around and head back the way they had come.

  “We’ve lost our way,” Herberg said over his shoulder.

  As Boschert sped from the camp, Cochran, oblivious to his captors’ intent, failed to realize anything was amiss. A little more than a mile down the road, a small track branched off to the right at a slight incline, cut its way through a field, and disappeared into woods. Boschert took the turn and drove the car 120 feet up the mud-and rock-strewn path before stopping among the trees. Herberg looked over his shoulder, said he needed to relieve himself, and asked Cochran, still handcuffed, if he cared to do the same. The airman said yes, and all four men got out of the car. Herberg stayed near the vehicle as the other men walked Cochran down the path. Not wanting to witness the scene, Herberg turned his back to the group. A minute later, he heard two shots. When Herberg turned around, Cochran was lying on the ground. He could see that one bullet had passed through the airman’s right eye. Preiss, standing over Cochran’s prostrate form, had fired the second slug through the back of the airman’s heart. The men fetched an old motor blanket from the car, wrapped the body, and carried it back to the vehicle. It was sometime between eleven and noon. The body strewn across the backseat, all three Gestapo agents sat in the front and returned to the concentration camp. They arrived minutes later at the camp’s main administrative office, a single-story building painted forest green. Inside, Herberg met with the camp’s deputy commandant, Adjutant Otto Ganninger.

  “We have been unlucky,” Herberg said, sticking with the Gestapo cover story. “We had a prisoner who tried to escape and was shot in flight.”

  Ganninger offered Herberg a knowing smile.

  “I am already in the picture,” he said without elaborating.

  Herberg simply nodded, not caring to know from whom Ganninger got his information. He just wanted to be done with the job.

  “Do you now want a death certificate?” Ganninger asked.

  When Herberg answered yes, Ganninger led him across the sodden grounds to another wooden barrack, which housed the camp’s registration office. Upon hearing Herberg’s story, the registrar—a member of the Kripo—refused to issue the necessary paperwork on the grounds that the death had occurred outside the camp. Ganninger pressed the issue, but the registrar refused to budge and summoned the camp doctor, who took the same stance. A desperate Herberg explained he was under orders “to produce this death certificate in the highest quarters.” His appeal failed to sway either man. While the stalemate ensued, Cochran’s body was taken to the camp’s crematorium and destroyed in its single oven. Once the ashes were consigned to an urn, Herberg sent a wire from the camp to Gestapo headquarters in Karlsruhe, stating that his mission was complete. He and his comrades eventually left Natzweiler in possession of the urn but not a death certificate.

  McKenna slid a pack of cigarettes across the table. Herberg reached for one with a slightly trembling hand and smiled when McKenna offered him a light.

  “In Karlsruhe, where I reported by telephone, I think to Gmeiner, I was reproached for not having a death certificate,” Herberg said, blue-gray smoke clouding his features. “Whether this was obtained later, I do not know.”

  “What happened next?” asked McKenna.

  Herberg leaned back in his chair and took another deep drag on his smoke. Several days after the murder, he said, he went to the local cinema in hopes of taking his mind off recent events. Halfway through the picture show, a Gestapo agent summoned him from the theater and escorted him to a waiting car outside. How the agent found him was a mystery. The man ordered Herberg into the vehicle and drove him to Gmeiner’s flat, where Herberg was told to leave immediately for Berlin. It seemed that Herberg’s handling of the Cochran murder had not satisfied Gestapo Chief Müller. Herberg left that afternoon for the capital with several blank sheets of office stationery signed by Gmeiner.

  Arriving at Müller’s office the following day, Herberg discovered that Gestapo agents from various regional offices had also been summoned for a meeting. Müller chastised all of them for their lack of imagination. Every report filed in connection with the killing of a Sagan escapee claimed that the prisoner had tried to escape during a bathroom break alongside the road. Müller took from Herberg the blank sheets of paper signed by Gmeiner and passed them to his secretary, who fed them into a typewriter. Pacing back and forth, Müller dictated a new report, stating that the car transporting Cochran back to camp had blown a tire. During “an unguarded moment,” Cochran leapt from the vehicle and made a dash for the woods while his captors busied themselves with the flat. Herberg and his men had no choice but to open fire, and they downed the airman with two shots. Müller finished dictating, passed the new report to Herberg, and ordered him to return to Karlsruhe and refile the document. Herberg could only nod and do what he had done since the whole sordid episode began: follow orders.

  Herberg stared across the table at McKenna and lowered his head. He opened his mouth, but the words seemed to catch in his throat. McKenna felt pity and loathing for this man whose anguish seemed genuine—but the “following orders” excuse served as inadequate defense against a crime so cold and calculated. Was Herberg merely weak-willed and cowardly? Perhaps, for McKenna didn’t believe the man to be sadistic. He offered Herberg another smoke and transferred him from the police prison in Wuppertal to the holding facility in Minden. From there, he would be sent to the London Cage.

  Herberg’s statement opened other avenues of investigation. In his notebook, McKenna now had the name of the gunman, Preiss, and Boschert, the man who drove them to the scene. He also had an eyewitness account of Karlsruhe Gestapo chief Josef Gmeiner ordering Cochran’s execution. On June 4, McKenna and interpreter Sergeant J. Van Giessen returned to the prison in Wuppertal and met with Major Barkworth. Did he have any information regarding Ganninger—the adjutant at Natzweiler—or Magnus Wochner, the camp registrar? Indeed, said Barkworth, taking a manila folder from his desk drawer and passing it to the RAF men. McKenna turned back the cover and stared unblinking at the grisly black-and-white photograph. A man lay strewn across a prison cot, his neck opened in a jagged, glistening wound.

  “Ganninger?” asked McKenna.

  Barkworth nodded. His team had arrested Ganninger two months prior and interrogated him on April 26. Alone in his cell afterward, Ganninger took a razor from the inside lining of his jacket and sliced his throat. Wochner, also captured, was tried before a military tribunal in May and received ten years for his complicity in the atrocities committed at Natzweiler. McKenna’s next step was to find and interrogate Preiss. He journeyed to the American sector and commenced his hunt at Dachau. It was easy, coming to a place such as this, to believe that every German was complicit in what had happened. How could those living in the surrounding village not have known what was going on behind the brick walls and barbed wire? Surely, they harbored some knowledge, an inkling, of the crimes being carried out in their name. And what if they did—what recourse did they have? It seemed to McKenna every simple question gave way to one of greater complexity. Or, maybe the matter wasn’t that vexing; maybe people knew but simply didn’t care. What did that say about humani
ty? McKenna pushed the thought away and walked to the administrative office, where he commandeered a desk and read through the inmate files. His search, which took the better part of the day, proved futile.

  The following day, he drove to Ludwigsburg, north of Stuttgart. Here, the Americans housed Nazi war criminals at the Flak-Kaserne, which, until the capitulation, had served as barracks for the German Army. The files there held nothing on Otto Preiss. Over the proceeding days, McKenna hit two more camps, including a compound in Mannheim that had once served as a satellite branch of the Natzweiler concentration camp. He eventually arrived at the U.S. internment camp at Darmstadt and found his man in the files. From Herberg McKenna had a physical description of Preiss, and he knew he’d caught him when guards brought the man into the interrogation room for questioning. Preiss was forty years old, completely bald, and slender, with a “round, unhealthy face, dark eyes, dark eyebrows, and a brutal expression.” According to his file, he had become a civilian police officer in 1925. He worked in various cities from Baden to Mannheim before being transferred to the Karlsruhe Gestapo in 1939. He initially worked in the press department, before joining Department II E, which specialized in economic sabotage and also handled breach-of-employment matters and cases involving foreign workers. It was in this department that Preiss remained until the end of the war, having achieved the rank of Kriminalsekretär, or detective constable.

  “I’m an officer with the Special Investigating Branch of the Royal Air Force,” said McKenna. “I’m investigating the murder of Flying Officer Cochran, and I believe you have information pertaining to that crime.”

  Preiss drummed a nervous cadence on the tabletop and seemed reluctant to speak, but relentless prodding soon elicited a confession. He detailed being summoned into Gmeiner’s office the day before the shooting and tasked with pulling the trigger. Why he had been selected, he couldn’t say, for matters involving prisoners of war fell beyond the scope of his department. There was, however, no point protesting the assignment. “The order has been given and is to be carried out,” he remembered Gmeiner telling him. “No discussion is allowed.” The facts, as he related them to McKenna, followed Herberg’s account closely, though their stories diverged when it came to the actual shooting. When the car stopped in the woods, Preiss said, all four men got out and stayed together. With Herberg and Preiss walking on either side of Cochran, and Boschert bringing up the rear, the men trudged another sixty feet into the woods. Herberg chatted amicably with the prisoner before stopping and turning him toward a tree. He nodded at Preiss, who pulled a 7.65mm Walther from his jacket pocket and fired point-blank into the back of Cochran’s head.

  “The pistol did not quite touch his head,” Preiss said. “The prisoner fell to the ground, and Herberg ascertained that death was instantaneous. As the body of the prisoner was still twitching slightly on the ground, Herberg requested me to fire another shot. I believe that Herberg used the words coup de grâce. I then fired another shot into the region of the heart of the prisoner.”

  Several weeks later, Herberg ordered Preiss back to the concentration camp to retrieve Cochran’s ashes and take them to Kripo headquarters in Breslau. From there, they would be taken to Stalag Luft III.

  “I declare that I only acted in accordance with orders and not because of my own free will,” said Preiss, watching as McKenna scribbled in his notebook. “I do not consider myself guilty, but state however that since the position is now said to be different, I am now incriminated by this matter.”

  He fell silent, as though pondering a morbid fate.

  “This was my first and last execution,” he said.

  McKenna secured permission from the Americans and took Preiss into custody. He booked him into the prison at Minden, where Herberg still awaited transfer to the London Cage.

  Back in his office at Rinteln, McKenna began making a series of calls and learned that the U.S. Third Army was holding Boschert at the No. 2 Civilian Internee Hospital in Karlsruhe. Initially detained by the French, Boschert had broken his spine some weeks prior under mysterious circumstances. The French, apparently done with him, had passed him on to the Americans, who had no particular use for him. On June 26, McKenna and Van Giessen left Rinteln and traveled by jeep, via Düsseldorf, to Karlsruhe. McKenna found the patient, shackled to his bed and lying in traction, reluctant to elaborate on his unfortunate accident but willing to discuss the murder of Flying Officer Cochran. His story followed the same plot laid down by Herberg and Preiss, although he claimed to have been keeping an eye on the car when the other two men walked Cochran into the woods.

  “After about half a minute to a minute, I heard two shots from the direction the three men had taken,” Boschert said. “Herberg and Preiss came out of the woods carrying the dead body of the prisoner…and I saw that he had been shot through the heart and the back of the neck.” At the concentration camp, while Herberg haggled for a death certificate, a guard ordered two prisoners to remove the body from the car and carry it to a building on the other side of the compound. Boschert remembered “the building had a chimney like a crematorium…. I never saw the dead body again.”

  McKenna had the Royal Army Medical Corps transport Boschert to a British internment camp near Paderborn. There he would remain until doctors deemed him fit enough for interrogation back in London. With a grim sense of satisfaction, McKenna watched medics load Boschert into the back of an ambulance and pull away. The men who had conveyed Cochran to his grave were now in custody—but the whereabouts of Josef Albert Andreas Gmeiner, their chief, remained unknown. The Americans had no leads to offer, and the Karlsruhe Gestapo had destroyed all their records prior to American forces reaching the city. The French, responding to McKenna’s inquiries, came forward and said they were holding Gmeiner in connection with wartime atrocities committed in Alsace Lorraine but were unwilling to turn him over to the British. Only after the RAF promised to hand him back should he be found not guilty in the Sagan case did the French release him into McKenna’s custody.

  Transferred to the War Criminals Holding Center in Minden, Gmeiner portrayed himself as an unwilling participant in the crime. He said that a few days after the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III, a wired transmission came through to his office from Gestapo Gruppenführer Müller in Berlin. Reciting from memory, Gmeiner said the document read, in part:

  By order of the Führer, Der Reichsführer SS, and chief of the German Police, has decreed that the English pilots who have escaped from the prisoner of war camp at Sagan are to be liquidated in case of their capture. The executions have to take place because the Englishmen, having escaped, have broken their word of honor! Therefore, it is lawful and necessary!

  “Having received the order, it was impossible for me to prevent its execution, although I considered it a crime,” Gmeiner said. “My death sentence, at any rate, would have been the unavoidable consequence, and I could not have prevented or altered the fate of the unfortunate prisoner by sacrificing myself and my family. After my arrest, the prisoner would have been executed even before my own death sentence had been effected. There was nothing left for me but to abstain from taking part in the execution of the dreadful deed. To know of the order and not be able to prevent its execution causes me great and depressing spiritual distress.”

  The war, Gmeiner said, had cost his family everything.

  “I became a civil servant to earn at least a minimum living for the maintenance of my family,” he said. “Although my income was modest, my wife and I saved a few thousand Marks—denying ourselves all personal enjoyment—for the future of our three children. In April 1944, my wife had to flee with the children from Karlsbad, where we had our family dwelling. She could only take with her what she and the children had on their bodies.”

  Gmeiner told McKenna everything his family owned had been destroyed. All he possessed were the clothes he currently wore.

  “If in my forty-second year,” he said, “I have nothing before me after years of very hard work an
d doing without, and after the complete loss of the modest fruits of my work—and when my family is forced to live on the mercy of relatives—then it is only the thought that I have not to reproach myself for any guilt. I was forced to act as I did, which kept me from taking my life, as was done in a cowardly way by those responsible.”

  Toward the end of July 1946, McKenna shipped Gmeiner—along with the other Natzweiler conspirators—off to the London Cage. McKenna forwarded the news to Wing Commander Bowes, who, in a progress report to his superiors in London dated August 6, 1946, wrote: “This case can now be regarded as completed.”

  NINE

  SAARBRÜCKEN

  Freezing temperatures, anti-aircraft fire, and marauding enemy fighters inflicted a heavy blood toll on Allied aircrews. As the war progressed, and greater swaths of Germany fell under the onslaught of British and American bombs, the citizenry adopted an increasingly dismal opinion of Allied airmen. Members of the Allied air forces heard nightmarish stories of angry citizens hanging captured airmen from lampposts or shooting crash survivors on the spot.

  Seven members of one British bomber crew who survived being shot down in February 1945 were captured by German soldiers and taken to a village, where refugees from the city of Pforzheim—recently set ablaze by the RAF—had come seeking shelter. The men were placed under guard in the basement of the local school. They did not remain there for long. An angry mob stormed the premises and dragged the aircrew outside, where a vengeful throng had gathered. They pushed and shoved the airmen down the street and beat them as they stumbled along. Bleeding and bruised, the airmen were forced into a large barn that stood alongside the village church. A single bulb illuminated the barn’s interior and revealed nooses hanging from a support beam. One of the airmen—wireless operator and air-gunner Tom Tate—caught site of the makeshift gallows just before entering the barn and made a break for it. He thrashed his way through the crowd and ran as hard as he could, not stopping even when he heard gunfire erupt behind him. He spent the night sleeping in some woods, surrendered the next morning to a group of German soldiers, and eventually wound up in a POW camp. Not until later did he learn that the enraged villagers had shot his crewmates outside the barn. Tate’s flight engineer, who escaped only to be recaptured the next day, was beaten by a mob of Hitler Youth and shot in the head by a fifteen-year-old boy who had lost his mother and five siblings in a recent raid.