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

by Read, Simon

  Shipment to a POW camp held no guarantee of civil treatment, as one airman, shot down over Hamburg in 1942 and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-B in the small Silesian town of Lamsdorf, wrote in a letter home:

  First of all, the fleas are terrible. Fellows find them in their cloths [sic], and their beds swarm with them. I am one of the lucky few who don’t seem pestered by the pesky blighters. Naturally, I keep my stuff as clean as poss: and that helps. I pick up 1 or 2 now and again, which cannot be helped…. Boy, do we feel uncivilized…. Sleeping accommodation is vile. There are 190 of us in the one barrack. A third of that number sleep on the floor…. Incidentally, this camp is noted as the worst Stalag in Europe. I can quite believe it. Well, I’m dog tired now, so I’m off to my so-called bed. Will carry on with a few moans in at a later date.

  Dulag Luft, the Luftwaffe transit camp, lay just outside Frankfurt. Upon arriving at the compound, prisoners were photographed, stripped to their underwear, and subjected to a rigorous search. After providing name, rank, and service number, the men were placed in solitary confinement. They lingered there for up to a week in a cell measuring 101⁄2 feet long by 51⁄2 feet wide. Only the ordeal of interrogation broke the monotony of isolation.

  The Germans initially took a gentle approach to questioning and handed prisoners what they claimed to be a Red Cross form. Filling in all the blanks, they said, would allow the airman’s family to be informed of their loved one’s fate in a timely manner. The questions, however, went beyond the personal basics and sought details on the composition of bomber groups, the strength of air squadrons, and other topics of military importance. Most airmen were quick to identify the ruse, which only stoked the ire of their captors. One RAF flight engineer sat silently as his interrogator went through the form and read the questions out loud. After nearly half an hour, the airman’s lack of response led to a sinister threat.

  “There are too many people going around France dressed up as airmen and wearing RAF identity discs,” the German said. “Unless you tell me more about yourself, I will have you shot as a spy.”

  “Go ahead and shoot,” the airman replied.

  The German, struck by his captive’s nonchalance, lost his enthusiasm for the threat and sent the airman back to his cell.

  The Germans did what they could to make the airmen uncomfortable and weaken their resolve. While in solitary, prisoners were denied the pleasure of cigarettes and the use of basic toiletries. Their dining options also left a lot to be desired. Breakfast was a bleak affair consisting of two pieces of black bread and jam, served with ersatz coffee or ersatz tea, usually “made from various mixtures of hay, carrots, and parched grain.” The men hardly fared better at lunch with their midday ration of thin, watery gruel. By dinner, the two pieces of black bread were almost a relief. A common practice employed by the Germans involved cranking up the heat in the solitary cells. The temperatures would reach stifling levels, aided by permanently sealed windows and cement walls lined with heavy insulation. In extreme cases, the metal bed frames would get hot enough to blister flesh. Once the Germans were satisfied they had learned all they could from a prisoner, the airman was moved out of solitary and into a regular barrack, where he awaited transfer to a permanent camp.

  The barrack walls were lined with microphones, something the inmates had fun with when they discovered them. “We used to go in these rooms with the microphones,” remembered one RAF pilot, “and shout the most horrible lines about our new 15-engined bombers with twenty pilots sitting in a row, and I am sure we shook the Germans on many occasions. Eventually, this game got rather pallid and we connected up the electric-light system and the microphone system and blew-up the whole works. The only thing that happened was that a German, who happened to be listening in at the time, nearly got his head blown off—and the Senior British Officer, who was the ‘unfortunate’ on these occasions got five days solitary confinement.”

  Roger Bushell arrived at Dulag Luft in May 1940. In those early days of war, the art of escape was a primitive thing. Prisoners had yet to learn the complex craft of digging tunnels, while the Germans lacked methods of detection to expose such activity. Both sides, however, would prove to be quick studies. Shortly after his arrival, Bushell joined the camp’s escape committee, which set about digging a tunnel out from one of the barracks. The intended goal was a dry streambed just beyond the wire. For weeks, the men dug with their hands, clawing at the earth and sweating into long cotton underwear to avoid dirtying their uniforms. They soon passed under the wire and had a mere eight feet to go when they struck an underwater spring and flooded the shaft. The Germans quickly discovered another tunnel started shortly thereafter.

  The escape season came to an end with the onset of winter but resumed in the spring of 1941. Digging began as soon as the ground had thawed. The men planned to break out on the first moonless night in June, and they completed the eighty-foot-long tunnel without any major setbacks. Bushell, originally intending to make his break through the tunnel, decided to blitz out on his own. Fluent in German, he believed he sported an above-average chance of making it to the Swiss border. A goat shed sat in the corner of the exercise field, which lay just beyond the compound’s barbed-wire perimeter. Bushell’s plan was simple: hide in the shed during the day and sneak away after sunset. When the day in question arrived, fellow prisoners distracted the guards by leading the goat into the field and staging a mock bullfight. Bushell took his position in the shed and waited for nightfall, the last few hours spent in the company of the goat, who didn’t seem to mind the intrusion.

  Bushell snuck away after dark. He made it to the local railway station and purchased a ticket with the few German marks he had managed to scrounge in the camp. He traveled through the night and disembarked the next day in the town of Stühlingen. Thirty yards from the border, Bushell’s luck ran out. Presenting himself as a drunken ski instructor, he tried staggering across the frontier, telling the border guard he was returning home after organizing a local ski event. The suspicious guard insisted Bushell accompany him to the police station. Bushell broke character and ran, prompting the startled German to give chase. The guard drew his pistol and squeezed off several rounds, the bullets missing their mark and kicking up asphalt. Bushell veered round a corner and found himself in a dead-end street. He was promptly arrested and dispatched to Stalag Luft I, a bleak and desolate compound near the Baltic coastal town of Barth, where he remained for several months.

  The meager rations and frigid Baltic weather took a harsh physical toll, but the miserable conditions only strengthened Bushell’s resolve. He was soon overseeing the construction of a new tunnel, but the Germans transferred the prisoners to another camp before its completion. Men, thirsty and hungry, were herded into railway cars for the nearly two-hundred-mile trip to a compound near Warburg. During the journey, prisoners used a table knife smuggled aboard to cut a hole in the car’s floorboards. Bushell—forty pounds lighter since his internment at Stalag Luft I—carefully lowered himself through the hole, the track beneath him a rushing metallic blur. He could feel the wind pulling on him, threatening to suck him under the wheels of the train. He held tight and waited for the train to slow down before dropping himself onto the rails and rolling clear of the undercarriage. Now on the run, he partnered with Czech airman Jack Zafouk and accompanied him to Prague. Their timing proved unfortunate, arriving as they did in the wake of Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination.

  Hitler ordered the arrest and murder of thousands of Czechs. Friends and neighbors betrayed one another to save their own skin—and so it was the Germans discovered the local family sheltering Bushell and Zafouk. The family paid in blood for its transgression. Zafouk was shipped to Colditz and Bushell eventually arrived at Stalag Luft III with his plan for a great escape in place. Like the final creation an artist is intent on completing, the escape became Bushell’s obsession. He oversaw every aspect of the planning with an almost tyrannical zeal. He expected the men executing his plans to accomplish the impo
ssible, whether it be the forging of two hundred travel passes or the tailoring of two hundred civilian outfits. He had no patience for skepticism and doubt.

  Just prior to the escape, Bushell partnered with Lieutenant Bernard Scheidhauer, a Frenchman. Scheidhauer was eighteen in June 1940, when France collapsed under the German onslaught. He fled the country by boat to England in what proved to be a harrowing cross-Channel voyage. The boat ran out of fuel mid-crossing and left the Frenchman and his five sailing companions adrift for days. They steadily worked their way through all the food and water on board. On the twelfth day, a Scottish freighter spotted the stranded men, ravaged by thirst, hunger, and exposure. Scheidhauer made a quick recovery and joined the Free French Air Force less than one week later, eventually taking to the skies with No. 131 Squadron. He began flying combat operations over Northern France in the summer of 1942. When his patrols took him over the coastal town of Brest, he would swoop in low and buzz his parents’ home, hoping they might realize it was their son waging war among the clouds. He was fighting not only for them, but the redemption of his nation’s honor—a matter he held dear. On November 18, 1942, it all came to an end when mechanical problems forced his Spitfire down. Scheidhauer, the controls going slack in his hand, managed to maneuver his plane out to sea toward the English Channel Islands. He landed the stricken fighter on what he believed to be the Isle of Wight. Clambering out of the cockpit, he was approached by local farmers, who informed the young pilot he had actually crash-landed in German-occupied Jersey. Less than an hour later, the Germans had him in custody. His next stop was Stalag Luft III, where he provided the escape committee with intelligence on France.

  On the night of the escape, Bushell and Scheidhauer were numbers five and six, respectively, to emerge from the tunnel and disappear into the woods. Disguised as French civilians and traveling by train, they hoped to make it to France and connect with the Resistance. They purchased tickets at the Sagan station for the Berlin-to-Breslau express. From Breslau, they journeyed to Saarbrücken, near the French border. Their train pulled into the city’s main railway station on the evening of Sunday, March 26. A police officer approached them on the platform and asked to see their travel papers and identity cards. He glanced at their documents and returned them without comment. Bushell and Scheidhauer thanked the officer in French and turned to walk away.

  “Good luck,” said the officer in English.

  “Thank you,” replied Scheidhauer, also in English.

  It was a simple—but effective—trap. The two men were arrested and taken to Lerchesflur Prison. Interrogated by the Kripo, they claimed to be French businessmen returning home to their families. Not until their captors threatened to shoot them as saboteurs did Bushell and Scheidhauer confess to their true identities. The local police, following protocol, relayed news of the capture to the War Search Headquarters of the Criminal Police in Berlin. The information made its way from there to Gestapo headquarters.

  In the early morning hours of Wednesday, March 29, the phone rang at the home of local Kripo chief Gustav Dingermann. The caller was Dr. Leopold Spann, head of the Saarbrücken Gestapo, with orders to ready Bushell and Scheidhauer for immediate transfer to Berlin. The order, Spann said, came from the highest quarters. Regardless of its origin, the order struck Dingermann as odd. The Wehrmacht or the Luftwaffe usually reclaimed captured escapees and returned them to their camps, not the Gestapo. When Dingermann questioned the change of protocol, Spann’s voice turned cold. He repeated the instructions and hung up the phone. Dingermann called the prison and asked that the necessary arrangements be made. When he arrived at his office later that morning, he learned that the RAF men had been picked up before daybreak. Several days later, one of Dingermann’s officers entered his office and closed the door. He took a seat on the other side of Dingermann’s desk and spoke in almost a whisper.

  “I heard in confidence from a Gestapo man,” the officer said, “that the vehicle carrying the two Air Force officers never arrived in Berlin at all, but that both were shot when trying to escape again.”

  Dingermann, who suffered from a chronic heart condition, slowly massaged the center of his chest and absorbed the news.

  “I seriously do not believe,” he said, “that the two of them tried to escape.”

  Urns bearing the names Bushell and Scheidhauer arrived at Stalag Luft III shortly thereafter. An inscription on the base of each urn identified Saarbrücken as the place of cremation.

  At his desk, McKenna took a pull from his glass of whiskey and opened the folder in front of him. The room was dark, except for the small circle of light cast by the green-shaded desk lamp. He dragged a hand across his tired eyes and began reading the document, a statement recently taken from Dingermann. Courtney’s team had found him several weeks prior at No. 6 CIC, Moosburg. Once the paperwork cleared, releasing Dingermann into British custody, the RAF had transferred him to the London Cage. He proved to be a cooperative witness and fully explained his involvement in the Saarbrücken affair. The day of the Sagan escape, Dingermann said, Berlin issued instructions laying out the protocol for the handling of recaptured escapees. “What struck me,” he told his interrogators, “was the provision that in the case of escaped prisoners being retaken, they were to be immediately interrogated in detail on how they managed to escape and that—until further instructions were given—the recaptured prisoners were to be kept in police custody. There was thus to be no direct handing over to the Wehrmacht as had been usual hitherto in cases of recapture.”

  Dingermann detailed how Bushell and Scheidhauer had been captured at the main railway station in Saarbrücken. “When informed a few days later that the vehicle carrying the two Air Force officers never arrived in Berlin at all, but that both of them were shot when trying to escape again,” he said, “I was very upset.”

  Dingermann identified Spann as the primary architect of the Saarbrücken murders but could not name the actual gunmen or say with any certainty if Spann himself pulled a trigger. It was doubtful Spann even survived the war. “About three or four weeks ago—that is the end of February and the beginning of March 1946—during my stay at the internment camp at Moosburg, I spoke to Kriminalkommissar Jaffke, who until the end of 1943, had been working at the State Police in Saarbrücken,” Dingermann said. “He told me that he had heard Spann, together with about forty to fifty officials of his department, had been killed during one of the large-scale air attacks on Linz, during which the offices there of the Gestapo had been badly hit.”

  McKenna pushed the statement aside and took another sip of his drink. He would have to confirm Spann’s death before striking him off the RAF’s list. The Saarbrücken affair was McKenna’s case. While he had teams canvassing the American and British zones, the French Zone, which included Saarbrücken, had been deemed McKenna’s beat. The French were still struggling to bring order to their house in terms of record keeping. From an investigative standpoint, there were additional considerations. Other than Leopold Spann—a man who might or might not be alive—McKenna had no names in his suspect pool. Early on he realized that the Saarbrücken case would entail a lot of knocking on doors, so to speak. He began a drawn-out hunt for those in the German security services assigned to Saarbrücken in 1944.

  The search took him from one prison facility to another. It was an exhausting routine, but one to which he had gradually become accustomed. The investigation had thus far pushed him—both physically and mentally—to an extent he had never experienced before. Some days passed with no more than a few hours’ sleep, and his emotional response to the unfolding story of the killings covered the gamut between revulsion and outrage. In a prison camp outside Saarbrücken, McKenna found a man named Josef Lampel, a onetime member of the Kripo assigned to Saarbrücken at the time of the Sagan escape. Lampel said a Kripo agent named Bender had arrested Bushell and Scheidhauer at the train station. Prior to his wartime service, Bender ran a tobacconist shop in Vorstadstrasse, Saarbrücken.

  “I pr
esume he is still living there,” Lampel said.

  McKenna checked with local authorities and learned that Bender never returned to Saarbrücken after the war. He forwarded the man’s name to war crime investigators in the American and French zones. He scored a hit with the French Security Police. The man was serving twelve years’ forced labor at Witlich Gaol, near Trier, for taking part in atrocities committed during the German occupation of Alsace Lorraine. French investigators had taken a statement from Bender, in which he detailed his role in the Saarbrücken affair. Also in French possession were a number of Gestapo documents containing entries relative to the detention and cremation of Bushell and Scheidhauer. At the present time, the French needed the documents for their own investigation and were unable to turn them over to the British. As Scheidhauer was a French national, they had a legitimate concern in the Saarbrücken case.

  In early May 1946, French Security Police passed along a statement taken three months earlier from a German police inspector stationed at Saarbrücken during the war. The inspector, a man named Schmoll, said Spann approached him one day in late March 1944 and ordered him to oversee the cremation of two prisoners recently shot while trying to escape. Schmoll made the necessary arrangements with the Neue Bremm torture camp just outside Saarbrücken, where two men he identified as Emil Schulz and Walter Breithaupt delivered the bodies by truck. McKenna added Schulz and Breithaupt to the RAF’s wanted list and forwarded the names to investigators in the British and American zones. The U.S. Army traced Breithaupt to his parents’ house outside Frankfurt and cleared the RAF to take him into custody. British military police surrounded the house in the early morning hours of October 7. An officer knocked on the front door and told the elderly couple who answered that their son was wanted for questioning in a sensitive matter. They allowed the officer to enter and said Walter was still in bed upstairs. The officer entered Breithaupt’s bedroom and found the wanted man sleeping. A startled Breithaupt was handcuffed, dragged outside to a waiting car, and taken to the holding facility at Minden.