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

by Read, Simon

  The dead this time included Czech Flying Officer “Wally” Valenta, head of the escape committee’s intelligence section. “You will never escape again,” the airman had been informed upon recapture. Likewise, murdered Flight Lieutenant Cyril Swain was told he would be shot. Flying Officer A. Wlodzimierz Kolanowski, also among the dead, had appeared severely depressed following his questioning by the Gestapo. Survivors later remembered him sitting quietly in a corner, refusing to say what had transpired during his interrogation. Flight Lieutenant Brian Evans, also among the ill-fated group, had penned a letter to his fiancée just days earlier:

  The rock marking the spot where the Great Escapers emerged from Harry and fled into the forest. The inscription, written in Polish, reads: “Allied airmen, prisoners of Stalag Luft III, were Great Escape participants.”

  You know darling, I still haven’t got over the idea that we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. We’re going to have even better times, too, than we’ve yet had. In one of your letters, you said you were going to spoil me when I get home. I’m very anxious to know how you’re going to spoil me. I think you deserve a lot of spoiling, too, dearest; in fact, I’ve got a terrific lot to repay to you. If it weren’t for your letters I don’t know what I’d do, for they’ve helped me tremendously, Joan. I’ve got such a lot of things to say to you, but somehow they just can’t be written; they wouldn’t make sense. In fact, I don’t think this letter reads too well. Hope you can understand what I mean. Letters are unsatisfactory things, aren’t they? Remember, I’m coming home soon to look after you, darling. Until then, remember that I’ll always love you.

  On April 2, officers from the Luftwaffe showed up to escort four prisoners back to the camp. By whatever strange reasoning dictated who would live and who would die, Flight Lieutenants A. Keith Ogilvie, Alastair McDonald, Alfred Thompson, and Paul Royle were deemed worthy of survival. For the men still imprisoned in the Görlitz jail, each day became a torturous waiting game. “I remained at Görlitz for eleven or twelve days,” one survivor later told investigators. “From about 30 March, a guard would go into a different cell and call out names. These men would then be taken away, and we did not see them again. We thought that they were being taken out for further interrogation, and when they did not return, that they had been sent back to camp.”

  Trench-coated Gestapo agents drove off with another six prisoners on April 6. Among them were Flight Lieutenants William Grisman and Harold Milford, who were told upon recapture that they would never see their wives again. Flight Lieutenant Alastair Gunn, placed in the back of a Gestapo sedan, was threatened with decapitation. The six urns that arrived at Stalag Luft III several days later bore plates indicating the bodies had been destroyed in Breslau, ninety-five miles east of Görlitz. The Luftwaffe returned another eight men, including Churchill and Bethell, to Sagan on April 6. One week later, the Gestapo picked up Flight Lieutenant James Long, the last of the Sagan escapees held at Görlitz. His ashes were shipped from Breslau and soon arrived at Stalag Luft III.

  Solving the Breslau-Görlitz murders hinged on finding Dr. Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, head of the Breslau Gestapo. In October 1944, acting on the orders of his superiors in Berlin, Scharpwinkel assumed command of the Breslau Criminal Police. With the Red Army closing in, his mandate was to ensure that the local populace remained defiant to the end. He summoned his subordinates to a meeting shortly after taking control and told them “the work of the Gestapo is, at the moment, more important than that of the Criminal Police.” Present at the conference was Hans Schumacher, a senior police commander irked by Scharpwinkel’s presence. Breslau’s situation grew increasingly dire in the days and weeks that followed. Residents began fleeing the city en masse, as the sound of artillery fire crept ever closer. By the end of January, with the city well within range of Russian guns, Schumacher ordered all “ailing, elderly, and female members of the office” to evacuate Breslau. Only those deemed healthy enough to serve in uniform and carry out their policing duties stayed behind. That left forty officers to police a population of a hundred thousand.

  Scharpwinkel studied the Russian positions on a map in his office. The closer the enemy advanced the more militant he became. In a tense meeting with Schumacher, Scharpwinkel demanded the remaining forty officers be relieved of their policing responsibilities and deployed in a fighting capacity. Schumacher resisted. The officers, he said, had no military training. Scharpwinkel again broached the matter several days later and announced the formation of his own military unit. Despite Schumacher’s protestations, he enlisted the forty police officers, agents from the Breslau Gestapo, and the elderly members of the Volkssturm (Home Guard), creating a mixed regiment of questionable fighting ability. Scharpwinkel, asserting his authority, placed sixty of the men under Schumacher’s command and charged him with preventing the Russians from infiltrating a sector of the city behind the front lines. Without enough ammunition or weapons to go around, the men were ill-equipped for the challenge. It was only a matter of days before Scharpwinkel reclaimed the majority of Schumacher’s men and stuck them in the front-line trenches.

  An unrelieved seventy hours at the front saw the majority of men succumb to enemy fire and freezing temperatures. An outraged Schumacher confronted Scharpwinkel, only to be accused of cowardice and threatened with execution. Shortly thereafter, Schumacher fell ill with a kidney ailment and was removed from the front line. He never saw Scharpwinkel again.

  Schumacher himself conveyed the details of those last desperate days in Breslau to British investigators following his apprehension in February 1946.

  “I cannot imagine Scharpwinkel escaped from Breslau,” he told an interrogator at the London Cage. “If he is not already dead, he has probably acquired a pay book with a false name. It is also quite possible he is somewhere in Lower Silesia as a civilian.”

  Although he claimed to know little of the Breslau murders, Schumacher was no innocent bystander. Prior to his transfer to the Criminal Police in February 1943, he had served with a police unit in Kiev and investigated “partisan activity, treason, serious cases of sabotage, and unauthorized possession of arms.” Individuals found guilty of such crimes were often shot. Schumacher assumed the role of executioner on more than one occasion. His unit shot anywhere from ten to thirty people a week. Killing was easy, he said, once you had been psychologically numbed to the atrocities on the Eastern Front.

  “Frequently, mothers brought their own neglected children and asked for them to be destroyed,” he said. “This demand was always refused.”

  To expedite the liquidation of Communist Party members, Berlin dispatched to Kiev a number of “gas lorries”—mobile gas chambers—with their own attendant staff.

  “Death,” Schumacher said, “occurred instantaneously and was painless, as an accompanying chemist assured us.”

  The search for an eyewitness to the Breslau murders eventually led McKenna’s team back to the U.S. Army internment camp in Moosburg. There, on May 20, 1946, RAF Flight Sergeant R. M. Daniel questioned the recently apprehended Max Richard Hansel, a former Kriminal Inspektor with the Görlitz Gestapo.

  “I want you to tell me all you know of this matter, and as we are in possession of a great deal of information already, I would advise you not to attempt lying,” Daniel said. “Do you remember a Grossfahndung in March 1944 after the escape of a large number of British RAF officers from a prison camp in Eastern Germany?”

  “Yes,” Hansel said. “They escaped from Sagan.”

  “And how many officers were recaptured in and around Görlitz?”

  “I do not know. I did not hear.”

  “You do know,” Daniel shot back. “Some officers were brought into the Gestapo office at Görlitz. How many were there?”

  “Six or seven,” Hansel conceded. “I first saw them when they were brought in from the jail in three cars guarded by about twelve men under the command of Dr. Scharpwinkel. I did not know any of the guards. They were from Breslau and may have b
een Kripo or Gestapo.”

  “What time of day did they arrive?”

  “I saw them about 19:30 hours, but I cannot remember the date.”

  “What happened then?” Daniel asked.

  “All the prisoners were taken into my office for interrogation,” Hansel said. “I was not there all the time, as I was sent out of the room, but I came in from time to time and I heard some of the questions asked.”

  “Who carried out the interrogations if you did not?”

  “Dr. Scharpwinkel,” Hansel replied. “He interrogated the men separately.”

  Fourteen questions were put to each officer, starting with the basics: name, rank, place of birth, and civilian occupation. These questions the prisoners answered freely, but they fell silent when pressed on more sensitive matters. What targets had they bombed prior to being shot down? What squadron did they belong to? Scharpwinkel, and six of his men who sat in on the proceedings, grew visibly agitated whenever an airman failed to cooperate.

  “Who are the persons responsible for organizing the escape?” Scharpwinkel asked each captive. Not one of the men answered. “What are the names of the other escapees?” Again, silence was the only response. Prisoners were stripped of all personal items and locked together in a room with an armed guard at the door. “Take care they don’t get away—otherwise something unpleasant will happen to you,” Scharpwinkel told the guard, “or something unpleasant will happen to them.”

  Scharpwinkel turned to address Hansel and the other Gestapo men present, including one Hansel recognized as Kriminalobersekretär Lux. He motioned them into an office and closed the door. Taking up position behind the desk, he produced from his tunic a printed order from Berlin. The matter at hand, he said, was top secret (“geheime reichssache”). The prisoners were to be taken away and shot. The Gestapo men accepted the news without comment and began immediate arrangements to see the order through. The airmen were bundled into four black cars parked outside the offices at Augustastrasse 31. Shortly after one that afternoon, the vehicles pulled away in convoy, with Scharpwinkel in the lead. Hansel and his driver brought up the rear, with two prisoners in their backseat. They followed the autobahn past the town of Halbau and continued another eight kilometers before coming to a wood. Traffic was light, and only a few cars passed in the opposite direction. The wood grew thick on either side of the roadway. The lead car eventually pulled to the side of the road, and Scharpwinkel got out. The other vehicles followed suit. They had been traveling for two and a half hours.

  “Scharpwinkel announced that a short break would be made here,” Hansel recalled. “The prisoners were to be sent up to the head of the column and guarded there. I directed the two prisoners from my truck to the front where the others were already standing. The guarding was done by Scharpwinkel’s staff, who were equipped with two submachine guns and in SS uniform. As far as I can remember, Kriminalobersekretär Lux had one of the submachine guns.”

  Hansel returned to his car and ate a butter sandwich he’d packed for the journey. The prisoners milled about for several minutes under the watchful eye of their Gestapo guardians, waiting for some sort of order. Finally, Scharpwinkel motioned with his hand, indicating the prisoners were to be marshaled deeper into the woods. Hansel, still eating his sandwich, watched the men disappear among the trees. A machine gun clattered somewhere beyond the tree line. Several sharp cracks of a pistol followed in rapid succession. Hansel got out of the car and ran into the woods, where he found the Gestapo men standing over six bodies. The prisoners lay among the dead leaves, their corpses roughly fifteen inches apart. One of the Gestapo agents turned to Hansel and said the prisoners had tried to escape.

  “Did you believe that?” Daniel asked.

  “No,” Hansel said. “They would have been crazy to try to escape with men armed with machine pistols standing so close behind them. Their chance of getting away was so slight.”

  Scharpwinkel observed the carnage and ordered Hansel, who was familiar with the local area, to drive to Halbau and telephone the undertaker in Görlitz. Hansel returned to the car and passed the orders along to his driver. It was four o’clock when they pulled away from the crime scene. It took the better part of two hours to get hold of the undertaker and tell him what had transpired. The undertaker, believing RAF officers had been shot while trying to escape, alerted the Görlitz crematorium.

  Hansel and his driver returned to the woods to await the undertaker’s arrival. Scharpwinkel and most of his party had already departed. Only Lux and three other men remained to guard the bodies. At eight-thirty, two vans from the undertaker’s office pulled up to the scene. Three bodies were placed in the back of each vehicle and taken away to be destroyed. Hansel retrieved the ashes from the Görlitz crematorium three days later and brought them to Scharpwinkel in Breslau.

  “Who paid the cost of the cremations?” Daniel asked.

  “The Breslau office,” Hansel said.

  Two or three weeks later, Hansel told Daniel, Scharpwinkel summoned him and the other participants to a meeting at the crime scene to coordinate their cover stories. Scharpwinkel told those gathered that the Swiss government had informed London of the killings.

  “I wish only that Scharpwinkel may be captured and have his just punishment meted out to him,” said Hansel, his tone spiteful. “What he has done to us old officials cannot be made good again.”

  The same month Hansel detailed what he knew about the Breslau murders, Flight Lieutenant Harold Harrison joined McKenna’s team and quickly decided postwar Germany was an inhospitable place. Unlike other members of the team, Harrison was not a policeman by training. He had learned his investigative skills, including the art of interrogation, on the job. Questioning captured members of the Gestapo left him disturbed, repulsed by what he considered to be their arrogance even under the heel of utter defeat. Germany was a nightmare of ruin and desperation, and he knew he had played a small role in rendering it as such. Dropping bombs had not caused him any great pleasure, though he did enjoy flying and took solace in the fact that Bomber Command’s actions were justified. It was a point disputed by the Gestapo men he questioned. When Harrison asked how they could mercilessly kill another human being without so much as looking them in the eye, the Gestapo men would invariably ask how Harrison could do the same thing. He discovered that normal civilians harbored similar resentments toward British aircrews. “People would recognize my aircrew brevet and say: ‘You must have been on that fire-bomb raid on X or Y. My wife, or my kid, was killed there.’ I learned in the end not to start the arid argument that I had killed on the field of combat and they performed cold-blooded murders. The answer always was: ‘We were both acting under orders.’ I could only wrap the answer up in the beautiful German word vielleicht: ‘Perhaps…take out of it what you will.’ ”

  Harrison learned that traveling about Germany could be a hazardous undertaking. Driving one night, he was startled by a muzzle flash just beyond the trees along the edge of the road. Bullets hammered the side of his jeep but fortunately caused Harrison no harm. Whether it was a deliberate attack against a British airman or simply a random assault, he never found out. Highway banditry was not an uncommon occurrence. “One was shot at,” he later recalled, “bricks were thrown and bottles broken on the road.” All RAF jeeps in Germany were equipped with a wire cutter—two sharp pieces of angled iron—that sat atop the front of the vehicle like a hood ornament. Unknown culprits had taken to stringing razor wire across the roadways. Such a trap had almost decapitated McKenna while he drove back to base one night. Only the glint of the wire in his headlights saved him at the last possible second from a grisly death. For Harrison, who “tended to look on life as something to be enjoyed,” postwar Germany “was a completely depressing experience.”

  While the newest member of the team acclimated himself to his new surroundings, the Breslau investigation moved slowly forward. There could be no closure to the inquiry, however, without locating Dr. Wilhelm Scharpwinkel. Since
McKenna’s arrival in Germany the year before, the former head of the Breslau Gestapo had been one of the RAF’s most wanted. All McKenna and his men had to go on was rumor and hearsay. No one knew for sure if the man was even still alive. A former fingerprint technician with the Breslau Gestapo, questioned by McKenna’s men in early 1946, said he had heard that the Russians had hanged Scharpwinkel. Another survivor of the Breslau siege told Allied investigators the Russians had arrested Scharpwinkel but not killed him. All efforts by the RAF to take the search into the Russian Zone of Occupation had thus far failed. Letters requesting permission had either been denied or ignored. The British attempted to curry favor with Soviet authorities by handing over, in early 1946, “three Germans accused of war crimes against Soviet nationals.” Arrangements were also being made to transfer into Russian custody a “large number of Germans suspected of war crimes against Soviet citizens in Norway, together with all available evidence, which they (British investigators) have been at great pains to collect.”