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

by Read, Simon

  Even if permission was eventually granted, dispatching an investigation team to the Soviet sector presented considerable problems, namely in the organizing of food supplies, quarters, and fuel.

  Although the search for Scharpwinkel proved to be frustrating, news from the American Zone in early December shed light on the fate of Arthur Nebe, the top man sought by the RAF. The onetime Kripo chief, responsible for compiling the Sagan execution list, was indeed dead. Although fond of Hitler when he first came to power in 1933, Nebe soon grew disillusioned with the Führer’s tyrannical behavior. Nebe initially kept his doubts to himself, fearing the consequences should he speak out—but his discontent grew as the Nazis systematically liquidated their political rivals. In 1936, his feelings still a secret, Nebe was appointed national head of the Kripo. Two years later saw the formation of the Central Security Office, which brought Germany’s policing and security agencies under one roof and the overall command of Heinrich Himmler. The Kripo was made Department V of the new security organization, and the Gestapo Department IV. Nebe did not like working in close proximity to Himmler, whom he considered a contemptuous little man. He now began to voice his misgivings to a close circle of confederates and expressed his desire to resign. They urged him to stay on, however, and argued he was ideally placed to monitor Himmler’s activities and catalogue the atrocities carried out in the name of National Socialism. He remained at his post, performing his duties, including designating who from among the recaptured Sagan prisoners would be shot. Four months later, in July 1944, he actively took part in the bomb plot to kill Hitler and was tasked with assassinating Himmler. When the plot proved a failure, Nebe fled Berlin and faked his suicide on the shore of Wannsee Lake, leaving a suitcase full of his possessions at the water’s edge. The ruse failed, and he was soon arrested and tried. He met his end in March 1945, hanged by piano wire from a meat hook in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison.

  McKenna could now cross the top man off his list, but it brought him little satisfaction. Although he had paid a price, Nebe would never answer for his complicity in the killings. McKenna wondered what Nebe would have said; what argument would he have put forward as his defense? Why would a man who supposedly opposed Hitler play a role in such an atrocity? McKenna knew from various British Intelligence assessments that Nebe had bloodied his hands before the Sagan murders. Between 1941 and 1942, he commanded Einsatzgruppen B, an SS death squad in occupied Russia—one of four such squads operating in Eastern Europe. Under Nebe’s leadership, Einsatzgruppen B slaughtered 46,000 Jews, Gypsies, and others deemed undesirable by the Reich. How would Nebe have explained this apparent dichotomy?

  On another investigative front, the search continued for Gestapo Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, last seen alive in Hitler’s bunker. Flight Sergeant Daniel tracked down the brother of Müller’s onetime secretary Babette Helmut. The brother said his sister had voluntarily surrendered and was now in American custody. It would do no good questioning her, he said, for she knew nothing of Müller’s whereabouts. He instead told Daniel to speak with Müller’s sister, who ran into the wanted man’s wife after the war. Frau Müller said her husband had killed himself as the Red Army fought its way into Berlin. Helmut’s brother gave Daniel Frau Müller’s address, a street in the Munich suburb of Pasing. Upon driving there, Daniel discovered that the brother had slipped him a fake address. He eventually tracked the woman down to a small house she shared with her mother. Taking into account the reputation of Frau Müller’s husband, Daniel showed up at the house with a heavily armed police contingent and raided the premises. They found no evidence of Heinrich. The man’s wife seemed hardly concerned with the true nature of his fate. She told Daniel her marriage had not been a happy one and that she took little interest in her husband’s business. She had fled Berlin in February 1945 to escape the advancing Red Army. One month later, her husband paid her a brief visit. That was the last time the two had seen each other. Just recently, she said, her father-in-law had received a letter from a woman purporting to be Müller’s mistress, claiming the man had killed himself. Frau Müller identified the woman as Anny Schmid and said she lived at Schützenstrasse 4, apartment 3, in the Berlin borough of Steglitz. She also gave Daniel the address of Müller’s father, Kolonie 2, Rembrandtstrasse 22, Pasing. That, she said, was all the information she had to give.

  Daniel left and went to see the father. A search of the house turned up nothing. Müller’s nineteen-year-old son, Reinhardt, a Wehrmacht veteran who saw action in the war’s final months, now lived with his grandparents. He told Daniel the Americans had imprisoned him at the end of the war. Once they had established that he held no fanatical points of view and was not a threat to the public, they let him go. Like his mother, Reinhardt said he last saw his father in Berlin three months before the capitulation. In early May, a letter from Heinrich arrived postmarked April 28. The letter, the son said, had since been lost. Daniel, through his interpreter, asked Müller senior for the letter he had received from Frau Schmid. The man complied with Daniel’s request—but only after some hesitation. As Daniel listened to his interpreter read the letter aloud, he understood why:

  My relations have told me of your visits and your nosey questions. During all my thirty-two years, I have never known such a cheek. It is a shame that Heinrich is dead to have to undergo such experiences. H. would be very angry if he knew of your present conduct.

  However, I have no wish to quarrel with you, only to give a clear statement of fact. You will forgive me if I do not go into the details of H.’s awful last days…because my attitude to you has changed after your recent behavior. I only hope your wife knows nothing of your shady activities. I want to at least keep my faith in H.’s dear loving mother.

  You are very curious about his bank account and my allowance.

  I could afford to pay for my own holidays and for his leaves as well. As for my fur coats—what are insinuating about my fur coats? I still have the receipts in my possession. The same goes for all your other insinuations.

  The whole of the private property including furniture, bank account, etc., were confiscated by the State. What [Heinrich] and I intended to keep after the Russian occupation were one carpet and two photographs, which I wanted to keep as a souvenir, and later as a keepsake for Reinhardt.

  As for your fairy tales about your poor wife having to go out as a washerwoman, find somebody else to tell them to. You must think that my relations and I were born stupid. Even if your wife does have to set her hand to earning a living, she has been doing for only one year what I have been doing all my life. Perhaps you will bear that in mind, Herr Müller.

  In the same letter, Schmid addressed Müller’s mother and offered condolences for the loss of her son. “We were together until the very last moments of his life,” she wrote, implying she had been there when Müller killed himself. Daniel, impressed by Schmid’s moxie, ordered continuous surveillance on the woman’s flat but decided not to confront her personally. If her reference to Müller’s death was a ploy to throw off Allied authorities, Daniel doubted she would confess to such a thing under interrogation.

  While the hunt for Müller stalled, McKenna could at least find solace in crossing another high-profile name of the RAF’s most wanted list. On June 14, 1946, the Russians finally confirmed that they had Scharpwinkel. Negotiations now began to schedule an interrogation. The British, wanting “an expert” to handle the questioning, assigned the task to Captain M. S. Cornish of the Intelligence Corps, an interrogator at the London Cage. In late June, the Ministry of Armed Forces of the USSR agreed to grant Cornish access. Cornish now scrambled to get himself a last-minute visa for the trip and debated what to wear. On July 2, the Foreign Office sent a cipher to its Moscow representative asking, “Should Captain C. wear mufti or uniform?” The first interrogation took place on August 31, in a sparsely furnished room in the Building of the Procurator of the Soviet Union in Moscow. Four German-and-English-speaking Russian officers watched the proceedings. Scha
rpwinkel, tall and gaunt, his body bent and his hair thin and gray, sat shackled at a long table. In a corner of the room, a secretary readied herself at a typewriter. The Russians told Cornish that prisoner intimidation would not be allowed due to Scharpwinkel’s fragile health.

  Scharpwinkel spoke matter-of-factly and told Cornish he had placed Lux in command of the Breslau murder squad. He also named two other men—Knappe and Kiske—and said that they, along with Lux, assumed the role of gunmen. He implicated Max Wielen, claiming the onetime Breslau Kripo chief was disappointed that the Gestapo—and not the Kripo—had been charged with executing recaptured prisoners. Cornish sent the information back to Lieutenant Colonel Scotland at the London Cage, where the sixty-four-year-old Wielen currently awaited trial. Scotland took the signed statement to Wielen, who had never come fully clean as to his role in the Breslau murders. Scotland hoped Wielen, faced with Scharpwinkel’s allegations, would “come across with some admission about his own activities.” Wielen read the statement and angrily cast it aside.

  “It’s a damn swindle,” Wielen screamed, “it’s lies, all of it! You have fabricated this to put me in an awkward position.”

  “Look at the signature, Wielen,” Scotland said. “See for yourself. That story has been written and signed by Scharpwinkel.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Wielen said. “The whole thing is a swindle.”

  Scotland, fighting to maintain his composure, leaned across the table.

  “If you were not the old man that you are, Wielen, and if I were not the old man that I am,” he said, “I’d give you a punch on the nose for suggesting I’m swindling you.”

  The Russians allowed Cornish to interrogate Scharpwinkel twice. The second interrogation took place on September 19.

  “I believe,” said Scharpwinkel, “that in my district twenty-seven shootings took place.”

  Shortly after the escape, an order from Berlin had reached Scharpwinkel’s office stipulating that six of the British officers recaptured in the Breslau area were to be shot. Lux, said Scharpwinkel, retrieved prisoners from the Görlitz jail “in order to carry out his mission.”

  “The first six were shot in the neighborhood of Görlitz, the others, I cannot say for certain, in the region of Liegnitz or Breslau,” Scharpwinkel said. “After each shooting, Lux reported to me that the order had been carried out. He told me also the approximate locality of the shooting. At the same time, he laid before me the teleprint destined for Berlin, which went out as Top Secret as directed and which only I was allowed to sign. It contained only the following text: ‘The British PW (followed by name) was shot at ______ hours, near (followed by name of locality) while again attempting to escape.’ Further details did not interest me, particularly as they were not explicitly asked for from Berlin. Other important work of a police nature prevented me from asking Lux for detailed particulars.”

  Scharpwinkel said he played observer only to the first six shootings.

  “My driver was Schröder,” he told Cornish. “The British were brought to the headquarters. As I speak English, I put one or two questions to the prisoners while they were being interrogated: were they married? had they children? etc. Lux explained to the prisoners that by order of the Supreme Military Commander they had been sentenced to death. Then we drove away. When the Reichsautobahn was reached the summary shootings were carried out. Everybody got out. The prisoners were placed in position. It was revealed to them that the sentence was about to be carried out. The prisoners showed considerable calm, which surprised me very much. The six prisoners stood next to one another in the wood. Lux gave the order to fire and the detachment fired. Lux shot with them. By the second salvo, the prisoners were dead.”

  Based on information provided by airmen imprisoned in Görlitz after the escape, Cornish knew that the first six men shot were Flying Officers Al Hake and Porokuro Patapu “Johnny” Pohe, Squadron Leader Ian Cross, and Flight Lieutenants Mike Casey, Thomas Leigh, and George Wiley.

  “As regards my activities and those of all the accused of my HQ, I should like to say I hope that whoever is judging the matter will take into account the condition in Germany, and the fact that soldiers and officials in Germany who had taken the oath had to obey every order,” Scharpwinkel said. “Non-compliance would have resulted in court-martial proceedings.”

  Negotiations began immediately to transfer Scharpwinkel into British custody. If Scharpwinkel was not brought to trial, it would be impossible for the RAF to “account for the murder of 29 out of the 50 British officers concerned.” The British, in a show of good faith, turned over to the Russians forty-three Germans formerly employed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, twenty-three of whom “held positions of importance on the camp staff.” Established in 1936 some twenty-one miles north of Berlin, the camp was a training facility for SS officers who went on to serve at other camps. It was “intended to set a standard for other concentration camps, both in its design and the treatment of prisoners.” Thousands of Red Army prisoners ended up in Sachsenhausen. Of the thirty thousand inmates who died of disease, starvation, and execution, the majority were Russians. Two days before Soviet forces liberated Sachsenhausen on April 22, 1945, thirty-three thousand inmates vacated the camp on a forced march to the northeast. The guards shot those who, weakened by malnutrition and barbaric mistreatment, collapsed. Most prisoners did not survive. The camp now lay in the Russian Zone of Occupation and was being used as an internment facility by the NKVD, who showed little mercy to those under their charge.

  After three months of bureaucratic back-and-forth, Soviet authorities informed the British government they could have Scharpwinkel if they tracked down “the former Counselor of the German Embassy in Moscow, Von Walter Hephart, and Engineer Lieutenant Gershkov Michael Vasilievich, who…committed a serious crime in the Soviet Union.” The Russians refused to elaborate on the nature of the crime. Unwilling to hand the two men over on the basis of such a vague accusation, the British turned down the Soviet request. Consequently, negotiations to extradite Scharpwinkel stalled. The Soviets held on to their prisoner, much to McKenna’s frustration. Following his statements to Cornish, Scharpwinkel was hospitalized with pneumonia and pleurisy. It seemed the man would never answer for his crimes—at least not in a British court.

  Nothing about the Breslau case was straightforward. Scharpwinkel, in his statement, said he was present only at the execution of the first six prisoners taken from the Görlitz jail. The RAF tracked down Scharpwinkel’s deputy, SS Officer Erwin Wieczorek, whose scarred upper lip twitched when he spoke. He told investigators he remembered Scharpwinkel being present at the shooting deaths of Pilot Officer Sortiros “Nick” Skanziklas and Flight Lieutenants Antoni Kiewnarski and James Wernham. He said Lux and Scharpwinkel retrieved the men from a prison in Hirschberg. The party traveled in four cars, with Scharpwinkel and his driver taking the lead. Although he could not remember the date, he recalled it was an evening in late March, sometime after six. As they drove along a forested road, Scharpwinkel’s car came to a slow stop in the middle of the lane. Wieczorek, in his car, watched Scharpwinkel’s driver exit the lead vehicle and check under the hood. Scharpwinkel also got out and said they were having engine trouble. He ordered everyone out of the cars and demanded that the prisoners stand between the second and third vehicles in the convoy. Wieczorek wandered up to Scharpwinkel’s car, where the driver still toiled beneath the hood. In a quiet tone, he told Wieczorek that Scharpwinkel had instructed him to stage the breakdown. The driver pretended to work on the engine for another ten minutes or so, as Wieczorek watched over his shoulder. The sound of screaming and machine-gun fire startled Wieczorek and drew his attention down the line of cars. The glare of headlights made it hard to see what was happening. He and the driver ran to where the shots had been fired and witnessed a scene of pandemonium.

  “The officials were running around excitedly,” Wieczorek said. “I saw a number of officials running around on the field adjoining
the road, and they were shining torches on dark shadows which were lying in the field. The last car turned round and set off at great speed towards Hirschberg. I heard somebody report to Scharpwinkel, ‘They are all dead.’ ”

  Wieczorek was taken into British custody and charged with complicity in the killings. His capture proved only a small victory. The Russian refusal to hand over Scharpwinkel was not McKenna’s only frustration with the Breslau investigation. Most of the gunmen—identified by Scharpwinkel in his statements to Cornish—were dead, killed in battle during the final days of the war. Information reached McKenna via an informant that one executioner, a man named Laeufer, had committed suicide. McKenna was skeptical. Through an associate who last saw Laeufer two days before the German surrender, McKenna learned that the man was eager to reunite with his wife and child. Laeufer’s wife lived in Berchtesgaden and said that the last she had heard, her husband was making his way home. In the event, Laeufer never showed up and was now presumed to be hiding under a false name. Even more frustrating for McKenna was the death of Kriminalobersekretär Lux, the chief executioner. Two eyewitnesses traced by McKenna’s team confirmed that Lux had died fighting in Scharpwinkel’s unit in Breslau. McKenna was bitterly disappointed. More than half the Sagan escapees had died at the hands of men who would never answer for their deeds.

  Four years after the event, the RAF tracked down Scharpwinkel’s driver, Robert Schröder, who said his superior witnessed the shooting of the ten officers taken from the Görlitz jail on March 31. The prisoners—Flight Lieutenants Edgar Humphreys, George McGill, Cyril Swain, Charles Hall, Patrick Langford, and Brian Evans, and Flying Officers “Wally” Valenta, A. Kolanowski, Robert Stewart, and Henry Birkland—were loaded into the back of a military transport truck. On the Sagan road, halfway to the camp, the truck pulled over so the men could relieve themselves. The weather that night was frigid. Scharpwinkel, riding with Schröder in the lead vehicle, got out of the car and walked to where the officers stood on the shoulder of the road, stomping their feet in an effort to keep warm. Dr. Gunther Absalon and Lux, armed with machine guns, stood nearby with their weapons at the ready. “The lorry stood forty meters behind me,” Schröder said. “I was sitting alone in the car when I suddenly heard shouts followed immediately by a mad firing of machine pistols. I jumped out of the car and ran to the rear. Behind the lorry lay the prisoners scattered on the ground. Some of them were right on the road, others were on a slope nearby, but they were all close together. When I had asked one of the officials what had happened, he said that some of the fellows had tried to escape and that they had all caught it.”