Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen
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Schröder’s statement confirmed the RAF’s long-held suspicion that Absalon “not only investigated the escape from Stalag Luft III but had participated in the shootings.”
By the end of 1946, McKenna and his team had yet to nail down any solid leads on Absalon’s whereabouts. If alive, he most likely had a new identity and corresponding papers.
TWELVE
ALONE
In the days that followed the murders, prisoners at Stalag Luft III loitered about the camp bulletin board in the freezing drizzle and studied the list of names. The grim roll call hung alongside a poster declaring, “To All Prisoners of War: The escape from prison camp is no longer a sport.” The rain and damp had by now smeared many names on the list, but among those still legible was twenty-three-year-old Flight Lieutenant Anthony Hayter’s. Numerous attempts by the RAF to ascertain Hayter’s fate had only met with disappointment. No urn bearing his name ever arrived at the camp. The absence of any information meant the RAF had no point of reference upon which to build an investigation.
Prior to the war, Hayter indulged his love of sports on the squash and tennis courts—but his true passion lay in the clouds. When Hayter was nine, his stepbrother took him up in a biplane. The exhilarating speed and the wind against his face, the towns and people a distant vision below, ignited a love affair with flying. He joined the peacetime RAF in 1938 and began his pilot training the following year. In April 1940, the RAF sent him with No. 57 Squadron to Northern France, where he flew his first combat operation on May 10. Flying reconnaissance over the Dutch-German frontier, Hayter’s Blenheim was attacked by three Messerschmitts. He threw the bomber about the sky in a desperate effort to evade enemy fire. The Messerschmitts stayed on his tail, guns blazing, but were forced to give up the chase when their fuel ran low. Hayter managed a safe return to base despite his bomber having 237 holes in the wings and fuselage. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Britain and was sent to Scotland to serve with Coastal Command. Again, luck seemed to be on his side. Prior to a practice flight, a Wellington bomber collided with Hayter’s Blenheim on the runway. One of the Wellington’s propellers sliced into Hayter’s plane and severed his navigator’s arm. Hayter pulled the wounded man from the flaming wreckage and saved the navigator’s life. The RAF eventually stationed Hayter in the Middle East with No. 148 Squadron, a Wellington unit. He survived a crash landing in the desert in early 1942 when one of his plane’s two engines gave out. On April 24, 1942, his bomber went down over Sicily. He escaped the crash without injury but was quickly seized by the Germans. He arrived at Stalag Luft III one week later.
For months, McKenna’s team stumbled blindly along, groping at the faintest of leads in Hayter’s case, with disappointment always being the end result. Only recently, in August 1946, had information emerged that might point to a resolution. In the London Cage, Lieutenant Colonel Scotland had decided to interrogate for a second time Walter Herberg—charged in the killing of Flying Officer Dennis Cochran—to see if any pertinent information had come to his mind since his last interrogation. At the behest of his captors, Herberg again recalled Cochran’s murder in detail and, as Scotland had hoped, divulged something new. Herberg said that after the killing, he was ordered to the Central Security Office in Berlin to report Cochran’s murder to Gestapo Chief Müller. While there, he saw other Gestapo officials who he presumed were visiting on similar business. This he had mentioned in his previous statement, but he now recalled having recognized a man named Heinrich Hilker, an agent with the Strasbourg Gestapo.
It was the first time in the investigation anyone had mentioned Strasbourg. All the RAF knew about Hayter following the breakout had come from surviving escapees who reported last seeing him traveling in the direction of Mülhausen, which would have taken him near Strasbourg. The information from Herberg was relayed to Bowes, who cautioned McKenna the development “should be treated with reserve.” Then, in February 1947, French Army investigators shared with the British a document discovered after the war in the archives of the German Gendarmerie Detachment of Mülhausen, near the Rhine. The document did not reveal who murdered Hayter, but it did provide details of his arrest:
Detachment of the Mülhausen Zillisheim, 31st March 1944
Gendarmerie at Zillisheim
Daily Log Book Reference 46/44
To the HQ of the Gendarmerie at Mülhausen/Alsace
Subject: Arrest of the escapee English Captain (Air Force)
Anthony Hayter.
Reference: Blitz-Fs. Breslau Number 4817 dated 25
March 1944, search for 80 escaped British
Air Force Officers.
On 27 March 1944, at about 8:30 a.m., the escapee [Flight Lieutenant] Anthony Hayter was stopped by the 3 Home Guard men Alfred Herrmann, Jakob Herrman and Ferdinand Wacker on the road between Mülhausen and Altkirch, and his papers were checked. Whilst checking his papers, the above-mentioned Home Guard men noticed that he was a foreigner and that the papers purported to be those of a Danish national. The Home Guard men had the strictest order to take every foreigner to the Gendarmerie Detachment and, for this reason, the suspicious foreigner was taken to the Gendarmerie Detachment at Zillisheim.
When I checked his papers more closely, I noticed that the pass he had was false, that it had several office stamps of different colours and that it purposed to be made out at the Police Headquarters at Leipzig. The photograph was unsatisfactory and Leipzig was spelt with a ‘ch’ at the end.
When I put it to the escapee that he had false papers, he admitted to be a Captain in the English Air Force who had escaped from Sagan on 24 March 1944. I then arrested the escapee and notified the Gendarmerie at Mülhausen. Soon after that, the escapee was taken to Mülhausen and brought before the officer in charge of the Gendarmerie there.
Names, addresses and personal data of the 3 Home Guard men who arrested the escapee and brought him to the Headquarters Detachment are as follows:
1. Alfred Hermann, farmer, born 22.9.1906 in Zillisheim, who was in charge of the patrol.
2. Jakob Hermann, farmer, born 21.2.1904 in Zillisheim, Home Guard man.
3. Ferdinand Wacker, electrician, born 19.1.1915 in Zillisheim.
The N.C.O. i/c of the Detachment of Gendarmerie
Signed, Welter
Meister of the Gendarmerie
Welter, the document’s author, was in French custody and awaiting trial on war crimes. “It would be very useful,” read a hand-scribbled note in French at the bottom of the document, “to know whether the English Colonel Hayter is still alive in order to get from him more precise information as to what happened after he had been arrested in the manner described above.”
Over the proceeding weeks, McKenna’s men made extensive inquiries in and around Strasbourg. Agents who served in the local Kripo and Gestapo at the time of the killing were located in area prisons with the help of the French Departement des Crimes de Guerre and interrogated without result. Among those questioned was Obersturmführer Julius Gehrum, a man who took apparent pride in his role as “executioner for the Strasbourg Gestapo.” With at least twenty confessed murders to his name, Gehrum told Flight Lieutenant Harrison that had orders been received for the shooting of any person by the local Gestapo, he would have been the triggerman. Harrison voiced his disgust at the man’s willingness to kill. When done with his statement, the Nazi asked Harrison—a former navigator with Bomber Command—if he had flown against Dresden. Harrison answered in the affirmative. The city, bombed by the Americans and British on February 13–14, 1945, suffered a fiery holocaust that all but wiped out the ancient capital of Saxony and killed an estimated fifty thousand people. Why, Gehrum wanted to know, had Harrison taken part in the raid? Harrison answered that if he had not flown the operation, he would have been court-martialed for disobeying orders. The German, satisfied, flashed Harrison a grim smile. The RAF man balked. Yes, he acknowledged a certain legitimacy in the other man’s point, but the two scenarios could hardly be considered the same. One was an o
rder to commit murder, cold and ruthless; the other, to execute a strategic operation of war. Indeed, obeying orders was only a legitimate defense if one could properly argue that the order was lawful.
Reaching out to the Americans for any leads, Harrison learned that former Strasbourg Gestapo Chief Alfred Schimmel was being held in War Crimes Cage 29 at Dachau. Schimmel told Harrison during interrogation that he was appointed chief in May 1942 but resigned the following year. Consequently, he knew nothing about the Hayter affair. Harrison traveled to Paris and reviewed Schimmel’s personnel file on record with CROWCASS (Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects), which revealed he had stayed with the Gestapo until May 1944. When confronted with this evidence, Schimmel said he had lied previously out of fear he might be charged in connection with the mass murders of paratroopers in the Elzas.
“Shortly after the end of the war,” he said, “rumors were heard in Munich that mass-shootings had taken place and that arrests—especially in Gestapo circles—could be expected.”
His lie exposed, Schimmel said he was summoned to Berlin on official business in early March 1944 and remained there for three weeks. When he returned from his trip, he learned from one of his deputies that an agent named Heinrich Hilker had been dispatched on a “special mission” to Breslau. He had left two days before Schimmel’s return, escorting “a man caught on the frontier during the Fahndung.” Hilker returned three days later but said little of his recent expedition. His reluctance to discuss the journey piqued Schimmel’s curiosity. When questioned directly, Hilker insisted his mission had involved nothing out of the ordinary. In the days that followed, Schimmel said, he grew increasingly suspicious when rumors in the office suggested the airman had “been shot by Hilker whilst trying to escape.”
He claimed to know nothing of any official order from Berlin demanding the execution of recaptured airmen. After leaving the Gestapo, he heard from various sources that Hilker had assumed command of a sabotage unit comprised of operatives from the the intelligence service of the SS. Hilker was shot while fighting in the Vosges Mountains and taken to Baden to recover. Schimmel said a former Gestapo colleague told him he had seen Hilker’s false identity papers, which made him out to be seven years younger than his actual age and identified him as a furniture packer.
“In the beginning of 1945, Hilker’s wife had a second baby and Hilker tried to get her to Neufeld, near Zaban,” Schimmel said. “He did not succeed, and he sent her back to her parents in a village near Karlsruhe.”
Schimmel described Hilker for inclusion on the RAF’s wanted list:
Height 1.90 M., slim build athletic, pale face, dark hair turning gray, age 42-44, heavy smoker and drinker, clean shaven, no glasses, speaks with a pronounced dialect from Karlsruhe, no peculiarities.
Done with Schimmel, Harrison drove to Strasbourg to examine records at the city’s crematorium. He found nothing relating to Hayter’s murder. “All the entries are in name form,” he wrote in a report, “except for a number of serials, which denote the cremation of bodies from the Anatomical Section at the Natzweiler Concentration Camp. These bodies were brought in by the Gestapo and were in batches; no single body having ever been brought in by the Gestapo. The two men at the crematorium in March 1944 had no recollection of any single body being brought in wearing foreign underclothes or articles of foreign clothing.” In the Prison Militaire, Strasbourg, Flight Sergeant Williams found and interviewed a man named Rudolf Peters. Peters joined the local Gestapo in December 1941 and attained the rank of Kriminalsekretär with Department IIB, which dealt with civilians who helped POWs on the run. Peters said the head of this department was Kriminalkommissar Max Dissner, who in turn reported to Schimmel. It was a morning in late March or early April 1944, Peters said, when Schimmel summoned him to a meeting. Gathered in Schimmel’s office were Dissner and an agent from the local Kripo. A young man in civilian clothing, his face thin beneath an unruly mop of blond hair, sat in a chair and faced Schimmel across the expanse of a large desk. Peters guessed him to be no more than twenty-eight years old. Schimmel thrust a finger in the man’s direction and told Peters, “That’s an English Air Force officer.”
“In my presence, the Air Force officer was asked a few questions by both Schimmel and the Kripo kommissar—both of whom spoke a little English,” Peters said. “The Air Force officer gave short replies and refused to give any information. I was then ordered by Schimmel to take the man to my room for the time being.”
Schimmel and the Kripo agent again attempted to interrogate the prisoner in Peters’s room. The airman would only admit that he had recently escaped from Stalag Luft III in Sagan. All questions aimed at determining how the men escaped and how they obtained civilian clothing and travel papers met with stubborn silence.
After forty-five futile minutes, Schimmel ordered Peters to place the airman in a cell downstairs. Peters and the Kripo agent marched the officer to the holding area below and locked him behind a cast-iron door. Later that day, at about three in the afternoon, Peters happened to glance out the window near his desk into the courtyard below and saw his immediate supervisor, Max Dissner, get into a waiting car with Hilker and the airman and drive away. He approached Dissner that evening and asked where they had gone. The prisoner’s suitcase was still sitting in Peters’s room. Dissner, in a foul mood, told Peters to mind his own business.
“Stop asking questions I cannot tell you anything about,” he snapped.
Peters did not push the subject, and he retired to his quarters for the evening. Half an hour later, Dissner entered the room and retrieved the airman’s suitcase, which contained only dirty laundry. The Gestapo, Peters told Williams, did not file any official paperwork regarding Hayter’s capture. He knew nothing more about the matter.
It was clear from Peters’s take on events that Schimmel had lied in his second statement to RAF investigators. Harrison and Williams returned to Dachau to interrogate him again. Shown Peters’s handwritten statement, Schimmel now confessed to knowing more than he had originally let on. Yes, he had been away from Strasbourg at the time of Hayter’s arrest, but he returned to find the airman in custody. Soon thereafter, a communiqué arrived from Müller in Berlin demanding that the prisoner be executed. Schimmel said he phoned Müller to protest. His superior was adamant the airman die and accused Schimmel of being “soft.” Schimmel said Müller threatened him with death by firing squad if he failed to carry out the order. Schimmel hung up the phone and pondered his next move. He could always take the airman by car to the Swiss border and allow him to escape. Schimmel said he seriously considered the matter and even entertained the idea of disappearing into Switzerland himself to escape the repercussions from Berlin. Thoughts of his wife and children, however, made him drop any such notion. Instead, he dispatched two men—Hilker and Dissner—to drive in the direction of Natzweiler concentration camp, kill Hayter somewhere nearby, and have the body destroyed in the camp oven. The killing was initially planned to take place on Good Friday—but committing the act on such a holy day troubled Schimmel, who decided to have the airman shot a day earlier, on Maundy Thursday.
The men took Hayter away by car and returned the following day. They told Schimmel they drove Hayter to a heavily wooded area less than a mile from Natzweiler. They walked him to a point beyond the tree line and told him to relieve himself. Dissner distracted the airman with casual banter. Hilker, standing behind the prisoner, pulled a Walther from his overcoat and fired point-blank into Hayter’s temple. They lugged the body back to the car and drove to the camp. The body was incinerated and the ashes placed in an unmarked urn and shipped back to Stalag Luft III.
The Americans handed Schimmel over to the British, who shipped him off to the London Cage to await trial. The focus now shifted to finding Hilker and Dissner. The Special Air Service traced Frau Mathilde Hilker and questioned her. A woman hardened by circumstance, she surrendered no ground and professed to know nothing about her husband’s current whereabouts. Her inte
rrogators, convinced she was lying, approached the U.S. Counter Intelligence Department in Karlsruhe and asked that her mail be monitored. Local inquiries about town turned up a family named Brenck at Humboldtstrasse 25, who had taken Hilker in at war’s end and helped him nurse a gunshot wound to the left shoulder. Nearby lived Hilker’s mother, who assumed her son to be dead or in hiding.
It would be another twenty years before investigators could close the book on the Hayter case. Not until May 11, 1948, did the RAF catch up with Dissner, living in Hamburg under an alias. He was arrested without incident and taken to the British war crimes prison in Minden. In his cell, he fashioned a noose from a torn piece of bedding and hanged himself before his interrogation. West German authorities eventually tracked Hilker down in 1966 and put him on trial for Hayter’s murder. He was acquitted two days before Christmas and went a free man.