by Helen Fry
The first arrest in the Sagan case was made in October 1944, seven months after the killings. Major Hans Thiede had been attached for a short time to No. 17 Inspection Centre (the centre responsible for six POW camps, including No. 3 at Sagan), where some recaptured RAF pilots had been held before being shot. In his defence, when interrogated by Captain Kettler at the London Cage on 19 October 1944, Thiede argued that he was an anti-Nazi who had not witnessed any of the Sagan events.10 His only knowledge of the case came from reading a telegram that British airmen had been shot while resisting arrest. He explained to interrogators about security in the various camps, and said that the key individuals to interview were Lieutenant-General Walther Grosch (commanding officer of No. 17 Inspection Centre) and Colonel Richard Waelde. Thiede’s testimony led to Grosch and Waelde later being brought to the cage to answer questions about whether the inspection centre had had any powers to protect prisoners.
Grosch was interrogated by Colonel Scotland on 7 December 1945 and initially refused to make a full statement.11 Scotland found him ‘haughty, an upright Prussian General who resented being interrogated’.12 He informed Grosch that he had ‘sufficient evidence to warrant a charge against you of conniving in this terrible crime. You can either prove to the court that you are innocent of a murder charge or you can demonstrate to me that you are innocent by writing a full statement of your actions following the escapes.’13
An hour later, having reflected on his position in his cell, Grosch asked to see Colonel Scotland again. Scotland passed him a pencil and paper on which to write down his account.14 It was a wise decision on Grosch’s part, because Scotland came to the conclusion that Grosch had actually taken no part in the Sagan crimes, and he was therefore not prosecuted.
The commandant of Stalag Luft III, Colonel Friedrich von Lindeiner, had been brought to the London Cage a few months earlier. Tall and rather distinguished-looking, Lindeiner appeared before Scotland on 14 August 1945. The Nazi regime had sentenced him to a year in a fortress for his apparent slackness as commander of Stalag Luft III in allowing the escape. Lindeiner had eventually been permitted to return to his home, where Russian forces had arrested him as they advanced across Germany. In the summer of 1945, the Russians extradited him to London for interrogation.
Scotland recalled how he had been eager to meet the man who had commanded Stalag Luft III at the time of a mass escape which had attracted so much attention.15 He was astute in his handling of Lindeiner, who had asked to see the questions in advance of his interrogation. Scotland told him that he was being held on suspicion of having deliberately allowed the prisoners to escape so that they would be shot.16
Scotland said to him: ‘You knew of the orders and that if further escapes occurred, shooting was likely … Someone wanted an opportunity to shoot a number of prisoners.’17
Lindeiner was visibly shocked at the suggestion, and protested that what had taken place after the escape had nothing to do with him. He said that he had warned the prisoners not to escape and was sorry for what had happened after they got away. Scotland reminded him that fifty innocent men had been murdered, and he was going to find out who was responsible. He insisted on Lindeiner’s full cooperation before he would believe his version of events. It was a bluff, because Scotland knew that Lindeiner could not have been responsible for the killings, otherwise the Germans would not have placed him behind bars. But Scotland needed a statement from him, and Lindeiner was not cooperating. Scotland sent him back to his room.
It took three days for Lindeiner to review his options and decide to cooperate. Finally, on 18 August 1945, he signed a voluntary statement providing valuable information, including a timetable of security checks on the night of the escape.18
By spring 1946, a number of suspects in the Sagan case were incarcerated in the London Cage. These included Bodo Struck of the State Security Head Office, who signed a statement witnessed by Captain Cornish on 3 April 1946. Bodo Struck was able to provide extensive details on how the Germans had categorised their prisoners and where they had been held. The following week, Peter Mohr was being held in the cage. He was the police commissioner who had compiled the original German reports on the Sagan case, and was thought to have significant information on the killings. During his interrogation by Captain Cornish on 10 April 1946, Mohr provided the most comprehensive report thus far.19 He explained that he was of a junior rank in the office and had to carry out the jobs that others did not want. He said that he had been shown ten or fifteen urns that were said to contain the ashes of the escaped prisoners. Only when he returned to Berlin did he hear about the Sagan Order – an order which, he said, had come straight from Himmler. Mohr had memorised the order and could quote it word for word to Captain Cornish. He said that all the killings had been carried out in the same manner: it was reported publicly by the authorities that the prisoners had been ‘shot in an attempt to escape or while offering resistance on arrest after a second attempted escape’.20 Mohr was a key material witness, because he told interrogators that this was untrue: the prisoners had not tried to escape after their recapture. This was the vital piece of evidence that Scotland and the interrogators needed to substantiate the Sagan case as a war crime.
Erich Zacharias
It was becoming apparent that the majority of the perpetrators were from the local Gestapo in the areas where the atrocities were committed. Wing Commander Bowes knew that as soon as the war was over many Gestapo and SS had disposed of their uniforms and were hiding among the civilian population under false identities, with fake papers and in civilian clothes. He and his team began to question local witnesses about the events surrounding the escape of the British pilots, and gathered statements on what they knew. It emerged that the bodies of at least three pilots had been cremated immediately at Moravská Ostrava, on the orders of the Gestapo. Two men in particular were urgently being hunted for their part in it: Hans Ziegler, who had given orders for the Stalag Luft III prisoners to be taken into the countryside and shot, and police officer Erich Zacharias, who had already admitted to his comrade Friedrich Kiowsky that he had shot two prisoners.21 Ziegler had instructed Zacharias to take the prisoners out into the countryside at 2 a.m. He told him it was ‘a nice quiet time when you won’t be disturbed, order them out of the truck for a pee and then shoot them. Their bodies are to be swiftly cremated. The excuse given in the official report to be attempted escape.’22
Bowes tracked down Zacharias in Bremen and arrested him. In April 1946, he personally escorted Zacharias from Germany to the London Cage. But it would be nearly two years before Ziegler was found.
Although Zacharias was not the first suspect in the Sagan case to be brought to the London Cage, he was the first of the Gestapo men to be interrogated there. By the time he arrived, he already had his story worked out. He was described as a brutal man, who readily obeyed orders. Major Roger Mortimer, who carried out duties at Wellington Barracks, occasionally had to provide guards and escorts for the London Cage. He described Zacharias as ‘one of the most appalling men I have ever met’.23
The interrogators had already heard from other witnesses how Zacharias’s men had brutally beaten up two escaped pilots, Squadron Leader T.G. Kirby-Green of the RAF and Flying Officer G.A. Kidder (a Canadian), and had driven them out of town to be shot. Their bodies were cremated in Moravská Ostrava. Captain Cornish led the interrogations of Zacharias, quietly watched by Scotland. The fair-haired Zacharias, of medium height, displayed a cockiness and bared his bad teeth as he flatly refused to make any statement. It was Scotland who took the decision to re-enact the last interrogation of Kidder and Kirby-Green by Zacharias and Ziegler at Zlín. One of them had ripped the handcuffs off Kidder, broken his hand and dragged him onto his knees. Scotland described the re-enactment in his unpublished memoirs:
We knew that there had [originally] been four men in the room. We prepared a room for Zacharias; the blinds were drawn, the lights were on, and on a table we placed a microphone to record anything Z
acharias might say. There were four of us in the room, two behind the table, and one on either side of the front. We had Zacharias brought in with handcuffs. He was made to kneel in front of the table, just as we imagined Kidder had done. A statement was read to Zacharias which gave the facts about his part in the murders. Once it had been read out, I moved over to Zacharias and put my hand on his shoulder, and said: ‘What is the truth?’ Whether the atmosphere and his memories of Zlin affected Zacharias, or whether the bit of showmanship appealed to him, he admitted shooting Kidder. The whole incident took less than five minutes to obtain the confession.24
Scotland called for the guard and said: ‘He has confessed. He can now make a statement.’25 The statement, signed ‘voluntarily and without compulsion’, was witnessed by Captain Cornish on 12 April 1946.26 The statement gave a detailed step-by-step account of the shootings, in which Zacharias admitted:
I made the prisoners get out of the car and go to the kerb to pass water there. I took up position about one metre obliquely left behind him … I drew my service pistol, which was all ready for firing, from the side pocket of my coat and fired obliquely in the left side of my prisoner in order to hit his heart. In order to make quite sure, I fired a second shot at the prisoner as he was collapsing … I convinced myself of the death of the prisoner by feeling his pulse and looking at his eye.27
It was always maintained by staff that no physical violence was ever used against Zacharias to obtain that confession. There is no apparent reason to doubt the reliability of Scotland’s memoirs which recounted the re-enactment. It therefore calls into question whether such psychological intimidation was justified, as well as the level of pressure that was acceptable to break the spirit of Zacharias – a known war criminal whose crimes were evident – and secure a confession from him. After the full confession was complete, Zacharias began to boast about his crimes.28 Scotland loathed him and arranged for his transfer to the cage at Kempton Park. But that was not the last of Zacharias.
Once at Kempton Park, Zacharias planned his escape. He had been allowed to keep his penknife, and every day for three weeks he used it to saw away at the lock on the unpainted door of his cell. He filled the hole with soft dough from his daily bread ration so that the guards would not notice it. On the night of his escape, the guard was asleep in his own room and the camp was quiet. With the lock broken away, Zacharias walked a few yards down the corridor before leaving through the open main entrance of the long, narrow building. He crossed the compound, climbed a tree, balanced on a branch, and jumped clear of the barbed-wire fence. There were no guards to be seen or any searchlights. At the second barbed-wire fence he struggled, and one of his shoes got stuck. He left it behind and made his escape.
It was several hours before Zacharias’s cell was checked and found empty by the early-morning guards on their rounds. With the shoe discovered in the fence, the local police and Home Guard mounted a manhunt. Zacharias was soon recaptured and escorted from Kempton Park straight back to the London Cage. Scotland refused to see him immediately, and instructed the guards that his first night was to be spent handcuffed to his bed.29
From the cage, Zacharias was transferred to a more secure camp near Sheffield. He stood trial at the first Sagan trial the following year, in 1947, where he was found guilty. He was executed at Hameln prison on 27 February 1948. But before that, the story of Zacharias would take an unexpected turn.
Suspects and perpetrators
Towards the end of June 1946, the London Cage handled a number of other Gestapo men in connection with the Sagan case. These included Richard Hansel, a greying man in his fifties who had had a long career in the German army. He always maintained that he had been transferred to the Gestapo without any consultation. Hansel was close to tears when the guards brought him into Scotland’s office, and it became clear that he lived in fear of being sent for trial. Hansel explained how he had accompanied the convoy of vehicles into the woods after a two-hour drive, and there the prisoners had been shot. He claimed to have known nothing of the shootings, and in his defence argued that Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, head of the Gestapo in Breslau, had made his men do things they did not want to do. He explained that at the time of the shootings, he had gone back to the truck to get a sandwich and was shocked to hear the gunfire in the woods.
Hansel signed a statement in the cage on 24 June 1946, witnessed by Colonel Scotland. Scotland decided that there was no need to hold him any longer, and ordered his transfer to a camp in Northumberland where he spent most of the time ‘as a nervous wreck and crying’.30
In June 1948, Hansel was back in the London Cage en route to his trial in Germany. Scotland wrote in his unpublished memoirs, ‘As the weather was fine, we put a chair in the back garden of the cage, let him sit in the sun, and gave him his meds there. We also got the doctor to look at him; to give Hansel sedatives to help him sleep.’31 The mention of meds and sedatives harks back to questions raised in chapter 7 about the use of drugs and whether they had indeed been administered with the prisoner’s consent. The court in Hamburg decided that Hansel was not guilty, and he was discharged.
Interrogators learned from another prisoner, Hans Schumacher, more about the central part played by the local Gestapo in the Sagan killings. Schumacher, a member of the Kripo (criminal police) in Breslau, pointed to Wilhelm Scharpwinkel as the man who knew all about what had happened. There was so much secrecy surrounding the killings that very little information had leaked out, he told interrogators. The case was indeed narrowed down to Scharpwinkel, the man in charge of the firing squads and head of the Gestapo in Breslau.32 His name was already on the wanted list, but his whereabouts were still unknown. He was finally located as a prisoner of the Russians, who refused to hand him over on the grounds that he was too ill to travel. Interrogating Scharpwinkel became an urgent priority for Scotland’s team. Negotiations began between the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, involving the British Embassy in Moscow and the Foreign Office in London. These led to the Russians granting the necessary visa and permission for Captain Cornish to visit Moscow and interrogate Scharpwinkel.33 He arrived in August 1946, interrogating the former Gestapo chief in a Moscow hospital on 31 August and 19 September. The Russians were initially suspicious of Cornish’s detailed interrogation, and insisted on a full Russian translation; but they soon tired of the protracted examinations and settled for a copy in German.
During the questioning, Scharpwinkel told Cornish: ‘I would have preferred that the order to shoot the prisoners had not reached my office; but if it had not been carried out there would have been a court martial.’34 He blamed the shootings on Max Wielen, a man called Lux and others, saying that he had only received news of the shootings after they had happened. He claimed that the order to shoot had come not from him but had been received by Lux direct from Berlin. Lux could never be brought to justice by the London Cage because he had been killed in the siege of Breslau at the end of the war.
In his statement of 31 August, Scharpwinkel admitted that he had been at the headquarters in Görlitz with Lux. Displaying no emotion, he calmly explained to Captain Cornish how he had witnessed Lux telling the captured pilots that they would be shot. The pilots were driven in a convoy towards Sagan. When they reached the main highway, they were ordered out of the vehicles. He told Cornish:
The prisoners were placed in position and 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.35
Prosecutors always believed Scharpwinkel to be guilty because he had made no attempt to prevent the killings. Sir Robert Craigie, the UK representative on the United Nations War Crimes Commission, wrote at the time: ‘It is clear that Scharpwinkel played a leading part in this war crime, and that he moved upon a higher level than any of the heads of the Gestapo in ot
her places involved.’36 Scharpwinkel did not face justice for the Sagan crimes, and died in a Soviet prison in 1947.
On 6 September 1945, Max Wielen, a member of the secret police in Breslau, had been interrogated at the London Cage by Major Reidel and Colonel William Edward Hinchley Cooke, one of the most senior interrogators of MI5.37 During the war, Hinchley Cooke had interrogated some of the first German agents who had landed in Britain. He was dubbed one of Britain’s greatest wartime spycatchers, and he helped turn Arthur Owens into the famous double agent Snow. Most of Hinchley Cooke’s legacy still lies buried in MI5 files.
In the autumn of 1946, Wielen arrived back at the London Cage, to be interrogated this time by Colonel Scotland. A statement was finally secured from Wielen on 2 November 1946. Although by the end of that year teams at the London Cage had prepared material evidence against various criminals in the Sagan case, ready for the trial, the only men directly implicated in the deaths of the twenty-nine RAF officers whom they had in custody were Wielen and Hansel.
Another suspect brought to the cage was police officer Erwin Wieczorek, a good-looking, quiet man in his forties, a member of the Breslau Gestapo and head of one of the four sections working under Scharpwinkel. He had been with Scharpwinkel during one of the killings and had thus been sworn to secrecy. At the time of that shooting, Wieczorek said he had raised the bonnet of the truck and pretended to be mending the engine so that he did not have to witness events.38 Standing before Colonel Scotland in June 1947, he provided the names of the killing squad and the driver, Robert Schroeder. He recollected the journey back from the shooting and told Scotland: ‘Hardly anyone spoke because we were tired and depressed by what had taken place.’39 Wieczorek said he had found various excuses not to accompany the squad on subsequent shootings. He signed a statement on 23 June 1947, and was not charged at the second Sagan trial in Hamburg in 1948.