Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (11 page)

“
Papirosi
,” the soldier said when done with his cursory examination.

It was McKenna’s turn to shake his head.

“
Papirosi
,” the soldier said again, bringing an imaginary cigarette to his lips.

“No,” McKenna said. “No cigarettes—no
papirosi
.”

The Russians decided to check for themselves and rummaged through the vehicle. McKenna eyed their firearms and kept silent. He stood shivering in the snow as the soldiers foraged through the glove box and checked under all the seats. Satisfied McKenna was not holding out, the Russians turned and walked back to their truck. One soldier flashed a broad grin and shook McKenna’s hand before joining his comrades. His teeth chattering and his shoulders hunched against the cold, McKenna watched the Russian transport pull away and disappear into the dark. He retreated quickly to the relative warmth of the jeep’s interior and continued to wait. At about midnight, a car came speeding down the autobahn from the direction of the capital and pulled in behind McKenna. From it emerged a visibly annoyed squadron leader from RAF headquarters in Berlin.

“You should have abandoned the car,” the squadron leader bellowed. “What does it matter?” He examined the jeep and shook his head. “We can’t tow this thing anyway with a broken axle. We’ll have to get out a heavy aid detachment in the morning.”

McKenna shrugged off the superior officer’s displeasure.

“Have you seen my sergeant interpreter?” he asked.

“Yes,” the squadron leader said, still examining the jeep, “we’ve got all the papers in Berlin.”

“Well,” McKenna said, “that’s all that matters.”

The squadron leader drove McKenna to Berlin and left the stricken jeep by the roadside. McKenna borrowed a car the next morning and returned to check on the vehicle and wait for a towing crew. He arrived at the spot mid-morning and found the jeep gone; four tire marks in the snow were all that remained. Desperate locals must have raided the jeep for scrap, McKenna theorized, picking it apart piece by piece.
McKenna drove to the nearest military checkpoint and called the local RAF authorities to report the jeep stolen.

“Are you sure there were no papers in it?” asked the group captain who took the call.

“Yes, sir.”

“Right, then forget it,” the group captain said. “We’ll write it off.”

McKenna returned to Rinteln without his jeep or any worthwhile information on Scharpwinkel.

Naked bulbs hanging from exposed wires in the ceiling bathed the interrogation room in a harsh white light. Dr. Ernst Kah sat at a long table and raised his shackled wrists to his mouth. He took a long drag on his cigarette and smiled at his inquisitors. Two weeks had passed since Kah’s initial arrest. The army, having obtained from him whatever information it sought, had now made him available to the RAF. McKenna, along with Squadron Leader W. P. Thomas, recently dispatched from England to assist in the investigation, arrived at No. 1 CIC at Neumünster on the afternoon of October 17. Expecting the onetime chief of the Breslau Security Police to be an ardent Nazi, they were surprised when he voiced, by way of greeting, his admiration for the British.

“I think you are prepared to help us with information,” said Thomas.

“Yes,” Kah said. “Germany has lost the war. Germany will not recover again. It is too late. England is the only country which can lead Europe and to establish Europe again. I do not say this as a joke.”

“If you do not tell us the truth,” Thomas said, “it will be your responsibility and not ours.”

Kah nodded, taking in another lungful of smoke. “I want to help you voluntarily,” he said, “because Germany cannot now do anything.”

The RAF men asked Kah if he knew of Scharpwinkel. Kah answered in the affirmative and explained that the man had served as chief of the local Gestapo in Breslau. The last he heard, Scharpwinkel
had been shot in the left leg during the Russian assault and most likely remained in the city. But such information, he warned, was based solely on secondhand intelligence he’d picked up in the days following the battle.

“Do you know what happened to him?”

“No,” Kah replied. “The capitulation was so much in a hurry. The report came in on a Sunday that the capitulation would be during the night of Sunday or Monday. During Sunday—and during the night—many fled to other parts, away from the Russians. That is what I did. We were surrounded, but many people succeeded in getting out. It was a matter of life and death. I left Breslau alone in the night of Sunday.”

Kah suggested a number of individuals on the RAF’s wanted list had been killed in the fighting at Breslau or were now in Russian custody. It would, of course, take time to corroborate such information. The Russians had thus far ignored McKenna’s various requests for assistance. Arrangements were promptly made to ship Kah back to England for further interrogation at the London Cage, a prisoner-of-war facility run by British Intelligence out of a grand house in Kensington Palace Gardens.

Still lacking strong leads, McKenna once more channeled his energy into canvassing the internment camps and focused on the British Zone of Occupation. New to the team was Flight Lieutenant Stephen Courtney who, accompanied by a large German shepherd of questionable demeanor named Fritz, had arrived in Rinteln in early October. McKenna tasked Courtney with searching the holding facilities in the American Zone. The camps, miserable in ideal conditions, were utterly wretched in the cold damp of winter. Drenched in rain, the grounds were rendered muddy swamps; the wooden huts reeked of rot. Over the course of several weeks, Courtney and Smit, serving as interpreter, made their way from one compound to another. It was monotonous and tiring work rife with bureaucracy. Authorization was required to travel from one town to another, and permission was needed to access the camps. On November 29, Courtney arrived at Dachau, the Nazis’ first concentration camp, located roughly ten miles outside Munich, on
the grounds of an old munitions factory. A GI standing sentry ushered Courtney’s car through the main gate, the wrought iron bearing the phrase
Arbeit macht frei
—“Work makes one free.” Entering the grounds, Courtney thought of a jingle he had heard shortly after his arrival in Germany:

Men—some in tattered civilian clothing, others in faded uniforms—milled about the compound as though waiting for something to happen. In a cold interrogation room, Courtney questioned prisoners known to have served in the Gestapo. He asked them about Scharpwinkel, Absalon, and others on the RAF’s wanted list. Some prisoners spat invective; others refused to talk. Some minor gains, however, were made. Information Courtney obtained from several inmates led to the arrest in early December of Colonel Ernst Richard Walde at a private residence outside Hannover. Walde, who had served as a
Luftwaffe
administrator at Stalag Luft III, was number twenty-four on McKenna’s list. Another informant steered the team to General Inspector Walther Grosch—Walde’s superior and number twenty-three on the list—who was hiding outside Kiel. Also apprehended in the same region was General Rudolf Hoffman, number twenty-six, overall commander of
Luftwaffe
installations, including Stalag Luft III, in Lower Silesia. The men were transferred to the London Cage, where, although cleared of direct involvement in the Sagan murders, they—as witnesses—confirmed the roles of other men being sought by the RAF.

The investigation continued to advance on the hearsay of others. For a detective with nearly two decades’ policing experience, McKenna found it discomfiting. He craved personal interaction with the suspects, longed to confront them with the facts, back them into a corner, and elicit a confession. In mid-December, the Judge Advocate General’s
Branch of the British Army of the Rhine forwarded McKenna a dossier on Fritz Panzinger, number seventy-five on the wanted list and onetime adjutant to Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller. Panzinger’s last known address was in Berlin, where he and his wife had lived in a second-floor flat at Yorckstrasse 72. On April 28, with the Red Army closing in, Panzinger joined other Gestapo officials on a flight out of Berlin, bound for Thuringia in central Germany. The aircraft reportedly crashed on takeoff, the fiery impact killing all on board. The story, however, was impossible to verify as the Gestapo had destroyed all pertinent records prior to the capitulation. What Allied investigators had managed to ascertain was that Panzinger’s wife, two days after the plane supposedly went down, bit into a cyanide capsule and killed herself. Panzinger’s mother and brother had been located in Munich and would be questioned in due time.

“The Americans,” the dossier concluded, “are interested in locating Panzinger and will pass on any information they may obtain.”

McKenna was happy to let the Americans worry about it; he had enough to deal with.
^*
He remained desperate for one solid lead, a cornerstone upon which he could slowly build his case.

On the afternoon of December 2, 1945, Dr. F. V. van der Bijil—a Czech lawyer who’d flown with the RAF during the war—returned to his room at the Hotel Esplanade in Prague, took pen to paper, and began a long letter to the British ambassador. A steady rain pummeled the window and distorted the view of the city’s ancient steeples and spires.

Restored after Germany’s defeat, the Czechoslovakian government was conducting its own investigation into wartime atrocities. On May 27, 1942, Prague Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich—“head of the Reich Security Service, Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, administrator of the concentration camps, and a specialist in Nazi
terror techniques”—had had an appointment with Hitler in Berlin. He left for the German capital that morning in an open-air car driven by his chauffeur. The black Mercedes pulled away from Heydrich’s villa in the suburb of Paneské Břežany and traveled along the Dresden-Prague Road. At an intersection, where the car slowed to maneuver a hairpin turn, two Czech patriots trained by British Intelligence lay in wait. Shortly after 10:30
A.M.
, as Heydrich’s car navigated the bend, one of the assassins stepped into the street and tossed a grenade at the vehicle. The resulting explosion wrecked the car and wounded Heydrich, who died several days later in a local hospital. His killers fled and took refuge in Ss. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral. Rather than surrender to the German troops who soon besieged the church, they took their own lives and became martyrs to the cause.

Response to the assassination was immediate and brutal. The Germans rolled into the small town of Lidice on the morning of June 9 and rounded up every male sixteen years of age and older. The 173 men were taken to a local farm and shot. “Seventeen rows of corpses in bloody clothes, with shattered skulls, brains and guts spilling out, lay on the ground in batches of ten” by the time the killing was done. German soldiers destroyed the town’s graveyard and desecrated four hundred graves. Women and children were shipped off to concentration camps, their homes looted and set ablaze.

The Czechs cast a wide net in their search for the perpetrators and hauled in more than their intended catch. Czech officials had been receptive to the British plea for help in the Sagan investigation. The government had a vested interest in the case. Flying Officer Ernst Valenta, a Sagan escapee, was a Czech national and one of the murdered fifty. After the war, Czech officials ensnared in their dragnet a onetime driver for the Gestapo. Under interrogation, the man confessed to participating in the murder of two escapees from Stalag Luft III: British Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green and Canadian Flying Officer Gordon Kidder. Van der Bijil, having informed the Czech government of his personal interest in the Sagan murders, was granted access to the Narochi Vybor prison in Zlín and allowed to question the man.

Now, in his hotel room, writing to the British ambassador, van der Bijil put what he knew down on paper: