Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (12 page)

Following their arrest and interrogation, wrote van der Bijil, the prisoners left Zlín in two Gestapo cars:

Also along for the ride was a Gestapo man named Erich Zacharias. According to information obtained by van der Bijil, Zacharias was married and now living in Gartenstadt in the British Zone. Military
authorities in the region, oblivious to the man’s past, had classified Zacharias “a harmless person.” According to Kiowsky, Zacharias had already murdered three people in Zlín, one being an eighteen-year-old girl. The letter went on to detail the murders of Kirby-Green and his Canadian companion:

Van der Bijil concluded his letter with a plea for immediate action:

Van der Bijil signed his name to the page and dropped the letter in the hotel’s outgoing mail.

^*
The man was never found.

Squadron Leader Tom Kirby-Green, with his mop of thick black hair, Clark Gable mustache, and chiseled features possessed a bohemian streak that both entertained his fellow prisoners and gave him an exotic air. One contemporary remembered him looking like “an overgrown Spaniard.” He wore bright-colored kaftans and played the maracas. He enjoyed Cuban music and was enthralled by Latin American culture. While others sat around and played cards, he reclined on his bunk and read French literature.

The son of a colonial governor, Kirby-Green was born in what is now present-day Malawi. His parents soon shipped him off to school in England, where he earned something of a reputation at Dover College. Accustomed as he was to a more adventurous upbringing on the subcontinent, he irked the headmaster early in his school days by shooting the ducks on the college pond. It did not take long, however, for him to earn the respect of his teachers and fellow students with his intellectual acumen and prowess on the rugby field. When done with school, he joined the ranks of RAF Bomber Command in 1936 intent on becoming a pilot. Coupled with his lust for adventure was a concern over Europe’s growing fascist threat. He served with several squadrons—including a Czech training unit—before joining No. 40 Squadron, flying Wellingtons out of RAF Alconbury in Cambridgeshire. On the evening
of October 16, 1941, he took off on his thirty-seventh operation, the target being Duisburg. Enemy fire knocked his bomber from the sky on the return flight and brought it down near Reichswald Forest in north Germany. He was captured near the wreckage. The Germans considered the incident a propaganda coup to the extent that Lord Haw-Haw, the traitorous Briton turned Nazi broadcaster, announced it over the airwaves. Not long thereafter, Kirby-Green ended up in Stalag Luft III.

In a letter to his wife, Maria, dated September 30, 1943, he described the horrifying ordeal of bailing out:

During the escape’s planning phase, Kirby-Green helped handle security matters and took part in digging the tunnels. All the while, his thoughts centered on Maria and their young son, Colin. Wandering the camp one afternoon, he paused and gazed through the wire at the surrounding pine forest. The trees, he wrote home later that day in his neat, cursive writing, “don’t do well. Few are growing, but anyway I feel we’ll be together before they grow much bigger.”

And so the days, marked only by the slow lengthening of tunnels and the sluggish growth of the trees, bled one into the other until, at last, all was ready. Prior to the breakout, Kirby-Green partnered with Canadian Flying Officer Gordon Kidder, a twenty-nine-year-old navigator who had done his part helping planned escapees learn German. Prior to the war, he had briefly attended Johns Hopkins University in the States, intent on gaining a master’s in German before deciding to
try his luck in the real world. When war broke out, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was posted as a navigator to No. 156 Squadron, a Pathfinder unit that flew in ahead of the main attack force to light the target area with colored flares. On the night of October 13, 1942, Kidder’s Wellington suffered heavy flak damage over Kiel and lost an engine. The pilot fought to maintain altitude as he turned the bomber for home. Over the North Sea, the second engine gave out. The plane came down hard in the water and killed all on board except Kidder—who suffered a broken ankle—and the radio operator. The two men managed to scramble aboard the aircraft’s emergency dinghy and spent the night bobbing about on the waves. They were picked up early the next morning by a German minesweeper. Kidder had subsequently languished in Stalag Luft III since Christmas 1942.

On the night of the escape, as nervous men again checked their forged travel documents, repeated whatever German phrases they had learned, and hoped their civilian disguises passed muster, Kirby-Green took a break from the frantic last-minute preparations and penned another letter home:

Kirby-Green and Kidder were among the first two dozen men to make it through the tunnel. Posing as Spanish laborers, the pair hoped to make it to Hungary and establish contact with friends of Kirby-Green’s. Once Kidder had been pulled through the tunnel, Kirby-Green crawled onto the shaft’s flatbed trolley. He lay on his stomach and held his suitcase out in front of him. Calamity struck when, more than halfway through the shaft, the trolley slipped off the rails. When Kirby-Green tried to fix the problem, he inadvertently knocked a shoring plank out of place and brought three feet of tunnel crashing down on him. It took an hour to pull him free, excavate the dirt, repair the damage, and situate the trolley back on the rails.

Despite the setback, the two men eventually emerged from underground and made their way through the pine forest to the Sagan train station. It was after midnight. Both men saw a number of fellow escapees hanging about the platform, trying to look anonymous. Unfortunately, they also noticed some off-duty guards from the camp waiting for a train. Among them was a female officer who took a sudden interest in Kirby-Green and Kidder. She approached them and demanded, in a barking tone, to see their papers. The other escapees milling about tried to ignore the scene. The two men presented their travel passes and explained to her in Spanish they were foreign workers. The guard told them to stay where they were and ran off to show their papers to a military police officer on duty at the station. The policeman gave the passes a quick looking over and nodded his approval.

The pair, much relieved, boarded the 1
A.M.
train to Breslau. They took their seats and felt a flicker of hope as the train pulled away into the night. The journey passed without incident, and they arrived at the Breslau station an hour and a half later. In the booking hall, the men
purchased two tickets to Czechoslovakia. They got as far as Hodonin in southern Moravia, where they were arrested on March 28 and taken to a prison in Zlín.

Wing Commander Wilfred “Freddie” Bowes was broad of beam, powerfully built, and possessed a jovial disposition and forceful nature. At forty-two, he had served in the RAF since 1918, the year it was established as the world’s first independent air force. His weathered face conveyed the dual nature of his personality, quick to smile at an off-color joke but just as prone to flash anger at the stupidity of others and what he perceived to be bureaucratic meddling. He never hesitated to speak his mind, caring little for what others thought of his opinions and making good use of profanities when he deemed a situation worthy of blunt language. In his subordinates, he instilled fear, respect, and a fierce loyalty. He did not suffer fools gladly and could harshly dress down those who failed to meet his expectations, but he bristled at the thought of anyone else reprimanding those who served under him.

By early December, Bowes had been promoted to chief of the Special Investigating Branch, British forces, Occupied Germany. He arrived in Germany that month to assume overall command of the investigation. McKenna, also in line for a promotion, was made squadron leader, which gave him greater pull when requesting help from senior officers. The two men admired each other but approached their work differently, one’s personality and methods serving as a good counterbalance to the other’s.

On January 24, 1946, the letter written by van der Bijil—delayed by diplomatic protocol and intelligence assessments—reached Bowes in Germany, along with a directive from SIB headquarters in London: