Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (15 page)

Bowes and his team took up position behind a row of foliage and studied the building’s façade. All appeared silent and still. Bowes squinted at his watch: the top of the hour was minutes away. Since Czechoslovakia, he had thought many times of Thomas Kirby-Green and Gordon Kidder, falling in a sodden field and lying in muck. He glanced at his watch again, impatient to get the job done. At 0100 hours, the Americans took the hotel from the front. A violent banging on the door announced their arrival, startling the sleeping guests and dispelling the darkness. The place sprang to life with noise and light. Bowes and his men rushed across a patch of frozen lawn and entered through
the back door. Guests who tried to flee their rooms were ordered back inside. It took several minutes to restore some level of peace and order. A bewildered Frau Brichta, in her nightgown, pleaded to know what was happening. Bowes showed his identification and stated his business. The woman seemed incredulous. “No Gestapo from Brno, or anywhere else,” she said, “has stayed here since the capitulation!”

A room-to-room search of the premises turned up nothing. Guests were questioned and the hotel registry examined, without results. That afternoon, Bowes interrogated Herr Brichta at the CIC in Salzburg. He admitted local Gestapo officials had once stayed at a hotel he owned in Brno. “They bled me white,” he said. “They had food and drink for which they offered nothing in return. They said that if events ever went wrong, they would come and stay at my hotel in Zell Am See, but they never did.” Bowes left the camp disappointed. Although he had found the Brichtas to be “undesirable types,” he could see no reason for them to lie. “With regard to the question of harbouring Gestapo officials, they were telling the truth,” he cabled London. “I consider it extremely probable that should Brichta get an opportunity of cutting of their throats, he would do so.”

Two days later, on March 11, McKenna—accompanied by Dutch translator Lieutenant Colonel Vreugdenhil—arrived in the American-held port of Bremen. He met that morning with officials from the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps and presented what information he had on Erich Zacharias. Records showed that a German national by that name currently worked as a clerk at the No. 256 U.S. Army Refrigeration Plant on the city’s main dock. McKenna moved quickly. Through the U.S. Army’s regional public safety officer, Lieutenant Freshour, he arranged a military police escort and descended on the docks that afternoon. The men, armed with automatics and mug shots of the wanted man, dispersed and went in search of their prey. It was 2:14
P.M.
when McKenna, standing outside the refrigeration plant, saw Zacharias heading in his direction. McKenna approached the man; Vreugdenhil and Freshour drew their Colt .45s and covered Zacharias from behind.

“My name is Frank McKenna,” he said, as he drew closer. “I’m an
officer with the Royal Air Force investigating the murders of fifty British airmen from Stalag Luft III. Show me your papers.”

The man fumbled inside his jacket and produced an American-issued identity card in the name of Erich Zacharias. Because the Americans had classified him as “harmless,” he’d had no reason to assume a false identity. McKenna pocketed the card and took the man by the arm. McKenna drove Zacharias to the CIC at Wesermünde. The prisoner was stripped and searched for poisons before being moved under armed guard to the American-run prison in Karlsburg. Later that day, McKenna sought permission from U.S. authorities to transfer Zacharias to the War Criminals Holding Centre in British-controlled Minden. Approval, he was told, would have to come from U.S. forces headquarters in Frankfurt Am Main and would take several days. Determined not to lose the RAF’s first major catch to the Americans, McKenna settled into a cheap hotel and waited.

He did not have to wait long: the necessary clearances came through the following day. He reported that afternoon to Freshour, who met him with a grim expression and news that Zacharias had escaped. As guards walked him to an army truck parked in the prison courtyard, Zacharias broke free and ran through the open prison gates. He put the truck between himself and the guards, who raised their rifles to fire, and disappeared into the nearby wreckage of a bombed-out building. McKenna phoned Bowes in Rinteln, who voiced his displeasure in the bluntest terms. There was nothing McKenna could do but lend whatever assistance the Americans might need. McKenna returned to Rinteln to let the manhunt run its course, but he held out little hope of success. A break came some weeks later when investigators, monitoring the mail services, intercepted a letter addressed to a friend of Zacharias. “Erich has been ill,” it read, “and will soon be on his way.” The return address was a house in Fallersleben, in the province of Brunswick, mere miles from the Russian Zone of Occupation. American soldiers stormed the house at one o’clock on the morning of March 31 and found Zacharias packing for a long trip. McKenna traveled to Wesermünde on April 2, took Zacharias into custody, and conveyed him to the British holding
facility in Minden. A strip search revealed in his possession a silver wristwatch of the kind worn by British aircrews.

“Where did you get this?” asked McKenna, holding up the watch for closer inspection.

“I bought it in Zlín,” said Zacharias, unable to provide additional details.

“Why did you escape from the American prison at Wesermünde?”

“I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I know why you arrested me,” Zacharias said. “Wasn’t it on account of two English Luftwaffe officers? I only did my duty; I will tell you all about it. I have had many sleepless nights of worry since the happening.”

McKenna informed Zacharias of his rights and allowed him to proceed. Zacharias made no attempt to assert his innocence. From 1938 to 1945, he had served with the Gestapo in Zlín under
Kriminalrat
Hans Ziegler.

“I last saw him in Zlín just before I left,” Zacharias said. “I don’t know where he is now. I don’t know where any of the other Gestapo are. I would tell you if I knew.”

Zacharias now played a familiar card.

“I carried out the task first because it was an order,” he said, “then because I was assured that nothing could happen to me later, and also because I justified myself in that there was a war on and that the airmen might have killed already many hundreds of civilians by bombing.”

He said that when he and Kiowsky retrieved the two airmen from the prison in Zlín, Kirby-Green voiced his anger at being shackled.

“I reported this to Ziegler at the office,” Zacharias said. “He replied that the two prisoners did not look like officers, but like tramps and therefore could not be treated in any other way until it had been established that they really were captured officers.”

After the prisoners were interrogated and their identities established, they were bundled into separate cars for their alleged transfer back to camp. It was about two o’clock in the morning when the journey commenced.

“I had the Canadian officer in my car,” Zacharias said. “I believe his name was Gordon.”

At four-thirty that morning, roughly six miles outside Moravska Ostrava, the two vehicles pulled over.

“I made the prisoner get out of the car and go to the kerb to pass water there,” he said. “I took up position about one meter obliquely to the left and behind him and observed what was happening at Knuppelberg’s car. I noticed that there, too, everything had gone according to plan and his prisoner was also standing at the kerb. Then Knuppelberg raised his right hand holding the pistol and pointed the barrel at the back of his prisoner’s head. This was for me the time for action. 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 to hit his heart.”

Zacharias said he and Knuppelberg fired their weapons simultaneously.

“I fired a second shot at the prisoner as he was collapsing,” Zacharias said, “hitting him above the right ear.”

Zacharias knelt beside the body, checked for a pulse, and felt none. Shining a torch in Kidder’s eyes, he saw no change in the pupils.

“I ran to Knuppelberg and saw his prisoner lying with a bleeding wound at the back of the head,” Zacharias said. “I then tried to make him hurry up and get to Moravska Ostrava to fetch an ambulance. I wanted the corpses to disappear as quickly as possible from the road so as not to give an exhibition to the many workers going to work.”

Once the bodies had been removed and taken away for cremation, Zacharias returned to the police station with Kiowsky and detailed the killings for Ziegler.

“He replied, ‘Good, that’s all right. You go home and sleep because you look terrible.’ ”

On April 5, 1946, McKenna escorted Erich Zacharias to the London Cage. The men took off from an airfield outside Minden and flew by Dakota to RAF Croydon. By jeep, they traveled into London proper, a wounded city. Zacharias stared out the window and took in the damage. What he saw fell far short of claims made by Nazi propaganda, declaring that German bombs had rendered the British capital a desolate wasteland. Surface air-raid shelters still lined cratered streets, and rubble-strewn holes marked where buildings once stood, but the city still thrived. Londoners appeared to be going about their business: heading to work, shopping, attempting to live as normal an existence as circumstances allowed.

The London Cage occupied three large white mansions in Kensington Palace Gardens, an exclusive enclave of grandiose architecture and old money. The eloquent exteriors of numbers 6, 7, and 8 belied the brutality that occurred within. Only a single barbed-wire fence separating the houses from the main street gave any indication of something amiss. Operated by MI9, the branch of the War Office charged with the interrogation of captured enemy personnel, the Cage had opened for business in July 1940. The interior of the houses had been modified to serve their unique purpose, with five interrogation rooms and cells to house up to sixty prisoners at any given time. A dozen noncommissioned officers served as interrogators and interpreters. Soldiers, selected “for
their height, rather than their brains,” guarded the prisoners around the clock. Lieutenant Colonel A. P. Scotland oversaw the facility’s day-to-day operation. Now in his mid-sixties, the blunt Scotland was the ideal man for the job. British-born, he had traveled in 1904, at the age of twenty-two, to South Africa and taken a job managing a branch of South African Territories, Ltd., a “grocery and provisions trade.” His work brought him into contact with German officials who invited him to join the German Army in southwest Africa to oversee the distribution of its food supplies. He served in the German Army from 1903 to 1907 and acquired unique insight into its military philosophies and tactics. The knowledge proved useful when, during the First World War, he worked as an interrogator for British Intelligence. He toured Germany twice between the wars, fascinated as he was by its people, and again went to work for British Intelligence as an interrogator during the Second World War.

The London Cage, despite its elegant setting, was a brutal place. Visiting the Cage, an RAF airman was surprised upon entering the premises one evening to find a German naval officer in full regalia on his hands and knees, scrubbing the floor to the entrance hall. Over him stood a broad-shouldered guard, a cigarette clamped in one corner of his mouth, with a heavy boot placed squarely on the prisoner’s back. Scotland possessed no qualms about the methods employed under his watch. “Abandon all hope ye who enter here,” he thought each morning as he settled behind his desk. Prisoners who refused to share what vital information they had were eventually broken. From the threat of violence to psychological browbeating, Scotland’s men excelled at their specialized trade. At night they roamed the halls and knocked on cell doors every fifteen minutes to deprive inmates of their sleep. Those who did not initially crack were threatened during interrogations with torture, needless surgical procedures, and execution. Others were told they would simply vanish and never be heard from again. Beatings were not uncommon, while making a prisoner stand at attention for more than twenty-four hours straight proved an effective method of wearing down a man’s resolve.

Vicious though such treatment may have been, Scotland felt justified in the steps taken to extract information. He was, after all, dealing with members of the Gestapo and the SS. Hadn’t they perpetrated far greater
evils on countless others? If anything, they deserved the harsh measures being meted out. Besides, his work served an important purpose. The statements he extracted from prisoners sent a number of Nazis to the gallows.

The Red Cross, which monitored prisoner-of-war facilities, initially knew nothing of the Cage. Only when the name and location of the Cage was inadvertently added to a list of camps submitted by British authorities did it come to the aid organization’s attention. In early 1946, they sent an inspector to Kensington Palace Gardens to ensure the treatment of those imprisoned behind its ornate white walls adhered to the Geneva Convention. Scotland would have none of it, and the inspector was promptly turned away at the door. Scotland explained his actions in a letter to his superiors at the War Office. Those imprisoned in the London Cage, he wrote, were either civilians or war criminals within the German military, neither of whom were protected under the Geneva Convention. Allowing the Red Cross to inspect the Cage, he argued, would severely limit his ability to do his job—especially when it came to questioning those suspected in the Stalag Luft III murders. Should the Red Cross persist in gaining access to the Cage, the interrogation of Sagan suspects, he wrote, “must proceed in Germany under conditions more closely related to police methods than to Geneva Convention principles.”

SS Captain Fritz Knoechlein, arrested for his part in the slaying of ninety-nine British soldiers near Paradis, Pas-de-Calais, France, in May 1940, made note of his experiences in the Cage prior to his 1949 execution. When he refused to surrender information sought by his interrogators, Knoechlein claimed he was stripped, starved, and deprived of sleep for nearly a week. The guards routinely beat him, he said, and forced him to exercise until he passed out. Among the physical exertions forced upon him were walking in a tight circle for four hours and running through the Cage’s landscaped back garden while carrying a heavy log. Complaining to Scotland about his treatment only made matters worse. He was tossed down a flight of stairs and beaten with a club. On one occasion, he wrote, he was forced to strip and stand near a hot gas stove. When he could no longer tolerate the heat, guards dragged him into a shower stall and blasted him with freezing water. Other
prisoners, he claimed, were treated in a similar manner and begged their captors to kill them. Scotland dismissed Knoechlein’s story of brutality as “a lame allegation.” He later recounted the SS man’s last few nights in the Cage before being shipped to Hamburg to face trial. “[He] gave us an example of what might have been regarded in another man as pitiful behavior, but from him it seemed merely contemptible,” Scotland wrote. “He began shrieking in a half-crazed fashion, so that the guards at the London Cage were at a loss to know how to control him. At one stage, the local police called in to enquire why such a din was emanating from sedate Kensington Palace Gardens.”