Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (16 page)

When Scotland received Zacharias at the London Cage, the Gestapo man struck him as being “a wild young brute.” The prisoner’s “abnormally large, powerful hands [and] remarkably thick neck” impressed him. McKenna warned the colonel that his new inmate had a penchant for escaping. Scotland dismissed McKenna’s concerns with a wave of the hand. Escape, he said, was a near impossibility with the Scots Guards watching the premises. Satisfied, McKenna left London and returned to Germany.

Zacharias proved forthcoming during interrogation. He recalled once torturing a captured airman at Gestapo headquarters in Zlín. Outside the airman’s cell, a young secretary sat waiting in the stone corridor with a business matter that required Zacharias’s attention. Emerging from the cell and fearful the girl might have heard the airman’s screams, Zacharias asked her out to lunch. They got in his car and drove out of town into the surrounding countryside. He occupied the young Czech girl with friendly conversation. She seemed not to notice the winding route he took through the woods, taking them farther away from civilization. Only when he ceased the friendly banter and pulled the car off the road did she ask what was happening. He got out of the car and dragged the girl from the vehicle. He pulled her away from the roadside and raped her among the bushes. As the girl lay prostrate, he drew his Walther pistol and put a bullet in her head. He walked back to his car and retrieved a shovel from the trunk. Beyond the tree line, he dug a shallow hole and disposed of the body. He brushed the dirt from his uniform and did his best to hand-iron out the creases before returning to his car. He drove back to Zlín, enjoyed a lunch out, and returned to work.

“He showed neither remorse for the act,” noted Scotland, “nor compunction about describing it.” He made Zacharias strip and kneel for hours on a concrete floor—an interrogation tactic he knew the Gestapo had frequently employed. Having already confessed his involvement in the Kirby-Green and Kidder murders to McKenna in Germany, Zacharias again repeated his story for Scotland’s men. “Take him away,” said Scotland, turning to a guard, “and feed him on kindness and cups of tea.”

Zacharias was soon transferred to a holding facility at Kempton Park Racecourse in Middlesex. On the night of May 13, he took the tin plate on which he’d been served dinner and began scratching away at the wood surrounding the lock on his cell door. It was tedious work, but he eventually scraped away enough wood to release the door’s lock mechanism. He snuck his way into the prison yard and scrambled up the side of a twelve-foot-high outhouse, its roof layered with barbed wire. He crossed the roof, crushing the wire underfoot, and leapt into a tree. He shimmied along a branch and lowered himself onto a guard walk, fenced on both sides by ten-foot-high wire palisades. Spotlights swept the walkway, but four trees—their branches thick with leaves—provided ample cover. A sentry on duty a hundred yards away saw nothing. Near the end of the walkway, Zacharias found an iron bar, which he used to separate the wire in one of the palisades. He wormed his way through the hole, losing a shoe in the process, and scurried off into the night. In his pocket were rations he’d saved from his meals, which he hoped would last him at least a day or two. He moved quickly, half-expecting to hear at any moment the blare of an alarm—but all remained silent behind him. Not until eight hours later, when making their morning rounds at five, did guards discover Zacharias missing.

Officials sounded a national alarm. The BBC, at the urging of the War Office, broadcast news of the escape and warned listeners to be vigilant. Erich Zacharias, “a Nazi police officer,” was extremely dangerous. “His escape,” proclaimed the
Sunday Times
, “is one of the boldest and most desperate from any prisoner of war camp in Britain during and since the war.” Reports described the fugitive as wearing “a dark blue reefer jacket with zip fastener down the front and blue trousers, and one brown shoe.” A break developed late that morning
when a guest at the nearby Weir Hotel reported seeing a man who answered the fugitive’s description, hiding in the shrubbery of a local park along the River Thames. An army of police officers and three hundred soldiers armed with tommy guns descended on the scene and fanned out through the park. Armored cars and radio vans from the Metropolitan Police Service blockaded nearby streets. RAF reconnaissance planes thundered over the park at tree level. Although area residents were urged to stay in their homes, curious onlookers began to congregate near the park and outside the prison camp. Noted one reporter: “Italian prisoners of war, who were also at the camp, were paraded outside the guardroom preparatory to repatriation, and smilingly enjoyed the temporary notoriety when scores of sightseers, who had heard of the escape, stopped to peer at them.”

Police found Zacharias later that day, hiding beneath a bush and nursing a sprained ankle. He was returned to Kempton Park and kept under continual watch until his eventual transfer to Hamburg to stand trial.

A newspaper clipping detailing the escape of Erich Zacharias from the prison camp at Kempton Park Racecourse. Zacharias was hanged for his participation in the murders of Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green and Flying Officer Gordon Kidder.

BRITISH NATIONAL ARCHIVES: ADM 40/2492

The urns of four Sagan escapees returned to Stalag Luft III bore inscriptions identifying the place of cremation as Danzig, but details surrounding the deaths of Flying Officer Henri Picard and Flight Lieutenants Edward Brettell, Romas Marcinkus, and Gilbert Walenn had been slow to materialize. The Russians had thus far denied British investigators access to the city. Not until Flight Lieutenant Courtney—accompanied by three translators and his German shepherd—located a man named Erich Graes at an American camp in Neumünster did the case begin to unravel. Graes had been deputy director of the
Kripo
in Danzig and charged with coordinating the local search for Sagan fugitives shortly after the escape. He dictated for Courtney the order that went out to all police and military installations following the breakout:

The document was signed by Kaltenbrunner. Graes told Courtney four British officers were subsequently arrested on a passenger train at Schneidemühl on the night of March 26 and taken to a prison camp in Marienburg. They were transferred by truck the following day to
Kripo
headquarters in Danzig for interrogation. The men arrived in the evening, after Graes had gone home for the night, but he left instructions with his prison commandant to place them “in the best room in the police station.” Graes said he and his men were not accustomed to handling British fugitives and dealt primarily with Russian prisoners of war who escaped from the nearby labor camps.

“The next morning, when I went to the office, I immediately phoned the police prison and enquired after the officers,” Graes said. “I learned to my immense surprise that they had been taken away by officials of the Gestapo in Danzig and had not been brought back.”

Calls were placed to the Danzig Gestapo chief, a man named Dr. Günther Venediger, who said the matter was classified “Top Secret” and could not be discussed. Graes said his superior officer, visibly upset, informed him several days later the Gestapo was transporting the cremated remains of the officers back to Breslau. He could only conclude that the Gestapo had shot the prisoners. In recounting the story, Graes nervously tapped his fingers while he spoke. He said he learned shortly thereafter the Gestapo had executed “forty-three or forty-seven” Sagan escapees. Several months after the killings, he picked up a Swiss newspaper and read an account of Anthony Eden’s promise to Parliament. Graes drove that day to Gestapo headquarters and confronted Venediger in his
office. He slapped the newspaper down on Venediger’s desk and pointed to the article. “Is this true?” he asked. “Were these men murdered?”

“We do not do that sort of thing in Matzkau,” Venediger said, brushing the newspaper aside.

“Matzkau?” asked Courtney.

“It’s a rather distant suburb of Danzig,” Graes explained. “There was a penal camp there for persons who had been sentenced by the SS and police courts. As far as I know, there was an average of 10,000 prisoners there.”

Graes’s tone and expression took on sudden anger.

“I am at any time ready to substantiate my statements on oath before the court,” he said. “It is a question of an action that can never be justified.”

Courtney nodded. “What can you tell me about Venediger?”

“He’s big and elegant looking and holds himself well. Somewhat aristocratic,” Graes said. “He’s slim and about six feet tall, has very dark—almost black—hair with a parting on the left. No mustache, thirty-eight years old. His home was in Danzig, but he’s rumored to have been seen in Hamburg after the capitulation. He might be found in Magdeburg, as his wife’s parents live there. He’ll certainly have false papers.”

Dr. Venediger now joined the ranks of the hunted.

McKenna and his men continued the arduous task of canvassing Allied prison camps in the British and American sectors for leads. It was a painstaking process that offered no alternative. At one camp after another, they reviewed countless prisoner files and dossiers, the pages of many stained with details of atrocities so heinous one could not help but feel physically ill. At No. 4 CIC near Recklinghausen in the British Zone, two of McKenna’s team reviewed the records of eight thousand internees. Named in the files was a onetime Gestapo agent who appeared on the RAF’s wanted list for his alleged involvement in the murders of Squadron Leader Roger Bushell and Lieutenant Bernard Scheidhauer in
Saarbrücken. Possessing “the manners and appearance of a thug,” the man confessed to knowing of the crime but denied direct involvement. He identified Saarbrücken Gestapo chief Dr. Leopold Spann, number forty-two on the RAF’s list, as the mastermind and—possibly—the gunman.

While the investigation made slow but steady progress in the British and American zones, efforts were under way to uncover leads in the French sector. Records at the French War Crimes and Political Prisoners Bureau in Paris were poorly organized—a result of the French frequently moving prisoners from one camp to another. The French were busy dismantling their smaller camps and transferring prisoners to larger facilities. Not until the process was complete and the smaller camps had been abolished was there any hope of the files being properly organized. In their sector, the French had assumed the role of conqueror and did little to hide their disdain for the vanquished population. As far as they were concerned, being a German—regardless of whether or not one was a Nazi—was crime enough. They had a grudge to settle. In the latter stages of the war, French forces—following behind the Americans—marched into Stuttgart and raped an estimated three thousand women and eight men. Likewise, in the small town of Freudenstadt, they raped women as old as eighty, burned homes, and shot civilians. It was the sort of behavior one associated more with the Red Army, which, in the vast areas of Germany it overran, unleashed a frenzy of “looting, destruction and rape.” Noted one Danish journalist, “It was not that a sex-starved Russian soldier forced himself upon a girl who took his fancy. It was a destructive, hateful and wholesale act of vengeance. Age or looks were irrelevant. The grandmother was no safer than the granddaughter, the ugly and filthy no more than the fresh and attractive.”