Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (18 page)

A visit by Bowes and Lyon one afternoon to what remained of Stalag Luft III underscored the depressing nature of their recent inquiries. The
Luftwaffe
evacuated the camp on the night of January 27, 1945, with the Red Army rapidly approaching from the east. More than two thousand inmates were forced to march nearly fifty miles in temperatures well below zero. After spending the night in barns, sheds, makeshift tents, and anything else that might shelter them from the freezing elements, the exhausted, frostbitten men arrived in the town of Spremberg. There, the Germans loaded them into the backs of trucks and shipped them off to new camps. American prisoners were dispatched to a compound just outside Munich. The inmates from North Compound, from which the escape took place, were taken to a facility near Bremen. They remained there until April 9, when their captors again decided to evacuate and forced them to march nearly one hundred miles to a camp outside Lübeck. The barracks were so overrun with lice, rodents, and filth, the prisoners were held in two neighboring farms instead, until their liberation by British troops on May 2.

Bowes and Lyon walked about the camp grounds in silence, the barracks now falling into disrepair. The surrounding pine forest had yet to reclaim the site. A monument to the fifty built by inmates not long after the escape still stood a short distance from the compound. It was made of gray stone from a local quarry. Three large slabs atop
the monument bore the names of the dead. The two RAF men read the names and bowed their heads.

There was nothing more for Bowes and Lyon to do in Breslau—nothing, in fact, they could do. An embittered Bowes arrived back in Rinteln toward the end of May. Although the Breslau inquiry had gone nowhere, he was pleased to learn of great strides made in the Munich investigation.

^*
Baatz was captured by the Russians but released early and never seen again. Weyland disappeared into the Russian Zone; the French captured and imprisoned Weissmann.

Lieutenants Johannes Gouws and Rupert Stevens, both South Africans, were among the first men to make it out of the tunnel. Gouws joined the air force on May 14, 1940—four days after Hitler unleashed his blitzkrieg on the west—and received his commission early the following year. He was posted to a fighter-bomber squadron in Abyssinia that mostly flew low-level reconnaissance operations. During one such mission in August 1941, engine problems forced Gouws to crash land his Hartbee. When it touched down, the plane flipped over and trapped Gouws under the fuselage, forcing his crewmate to dig him out. Bruised but upright, the two men walked away from the wreckage and spent the better part of a week trudging across the barren landscape, sheltering in the huts of locals at night, before rejoining their squadron. Eight months later, on April 9, 1942, two Me-109s shot down Gouws and his Tomahawk over Egypt. This time, he did not evade capture.

Rupert John Stevens received his wings shortly after Britain’s declaration of war. Less than six months later, he was flying combat operations over the Western Desert. The target for Stevens and his crew on the morning of November 14, 1941, was a German airfield in Derna, Libya. Nine Martin Maryland light bombers took off on the raid and fell into formation over an endless expanse of desert. They made their objective and bombed and strafed the airfield before setting a course
for home. On the ground, anti-aircraft guns opened fire and threw up heavy clouds of shrapnel. Flak hit the port wing of Stevens’s aircraft and punctured the fuel tanks. Within seconds, the damaged wing was hemorrhaging fuel. It took only minutes to completely empty the tank. The bomber’s controls grew sluggish and the aircraft began losing altitude. As had been the plan in case of emergency, Stevens turned the stricken bomber toward Tobruk, dropped the plane’s undercarriage, and ordered the crew to fire the colors of the day from their flare guns. The men, however, mistook the German-held port of Bardia for Tobruk. Flak again battered the plane as it came in low. Shrapnel pierced the cockpit, wounding Stevens and knocking him unconscious. The navigator seized the controls but died on landing when the plane’s nose caved in. Although suffering life-threatening injuries, Stevens and the two air gunners survived the ordeal. They were captured and sent to a German hospital, where they slowly recovered from their wounds. Once in better health, they were dispatched to various prison camps. It wasn’t long before Stevens found himself, along with Gouws, in Stalag Luft III.

Their plan the night of the escape was to travel by train to Breslau and then Switzerland. They picked their way through the pine forest surrounding the camp and arrived at the Sagan station only to see their intended train pulling away from the platform. They hung about the station for more than an hour, wrestling with frantic nerves, before boarding the one o’clock express to Breslau. It was in the booking hall at Breslau station the two men were last seen, doing their best to blend in with the other travelers. Their ashes arrived at Stalag Luft III several weeks later. An inscription on the underside of each urn gave the date of death as March 29, 1944, and identified Munich as the place of cremation.

It was all the RAF had to go on.

The investigation commenced in November 1945. Because their canvassing of internment camps in the American sector would take them to Munich, McKenna tasked Flight Lieutenant Courtney’s team with investigating the Gouws-Stevens murders. Early on, Courtney and his men traced a onetime member of the Munich
Kripo
to the southern
Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a ski resort popular with the Nazi leadership before the war. It was here Hitler had opened the 1936 Winter Olympics and presented himself as the benevolent dictator. In preparation for the hordes of spectators, the Nazis removed the numerous “Jews Not Wanted” signs displayed prominently about town prior to the games. Only five months earlier—at the party’s annual rally—the regime had enacted the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws designed to safeguard the “purity” of the German race. By the time Hitler took his seat in the Führer’s Gallery to watch the games, his minions were busy shipping political opponents and those of inferior blood off to concentration camps. It was to this Alpine idyll that Hermann Göring had escaped in the wake of Hitler’s failed coup in Munich in 1923. And it was here Hitler initially planned to build a mountain retreat, before he finally settled on Berchtesgaden.

The Americans now maintained an internment camp at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Flight Sergeant Williams, a member of Courtney’s team, arrived at the facility on January 21, 1946, to interview Anton Gassner. The onetime
Kripo
agent refused to answer questions put to him by a member of the Royal Air Force. Williams lit a cigarette and explained in a casual manner that a cell awaited Gassner in the London Cage. Cooperation now might go some way in helping his situation in the future. Gassner took a cigarette from the packet Williams placed on the table and signaled his acquiescence by asking for a light.

“Are you a party member?” asked Williams.

“Yes,” Gassner said, “since the first of May 1937.”

“When were you arrested?”

“On 30th June, 1945.”

Gassner said he became a police officer in 1913, at the age of twenty-three, and joined a small gendarmerie in the town of Augsberg. He transferred in July 1919 to the Munich Town Police, which was taken over by the state in 1938 and absorbed into the
Kripo
. He spent the entire war in Munich and achieved the rank of
kriminalrat,
or detective. In the waning days of the conflict—with the U.S. Army closing in—he fled Munich and went into hiding at his sister’s house in Reichenhall. It was there the Americans took him into custody.

“Do you remember,” asked Williams, “that in March 1944 there was a mass escape from a stalag at Sagan?”

Gassner said a teleprint from the State Security Office in Berlin had come through to Criminal Police headquarters in Munich on the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1944. The message detailed the escape from Stalag Luft III and ordered all regional police agencies to join the search effort. The escapees were officers of the Royal Air Force and most likely carrying false papers and disguised in civilian clothing. Gassner said his superior, a man named Greiner, placed him in charge of search operations in and around Munich. Gassner focused his efforts on area train stations, which quickly led to the apprehension of three RAF officers. Taken first into custody was Lieutenant Neely, arrested on an express train outside Donauwoerth. Neely spoke “excellent German,” Gassner said, and made “a good impression” on his captors.

“The flying officer asked me what would happen to him,” Gassner said. “I gave him to understand that I supposed he would be returned to Sagan, but that instructions would have to come from the State Security Head Office. Until then, he would have to remain in the prison of the police headquarters in Munich. Before taking leave of him, I asked him whether he required anything or had enough to eat and smoke. He indicated to me that he did not require anything. I told him that if, during his stay, he required something after all, he should mention it to me or my deputy.”

Gouws and Stevens were arrested shortly thereafter on separate trains. A Munich police inspector took one into custody on the Buchloe-Lindau express just outside Kaufbeuren, roughly fifty miles from Munich. The other man was riding in a second-class compartment on the slow train from Rosenheim. Both men were taken to Criminal Police headquarters in Munich and questioned. All three arrests, Gassner said, took place between March 25 and April 3. After the two South Africans were apprehended, Gassner had to leave Munich for a War Search Conference in Dresden. Upon his return on April 11, he learned that Neely had been sent back to Stalag Luft III.

“The two other officers,” he said, “had been taken away by the State Police.”

Less than a week later, Greiner’s deputy—a man named Haselsberger—asked Gassner to transport two wrapped parcels to Criminal Police headquarters in Breslau.

“At first, Haselsberger did not want to say what they contained,” Gassner said. “I replied that in that case, we would simply open the boxes—but this, Haselsberger would not permit. Then he intimated to me, pointing out that it was top secret, that the parcels contained urns of two English Air Force officers. He did not tell me from which department this top secret matter had originated, but I guessed immediately it must be a question of the English flyers who had been in custody. How these officers met their death and at whose hands I did not find out at that time.”

Gassner said all evidence relating to the murders had since been destroyed.

“About a fortnight before the arrival of the American Army,” he said, “all secret documents, and thus also the Sagan file at the Criminal Police headquarters in Munich, were destroyed by orders of Greiner.”

“And what happened to Greiner?” Williams asked.

Gassner said the U.S. Army seized Greiner in June 1945. The Americans confirmed they had the former Munich
Kripo
chief in custody. Courtney handled Greiner’s interrogation but gleaned little information. The man claimed to have been away on sick leave at the time of the Sagan escape, but Courtney pushed forward with his questioning. Greiner, an experienced interrogator himself, offered only vague answers.

“What happened to the two RAF officers?”

“They were handed over to the Gestapo,” Greiner said. “That is all I know. I learned from Gassner that two urns were taken to Breslau by an official.”

“Did you see the urns?”

“No.”

“Do you know what happened before the urns were filled with ashes?”

“I don’t know,” said Greiner. “It was all very hush-hush.”

“As head of the Munich Kripo,” said Courtney, more than a little incredulous, “didn’t you enquire?”

“No,” replied Greiner, matter-of-factly. “The matter finished for me after the Gestapo took the case over.”

Courtney, not wanting to waste any more time, left the room and made the necessary arrangements to transfer Greiner to the London Cage for a more thorough interrogation. In the meantime, the canvassing of American camps continued. For Courtney and his team, it was akin to fumbling about in the dark. They weren’t always sure what they were looking for until they found it. At an internment camp in Ludwigsburg, they came across a man named Josef Achter. A onetime Bavarian police officer turned Gestapo agent, Achter detailed the night Gouws and Stevens were murdered. He was working the night shift at Gestapo headquarters in Munich with another agent named Emil Weil. He remembered the occasion well because one of the on-duty drivers, a man named Schneider, turned up to work with a Russian tommy gun.