Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (19 page)

“I had not seen a model like that before,” Achter said. “Schneider told me it was his own property; that he had brought it back with him from active service in the East.”

Shortly before eleven that evening, Munich Gestapo chief Dr. Oswald Schäfer summoned to his office Weil, Schneider, and two other men identified as
Kriminalkommissar
Martin Schermer and
Kriminalsekretär
Eduard Geith. Achter, whose desk faced Schäfer’s office, said the men met behind closed doors for roughly ten minutes. When the meeting concluded, none of the participants seemed eager to share details.

“Weil resumed his seat opposite me,” Achter said. “I asked Weil what was up. He evaded answering and gave it to be understood he was not allowed to talk about it. I never discovered anything about the nature and purpose of the job—either in the course of conversation, or by rumor—so that I forgot about the incident.”

Not until after his arrest at war’s end, Achter said, did he put the pieces together. In an American-run internment camp, Achter learned from a colleague that two escapees from Stalag Luft III had been murdered in the Munich area.

“Until then,” he said, “I did not know this fact.”

“What happened to Weil, Schermer, and Geith?” Courtney asked.

“I heard Weil worked for the Americans in Munich after the capitulation but had later been arrested,” Achter said. He believed the Americans had also seized Schneider. “According to an eye-witness account, Schermer committed suicide by shooting himself. It’s also been said that Geith is in some American internment camp.”

“What about Schäfer?”

“There are various opinions about Schäfer’s whereabouts,” Achter said. “According to his deputy, he is said to have left on a bicycle with very little luggage the day before the troops marched into Munich. He was supposedly seen in the Tyrol a few days later. It is generally assumed that he first fled and then later committed suicide. As far as I know, his family was living in a village near Prien when the war ended.”

Achter’s information cleared away the fog of mystery long obscuring the murders. Courtney now added Weil, Schneider, Geith, and Schäfer to his wanted list. A search of Munich city records produced a death certificate for Schermer, who apparently hanged himself from a tree prior to the Americans entering the city.

At about this time, interrogators at the London Cage were busy questioning a recently captured staff member from the Central Security Office named Peter Mohr. Mohr had joined the Bavarian Police in 1926 before transferring to the Munich
Kripo
one year before the outbreak of war. A promotion in February 1944 to the rank of
Kriminalkommissar
—the equivalent of a detective superintendent—saw him transferred to security headquarters in Berlin. He was assigned to Section C, which helped coordinate nationwide manhunts for wanted individuals. One month later, word reached Berlin of the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III. Believing this episode would provide Mohr valuable insight as to how one organized a large-scale search, Mohr’s superior placed him in charge of the Sagan case files. Consequently, Mohr was well versed in all aspects of the case and possessed knowledge relevant to the Munich investigation. Part of Mohr’s job was to catalogue the possessions of those escapees murdered by the Gestapo.

While processing Gouws’s and Stevens’s personal effects, Mohr learned that the Munich Gestapo had deducted the cost of the coffins and cremations from the cash the prisoners had on them. If the Gestapo had been forced to pay cremation expenses, then the bodies had most likely been destroyed at the city’s only public crematorium, located in Munich’s East Cemetery. No cost would have been incurred had the Gestapo destroyed the bodies at the Dachau concentration camp, Mohr told his London interrogators. In Munich, Flight Sergeant Williams reviewed the cemetery’s records and found copies of receipts for the two cremations. At an abandoned building previously used as the police prison, he discovered a document—left behind in the mad rush to vacate the building prior the arrival of American forces—stating that Gouws and Stevens had been held in cell number thirty-two upon their capture. Williams made his way to the holding area on the lower levels and found the cell in question. “It was two feet wide and about five feet long,” he noted, “and you could see the marks on the walls where the poor devils who were kept there for any length of time had gone demented, and beaten and scratched the wall.”

The search for Emil Weil took Courtney back to Dachau once the Americans confirmed they had the man in custody. On May 16, 1946, a visibly frightened Weil provided Courtney an eyewitness account of the killings. Originally a civil police officer in Bavaria, Weil had been posted to the Gestapo in Neustadt in 1938 to help oversee security during construction of the Siegfried Line, a stretch of fortifications along Germany’s western frontier. The following year—at the age of twenty-nine—he was transferred to the Munich Gestapo and remained there for the war’s entirety, assigned to the Counter Espionage Branch.

The Gestapo in Munich operated out of the Wittelsbach Palais, former royal palace of the Bavarian monarchs. One night, toward the end of March 1944, Weil was catching up on paperwork at his desk. At about ten o’clock, he heard a car pull up in the courtyard below his office window. He glanced out and saw Geith, Schneider, and Schermer exit the car and enter the palace. Roughly two hours later, Weil said, Schermer came into the duty office and told him he would be taking
part in the transporting of two prisoners early the next morning. When Weil questioned the assignment, Schermer waved a dismissive hand and said, “Orders are orders.” At four-thirty in the morning, Weil was summoned downstairs to the station’s holding cells. He saw two men in civilian clothing being moved from one of the cells at gunpoint and placed in a six-seater car out back. He, along with Schermer, Schneider, and Geith, got in the car with the two prisoners. They got on the autobahn and drove in the direction of Ingolstadt. They rode in silence. Thirty miles into the journey, Weil said, Schermer ordered the car onto the shoulder. Everyone was told to relieve himself. The air was cold and a frost covered the ground. Weil walked past the front of the car and into a meadow that fell away from the roadside. Behind him, the two prisoners were ushered out of the car and marched to a position about six feet to Weil’s right and less than two feet in front him.

“On the right of the prisoners was Geith, also slightly in front of me,” Weil said. “I did not see whether or not the prisoners were manacled. While I urinated, two shots from an automatic weapon fired in quick succession. I saw the first prisoner on the left falling forward and, immediately afterwards, the one on the right. I turned at once towards the car and saw Schermer standing before the rear right door. At the same moment, I noticed Schneider at the back of the car. He had a submachine gun in his hand. Then I saw Schermer going to the two who were lying there. He looked at Schneider and told him to fire more shots at each. Schneider approached the two corpses and fired a few shots with his sub-machine gun, as he had been ordered. Schermer ordered that a covering be fetched from the car and the bodies covered. I did not go to the bodies nor did I cover them.”

Weil drew a nervous breath before continuing.

“Schermer said he had to drive to the municipal legal official and medical officer, and told me and Geith to remain with the bodies in the meantime. After about twenty minutes, two policemen came along on their beat. Geith showed them his papers and said our commanding officer had gone to the authorities. As far as I remember, one of the policemen remained with us, and the other left us after a while.”

Schermer and Schneider returned in a van roughly one hour later
with a police officer and a civilian worker. The latter approached the bodies and pulled back a corner of the blanket.

“They’re dead,” he said.

Schermer summoned the officer and civilian to the back of the van, where they conferred in quiet tones. What they said could not be heard by the others, who remained by the bodies.

“Shortly afterwards,” Weil said, “the civilian and the police officer drove off in the direction of Ingolstadt. At Schermer’s instruction, Schneider, Geith, and I had to put the bodies in a hollow to prevent their being seen so easily from the autobahn. We also had to cover them with pine twigs so that we could take the covering with us. One of the policemen remained with the bodies. Schermer, Geith, Schneider, and I then returned to Munich. At Allerhausen (or some such name) we stopped at the police station where Schermer, I presume, telephoned the funeral office at Munich to collect the bodies. On our return to the office we had to swear an oath of secrecy before Schäfer.”

Not until April 1945, with the Americans only days away from the city, did the matter come up again. A panicked Schäfer dispatched Weil to the local funeral home to remove the airmen’s names from the undertaker’s registry. Weil did as instructed, using a pocketknife and typewriter eraser to eliminate the names from the pages of the book. Reporting to Schäfer upon completing the job, Weil was ordered to do the same with the booking ledger at the police prison, where Gouws and Stevens had initially been held. The police, Weil said, did not object to his mission, as they planned on destroying all records prior to the arrival of the Americans.

Courtney had Weil transferred to the British military prison in Minden and crossed the man’s name off his list. He now turned his attention to combing the American camps for Schneider and Geith. Although the U.S. Army had seized both men in a postwar roundup of Nazi collaborators, locating them among the hundreds of thousands of people now interned in Allied camps posed a significant challenge. Inaccurate record keeping and the in-and-out flow of transfers from one camp to another meant some individuals got lost in the shuffle. Oswald Schäfer’s whereabouts, however, were a different matter. Depending on
whom Courtney spoke with, Schäfer was either dead or on the run. Until the man’s fate could be firmly substantiated, his name would remain on the wanted list.

The search for Schneider eventually took a turn in the right direction when Courtney located the man’s wife. She said her husband was being held in Hammelburg, a small town in Bavaria and the site of a large internment camp. The lead was forwarded to the Americans, who confirmed several days later that Johann Schneider’s name appeared on the camp’s list of identified prisoners. The journey from Munich by jeep took Courtney through the snowcapped Bavarian Alps, a stunning reprieve from the depressing drudgery of shattered cities and mud-swollen camps. His arrival in Hammelburg, however, brought him back to reality. The camp sat in a forested area roughly two miles south of the city. Initially a training facility for the German Army, the camp was used to hold enemy combatants during both world wars. It was here the Germans imprisoned Americans captured during the Battle of the Bulge. Conditions at the camp, designated Oflag XIII-B, were grim during the best of times and had grown increasingly dire as the war turned against the Reich.

Each of the seven five-roomed barracks in the camp’s American compound housed nearly two hundred GIs during the war. Lighting in each room, provided by two single fifteen-watt bulbs, was extremely poor—as was insulation against the elements. Temperatures in the barracks during the winter averaged no higher than twenty degrees and forced the incarcerated men to gather whatever clothes and blankets they could spare and burn them in the single stove that furnished each room. Because the camp received no clothes from the Red Cross, staying warm during the cold months became a matter of basic survival for the inmates. There were no washrooms. The men had to retrieve any water they needed from a faucet in the camp’s kitchen to fill the few sinks in their barracks. Because of fuel rationing, the camp was not equipped with hot water. Comfort could hardly be found in the daily rations, which consisted of “one-tenth of a loaf of bread, one cup of ersatz coffee, one bowl of barley soup, and one serving of vegetables.” Occasionally, the diet was supplemented by a teaspoon of sugar and a
small slice of margarine. Toward the end of the war, many men in the camp were bedridden by malnutrition.

As the war swung in the Allies’ favor—and air raids over Germany wrought ever-increasing carnage—tensions between the Americans and their German captors ran increasingly high. The camp’s commandant had strict rules in place dictating the proper protocol during an air raid. When air raid sirens in the vicinity of the camp signaled an impending attack, the prisoners had three minutes to get back to their barracks. One evening, the sirens began to wail, and four American officers, standing at the barbed-wire fence and chatting with several Serbian POWs in the neighboring compound, did not immediately seek shelter. They eventually returned to their barracks with a slim margin to spare and were spotted by a guard standing post seventy-five yards away. The guard fired at the four men and struck one in the back. The bullet tore through the prisoner’s lung and blew out his chest. Another POW was shot, on a separate occasion, in the back of the head by a guard after failing to understand an order barked at him in German. One order in particular irked American officers imprisoned at Oflag XIII-B. The camp’s commandant deemed it necessary for all Americans, regardless of rank, to salute German officers first. The regulation, naturally, led to a fair number of ugly confrontations between guards and prisoners.

In late March 1945, Lieutenant General George S. Patton—commanding the U.S. Third Army—ordered the creation of a special task force to penetrate fifty miles behind enemy lines and liberate Americans imprisoned in the camp. Patton issued the order under the official guise of a rescue operation, but his true intent may have simply been to free his son-in-law, who was captured in Tunisia in 1943. The task force, codenamed “Baum” after its commander, Captain Abraham J. Baum, was drawn from Third Army’s 4th Armored Division. Numbering 314 men, 16 tanks, 28 half-tracks, and 13 other assorted vehicles, the task force set off at 21:00 hours on March 26 from the American bridgehead south of Aschaffenburg. They ran into heavy resistance almost immediately outside the nearby town of Schweinheim. Intense German fire destroyed two Sherman tanks and bogged the task force
down for hours. Not until the early morning did it punch a hole through the German defenses and continue on its way, thundering along Reichstrasse 26. Reaching the town of Gemünden at 0800 hours on March 27, the force again encountered blistering enemy fire and lost three more tanks. Unable to break through, the Americans were forced to retreat and find another way to the camp. They followed the Sinn River north and turned in the direction of Hammelburg before making visual contact that afternoon with the camp. Seeing men in gray uniforms moving about the compound, the Americans opened fire from a distance, not realizing they were shelling Serbian POWs. The camp’s commandant sent four men—including, by chance, Patton’s son-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel John Waters—to alert the American force to its mistake. As the men approached the tanks, an anxious German guard shot Waters in the back. Waters was carried back to the camp and treated by a Serbian medical team.