Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (27 page)

McKenna, disbelieving, said nothing.

“It appeared to me,” Bruchardt continued, “as if this incident seemed very unpleasant to Dr. Venediger, because he spoke of possible international conflicts and inquiries. I was to drive out there and look
at everything and ask the Ukrainian
Untersturmführer
about the exact facts of the case in order to furnish Venediger with an account and to set everything on the right path.”

Bruchardt said he rode his motorcycle to the scene of the shooting and saw two cars parked alongside the road. The guards’ commander, leaning against one vehicle, told Bruchardt his men had warned the prisoners they would be shot if they tried to escape. When the officers scrambled for the trees, he and his men opened fire. He admitted with a coy smile to being somewhat drunk at the time and had perhaps been too quick to rely on his weapon.

“When he had led me into the woods for about 100 meters, I saw four corpses lying one next to the other in a line. In various directions leading into the wood, were tracks of bodies having been dragged, at the end of which I saw traces of blood,” Bruchardt said. “As the shots had all obviously entered into the backs of the bodies, I had no doubt of the authenticity of the story.”

Bruchardt dispatched one of the guards to retrieve a truck and take the bodies to the local Gestapo headquarters, where he debriefed Venediger. The Gestapo chief told Bruchardt to write a report on the incident for Berlin but omit any reference to Venediger having relied on “White Russians” to transport the prisoners. In the report, Bruchardt was to say he had been in charge of returning the RAF officers to Sagan and was forced to shoot them when they tried to escape.

“What purpose would it have served if I refused?” Bruchardt asked McKenna. “It would either have been deemed as a refusal to obey an order during a time of war, or a violation of instructions regarding Secret State Matters. Both would have resulted in the death penalty. I arranged to coffin and cremate the bodies in the crematorium at Danzig-Langfuhr. The urns with the ashes were then sent to Berlin, together with the belongings of the dead bodies.”

Based on what Venediger told him, Bruchardt said he believed the remains and personal possessions were destined for England. He claimed not to know of any plan to kill recaptured POWs. Surely, he said, had the Gestapo murdered the British officers in cold blood, the bodies would have been disposed of quietly. He thought nothing more of the
matter until some months later when the Sagan affair made international headlines.

“Since the Nuremberg Trials, I have lived in constant fear of being connected with this incident,” Bruchardt said. “Now, I am hoping for the speedy seizure of Dr. Venediger so that he can clear me by describing the real facts of the case.”

McKenna, confident Bruchardt was one of the Danzig gunmen, arranged for his transfer to the London Cage. All the while, the whereabouts of Venediger remained unknown.

^*
Roemer was never heard from again; the Czechs executed Kozlowsky in 1947.

What the RAF knew of the Breslau murders came from postwar statements by escapees who had passed through the jail at Görlitz before being shipped back to Stalag Luft III. Thirty-five of the seventy-six men who fled through the tunnel found themselves, shortly after their recapture, in the civilian jail at Sagan. Instead of being returned to the camp as expected, they were driven to Görlitz—some sixty miles away—for interrogation at the local Gestapo headquarters. There, all the officers were questioned in regards to the escape. The interrogators, who wore civilian clothing, tried to scare information from the prisoners by threatening them with execution if they failed to answer specific questions.

On the morning of March 30, 1944, Flight Lieutenants S. A. “Dick” Churchill and R. A. Bethell heard cars pull up outside the jail. They peered through the barred window of their cell and saw three cars idling in the frost-covered courtyard below. “Ten civilians of the Gestapo type” emerged from the vehicles and entered the building. They reappeared several minutes later with six prisoners in tow, including Australian Flying Officer Al Hake, who had overseen the escape committee’s compass factory at Stalag Luft III. From their vantage point, Churchill and Bethell watched the Gestapo bundle the RAF men into the waiting cars and drive them away. Six urns arrived at Stalag Luft III several days later. A plate on each urn, dated March 31, identified the place of
cremation as Görlitz. The Gestapo agents returned on the morning of March 31. Through their cell window, Churchill and Bethell saw a large, middle-aged man they recognized from the day before. One prisoner described this particular agent, who appeared to be in charge of the others, as having a “battered-looking, pugilistic type of face.” The Gestapo removed ten prisoners from the jail that morning. Shortly thereafter, ten urns—each stamped with a name, but no date—arrived at Stalag Luft III from the town of Liegnitz, fifty-five miles east of Görlitz.

The dead this time included Czech Flying Officer “Wally” Valenta, head of the escape committee’s intelligence section. “You will never escape again,” the airman had been informed upon recapture. Likewise, murdered Flight Lieutenant Cyril Swain was told he would be shot. Flying Officer A. Wlodzimierz Kolanowski, also among the dead, had appeared severely depressed following his questioning by the Gestapo. Survivors later remembered him sitting quietly in a corner, refusing to say what had transpired during his interrogation. Flight Lieutenant
Brian Evans, also among the ill-fated group, had penned a letter to his fiancée just days earlier:

The rock marking the spot where the Great Escapers emerged from Harry and fled into the forest. The inscription, written in Polish, reads: “Allied airmen, prisoners of Stalag Luft III, were Great Escape participants.”

On April 2, officers from the
Luftwaffe
showed up to escort four prisoners back to the camp. By whatever strange reasoning dictated who would live and who would die, Flight Lieutenants A. Keith Ogilvie, Alastair McDonald, Alfred Thompson, and Paul Royle were deemed worthy of survival. For the men still imprisoned in the Görlitz jail, each day became a torturous waiting game. “I remained at Görlitz for eleven or twelve days,” one survivor later told investigators. “From about 30 March, a guard would go into a different cell and call out names. These men would then be taken away, and we did not see them again. We thought that they were being taken out for further interrogation, and when they did not return, that they had been sent back to camp.”

Trench-coated Gestapo agents drove off with another six prisoners on April 6. Among them were Flight Lieutenants William Grisman and Harold Milford, who were told upon recapture that they would never see their wives again. Flight Lieutenant Alastair Gunn, placed in the back of a Gestapo sedan, was threatened with decapitation. The six urns that arrived at Stalag Luft III several days later bore plates indicating the bodies had been destroyed in Breslau, ninety-five miles east of Görlitz.
The
Luftwaffe
returned another eight men, including Churchill and Bethell, to Sagan on April 6. One week later, the Gestapo picked up Flight Lieutenant James Long, the last of the Sagan escapees held at Görlitz. His ashes were shipped from Breslau and soon arrived at Stalag Luft III.

Solving the Breslau-Görlitz murders hinged on finding Dr. Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, head of the Breslau Gestapo. In October 1944, acting on the orders of his superiors in Berlin, Scharpwinkel assumed command of the Breslau Criminal Police. With the Red Army closing in, his mandate was to ensure that the local populace remained defiant to the end. He summoned his subordinates to a meeting shortly after taking control and told them “the work of the Gestapo is, at the moment, more important than that of the Criminal Police.” Present at the conference was Hans Schumacher, a senior police commander irked by Scharpwinkel’s presence. Breslau’s situation grew increasingly dire in the days and weeks that followed. Residents began fleeing the city en masse, as the sound of artillery fire crept ever closer. By the end of January, with the city well within range of Russian guns, Schumacher ordered all “ailing, elderly, and female members of the office” to evacuate Breslau. Only those deemed healthy enough to serve in uniform and carry out their policing duties stayed behind. That left forty officers to police a population of a hundred thousand.

Scharpwinkel studied the Russian positions on a map in his office. The closer the enemy advanced the more militant he became. In a tense meeting with Schumacher, Scharpwinkel demanded the remaining forty officers be relieved of their policing responsibilities and deployed in a fighting capacity. Schumacher resisted. The officers, he said, had no military training. Scharpwinkel again broached the matter several days later and announced the formation of his own military unit. Despite Schumacher’s protestations, he enlisted the forty police officers, agents from the Breslau Gestapo, and the elderly members of the
Volkssturm
(Home Guard), creating a mixed regiment of questionable fighting ability. Scharpwinkel, asserting his authority, placed sixty of the men under Schumacher’s command and charged him with preventing the Russians
from infiltrating a sector of the city behind the front lines. Without enough ammunition or weapons to go around, the men were ill-equipped for the challenge. It was only a matter of days before Scharpwinkel reclaimed the majority of Schumacher’s men and stuck them in the front-line trenches.

An unrelieved seventy hours at the front saw the majority of men succumb to enemy fire and freezing temperatures. An outraged Schumacher confronted Scharpwinkel, only to be accused of cowardice and threatened with execution. Shortly thereafter, Schumacher fell ill with a kidney ailment and was removed from the front line. He never saw Scharpwinkel again.

Schumacher himself conveyed the details of those last desperate days in Breslau to British investigators following his apprehension in February 1946.

“I cannot imagine Scharpwinkel escaped from Breslau,” he told an interrogator at the London Cage. “If he is not already dead, he has probably acquired a pay book with a false name. It is also quite possible he is somewhere in Lower Silesia as a civilian.”

Although he claimed to know little of the Breslau murders, Schumacher was no innocent bystander. Prior to his transfer to the Criminal Police in February 1943, he had served with a police unit in Kiev and investigated “partisan activity, treason, serious cases of sabotage, and unauthorized possession of arms.” Individuals found guilty of such crimes were often shot. Schumacher assumed the role of executioner on more than one occasion. His unit shot anywhere from ten to thirty people a week. Killing was easy, he said, once you had been psychologically numbed to the atrocities on the Eastern Front.