Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (28 page)

“Frequently, mothers brought their own neglected children and asked for them to be destroyed,” he said. “This demand was always refused.”

To expedite the liquidation of Communist Party members, Berlin dispatched to Kiev a number of “gas lorries”—mobile gas chambers—with their own attendant staff.

“Death,” Schumacher said, “occurred instantaneously and was painless, as an accompanying chemist assured us.”

The search for an eyewitness to the Breslau murders eventually led McKenna’s team back to the U.S. Army internment camp in Moosburg. There, on May 20, 1946, RAF Flight Sergeant R. M. Daniel questioned the recently apprehended Max Richard Hansel, a former
Kriminal Inspektor
with the Görlitz Gestapo.

“I want you to tell me all you know of this matter, and as we are in possession of a great deal of information already, I would advise you not to attempt lying,” Daniel said. “Do you remember a
Grossfahndung
in March 1944 after the escape of a large number of British RAF officers from a prison camp in Eastern Germany?”

“Yes,” Hansel said. “They escaped from Sagan.”

“And how many officers were recaptured in and around Görlitz?”

“I do not know. I did not hear.”

“You do know,” Daniel shot back. “Some officers were brought into the Gestapo office at Görlitz. How many were there?”

“Six or seven,” Hansel conceded. “I first saw them when they were brought in from the jail in three cars guarded by about twelve men under the command of Dr. Scharpwinkel. I did not know any of the guards. They were from Breslau and may have been
Kripo
or Gestapo.”

“What time of day did they arrive?”

“I saw them about 19:30 hours, but I cannot remember the date.”

“What happened then?” Daniel asked.

“All the prisoners were taken into my office for interrogation,” Hansel said. “I was not there all the time, as I was sent out of the room, but I came in from time to time and I heard some of the questions asked.”

“Who carried out the interrogations if you did not?”

“Dr. Scharpwinkel,” Hansel replied. “He interrogated the men separately.”

Fourteen questions were put to each officer, starting with the basics: name, rank, place of birth, and civilian occupation. These questions the prisoners answered freely, but they fell silent when pressed on more sensitive matters. What targets had they bombed prior to being shot down? What squadron did they belong to? Scharpwinkel, and six of
his men who sat in on the proceedings, grew visibly agitated whenever an airman failed to cooperate.

“Who are the persons responsible for organizing the escape?” Scharpwinkel asked each captive. Not one of the men answered. “What are the names of the other escapees?” Again, silence was the only response. Prisoners were stripped of all personal items and locked together in a room with an armed guard at the door. “Take care they don’t get away—otherwise something unpleasant will happen to you,” Scharpwinkel told the guard, “or something unpleasant will happen to them.”

Scharpwinkel turned to address Hansel and the other Gestapo men present, including one Hansel recognized as
Kriminalobersekretär
Lux. He motioned them into an office and closed the door. Taking up position behind the desk, he produced from his tunic a printed order from Berlin. The matter at hand, he said, was top secret (“
geheime reichssache
”). The prisoners were to be taken away and shot. The Gestapo men accepted the news without comment and began immediate arrangements to see the order through. The airmen were bundled into four black cars parked outside the offices at Augustastrasse 31. Shortly after one that afternoon, the vehicles pulled away in convoy, with Scharpwinkel in the lead. Hansel and his driver brought up the rear, with two prisoners in their backseat. They followed the autobahn past the town of Halbau and continued another eight kilometers before coming to a wood. Traffic was light, and only a few cars passed in the opposite direction. The wood grew thick on either side of the roadway. The lead car eventually pulled to the side of the road, and Scharpwinkel got out. The other vehicles followed suit. They had been traveling for two and a half hours.

“Scharpwinkel announced that a short break would be made here,” Hansel recalled. “The prisoners were to be sent up to the head of the column and guarded there. I directed the two prisoners from my truck to the front where the others were already standing. The guarding was done by Scharpwinkel’s staff, who were equipped with two submachine guns and in SS uniform. As far as I can remember,
Kriminalobersekretär
Lux had one of the submachine guns.”

Hansel returned to his car and ate a butter sandwich he’d packed for the journey. The prisoners milled about for several minutes under the watchful eye of their Gestapo guardians, waiting for some sort of order. Finally, Scharpwinkel motioned with his hand, indicating the prisoners were to be marshaled deeper into the woods. Hansel, still eating his sandwich, watched the men disappear among the trees. A machine gun clattered somewhere beyond the tree line. Several sharp cracks of a pistol followed in rapid succession. Hansel got out of the car and ran into the woods, where he found the Gestapo men standing over six bodies. The prisoners lay among the dead leaves, their corpses roughly fifteen inches apart. One of the Gestapo agents turned to Hansel and said the prisoners had tried to escape.

“Did you believe that?” Daniel asked.

“No,” Hansel said. “They would have been crazy to try to escape with men armed with machine pistols standing so close behind them. Their chance of getting away was so slight.”

Scharpwinkel observed the carnage and ordered Hansel, who was familiar with the local area, to drive to Halbau and telephone the undertaker in Görlitz. Hansel returned to the car and passed the orders along to his driver. It was four o’clock when they pulled away from the crime scene. It took the better part of two hours to get hold of the undertaker and tell him what had transpired. The undertaker, believing RAF officers had been shot while trying to escape, alerted the Görlitz crematorium.

Hansel and his driver returned to the woods to await the undertaker’s arrival. Scharpwinkel and most of his party had already departed. Only Lux and three other men remained to guard the bodies. At eight-thirty, two vans from the undertaker’s office pulled up to the scene. Three bodies were placed in the back of each vehicle and taken away to be destroyed. Hansel retrieved the ashes from the Görlitz crematorium three days later and brought them to Scharpwinkel in Breslau.

“Who paid the cost of the cremations?” Daniel asked.

“The Breslau office,” Hansel said.

Two or three weeks later, Hansel told Daniel, Scharpwinkel summoned
him and the other participants to a meeting at the crime scene to coordinate their cover stories. Scharpwinkel told those gathered that the Swiss government had informed London of the killings.

“I wish only that Scharpwinkel may be captured and have his just punishment meted out to him,” said Hansel, his tone spiteful. “What he has done to us old officials cannot be made good again.”

The same month Hansel detailed what he knew about the Breslau murders, Flight Lieutenant Harold Harrison joined McKenna’s team and quickly decided postwar Germany was an inhospitable place. Unlike other members of the team, Harrison was not a policeman by training. He had learned his investigative skills, including the art of interrogation, on the job. Questioning captured members of the Gestapo left him disturbed, repulsed by what he considered to be their arrogance even under the heel of utter defeat. Germany was a nightmare of ruin and desperation, and he knew he had played a small role in rendering it as such. Dropping bombs had not caused him any great pleasure, though he did enjoy flying and took solace in the fact that Bomber Command’s actions were justified. It was a point disputed by the Gestapo men he questioned. When Harrison asked how they could mercilessly kill another human being without so much as looking them in the eye, the Gestapo men would invariably ask how Harrison could do the same thing. He discovered that normal civilians harbored similar resentments toward British aircrews. “People would recognize my aircrew brevet and say: ‘You must have been on that fire-bomb raid on X or Y. My wife, or my kid, was killed there.’ I learned in the end not to start the arid argument that I had killed on the field of combat and they performed cold-blooded murders. The answer always was: ‘We were both acting under orders.’ I could only wrap the answer up in the beautiful German word
vielleicht
: ‘Perhaps…take out of it what you will.’ ”

Harrison learned that traveling about Germany could be a hazardous undertaking. Driving one night, he was startled by a muzzle flash just beyond the trees along the edge of the road. Bullets hammered the side of his jeep but fortunately caused Harrison no harm. Whether it was a deliberate attack against a British airman or simply a random
assault, he never found out. Highway banditry was not an uncommon occurrence. “One was shot at,” he later recalled, “bricks were thrown and bottles broken on the road.” All RAF jeeps in Germany were equipped with a wire cutter—two sharp pieces of angled iron—that sat atop the front of the vehicle like a hood ornament. Unknown culprits had taken to stringing razor wire across the roadways. Such a trap had almost decapitated McKenna while he drove back to base one night. Only the glint of the wire in his headlights saved him at the last possible second from a grisly death. For Harrison, who “tended to look on life as something to be enjoyed,” postwar Germany “was a completely depressing experience.”

While the newest member of the team acclimated himself to his new surroundings, the Breslau investigation moved slowly forward. There could be no closure to the inquiry, however, without locating Dr. Wilhelm Scharpwinkel. Since McKenna’s arrival in Germany the year before, the former head of the Breslau Gestapo had been one of the RAF’s most wanted. All McKenna and his men had to go on was rumor and hearsay. No one knew for sure if the man was even still alive. A former fingerprint technician with the Breslau Gestapo, questioned by McKenna’s men in early 1946, said he had heard that the Russians had hanged Scharpwinkel. Another survivor of the Breslau siege told Allied investigators the Russians had arrested Scharpwinkel but not killed him. All efforts by the RAF to take the search into the Russian Zone of Occupation had thus far failed. Letters requesting permission had either been denied or ignored. The British attempted to curry favor with Soviet authorities by handing over, in early 1946, “three Germans accused of war crimes against Soviet nationals.” Arrangements were also being made to transfer into Russian custody a “large number of Germans suspected of war crimes against Soviet citizens in Norway, together with all available evidence, which they (British investigators) have been at great pains to collect.”

Even if permission was eventually granted, dispatching an investigation team to the Soviet sector presented considerable problems, namely in the organizing of food supplies, quarters, and fuel.

Although the search for Scharpwinkel proved to be frustrating, news
from the American Zone in early December shed light on the fate of Arthur Nebe, the top man sought by the RAF. The onetime
Kripo
chief, responsible for compiling the Sagan execution list, was indeed dead. Although fond of Hitler when he first came to power in 1933, Nebe soon grew disillusioned with the Führer’s tyrannical behavior. Nebe initially kept his doubts to himself, fearing the consequences should he speak out—but his discontent grew as the Nazis systematically liquidated their political rivals. In 1936, his feelings still a secret, Nebe was appointed national head of the
Kripo
. Two years later saw the formation of the Central Security Office, which brought Germany’s policing and security agencies under one roof and the overall command of Heinrich Himmler. The
Kripo
was made Department V of the new security organization, and the Gestapo Department IV. Nebe did not like working in close proximity to Himmler, whom he considered a contemptuous little man. He now began to voice his misgivings to a close circle of confederates and expressed his desire to resign. They urged him to stay on, however, and argued he was ideally placed to monitor Himmler’s activities and catalogue the atrocities carried out in the name of National Socialism. He remained at his post, performing his duties, including designating who from among the recaptured Sagan prisoners would be shot. Four months later, in July 1944, he actively took part in the bomb plot to kill Hitler and was tasked with assassinating Himmler. When the plot proved a failure, Nebe fled Berlin and faked his suicide on the shore of Wannsee Lake, leaving a suitcase full of his possessions at the water’s edge. The ruse failed, and he was soon arrested and tried. He met his end in March 1945, hanged by piano wire from a meat hook in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison.

McKenna could now cross the top man off his list, but it brought him little satisfaction. Although he had paid a price, Nebe would never answer for his complicity in the killings. McKenna wondered what Nebe would have said; what argument would he have put forward as his defense? Why would a man who supposedly opposed Hitler play a role in such an atrocity? McKenna knew from various British Intelligence assessments that Nebe had bloodied his hands before the Sagan murders. Between 1941 and 1942, he commanded
Einsatzgruppen
B, an SS death squad in occupied Russia—one of four such squads operating in Eastern Europe. Under Nebe’s leadership,
Einsatzgruppen
B slaughtered 46,000 Jews, Gypsies, and others deemed undesirable by the Reich. How would Nebe have explained this apparent dichotomy?

On another investigative front, the search continued for Gestapo
Gruppenführer
Heinrich Müller, last seen alive in Hitler’s bunker. Flight Sergeant Daniel tracked down the brother of Müller’s onetime secretary Babette Helmut. The brother said his sister had voluntarily surrendered and was now in American custody. It would do no good questioning her, he said, for she knew nothing of Müller’s whereabouts. He instead told Daniel to speak with Müller’s sister, who ran into the wanted man’s wife after the war. Frau Müller said her husband had killed himself as the Red Army fought its way into Berlin. Helmut’s brother gave Daniel Frau Müller’s address, a street in the Munich suburb of Pasing. Upon driving there, Daniel discovered that the brother had slipped him a fake address. He eventually tracked the woman down to a small house she shared with her mother. Taking into account the reputation of Frau Müller’s husband, Daniel showed up at the house with a heavily armed police contingent and raided the premises. They found no evidence of Heinrich. The man’s wife seemed hardly concerned with the true nature of his fate. She told Daniel her marriage had not been a happy one and that she took little interest in her husband’s business. She had fled Berlin in February 1945 to escape the advancing Red Army. One month later, her husband paid her a brief visit. That was the last time the two had seen each other. Just recently, she said, her father-in-law had received a letter from a woman purporting to be Müller’s mistress, claiming the man had killed himself. Frau Müller identified the woman as Anny Schmid and said she lived at Schützenstrasse 4, apartment 3, in the Berlin borough of Steglitz. She also gave Daniel the address of Müller’s father, Kolonie 2, Rembrandtstrasse 22, Pasing. That, she said, was all the information she had to give.