Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (31 page)

“In my presence, the Air Force officer was asked a few questions by both Schimmel and the
Kripo kommissar
—both of whom spoke a little English,” Peters said. “The Air Force officer gave short replies and refused to give any information. I was then ordered by Schimmel to take the man to my room for the time being.”

Schimmel and the
Kripo
agent again attempted to interrogate the prisoner in Peters’s room. The airman would only admit that he had recently escaped from Stalag Luft III in Sagan. All questions aimed at
determining how the men escaped and how they obtained civilian clothing and travel papers met with stubborn silence.

After forty-five futile minutes, Schimmel ordered Peters to place the airman in a cell downstairs. Peters and the
Kripo
agent marched the officer to the holding area below and locked him behind a cast-iron door. Later that day, at about three in the afternoon, Peters happened to glance out the window near his desk into the courtyard below and saw his immediate supervisor, Max Dissner, get into a waiting car with Hilker and the airman and drive away. He approached Dissner that evening and asked where they had gone. The prisoner’s suitcase was still sitting in Peters’s room. Dissner, in a foul mood, told Peters to mind his own business.

“Stop asking questions I cannot tell you anything about,” he snapped.

Peters did not push the subject, and he retired to his quarters for the evening. Half an hour later, Dissner entered the room and retrieved the airman’s suitcase, which contained only dirty laundry. The Gestapo, Peters told Williams, did not file any official paperwork regarding Hayter’s capture. He knew nothing more about the matter.

It was clear from Peters’s take on events that Schimmel had lied in his second statement to RAF investigators. Harrison and Williams returned to Dachau to interrogate him again. Shown Peters’s handwritten statement, Schimmel now confessed to knowing more than he had originally let on. Yes, he had been away from Strasbourg at the time of Hayter’s arrest, but he returned to find the airman in custody. Soon thereafter, a communiqué arrived from Müller in Berlin demanding that the prisoner be executed. Schimmel said he phoned Müller to protest. His superior was adamant the airman die and accused Schimmel of being “soft.” Schimmel said Müller threatened him with death by firing squad if he failed to carry out the order. Schimmel hung up the phone and pondered his next move. He could always take the airman by car to the Swiss border and allow him to escape. Schimmel said he seriously considered the matter and even entertained the idea of disappearing into Switzerland himself to escape the
repercussions from Berlin. Thoughts of his wife and children, however, made him drop any such notion. Instead, he dispatched two men—Hilker and Dissner—to drive in the direction of Natzweiler concentration camp, kill Hayter somewhere nearby, and have the body destroyed in the camp oven. The killing was initially planned to take place on Good Friday—but committing the act on such a holy day troubled Schimmel, who decided to have the airman shot a day earlier, on Maundy Thursday.

The men took Hayter away by car and returned the following day. They told Schimmel they drove Hayter to a heavily wooded area less than a mile from Natzweiler. They walked him to a point beyond the tree line and told him to relieve himself. Dissner distracted the airman with casual banter. Hilker, standing behind the prisoner, pulled a Walther from his overcoat and fired point-blank into Hayter’s temple. They lugged the body back to the car and drove to the camp. The body was incinerated and the ashes placed in an unmarked urn and shipped back to Stalag Luft III.

The Americans handed Schimmel over to the British, who shipped him off to the London Cage to await trial. The focus now shifted to finding Hilker and Dissner. The Special Air Service traced Frau Mathilde Hilker and questioned her. A woman hardened by circumstance, she surrendered no ground and professed to know nothing about her husband’s current whereabouts. Her interrogators, convinced she was lying, approached the U.S. Counter Intelligence Department in Karlsruhe and asked that her mail be monitored. Local inquiries about town turned up a family named Brenck at Humboldtstrasse 25, who had taken Hilker in at war’s end and helped him nurse a gunshot wound to the left shoulder. Nearby lived Hilker’s mother, who assumed her son to be dead or in hiding.

It would be another twenty years before investigators could close the book on the Hayter case. Not until May 11, 1948, did the RAF catch up with Dissner, living in Hamburg under an alias. He was arrested without incident and taken to the British war crimes prison in Minden. In his cell, he fashioned a noose from a torn piece of bedding
and hanged himself before his interrogation. West German authorities eventually tracked Hilker down in 1966 and put him on trial for Hayter’s murder. He was acquitted two days before Christmas and went a free man.

In the days following the mass breakout, the Gestapo delivered four urns to Stalag Luft III, each adorned with a single Roman numeral in place of a name and location of cremation. The consecutive numbering on the urns, I to IV, suggested that the four victims had died together. A method of elimination determined the urns most likely belonged to Squadron Leader James Catanach, Royal Australian Air Force; Pilot Officer Arnold Christensen, Royal New Zealand Air Force; and Lieutenants Hallada Espelid and Nils Fuglesang of the Royal Norwegian Air Force. No one knew their decided course of action after fleeing the tunnel. Indeed, a shroud of mystery obscured everything about the killings.

As a young boy, James Catanach charmed friends and family with his easy smile and relaxed humor. He enjoyed athletics and adventure, spending his summer vacations exploring the rugged brush of Victoria’s Mount Macedon and the volcanic terrain of Hanging Rock. It was a hunger for excitement that prompted him at eighteen to join the air force when war broke out in Europe. Before shipping off, Catanach gave his cousin a treasured family heirloom, a broken antique pocket
watch. “Take care of it,” he said, “and I’ll fix it for you when I come home.”

He arrived in England in April 1941 after completing his flight training in Australia and Canada. Posted to No. 455 Squadron—the first Australian bomber squadron—he soon developed a reputation for his steel composure and brazen flying. It was not uncommon for his Hampden bomber to return from an operation ravaged by flak. On the night of March 13, 1942, Catanach and his crew took off for the killing skies over Cologne, Germany’s fourth-largest city, behind Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. There was no moon as the 135 bombers winged their way across the North Sea. Catanach and his crew passed through the European coastal defenses without incident and turned on course for the final run to the target. The leading aircrews dropped green and red flares and incendiary bombs to adequately mark the target area.
Searchlights canvassed the sky as Catanach steadied the Hampden on its attack run and followed the slight alterations to the course suggested by the bomb aimer in the nose of the aircraft.

Photographs of Lieutenants Hallada Espelid and Nils Fuglesang, Squadron Leader James Catanach, and Pilot Officer Arnold Christensen taken by the
Kripo
shortly after their arrest in Flensburg.   
BRITISH NATIONAL ARCHIVES: WO 235/431

Bombs finally gone, dropped into a sea of fire, Catanach turned the Hampden for home. As he put distance between his bomber and the target, a piece of flak punctured the Hampden’s nose and smashed its way into the cockpit, wounding Catanach and leaving him partially blinded. “Boys,” he said calmly into his mic, “I think we’d better be getting home now.” For his bravery and skill, Catanach was promoted to flight lieutenant less than one month later. In June, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and became, at the age of twenty, the youngest squadron leader in the RAAF. His squadron had by now transferred from Bomber to Coastal Command as a torpedo-bomber squadron. He and his crew spent two months training in their new role, patrolling the North Sea and attacking enemy shipping when the opportunity presented itself. In September 1942, the squadron flew to Murmansk in Russia on a special mission to target German warships preying on Allied Arctic convoys. The planes took off from Scotland on the night of September 4. Over Vadso, with only an hour flight time remaining, anti-aircraft fire struck Catanach’s Hampden, taking out an engine and puncturing a fuel tank.

Losing altitude, Catanach was forced to bring the bomber down on a flat expanse of open wilderness. The uninjured crew climbed out and encountered a group of soldiers dressed in white winter gear devoid of any military markings. It was just their misfortune that the men were members of a German patrol. Catanach and his crew, promptly captured, were shipped almost immediately to Germany. By September, the young Australian, still only twenty, found himself behind the wire in Stalag Luft III. Not long after his arrival, he met another twenty-year-old pilot, Pilot Officer Arnold Christensen of the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

Like Catanach, Christensen was eighteen when he joined the service. He earned his wings and commission in 1942 and arrived in Britain in March of that year. For one who had always loved learning, the island’s
ancient architecture and monuments to history proved to be a source of endless fascination. He spent his first couple of months flying single-engine fighters with an operational training unit, before being posted to No. 26 Squadron. He hardly had time to settle into his new surroundings. On August 19, six days after his arrival on base, Christensen took off on a reconnaissance flight over Dieppe. It was his first operational flight against the enemy. More than six thousand soldiers—mostly Canadians supported by the Royal Navy—had stormed the Dieppe beaches that morning with the aim of temporarily seizing the port. Christensen and his wingman flew the last two sorties of the day and thundered low over the beach in their Mustangs to assess the field of battle. For twenty minutes they circled overhead while maneuvering through flak and small-arms fire from enemy troops below. Several rounds found their mark and struck both aircraft. The men turned their fighters for home, but Christensen’s wingman went down in the English Channel. Christensen struggled to maintain altitude—but to no avail. As the engine began stuttering and the nose dipped toward the water, Christensen bailed out. He landed in the Channel uninjured, inflated his emergency dinghy, and climbed aboard. He remained adrift for two days before washing ashore on the French coast, where German soldiers soon captured him. He then joined the ranks of other inmates at Stalag Luft III.

Christensen’s family was of Danish lineage. In captivity, he exchanged letters with loved ones in Denmark. When Roger Bushell’s X-Organization launched preparations for the mass breakout, Christensen joined the committee’s intelligence section. Its task was to gather information on all parts of Europe that might prove useful to escapees on the run. Christensen collected intelligence on Denmark. Gathering information for the committee on Norway was twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Hallada Espelid, who had escaped to England by boat when the Germans invaded his home country in April 1940. He joined the Royal Norwegian Air Force the following year and was flying Spitfires with No. 331 Squadron by 1942. On August 27 that year, while he was on a reconnaissance operation over Dunkirk, flak struck Espelid’s Spitfire and forced him down in the Pas de Calais. The Germans captured him
as he staggered from the wreckage. After arriving at Stalag Luft III, he met Lieutenant Nils Fuglesang, a fellow countryman who had also fled to Britain in the war’s early days and wound up flying Spitfires for the Royal Norwegian Air Force.

Fuglesang’s war came to an end on May 2, 1943, while flying his eighty-fifth sortie. Over Flushing, he engaged a Focke-Wulf 190. The enemy aircraft charged Fuglesang’s Spitfire in a frontal attack. Cannon fire set Fuglesang’s machine ablaze. In the smoke-filled cockpit, he struggled only briefly with the controls before realizing the fighter was lost. He bailed out and came down in a field, not far from where a German Army unit happened to be training. Soldiers were soon marching him off at gunpoint.