Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (34 page)

How had so many succumbed to such murderous fanaticism? That was a question the investigation would never answer. Some of the men questioned by McKenna and his team said they only pulled the trigger to save their families from the torturous SS. Was this a valid excuse? McKenna did not believe that Emil Schulz, most likely to hang for killing Roger Bushell, was a monster. Nevertheless, he shot an unarmed man in the back of the head. A husband and father could not be faulted for wanting to protect his family, but that did not legitimize murder. So what alternative did that leave? It was an uncomfortable question.

Based on Baumann’s information, McKenna found Fritz Schmidt’s mother living in a small house near the Bodensee. The setting seemed
a world removed from the shell-shocked cities and crowded internment camps McKenna had come to know so well over the previous months. Frau Maria Schmidt—“very old and and an imbecile”—smiled when McKenna mentioned her son’s name. She seemed to have no inkling of her son’s wartime activities and could only tell McKenna she had last seen him three weeks ago. She was unsure when he’d be home for another visit. McKenna—sitting in the woman’s living room, looking at the glistening mountain vista beyond the window—suspected Schmidt’s visits home were now a permanent thing of the past. He thanked the woman for her time and left. The search for Schmidt would continue for another two decades.

The weeks slowly passed without leads on Schmidt or Post. All the while, demobilization thinned the ranks of the investigation team. By May 1947, the RAF had one wing commander (Bowes), one squadron leader (McKenna), one warrant officer, and three Dutch interpreters assigned to the case. The investigation had now taken on a “spasmodic” quality, the result—McKenna explained in a progress report—“of information given to various officials in the countries visited, who, from time to time, obtain information on persons still wanted in connection with these murders.”

Indeed, the investigation appeared to be winding down. The RAF—since launching its inquiry in September 1945—had tracked down 329 suspects, twenty-three of whom were directly complicit in the Sagan murders. Two of those individuals—Seetzen and Franz Schmidt—were dead by their own hand, and one—Friedrich Kiowsky—was in Czech custody. Currently, twenty-one suspects sat in cells in London and Minden awaiting trial. The British, hoping to charge and try Scharpwinkel, were still negotiating his release with the Russians. Venediger of the Danzig Gestapo remained on the run, as did Munich Gestapo chief Schäfer. The hunt for Hans Ziegler, head of the Gestapo in Zlín, continued. His seventy-two-year-old mother was traced to a house at Katzmeyerstrasse 71 in Munich, where she lived with her daughter and three-year-old grandson. Flight Sergeant Daniel raided the premises but found no physical evidence suggesting Ziegler had been there
recently. The mother and daughter were questioned in separate rooms, the younger woman making no secret of the hatred she felt toward her interrogators. If she had information, she refused to part with it. Her husband, a former Gestapo agent, now languished in an Allied internment camp. The mother tried to placate Daniel and his interpreter and told them she had last seen her son three weeks prior. Daniel asked his interpreter to speak with the grandson, who sat playing in another room under the eye of a military policeman. The boy, when questioned, said Ziegler had come to visit the previous Sunday—a mere four days ago. Ziegler’s mother said nothing when Daniel pressed her further. Where, Daniel asked, was her son? The woman insisted she didn’t know.

With no strong leads to go on, it was now a waiting game. McKenna spent his days working the phone and traveling to various internment camps to check on recent arrivals. On May 19, 1947, the commandant of the holding facility in Minden called McKenna and told him the North West Europe War Crimes Unit had just brought in a man named Johannes Pohlmann. A witness had recognized Pohlmann—working as “a haulage contractor” in the town of Celle—as Johannes Post. He was arrested “in connection with the murders of 300 people at the notorious A.E.L. Nordmark Concentration Camp” near Kiel. Formal charges had yet to be filed. The man was still insisting a case of mistaken identity had been made. McKenna traveled to Minden on May 21 to see the prisoner for himself. After checking in with the facility’s commandant, he walked to cell no. 4 and peered through a spy hole in the cell door. The prisoner was sitting on a small cot, staring in McKenna’s direction, his features haggard. McKenna pulled from his tunic the picture he had of Marianne Heidt and Johannes Post on their skiing holiday. True, the face was thinner—but the eyes and prominent chin left no doubt. He peered into the cell once more and knew the search for Johannes Post was at an end.

He placed an urgent call to the head of the North West Europe War Crimes Unit and obtained permission to interrogate the prisoner. A guard unlocked the cell door and stood watch as McKenna dropped the photograph on the man’s lap. Pohlmann hardly glanced at the image.
“That’s me,” he said, neither surprised nor disturbed. “I am Post.” McKenna asked the guard to bring an interpreter to the cell. Post, his cover blown, freely admitted to knowing all about the Kiel murders and added with apparent pride that he was in command of the execution squad. McKenna listened as Post detailed the murders of Catanach, Espelid, Fuglesang, and Christensen. Post mentioned, with some amusement, how Catanach balked when told he would soon be shot, and Post described the young airman’s puzzlement when he realized Post had not been joking. “Why?” had been the last word Catanach uttered, according to Post, who shot him through the back without dignifying that simple and desperate question with a response. The bullet pierced the airman’s heart. Over the course of the investigation, other suspects had expressed—even if untrue—remorse for their actions. They acknowledged that their deeds were wrong. McKenna now sat looking at Post, waiting to hear some word of regret—but none was forthcoming.

“How could you do such a thing as this?” McKenna finally asked. “How could you be so inhuman?”

McKenna listened to the translator convey the question to Post.

“Inhuman! I was dealing with sub-humans,” Post spat, “yet I always gave them a full night’s warning before I shot them, so that they could prepare to meet their fate. For the glory of the Führer, I have killed any number of sub-humans. I have liquidated non-Aryans, gypsies, vagrants, Jews, and politically unreliables. The Führer has shown his appreciation by personally awarding me the highest political decoration in the realm. For the glory of the Führer, I only regret that I have not killed more. People like you. I wish I had had the chance to wipe out more people like you, who have left our cities in ruins and killed our women and children. These terror-fliers I disposed of were of no more good to the Reich than to all the other sub-humans whom I sent on their journey to Heaven for the glory of the Führer, who has presented me with the Order of the Blood.”

McKenna, his hunt all but over, left the cell sickened. The RAF charged Post with murder the following month, after the Nordmark
case went nowhere. With Fritz Schmidt the only man wanted in connection with the Kiel murders, McKenna and Bowes considered the matter closed. On June 30, 1947, Bowes penned a report to SIB headquarters in London:

Bowes read what he had written and made a few minor changes before adding the closing line: “This can be considered the final report on this case.”

There were thirty-eight men still being sought by the RAF. Throughout July and August 1947, McKenna met with occupation authorities in the American, British, and French zones, distributing more than ten thousand photographs of the wanted men. Among those still unaccounted for were former Munich Gestapo chief Dr. Oswald Schäfer and onetime head of the Zlín Gestapo Hans Ziegler. McKenna traced Schäfer’s wife to an address in the town of Braunfels. Lisalotte Schäfer told McKenna she had neither seen nor heard from her husband in two years and believed he was dead.

The photographs were disseminated throughout the Allied armies and agencies investigating Nazi atrocities. The U.S. Army published the photos in
Rogue’s Gallery
, a widely circulated sheet profiling those being sought for war crimes. The new wave of publicity led to Ziegler’s apprehension in late 1947. He was shipped to the London Cage to answer questions regarding the Kirby-Green and Kidder murders. On the night of February 3, 1948, a guard looking into Ziegler’s cell saw the man lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood. The tin dinner tray he used to slice his throat lay beside him.

Eighteen defendants in the Sagan case went on trial at the British Military Court in Hamburg on July 1, 1947. Presiding over the trial were a
major general, three army officers, and three representatives of the Royal Air Force. Charges against all eighteen men were read into the record:

Additional charges of murder were leveled against the defendants for their role in the killings of individual POWs. Emil Schulz and Walter Breithaupt were charged with killing Squadron Leader Roger Bushell and Lieutenant Bernard Scheidhauer; Alfred Schimmel was charged with shooting Flight Lieutenant Anthony Hayter; Heinrich Boschert, Josef Gmeiner, Walter Herberg, and Otto Preiss were charged in the death of Flying Officer Dennis Cochran; Eduard Geith, Johann Schneider, and Emil Weil were charged in the shooting deaths of Lieutenants Johannes S. Gouws and Rupert J. Stevens; Walter Jacobs, Oskar Schmidt, and Wilhelm Struve faced murder charges in the deaths of Lieutenants Hans Espelid and Nils Fuglesang and Pilot Officer Arnold J. Christensen; Erich Zacharias was charged in the slayings of Flying Officer Gordon Kidder and Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green; Artur Denkmann, Hans Kaehler, and Johannes Post were charged with shooting Squadron Leader Catanach, Pilot Officer Christensen, and Lieutenants Espelid and Fuglesang.

The first two charges, faced by all defendants, were charges of conspiracy to commit murder. The chief defendant, Max Wielen—the former head of the Breslau
Kripo
who sounded the national alarm following the escape—was brought to trial on these charges alone and was not charged with participating in any particular killing. Wielen was the only
Kripo
official in the defendant’s dock; the other seventeen men represented six regional Gestapo offices. All eighteen defendants pleaded not guilty. The prosecution’s underlying argument was simple: “Owing to the
Grossfahndung
(the nation-wide search), notified to every police headquarters, all policemen in Germany must have known that prisoners of war were at large and that therefore the accused, being members of the Gestapo, could not be heard to say that they did not know the identity of the prisoners they went out to kill.”

The defense had a much tougher case, as it had to prove the defendants were unaware of their victims’ identities or the illegality of their actions. Lawyers representing Post wanted to call character witnesses who would testify that the ardent Nazi had once saved a British airman from an outraged mob. Post bluntly refused. “I could not have been a National Socialist for so many years,” he said, “and suddenly put in affidavits from Communists or Jews or freethinkers.” The main foundation of the defense’s case, however, was “the plea of superior orders”—orders the defendants were powerless to disobey. The defense argued that, “according to laws prevailing in Germany at the time of the offense,” orders issued by Hitler were legal; disobeying them was not. International law, however, deemed the following of such orders to be illegal. “International law,” defense attorneys proclaimed, “must not place the subject in an insoluble dilemma where he has only two possible courses of action, both of which are criminal, thus leaving him ‘no way out.’ In order to be able to say that a person has committed an offense, there must be an alternative course open to him, which does not constitute an offense.”