The Nazi Hunters (25 page)

The familiar cry rang out from behind him: ‘
Achtung!
’

It was followed by a volley of shots, one of which tore into the wooden stock of SSM White’s M1 carbine. The six men ran, losing each other in the bullet-riven chaos. Hislop, Major Power and one other – SAS man Joe Owens – headed in one direction, with Colonel Franks leading Chris Sykes and SSM White in the other. Hislop, Power and Owens went to ground in the thick undergrowth, as the sound of search parties drew ever closer.

They lay still as death, pistols cocked, as bayonets jabbed into bushes to either side of their hiding place. Just when it seemed that the enemy must discover them, a massive barrage of incoming fire slammed into what had to be the German’s front-line trenches. American forces had unleashed an attack. Those forming the search party dashed back to their posts, saving Hislop et al. from almost certain discovery.

The fighting lasted until nightfall, which gave the three men the perfect opportunity to slip away. The night was pitch dark, but Major Power set a compass bearing for where he figured the nearest US positions had to be. The three men set out, with Hislop holding onto Major Power’s belt and Owens holding onto Hislop’s in turn. Thanks to the SAS major’s sterling skills at navigation they reached a road that he was certain lay in friendly hands, and they took cover in some bushes.

Come daybreak, they saw a patrol of US troops marching down the road. The three men rose from the undergrowth and, waving and shouting for joy, they announced their arrival and their deliverance from all but certain death.

It was the morning of 15 October 1944. For Captain John Hislop, a man once accused of having a ‘regrettable lack of military aptitude’, Op Loyton had turned into a two-month ordeal. Colonel Franks, Captain Chris Sykes and SSM White also made it that morning, though the colonel was shot in the arm when the Americans mistook him for one of the enemy.

In dribs and drabs, other Op Loyton teams also made it through to US forces, although after his repeated raids against the enemy – including the one, dramatic strike onto German soil – Lieutenant Karl Marx was so ill that he practically had to crawl through the lines. So sick was he as a result of his travails in the Vosges that he would be invalided out of the army.

There were others who were even less fortunate. Lieutenant Johnsen’s Phantom party was shot to pieces, only a badly wounded Johnsen managing to drag himself across the lines. The others lay where they had fallen, gunned down by the enemy in no-man’s-land.

And in a cave in the woods at Pierre-Percée, two SAS officers were readying themselves to make their own foray towards the Allied lines. Major Dennis Reynolds was much recovered from his wounds, and he, like Captain Whately-Smith, was impatient to join the war and to fight.

But their efforts to do so would end in darkness and bloody ruin.

Chapter Sixteen

Barely two weeks after being shot and injured while crossing the lines, the indefatigable Colonel Franks issued a ‘SECRET’ memo on the fate of the eighty-two men deployed on Op Loyton – Phantoms, Jedburghs and SAS alike. Just a handful were recorded as ‘killed in action’. They included Sergeant Lodge, Troopers Davis and Hall and Corporal Kasperovitch.

By contrast, thirty-one were listed as ‘MISSING, BELIEVED PW’ (PW standing for prisoner of war) or simply as ‘MISSING’. The ‘missing’ included Captain Gough, Lieutenant Dill and his ‘rearguard’ party, as well as Major Reynolds and Captain Whately-Smith – the last of the Op Loyton force to try to effect an escape. None had made it through to Allied lines.

In short, little or nothing was known about the fate of more than one-third of Colonel Franks’ force. The 2 SAS commander had failed to bring them home, but he lived in hope that some at least might have been taken as prisoners of war. Which raised the question: what might the future hold for those captives?

Against seemingly impossible odds, Operation Loyton had delivered; chaos and havoc had been spread across the Vosges. The war diary listed the impact the long weeks of raiding had had upon the main supply routes that ran through the valleys: ‘SAS attacks and demolitions have reduced enemy use of this road by estimated 50% plus . . . Due to SAS attacks and demolitions this road is no longer available to enemy traffic . . .’ Two major railways were listed as ‘knocked out by SAS; not in use’.

As Captain Hislop commented, it was only after the end of the mission that the true extent of Loyton’s impact could be gauged, including the extent of disruption and alarm to which the SAS presence gave rise amongst the Germans. ‘Troops in the area were kept in a state of permanent tension, never knowing when they were likely to be ambushed, or blown up by a mine laid on a road.’

Nothing struck fear into the hearts of the enemy foot soldiers more than witnessing their high command being targeted and killed. On Op Loyton, the SAS plan of hitting staff cars above all else had paid massive dividends. With an entire German division having been diverted to the hunt, Loyton also scored a major victory simply by pinning down thousands of German troops who would have been better deployed fighting on the front.

Viewed from this standpoint,
Standartenführer
Isselhorst’s Waldfest had proved something of a failure. Across the Vosges thousands of villagers had been rounded up, beaten, tortured, killed or shipped off to the concentration camps, but that had not put a stop to Op Loyton. And with the withdrawal of the majority of Franks’ men, Isselhorst and his cronies were left with only one target for their retribution: a few dozen Special Forces captives.

Colonel Franks and his fellow commanders suspected that the future for those men might well be bleak, but they had no clear idea of the fate of the ‘missing’. The first clues as to what the enemy intended for them would come from the most unlikely of quarters.

In the final days of October 1944 the Americans made their long-awaited advance into the Vosges. It happened against all expectations. In the terrible conditions of that storm-swept autumn, Patton’s army was unable to rely upon Allied air power to provide the decisive advantage. Likewise, the US General’s armour was rendered largely impotent by the freezing, snow-bound conditions.

Patton’s 7th Army broke through by the sheer force of ballsy, courageous soldiering, as American infantry fought a series of savage, uphill battles, advancing through snowdrifts and dark, frozen woodlands, and often closing at close quarters with the enemy. Indeed, the 7th Army’s victory represented the first time in recorded history that an attacker had succeeded in vanquishing a defender entrenched in the Vosges, by force of arms alone.

One man within the 7th Army had a somewhat different agenda, one that wasn’t limited purely to waging war. Prince Yuri ‘Yurka’ Galitzine, a 21-year-old Russian royal born to an English mother, was attached to the 7th Army as part of the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), an SOE spin-off tasked with propaganda operations. The aim of the PWE was to win the information war by placing positive stories about the Allies and negative ones about the enemy in the press.

Two months earlier, Captain Galitzine had landed on a beach at St. Tropez, then a quiet and little-known village on France’s Mediterranean coast. He was part of a three-man PWE team – consisting of himself, an American and a Frenchman – charged by Allied high command with gathering intelligence on whatever secrets the retreating German forces might have left behind.

Born in Japan, Galitzine had lived in Austria and France, before moving to Britain with his mother. He’d led a privileged youth, moving in high society, and prior to the war he’d even flirted with the Right Club – a right-wing London group that had included Nazi sympathizers. But the young, aristocratic and decidedly dashing Russian-English prince, who wore his dark hair fashionably long, was about to come face to face with the appalling reality of Nazism.

In Nice, his team was one of the first to enter the city’s recently vacated Gestapo headquarters. As he surveyed the scene before him Galitzine’s deep brown eyes were full of an honest determination coupled with an instinctive empathy. What he would witness in the Gestapo’s cellar-cum-torture-chamber would sicken and revolt this innately humane man.

There were eleven bodies in the cellar, Galitzine recalled. ‘One of them was the daughter of the mayor, Eliane Valiano, and I was horrified.’ The young woman was six months pregnant and she had been raped after death. ‘I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe that people could behave like that.’

Sadly, by Nazi Germany’s standards Prince Galitzine hadn’t seen anything yet. As the 7th Army had pushed eastwards of the Vosges and taken Strasbourg, the entire records of the local Gestapo –
Standartenführer
Isselhorst’s command – had been captured. They in turn led Prince Galitzine to Schirmek, and to a discovery that would change his life for ever: the concentration camp at Natzweiler.

‘I was briefed to go,’ recalled Galitzine, ‘because I was told there was a “concentration camp”.’ At the time few amongst the Allies had any idea what a concentration camp might be, but as Galiztine drove into the hills above Schirmek he was about to find out.

At first, he was struck by the majestic beauty of the Vosges Mountains in winter, which were carpeted with thick and verdant forests right up to the snow line. It was a long and winding climb, Natzweiler itself lying at 9,000 feet of altitude. Even as he drew closer, Galitzine still imagined the concentration camp to be some kind of tented affair.

‘The first thing that really struck one was the smell; the most ghastly sickly-sweet smell,’ he remarked. Ominously, it hit him from a considerable distance before he reached the camp. He didn’t realise until he saw the evidence with his own eyes, but it was the smell of bodies; of human flesh burned in the crematorium.

At Natzweiler there were scattered urns lying about full of human ashes, coffins stacked high and piles upon piles of filthy, stinking clothing. Galitzine saw a ‘few rather dazed chaps in striped suits wandering around – not very many of them’. The more healthy and active prisoners had wandered off to the nearby villages to try to find help.

Sickened and uncomprehending –
what in God’s name had happened here? 
– the former right-wing bon vivant struggled to come to terms with what he had stumbled into. Galitzine found those survivors who were compos mentis and able to talk. They explained to him what a ‘concentration camp’ was, and as they did so the scales fell from the young SOE captain’s eyes.

Provoked to a cold fury, Galitzine was determined to document every horror and inhumanity. He set about compiling a briefing on the camp, entitled ‘Special Report on German concentration camp (KZ NATZWEILER)’. Directed to his boss, the ‘Chief, Liberated Areas Section, PWD SHAEF’ (the Political Warfare Directorate of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force), it began: ‘This report is based upon personal investigations and observations made during operations . . .’

What Galitzine discovered was this. In 1941 someone – Hitler? Himmler? – had decided that the Nazi Party buildings in Nuremberg needed to be faced with the finest red Alsatian granite. The best source of the stone was a quarry adjacent to Natzweiler, and so the former ski resort was transformed into a labour camp, from which inmates would be worked to their deaths in the nearby stone quarry.

‘This camp was to be a distributing and restocking centre for slave labour,’ Galitzine reported, ‘with the idea of “working the prisoners to death”.’

By the spring of 1943 there were fifteen barracks huts in three rows, built on a ‘terrace’ hewn out of the mountainside. The surrounding area was cleared of its few civilian inhabitants and made a no-go zone. The camp was ringed by a double row of razor wire, with guard posts set at intervals. The fence was electrified with a high voltage current, and Natzweiler came complete with its own crematorium – the ovens in which the dead and the near-dead would be burned.

A Junkers aircraft factory was also built on the ‘terrace’ as an alternative work site for the slave labour force. When enough red granite had been mined, Natzweiler became a holding camp. From there, ‘inmates’ were shipped out in work parties to whatever enterprise might require such slave labour – including several underground armament factories and the nearby Mercedes-Benz plant, which manufactured trucks for the
Wehrmacht
. When a contingent was deemed too exhausted or sick to serve a ‘useful purpose’ any more, they were shipped back to Natzweiler, for termination.

The earliest inmates were German political prisoners – mostly communists and anti-Nazis. Then came the Polish, Dutch, Norwegian, Czech, Greek, Italian and Russian enemies of the Reich. And, finally, suspected members of the French Resistance were shipped through Natzweiler’s dark gates. Prisoners were classified according to their ‘crimes’: political opponents, homosexuals, forced-labour dodgers, Jews.

But the worst classification of all was reserved for the least fortunate of inmates. ‘Those prisoners who were considered more dangerous or who had attempted to escape were designated ‘N.N.’ – the NN standing for Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog),’ Galitzine reported. ‘These prisoners wore a yellow patch with three black circles over the heart. They could be shot for the slightest misdemeanour and were not allowed any mail or communication with other persons.’

Captured Maquis were invariably classed as
Nacht und Nebel
.

The labourers worked eleven hours a day, on a starvation diet of a thrice-daily crust of bread and bowl of thin ‘soup’. Prisoners resorted to eating grass, dung and even digging up worms in the muddy floor of the quarry. Disease was rife. In addition to its crematorium, Natzweiler had a highly experimental form of a gas chamber, perhaps the most chilling of Galitzine’s discoveries.