The Nazi Hunters (34 page)

A large part of Barkworth’s problems stemmed from his insistence on behaving as an SAS man would, while surrounded by the regular British military establishment in peacetime. Following his sojourn with the Villa Degler team, Galitzine had gone to visit one of the key people in charge of the British zone of occupation. That man, while aware of Barkworth’s unique qualities, had largely washed his hands of him.

‘Frankly, there are times when I just cannot help him, because he’s his own worst enemy. He will in fact insult generals or brigadiers or he will do things which he knows you’re not allowed to do in the army. He’ll walk into a mess improperly dressed or he’ll bring a sergeant-major into the officers’ mess – that sort of thing.’

A sergeant – like Dusty Rhodes – was not permitted in a British Army officers’ mess, because by definition it was reserved for officers only. Rarely had the SAS had a mess of any sort. More often than not they had made use of the local North African, Italian or French bars or brothels in the areas where they operated: locations in which they were fond of drinking, and where officers and men could rub shoulders with little distinction between ranks.

In Barkworth’s book, men like Rhodes were absolutely his equal, regardless of their rank, and should be treated as such. Indeed, Sergeant Fred ‘Dusty’ Rhodes was about to prove his worth to the chief Nazi hunter one hundred times over.

The trail to
Hauptscharführer
Straub – Natzweiler’s chief executioner – had been a long and convoluted one, even by Barkworth’s standards. It had started in London, at the Eaton Square office of Prince Galitzine. Though he had been ordered to bury it, Galitzine’s December 1944 Natzweiler report had very much done the rounds. One of the desks it had landed upon was that of Vera Atkins, one of the SOE’s chief spymasters.

With Churchill’s fall from power, the SOE was also scheduled for closure. But like Colonel Franks and Major Barkworth, Vera Atkins – who had worked within the SOE’s French ‘F’ Section, recruiting and dispatching female agents to France – felt a burning sense of responsibility to ‘her people’, those that she had sent into harm’s way.

Of the hundred or so F Section agents who were taken prisoner by the enemy, only twenty-six had returned. For an SOE agent parachuted into occupied France dressed in civilian clothing, capture had spelled almost certain torture and death.

‘You owe people something, after all, who have fought for you and risked their life for you,’ Atkins averred. She, like Barkworth, believed the missing had to be traced, and their killers hunted down.

That summer, Atkins had read in Galitzine’s Natzweiler report of a British prisoner called Brian Stonehouse – the man who had made the pencil drawings of his fellow Natzweiler inmates. Atkins recognized Stonehouse as an SOE agent serving with her own F Section. More to the point, she knew that he had survived. Galitzine had also written of a group of British women allegedly executed at Natzweiler, who may have been fellow SOE agents.

Acting on a hunch, Atkins had shown the returned Stonehouse photos of four of her missing agents: Andrée Borrel, Diana Rowden, Sonya Olschanezky and Vera Leigh. As far as Stonehouse could remember, in the summer of 1944 it was those very women who had been brought to Natzweiler by their SS captors, whereupon they were taken to the crematorium to be killed.

Atkins felt the loss of the four acutely, especially as Andrée Borrel was the first ever female agent that the SOE had parachuted into occupied France. She paid a visit to Galitzine’s Eaton Square office to follow up the case. It was there that Galitzine was able to reveal to her who the real expert on Natzweiler and its victims now was: Major Barkworth of the SAS.

Galitzine’s opinion of the man was striking. ‘This officer – known as “Bill” to his friends – was a man of enterprise and resource, who knew Germany well, talked the language like a native and was endowed with a complete disregard for higher authority. He started with the scantiest of evidence, persisted when others would have given up, and finally succeeded in such an uncanny way that British, French and Americans alike christened him “the Lawrence of Occupied Germany”.’

Learning of Barkworth and his work, Atkins decided to travel out to Gaggenau to meet him. The two Nazi hunters hit it off immediately. From Barkworth, Atkins secured the leads that she needed – the survivors from Natzweiler who could testify to what had happened to her four missing agents.

The story that emerged was a particularly horrifying one. Injected with what they were told was a typhoid vaccine, the four women had in truth been given some kind of a knockout dose – most likely carbolic acid (Phenol), one of the Nazi’s favourite killer drugs. The camp doctor who had administered the injections was an SS man called Werner Rohde. The women were fed one by one into the Natzweiler crematoria – the ovens in which the camp staff burned the bodies of the dead.

But Doctor Rohde must have got his doses wrong. One of the women had come back to consciousness, even as she was slid towards the flames, and she had managed to rake the face of her killer with her long fingernails. The man who had proceeded to thrust her into the furnace and burn her alive was Natzweiler’s chief executioner,
Hauptscharführer
Peter Straub.

As luck would have it, Barkworth had recently been given details of what might be
Hauptscharführer
Straub’s home address. After meeting Atkins, the Natzweiler executioner’s arrest had become a high priority, for obvious reasons. There was no evidence that Straub would be ‘at home’, but Barkworth figured it was worth sending a team to the address that he had for him, just to be certain.

That team was led by his redoubtable right-hand man and long-time Villa Degler enforcer, Sergeant Dusty Rhodes. Travelling in the ageing, war-worn jeeps, Rhodes and company set out driving north-east, towards where the French zone of occupation ended. The home address that Barkworth had for Straub lay in the city of Mannheim, which was across the border in the American zone.

One of the major criticisms levelled at Barkworth by the BAOR and other detractors was that he and his men zoomed about in their jeeps willy-nilly, never bothering to secure the proper papers to pass through the various zones of occupation. They were right. Frankly, Barkworth couldn’t be bothered. He did not have the time to do the paperwork. More to the point, he did not want to flag up to anyone outside of the Villa Degler where he was going, or why.

All systems were leaky. If word got out to the man he was hunting that a Barkworth team was on its way, his prey would fast disappear. It was best to arrive unannounced, and to circumvent or blag their way through any troublesome checkpoints. But the BAOR in particular hated it. They never knew where Barkworth was going to pop up next, which was why they had tried to ban him from operating in the British zone.

Likewise, Rhodes would be blagging his way through to Mannheim.

During the war, some 2,000 of the city’s Jews had been dispatched to the extermination camps. But in time Mannheim’s heavy industries had attracted the Allied bombers, and during several night raids the city centre had been flattened. It was through that kind of war-ravaged landscape that Rhodes found himself driving, dodging around piles of blasted rubble and bomb craters – not to mention several tiresome French and American checkpoints – as he sought out the Natzweiler executioner’s home.

As Rhodes climbed the steps that led to what he hoped was Straub’s door, he reminded himself how the Nazis had issued many of their people with false identity papers at war’s end, with the intention that they should continue the fight after the Allies had seized Germany, forming an underground army called ‘The Werewolves’. Straub might well have such false documents. There was also a booming black market in occupied Germany, so he could also have purchased himself a new identity.

It was around one o’clock in the morning when a heavily armed Rhodes rapped on the door. A young woman came and answered. She looked shocked at the SAS’s team’s surprise arrival. There was a figure seated behind her in the living room, smoking a cigar. He appeared decidedly less perturbed. That man denied that he was Peter Straub. But upon studying his features closely, Rhodes realized that he held a trump card.

Rhodes knew well the horrific story of how the four SOE agents had met their end. ‘Straub . . . was putting the women into the cremator after they’d been injected and were supposed to be dead,’ Rhodes recalled. ‘One of the women, on being pushed into the furnace, regained consciousness and at that instant she clawed Straub down one side of his face. He still had the marks of that woman’s fingernails as scars . . .’

False papers or not, Rhodes was certain that this was their man. Straub was arrested and taken back to the Villa Degler at gunpoint, where his interrogators – Barkworth and Vera Atkins – awaited. So significant was Straub’s arrest that a third interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Draper, a legal eagle with extensive war crimes experience, was also present.

At first Straub tried to deny everything. He claimed he had been away on leave when the four SOE agents had been killed. He blamed the entire thing on camp doctor and fellow SS officer Rohde, who had administered the injections. ‘I never lifted a finger against a single prisoner and never saw any in uniform,’ Straub tried to argue. But none of that could explain away the livid scars on his cheek.

Over time, his interrogators broke him down. Finally, Straub began to talk. Bit by bit he revealed the truth of what had happened, but he tried to excuse it all by professing that he was ‘only following orders’. Once the story of the four female agents had been clarified – it had indeed happened in the horrifying way that Atkins had been told – they moved on to other executions at Natzweiler.

Straub spoke about the main means of killing: hanging. His interrogators went to great lengths to establish the height of the stool upon which the condemned were made to stand, before it was kicked away. Straub did not prove clever enough – or maybe he just didn’t care – to realize the thrust of the questioning. By the end his interrogators had established that the stool was not high enough to achieve a ‘proper’ hanging.

Straub’s victims had died of a slow strangulation, as opposed to a long drop that would break the neck, causing death pretty much instantaneously. Straub hadn’t even proved a very efficient executioner. Or maybe this had all been deliberate. Perhaps the victims had been left to writhe and to struggle at the end of the noose as a gruesome warning.

As the interrogation drew to a close, Straub mentioned, almost boastfully, the number of ‘pieces’ that he had killed in a day. At that stage the former Natzweiler executioner was told the following: ‘You leave this room on your hands and knees like an animal. You are not fit to stand and talk to human beings on your legs.’

The four female SOE agents had been executed on orders direct from Berlin. They had been classified as
Nacht und Nebel
 – night and fog – prisoners, which was why they had been sent to Natzweiler. Being
Nacht und Nebel
, the Berlin orders stated that they were to be ‘destroyed without trace’. Well, their physical remains had indeed been reduced to a heap of ashes. But, against all odds, the truth of their murder and who was responsible had been uncovered by the Nazi hunters.

All the more worrying, therefore, that Barkworth’s unit was about to face the hangman’s noose itself.

By the end of September 1945, the SAS had already started destroying sensitive files in preparation for its disbandment. At the same time, questions were being raised about the legitimacy of Barkworth’s Villa Degler operations.

‘The question has arisen as to the authorization and accreditation of various investigating officers or teams operating in France,’ stated a 29 September letter from the War Office. ‘We are anxious that no misunderstanding . . . should exist in regard to officers and their teams . . . Will you please say in the case of Major Barkworth and his team what was the originating authority for dispatch and to what headquarters or unit are they accredited.’

One wonders who was supposed to answer such a query, when the SAS itself was in the midst of being shut down.

On 4 October 1945 orders were issued for the formal disbandment of the SAS. The ‘Urgent Memorandum’ stated: ‘It has been decided to disband the Special Air Services Regt . . . Disbandment will commence on 5 Oct 45 and will be completed by 16 Nov 45 . . . The attention . . . is directed to the instructions contained in pamphlet “Disbandment of units . . . 1945”, copies of which are being forwarded . . . Complete disbandment will be reported to the War Office . . .’

On 5 October passing-out parades took place at the 1 and 2 SAS headquarters, as the men prepared either to return to their ‘home’ regiments, to volunteer for other airborne units or to leave the military altogether. On the face of it the SAS headquarters staff had been left to tie up any loose ends – paperwork, remaining stores and the like – before the final shutdown.

That left Barkworth’s Villa Degler unit as the single largest group of SAS anywhere in the world that was still somehow ‘operational’. Colonel Franks was determined to keep Barkworth’s unit going, come hell or high water.

Just days after the 5 October formal disbandment, Franks put into place stage one of his ‘SAS survival plan’. The Special Air Service Regimental Association was founded, holding its first meeting on 12 October at Colonel Franks’ Wyvenhoe Park headquarters. Franks was appointed its chairman, with Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling, the original founder of the SAS, as president.