Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (10 page)

Taylor spent the next several hours back at his office, staring at the phone. On his desk sat the wanted list McKenna had circulated to Allied police units several weeks earlier. The name “Mercier” was not on it—but that meant little. The landlady called at seven to report that Mercier had just returned. Less than thirty minutes later, Taylor was back at the address and knocking on the door of an upstairs bedroom. When Mercier opened the door, Taylor pushed his way in and placed the man under arrest. Mercier put up little resistance but gave violent voice to his protests, insisting Taylor had made a mistake. He was, he said, a French national and had the papers to prove it. Taylor ignored the man’s ranting and hurried him down to the car. Back at the RAF Police office, the man refused to submit to interrogation. He was turned over to the German civil police and taken to the local jail, where he promptly tried to break free of his guards and make a run for it. He spent the night in a cramped cell under constant supervision. The next morning, he was shackled and led to a dank interrogation room.

This time, under forceful questioning, Mercier’s front crumbled. He slumped back in his chair and uttered his real name. Taylor’s eyes dropped to a sheet of paper in front of him. He ran his finger down McKenna’s wanted list. Dr. Ernst Kah, head of the Breslau
Sicherheitsdienst
—or SD, the intelligence agency of the SS—occupied the number-twelve slot.

Kah, now desperate to prove his willingness to help, began rattling off the names and whereabouts of other Nazis on the run, including one man in particular. Colonel Heinrich Seetzen, inspector of Security Police in the Breslau area, sat at number nine on McKenna’s list. What about him? Taylor asked. At Kohlerstrasse 6, in Hamburg, Kah said,
British authorities would find Seetzen hiding under the name Gollwicer. Taylor asked for a description. Kah, after a moment’s consideration, placed Seetzen in his mid-to-late thirties. Powerfully built, though comprised more of fat than muscle, he stood roughly six feet tall. His eyes were a watery gray beneath a fringe of fair hair. A motor accident had left scars on his arms and face.

“You will take us to him,” Taylor said.

Kah could only agree.

It was past midnight when two RAF police cars, their headlights extinguished, turned onto Kohlerstrasse and moved slowly down the street. Kah sat wedged in the backseat of the rear car, between two RAF police officers. The cars passed darkened lots, some bearing the distinct silhouettes of small, cramped houses; others piled high with the wreckage of homes rendered flat by Allied bombing. Outside the house at number six, the cars came to a stop. Two officers, their sidearms drawn, emerged from the lead vehicle and rushed up the garden path. From where he sat, Kah could see the shadowy figures approach the door. They forced their way into the house, yellow light spilling from the doorway onto the darkened stoop. Kah could hear shouting and the barking of commands. Curtains were drawn across the windows, making it impossible to see the chaos unfolding inside. Several tense minutes passed before the two RAF policemen appeared in the doorway with a struggling man between them. They fought their way down the garden to the front of the car in which Kah sat. The driver turned on the headlights, illuminating the man’s face. Kah nodded.

The officers bundled Seetzen into the first car and sped off toward police headquarters. His wrists cuffed behind him, Seetzen sat quietly in the backseat and worked the back side of his teeth with his tongue. He dislodged the cyanide capsule from his bridgework, positioned it between his teeth, and bit down. In the front of the car, one of the arresting officers turned around and saw Seetzen, his body wracked with spasms, frothing at the mouth. The driver turned the wheel hard and changed course for the hospital. They arrived within minutes, but it was too late. Seetzen lay dead across the seat, white residue dribbling from his lips.

Three Russian soldiers, two men and a woman, stormed the emergency ward of Breslau Hospital No. 6 on the morning of May 10, 1945. Armed with Tokarev rifles, they moved from bed to bed, prodding the burned and mangled casualties of the recent siege, screaming the same question over and over.

“Where is Lieutenant Hagamann?”

The Russian woman stomped through the ward, kicked the sides of beds, and fired the question at dazed and bewildered patients. The male soldiers, their rifles at the ready, followed in her wake.

“Are you Lieutenant Hagamann?” the woman screamed at one man, his body wrapped in bandages. When the man shook his head, she moved on to the next bed. “Where is Lieutenant Hagamann?”

The volatile questioning dragged on as one patient after the other denied being Hagamann. There was no doubt among those in the ward as to what fate awaited the unfortunate lieutenant should he be found.

“Are you Lieutenant Hagamann?”

Another man, his skin scarred and blackened, uttered a weak-sounding “No.”

In a corner bed at the far end of the ward, a man raised his head and said, “I am Hagamann.”

The Russians approached and ripped the sheets from his bed to reveal a lightly bandaged leg.

“You are Scharpwinkel,” the Russian woman yelled.

“Yes,” the man said. “I am Scharpwinkel, head of the Gestapo in Breslau.”

The soldiers pulled Scharpwinkel out of bed and dragged him from the ward. Several minutes later, a car engine roared to life in the hospital courtyard below. The sound of squealing tires signaled the Russians’ hasty departure.

The man telling McKenna the story paused and looked out the window of his small cottage, the rural serenity of his present surroundings far removed from the blood and antiseptic of the hospital. McKenna had tracked down Hubertus Zembrodt, twenty-seven, without a problem. Checking with the town
Bürgermeister
in Bartrup a day after questioning Lonsky, McKenna was provided an address on Alverdiessennerstrasse. Zembrodt—poor but pleasant—invited McKenna in and spoke freely. He told McKenna he’d joined the
Wehrmacht
before the war. He served in France and on the Eastern Front, where he was wounded in late 1944. He convalesced for two months before being sent to Breslau in January 1945. Three months later, enemy fire put him in the same hospital as Scharpwinkel, who had also been wounded in the Breslau fighting. The Russians imprisoned Zembrodt and the other patients after the city’s fall but released him in July. Unable to find accommodations elsewhere, he settled in Bartrup—unemployed, but thankful to be alive.

“The Russians also arrested Dr. Mehling, who was the doctor in charge of all the hospitals in Breslau,” Zembrodt said, returning to his story. “I have never heard of either man since that day and don’t know what has happened to them.”

“Is there anything about Scharpwinkel you can tell me?” McKenna asked. “Anything at all.”

“The arrest at the hospital caused a certain amount of discussion among the patients and staff at the time,” Zembrodt said. “As far as I can remember, Dr. Scharpwinkel was in the hospital about four weeks before he was taken away by the Russians.”

“What about during the actual fighting?” McKenna asked. “Did you hear of a unit under his command codenamed Scharpwinkel?”

Zembrodt shook his head and said he knew little else about the man. McKenna concluded the interview and returned with Smit to their barracks at Rinteln. Brooding at the wheel, McKenna pondered Zembrodt’s story. It failed to prove the Russians had liquidated Scharpwinkel. He drove and kept his thoughts to himself, the steady patter of rain and the rhythmic slapping of the windshield wipers the only sounds. When Smit, attempting to break the heavy silence, suggested they cross Scharpwinkel off their list, McKenna dismissed the idea. Scharpwinkel would remain a wanted man, McKenna said, until physical evidence dictated otherwise.

McKenna restored his spirits back at the barracks with a cigarette and glass of whiskey in the canteen. He returned to his office and studied the fifty mug shots on the wall. Under their watchful gaze, he took a seat and began sorting through the growing stack of paperwork on his desk. Since the investigation began, McKenna’s team had received numerous tips from both anonymous and official sources. One in particular came from a Dr. Rudolf Diels and concerned General Arthur Nebe, the top man on the RAF’s list. Presently, Diels was in British custody and preparing to testify for the prosecution at Nuremberg. The doctor served as the Gestapo’s first chief from 1933 to 1934. When political intrigue forced him out of the job, he assumed command of security for the government of Cologne. Because of the various positions he’d held before and during the war, Diels was well versed on the inner workings of the Gestapo and
Kripo
.

Recently interrogated by British military officials, Diels said he had been arrested and sentenced to death for his alleged involvement in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. He claimed to have seen Nebe placed in the cell adjacent to his while imprisoned at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. According to information passed on to McKenna’s team by the Judge Advocate General’s Office:

McKenna pulled a copy of the wanted list from his desk drawer. To the right of Nebe’s name he wrote, “Believed dead but not yet confirmed.” In the number-ten slot, alongside Absalon’s name, he scrawled in pencil: “Believed killed or taken by the Russians.” The pages of his notebook were filled with rumors and speculation but nothing concrete. Definitive leads remained elusive despite twenty-six days of investigative footwork. As he sat pondering the list, the phone on his desk rang. Sergeant Taylor, at the end of the line, informed McKenna of Kah’s apprehension and the subsequent arrest and suicide of Heinrich Seetzen. Neither man, he said, answering McKenna’s question, had mentioned Scharpwinkel or Absalon. Kah was now being transferred to No. 1 Civilian Internment Camp (CIC) at Neumünster. The British Army planned to hold him in isolation for fourteen days’ interrogation. Once they were done, Taylor said, McKenna would be free to question Kah himself.

McKenna hung up the phone and picked up his pencil. Satisfied, he drew a line through Seetzen’s name at number twelve and checked off Kah at number seven. Two down.

McKenna and Smit left Rinteln several days later for Berlin, where they hoped to uncover information on Scharpwinkel. They traveled by jeep to Helmstedt and cleared an army checkpoint before leaving the British Zone of Occupation behind. McKenna doubted they would make Berlin by nightfall. Showing their papers at another checkpoint beneath a red sickle-and-hammer flag, they passed into the Russian Zone. They traveled on for another forty-five minutes, racing against the fading light
and mindful of the storm clouds overhead, before the jeep’s engine died without warning. McKenna cursed and guided the jeep onto the road’s center divide.

“This is a hell of a mess,” he said, looking up at the darkening sky. “No one will come through now.”

The two men remained in the jeep and considered their next move. They were still roughly ninety miles from Berlin. The minutes ticked by until, in the evening gloom, the distant sound of an engine signaled an approaching vehicle. Two American officers in a jeep screeched to a halt alongside McKenna’s stricken ride and asked if he needed help. On him, McKenna had his French and American travel passes, a copy of the wanted list, and his notebook.

“I have papers here that I don’t want to get into anybody else’s hands,” McKenna said. “Would you be kind enough to take them with my sergeant to Berlin, and I’ll sit and wait for the Aid Department to come out. Please tell them exactly where I am.”

The Americans agreed to help and drove off toward Berlin with McKenna’s papers and Smit. McKenna watched the taillights vanish into the night and suddenly felt very alone. The surrounding landscape was completely still and cloaked in a heavy silence. He climbed back into the jeep and wrapped himself in an overcoat and blankets. It would be at least four hours, he guessed, before help arrived. Snow began to fall and quickly piled high against the jeep’s windshield. He settled in for the long wait and gradually drifted off.

Low voices and footsteps in the snow dragged him from a shallow sleep. Through the fogged passenger window, he saw several men approaching the jeep, their features faintly lit by the pale glow of oil lamps. Their vehicle—a large, canvas-topped truck with chains around the tires—sat alongside his. A gloved hand knocked on the driver’s-side window and motioned for McKenna to get out. He could now hear the men more clearly and realized they were speaking Russian. Wearily, he got out and tried to identify himself using the few Russian words he knew. The soldiers, heavily bundled in long coats, rifles slung over their shoulders, shook their heads. One nudged McKenna out of the way and peered inside the jeep.