Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (20 page)

Negotiations between camp representatives and Captain Baum went forward despite the incident and carried on for several hours. As thousands of American prisoners gathered at the compound’s perimeter fence to cheer the task force’s arrival, it became clear that there was no way Baum could transport them all back to Allied lines. Baum decided only field-grade officers would be allowed to journey with the task force. The remaining American prisoners were given the option of traveling the fifty miles west back to the American lines by foot, if they so wished. Many wisely opted to stay put until the final liberation. At 20:00 hours, the task force pulled away from the camp. The outward journey had cost Baum more than a quarter of his fighting force. The journey back promised to be just as arduous. There was no moon to light the way. Baum and his men would have to use the lights on their vehicles, meaning they would be easy prey for the German forces stalking the return route.

Several miles from the camp, near the town of Hollrich, the task force’s lead tank was hit by a German
panzerfaust
. German troops swarmed the vehicle and maneuvered it into a nearby garden. They aimed its gun down the road and took out three more Shermans in rapid succession. Baum ordered his men to pull back. What remained
of Baum’s force retreated to a nearby hill, where they spent the remainder of the night. Staring at the four pillars of fire in the near distance, Baum knew their chances of making it back to the American lines alive were slim. Early the next morning, as Baum ordered what remained of his men and machines to move out, the hill rumbled violently to life. Throughout the night, German forces had moved into concealed positions at the base of the hill. They now opened fire from all directions, sending up great columns of blasted earth, obliterating flesh and metal. Baum ordered “every man for himself.” The men scattered and ran into the surrounding woods. The Germans quickly rounded up those who were slow or injured. Baum made it into the woods but was shot in the leg and soon captured. He wound up a prisoner in the very camp he’d been sent to liberate. His stay, however, would prove to be a short one. The U.S. 14th Armored Division liberated the camp ten days later, on April 5, 1945.

The rescue operation proved costly in both men and machines. Baum’s task force lost all 57 vehicles; 26 of its 314 men were killed. The Americans assumed control of Oflag XIII-B at the war’s end. In the camp’s northern compound, the U.S. Army interned known and suspected Nazis. It was here Courtney arrived on a damp March afternoon. He was greeted by the camp’s American commandant and escorted to a room in one of the compound’s stone-built barracks. A small table surrounded by three chairs sat in the center of the room. Courtney took a seat and waited several minutes before two armed guards brought Johann Schneider, shackled at the wrists, into the room.

Courtney studied a file in front of him and reviewed the man’s particulars. Schneider had worked as an unskilled laborer, bouncing between farm work and the odd construction job, before joining the SA (the first Nazi paramilitary organization, its members often referred to as “brownshirts”) in 1932. He soon transferred to the SS and marched with troops into Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, and then Poland the following year. Between 1940 and 1943, he served as a chauffeur with the Security Service on the Eastern Front before taking a job as driver with the Gestapo in Munich. Courtney, done reading, looked up and introduced himself. He urged Schneider to share what he knew
about the business at hand. All Schneider could do was nod and give his version of events.

At roughly ten o’clock on the night of March 29, Schneider answered a knock on the door of his Munich flat. A uniformed policeman stood in the hallway with a summons from Gestapo headquarters. Schneider got dressed and rode his bike to the office, arriving within the hour. As he entered the building, Schermer met him and ordered him to prepare a six-seated car for a late-night journey. Schneider went down to the garage and checked out a vehicle. As he finished checking the tire pressure and oil levels, Schermer and Geith appeared.

“We drive to police HQ,” Schermer said.

At the station, the two men disappeared inside and left Schneider behind the wheel. They emerged fifteen minutes later with two prisoners shackled together at the wrists. They drove back to the Gestapo building, where Geith ordered the prisoners out of the car and led them away to an interrogation cell.

“Be ready to leave,” Schermer said when the captives were out of sight. “Make sure you have a machine-pistol with you. This may take a long time, but I’ll let you know.”

It took the better part of three hours. Not until four-thirty in the morning did Schermer return to the garage.

“On Schäfer’s orders, you have to drive in the direction of Ingolstadt,” Schermer told Schneider. “It concerns two prisoners who have often escaped. They are air-raid shelter burglars and looters. Should these two escape, then you will shoot on my orders.”

Weil and Geith placed the prisoners in the back of the car at gunpoint and sat on either side of them. Schneider assumed his position behind the wheel, while Schermer sat in the front passenger seat. In the east, the first slate moments of daylight were evident above the city’s shattered skyline as the car pulled out of the garage. Schneider turned onto the autobahn outside Munich and drove twenty-one miles in the direction of Ingolstadt. The sky had by now sufficiently brightened to a point where headlights were no longer necessary. In the back, the prisoners stared out at a frostbitten landscape, at fields covered in white,
and the glistening branches of trees. Eyeing the bleak terrain, Schneider suddenly felt Schermer’s hand on his arm.

“Stop,” Schermer barked. “Pull up to the right.”

Schneider pulled onto the frozen shoulder. As the car slowed to a stop, Schermer turned to the men in the backseat.

“Relieve yourselves,” he said.

Weil and Geith got out of the car and led the prisoners down a slight incline into the meadow. Schermer, standing near the passenger door, leaned through the window, motioned to the submachine gun under the driver’s seat, and told Schneider to exit the vehicle. Schneider got out, retrieving the gun as he did so. He pulled a magazine from his pocket, jammed it home, and slung the gun over his shoulder. He walked to the rear of the car and leaned against the luggage box. From this vantage point, he had a clear view of the meadow and the prisoners—still chained at the wrists—fifteen feet in front of him. Except for the random bush and tree, there were few places for the prisoners to take cover should they make a run for it.

As Schneider surveyed the scene, he noticed Schermer, standing several feet away, excitedly waving his hands. When Schneider looked in his direction, Schermer pointed at the prisoners and, in a hushed but excited voice, said, “Shoot! Shoot!”

“I looked at him again briefly,” Schneider told Courtney, “and then it went through my head. He wants me to shoot the two prisoners here on the spot.”

Schneider took aim with the submachine gun and squeezed off six rounds. He saw the two prisoners collapse in the snow and heard Schermer tell him to “stop shooting.” In the meadow, Weil and Geith knelt beside the bodies and checked for signs of life. Death having been established, the two men signaled Schermer the job was done.

“Take off the chains at once,” he ordered.

Schneider remained by the car, a thin wisp of gray smoke curling up from the gun’s muzzle. He stuck the weapon back under the driver’s seat and, following Schermer’s orders, retrieved a large piece of tarpaulin from a toolbox in the back. Weil and Geith spread the tarpaulin
over the two bodies and camouflaged it with fallen fir branches gathered from the base of a nearby tree. Alongside the road, Schermer busied himself collecting the spent shell casings. He ordered Schneider to pull the car fifteen feet forward and scattered the casings about the car’s new position.

“If there is a commission of enquiry,” he said, “you shot from here.”

The remainder of Schneider’s story mirrored Weil’s statement. He and Schermer went off to notify the proper authorities while Weil and Geith remained with the bodies.

“Schermer told me later that nothing had to be mentioned about this case,” he said in conclusion.

Courtney took Schneider into custody and placed him in a cell at Minden. The Americans confirmed they had Eduard Geith in custody, having arrested him on May 5, 1945, and soon turned him over to Courtney. A career police officer before the war, Eduard Geith had joined the Munich Police Force as an auxiliary officer in 1919, shortly after his twentieth birthday. He worked his way up the chain of command, eventually achieving the equivalent rank of assistant senior detective. In January 1938, he transferred to Gestapo headquarters, Munich, and continued his ascent. The war took a personal toll on him in November 1944, when his wife, Magdalene, was killed in an air raid.

Johann Schneider called at Geith’s flat shortly after midnight on March 29, 1944, and said he was to report immediately to local Gestapo headquarters. A car was waiting downstairs. The two men arrived at the Wittelsbach Palais less than half an hour later and reported to Schermer. Reading from a teletype, Schermer said that local police had captured two fugitive RAF officers. The men were to be turned over to the Gestapo and, on orders from Berlin, shot. Schermer filed the teletype in a desk drawer and made Weil, Schneider, and Geith swear to secrecy. The men discussed how to execute the order. They decided the best course of action would be to find open country near the edge of a wood and shoot the men near the tree line, making it look as if the prisoners had made a run for it. Geith said that he and Weil advised against using their Walther service pistols, for fear the weapons were not accurate enough.

“Schneider proposed after long hesitation that he would carry out the matter with a machine-pistol,” Geith said. “He was certain of himself and would also guarantee there would be no mistake. Schermer agreed to Schneider’s solution, and Weil and myself were also content with this solution. Every one of us took an equal part in this plan.”

Following the hour-long meeting, Geith said he and Schermer retrieved the prisoners from the local police station and brought them back to the Palais for interrogation. One of the prisoners spoke broken German, while Weil—present in the room—spoke schoolboy English. Their combined language skills enabled the two sides to communicate in an effective, if not efficient, manner. The process, however, appeared to wear on Schermer’s nerves. Working his way through one cigarette after another as the prisoners gave their statements, he harried them to keep it brief.

“Nothing,” said Geith, “went quickly enough for him.”

During the interrogation, Geith said, the prisoners made it clear they were British airmen and provided personal information, a few scant details about the escape, and the towns they had passed through in their bid for freedom. The prisoners signed their statements, which did not survive the war, and were then ordered to strip. Geith inspected the men’s armpits; Weil looked elsewhere. The search complete, the prisoners were ordered to dress and were chained together at the wrists. Sometime between five and five-thirty that morning, the airmen were bundled into a car for what they believed was the return journey to Stalag Luft III. Geith and Weil each wore a Walther pistol in a holster on his right hip, with a round loaded in the breech. They sat in the back with the airmen and faced them on two fold-out chairs.

They drove through the northern suburbs of Munich and pulled onto the autobahn. They clocked no more than twenty-five miles before stopping on the right shoulder, alongside a meadow that sloped gently upward into a pine forest. Geith said he and Weil got out of the car and led the prisoners into the field, away from the main road. Once satisfied that passing motorists could not see them, they signaled the prisoners to stop and relieve themselves.

“In my opinion, it could only have been a matter of seconds that
the prisoners stood there,” Geith said. “Then, there were two short bursts of fire—one immediately following the other. The two prisoners collapsed forward on their knees onto the ground without making a sound. We—Schermer, Schneider, Weil, and I—hurried to the fallen men.”

One of the airmen lay twitching on the ground.

“I’ll see to that,” said Schneider, still clasping the submachine gun, and fired two shots into the prisoner’s head.

Geith knelt beside the bodies and undid the chain that bound the two men together. The shackle had been lightly fastened so as not to leave any trace of a bruise. As Geith unlocked the restraint, Schneider removed and pocketed a wristwatch worn by one of the dead officers. The men quickly gathered branches and fir green from the nearby woods and covered the bodies.

“After all this had happened,” Geith said, “Weil and I fired a few shots with our service pistols in the direction of the forest, aiming mainly at a telegraph pole in the direction of the wood, so as to leave on it marks of the so-called pursuit shots.”

The coroner, summoned to the scene, gave the bodies a quick going over.

“Yes,” he said, “there is certainly no more to be done here.”

The bodies were loaded into a wagon and taken to the crematorium at the Eastern Cemetery in Munich to be destroyed. Returning to Gestapo headquarters, Geith said, he and his compatriots were “inwardly excited” by Schermer’s insistence that an Allied inquiry into the murders would likely follow. They inventoried the victims’ personal items back at the office and divvied up a pack of cigarettes found on one of the bodies. Once Schermer filed his incident report several days later in Berlin, Geith considered the matter closed. Schäfer again swore all participants to secrecy and threatened them with death should even the “smallest detail” come to light. Not long thereafter, the Sagan killings made international headlines. Geith, sitting down one evening to read a newspaper in his Munich flat, found British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden staring up at him from the front page. The article detailed Eden’s
recent speech denouncing the German explanation that prisoners had been shot while trying to escape.