Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (23 page)

McKenna had the Royal Army Medical Corps transport Boschert to a British internment camp near Paderborn. There he would remain until doctors deemed him fit enough for interrogation back in London. With a grim sense of satisfaction, McKenna watched medics load Boschert into the back of an ambulance and pull away. The men who had conveyed Cochran to his grave were now in custody—but the whereabouts of Josef Albert Andreas Gmeiner, their chief, remained unknown. The Americans had no leads to offer, and the Karlsruhe Gestapo had destroyed all their records prior to American forces reaching the city. The French, responding to McKenna’s inquiries, came forward and said they were holding Gmeiner in connection with wartime atrocities committed in Alsace Lorraine but were unwilling to turn him over to the British. Only after the RAF promised to hand him back should he be found not guilty in the Sagan case did the French release him into McKenna’s custody.

Transferred to the War Criminals Holding Center in Minden, Gmeiner portrayed himself as an unwilling participant in the crime. He said that a few days after the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III, a wired transmission came through to his office from Gestapo
Gruppenführer
Müller in Berlin. Reciting from memory, Gmeiner said the document read, in part:

“Having received the order, it was impossible for me to prevent its execution, although I considered it a crime,” Gmeiner said. “My death sentence, at any rate, would have been the unavoidable consequence, and I could not have prevented or altered the fate of the unfortunate
prisoner by sacrificing myself and my family. After my arrest, the prisoner would have been executed even before my own death sentence had been effected. There was nothing left for me but to abstain from taking part in the execution of the dreadful deed. To know of the order and not be able to prevent its execution causes me great and depressing spiritual distress.”

The war, Gmeiner said, had cost his family everything.

“I became a civil servant to earn at least a minimum living for the maintenance of my family,” he said. “Although my income was modest, my wife and I saved a few thousand Marks—denying ourselves all personal enjoyment—for the future of our three children. In April 1944, my wife had to flee with the children from Karlsbad, where we had our family dwelling. She could only take with her what she and the children had on their bodies.”

Gmeiner told McKenna everything his family owned had been destroyed. All he possessed were the clothes he currently wore.

“If in my forty-second year,” he said, “I have nothing before me after years of very hard work and doing without, and after the complete loss of the modest fruits of my work—and when my family is forced to live on the mercy of relatives—then it is only the thought that I have not to reproach myself for any guilt. I was forced to act as I did, which kept me from taking my life, as was done in a cowardly way by those responsible.”

Toward the end of July 1946, McKenna shipped Gmeiner—along with the other Natzweiler conspirators—off to the London Cage. McKenna forwarded the news to Wing Commander Bowes, who, in a progress report to his superiors in London dated August 6, 1946, wrote: “This case can now be regarded as completed.”

Freezing temperatures, anti-aircraft fire, and marauding enemy fighters inflicted a heavy blood toll on Allied aircrews. As the war progressed, and greater swaths of Germany fell under the onslaught of British and American bombs, the citizenry adopted an increasingly dismal opinion of Allied airmen. Members of the Allied air forces heard nightmarish stories of angry citizens hanging captured airmen from lampposts or shooting crash survivors on the spot.

Seven members of one British bomber crew who survived being shot down in February 1945 were captured by German soldiers and taken to a village, where refugees from the city of Pforzheim—recently set ablaze by the RAF—had come seeking shelter. The men were placed under guard in the basement of the local school. They did not remain there for long. An angry mob stormed the premises and dragged the aircrew outside, where a vengeful throng had gathered. They pushed and shoved the airmen down the street and beat them as they stumbled along. Bleeding and bruised, the airmen were forced into a large barn that stood alongside the village church. A single bulb illuminated the barn’s interior and revealed nooses hanging from a support beam. One of the airmen—wireless operator and air-gunner Tom Tate—caught site of the makeshift gallows just before entering the barn and made a break for it. He thrashed his way through the crowd and ran as hard
as he could, not stopping even when he heard gunfire erupt behind him. He spent the night sleeping in some woods, surrendered the next morning to a group of German soldiers, and eventually wound up in a POW camp. Not until later did he learn that the enraged villagers had shot his crewmates outside the barn. Tate’s flight engineer, who escaped only to be recaptured the next day, was beaten by a mob of Hitler Youth and shot in the head by a fifteen-year-old boy who had lost his mother and five siblings in a recent raid.

Shipment to a POW camp held no guarantee of civil treatment, as one airman, shot down over Hamburg in 1942 and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-B in the small Silesian town of Lamsdorf, wrote in a letter home:

Dulag Luft, the
Luftwaffe
transit camp, lay just outside Frankfurt. Upon arriving at the compound, prisoners were photographed, stripped to their underwear, and subjected to a rigorous search. After providing name, rank, and service number, the men were placed in solitary confinement. They lingered there for up to a week in a cell measuring 10
¹
⁄
₂
feet long by 5
¹
⁄
₂
feet wide. Only the ordeal of interrogation broke the monotony of isolation.

The Germans initially took a gentle approach to questioning and handed prisoners what they claimed to be a Red Cross form. Filling in all the blanks, they said, would allow the airman’s family to be informed of their loved one’s fate in a timely manner. The questions, however, went beyond the personal basics and sought details on the composition
of bomber groups, the strength of air squadrons, and other topics of military importance. Most airmen were quick to identify the ruse, which only stoked the ire of their captors. One RAF flight engineer sat silently as his interrogator went through the form and read the questions out loud. After nearly half an hour, the airman’s lack of response led to a sinister threat.

“There are too many people going around France dressed up as airmen and wearing RAF identity discs,” the German said. “Unless you tell me more about yourself, I will have you shot as a spy.”

“Go ahead and shoot,” the airman replied.

The German, struck by his captive’s nonchalance, lost his enthusiasm for the threat and sent the airman back to his cell.

The Germans did what they could to make the airmen uncomfortable and weaken their resolve. While in solitary, prisoners were denied the pleasure of cigarettes and the use of basic toiletries. Their dining options also left a lot to be desired. Breakfast was a bleak affair consisting of two pieces of black bread and jam, served with ersatz coffee or ersatz tea, usually “made from various mixtures of hay, carrots, and parched grain.” The men hardly fared better at lunch with their midday ration of thin, watery gruel. By dinner, the two pieces of black bread were almost a relief. A common practice employed by the Germans involved cranking up the heat in the solitary cells. The temperatures would reach stifling levels, aided by permanently sealed windows and cement walls lined with heavy insulation. In extreme cases, the metal bed frames would get hot enough to blister flesh. Once the Germans were satisfied they had learned all they could from a prisoner, the airman was moved out of solitary and into a regular barrack, where he awaited transfer to a permanent camp.

The barrack walls were lined with microphones, something the inmates had fun with when they discovered them. “We used to go in these rooms with the microphones,” remembered one RAF pilot, “and shout the most horrible lines about our new 15-engined bombers with twenty pilots sitting in a row, and I am sure we shook the Germans on many occasions. Eventually, this game got rather pallid and we connected up the electric-light system and the microphone system and
blew-up the whole works. The only thing that happened was that a German, who happened to be listening in at the time, nearly got his head blown off—and the Senior British Officer, who was the ‘unfortunate’ on these occasions got five days solitary confinement.”

Roger Bushell arrived at Dulag Luft in May 1940. In those early days of war, the art of escape was a primitive thing. Prisoners had yet to learn the complex craft of digging tunnels, while the Germans lacked methods of detection to expose such activity. Both sides, however, would prove to be quick studies. Shortly after his arrival, Bushell joined the camp’s escape committee, which set about digging a tunnel out from one of the barracks. The intended goal was a dry streambed just beyond the wire. For weeks, the men dug with their hands, clawing at the earth and sweating into long cotton underwear to avoid dirtying their uniforms. They soon passed under the wire and had a mere eight feet to go when they struck an underwater spring and flooded the shaft. The Germans quickly discovered another tunnel started shortly thereafter.

The escape season came to an end with the onset of winter but resumed in the spring of 1941. Digging began as soon as the ground had thawed. The men planned to break out on the first moonless night in June, and they completed the eighty-foot-long tunnel without any major setbacks. Bushell, originally intending to make his break through the tunnel, decided to blitz out on his own. Fluent in German, he believed he sported an above-average chance of making it to the Swiss border. A goat shed sat in the corner of the exercise field, which lay just beyond the compound’s barbed-wire perimeter. Bushell’s plan was simple: hide in the shed during the day and sneak away after sunset. When the day in question arrived, fellow prisoners distracted the guards by leading the goat into the field and staging a mock bullfight. Bushell took his position in the shed and waited for nightfall, the last few hours spent in the company of the goat, who didn’t seem to mind the intrusion.

Bushell snuck away after dark. He made it to the local railway station and purchased a ticket with the few German marks he had managed to scrounge in the camp. He traveled through the night and disembarked the next day in the town of Stühlingen. Thirty yards from the border,
Bushell’s luck ran out. Presenting himself as a drunken ski instructor, he tried staggering across the frontier, telling the border guard he was returning home after organizing a local ski event. The suspicious guard insisted Bushell accompany him to the police station. Bushell broke character and ran, prompting the startled German to give chase. The guard drew his pistol and squeezed off several rounds, the bullets missing their mark and kicking up asphalt. Bushell veered round a corner and found himself in a dead-end street. He was promptly arrested and dispatched to Stalag Luft I, a bleak and desolate compound near the Baltic coastal town of Barth, where he remained for several months.

The meager rations and frigid Baltic weather took a harsh physical toll, but the miserable conditions only strengthened Bushell’s resolve. He was soon overseeing the construction of a new tunnel, but the Germans transferred the prisoners to another camp before its completion. Men, thirsty and hungry, were herded into railway cars for the nearly two-hundred-mile trip to a compound near Warburg. During the journey, prisoners used a table knife smuggled aboard to cut a hole in the car’s floorboards. Bushell—forty pounds lighter since his internment at Stalag Luft I—carefully lowered himself through the hole, the track beneath him a rushing metallic blur. He could feel the wind pulling on him, threatening to suck him under the wheels of the train. He held tight and waited for the train to slow down before dropping himself onto the rails and rolling clear of the undercarriage. Now on the run, he partnered with Czech airman Jack Zafouk and accompanied him to Prague. Their timing proved unfortunate, arriving as they did in the wake of Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination.

Hitler ordered the arrest and murder of thousands of Czechs. Friends and neighbors betrayed one another to save their own skin—and so it was the Germans discovered the local family sheltering Bushell and Zafouk. The family paid in blood for its transgression. Zafouk was shipped to Colditz and Bushell eventually arrived at Stalag Luft III with his plan for a great escape in place. Like the final creation an artist is intent on completing, the escape became Bushell’s obsession. He oversaw every aspect of the planning with an almost tyrannical zeal. He expected
the men executing his plans to accomplish the impossible, whether it be the forging of two hundred travel passes or the tailoring of two hundred civilian outfits. He had no patience for skepticism and doubt.

Just prior to the escape, Bushell partnered with Lieutenant Bernard Scheidhauer, a Frenchman. Scheidhauer was eighteen in June 1940, when France collapsed under the German onslaught. He fled the country by boat to England in what proved to be a harrowing cross-Channel voyage. The boat ran out of fuel mid-crossing and left the Frenchman and his five sailing companions adrift for days. They steadily worked their way through all the food and water on board. On the twelfth day, a Scottish freighter spotted the stranded men, ravaged by thirst, hunger, and exposure. Scheidhauer made a quick recovery and joined the Free French Air Force less than one week later, eventually taking to the skies with No. 131 Squadron. He began flying combat operations over Northern France in the summer of 1942. When his patrols took him over the coastal town of Brest, he would swoop in low and buzz his parents’ home, hoping they might realize it was their son waging war among the clouds. He was fighting not only for them, but the redemption of his nation’s honor—a matter he held dear. On November 18, 1942, it all came to an end when mechanical problems forced his Spitfire down. Scheidhauer, the controls going slack in his hand, managed to maneuver his plane out to sea toward the English Channel Islands. He landed the stricken fighter on what he believed to be the Isle of Wight. Clambering out of the cockpit, he was approached by local farmers, who informed the young pilot he had actually crash-landed in German-occupied Jersey. Less than an hour later, the Germans had him in custody. His next stop was Stalag Luft III, where he provided the escape committee with intelligence on France.