Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (24 page)

On the night of the escape, Bushell and Scheidhauer were numbers five and six, respectively, to emerge from the tunnel and disappear into the woods. Disguised as French civilians and traveling by train, they hoped to make it to France and connect with the Resistance. They purchased tickets at the Sagan station for the Berlin-to-Breslau express. From Breslau, they journeyed to Saarbrücken, near the French border. Their train pulled into the city’s main railway station on the
evening of Sunday, March 26. A police officer approached them on the platform and asked to see their travel papers and identity cards. He glanced at their documents and returned them without comment. Bushell and Scheidhauer thanked the officer in French and turned to walk away.

“Good luck,” said the officer in English.

“Thank you,” replied Scheidhauer, also in English.

It was a simple—but effective—trap. The two men were arrested and taken to Lerchesflur Prison. Interrogated by the
Kripo
, they claimed to be French businessmen returning home to their families. Not until their captors threatened to shoot them as saboteurs did Bushell and Scheidhauer confess to their true identities. The local police, following protocol, relayed news of the capture to the War Search Headquarters of the Criminal Police in Berlin. The information made its way from there to Gestapo headquarters.

In the early morning hours of Wednesday, March 29, the phone rang at the home of local
Kripo
chief Gustav Dingermann. The caller was Dr. Leopold Spann, head of the Saarbrücken Gestapo, with orders to ready Bushell and Scheidhauer for immediate transfer to Berlin. The order, Spann said, came from the highest quarters. Regardless of its origin, the order struck Dingermann as odd. The
Wehrmacht
or the
Luftwaffe
usually reclaimed captured escapees and returned them to their camps, not the Gestapo. When Dingermann questioned the change of protocol, Spann’s voice turned cold. He repeated the instructions and hung up the phone. Dingermann called the prison and asked that the necessary arrangements be made. When he arrived at his office later that morning, he learned that the RAF men had been picked up before daybreak. Several days later, one of Dingermann’s officers entered his office and closed the door. He took a seat on the other side of Dingermann’s desk and spoke in almost a whisper.

“I heard in confidence from a Gestapo man,” the officer said, “that the vehicle carrying the two Air Force officers never arrived in Berlin at all, but that both were shot when trying to escape again.”

Dingermann, who suffered from a chronic heart condition, slowly massaged the center of his chest and absorbed the news.

“I seriously do not believe,” he said, “that the two of them tried to escape.”

Urns bearing the names Bushell and Scheidhauer arrived at Stalag Luft III shortly thereafter. An inscription on the base of each urn identified Saarbrücken as the place of cremation.

At his desk, McKenna took a pull from his glass of whiskey and opened the folder in front of him. The room was dark, except for the small circle of light cast by the green-shaded desk lamp. He dragged a hand across his tired eyes and began reading the document, a statement recently taken from Dingermann. Courtney’s team had found him several weeks prior at No. 6 CIC, Moosburg. Once the paperwork cleared, releasing Dingermann into British custody, the RAF had transferred him to the London Cage. He proved to be a cooperative witness and fully explained his involvement in the Saarbrücken affair. The day of the Sagan escape, Dingermann said, Berlin issued instructions laying out the protocol for the handling of recaptured escapees. “What struck me,” he told his interrogators, “was the provision that in the case of escaped prisoners being retaken, they were to be immediately interrogated in detail on how they managed to escape and that—until further instructions were given—the recaptured prisoners were to be kept in police custody. There was thus to be no direct handing over to the Wehrmacht as had been usual hitherto in cases of recapture.”

Dingermann detailed how Bushell and Scheidhauer had been captured at the main railway station in Saarbrücken. “When informed a few days later that the vehicle carrying the two Air Force officers never arrived in Berlin at all, but that both of them were shot when trying to escape again,” he said, “I was very upset.”

Dingermann identified Spann as the primary architect of the Saarbrücken murders but could not name the actual gunmen or say with any certainty if Spann himself pulled a trigger. It was doubtful Spann even survived the war. “About three or four weeks ago—that is the end
of February and the beginning of March 1946—during my stay at the internment camp at Moosburg, I spoke to Kriminalkommissar Jaffke, who until the end of 1943, had been working at the State Police in Saarbrücken,” Dingermann said. “He told me that he had heard Spann, together with about forty to fifty officials of his department, had been killed during one of the large-scale air attacks on Linz, during which the offices there of the Gestapo had been badly hit.”

McKenna pushed the statement aside and took another sip of his drink. He would have to confirm Spann’s death before striking him off the RAF’s list. The Saarbrücken affair was McKenna’s case. While he had teams canvassing the American and British zones, the French Zone, which included Saarbrücken, had been deemed McKenna’s beat. The French were still struggling to bring order to their house in terms of record keeping. From an investigative standpoint, there were additional considerations. Other than Leopold Spann—a man who might or might not be alive—McKenna had no names in his suspect pool. Early on he realized that the Saarbrücken case would entail a lot of knocking on doors, so to speak. He began a drawn-out hunt for those in the German security services assigned to Saarbrücken in 1944.

The search took him from one prison facility to another. It was an exhausting routine, but one to which he had gradually become accustomed. The investigation had thus far pushed him—both physically and mentally—to an extent he had never experienced before. Some days passed with no more than a few hours’ sleep, and his emotional response to the unfolding story of the killings covered the gamut between revulsion and outrage. In a prison camp outside Saarbrücken, McKenna found a man named Josef Lampel, a onetime member of the
Kripo
assigned to Saarbrücken at the time of the Sagan escape. Lampel said a
Kripo
agent named Bender had arrested Bushell and Scheidhauer at the train station. Prior to his wartime service, Bender ran a tobacconist shop in Vorstadstrasse, Saarbrücken.

“I presume he is still living there,” Lampel said.

McKenna checked with local authorities and learned that Bender never returned to Saarbrücken after the war. He forwarded the man’s name to war crime investigators in the American and French zones. He
scored a hit with the French Security Police. The man was serving twelve years’ forced labor at Witlich Gaol, near Trier, for taking part in atrocities committed during the German occupation of Alsace Lorraine. French investigators had taken a statement from Bender, in which he detailed his role in the Saarbrücken affair. Also in French possession were a number of Gestapo documents containing entries relative to the detention and cremation of Bushell and Scheidhauer. At the present time, the French needed the documents for their own investigation and were unable to turn them over to the British. As Scheidhauer was a French national, they had a legitimate concern in the Saarbrücken case.

In early May 1946, French Security Police passed along a statement taken three months earlier from a German police inspector stationed at Saarbrücken during the war. The inspector, a man named Schmoll, said Spann approached him one day in late March 1944 and ordered
him to oversee the cremation of two prisoners recently shot while trying to escape. Schmoll made the necessary arrangements with the Neue Bremm torture camp just outside Saarbrücken, where two men he identified as Emil Schulz and Walter Breithaupt delivered the bodies by truck. McKenna added Schulz and Breithaupt to the RAF’s wanted list and forwarded the names to investigators in the British and American zones. The U.S. Army traced Breithaupt to his parents’ house outside Frankfurt and cleared the RAF to take him into custody. British military police surrounded the house in the early morning hours of October 7. An officer knocked on the front door and told the elderly couple who answered that their son was wanted for questioning in a sensitive matter. They allowed the officer to enter and said Walter was still in bed upstairs. The officer entered Breithaupt’s bedroom and found the wanted man sleeping. A startled Breithaupt was handcuffed, dragged outside to a waiting car, and taken to the holding facility at Minden.

An aerial reconnaisance photograph of Stalag Luft III. The white arrow is pointing to the railway station the escapees headed for once clearing the tunnel.   
BRITISH NATIONAL ARCHIVES: AIR 40/229

At the time of the shootings, Breithaupt was Spann’s personal driver and lived in a small room above the maintenance garage behind the offices of the Saarbrücken Gestapo. Shortly after four in the morning on March 29, Spann woke Breithaupt and told him to prepare the car for a journey to Mannheim. Breithaupt forced himself out of bed and checked the tires and engine oil. Satisfied, he pulled the car round to the front of the office and saw
Kriminalsekretär
Emil Schulz standing in the predawn gloom. Getting in the car, Schulz explained that two escapees from Stalag Luft III were being held by the local criminal police and were “to be returned to a camp in the Reich.” They drove to Lerchesflur Prison, retrieved the fugitives, and brought them back to Gestapo headquarters, where Schulz shackled the prisoners’ wrists. Bushell protested and surprised Breithaupt and Schulz by addressing them in angry German.

“This is not compatible with the honor of an officer,” he said.

An apologetic Schulz said he was only following orders and disappeared inside the building. He returned several minutes later with Spann; both men wore their gray SS uniforms. Schulz climbed into the backseat between the prisoners. Spann got in the front and told Breithaupt to start driving. He informed the airmen they were being taken
to a prison camp deep in the heart of Germany. From Saarbrücken, Breithaupt drove to Hamburg and picked up the Reichsstrasse. He followed it to Kaiserslautern and merged onto the autobahn in the direction of Mannheim. The road at this early hour was empty, prompting Breithaupt to ride hard on the accelerator.

“Don’t drive so fast,” Spann said. “We have plenty of time.”

Bushell and Scheidhauer remained silent during the journey. Spann eventually ordered Breithaupt to pull onto the grass verge. He told the driver to stay with the prisoners and got out of the car with Schulz. The two men each lit a cigarette, and they stamped their feet in the frigid air. They walked to the rear of the car and stood conversing in close quarters, their voices quiet. Breithaupt, watching them through the back window, saw Spann beckon to him.

“I have received an order by teleprint from Berlin to shoot the prisoners,” Spann said matter-of-factly. Seeing the look on Breithaupt’s face, he tried to offer words of reason. “Remember what happens to our wives and children during air raids on our cities.”