Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (30 page)

Four years after the event, the RAF tracked down Scharpwinkel’s driver, Robert Schröder, who said his superior witnessed the shooting of the ten officers taken from the Görlitz jail on March 31. The prisoners—Flight Lieutenants Edgar Humphreys, George McGill, Cyril Swain, Charles Hall, Patrick Langford, and Brian Evans, and Flying Officers “Wally” Valenta, A. Kolanowski, Robert Stewart, and Henry Birkland—were loaded into the back of a military transport truck. On the Sagan road, halfway to the camp, the truck pulled over so the men could relieve themselves. The weather that night was frigid. Scharpwinkel, riding with Schröder in the lead vehicle, got out of the car and walked to where the officers stood on the shoulder of the road, stomping their feet in an effort to keep warm. Dr. Gunther Absalon and Lux, armed with machine guns, stood nearby with their weapons at the ready. “The lorry stood forty meters behind me,” Schröder said. “I was sitting alone in the car when I suddenly heard shouts followed immediately by a mad firing of machine pistols. I jumped out of the car and ran to the rear. Behind the lorry lay the prisoners scattered on the ground. Some of them were right on the road, others were on a slope nearby, but they were all close together. When I had asked one of the officials what had happened, he said that some of the fellows had tried to escape and that they had all caught it.”

Schröder’s statement confirmed the RAF’s long-held suspicion that Absalon “not only investigated the escape from Stalag Luft III but had participated in the shootings.”

By the end of 1946, McKenna and his team had yet to nail down any solid leads on Absalon’s whereabouts. If alive, he most likely had a new identity and corresponding papers.

In the days that followed the murders, prisoners at Stalag Luft III loitered about the camp bulletin board in the freezing drizzle and studied the list of names. The grim roll call hung alongside a poster declaring, “To All Prisoners of War: The escape from prison camp is no longer a sport.” The rain and damp had by now smeared many names on the list, but among those still legible was twenty-three-year-old Flight Lieutenant Anthony Hayter’s. Numerous attempts by the RAF to ascertain Hayter’s fate had only met with disappointment. No urn bearing his name ever arrived at the camp. The absence of any information meant the RAF had no point of reference upon which to build an investigation.

Prior to the war, Hayter indulged his love of sports on the squash and tennis courts—but his true passion lay in the clouds. When Hayter was nine, his stepbrother took him up in a biplane. The exhilarating speed and the wind against his face, the towns and people a distant vision below, ignited a love affair with flying. He joined the peacetime RAF in 1938 and began his pilot training the following year. In April 1940, the RAF sent him with No. 57 Squadron to Northern France, where he flew his first combat operation on May 10. Flying reconnaissance over the Dutch-German frontier, Hayter’s Blenheim
was attacked by three Messerschmitts. He threw the bomber about the sky in a desperate effort to evade enemy fire. The Messerschmitts stayed on his tail, guns blazing, but were forced to give up the chase when their fuel ran low. Hayter managed a safe return to base despite his bomber having 237 holes in the wings and fuselage. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Britain and was sent to Scotland to serve with Coastal Command. Again, luck seemed to be on his side. Prior to a practice flight, a Wellington bomber collided with Hayter’s Blenheim on the runway. One of the Wellington’s propellers sliced into Hayter’s plane and severed his navigator’s arm. Hayter pulled the wounded man from the flaming wreckage and saved the navigator’s life. The RAF eventually stationed Hayter in the Middle East with No. 148 Squadron, a Wellington unit. He survived a crash landing in the desert in early 1942 when one of his plane’s two engines gave out. On April 24, 1942, his bomber went down over Sicily. He escaped the crash without injury but was quickly seized by the Germans. He arrived at Stalag Luft III one week later.

For months, McKenna’s team stumbled blindly along, groping at the faintest of leads in Hayter’s case, with disappointment always being the end result. Only recently, in August 1946, had information emerged that might point to a resolution. In the London Cage, Lieutenant Colonel Scotland had decided to interrogate for a second time Walter Herberg—charged in the killing of Flying Officer Dennis Cochran—to see if any pertinent information had come to his mind since his last interrogation. At the behest of his captors, Herberg again recalled Cochran’s murder in detail and, as Scotland had hoped, divulged something new. Herberg said that after the killing, he was ordered to the Central Security Office in Berlin to report Cochran’s murder to Gestapo Chief Müller. While there, he saw other Gestapo officials who he presumed were visiting on similar business. This he had mentioned in his previous statement, but he now recalled having recognized a man named Heinrich Hilker, an agent with the Strasbourg Gestapo.

It was the first time in the investigation anyone had mentioned Strasbourg. All the RAF knew about Hayter following the breakout had come from surviving escapees who reported last seeing him traveling in the direction of Mülhausen, which would have taken him near Strasbourg. The information from Herberg was relayed to Bowes, who cautioned McKenna the development “should be treated with reserve.” Then, in February 1947, French Army investigators shared with the British a document discovered after the war in the archives of the German Gendarmerie Detachment of Mülhausen, near the Rhine. The document did not reveal who murdered Hayter, but it did provide details of his arrest:

Welter, the document’s author, was in French custody and awaiting trial on war crimes. “It would be very useful,” read a hand-scribbled note in French at the bottom of the document, “to know whether the English Colonel Hayter is still alive in order to get from him more precise information as to what happened after he had been arrested in the manner described above.”

Over the proceeding weeks, McKenna’s men made extensive inquiries in and around Strasbourg. Agents who served in the local
Kripo
and Gestapo at the time of the killing were located in area prisons with the help of the French
Departement des Crimes de Guerre
and interrogated without result. Among those questioned was
Obersturmführer
Julius Gehrum, a man who took apparent pride in his role as “executioner for the Strasbourg Gestapo.” With at least twenty confessed murders to his name, Gehrum told Flight Lieutenant Harrison that had orders been received for the shooting of any person by the local Gestapo, he would have been the triggerman. Harrison voiced his disgust at the man’s willingness to kill. When done with his statement, the Nazi asked Harrison—a former navigator with Bomber Command—if he had flown against Dresden. Harrison answered in the affirmative. The city, bombed by the Americans and British on February 13–14, 1945, suffered a fiery holocaust that all but wiped out the ancient capital of Saxony and killed an estimated fifty thousand people. Why, Gehrum wanted to know, had Harrison taken part in the raid? Harrison answered that if he had not flown the operation, he would have been court-martialed for disobeying orders. The German, satisfied, flashed Harrison a grim smile. The RAF man balked. Yes, he acknowledged a certain legitimacy in the other man’s point, but the two scenarios could hardly be considered the same. One was an order to commit murder, cold and ruthless; the other, to execute a strategic operation of war. Indeed, obeying orders was only a legitimate defense if one could properly argue that the order was lawful.

Reaching out to the Americans for any leads, Harrison learned that former Strasbourg Gestapo Chief Alfred Schimmel was being held in War Crimes Cage 29 at Dachau. Schimmel told Harrison during interrogation that he was appointed chief in May 1942 but resigned the following year. Consequently, he knew nothing about the Hayter affair. Harrison traveled to Paris and reviewed Schimmel’s personnel file on record with CROWCASS (Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects), which revealed he had stayed with the Gestapo until May 1944. When confronted with this evidence, Schimmel said he had lied
previously out of fear he might be charged in connection with the mass murders of paratroopers in the Elzas.

“Shortly after the end of the war,” he said, “rumors were heard in Munich that mass-shootings had taken place and that arrests—especially in Gestapo circles—could be expected.”

His lie exposed, Schimmel said he was summoned to Berlin on official business in early March 1944 and remained there for three weeks. When he returned from his trip, he learned from one of his deputies that an agent named Heinrich Hilker had been dispatched on a “special mission” to Breslau. He had left two days before Schimmel’s return, escorting “a man caught on the frontier during the
Fahndung
.” Hilker returned three days later but said little of his recent expedition. His reluctance to discuss the journey piqued Schimmel’s curiosity. When questioned directly, Hilker insisted his mission had involved nothing out of the ordinary. In the days that followed, Schimmel said, he grew increasingly suspicious when rumors in the office suggested the airman had “been shot by Hilker whilst trying to escape.”

He claimed to know nothing of any official order from Berlin demanding the execution of recaptured airmen. After leaving the Gestapo, he heard from various sources that Hilker had assumed command of a sabotage unit comprised of operatives from the the intelligence service of the SS. Hilker was shot while fighting in the Vosges Mountains and taken to Baden to recover. Schimmel said a former Gestapo colleague told him he had seen Hilker’s false identity papers, which made him out to be seven years younger than his actual age and identified him as a furniture packer.

“In the beginning of 1945, Hilker’s wife had a second baby and Hilker tried to get her to Neufeld, near Zaban,” Schimmel said. “He did not succeed, and he sent her back to her parents in a village near Karlsruhe.”

Schimmel described Hilker for inclusion on the RAF’s wanted list:

Done with Schimmel, Harrison drove to Strasbourg to examine records at the city’s crematorium. He found nothing relating to Hayter’s murder. “All the entries are in name form,” he wrote in a report, “except for a number of serials, which denote the cremation of bodies from the Anatomical Section at the Natzweiler Concentration Camp. These bodies were brought in by the Gestapo and were in batches; no single body having ever been brought in by the Gestapo. The two men at the crematorium in March 1944 had no recollection of any single body being brought in wearing foreign underclothes or articles of foreign clothing.” In the Prison Militaire, Strasbourg, Flight Sergeant Williams found and interviewed a man named Rudolf Peters. Peters joined the local Gestapo in December 1941 and attained the rank of
Kriminalsekretär
with Department IIB, which dealt with civilians who helped POWs on the run. Peters said the head of this department was
Kriminalkommissar
Max Dissner, who in turn reported to Schimmel. It was a morning in late March or early April 1944, Peters said, when Schimmel summoned him to a meeting. Gathered in Schimmel’s office were Dissner and an agent from the local
Kripo
. A young man in civilian clothing, his face thin beneath an unruly mop of blond hair, sat in a chair and faced Schimmel across the expanse of a large desk. Peters guessed him to be no more than twenty-eight years old. Schimmel thrust a finger in the man’s direction and told Peters, “That’s an English Air Force officer.”