The Nazi Hunters (26 page)

In the ultimate irony, the gas chamber was sited in a converted block of the former ‘Alpine style’ ski resort. Its purpose was to test out nerve gases and other chemical weapons, using the prisoners as human guinea pigs. A slot in the door to the 12-foot-by-12-foot chamber enabled the insertion of a gas cartridge containing whatever agent was being tested. A glass panel could be slid back to enable the ‘scientists’ to observe the effects of the gassing.

‘Each prisoner was fed well a week before being gassed,’ Galitzine reported. ‘Some even got out alive when the gas failed to work, but they always died in some other way later. The doctors tried to “revive” patients by injections of antidotes to the gas. Most of the victims in the gas chamber were women . . .’ They were stripped naked, then crammed into the chamber.

Incredibly, the Natzweiler camp commandant’s house – a seemingly quaint Hansel-and-Gretel building set over three floors – lay just a few dozen yards from the camp perimeter. Josef Kramer, who had served as commandant at both Auschwitz and Belsen during his time, had lived there with his family, as had Heinrich Schwarz, another former Auschwitz commandant. The house had an open-air swimming pool set to one side, and the other offered a view through the razor wire towards the massed ranks of huts. A track ran by the house and pool: this was the route the condemned took to the gas chamber.

Natzweiler, Galitzine discovered, had been a tool of what was later to become known as Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’. Medical experiments were carried out on Jewish inmates, to ‘prove’ the ‘inferiority’ of the Jewish race –
Untermensch
(subhumans) in Nazi-speak. ‘The prisoners were used unhesitatingly as human guinea pigs,’ Galitzine wrote, with barely disguised revulsion. ‘Bodies were found preserved in alcohol in jars, some being already cut up. The prison numbers of all bodies are available which will permit identification.’

Serendipitously perhaps, four of the survivors that Galitzine managed to speak to were members of the Resistance. They were to describe to Galitzine one horrifying incident that would reveal the fate of some of those who had disappeared in the valleys of the Vosges, when the SAS had been waging war there.

‘By hangings and shooting in the neck, 92 women and approximately 300 men were killed during the night of the 1st to 2nd Sept 1944,’ Galitzine wrote. ‘The corpses were stacked up in a cellar, in which the blood was 20 cm. high . . . They are alleged to be a group of partisans who had been captured in the vicinity.’

Natzweiler lies approximately 10  miles due east of Moussey. The timing of this mass killing, plus the geography and the numbers, tie up with the first of the Waldfest deportations from the Rabodeau Valley of those alleged to be Maquis (‘partisans’).

But of even more relevance to Operation Loyton were Galitzine’s final discoveries at Natzweiler. He heard rumours that fellow soldiers – Allied elite operators, like him – had lost their lives in this place of hell. He unearthed the first concrete evidence in some pencil drawings made of Natzweiler inmates, which bore the signature ‘B.J. Stonehouse’. Stonehouse was a British officer held at Natzweiler, along with a supposedly fellow British elite forces operator, called Patrick O’Leary.

Galitzine presumed that both Stonehouse and O’Leary had been ‘terminated’, and he reported them as dead. The deeper he dug, the more evidence he uncovered. There were suggestions that American airmen had been incarcerated at Natzweiler. An eyewitness spoke of four British women being executed at the camp, and there were suggestions they may have been fellow SOE agents. Plus there were reports that an officer of the Special Air Service had been held at the camp – fate unknown.

Galitzine’s report was rushed direct to SHAEF in Paris. In the winter of 1944 the world was still a long way from uncovering the horrors of the concentration camps. Belsen and Auschwitz would not be liberated for another five months. The terrible aberrations that Prince Galitzine had so painstakingly documented at Natzweiler were utterly unknown to the world right then.

Galitzine expected his report to provoke a storm of outrage at SHAEF. He anticipated a major press conference would be called, at which his findings would be presented to a horrified world press corps. Instead, his report was quietly and efficiently buried. The truth about Natzweiler was suppressed, and Galitzine himself was ordered to keep quiet about whatever he may have discovered there.

A freethinker by nature, Galitzine was beside himself with anger. ‘I got a rude signal from headquarters saying that I wasn’t to discuss this with anyone,’ Galitzine recalled. His report into Natzweiler was to be buried.

He was shocked and appalled. This was the first concentration camp that the Allies had ever run into. His report was the first official document to catalogue the existence of such a place, and to detail its horrific excesses. Why then had it been suppressed? Typically, Prince Galitzine demanded answers.

The only explanation he was ever offered was that if the true horrors of the concentration camps were exposed, it ‘might make the Germans resist all the more and . . . they would feel there was no hope’. If the Allies branded the whole of the German nation as being responsible for such evil, the German people might never give up. In short, it might prolong the war.

But such arguments made little sense to Galitzine. Hitler had ordered that there would be ‘no surrender’ anyway, so how could exposing a place like Natzweiler make it any worse? Galitzine was left bitterly disappointed and troubled; doubly so, as some of those held at Natzweiler appeared to have been fellow Allied soldiers.

As it happened, Galitzine was a personal friend of Captain Henry Carey Druce, the two men having been at officer training corps together. He was also an acquaintance of SAS Major Dennis Reynolds and Captain Whately-Smith, two of the Op Loyton ‘missing’. It was only natural that Galitzine would take his report – rejected and silenced by Allied High Command – to a group of fellow mavericks at SAS headquarters.

Attached to Galitzine’s document was an appendix, containing a list of twenty-two ‘German War Criminals in the STRUTHOF affair’ (Struthof being an alternative name for Natzweiler). It detailed those key figures at the camp – predominantly SS – who had brutalized and terminated thousands of prisoners, including very possibly some of the Op Loyton ‘missing’. These were also the mass killers who had tortured and executed so many of the suspected Maquis from Moussey and the wider Rabodeau Valley.

Galitzine listed the killers in Annex A in his report. The following pages – Annex B – were titled ‘Witnesses for Crimes committed at Struthof Camp’. First on the list was Ernst Krenzer, a civil engineer forced to work in the quarry, and a Maquis intelligence agent. Next came M. Nicole, a stonemason and another Maquis, also forced to work in the quarry. Further down the page was Pastor Herring, a local priest who had helped pass food parcels to the starving prisoners.

There were eighteen witnesses in all, and their statements cataloguing Natzweiler’s horrors ran to many pages. Clearly, Galitzine had expected more from his report than simply a storm of media coverage and a howl of global outrage; he’d expected justice. Sadly, all three seemed to have eluded him.

Yet as Colonel Franks cast his eye down Galitzine’s list, he had the first inklings that, come hell or high water, the killers must be hunted down.

Chapter Seventeen

In late November 1944 the British government was finally forced to initiate action over Nazi war crimes. The catalyst for this was the horrific execution of the Stalag Luft escapees – those whose story was immortalized in the
The Great Escape
.

In the spring of 1944, seventy-three POWs from the German prison camp Stalag Luft III had escaped by tunnelling under the wire. Within days all but three had been recaptured. Dozens of the would-be escapees were subsequently executed, as a result of which a statement was made in British parliament condemning the killings as ‘an odious crime against the laws and conventions of war’.

The press blew the story of these cold-blooded murders wide open, a horrified British public pressurizing their government to act. Military courts were established to try Nazi war criminals for ‘violations of the laws and usages of war committed . . . since 2 September 1939’. But the Foreign Office – authors and executors of British foreign policy – exerted pressure at the very highest level to try to bring an end to such trials before they could even get started.

Why? The truth was that, in the closing stages of the Second World War, Nazi Germany was no longer the West’s foremost enemy. The powers that be were already turning their attention towards Stalin’s Russia and Communism, and what would become known as the Cold War. As an – almost unbelievable – testament to how seriously this shift in policy was being treated, consider Winston Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable. Drafted in the latter stages of the war, this was his plan for Western military forces to roll east of Berlin, and to take Russia.

Unthinkable had a start date of 1 July 1945. On that day, British, Polish, American, Australian, Canadian and other troops operating alongside their former enemies, the soldiers of the
Wehrmacht
, were to invade Russia. It made ‘sense’ to fight alongside the
Wehrmacht
. After all, the German military had waged war against the Soviet Red Army, and the German intelligence community had carried out espionage against the Russians. On the Eastern Front they had gained invaluable know-how that would be essential for any force that might wish to march on Moscow, and they were the only military-intelligence apparatus with such experience.

Operation Unthinkable was vetoed by US President Roosevelt, but it reflected the view held at the highest level: the Russians were the new enemy. In this light, it is perhaps easier to understand why Prince Galitzine’s November 1944 discoveries at Natzweiler were so rapidly and comprehensively quashed. They were ‘inconvenient’ to the pervading realpolitik, as would be any hunt for the Nazi war criminals who had orchestrated and executed such mass murder.

But, thankfully, there were those who refused to let pragmatism triumph over what was just and right. First and foremost amongst them was Colonel Brian Franks.

In early December 1944 a letter landed on Colonel Franks’ desk with concrete news of the missing. Of course, the commander of 2 SAS had many things on his mind right then, in addition to the fate of those lost on Op Loyton. He had units in action from Norway through to Italy and at all points in between. But the letter was nonetheless electrifying.

It was from the American Red Cross, and it listed the names of some of the British and American POWs who had been detained in Schirmek’s
Sicherungslager 
– the ‘security camp’ that had served as the processing facility for all Waldfest captives. It included the following, with military service numbers:

Lieut. Garis P. Jacoby, ASN 0556376 (American)

Sgt. Michael Pipcock, ASN 16176838 (American)

Captain Whately-Smith, SAS 113612 (British)

Major Dennis B. Reynolds, 2 SAS Regt 130856 (British)

Captain Victor Gough, 148884, Somerset Light Infantry,

Attached HQ Special Forces (British)

Lieutenant David Dill, 2 SAS 265704 (British).

The author of the letter, one Henry W. Dunning, concluded: ‘On the 8th November 1944 these soldiers were still alive. I was able to talk with them personally several times and promised to advise their families . . .’

As a result of Dunning’s surprise revelations, the War Office wrote to the relatives of those British soldiers named. To Gough’s family they stated: ‘It would appear that this officer was seen in the hands of the Gestapo on the 8th November, 1944 . . . We cannot accept this as an official prisoner of war report, but we think we ought to pass this information on to the next-of-kin . . .’

For Colonel Franks, this was tantalizing evidence that some at least of the Op Loyton missing might well be alive. In January 1945 Captain Gough, Lieutenant Dill, Major Reynolds and Captain Whately-Smith were officially listed as ‘missing, believed prisoner of war’. But by then Colonel Franks had taken his own, unilateral action to launch the search for those operators he had lost in the Vosges.

The two individuals he chose to lead that search were both intimates of Op Loyton. One, Chris Sykes, had been amongst the last to cross the German lines at the mission’s bloody end. The other, Major Bill Barkworth, was the chief of 2 SAS’s intelligence cell, and the man who had given Captain Henry Carey Druce his eleventh-hour briefing when he had taken over command of the initial insertion into the Vosges.

In December 1944, Sykes and Barkworth returned to the Rabodeau Valley – the Vale of Tears – charged to leave no stone unturned in the quest for the missing. Perhaps unwittingly, Colonel Franks had just dispatched to the field an individual who would go on to earn a fearsome reputation as a manhunter without equal.

Within days, the first bodies would be found.

Major Eric ‘Bill’ Barkworth was a brilliant, maverick-spirited individualist, a man with little time for regulations or red tape. Slim, wiry and with dark eyes betraying a razor-sharp intellect, plus an unshakeable calm incorruptibility, Barkworth’s defining feature was his resolute lack of respect for dumb rank or privilege.

A core value of the SAS was to value ‘merit above rank’; those who led did so by dint of their innate skill and regardless of their rank. Likewise, in Barkworth’s book, respect had to be earned. He also had little truck with mindless rules and regulations or for traditions steeped in prejudice and privilege. He broke the rules when the rules needed to be broken. That is what had made him such a fine SAS officer, and it would make him a war-criminal hunter without compare.