The Nazi Hunters (29 page)

Colonel Brian Franks’ initiative was inspired in part by the bombshell news that he had just received regarding the Op Loyton missing. By now a vanquished Germany was being split into zones of occupation, each overseen by one of the main Allied powers. There were four: a British zone, an American zone, a Russian zone and a French one. The French zone was by far the smallest, but it did encompass those areas of Germany immediately east of the Vosges.

The French had written to the War Office regarding several bodies that had been found buried in some woodland close to the Gaggenau concentration camp, which lay in the French occupation zone. Gaggenau was itself a sub-camp of Natzweiler, and had thus been part of
Standartenführer
Isselhorst’s area of command. One of those corpses had been tentatively identified as a former Op Loyton operative.

So it was that Colonel Franks was alerted to the next place to search for the missing. Franks ordered Barkworth to lead an SAS team to Gaggenau. Along with Sykes, Barkworth chose to take with him Sergeant Fred ‘Dusty’ Rhodes, one of his most trusted lieutenants. Rhodes was another of those who’d briefed Captain Henry Carey Druce, prior to his last-minute departure on Op Loyton. He’d also opted to fly on several of the Loyton re-supply drops, to help dispatch parachutists and to kick containers out of the bomb bays.

A tough and unyielding Yorkshireman, Rhodes – like Barkworth, Sykes and Franks – felt a powerful personal connection to Op Loyton and the missing. As they set out for Dover riding in one of the original SAS jeeps, plus a 15-hundredweight Bedford truck laden with supplies, they little knew their quest would take them four years to complete and encompass so many disparate countries.

Three years earlier, Barkworth had recruited Rhodes into the SAS, and the two men were close. Rhodes had been serving with the Coldstream Guards, fighting in North Africa. Pulled back from the front line for a rest period, Rhodes and a pal had come across a notice about a ‘special unit’ seeking applicants. Having zero idea what the ‘SAS’ might be, both men went for an interview with the then Captain Barkworth.

‘After a lot of questions that delved really, really deep into your background . . . we were given twenty-four hours to pack all our gear,’ Rhodes remarked of his selection by Barkworth. Training commenced immediately. ‘There was a mountain we used to call The Jebel. You used to put your pack on and to prove your physical fitness you had to run up this mountain, and time it in different stages from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom. If you failed in any way you were finished with the Regiment.’

Rhodes was recruited into Barkworth’s newly formed intelligence section. At first he worried if this was ‘real soldiering’, especially as the men of the cell weren’t allowed to deploy on operations, in case of capture. ‘The intelligence unit held so much information. When one knows that there are seven or eight operations going on somewhere behind the enemy lines . . .’ If a man from the intelligence cell were taken captive, he might break under torture and blow all those missions.

But when Rhodes saw how successful missions based upon intelligence had proved, he understood how crucial was his role. Later, he and his fellow intel people were allowed to go on purely ‘hit-and-run’ type operations, where the chances of getting captured were less than on a mission behind enemy lines. ‘We would either go by submarine or go by destroyer, and . . . hit a certain building or a certain bridge or hit a certain airport.’

In many ways the sandy-haired, blue-eyed Rhodes and his commanding officer, Barkworth, were birds of a feather: unconventional, risk-taking nonconformists. One story from the closing stages of the war illustrates this most powerfully. Barkworth’s intelligence section had deployed into Germany to help take the surrender of enemy units. A group of elite troops was holed up in a thick-walled castle. Major Barkworth went there to negotiate with their commander.

‘They said they would surrender to nobody but a member of the Brigadier Guards,’ Rhodes recalled, the Brigadier Guards being another name for the Coldstream Guards. Barkworth’s response to the German officer’s request was this: ‘That’s all right, I’ve got one here for you.’ He turned to Rhodes. ‘Right then, come on – here goes: show them what the Brigadier Guards can do!’

‘The whole bloody lot surrendered!’ Rhodes recalled. ‘The officer surrendered, and he surrendered the whole garrison to one former member of the Brigadier Guards, but he would not surrender to anybody else, because the Brigadier Guards [stood] in very high esteem . . . with the German Army at that time.’

Rhodes described Barkworth as, ‘a very eccentric person. He could be arrogant, he could be amusing, he could be the most awkward person that one could ever wish to meet. But at the same time he was a very loyal person . . . to the people who worked for him.’

Rhodes and Barkworth would form the cornerstones of the SAS unit tasked to hunt down the Nazi killers.

‘We aimed to make Gaggenau our headquarters,’ remarked Rhodes, ‘possibly because one wouldn’t think it was central to the area we were working in. We had a . . . good working relationship with the French and the Americans – only being possibly 10 miles from the American zone. We were able to use the Americans’ specialists – pathologists and so on, to do autopsies on the bodies we found . . .’

There were corpses in the forests around Gaggenau awaiting exhumation, so they might yield up their dark secrets. Rhodes believed in an eye for an eye. He and his fellow SAS operators had been briefed that if ever they were captured and threatened with execution, they should throw the threat right back in their captor’s faces. Any would-be executioners of SAS men were to be told that they would be hunted down in turn.

‘We already knew the end product of a person being caught,’ remarked Rhodes. ‘[We] were told to tell people the Regiment would investigate the causes of the death and I always think that was the intention of the Regiment anyway. I don’t think it was something just thought up . . . We had two priorities: one was to find all our SAS comrades; the second was to make sure no one who’d killed any SAS soldiers escaped justice.’

The Regiment would hunt them down; that had always been the plan. And as far as these men were concerned, such promises of retribution had to be kept.

Chapter Nineteen

In the aftermath of defeat, Germany – the nation that Barkworth, Rhodes, Sykes et al were heading into – was in utter chaos. So much so that in late May 1945 the Allies felt they had far more pressing priorities than hunting for war criminals. The entire country was at risk of starvation. In response, the Allied powers had launched Operation Barleycorn, in which every able-bodied German – the hundreds and thousands of POWs first and foremost – was being sent into the fields, to reap and to sow.

The entire nation seemed to be in flux. Refugees were fleeing from the east – from Stalin’s Russia – into the Western zones of control. German civilians had been hiding in the countryside to escape the devastating effect of Allied bombing; now they were trying to return to their homes in the nation’s bombed-out and dysfunctional towns and cities.

More than anything, the Allied powers feared a mass famine in Germany, for with it would come pestilence and disease. At every turn there was hunger, suffering and misery. When Barkworth and team stopped en route to eat their rations, from out of nowhere they found themselves surrounded by a silent horde of children. The urchins stood, transfixed, their eyes unnaturally enlarged by the withering effects of hunger, watching every crumb of food as it disappeared.

It was abundantly clear that the German children bore no responsibility for the horrors visited on the world by the Nazi regime. They, too, were the victims of the dark evil and megalomania that had gripped this land. The SAS men understood this instinctively; they ended up throwing their food to the children and moving rapidly on.

To some, Barkworth’s present quest might perhaps seem an obtuse and unjustifiable one. The fate of a few dozen missing SAS was being prioritized above that of an entire nation in the throes of near collapse. Moreover, what made the Op Loyton missing so
special
? At every turn, the Allies were being confronted by the horrors that Nazi Germany had perpetrated; in the British zone alone there were some eighty concentration camps, slave-labour centres and extermination facilities.

What made the Op Loyton killers – arguably minor war criminals, when compared to those who had murdered hundreds of thousands – so worthy of retribution? Surely those who had orchestrated the mass extermination of millions – at Belsen, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau, to name but a few of the camps – should form the primary focus of any manhunt?

Well indeed, they should and they would. The headline camps would attract the lion’s share of Allied efforts to seek justice and retribution. It was for that very reason that Colonel Franks had taken the unilateral action of sending this tiny SAS force on its present mission.
Lest we forget
.

Gaggenau straddles the Murg River, a tributary of the Rhine, lying just a few dozen kilometres to east of the Vosges. During the war the main employer in the area had been the Mercedes-Benz vehicle factory, which had drawn the inevitable Allied bombing raids to it. In September and October 1944 hundreds of US Air Force B-17s had rained down destruction on the automobile complex, and as a result around 70 per cent of the city had been destroyed.

In the Bad Rotenfels district a camp had been built housing 1,500 forced labourers who slaved away in the Daimler-Benz plant. To the rear of the automobile factory sat a patch of woodland known as the Erlich Forest. In summer a place of grand deciduous woodland, in the spring of 1945 the trees were just coming back into leafy bloom. But the thrusting sap of life contrasted starkly with what lay buried beneath the forest floor.

Before heading for that forest, Barkworth needed to find himself a base of operations. He chose to requisition a 1930s modernist, angular, Bauhaus-style residence called the Villa Degler, which until very recently had been the home of a prominent local Nazi. When the French had taken control of the city they had arrested Herr Degler, and in a neat role reversal Barkworth moved his team into his recently vacated home.

Herr Degler’s wife and two teenage daughters were commanded by Barkworth to do the cooking and the cleaning for his newly installed Nazi-hunting team. Stark and blocky on the outside, the Villa Degler was all golden candelabras, polished wooden shutters and tasteful decor on the inside. More importantly, it had a large and secure cellar that would make a perfect holding cell for what Barkworth intended to corral here: his prisoners.

From the roof of the Villa Degler Barkworth set up his all-important radio communications, manned by a Phantom team, so he could speak direct to SAS headquarters. Very few, if any, British troops were based in the French zone of occupation, so all supplies – human and materiel – would either have to be shipped out from the UK, or from the British zone, situated 60 miles to their north. Direct and efficient communication would be key.

The only other English-speaking forces in the vicinity were an American war crimes investigation team, who had been drafted in because the mass grave that had drawn Barkworth was also said to contain Americans. The US team was led by a Colonel David Chavez Jr, and he and his group of experts would prove to be one of Barkworth’s greatest allies in the hunt for the missing and their killers.

Early on the morning of 10 June, Barkworth’s men and those of Colonel Chavez gathered in the eerie dawn quiet of the Erlich Forest. The task before them would consume their every waking moment for the next ten days. This was not going to be the first exhumation; the French had made one – somewhat chaotic – effort to dig up the bodies and identify them, which had prompted the original letter that Colonel Franks had received about SAS men being buried here.

Shortly after French troops had seized Gaggenau, the locals had warned them about a mass grave in the forest. A number of prisoners from the Rotenfels labour camp had been taken into the cover of the trees and shot. The corpses were tipped into two bomb craters lying side by side, and buried there.

The French had gone to investigate. When they were first exhumed, the twenty-seven bodies had been in a fine state of preservation. The dead had been buried almost immediately after their executions, and had barely begun to decompose. But unfortunately, after the French had dug them up, the pile of corpses had been left to cook in the spring sunshine for eight days.

When Barkworth, Sykes and Rhodes – plus Chavez and his American team – arrived to carry out the second dig, they would be met by a far less palatable set of circumstances. Chavez’s team included a pair of expert pathologists. As the digging commenced and the smell began to permeate the atmosphere, they explained to Major Barkworth and their colonel – a British and an American officer, seeking a reckoning for their dead comrades – what they might expect to find.

Buried within minutes of their deaths and under a good depth of heavy soil, the corpses – although some six months old by the time of their first exhumation – had been almost mummified. The conditions underground were dry and cool – a foot or more below ground the temperature only ever varies marginally – and the skin had gone through a ‘tanning’ process, becoming brown and leathery. Body tissue had turned to a fatty wax called adipocere, which is the consistency of moist clay.

But once the air and the heat and the spring insect life had been allowed to get to the bodies, real decomposition would have set in. Flies would have laid their eggs, which in turn would result in maggot infestations. Soft tissues would have started to discolour, disintegrate and putrefy, leaving only solid body parts – the tendons and ligaments – attached to the skeletons. It was at this stage of decay that the bodies were now likely to be found.