The Nazi Hunters (35 page)

In the face of War Office apathy and fudge, Franks took further decisive action. Having founded the SAS Association, he recruited Winston Churchill as its patron. Churchill – one of the most prescient politicians of his time – was acutely aware of the Soviet threat to Europe. In 1946 he would popularize the phrase the ‘Iron Curtain’. He understood how keeping alive a force like the SAS – one of the few units primed to cause havoc behind enemy lines – was vital to Britain’s ability to combat such a threat.

Working closely with the former prime minster, plus his son, Randolph Churchill, Franks put in place the second part of his SAS survival plan – the formation of a ‘shadow headquarters’. There was little doubt that Colonel Franks was the prime mover in preserving the SAS. The Regiment was on life support, but via Franks’ efforts it was at least still breathing.

Even David Stirling would go on to remark: ‘Had it not been for Brian Franks we would have been consigned to oblivion.’

During the war years, Stirling’s determination to do what was right, no matter what ‘the fossilized layers of shit’ at high command determined, had been a defining feature of the SAS. He’d orchestrated several ‘private enterprise jobs’ in defiance of high command, leading to the accusations of the SAS being a ‘private army’.

Now Colonel Franks, with Stirling’s help, was about to embark upon the single greatest ‘private enterprise job’ of all. Prior to the war, Franks had worked in senior management at the palatial Hyde Park Hotel in Kensington, west London. It was there that he now established the SAS’s shadow headquarters, ‘requisitioning’ a couple of rooms as an HQ of operations. The bar of the hotel became the unofficial SAS briefing room, and the place where Colonel Franks would meet his Villa Degler commander, on Barkworth’s rare visits to London.

On one thing Franks was absolutely adamant. In spite of their deniable status, Barkworth’s team would continue to wear the trademark Regimental insignia that so defined the unit. They would continue to wear the distinctive SAS beret, and they would proudly sport the winged-dagger insignia bearing the timeless motto: ‘Who Dares Wins.’

Determined to see the Op Loyton war criminals face justice, the Barkworth team fulfilled another vital function: it would serve to keep the SAS functioning in the shadows until the winds of fortune blew more favourably and the Regiment could be reformed, as Franks was determined it would be. Of course, certain individuals within the War Office bureaucracy were already primed to quietly assist such covert operations.

When the order was issued to disband the SAS, Colonel Franks went to speak to Prince Galitzine. ‘I’m going to ask you a very big favour,’ he told him. ‘Is there any means by which you can keep this team going?’ By ‘this team’ Franks meant the all-imporant Villa Degler operation. Galitzine told Franks that he’d see what he could do.

Without any formal permission or clearance, Galitzine managed to take advantage of the post-war confusion at the War Office, and massage budgets, rations, supplies and more out of the chaos. He even managed to ensure that wages would continue to be paid to Barkworth and his men.

‘They weren’t mercenaries,’ Galitzine remarked. ‘They were being paid by the War Office; we were paying them all right . . .’

Officially, Barkworth, Rhodes and all on the Villa Degler operation were listed as having returned to their parent regiments. This would serve as a cover in case of any difficult questions being raised by inquisitive Whitehall mandarins, politicians or the press. Barkworth’s Villa Degler team had always been semi-official.

Now, they had slipped completely into the shadows.

Chapter Twenty-three

In October 1945, shortly after Barkworth’s team had ‘gone dark’, Galitzine authored a paper entitled ‘War Crimes “Man Hunting” Teams’. Its intention appears to have been to trumpet the successes of the Barkworth unit at the highest level, without revealing that they were still very much in operation.

In his paper Galitzine advocated the expansion of such efforts, based upon the SAS model. On the ‘question of manhunting . . . they have proven particularly successful’, he declared. He called for the formation of several ‘Man Hunting teams’, each of 100 or more operators. Those teams should contain a ‘high percentage of officers trained in intelligence and signals work’. They should have ‘great mobility’ and ‘good signals communications over very long distances’, and such efforts should be considered as an ‘Operation of War’.

In essence, what Galitzine was describing was the Villa Degler unit. His paper seems to have been an attempt to bring Barkworth’s team in from the cold. Basically, he was saying:
we need these kinds of units – oh, and here’s one I made earlier, so let’s start here. And let’s build on this model and expand it massively.

Unsurprisingly, Galitzine’s paper attracted attention. The BAOR in particular was furious. In a ‘Confidential’ 24 November letter, one A.G. Somerhough, of the BAOR’s legal staff, wrote: ‘It is difficult to criticize this paper as it is so obviously based on a complete misconception’. Of the work by the Villa Degler team, Somerhough commented: ‘If this is Major Barkworth’s unit, I understood its purpose was to discover the bodies of murdered SAS personnel, not to track down the criminals and that they had been there months and that up to a short time ago they had not arrested anybody.’

Somerhough was a powerful adversary. A highly experienced military legal officer, he had earned three Mentions in Dispatches during the war. His increasingly negative comments carried weight. Even so, the criticism implicit in Galitzine’s paper – that not enough was being done by the existing bodies – seems to have hit home. At the end of November Prime Minister Clement Attlee authored a personal note addressed to the Secretary of State for War.

‘I am concerned at the delays which have occurred in dealing with these matters . . . It is essential that . . . the persons on whom rests the responsibility for the investigation of War Crimes and bringing to trial of their authors should be officers with drive and energy, and that the high priority to be accorded to War Crimes should be fully understood.’

In the winter of 1945 there seems to have been division at the heart of the British government: on the one hand, the doves wanted to disband the military machine as swiftly as possible and to deliver to a weary British public a long-anticipated peace dividend. On the other, the hawks wanted a resolute and robust war crimes machinery to be put in place to ensure that justice was done.

As there was no concrete response to Galitzine’s ‘Man Hunting’ paper, it seems that the doves won out. Or, rather, it may simply have been a triumph of sheer pragmatism. Britain immediately post-war was close to ruin. The cost of fighting had bled the country dry, the Treasury was facing bankruptcy and to many minds the priorities of rebuilding the shattered economy trumped those of hunting down war criminals, no matter how egregious their crimes.

Either way, Barkworth’s manhunting unit was left out in the cold.

Simply because it was the best and most secretive location, Galitzine’s Eaton Square office became the clandestine resupply and communications back-up for Barkworth’s team. From there direct radio links would be maintained between London and Gaggenau. A 30 November memo entitled ‘War Crimes Investigation, SAS’ – penned almost two months
after
the Regiment’s official disbandment – sets out the means of maintaining such communications.

‘Two ORs [other ranks – men who weren’t officers] are being accommodated for duty in Room 404 as W/T Signal Rear Link to the SAS . . . This will entail the working of a small W/T transmitting and receiving set from the roof of . . . Eaton Square. The transmitting set will be worked off batteries . . . and it is intended that the receiver be worked off the house circuit.’

The two men manning this radio ‘rear link’ were SAS operators Freddie Oakes and John Sumnall, veteran members of the Villa Degler manhunting unit.

At the very highest level, strings were being pulled to keep the Secret Hunters in business. ‘Colonel Franks . . . was extremely well connected and knew an awful lot of people . . .’, Galitzine remarked. Franks used such connections to keep the Villa Degler unit in operation. Galitzine didn’t feel inclined to ask him who exactly were these high-level supporters, ‘because we felt the whole thing was so unofficial the less it was talked about the better’.

By the late autumn of 1945 the Villa Degler team was still in business, but it was clinging on by its fingertips. Barkworth had no formal authority to operate; no specific background or training in his task; no official budget; and the SAS Regiment had been formally disbanded, which meant his unit didn’t in theory exist. He was answerable only to Galitzine’s Eaton Square set-up, and to Colonel Franks’ shadow HQ at the Hyde Park Hotel. In other words, he was answerable to no one.

A lesser man might have baulked at the hand that fate had dealt him, but as far as Barkworth was concerned it freed him up to do as he pleased. Released at last from the chains that had bound him – red tape and bureaucracy is hard to apply to an off-the-books unit that simply doesn’t exist – Barkworth believed that anything was possible.

Barkworth was a truly remarkable man, according to Galitzine. He was ‘a mystic . . . a thinker; absolutely dedicated to the job he had of looking for his missing people’. No measure was too extreme for Barkworth, if it might further the cause of the hunt.

By now, the case of the Natzweiler murders – the four SOE women burned to death in the ovens – had been well and truly solved. Having nailed Straub, Barkworth’s team had proceeded to round up the chief architects of the evil. The camp medical orderly had been tracked down in hiding in southern France. The camp doctor – Werner Rohde – had been traced to the American zone of occupation, just as Straub had been.

But where Barkworth and his team had reached a seeming dead end was in tracing the eighteen remaining Op Loyton ‘missing’. Galitzine received a radio call in his Eaton Square office, bemoaning how all their leads seemed to have come to naught. He packed his bags and headed out to Gaggenau, flying into Frankfurt, where Barkworth met him with a jeep and a firm handshake.

Together they drove to the Villa Degler. En route Barkworth made a passing remark, one that shocked the largely imperturbable Galitzine. ‘You know, we tried planchette last night – you know, the Ouija board.’

For a brief moment Galitzine became the pompous War Office official that he most certainly was not. ‘You can’t mean you did this! I mean, it’s ridiculous—’

‘Why not?’ Barkworth cut in. If people were murdered during the war, surely they’d want to communicate what had happened to them, and by whatever means possible.

Galitzine lapsed into silence.

He couldn’t argue with Barkworth’s logic.

That evening, he joined Barkworth and four other members of his team at the round wooden table in the Villa Degler’s drawing room. A candle burned dimly; there was little electricity yet in bombed-out Gaggenau. The room struck Galitzine as being no longer simply conspiratorial; there was something . . . otherworldly lurking just out of vision amongst the shadows. He felt his heart thumping as Barkworth arranged the ‘tools’ of the Ouija board, and they readied themselves to commune with the dead.

Numbered playing cards were laid on the table, plus all the letters of the alphabet and the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’. An upturned glass was placed in the middle. Suddenly, an English name came up. ‘The glass spelled out ‘F-o-r-d-h-a-m, Flight Sergeant RCAF,’ remarked Galitzine. ‘And then – “Killed at Cirey, in the Vosges.” ’

The glass revealed that the crew had been flying a Lancaster bomber.

The Ouija board continued to ‘talk’ to those assembled around the table long into the night. Everyone was exhausted, but they were in a high state of feverish excitement and couldn’t tear themselves away.

The Ouija board revealed that three of the Lancaster crew had been killed on crash-landing, but two had survived. Apparently, Fordham and one other ariman had been marched out to a grove of lime trees, just outside of Cirey village, where they were made to dig their own graves, before being shot in the back of the head.

As dawn was almost upon them, the Villa Degler men asked a final question of the Ouija board: ‘Do you know the names of any of the Germans involved?’ The glass spelled out a name.

The gathering broke up. Some rushed to prepare the jeeps for the journey to Cirey, a village that lies some 15 kilometres to the north of Moussey. Others powered up the radio set and sent an urgent message to Eaton Square, asking if the RAF missing persons bureau could trace the Lancaster bomber that had supposedly gone down.

They asked for: ‘Details of aircraft and crews all planes reported missing, either (a) over Vosges area, (b) en route to or from raids which would take them over Vosges area and which are not known to have crashed elsewhere. Consider Stuttgart raids the most fruitful. Period required 20 July until 31 Aug 44. Attach great importance to early production of these details so hope it will be possible.’

A second message was sent to CROWCASS – the Paris-based central registry of the wanted; formally the ‘Central Registry of War Crimes and Security Suspects’ – asking if they held a German prisoner of war bearing the name thrown up by the Ouija board. That done, Barkworth, Galitzine et al downed some Benzedrine and jumped in the jeeps, tearing off with the rising sun to their backs.