The Nazi Hunters (41 page)

The suspect black marketeer ultimately fell victim to his blind greed. Barkworth had learned that this man was hiding out in the Russian zone, at Leipzig, a city in east Germany.

Playing on his supposed resemblance to Isselhorst’s deputy, Schneider – his spoken German sounded exactly like the former Gestapo chief – Barkworth placed a phone call to the Leipzig address where the man he wanted was hiding out. He explained that he, Schneider, was still at large and had got into black market profiteering in the British and American zones.

‘I’m onto a frightfully good thing,’ Barkworth enthused. ‘If you meet me under the clock in Cologne Railway Station at midnight, I’ll cut you in on it and we can share the proceeds together.’

Barkworth suggested a date to meet. His target agreed. Cologne lay across the far side of Germany from Leipzig, straddling the River Rhine. Whatever deal Barkworth had offered his target, it must have been a strong inducement indeed, for he took the bait. Barkworth and his men were waiting beneath the railway station clock at midnight. They nabbed their man, bundled him into a jeep, and from thence to the Villa Degler basement cell.

Barkworth’s Missing Parachutists report also listed dozens of witnesses – those who were willing to take the stand and give evidence against the Nazi killers. Foremost amongst them, of course, were the Moussey villagers. But there were also a few good Germans who were keen to testify against their fellow countrymen; those fine upstanding citizens who had never bought into the Nazi lie. Most prominent amongst them was one Werner Helfen.

Major Dennis Reynolds and Captain Victor Gough had been tortured horribly following their capture. Beaten so severely that his bones showed through his skin, Reynolds had had his stomach stamped on repeatedly by Stuka Neuschwanger. But, sometime after their incarceration in Schirmek’s
Sicherungslager
, a German prisoner had unexpectedly joined the British captives in their subterranean cell – one who would prove of great help to them all.

Untersturmführer
(Second Lieutenant) Werner Helfen had commanded a company of men guarding various strategic buildings. Moved into the Vosges in August 1944, they had been issued with sawn-off shotguns to replace their standard weaponry. With the Americans pressing home their advance,
Untersturmführer
Helfen had ordered his men to throw their weapons into a river. His reasoning was that under the Hague Conventions such guns were banned from being used as weapons of war. If his men were captured with such arms they would forfeit their right to POW status and its protections.

In due course Helfen was arrested and sentenced to death by an SS tribunal, for ‘wilful destruction of Government property’. He was sent to Schirmek while his death sentence was being processed. As a German, he was given the job of fetching and serving food to his fellow prisoners, which allowed him some latitude to move around the camp.

Helfen put such freedoms to good use. He managed to get a French doctor to tend to the injured US airman, Pipcock, whose wounds had not been treated, and he smuggled in extra food for the starving Allied prisoners. During his wanderings Helfen noticed a large potato store made of wooden planks. It gave him an idea to build a ladder with which to try to scale the outer fence that ringed the camp
.

He shared the idea with his English and American fellow prisoners. Work on the ladder began immediately. The escape committee was led by Helfen, ably assisted by Gough, David Dill and the US airman Lieutenant Jacoby. Collecting pilfered slats at night when there were fewer patrols, they deadened the noise of construction by covering themselves with blankets as they worked. Ladder complete, the escape committee settled on 12 November as the date to make their break for freedom.

But during the day of the 12th the men could hear the crump of Allied shelling and the distant blasts of small-arms fire. Wave after wave of Allied bombers thundered overhead. They figured the front line was no more than 9 miles away. The escape committee tried to weigh up the risks of trying to escape versus the chances of the camp being liberated by the Allies. Lieutenant Helfen attempted to impress upon the men how their SS guards would not give up without a fight; many of the POWs might be killed.

Such agonizing deliberations were overtaken by developments. The camp commandant, Karl Buck, announced that the entire population of the
Sicherungslager
was to prepare to move. They were being trucked east, to a new camp – Rotenfels, at Gaggenau. On their last night together in Schirmek, Gough presented Helfen with his personal SOE-issue silk escape map, as a keepsake.

Gough used to try to brighten his fellow prisoners’ days by drawing cartoons of ‘camp life’. One showed a prisoner in uniform seated before a dining table, complete with tablecloth, and with a speech bubble coming from his mouth: ‘What – no cabbage soup?’ Another showed a thickly moustachioed British officer turning around in surprise, as a figure tunnelled through his office floor, pickaxe in hand. ‘Captain Jones, reporting from Schirmek, sir!’ read the speech bubble.

Bearing in mind how savagely Gough had been beaten, the cartoons bear testimony to the man’s incredible resilience of spirit. Following Buck’s order to move camp, ten of the prisoners – Gough, Dill, Jacoby and Helfen included – were loaded aboard a German truck. They set off in the early hours and by 06.00 they were moving through the deserted streets of Strasbourg. The two German guards driving the truck slowed, and allowed Helfen to jump down and slip away.

Werner Helfen made his way back to his hometown, where he remained until the Allies overran the area. In due course, Barkworth tracked him down. Helfen proved keen as mustard to stand as a prosecution witness against several of Barkworth’s accused. Speaking of one of the priests executed in the Erlich Forest he told Barkworth:

‘So it happened that of all people, Abbé Claude, of whom I have the best memories – he was the quietest, most God-loving and selfless person in the prison – would be hunted down by these monsters.’

Barkworth was so touched by Werner Helfen’s principled stand, that he penned the German officer a letter of commendation. It read:

During the time he spent in the cells of Schirmek Camp he did the best he could to better the conditions for the English and American prisoners of war . . . although, had he been discovered he would have been severely punished. In smaller matters such as obtaining extra food, and giving these prisoners exercise – both of which were otherwise not allowed to them – and also in the development of an escape plan, he showed his good intentions.

It was from another key witness – a medical doctor, Dr Thomassin – that the true fate of SAS Lieutenant Silly would be eastablished. Dr Thomassin had been called to the ruins of a sawmill in Moyenmoutier village that had been burned to the ground. Human remains had been discovered in the ashes, but they were too badly burned to be identifiable. What the doctor did discover was a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, with a metal spectacle case from which the leather had been scorched away.

Amongst the blackened ashes there were also the distinctive brass buttons of the type a
garde forestier
(forest ranger) would wear on his uniform. Lieutenant Silly had been held captive along with two such men. Barkworth concluded from the evidence that Silly had met his end here, at the Moyenmoutier sawmill, and that the remains previously identified as his must have been those of SAS Trooper Donald Lewis, one of the few Op Loyton cases that remained unsolved.

By now, the sterling efforts of the Secret Hunters were being recognized by London: ‘this has . . . become one of the most important War Crimes operations’. The presence of Colonel Brian Franks’ quiet hand at the tiller can be detected from the occasional handwritten missive sent on Hyde Park Hotel headed paper to his manhunters.

To Yurka Galitzine he passed on a letter from Captain Henry Parker, busy investigating war crimes perpetrated against SAS men in Italy. ‘The nasty snag at the moment is that JAG [the judge advocate general] here are trying to post me to Austria, but not trying too hard, so I think I can fight a delaying action,’ Parker noted to Franks.

Parker was seeking more time to complete his Italian investigations. He signed off his letter: ‘Please give my regards to your good lady wife, and also Sgt (bogus, acting and unpaid) Morgan wishes to be remembered to you.’
Bogus, acting and unpaid
: three words that might sum up much of the Secret Hunters’ work in the spring of 1946. Colonel Franks – the overall conductor of the Nazi-hunting operations – passed Parker’s note to the ‘fixer’, Prince Yurka Galitzine, at his Eaton Square office.

‘Dear Galitzine, I presume the request Parker refers to came from you or Bill B; therefore send the enclosed on to you. Hopefully goes well and Bill uses him in the manner so narrated. I promised to send him some . . . medal ribbon but have failed, but will send to Everitt to pass on. Yours, Brian Franks.’

Barkworth’s conclusion to his Missing Parachutists report encapsulated how all-consuming had become the hunt for the Op Loyton disappeared, for the truth and for the killers, and how wide he and his men had been forced to spread their net.

‘When this unit began this enquiry in June 1945, it was with no foreknowledge that it would become so protracted or involved.’ He characterized Waldfest as being a ‘policy of mediaeval brutality’, describing those who had designed and implemented it as ‘Germans whose courage and exhibition of cruelty was . . . inversely proportionate to the risks they ran . . .’

In other words, they were happy to exhibit cruelty and supposed bravery, as long as they faced no danger in doing so.

But with that most elusive of things – a reckoning – almost within Barkworth’s grasp, he appears to have been under an increasing amount of strain. Unless they took the law into their own hands, the Secret Hunters – and with them the Op Loyton victims, the Moussey villagers and the families of all who had been murdered – would get just one shot at justice: the coming trials. How terrible it would be to fall at the final hurdle.

A late spring 1946 radio message to Eaton Square reveals how even Barkworth was close to breaking point, as the frantic work of the trial preparations got underway. Clearly, there was only so far that whisky and Benzedrine could take the Villa Degler operators.

‘If trial advanced ten days cannot cope and intend stop now. Your last directive approach bounds impossibility yet considered by day and night work possible to achieve. Alteration date trial makes whole situation impossible and ridiculous. If I worked same hours as War Office this job would take further three months.’

And a few days later: ‘Have tried to prepare evidence as thoroughly as possible and am sure you appreciate I do not want to hand in skimped work through wild all haste . . .’

The first of the Op Loyton war crimes trials was only weeks away now. But, frustratingly, as the long-awaited prosecutions loomed, the Secret Hunters were forced to accept that one man – perhaps their foremost target – had eluded them.

As a legal expert’s letter to Barkworth made clear, it was of utmost importance to capture all such individuals – those who had served in positions of high command. ‘Very essential. He is only member of the HQ that gave the order for the execution. In his absence the lesser fry may attribute all the blame to him and escape themselves.’

But
Sturmbannführer
Hans Dietrich Ernst remained listed as: ‘at large with no indication of . . . suspected whereabouts’. Worryingly, Barkworth’s most-wanted looked set to escape justice.

Chapter Twenty-eight

On 6 May 1946 – barely a year after Colonel Franks had dispatched Barkworth to Gaggenau to investigate the bodies found in the Erlich Forest – the first of the ‘SAS War Crimes Trials’ opened. It was held under the authority of a British military court, sitting at the Zoological Gardens, Wuppertal, a city lying just to the north of Cologne, well into the British zone of occupation. With delicious irony, the ‘courtroom’ was established in the zoo’s former banqueting hall.

Galitzine had written to Major Alastair Hunt, the prosecutor, shortly before the trial’s start. ‘Here are the affidavits that I have collected off Barkworth to date . . . I am having all the accused shifted to near Wuppertal, so that it may be necessary for Bill B to come up and camp there. Anyway, I think it will be better to establish our base there almost immediately after your arrival.’

With the first hearing about to commence, the focus was shifting away from the manhunters and onto the legal experts who would prosecute the cases. But Barkworth, Rhodes and several of his men still had a key role to play. They were billeted in the administration building adjacent to the banqueting-hall-cum-courtroom, while those facing trial were incarcerated in the local jail.

Even now –
particularly now
 – the drama was far from over. Barkworth made it clear that he wanted his suspects watched closely at all times, and especially when they were shipped to and from the court. Wherever possible prisoners ‘should have no opportunity [of] speaking to’ other suspects, to prevent them from better concocting their stories, Barkworth directed.

All prisoners were to be accompanied by ‘escorts carrying arms’ and none were to be left ‘without provision handcuffs or in proper prison trucks’. ‘Do not wish to have to look for them again,’ Barkworth noted drily.