The Nazi Hunters (42 page)

One prisoner did manage to ‘escape’ his forthcoming trial. SS officer and war crimes suspect Heinrich Ganninger committed suicide shortly after SAS Major Barkworth had interrogated him.

A ‘gagging order’ had been placed on the trial hearings; there was to be no media coverage. This was for two reasons: one, so that the relatives of those killed would not be caused further upset by seeing their loves ones’ suffering and death splashed over the newspapers. And two, so that those still at large – chiefly
Sturmbannführer
Ernst – would not be alerted to the fact that the quest for justice continued.

This first trial concerned the Erlich Forest killings. The eleven accused – including former Schirmek commandant Karl Buck, Stuka Neuschwanger and Karl Dinkel, the man snatched by Barkworth ‘
bei Nacht und Nebel
’ from his travelling theatre troupe – were appointed German defence lawyers in an effort to ensure ‘fair play’. They were charged with the 25 November 1944 murders of fourteen prisoners: six SAS soldiers, four American airmen and four French nationals.

A Frenchman – Air Force Captain Bellet – was included on the six-person prosecution panel, as French nationals had lost their lives in the mass murder. Major Hunt – the military lawyer attached to Galitzine’s Eaton Square operation – led the prosecution, and Captain Prince Galitzine himself had been shipped over from London to attach himself to Barkworth’s unit for the duration of the hearings.

The argument for the accused’s guilt was fairly simple: prisoners of war are protected under the 1929 Geneva Convention and cannot simply be murdered out of hand. If the prosecution could establish that the defendants were guilty of such murders, ‘the court would be entitled to convict these accused of a violation of the rules of international law’, the judge advocate – the military official presiding over the hearings – explained.

Predictably, the German lawyers for the accused pleaded that they had ‘acted under superior orders’ – in other words, they were simply doing as they’d been told. They cited Hitler’s Commando Order as being ‘justification’ for their actions. If the defence of superior orders stood, only Hitler would be guilty, and he had reportedly committed suicide in his Berlin bunker in April 1945. The Wuppertal trials would be rendered a farce.

Standartenführer
Isselhorst was called as an early defence witness. The former Gestapo and SS commander, himself a highly trained lawyer, argued that the Commando Order bound all German servicemen, including SS and Gestapo personnel, to shoot ‘members of so-called Commando detachments who were parachuted . . . behind the German lines to do acts of sabotage or interference’.

Isselhorst claimed to have ‘reinterpreted’ the Commando Order, such that it would only be applied to those ‘parachutists’ proved to have worked with the Maquis ‘terrorists’. Isselhorst then tried to blame
Sturmbannführer
Ernst – the only senior suspect not in captivity – for the Erlich Forest massacre. Isselhorst argued that it was Ernst who had convinced him that the fourteen men were saboteurs and spies, operating in close collaboration with the Maquis, and that their execution under Hitler’s Commando Order was justified.

In other words, under the defence of ‘superior orders’, only Hitler and
Sturmbannführer
Ernst were guilty, and by their guilt all eleven defendants would be exonerated.

Major Barkworth was called as a prosecution witness in an effort to quash Isselhorst’s arguments. He pointed out that it was not in the remit of the Operation Loyton team to organize and support the Maquis; that task lay with ‘other units’ – a euphemism for the Jedburghs. Members of the SAS did inevitably have contact with the Maquis because ‘the operation . . . in the Vosges area was mounted at a time at which the Maquis had risen against the German invaders’.

In other words, there had been no deliberate ‘collaboration’ with the Maquis, and so Hitler’s Commando Order did not apply to the SAS men.

Under cross-examination the eleven accused started to fall upon each other. Karl Buck tried to pin all responsibility on ‘orders from Isselhorst’. Those who had taken the victims into the Erlich Forest accused Stuka Neuschwanger of having acted as the enforcer, ensuring that the killings went ahead no matter what. Some claimed to have had no idea that the prisoners faced execution, and to have objected to taking any part in any shootings.

Amidst such mutual recriminations, Neuschwanger tried to strike back against his accusers. His lawyer claimed – rightly, as it happened – that British Sergeant Fred Rhodes had ill-treated him when he was taken back to the site of the Erlich Forest killings. Rhodes had beaten him and thrown him into the crater bottom, the German defence lawyer complained. In light of such behaviour, the British soldiers were little better than the accused.

The judge advocate fixed Rhodes with a gimlet eye. Was there any truth to this accusation, he demanded? Dusty Rhodes fished in his pocket and pulled out a leave pass, ‘proving’ that he had been in England at the time of the alleged assault, enjoying a rare period of rest time. It was entirely bogus, of course. The document was a forgery, and not the first used by the Secret Hunters. But it was a necessary and justifiable bending of the rules.

That uncomfortable issue dealt with, the judge advocate turned to the letter of the law. The fact that a soldier may have been ordered to do something didn’t mean that the act wasn’t a war crime; likewise, acting under orders didn’t mean that the soldier was immune from punishment for his actions. He also pointed out that the accused must have known that what they were doing was wrong, or else why did they go to such lengths – stripping the victims; burning their clothing; burying their dog tags – to obliterate their identities? Lawful executions did not take place in the midst of the woods, with mass burials in bomb craters and with all identifying marks removed from the victims. In essence, the accused were damned by their own admissions.

The judge advocate moved on to the final debate, whether ignorance of the law offered any defence. ‘The Court must ask itself: “What did each of these accused know about the rights of a prisoner of war?” . . . The Court may well think that these men are not lawyers. They may not have heard of the Hague Convention or the Geneva Convention. They may not have seen any book of military law . . .’

The judge advocate paused while his summing up was translated into German. ‘But the Court has to consider whether men who are serving as soldiers or in proximity to soldiers know as a matter . . . of military life whether a prisoner of war has certain rights and whether one of those rights is not, when captured, to security for his person.’

All eleven accused barring one – Josef Muth – were found guilty. Five were given prison sentences of up to ten years, and five death sentences were passed down – including for Karl Buck and Stuka Neuschwanger. Even then, their ordeal was far from over. Buck and Neuschwanger were shortly to be passed into French hands, so that the French could try them for war crimes perpetrated against French civilians.

While the trial outcome was largely gratifying, the custodial sentences seemed far too lenient. Two of the accused had only been given two and three years respectively, and with parole for good behaviour they might all be free by the turn of the decade. Barkworth had always hoped that the trials would be seen as ‘an example of strict impartial justice and not of revenge’. But the punishment needed to fit the crime.

In the next case – that concerning Lieutenant Dill’s rearguard, who had been captured defending the SAS’s final Moussey base – fourteen defendants were charged with the murder of eight SAS men in the forests above La Grande Fosse. The last of the British soldiers had told his executioners the poignant truth: ‘We were good men.’ Good men who had not deserved to die in such a sordid act of murder – as, hopefully, the trial was about to prove.

All of the accused – Georg Zahringer amongst them, the man who had given Barkworth his game-changing testimony – were former members of
Einsatzkommando
Ernst. Predictably, their defence lawyers argued that they had all been carrying out their commander’s orders, and so were not guilty of any crimes. Without Ernst in the dock to testify or to be cross-examined, the prosecution faced an uphill battle.

Amongst countless other crimes, these men were responsible for stripping naked eight SAS captives and marching each to an open grave in the forest – one in which they could see their dead comrades – before shooting them in the head. But sadly, the final sentences handed down for the La Grande Fosse case were close to laughable. Six of the fourteen accused were found not guilty. Of the remaining eight, only one received a ten-year sentence, and two were given just two and three years respectively.

For those who had spent so long hunting down the accused, this was a gross injustice. They had promised the murdered of Op Loyton and their families a reckoning. In this case they, or rather the courts, had failed.

In light of the hopeless leniency of the sentences, Barkworth changed tack. He began offering inducements for key witnesses to turn evidence against their former colleagues. Those who must have known they faced a death sentence were offered the hope that it might be reduced to life imprisonment, if they dished the dirt on their fellows. The Secret Hunters were learning to ‘play the legal game’, and just in time, for the Natzweiler trial was the next scheduled hearing.

Rightly, there was a public outcry at the pathetic nature of the La Grande Fosse sentences. At least that part of the story – that the killers had escaped proper justice – had made it into the press. The same failures could not be allowed to happen at the forthcoming hearing. The Natzweiler trial would deal with the four female SOE agents injected with poison and burned to death in the camp ovens, but in truth its scope would be far, far wider.

Some 25,000 people had been liquidated at Natzweiler, and the accused were complicit in all of those crimes. When British and American troops had stumbled upon the Nazi concentration camps, they had recoiled instinctively from the horrors they discovered. Such war crimes – such mechanized genocide; the well-ordered liquidation of millions of men, women and children – transgressed all norms of human behaviour.

If the Natzweiler trial ended in a debacle, the resulting outcry would be deafening. Justice absolutely had to be seen to be done.

Prior to the Natzweiler hearings, London mooted a ban on press reporting of the names of the victims. On 24 May 1946 the War Office wrote to the next of kin of Vera Leigh, one of the SOE agents killed, warning that, ‘in any publicity concerning the trials mention would be made of her by name . . . In view of the distressing circumstances in which Vera was killed, we are most anxious to spare her relatives any further pain which . . . publicity might entail.’

But, in a 27 May reply, the late Vera Leigh’s family made their feelings abundantly clear. ‘I have already made known to all members of the family the circumstances in which she met her death and feel that no useful purpose would be gained in suppressing Miss Leigh’s name from any reports that may be published . . . it would be preferable that the full story should be published rather than a garbled version should appear in the Press through some indirect source.’

On 28 May the Natzweiler trial opened at Wuppertal and, despite the relatives’ wishes, a blanket ban had been imposed on any media reporting of the case. In the dock stood nine accused. They included Werner Rohde, the camp doctor who had administered the supposedly lethal carbolic acid injections. In a war crimes trial such as this, a medical doctor like Rohde was rightly stripped of his respected ‘Doctor’ title. Standing alongside Rohde were Peter Straub, the camp executioner whose face had been raked by the nails of one of his victims, and Fritz Hartjenstein, the camp commandant.

Amongst the first witnesses to give evidence for the prosecution were SOE spymaster Vera Atkins, plus Brian Stonehouse, the SOE agent whose presence had first been detected at Natzweiler by Captain Galitzine, during his autumn 1944 discovery of the camp. However, from the very start, the German defence lawyers argued persuasively that SOE agents who were not deployed in uniform could enjoy none of the legal protections of soldiers in wartime.

‘International law allowed for the execution of irregular combatants,’ Dr Groebel, the chief defence attorney, pointed out. He suggested that the court should ‘consider this case from the point of view that it was a normal and simple execution of spies’. This was said in defence of a man like Straub, who had by his own boastful admission, ‘put four million people up the chimney’. It may have been no exaggeration: prior to his stint at Natzweiler, Straub had worked at Auschwitz.

Major Hunt, the prosecutor, countered this by pointing out that under international law even spies had to be given a trial prior to their execution. ‘Killing in such a manner at such a time and in such circumstances raises a presumption that there was no trial . . . If this was a lawful execution, then why such secrecy?’

Groebel countered by stating that, ‘for us Germans, our Government in the last years has created an enormous number of special courts . . . courts which everywhere decided the fate of human beings and normally passed sentences of death . . . We Germans have been hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world and I do not know how proceedings are carried out there now’.

In other words, all the defendants were themselves the sorry victims of a totalitarian system of government, over which they had had neither any say, nor any form of control. It was the defence of superior orders by another name and, incredibly, in that May 1946 court in Wuppertal it seemed to be working.