Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (6 page)

Now, on this Thursday morning, Hans Pieber, one of the camp’s administrative officers, knocked on Massey’s door with a summons from the
kommandant
for an eleven o’clock meeting. Pieber, generally a man of happy disposition, appeared solemn. In the days following the breakout, prisoners had been denied their Red Cross care packages and use of the camp’s theater. Such reprisals, the prisoners had agreed, were minor by German standards. Presently, Massey wondered aloud if the
kommandant
had decided upon a more severe form of retribution. Pieber, his brow creased, said he only knew the
kommandant
had some “terrible” news.

At the prescribed hour, Massey left his barracks accompanied by his personal interpreter, Squadron Leader Philip Murray. Fellow prisoners watched the two men walk slowly across the compound. The camp’s rumor mill had wasted little time generating numerous dark theories as to what hardships would soon befall the inmates. At the main gate, armed guards escorted the two men to the
kommandant
’s hut. Inside, they were led to a small office and took seats opposite the
kommandant
’s desk.
Oberst
(Colonel) Braune greeted the men with a silent nod, but remained standing. Pieber stood in one corner of the room, averting
his gaze. Braune held a single sheet of paper in his hand and stared almost helplessly at the words typed across it.

“I have been instructed by my higher authority to communicate to you this report,” Braune said, his voice quiet. “As a result of a tunnel from which seventy-six officers escaped from Stalag Luft III, north compound, forty-one of these officers have been shot while resisting arrest or attempting further escape after arrest.”

Murray, translating for Massey, stopped mid-sentence.

“How many were shot?” he asked, disbelieving.

“Forty-one,” Braune said, failing to meet Murray’s gaze.

Murray struggled to keep his emotional response in check. He turned to Massey, who, upon hearing the translation, took in a sharp breath and repeated the same question asked by Murray.

“How many were shot?”

“Forty-one,” Murray said, his voice thick in his throat.

Massey sat momentarily stunned, lost in the tumult of his thoughts. He fixed his eyes on Braune but addressed Murray when he finally spoke.

“Ask him how many were wounded.”

Braune, now wringing his hands, said the “higher authority” allowed him only to disclose the shooting of forty-one officers. Massey, unmoved, asked Murray to repeat the question.

“I think no one was wounded,” Braune said.

Massey leaned forward in his chair, anger laying waste to his calm reserve.

“Do you mean to tell me that forty-one men can be shot at in those circumstances and that all were killed and no one was wounded?”

Braune had no answer.

“Do you have a list of names?” Massey asked.

Again, Braune struggled, saying he knew nothing more beyond the details already relayed.

“I would like to have the names as soon as it is possible to get them,” Massey said and rose from his chair.

Braune agreed without protest before pleading his case.

“I am acting under orders,” he said. “I may only indulge what I’m instructed to by my higher authority.”

“What is this higher authority?”

“Just a higher authority,” said Braune, his voice dropping to a near whisper.

Before turning to leave, Massey asked that the bodies be returned to the camp for proper burial arrangements and the disposal of personal effects.

“I demand that the Protecting Power also be informed,” he said in reference to the International Red Cross, which routinely visited the camp to ensure standards adhered to the Geneva Convention.

Braune agreed to Massey’s demands but warned he could only arrange whatever the “higher authority” permitted.

Massey and Murray left the office and stepped outside, with Pieber following close behind.

“Please do not think the
Luftwaffe
had anything to do with this dreadful thing,” he said, clearly distraught. “It is terrible.”

Massey called the camp’s three hundred senior officers—one for every room in each barrack—to a meeting in the compound’s theater. The men received the news in quiet disbelief, and word of the atrocity quickly spread throughout the camp. That same day, eight more escapees returned under armed
Luftwaffe
guard and were put in the cooler. Massey, in his room, his game leg elevated on a chair, tallied the numbers at day’s end. Out of seventy-six men, forty-one were dead; another fourteen were back behind the wire, and the fate of twenty-one men remained unknown. Massey’s fate, however, was clear. In the weeks prior, the Germans had made arrangements to repatriate him back to Britain on medical grounds. He left the camp on April 11, bound for Switzerland on the first part of his return journey to England. In his place, Group Captain D. E. L. Wilson of the Royal Australian Air Force became senior British officer at Stalag Luft III.

In the early evening hours of April 15, a list identifying the victims appeared on the camp’s notice board. A crowd quickly gathered and listened as the names were read aloud in a somber roll call. Quiet expressions of grief gave way to cries of outrage when it became apparent the list contained not forty-one names, but forty-seven. Two days later, Gabrielle Naville, a representative of the Swiss Protecting Power, visited the
camp on a routine welfare inspection. Wilson pulled Naville aside, detailed recent events, and provided a copy of the list. Among the dead were twenty-five Britons, six Canadians, three Australians, two New Zealanders, three South Africans, four Poles, two Norwegians, one Frenchman, and a Greek. The Swiss government in May reported the killings to the British government. On May 19, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden addressed the House of Commons. After relaying the basic facts of the case and voicing the outrage of His Majesty’s government, he demanded Germany provide through Switzerland “a full and immediate report on the circumstances in which these men met their death.”

In the weeks that followed, the Swiss learned of three additional victims, bringing the total number of those murdered to fifty. If some prisoners at Stalag Luft III remained skeptical of the news, the ashes brushed aside any lingering disbelief. Throughout May and July, the cremated remains of the deceased were delivered to the camp in forty-six urns and four boxes. On each container was engraved the city in which the prisoner had been shot. Braune allowed a group of prisoners to construct in a nearby cemetery a stone memorial in which the ashes were placed.

Eden made a second statement to Parliament on June 23, disclosing the new casualty figure. Germany, he said, had communicated through Switzerland its reasoning for the killings, asserting the victims were involved in sabotage operations that endangered the German public. Eden dismissed the accusation. “No orders,” he said, “have at any time been given to British prisoners of war to take part, in the event of their escape, in any subversive action as is alleged in the German note.” Regardless of the circumstances, he continued, there was no viable excuse for executing fifty men.

“His Majesty’s Government must, therefore, record their solemn protest against these cold-blooded acts of butchery,” he said in conclusion. “They will never cease in their efforts to collect the evidence to identify all those responsible. They are firmly resolved that these foul criminals shall be tracked down to the last man, wherever they may take refuge,” swore Eden. “When the war is over, they will be brought to exemplary justice.”

^*
No relation to Friedrich Schmidt.

Frank McKenna eyed the pile of documents on his bureau and pondered, not for the first time, the immensity of the task. More than a year had passed since the commission of the crimes detailed in the mountainous stack of folders and overflowing envelopes. He knew full well of Anthony Eden’s promise to bring the killers to justice, but a politician’s pledge was something one often accepted with a healthy amount of skepticism. On this evening in late August 1945, sitting in the cramped bedroom he rented from a police officer widowed during the Blitz, McKenna harbored his fair share of doubt.

He held the rank of flight sergeant, having joined the Royal Air Force and volunteered for bomber crew. At thirty-seven, he was an old man by aircrew standards but was nevertheless compelled by a fervent sense of duty. He was tall and lean, with sharp features. A well-defined chin and angular jaw gave him a somewhat hardened appearance; his pale eyes and thin mouth were not prone to easy laughter. A devout Catholic, he had been driven all his life by rigid ideals of right and wrong and doing what needed to be done. He believed in hard justice and the need to atone for one’s sins. Such views propelled him in his civilian career. Before the war, McKenna had worked his way up to detective-sergeant in the Blackpool Borough Police. His physicality and dedication to police work earned him, among his fellow detectives, the
sobriquet “Sherlock Holmes.” He could have spent a relatively safe war ensconced in his police work, but that would have gone against McKenna’s dutiful nature.

He flew thirty operations as a flight engineer on Lancasters with No. 622 Squadron and completed his tour of duty by Christmas 1944. His operational commitments met, McKenna joined the RAF Police and secured a posting with the Special Investigating Branch (SIB), headquartered at Princes Court Gate, South Kensington, London. He spent the better part of 1945 investigating routine crimes within the service, crimes that hardly differed from those he tackled as a copper on “Civvy Street.” Stolen property and cases of assault were typical fare that neither challenged McKenna nor necessarily bored him. It was simply police work and appealed to his sense of righteousness. When Britain’s Judge Advocate General’s Office assigned the Sagan case to the Royal Air Force, Group Captain W. V. Nicholas, the head of SIB, knew McKenna’s puritanical work ethic would prove a defining quality. And so, when the file hit his desk, he had sent McKenna off to review it and render an opinion.

It took McKenna a week to slog his way through the documents. They included an account of the Stalag Luft III breakout, many details of which had not yet been made public. He marveled at the escape’s complexity and the audacity of those who’d planned it. But of the seventy-six men who made it through the tunnel, only three had managed to get back to England: Peter Bergsland and Jens Muller, lieutenants in the Royal Norwegian Air Force, and Dutch Flight Lieutenant Bram Van der Stok. Bergsland and Muller had made their way to Stettin, where Swedish sailors smuggled them aboard a ship and hid them in the chain locker. On the morning of March 30, the ship arrived in Stockholm. The two men—sore, but alive—disembarked and sought refuge at the British Consul. Their odyssey had lasted six days; Van der Stok’s journey to freedom took four months. He traveled by train from Sagan to the Netherlands, where he went underground for several weeks and stayed with an old college professor. He next cycled into Belgium and dropped off the grid with the help of an uncle. Through a family friend, he acquired an address in southwest France and traveled by rail to St. Gaudens, where he made contact with the French Resistance.
There followed an arduous trek across the Pyrenees into Spain. From there, it was on to Portugal and then England.

The men, back on British soil, told the War Office what they knew of the escape’s planning and execution based on their individual involvement. Their information was coupled with an account from Group Captain Massey—the repatriated senior British officer from Stalag Luft III—who provided what information he could on the violent aftermath. The documents, viewed in their entirety, were a threadbare tapestry of information when one considered the scope and immensity of the killings. The fog of war had effectively concealed many details of the crime. The identity of the gunmen remained a mystery, though the names of several high-ranking officials were put forward as most likely being involved in the murders. Some men of interest, noted Military Intelligence, might already be in custody. Allied prison camps were teeming with captives, but the daunting task of identifying the hundreds of thousands of prisoners behind the wire was far from complete. One man known to be in custody was Breslau
Kripo
chief Max Wielen. The British Army had picked him up after they crossed the Rhine, two weeks before Germany surrendered. In his statement to interrogators, Wielen detailed how national
Kripo
chief Arthur Nebe had ordered him to hand captured escapees in his custody over to Dr. Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, head of the Breslau Gestapo. British Intelligence placed considerable emphasis on this piece of information.

It was ascertained, through interviews with surviving escapees, that the majority of the Sagan fugitives—thirty-five them—had been captured in the Breslau area and imprisoned in the town of Görlitz. The Gestapo murdered twenty-nine men and shipped the remaining six back to Stalag Luft III. Scharpwinkel was a killer—but his whereabouts, indeed even whether he was still alive, remained a mystery. He had taken part in the defense of Breslau, besieged by the Red Army during the last three months of war. Having declared the city a fortress, Hitler ordered Breslau’s defenders to fight to the last man. Scharpwinkel was most likely dead, but McKenna required hard evidence before accepting something as fact. Uncovering such evidence would not be easy. Seventeen months had passed since the killings—plenty of time for the
Gestapo to destroy incriminating files and send the perpetrators underground with forged papers and new identities. Germany, wrecked from one end to the other, had been carved up among the Allies. Sagan, conquered by the Red Army in February 1945, now lay within the Russian Zone of Occupation and was closed to British and American forces.