The Great Escape (36 page)

“This is the efficient part,” he said as they came to a long corridor with thirty cell doors on one side and a single door on the other.

“No accused man who went through this single door ever came out again,” said the Czech. Behind the door was a courtroom and across the back of the room stretched a thick curtain. He pulled the curtain aside and showed them where the execution gangs waited for the victims of the court. This was sudden death. There was a rail across it, like the rails in butcher shops, and a row of nooses was hanging down from it. As men were sentenced, they strung them up and slid the nooses along the rail through another curtain into a room full of cheap coffins.

In a corner of the execution chamber, there was a guillotine.

“They used to lie them face-up on this,” said the Czech.

Bowes found Kiowski in a cell by himself, a dry-lipped, nervous little man with black hair. The Czechs had proof of ten murders against him. Kiowski admitted he
did
know a little about Kirby-Green and Kidder. It was the first break in the entire case. He had been stationed at Zlin, said Kiowski. on the German-Czech border, on March 28, 1944, when two suspects were caught trying to cross the frontier into Czechoslovakia. Their names, he found out later, were Kirby-Green and Kidder. The local Gestapo chief, Hans Ziegler, interrogated them, and later that night a Gestapo agent called Knuppelberg arrived from area Gestapo headquarters at Brno with orders about the two prisoners.

Kiowski said he was duty driver that night, and about 2 A.M. in the morning Ziegler called him and another driver named Schwarzer to drive the two prisoners back to Sagan. Knuppelberg sat in the back of his car with the handcuffed Kidder, and a local Gestapo man called Zacharias sat in the other car with Kirby-Green, also handcuffed.

About forty miles along the road, some ten miles before Moravska Ostrava, Knuppelberg stopped the cars and they let the two prisoners get out to relieve themselves, removing the handcuffs. Kiowski said that as they got to the side of the road, both Kirby-Green and Kidder made a sudden dash into the darkness. Sitting in the car, he heard shots from Zacharias and Knuppelberg, and both fleeing prisoners fell dead.

Bowes was certain Kiowski was lying. He had always expected that when he found the murderers they would say that the prisoners had been killed trying to escape. He and Lyon straddled themselves on two chairs, rested their arms on the backs, and settled down to cross-question Kiowski. They kept at it for six straight hours till they were all hoarse and sweating, Kiowski still sticking to his story.

And then they caught him in a flat lie. Hours earlier, Kiowski had said his orders were to drive straight to Sagan without stopping. And then later, in answer to what seemed an innocent question, Kiowski described how he had fueled the cars before they drove off and told how much gas he had put in. It was only enough to get them to Moravska Ostrava (where there was a crematorium) and back to Zlin. Sagan lay another 140 miles further on. Bowes put his red face close to Kiowski and shouted the lie back to him, and Kiowski fainted.

They brought him around by pouring slivovitch down his throat, and then Kiowski told the truth.

Before they set out from Zlin, he said, he had asked Zacharias what was going to happen to the two prisoners, and Zacharias had pointed with his thumb downward. About ten miles from Moravska Ostrava, as he had said before, they had stopped the cars and let the two prisoners out to urinate. As they stood by the side of the road, Zacharias stood behind Kidder and Knuppelberg behind Kirby-Green, both with drawn pistols. Knuppelberg looked at Zacharias across the few feet of darkness and raised his arm, the prearranged signal. Both lifted their pistols and fired simultaneously, and then Zacharias fired a second shot to make sure. Kirby-Green and Kidder slid to the ground without a sound. Death was instantaneous. Knuppelberg drove on to Moravska Ostrava and got an ambulance to take the bodies to the crematorium.

The Czechs wouldn’t let Bowes take Kiowski. They had too much on him themselves, and later they executed him.

Bowes and Lyon went to Zlin to start the search for the others, and there they found that Ziegler had committed suicide when Germany collapsed. In the local jail, however, they found Frau Zacharias. They learned a lot about Zacharias from her. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. He was not, it seems, either a good man or a good husband. There was the case of the Czech typist to whom Zacharias had paid some attention, and when she began to get a little difficult he murdered her. And after that there was the little girl of seventeen, a displaced person and suspected spy. Zacharias took her out into the woods and later he sent a Russian slave laborer to bury the body.

“He is in Bremen now,” said Frau Zacharias, and gave Bowes the address. Bowes sent a man flying to Bremen, and at the address the wife had given him, he arrested Zacharias, a big, blond-haired man with thin lips and nostrils; a very tough character as he proved within twenty-four hours by escaping from American custody.

Bowes was seething. They searched half of Germany, but there was no trace of Zacharias till on the seventeenth day they intercepted a letter card addressed to a relative which said, “Uncle Erich is well and is leaving shortly on a trip.”

Zacharias’ Christian names were Herman, August, Erich. The letter card came from a town up near the border of the Russian Zone. Bowes drove full speed there with a team of police, and at dusk they surrounded the house from which the letter card had come. Bowes and Lyon rushed in the back and front doors with drawn pistols, and in the kitchen they found Zacharias eating supper. Beside him was his bag, ready packed. He was to leave in an hour to slip across the border into the Russian Zone, where there would have been no hope of finding him.

Bowes flew him back to England, where he escaped again but was once more recaptured. In London District Cage he denied knowing anything about the shootings until they slapped in front of him the evidence of his wife and Kiowski, and Zacharias looked up and shrugged.

“Well, I can only die once,” he said, and confessed.

Bowes at last knew the Gestapo was definitely involved in the shootings. He flew to Brno to track down Knuppelberg, and there he heard that a Brno Gestapo official, S.S.-
Hauptsturmfuehrer
Franz Schauschutz had been in Zlin about the time of the murders.

He found in Brno a little café where the Gestapo used to drink at night, and the proprietor, spitting at the mention of his former clients, told Bowes that Schauschutz and Knuppelberg and others used to hold drunken parties there several times a week, bringing typists whom they usually stripped naked. Around the walls a local artist had captured the spirit of some of the gatherings with a series of murals of satyrs holding naked girls. Greatly daring, the artist had drawn on the satyrs the heads of the Gestapo men (who had thought it a great joke).

“This,” said the proprietor, stabbing a dirty finger at one, “is Knuppelberg. And this,” pointing to another, “is Schauschutz.” He added bitterly. “They never paid a bill in five years.”

Bowes photographed the heads. In what was left of the Brno police records he found Schauschutz’s name and an address in a little town in Austria. He drove to the town and arrested Schauschutz there, recognizing him from the photograph of the drawing on the wall of the Brno café.

Schauschutz had apparently not been involved in the actual shooting, but he knew something of the aftermath. After the announcements of the shootings there had been a great outcry in England (Bowes knew that well enough). An alarmed Ribbentrop had demanded of Himmler that the shootings be adequately covered.

Schauschutz said that Gestapo headquarters in Berlin sent for Knuppelberg, and there in Gestapo chief Mueller’s Berlin office Knuppelberg saw a man called Scharpwinkel, who was Gestapo chief at Breslau, and Gestapo men from Karlsruhe, Munich, Strasbourg, Saarbruecken, Danzig, and Kiel. As Schauschutz spoke, the case was breaking wide open.

Mueller, said Schauschutz, roughly rebuked the Gestapo representatives present. Their reports of the shootings of the escaped Air Force prisoners were all unimaginatively the same. Without exception, they said the prisoners tried to escape while being allowed to urinate beside the road on the way back to Sagan. They were to go and prepare fresh reports, said Mueller, putting more variety and convincing detail into them. Schauschutz said that Knuppelberg came back to Brno and made out a new fake report, which was sent to Berlin.

Bowes sent his teams to the cities mentioned by Schauschutz and applied to Warsaw for a permit to go to Breslau himself.

On four of the urns no town name had been engraved but in the Kiel Crematorium record book one of Bowes’ men found an entry showing that, on March 20, 1944, four people had been cremated there. The column where the names should have been showed four blanks. Otto Fahl, the old crematorium attendant, said he vaguely remembered the four. They were men. He understood that they had come from Flensburg, on the Danish border.

In Flensburg, Bowes found some of the old local Gestapo in British custody, and they told him that the four had been escaped airmen who had been collected from them by men from Kiel Gestapo, led by a Major Post.

Bowes tracked down Post and arrested him in a garage at Celle. He was a dark, strong-looking, arrogant man and said he knew nothing of four such men. Bowes and his teams picked up more of Kiel Gestapo — Kaehler, Oskar Schmidt, Franz Schmidt, Jackobs and others. Franz Schmidt was the first to crack, and he told the story.

Jimmy Catanach, the Australian, Christensen, a New Zealander, and two Norwegians, Espelid and Fugelsang, had been arrested at gun-point right on the Danish border and thrown into jail. Fritz Schmidt, chief of Kiel Gestapo, received a secret order from Mueller in Berlin that the four were to be shot. He called Post and several more reliable executioners and told them what they had to do. Then he shook hands with each man to bind him to secrecy under his Gestapo oath.

Post and the others drove to Flensburg, and Post put Catanach in his car. The other three traveled in the second car. Post drew a couple of miles ahead of the others and stopped by a field near Rotenhahn. He led Catanach behind the hedge and shot him in the back. Catanach died instantly. A couple of minutes later the other car drove up. The other three prisoners were pushed into the field. One of them saw Catanach’s body and let out a shout, and the three of them scattered, running, but were shot down before they had gone ten paces.

Bowes’ men gave Schmidt paper and a pen and sent him to his cell to write out his confession. When they went back they found he had taken his singlet off, stood on a chair, tied the end of his singlet to the cell ventilator, twisted the armholes around his neck and stepped off the chair. He was hanging, quite dead. He
had
written something on the paper they had given him — a note addressed to his daughter. It said, “Hitler was right,” and told her not to forget her Nazi teachings.

The other Kiel prisoners talked freely and gladly about Post, telling Bowes that he was an insatiable sadist. One of them told how Post had built a slave-labor camp outside Kiel and suggested that a certain one of the huts should be pulled down. The British put German workmen on the pulling it down, and under the foundations they found 160 corpses of Post’s victims.

Bowes finally got around through Warsaw to Breslau, Georlitz, Hirschberg, and Sagan but from the Russians and the Poles met only obstructionism and was not able to see a single one of the local Gestapo whom they had in jails. A Polish officer trailed him wherever he went, and Bowes finally sat down next to his shadow in a café and bought him drinks till he was glassy-eyed, in which condition the Pole freely told Bowes he was regarded as a spy.

Curiously enough, a report came through from Moscow that Scharpwinkel was being held there. Captain Cornish of the British army flew there, and the Russians took him to see Scharpwinkel, a dark, ruthless man whom the Russians persuaded to speak. Though Scharpwinkel himself was economical with the truth, the details he gave implicated Wielen, and Wielen was tracked down in Western Germany. Wielen implicated Scharpwinkel, and bit by bit the truth came out.

Scharpwinkel had gone with Lux and his murder gang to Goerlitz on March 30, 1944, and there they had interrogated some of the prisoners. After lunch they put six of them in a truck — Cross, Mike Casey, Wiley, Leigh, Pohé, and Al Hake — and drove off toward Sagan. Five miles past Halbau, Scharpwinkel ordered the truck to pull up, and Lux and his gunmen prodded the prisoners into the roadway. They escorted them about a hundred yards into the wood and there Scharpwinkel told them they were to be executed.

(“I was surprised,” Scharpwinkel said reflectively in Moscow, “that they took it so calmly.”)

They were lined up, and Lux gave the order to fire. By the second salvo they were all dead. Lux told Scharpwinkel that the following day they would go to Hirschberg.

The next day Lux and his men took ten more from Goerlitz — Humphries, McGill, Swain, Hall, Pat Langford, Evans, Valenta, Kolanowski, Stewart, and Birkland. The urns containing the ashes of these men showed they were cremated at Liegnitz. Either that day or the day after, Lux also took his men to Hirschberg, where they took Kiewnarski, Pawluk, Wernham, and Skanziklas and shot them.

On April 6, Lux took another six from Goerlitz — Grisman, Gunn, J. F. Williams, Milford, Street, and McGarr. They were cremated at Breslau. But it was not till April 13 that Lux took Cookie Long from Goerlitz. His urn shows that he was cremated at Breslau.

That brought Lux’s murder total to twenty-seven, a figure to which Tobolski can probably be added, and also, perhaps, Danny Krol, who was caught with Dowse at Oels, in the Breslau area. He was last seen alive there, and his urn is marked “Breslau.”