The Great Escape (37 page)

Gradually, through patient research into regional Gestapos, Bowes brought to light the details of most of the other shootings.

Willy Williams (Squadron Leader J. E. A. Williams), Johnny Bull, Kierath, and Mondschein were caught trying to cross the Czech border near Reichenberg, and after interrogation and several days in the cells they were taken away from Reichenberg at four o’clock in the morning of March 29, and not seen again. They were cremated that same day at Bruex. They certainly weren’t killed trying to escape again. Baatz, the local Gestapo chief, had signed the order for their cremation the previous day. Stower also vanished from Reichenberg Jail.

Kriminalpolizei took Gouws and Stevens off a train south of Munich and, on the evening of March 28, three Gestapo men were ordered to shoot them and pledged to secrecy by handshake. They drove the two prisoners out of Munich in a car, stopped in open country, and told them they could get out to relieve themselves. As they stood by the side of the road, a Gestapo agent called Schneider shot both with a machine pistol. They were cremated at Munich. A year later, when the American Army was approaching Munich, Weil, one of the shooting party, went to the crematorium and tried to rub their names out of the record with a penknife.

Cochran was caught near Karlsruhe, and on March 31, he was taken out in a car toward Natzweiler and shot from behind in the woods by a Gestapo agent called Preiss. Tony Hayer was not caught for nearly two weeks and then police picked him up at Strasbourg on the French border. On April 6, two Strasbourg Gestapo men drove him out on the autobahn toward Breslau and shot him, as the others had done, by the side of the road.

Bushell and Scheidhauer had caught their train all right from Sagan. (Van Der Stok saw Bushell buying train tickets in Breslau station.) A day or two later they reached Saarbruecken and were waiting on the platform for a train down to Alsace when two security policemen questioned them. They showed their papers, which were almost perfect. Roger had some of the original passes. Scheidhauer spoke natural French, of course, and Roger spoke good French and faultless Bernese German. They had their stories word-perfect — they were Frenchmen who’d been working in Germany and were going home on leave. They answered perfectly questions about their homes and families, and at last the policemen seemed satisfied and handed the passes back.

As they were walking away one of them pulled an old trick. He swung around and shot a sudden question at Scheidhauer, and Scheidhauer, who had been speaking English in the compound for two years, involuntarily answered in English. The police had their pistol out in a second and took them away to Lerchesflur Prison.

During the next few days they were interrogated by the Kriminalpolizei, and as the alternative seemed to lie in being regarded as spies, they finally admitted they had escaped from Stalag Luft III. On the evening of March 28, Dr. Spann, Gestapo chief in Saarbruecken, received a top secret teleprint order from General Mueller that the two prisoners were to be shot. Spann sent his triggerman, Emil Schulz, to collect them from the prison. Schulz handcuffed them behind their backs, and a Gestapo driver called Briethaupt drove him, Spann, and the two prisoners out along the autobahn toward Kaiserslautern.

A few miles out, Spann ordered the car to stop, and they took the handcuffs off the prisoners and told them they could get out and relieve themselves. By the side of the road, Spann and Schulz each fired two shots. Scheidhauer fell straight forward on his face and did not move. Bushell crumpled slowly onto his right side. They were cremated at Saarbruecken.

Schulz and Breithaupt were not popular in Saarbruecken. Bowes found some of their old colleagues in prison camps there, and they told him everything they knew, including the probable whereabouts of the two. A couple of days later, Schulz was arrested at his home in the French Zone, and about the same time they found Briethaupt hiding in a hut in a wood in the American Zone. Retribution had already caught up with Spann. In the closing days of the war he had been killed in an air raid on Linz.

Spann wasn’t the only one beyond human justice. Fittingly enough General Nebe, who had selected the fifty victims and given their names to the Gestapo, had had his own name handed to the Gestapo. He had been imprudent, enough to become implicated in the Hitler bomb plot of July, and his old friend, General Mueller, with whom he and Kaltenbrunner had lunch every day, hanged him.

Mueller did not grieve long. He died in the fighting when the Russian took Berlin. Kaltenbrunner died at Nuremberg with other top Nazis.

Lux died in the fighting in Breslau, and so did most of his murder gang. The rest vanished.

The Russians did not hand Scharpwinkel over. They reported that he had died in Moscow after an illness. (Bowes will bet a pound to a penny that the brilliant and ruthless Scharpwinkel is still in an official uniform either in Russia or in the Russian Zone of Germany, training men in the job he knows so well for new masters.)

Bowes now knew what had happened in varying detail to forty-six of the fifty, and in custody he had eighteen men for trial. There were several more smaller fry he wanted in addition to those who had died, but they had scattered throughout Germany and covered their tracks.

The trial of the eighteen started on July 1, 1947, before No. 1 War Crimes Court in the old-fashioned gray courtroom of the Kurio Haus in Hamburg. The military judges, red-tabbed in khaki and in R.A.F. blue, sat in a row before a table on a raised dais at the head of the room, a major-general, an air commodore, three colonels, and two wing commanders. In the middle of them, to guide them on law, sat the wigged and black-gowned Advocate-General C. L. Stirling, C.B.E., K.C., a tall spare man with a pince-nez and a crisp, incisive voice.

On the other side of the room, the accused sat in two rows on benches in the large dock, and in front of them sat their black-gowned German counsel.

For fifty days — one for each murdered man — the damning evidence mounted against them, and on the fiftieth day the court convicted them all.

Grizzled, sixty-four-year-old Wielen was found guilty of taking part in the high-level conspiracy to murder the fifty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Schulz and Breihaupt were convicted of murdering Bushell and Sheidhauer and sentenced to death.

Alfred Schimmel was convicted of the murder of Tony Hayter and sentenced to death.

Josef Gmeiner, Walter Herberg, Otto Preiss, and Heinrich Boschert were found guilty of the murder of Cochran. Death sentence.

Johannes Post and Hans Kahler were sentenced to death for the murder of Catanach, Christensen, Fugelsang, and Espelid; Arthur Denkman, their driver, got ten years for being an accessory.

Oskar Schmidt and Walter Jackobs were sentenced to death for the murders of Christensen, Espelid, and Fugelsang. Their driver, Wilhelm Struve, was sentenced to ten years for being an accessory.

Emil Weil, Eduard Geith, and Johan Schneider were found guilty of the murders of Gouws and Stevens and sentenced to death.

Zacharias was sentenced to death for the murders of Kidder and Kirby-Green.

Post was arrogant and sneering to the last. He must have realized that there could only be one way out for him. Most of the others became very subdued. Jackobs embraced religion.

Boschert’s death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, but the other fourteen condemned men were hanged in Hamelin Jail, near Hamburg, on February 26, 1948.

Four of the murdered airmen were still unavenged — Tim Walenn, Henri Picard, Gordon Brettell, and Romas Marcinkus. Bowes had traced them to Danzig, where they had been aiming. Police had taken them off a train near Schneidemuehl and lodged them for a day in a near-by prison camp. A British sergeant-major in that camp had reported after the war that they had a plot to escape again, and as they were about to put it into execution, the Gestapo arrived and took them away.

That, Bowes assumed, would be Danzig Gestapo. He had sixty of the former Danzig and district Gestapo held behind barbed wire at Esteveger, near Danzig, and he cross-questioned them repeatedly but could not get a lead. Danzig Gestapo chief, Dr. Venediger, would be certain to know, but Venediger had vanished. And then one day in early July, 1948, one of the prisoners called Achterberg asked to see him.

“I feel that a lot of quite innocent men are being held here,” Achterberg said. “The man you want is called Burchhardt, and I think I can tell you where you might find him. His wife lives just north of Hamburg,” and Achterberg mentioned an address in a little town.

He and the others told Bowes a lot about their old colleague Burchhardt, and none of it was very nice. Burchhardt, they said, was Danzig’s most reliable executioner because he took such a pride and pleasure in his work. He had a record of many murders in the name of duty. His favorite method, according to his comrades, was to take his victims to his own room and flog them to death with a rhinoceros hide whip. They said we was such a huge, gorilla-like man that he could almost take a man’s head off with his whip. Bowes wouldn’t believe it at first, but so many of Burchhardt’s old colleagues repeated the story so sincerely that he came to believe them.

“Be careful of Burchhardt,” one of them said. “He will probably shoot first.”

A party of armed men went to the address Achterberg had given and found Burchhardt’s wife there, but not Burchhardt. They
did
find, though, that Burchhardt had made the same mistake as Zacharias.

“He’s run away with his mistress,” said the abandoned frau with fury. “I can tell you where you’ll find him — in a town called Kempten in the American Zone. He calls himself Brandt now and is working as a carpenter. You’ll probably find him with the woman, Toni Schatz.”

They drove all day and reached Kempten, near the Swiss border, about midnight, and at one o’clock in the morning they raided Toni Schatz’ flat. Fraulein Schatz was a shapely blonde who welcomed them with shrill fury in a short slip that barely camouflaged what it did not hide. At first she said she’d never heard of Brandt, or Burchhardt, but when they threatened to confront her with Frau Burchhardt herself she broke down and gave them the address of a flat not far away.

Leaving a guard with Toni so she could not give a warning, Bowes posted twenty men around the entrance to the flats where the girl said Burchhardt was. He roused the janitor and got the master key, and at 3 A.M. Bowes and Lyon softly let themselves in the door of a flat where the janitor said Herr Brandt lived.

The flat was in darkness, and they felt their way into the bedroom. When they were quietly in position standing with drawn pistols over a dark form asleep in the bed, Bowes flicked on the light. Burchhardt was awake in a second and jumped halfway up with shock at seeing them. They found a loaded gun under his pillow. He was so huge that they could not fit the handcuffs over his wrists.

“I hope,” said Burchhardt, the unorthodox executioner, “that I’m going to get fair play.”

Checking Burchhardt’s story with the evidence of the Danzig Gestapo men held at Esteveger (they were talking freely now), Bowes found what had happened to the last four recaptured airmen. Burchhardt and a murder team had driven them to a wood outside Trampken about twelve miles from Danzig, and among the trees, seventy yards from the road, they machine-gunned them and the four died instantly.

About the same time, Bowes caught up with Erwin Wieczorek, who had been with Lux’s gang in Goerlitz, and Richard Haensel, Kriminalpolizei chief in Goerlitz. On October 11, 1948, these two and Burchhardt faced the War Crimes Court, again, sitting in the gray, paneled courtroom of the Kurio Haus in Hamburg.

The trial lasted twenty days and Wieczorek was found guilty of being concerned in the murders of Cross, Casey, Leigh, Wiley, Pohé, and Hake and sentenced to death.

Haensel was acquitted on the grounds that it was not proved that he had taken an active part in the murder conspiracy.

Burchhardt was convicted of the murders of Walenn, Picard, Brettell, and Marcinkus, and sentenced to death.

Wieczorek and Burchhardt did not hang. Wieczorek’s conviction was not confirmed by the British occupation authorities. He claimed that he had not been present when the men had been shot in the woods but had stayed behind tinkering with the engine of one of the cars parked on the autobahn. He was freed.

The death sentence on that trusty executioner Burchhardt was commuted to imprisonment for life. The authorities considered it was a little too long since the four murders (four years) to exact the full penalty. Life imprisonment is twenty-one years. Some say there will be an amnesty long before that, and I expect they are probably right.