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.
An intelligence report concluded: “In view of these difficulties, it would appear that the best way of increasing the speed and efficiency of investigations might be to set up temporarily a small unit to make investigations in Germany. There can be little doubt that the employment of a small group of officers with police experience and a knowledge of German would be well justified having regard to the facts that, first, it is one of the worst of the war crimes committed against British nationals in general and the R.A.F. in particular; secondly, that it involves major war criminals; thirdly, that a large number of victims are involved; and fourthly, that is has aroused considerable public interest.”
McKenna closed the file and shook his head. A week after receiving the documents, he returned to Nicholas’s office to deliver his professional opinion. There was, he told the group captain, little hope of realizing Anthony Eden’s promise. Nicholas leaned back in his chair and tamped tobacco in a pipe. He sucked in a mouthful of smoke and hissed it out between clenched teeth, listening as McKenna rattled off various reasons as to why the case was destined to fail. Nicholas politely acknowledged McKenna’s arguments then casually brushed them aside.
“Listen,” he said. “There appears to be little more evidence to be gained from Allied witnesses. Although the outline is clear, the full story cannot be learnt until more of the Germans connected with the case are traced and interrogated.”
McKenna realized, with a certain degree of alarm, that a decision had already been made. When he opened his mouth to protest, Nicholas raised his arm to signify the matter had been settled. McKenna, accompanied by Flight Sergeant H. J. Williams, an ex–Portsmouth police officer, would venture to Germany and set about bringing the murderers to justice. McKenna resigned himself to the mission, knowing any argument against the assignment would most likely result in a forceful rebuff.
McKenna and Flight Sergeant Williams left England on September 3, 1945, six years to the day after Britain’s declaration of war. They took off from RAF Northolt in a Dakota, thundered across the coast, and set a bumpy course over the English Channel. The bomber’s interior smelled of grease and metal polish. The Pratt & Whitney engines rattled every screw and joint in the plane—or so thought McKenna, who feared the water. He made a point of not looking out the window as they crossed the sea and instead focused on bringing Williams up to date. The two men had to shout to hear each other over the fuselage noise. McKenna passed files to Williams and familiarized him with their prey. There was, of course, Scharpwinkel, followed by Dr. Gunther Absalon, an SS captain charged with prisoner-of-war security in the Sagan region. McKenna provided the relevant background.
“The camp’s commandant at the time of the escape was Colonel Friedrich-Wilhelm von Lindeiner-Wildau, sixty-four, a decorated cavalry officer from the First World War and pro-British,” McKenna shouted. “He had no patience for Hitler or the fanatics who towed the Nazi line. He knew any recaptured escapee would have to answer to the Gestapo, leaving him powerless to intervene on the prisoner’s behalf. The morning of the escape, he made forty-two telephone calls to regional Gestapo and Kripo headquarters, alerting them to the breach. Max Wielen—who we have in custody—was chief of the Breslau Kripo, which had jurisdiction over the Sagan region. He issued a Grossfahndung, a national hue and cry placing all military and security personnel on the highest alert. That same afternoon, he ordered Gunther Absalon to conduct an investigation at the camp. Absalon stripped Lindeiner of his rank and placed him under arrest.”
McKenna handed Williams a copy of Lindeiner’s statement, taken by a British interrogator after the war, and summarized the main points.
“Nineteen of the escaped officers were recaptured in the vicinity of Sagan immediately after the escape,” he said. “They were put in the local jail, where they were searched and identified by local Kripo personnel. At mid-day on Sunday, 26 March, Absalon was asked by Lindeiner to have the officers who were being held at Sagan prison returned to camp. Absalon refused the request peremptorily, explaining that he could accept no instructions from Lindeiner as the latter had been relieved of his post on account of the escape. On the evening of Sunday, 26 March, all nineteen officers were taken to Görlitz, and a further sixteen were brought there on various days. It’s not possible to establish with certainty on whose instructions this transfer was carried out. The normal procedure was to return escapers captured by ordinary police to their camp, which applied to at least the officers of British and Dominion nationality. On Sunday evening, no instructions could have possibly reached the local Kripo to treat this particular escape in any different way, and the assumption is therefore that the Kripo took these measures on their own initiative.”
McKenna braved a glance out the window and felt a weight lift when he saw land passing beneath the clouds. He turned back to the case file. Because Absalon had received orders to investigate the escape, he said, he would naturally have been required to interrogate recaptured prisoners. The facility at Görlitz had been a prison in the traditional sense before the war. The Gestapo, however, took it over once hostilities commenced and ran it as an interrogation center. Prisoners housed at Görlitz were mostly civilian and foreign workers accused of sabotage and other treasonous acts against the Reich. The prison, overrun with lice and fleas, was filthy. Prisoners received barely enough food to survive, their daily rations consisting of “200 grams of black bread and one liter of watery soup.” Having been questioned, inmates were hauled before a special court where a panel of judges would sentence them to hard labor or condemn them to a death camp.
“Presumably,” McKenna theorized, “it was Absalon who ordered the transfer of the officers to Görlitz, where interrogation and segregation could be more easily carried out.”
As for Lindeiner, the stress of it all resulted in a coronary. He survived, only to be court-martialed—but the German capitulation spared him the hardship of a year in prison. Now held in London, he was cooperating with the British. Questioned after the war, former inmates of Stalag Luft III described the one-time colonel as “a good sort of commandant with a very difficult task, but well liked by his prisoners and staff.” He had encouraged the prisoners under his charge to pursue various hobbies, from sports and gardening to amateur theatrical productions. He routinely violated protocol by shaking hands with inmates, accepting their invitations to tea, and joining them for a smoke. On three occasions, he presented senior ranking prisoners with wine and champagne on their birthdays. McKenna couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for the man.
Turbulence rattled the plane as McKenna and Williams next focused on the upper echelons of the Nazi hierarchy. Hitler and Himmler were dead. Göring and Keitel were awaiting trial at Nuremberg, as was Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s second in command at the Central Security Office. That left Nebe, national head of the Kripo, whose whereabouts were presently unknown. The fate of Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller, last seen on April 29, 1945, in Hitler’s bunker, also remained a mystery. Their names had been added to the Central Register of War Criminals and Security Suspects in Paris, along with those of 106 other men wanted in connection with the Sagan murders. Britain’s Judge Advocate General’s Office had compiled the list, drawing the names from interrogations and intelligence reports. McKenna would have to determine who, on the list, had actually played a complicit role in the killings. It was understood that the list was a fluid thing, prone to change based on McKenna’s findings. For all anyone knew, most men listed were already dead or languishing in Allied prison camps under assumed names.
“Where do we start?” asked Williams.
“The first task will be to ascertain that none of the wanted men are in fact held in the British, American, and French occupation zones,” McKenna said. “It cannot be assumed that just because a name is not recorded in the Central Registry of Detained Persons that the individual is not in Allied hands. The next task is to make enquiries for the wanted persons in the German towns in the British, American, and French occupation zones. Saarbrücken, Natzweiler, Munich, Stuttgart. In these places, searches should be made where possible in the records of the Kripo and Gestapo offices.”
There were additional avenues to explore, McKenna continued, including making inquiries in Berlin to review, if such material still existed, the records of the Central Security Office.
“If it is found possible to make enquiries inside the Russian occupation zone,” he said, “full enquiries should be made at Breslau, Görlitz, Hirschberg, Oels, Liegnitz, Dresden, and Danzig.”
The Dakota banked in a steep turn. McKenna looked out the window and saw a scene of utter devastation, a tortured expanse of twisted metal and shattered masonry: the skeletal remains of a city. Through the clouds, he could see people moving about the wreckage. It seemed remarkable that anything could live down there. Bombing Germany at night, all one could see was the glow of searchlights and the black clouds of flak illuminated by the fires below. It was impossible, under such conditions, to ascertain the true extent of the carnage being done. Now, in the light of day, McKenna felt a sense of pity—not necessarily for the people below, but that events had made such actions necessary.
The plane touched down with a heavy thud on a freshly bulldozed runway outside Rinteln in northwestern Germany. McKenna and Williams disembarked, cleared military customs, and were met by a representative of the RAF, who drove them by jeep to RAF Rinteln. Located on the banks of the Weser River, the ancient town had somehow escaped the ravages of war. Its medieval architecture and timber-framed houses were reminiscent of a Grimm’s fairy tale. In stark contrast to the devastation McKenna had viewed from the plane, Rinteln was an oddity—a small vestige of simpler times. The jeep turned onto Waldkaterallee, a quiet, tree-lined street, and stopped in front of a guard gate. An RAF policeman, having checked identification papers, raised a red-and-white barrier and allowed the jeep to pass. McKenna admired the grounds and commented on the number of trees. It was an astute observation, said the driver. The English translation for Waldkaterallee is “Forest Hang Over Alley.” They pulled up in front of a three-story barrack building with a heavily sloped roof. The RAF man led McKenna and Williams inside and helped get them situated. They were shown their sleeping quarters and their office, a spacious room of desks and filing cabinets. A large map of Germany dominated one wall. Then, with an utterance of good luck, their escort left McKenna and Williams to the task at hand.
The two men pondered their new surroundings and staked out their desks. McKenna spread the case files out in front of him and approached the wall-mounted map, which, he saw upon closer inspection, showed the Allied partitioning of Germany. The British occupied the northwest region of the country, while the Americans controlled the south. The French held territory along Germany’s southwestern border with France. The Russians occupied the east. Berlin, although located in the Soviet Zone, was jointly held by the Americans in the south, the British in the west, the French in the north, and the Russians in the east. McKenna returned to his desk and sorted through the files. The ashes of the dead had been shipped back to Stalag Luft III in urns, many of which bore inscriptions identifying the place of execution. McKenna found the list of cities and returned to the map. Breslau, the site of the majority of killings, lay deep within the Soviet sector. The Russians, who now oversaw nearly a quarter of Germany’s population, would most likely deny McKenna and his team access to the area. Cities such as Kiel, Hanover, and Hamburg fell within the British Zone and would pose no foreseeable problem. The British governed 23,000,000 people in their zone of occupation, which included the farmlands of the Rhine. Also under British control was the decimated Ruhr Valley. Once the industrial center of the Nazi war machine, its cities were now all but destroyed. American and British bombers had laid nearly 70 percent of Cologne to waste. “A staggering 93 percent” of Düsseldorf lay in ruins. In the American Zone, cities such as Frankfurt, Bremen, and Munich had suffered their own ordeal by fire.
With a general lay of the land, McKenna contacted the relevant Allied authorities in the American, British, and French zones, informing them of his arrival, the nature of the investigation, and the particulars of those wanted by the RAF. German police departments were also forwarded the wanted list. Meetings consumed the next several days. The commander of the North Western Europe War Crimes Investigation Unit offered McKenna the use of a holding facility in Minden. Officials at the American Authorities’ Headquarters in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt granted McKenna permits to enter the American Zone of Occupation. Records of recently captured Nazi officials were reviewed at Rhine Army headquarters and the Judge Advocate General Branch. These first several days seemed to pass in a flurry of papers, files, and index cards.
Back at his desk one evening, McKenna lit a smoke and pondered his next move. With no crime scene to examine, no witnesses to interview, and no evidence to analyze, the investigation lacked a clear starting point. Alongside the wall map he pinned mug shots of the murdered men, their solemn, black-and-white stares offering grim encouragement. Two of the victims were Flying Officer Robert Stewart and Flight Lieutenant Edgar Humphreys. Both men had been among the thirty-five prisoners to end up in the jail at Görlitz. McKenna flipped through the statements of the survivors who’d passed through the jail. The Gestapo had threatened to behead and shoot some of the recaptured men. Several prisoners were told outright that they would never see their homes or loved ones again. On the morning of March 31, 1944, roughly a dozen Gestapo agents—dressed in leather overcoats and fedoras—showed up at the prison and took ten inmates, including Humphreys and Stewart, away. Their ashes arrived at Stalag Luft III several days later in urns bearing their names and the place of cremation: Liegnitz. Humphreys was twenty-nine, Stewart thirty-two. McKenna took a drag on his cigarette and blinked the smoke out of his eyes. As a civilian police officer in Blackpool, he had become friends with a number of aircrew serving at RAF Squires Gate, the local air base. He often downed pints in the mess hall with Humphreys, a good-humored sort who showed him around the airfield and sparked an enthusiasm for the air force. A Blenheim pilot with No. 107 Squadron, Humphreys took off on December 19, 1940, for a daylight operation against the Channel ports and never returned. Stewart had also become a friend before being shot down over Duisburg on the night of April 27, 1943.
McKenna stared at their photographs and felt the weight of responsibility on him. He hoped to provide the fifty men with an epitaph worthy of all they had suffered. He stubbed out his cigarette, switched off the desk lamp, and retired for the night. The next day he dispatched a report to London, summarizing his first ten days in Germany. The odds of conducting a successful investigation were daunting but not impossible. His immediate plan was to comb the files of regional war crimes record offices in the hopes of establishing a lead, whether it be a name or an address that might put him on track. He also intended to visit the “camps and concentration areas” where the Allies were holding German prisoners. The challenge lay in the sheer numbers. There were a multitude of such facilities, housing millions of Germans, whom the Allies had to clear through a process of elimination. While there was a register listing all those in captivity, it was most likely, McKenna wrote, that many prisoners had assumed false identities prior to their apprehension. Despite such obstacles, McKenna believed the investigation would last several months at most. It was an optimistic assessment.
Listening to the voice at the end of the line, McKenna reached for a pen. He scribbled down an address and read it back to ensure he had it correct. The chief of the Düsseldorf Criminal Police confirmed the house and street number. McKenna uttered his thanks and hung up the phone. He held a short council of war with Williams and the newest member of his team. Fluent in German and English, Wilhelm Smit—a sergeant in the Royal Netherlands Air Force—had recently been seconded to the RAF’s Special Investigating Branch and assigned to McKenna as an interpreter.
“We have a possible line of information,” McKenna said, holding up the scrap of paper with the address. Responding to the wanted list he had wired out to regional police departments, McKenna said, authorities in Düsseldorf had just called with the address of Dr. Gunther Absalon’s parents, who lived in the old Düsseldorf district of Heerdt.
Early the next morning, McKenna and his team set off by jeep. They traveled south through open country and small towns in the direction of Dortmund. The fields and hills on either side of the road at first appeared untouched by war, but the scenery morphed as they drew closer to the city. The greenery faded away and the woodlands thinned, consumed by scorched earth and a cratered landscape. Dortmund itself was mostly ash and rubble. The buildings that still survived stood without roofs or windows. On many, the walls had been blasted away, allowing passersby to stare at the devastated rooms within, the furnishings smashed and splintered, a lifetime of mementos and memories blown to pieces. People wandered aimlessly through the streets, pulling what possessions they still had in carts or simply carrying them in a bundle on their back. The RAF men steered clear of wreckage and bomb-ripped chasms, before passing once more into the country. They traveled the remainder of the way through battered terrain and finally reached Düsseldorf by mid-afternoon. The carnage here mirrored that seen in Dortmund. McKenna looked out at queues of people waiting for their weekly rations. Many appeared indigent and their clothes threadbare. The investigators made their way through the ravaged city center—blasted numerous times during the RAF’s five-month campaign against the Ruhr in 1943—before crossing the Rhine into Heerdt.
Paul and Martha Absalon lived in a small house at Kribbenstrasse 20. The elderly couple answered the door, surprised to find three men wearing the dress blues of the British Royal Air Force standing on their doorstep. Speaking through Smit, McKenna introduced himself and stated the purpose of his visit.
“We’re trying to locate your son,” he said. “We need his help resolving an important matter.”
The couple led them into a small living room, its windows still taped as a precautionary measure against bomb damage. Martha Absalon, unnerved by the British presence, remained shielded behind her husband. McKenna took a seat, offered what he hoped was a reassuring smile, and asked the couple when they last saw their son.
“It’s vital we find him,” he said, mindful not to mention the true nature of his visit.
Paul Absalon spoke in a halting voice, as though worried each word might reveal some transgression on the part of his son.
“We have not heard from him in a long while,” he said. “He was in Breslau and wrote to us regularly, but we haven’t received a letter from him since February 7. We don’t know what’s become of him or his whereabouts.”
McKenna nodded and, with the couple’s permission, ordered Williams and Smit to search the house. They turned out every drawer and closet but found nothing to suggest the Absalons were lying. McKenna looked about the sitting room. On the wall was an old family portrait, a picture of the Absalons in happier times, posing with their young son.
“Was Gunther married?”
“Yes,” replied the mother. “She lives in Düsseldorf.”
With an address in hand, the three RAF officers drove a short distance to Brunnenstrasse 42. Frau Gerda Absalon, having been left to care for two small children and her mother, appeared a pretty, though tired, woman. At her side clung a young girl, whom she gently ushered down a hallway into a back room. When she returned, she sat in an armchair, brushed a strand of dark hair aside, and rested her hands in her lap. McKenna noticed she wore no wedding ring. She caught him looking and managed a weak smile.
“You are here about Gunther,” she said.
Smit translated and McKenna nodded.
“What can you tell us?” he asked.
“Not much,” she said, explaining that the last she’d heard from him had also been a letter in February posted from Am Anger 10, Breslau. The missive had been brief, simply letting her know he was still alive. Her casual tone suggested the news bore little emotional weight. At thirty, she was three years Absalon’s junior and eager to be done with him for good.
“Relations between my husband and myself have always been somewhat strained,” she said. “My family and I are not members of the Nazi Party, whereas my husband was always a devoted follower. I’m sure he was in Breslau at the end of the war, and was either killed or taken prisoner by the Russians.”
She paused and stared briefly at her bare left hand.
“If I do hear from him again,” she said, “I will be asking him for a divorce.”
She got up from her chair, moved across the room to a small writing desk, and retrieved a photograph from the drawer. Without giving it another glance, she passed it to McKenna.
“You can have this,” she said.
McKenna looked at the picture and saw a young man of Aryan stock, about thirty, looking back at him. His blond hair shorn close to the scalp, he wore at a slight angle on his head a military cap bearing the death’s head insignia of the SS. The mouth was a thin, straight line, the eyes cold, and the stare distant. From a British Intelligence report, McKenna knew Absalon always appeared “well groomed and smartly dressed.” He pocketed the photograph, thanked Gerda Absalon for her time, and left.
They traveled back to Rinteln, traversing the same battered landscape in the dark. While Smit and Williams were quick to dismiss Absalon as dead, a casualty of the Russian onslaught, McKenna refused to accept the notion. Absalon could have survived and gone underground, or simply slipped away in the chaos of battle. Russian forces had encircled Breslau—the largest city in eastern Germany—on February 15. The fifty thousand defenders, a motley crew of depleted army units and local militia, faced thirteen Soviet divisions. Russian artillery and fighter planes blasted and strafed the city, leveling entire blocks, littering streets with rubble and human wreckage. The fighting raged among the ruins and exacted an awful, bloody toll. Hitler, despite an urgent plea from the commander of German forces on April 6, refused to surrender the city. On April 30, Hitler killed himself. Two days later, on May 2, Berlin fell to the Russians, but the fighting in Breslau continued four more days. Roughly sixteen thousand German civilians and soldiers were dead by the battle’s end, and two-thirds of the city lay in a smoldering heap. The siege cost the Russians eight thousand lives.
McKenna arrived back in Rinteln desperate for a lead. He spent the days that followed visiting internment camps and cross-referencing the names of German prisoners with those on his wanted list. His rounds took him to Belsen near Hanover, now a place of incarceration for onetime Gestapo members. The British, for sanitary reasons, had torched the camp with flamethrowers shortly after its liberation in April. SS guards, fleeing the advancing Allied armies, had left thirteen thousand bodies unburied. The living lay among the dead. So emaciated and racked with typhus and typhoid were the survivors, they were hard to differentiate from the corpses. The bodies were bulldozed into large trenches and quickly covered up to stop the further spread of disease. Now, five months later, macabre monuments to the atrocities committed in the camp still remained. The smell of decomposition and human waste lingered. Human bones, not yet buried, were stacked in large piles. Walking to the camp’s registration office, McKenna eyed one large mound of earth after another, his revulsion growing at the realization they were mass graves.
His review of camp files turned up nothing, but being eager to put Belsen behind him, he found that the futility of his efforts hardly upset him. McKenna walked slowly back to his jeep. As a detective, he had witnessed man’s capacity for violence in its infinite forms—but the camp defied understanding. Slaughter on the battlefield had a rationale behind it one could grasp, if not accept. Even the indiscriminate bombing of British and German cities served strategic aims one could argue for or against. The atrocities in the camps, however, went beyond any human reasoning. McKenna took comfort in his faith and did not believe in a vicious God, but how did one explain such barbarism? Lacking answers, he gunned the engine and turned the jeep around. As Belsen fell away behind him, he pondered the men on his wanted list. Would they express remorse for what they had done or simply swear blind allegiance to their cause? He mulled the questions over as he drove back to Rinteln, the sides of the road littered with rusting armored vehicles. He occasionally passed a bedraggled procession of the bombed-out and homeless, wandering from one town to another in search of food and shelter.
The dislocation of millions added another layer of complexity to the investigation, though it favored the men being sought by the RAF. Establishing the identities of those blasted or forced from their homes was all but impossible, as the vast number of displaced people had no way of confirming who they were. Those wanted by the authorities for war crimes and other transgressions could pass themselves off as anyone they so desired and disappear among the ruins. As McKenna considered this, something in his mind suddenly clicked. Noncombatants would have been evacuated from Breslau before the Russian siege began, and combatants desperate to avoid capture most likely slipped out before the Red Army overran the city. If he could find out where evacuees from Breslau were now located, he might get a line on Absalon or Scharpwinkel.
Back in Rinteln, McKenna paid a visit to the town’s Bürgermeister—equivalent to a mayor—who said survivors of Breslau had fled to Rinteln and the surrounding area. Of course, he warned, some might have moved on, but many were likely to still be in the vicinity. Would the flight lieutenant care for the names and addresses of the host families? McKenna could hardly believe his luck and returned to his barracks with a long list of doors to knock on. He showed the list that evening to Smit. The two of them, he said, would have to start canvassing neighborhoods the following day. It was old-fashioned detective work and certainly preferable to the drudgery of cross-referencing files. They would work separately to save time, each covering his own ground. Although having been in the country for only three weeks, McKenna had picked up enough rudimentary German to stumble through the questions he needed to ask.
The rain fell dark and slow the following morning, September 27, as McKenna—his collar turned up against the cold—made his way door to door. His inquiries went nowhere that first day, and he returned to his barrack soaked through and foul tempered. At most houses, no one had answered the door. Those who were home said apologetically they were no longer housing refugees. A stiff drink and a smoke in the mess hall that evening put his mood right but did nothing to make the prospect of hitting the streets again any more appealing. When Smit pulled up a chair and reached for the bottle, McKenna hoped to hear some good news, but he felt his optimism fade when he saw the other man’s grim expression. Between them, they easily conquered the bottle’s contents and a pack of cigarettes before calling it a night.
The image, initially a blur, slowly came into focus. A field spread out before him beneath a gunmetal sky. Two figures materialized in the distance, one walking in front of the other. Watching them approach, McKenna realized the man in front was a young RAF officer, his uniform tailored to look like a suit. Behind him, a pistol in hand, stomped a member of the Gestapo dressed in a gray SS uniform. The two men stopped in front of McKenna and seemed unaware of his presence. Unable to move or cry out, he watched in horror as the Gestapo man raised the gun to the back of the airman’s head and pulled the trigger. The young man’s body convulsed and fell forward, the pistol’s report echoing across the field like thunder.
McKenna jerked upright in bed. He stared into a dark corner of the room and listened to the rain beat a steady cadence against the window. The dream, which had plagued him for several weeks, lingered in his mind’s eye. He lay his head back on the pillow, relieved when the afterimage at last began to fade.
The rain, much to McKenna’s extreme annoyance, continued into the morning. He prepped for the pending ordeal with several mugs of strong coffee in the mess. The second day of canvassing, September 28, seemed to be a depressing repeat of the first. One by one, he crossed names and addresses off his list, success having thus far steered clear of his efforts. It was near day’s end when he knocked on the door of a small terraced house at Berlinstrasse 18a, and heard someone inside work a lock. The door opened a crack, and a young woman peered out. In German, McKenna fumbled his way through an introduction and asked if she was housing anyone from Breslau. The woman nodded and, in German and rough English, said she had living with her a man named Klaus Lonsky. He was out, but McKenna was welcome to wait for him if he so wished. Desperate to be out of the rain, McKenna accepted the invitation.
A little while later, sitting in the woman’s living room, McKenna heard the front door open and close. When Lonsky entered the room, McKenna rose to greet him. He was younger than McKenna had expected, probably in his late twenties, but his movements were slow and his expression battle-weary. McKenna, wondering if his tongue would ever prove adept at German, began explaining the purpose of his visit. Lonsky cut him off and said he understood English.
McKenna allowed himself a quick smile.
“I’m investigating the murder of fifty Allied airmen who escaped from Stalag Luft III in March of last year,” McKenna said. “One person of considerable interest is this man. Do you know him?”
McKenna retrieved the picture of Absalon from an inside pocket. Lonsky glanced only briefly at the photograph and nodded. He took a seat, his movements stiff, and explained that before the war he had attended school at the University of Breslau. He joined the Wehrmacht in 1939 and served in an artillery unit and tank regiment before being wounded in April 1943. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Military Police and was assigned to a patrol unit. His policing duties, he said, often brought him into contact with the Criminal Police.
“In this way, I got to know Dr. Gunther Absalon,” Lonsky said. “He was in charge of the thirteenth section of the Criminal Police. I talked with Dr. Absalon on a number of occasions and learned he came from the Rhine district.”
McKenna asked Lonsky what, if anything, he knew of the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III.
“Whilst I was in the Military Police, my own troop headquarters were at Sagan,” Lonsky volunteered. “I know there was a prisoner-of-war camp there, and on occasions we used to hear that a number of prisoners had escaped. I remember a big number escaping, I think about eighty-one, about March 1944. My unit was advised of the escape, and I believe the whole garrison in Sagan was ordered to take part in the search for the escaped prisoners of war. I heard that a number of them were recaptured, but what happened to them I do not know. I believe some were recaptured in the Görlitz and Breslau areas, but I have never heard what happened to them.”
“What instructions did you receive regarding the arrest of prisoners of war?” McKenna asked.
“We were to take them to the nearest Oflag or Stalag and hand them over.”
“Did you know anyone associated with the Breslau Gestapo?”
“There was a Dr. Scharpwinkel,” Lonsky said, prompting McKenna to lean forward in his chair. “I never met him and do not know his rank. I have seen his signature on papers, but I do not know his Christian name. I do not know where he came from, but he was probably a Silesian.”
“And you fought at Breslau?”
Lonsky nodded.
“I remained in the Military Police until September 1944, when I was dismissed for not being a member of the Nazi Party. I believe at that time the authorities decided control of the home country should be taken over by the SS, and that a check was made respecting persons who did or did not belong to the Nazis. After leaving the Military Police, I obtained a post on the staff, which had been set up to prepare for the defense of Breslau.”
When the battle commenced on January 20, 1945, Lonsky was assistant to the garrison commander’s senior staff officer. He served in that capacity until wounded by a shell one month into the fighting. Bombed out of several hospitals, he was captured by advancing U.S. forces on March 27.
“And what about Scharpwinkel?” asked McKenna. “He was at Breslau, too, yes?”
“I had a good knowledge of the various fighting units that were engaged there and clearly remember a unit called Einheit [Unit] Scharpwinkel, which was made up of the Gestapo and Criminal Police of the Breslau district,” Lonsky said, adding the unit—at its maximum strength—numbered 150 men. “It was engaged in the North-East of the fortress. I remember one particular incident with regard to the unit. The Russians had forced a spearhead in the direction of Deutschlissa, and headquarters directed that the spearhead must be wiped out. The commander in that sector replied that his men were exhausted and advised that the newcomers, the Gestapo—members of Unit Scharpwinkel—be engaged for this operation as they were fresh and would prove to be fanatical fighters.”
“What happened?”
“Approval was given for them to engage,” Lonsky said, “but they failed to wipe out the Russian spearhead. It is probable that they suffered severe losses.”
“But you don’t know for sure?” asked McKenna.
Lonsky gave an apologetic shrug.
“Do you know what happened to Scharpwinkel?”
“Since the capitulation of Germany, I have only met one person who I knew in Breslau,” Lonsky said. “His name is Zembrodt. He was a lieutenant in an infantry regiment. In discussing the defense of Breslau, he told me that he and his wife had been taken prisoners by the Russians. He also mentioned something about Dr. Scharpwinkel being in a hospital in Breslau and the Russians coming to take him away.”
“Where can I find this Zembrodt?”
“I met him in Rinteln recently,” Lonsky said, “and he told me he lives in Barntrup.”
McKenna knew the place by name, it being roughly twenty miles from Rinteln.
“What about Absalon?”
“I saw Dr. Absalon on occasions after I left the Military Police, as he used to come to the building where we had our staff offices and which had a restaurant underneath,” Lonsky said. “He came there for a drink, as his police office was nearby—but I do not remember seeing him after Christmas 1944.”
McKenna thanked Lonsky for his time and stepped once more into the rain.
Since the German capitulation, a man named Mercier had been aimlessly wandering the country. He considered himself lucky, having survived the slaughter at Breslau. He had slipped out of the city on May 6, mere days before the Russians completely overran the German defenses. Not sure where to go, he made his way down to the Oder River, where an armed Russian patrol robbed him of the few meager items still in his possession. Threatening to ship him off to a labor camp in Siberia, they marched him at gunpoint to a Red Army command post in the nearby town of Tarnow and held him for several days. During questioning, he identified himself as a French laborer forced to take up arms for the Nazis. “Where are your papers?” his captors asked. Mercier shrugged. All he had, he said, were the ragged clothes that hung from his gaunt frame. A Russian commander, taking the Frenchman at his word, issued the man new travel papers in the name of Mercier and let him go. So, from the town of Tarnow, he set off with only one goal in mind: to find his wife, whom he had not seen in more than a year.
He often walked alone but occasionally joined one of the many straggling processions of refugees that shuffled alongside the roads. The country he knew was gone. Food was scarce and shelter hard to come by. The glorious Reich, once resplendent in victory, giddy with conquest, now lay prostrate in ruins. He ventured through one flattened town after another, laying his head where he could. From a black marketeer, he purchased a ration card to help acquire food. He traveled west toward Görlitz, the great west-east exchange point for Polish and German refugees. At the local Polish Consulate, he presented his Red Army travel papers and secured a permit allowing him to cross the River Neisse into the west. His subsequent wanderings took him by rail into Prague then back into Germany through Lübeck and Hanover. All the while, he hoped to be reunited with his wife of twenty years—but like so many others, she had simply disappeared amid the chaos of war. He gradually made his way to Hamburg, where he found room and board at the Swedish Mission Hostel. To make money, he thought he might have a go at establishing himself in the wine trade as a salesman. He had often enjoyed a nice vintage before the war and was not ignorant on the subject. Whether he found his wife or not, he had to somehow make a living.
Several days later, a telephone rang in the Hamburg office of the RAF Security Police. A Sergeant Taylor took the call. The man on the other end of the line spoke in a low voice. At the Swedish Mission Hostel, the caller said, police would find a onetime Obersturmbannführer (the equivalent to a lieutenant colonel) in the SS lodging under the name Ernest Mercier. Before Taylor could ask any questions, the line went dead. He made his way to the hostel, navigating the wreckage-strewn streets, and checked with the clerk behind the desk. A look at the guest ledger revealed that Mercier had vacated his room several days prior but had left a forwarding address for any stray correspondence: a boardinghouse at Gurlittstrasse 23. The proprietress at the boardinghouse told Taylor that Mercier was out but expected back later that evening. Taylor gave the landlady his phone number and told her to call him the moment Mercier returned.
Taylor spent the next several hours back at his office, staring at the phone. On his desk sat the wanted list McKenna had circulated to Allied police units several weeks earlier. The name “Mercier” was not on it—but that meant little. The landlady called at seven to report that Mercier had just returned. Less than thirty minutes later, Taylor was back at the address and knocking on the door of an upstairs bedroom. When Mercier opened the door, Taylor pushed his way in and placed the man under arrest. Mercier put up little resistance but gave violent voice to his protests, insisting Taylor had made a mistake. He was, he said, a French national and had the papers to prove it. Taylor ignored the man’s ranting and hurried him down to the car. Back at the RAF Police office, the man refused to submit to interrogation. He was turned over to the German civil police and taken to the local jail, where he promptly tried to break free of his guards and make a run for it. He spent the night in a cramped cell under constant supervision. The next morning, he was shackled and led to a dank interrogation room.
This time, under forceful questioning, Mercier’s front crumbled. He slumped back in his chair and uttered his real name. Taylor’s eyes dropped to a sheet of paper in front of him. He ran his finger down McKenna’s wanted list. Dr. Ernst Kah, head of the Breslau Sicherheitsdienst—or SD, the intelligence agency of the SS—occupied the number-twelve slot.
Kah, now desperate to prove his willingness to help, began rattling off the names and whereabouts of other Nazis on the run, including one man in particular. Colonel Heinrich Seetzen, inspector of Security Police in the Breslau area, sat at number nine on McKenna’s list. What about him? Taylor asked. At Kohlerstrasse 6, in Hamburg, Kah said, British authorities would find Seetzen hiding under the name Gollwicer. Taylor asked for a description. Kah, after a moment’s consideration, placed Seetzen in his mid-to-late thirties. Powerfully built, though comprised more of fat than muscle, he stood roughly six feet tall. His eyes were a watery gray beneath a fringe of fair hair. A motor accident had left scars on his arms and face.
“You will take us to him,” Taylor said.
Kah could only agree.
It was past midnight when two RAF police cars, their headlights extinguished, turned onto Kohlerstrasse and moved slowly down the street. Kah sat wedged in the backseat of the rear car, between two RAF police officers. The cars passed darkened lots, some bearing the distinct silhouettes of small, cramped houses; others piled high with the wreckage of homes rendered flat by Allied bombing. Outside the house at number six, the cars came to a stop. Two officers, their sidearms drawn, emerged from the lead vehicle and rushed up the garden path. From where he sat, Kah could see the shadowy figures approach the door. They forced their way into the house, yellow light spilling from the doorway onto the darkened stoop. Kah could hear shouting and the barking of commands. Curtains were drawn across the windows, making it impossible to see the chaos unfolding inside. Several tense minutes passed before the two RAF policemen appeared in the doorway with a struggling man between them. They fought their way down the garden to the front of the car in which Kah sat. The driver turned on the headlights, illuminating the man’s face. Kah nodded.
The officers bundled Seetzen into the first car and sped off toward police headquarters. His wrists cuffed behind him, Seetzen sat quietly in the backseat and worked the back side of his teeth with his tongue. He dislodged the cyanide capsule from his bridgework, positioned it between his teeth, and bit down. In the front of the car, one of the arresting officers turned around and saw Seetzen, his body wracked with spasms, frothing at the mouth. The driver turned the wheel hard and changed course for the hospital. They arrived within minutes, but it was too late. Seetzen lay dead across the seat, white residue dribbling from his lips.