Three Russian soldiers, two men and a woman, stormed the emergency ward of Breslau Hospital No. 6 on the morning of May 10, 1945. Armed with Tokarev rifles, they moved from bed to bed, prodding the burned and mangled casualties of the recent siege, screaming the same question over and over.
“Where is Lieutenant Hagamann?”
The Russian woman stomped through the ward, kicked the sides of beds, and fired the question at dazed and bewildered patients. The male soldiers, their rifles at the ready, followed in her wake.
“Are you Lieutenant Hagamann?” the woman screamed at one man, his body wrapped in bandages. When the man shook his head, she moved on to the next bed. “Where is Lieutenant Hagamann?”
The volatile questioning dragged on as one patient after the other denied being Hagamann. There was no doubt among those in the ward as to what fate awaited the unfortunate lieutenant should he be found.
“Are you Lieutenant Hagamann?”
Another man, his skin scarred and blackened, uttered a weak-sounding “No.”
In a corner bed at the far end of the ward, a man raised his head and said, “I am Hagamann.”
The Russians approached and ripped the sheets from his bed to reveal a lightly bandaged leg.
“You are Scharpwinkel,” the Russian woman yelled.
“Yes,” the man said. “I am Scharpwinkel, head of the Gestapo in Breslau.”
The soldiers pulled Scharpwinkel out of bed and dragged him from the ward. Several minutes later, a car engine roared to life in the hospital courtyard below. The sound of squealing tires signaled the Russians’ hasty departure.
The man telling McKenna the story paused and looked out the window of his small cottage, the rural serenity of his present surroundings far removed from the blood and antiseptic of the hospital. McKenna had tracked down Hubertus Zembrodt, twenty-seven, without a problem. Checking with the town Bürgermeister in Bartrup a day after questioning Lonsky, McKenna was provided an address on Alverdiessennerstrasse. Zembrodt—poor but pleasant—invited McKenna in and spoke freely. He told McKenna he’d joined the Wehrmacht before the war. He served in France and on the Eastern Front, where he was wounded in late 1944. He convalesced for two months before being sent to Breslau in January 1945. Three months later, enemy fire put him in the same hospital as Scharpwinkel, who had also been wounded in the Breslau fighting. The Russians imprisoned Zembrodt and the other patients after the city’s fall but released him in July. Unable to find accommodations elsewhere, he settled in Bartrup—unemployed, but thankful to be alive.
“The Russians also arrested Dr. Mehling, who was the doctor in charge of all the hospitals in Breslau,” Zembrodt said, returning to his story. “I have never heard of either man since that day and don’t know what has happened to them.”
“Is there anything about Scharpwinkel you can tell me?” McKenna asked. “Anything at all.”
“The arrest at the hospital caused a certain amount of discussion among the patients and staff at the time,” Zembrodt said. “As far as I can remember, Dr. Scharpwinkel was in the hospital about four weeks before he was taken away by the Russians.”
“What about during the actual fighting?” McKenna asked. “Did you hear of a unit under his command codenamed Scharpwinkel?”
Zembrodt shook his head and said he knew little else about the man. McKenna concluded the interview and returned with Smit to their barracks at Rinteln. Brooding at the wheel, McKenna pondered Zembrodt’s story. It failed to prove the Russians had liquidated Scharpwinkel. He drove and kept his thoughts to himself, the steady patter of rain and the rhythmic slapping of the windshield wipers the only sounds. When Smit, attempting to break the heavy silence, suggested they cross Scharpwinkel off their list, McKenna dismissed the idea. Scharpwinkel would remain a wanted man, McKenna said, until physical evidence dictated otherwise.
McKenna restored his spirits back at the barracks with a cigarette and glass of whiskey in the canteen. He returned to his office and studied the fifty mug shots on the wall. Under their watchful gaze, he took a seat and began sorting through the growing stack of paperwork on his desk. Since the investigation began, McKenna’s team had received numerous tips from both anonymous and official sources. One in particular came from a Dr. Rudolf Diels and concerned General Arthur Nebe, the top man on the RAF’s list. Presently, Diels was in British custody and preparing to testify for the prosecution at Nuremberg. The doctor served as the Gestapo’s first chief from 1933 to 1934. When political intrigue forced him out of the job, he assumed command of security for the government of Cologne. Because of the various positions he’d held before and during the war, Diels was well versed on the inner workings of the Gestapo and Kripo.
Recently interrogated by British military officials, Diels said he had been arrested and sentenced to death for his alleged involvement in the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. He claimed to have seen Nebe placed in the cell adjacent to his while imprisoned at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. According to information passed on to McKenna’s team by the Judge Advocate General’s Office:
Nebe was regarded as a most interesting prisoner by the Gestapo because the case against him for treason was allegedly clear cut. Nebe had disappeared from his office sometime after the Hitler plot, and his arrest was ordered. He was eventually captured. Dr. Diels had thought that Nebe might still be alive, but he has since seen a friend in the Bad Oeynhausen district and had been told that a man named Huebner, who was in the next cell to Nebe, had been shot. It was the practice to shoot prisoners in batches of eight and he presumed that Nebe must, therefore, have been executed.
McKenna pulled a copy of the wanted list from his desk drawer. To the right of Nebe’s name he wrote, “Believed dead but not yet confirmed.” In the number-ten slot, alongside Absalon’s name, he scrawled in pencil: “Believed killed or taken by the Russians.” The pages of his notebook were filled with rumors and speculation but nothing concrete. Definitive leads remained elusive despite twenty-six days of investigative footwork. As he sat pondering the list, the phone on his desk rang. Sergeant Taylor, at the end of the line, informed McKenna of Kah’s apprehension and the subsequent arrest and suicide of Heinrich Seetzen. Neither man, he said, answering McKenna’s question, had mentioned Scharpwinkel or Absalon. Kah was now being transferred to No. 1 Civilian Internment Camp (CIC) at Neumünster. The British Army planned to hold him in isolation for fourteen days’ interrogation. Once they were done, Taylor said, McKenna would be free to question Kah himself.
McKenna hung up the phone and picked up his pencil. Satisfied, he drew a line through Seetzen’s name at number twelve and checked off Kah at number seven. Two down.
McKenna and Smit left Rinteln several days later for Berlin, where they hoped to uncover information on Scharpwinkel. They traveled by jeep to Helmstedt and cleared an army checkpoint before leaving the British Zone of Occupation behind. McKenna doubted they would make Berlin by nightfall. Showing their papers at another checkpoint beneath a red sickle-and-hammer flag, they passed into the Russian Zone. They traveled on for another forty-five minutes, racing against the fading light and mindful of the storm clouds overhead, before the jeep’s engine died without warning. McKenna cursed and guided the jeep onto the road’s center divide.
“This is a hell of a mess,” he said, looking up at the darkening sky. “No one will come through now.”
The two men remained in the jeep and considered their next move. They were still roughly ninety miles from Berlin. The minutes ticked by until, in the evening gloom, the distant sound of an engine signaled an approaching vehicle. Two American officers in a jeep screeched to a halt alongside McKenna’s stricken ride and asked if he needed help. On him, McKenna had his French and American travel passes, a copy of the wanted list, and his notebook.
“I have papers here that I don’t want to get into anybody else’s hands,” McKenna said. “Would you be kind enough to take them with my sergeant to Berlin, and I’ll sit and wait for the Aid Department to come out. Please tell them exactly where I am.”
The Americans agreed to help and drove off toward Berlin with McKenna’s papers and Smit. McKenna watched the taillights vanish into the night and suddenly felt very alone. The surrounding landscape was completely still and cloaked in a heavy silence. He climbed back into the jeep and wrapped himself in an overcoat and blankets. It would be at least four hours, he guessed, before help arrived. Snow began to fall and quickly piled high against the jeep’s windshield. He settled in for the long wait and gradually drifted off.
Low voices and footsteps in the snow dragged him from a shallow sleep. Through the fogged passenger window, he saw several men approaching the jeep, their features faintly lit by the pale glow of oil lamps. Their vehicle—a large, canvas-topped truck with chains around the tires—sat alongside his. A gloved hand knocked on the driver’s-side window and motioned for McKenna to get out. He could now hear the men more clearly and realized they were speaking Russian. Wearily, he got out and tried to identify himself using the few Russian words he knew. The soldiers, heavily bundled in long coats, rifles slung over their shoulders, shook their heads. One nudged McKenna out of the way and peered inside the jeep.
“Papirosi,” the soldier said when done with his cursory examination.
It was McKenna’s turn to shake his head.
“Papirosi,” the soldier said again, bringing an imaginary cigarette to his lips.
“No,” McKenna said. “No cigarettes—no papirosi.”
The Russians decided to check for themselves and rummaged through the vehicle. McKenna eyed their firearms and kept silent. He stood shivering in the snow as the soldiers foraged through the glove box and checked under all the seats. Satisfied McKenna was not holding out, the Russians turned and walked back to their truck. One soldier flashed a broad grin and shook McKenna’s hand before joining his comrades. His teeth chattering and his shoulders hunched against the cold, McKenna watched the Russian transport pull away and disappear into the dark. He retreated quickly to the relative warmth of the jeep’s interior and continued to wait. At about midnight, a car came speeding down the autobahn from the direction of the capital and pulled in behind McKenna. From it emerged a visibly annoyed squadron leader from RAF headquarters in Berlin.
“You should have abandoned the car,” the squadron leader bellowed. “What does it matter?” He examined the jeep and shook his head. “We can’t tow this thing anyway with a broken axle. We’ll have to get out a heavy aid detachment in the morning.”
McKenna shrugged off the superior officer’s displeasure.
“Have you seen my sergeant interpreter?” he asked.
“Yes,” the squadron leader said, still examining the jeep, “we’ve got all the papers in Berlin.”
“Well,” McKenna said, “that’s all that matters.”
The squadron leader drove McKenna to Berlin and left the stricken jeep by the roadside. McKenna borrowed a car the next morning and returned to check on the vehicle and wait for a towing crew. He arrived at the spot mid-morning and found the jeep gone; four tire marks in the snow were all that remained. Desperate locals must have raided the jeep for scrap, McKenna theorized, picking it apart piece by piece. McKenna drove to the nearest military checkpoint and called the local RAF authorities to report the jeep stolen.
“Are you sure there were no papers in it?” asked the group captain who took the call.
“Yes, sir.”
“Right, then forget it,” the group captain said. “We’ll write it off.”
McKenna returned to Rinteln without his jeep or any worthwhile information on Scharpwinkel.
Naked bulbs hanging from exposed wires in the ceiling bathed the interrogation room in a harsh white light. Dr. Ernst Kah sat at a long table and raised his shackled wrists to his mouth. He took a long drag on his cigarette and smiled at his inquisitors. Two weeks had passed since Kah’s initial arrest. The army, having obtained from him whatever information it sought, had now made him available to the RAF. McKenna, along with Squadron Leader W. P. Thomas, recently dispatched from England to assist in the investigation, arrived at No. 1 CIC at Neumünster on the afternoon of October 17. Expecting the onetime chief of the Breslau Security Police to be an ardent Nazi, they were surprised when he voiced, by way of greeting, his admiration for the British.
“I think you are prepared to help us with information,” said Thomas.
“Yes,” Kah said. “Germany has lost the war. Germany will not recover again. It is too late. England is the only country which can lead Europe and to establish Europe again. I do not say this as a joke.”
“If you do not tell us the truth,” Thomas said, “it will be your responsibility and not ours.”
Kah nodded, taking in another lungful of smoke. “I want to help you voluntarily,” he said, “because Germany cannot now do anything.”
The RAF men asked Kah if he knew of Scharpwinkel. Kah answered in the affirmative and explained that the man had served as chief of the local Gestapo in Breslau. The last he heard, Scharpwinkel had been shot in the left leg during the Russian assault and most likely remained in the city. But such information, he warned, was based solely on secondhand intelligence he’d picked up in the days following the battle.
“Do you know what happened to him?”
“No,” Kah replied. “The capitulation was so much in a hurry. The report came in on a Sunday that the capitulation would be during the night of Sunday or Monday. During Sunday—and during the night—many fled to other parts, away from the Russians. That is what I did. We were surrounded, but many people succeeded in getting out. It was a matter of life and death. I left Breslau alone in the night of Sunday.”
Kah suggested a number of individuals on the RAF’s wanted list had been killed in the fighting at Breslau or were now in Russian custody. It would, of course, take time to corroborate such information. The Russians had thus far ignored McKenna’s various requests for assistance. Arrangements were promptly made to ship Kah back to England for further interrogation at the London Cage, a prisoner-of-war facility run by British Intelligence out of a grand house in Kensington Palace Gardens.
Still lacking strong leads, McKenna once more channeled his energy into canvassing the internment camps and focused on the British Zone of Occupation. New to the team was Flight Lieutenant Stephen Courtney who, accompanied by a large German shepherd of questionable demeanor named Fritz, had arrived in Rinteln in early October. McKenna tasked Courtney with searching the holding facilities in the American Zone. The camps, miserable in ideal conditions, were utterly wretched in the cold damp of winter. Drenched in rain, the grounds were rendered muddy swamps; the wooden huts reeked of rot. Over the course of several weeks, Courtney and Smit, serving as interpreter, made their way from one compound to another. It was monotonous and tiring work rife with bureaucracy. Authorization was required to travel from one town to another, and permission was needed to access the camps. On November 29, Courtney arrived at Dachau, the Nazis’ first concentration camp, located roughly ten miles outside Munich, on the grounds of an old munitions factory. A GI standing sentry ushered Courtney’s car through the main gate, the wrought iron bearing the phrase Arbeit macht frei—“Work makes one free.” Entering the grounds, Courtney thought of a jingle he had heard shortly after his arrival in Germany:
Lieber Herr Gott, mach mich stumm
Das ich nicht nach Dachau komm.
[Dear God, make me dumb
That I may not to Dachau come.]
Men—some in tattered civilian clothing, others in faded uniforms—milled about the compound as though waiting for something to happen. In a cold interrogation room, Courtney questioned prisoners known to have served in the Gestapo. He asked them about Scharpwinkel, Absalon, and others on the RAF’s wanted list. Some prisoners spat invective; others refused to talk. Some minor gains, however, were made. Information Courtney obtained from several inmates led to the arrest in early December of Colonel Ernst Richard Walde at a private residence outside Hannover. Walde, who had served as a Luftwaffe administrator at Stalag Luft III, was number twenty-four on McKenna’s list. Another informant steered the team to General Inspector Walther Grosch—Walde’s superior and number twenty-three on the list—who was hiding outside Kiel. Also apprehended in the same region was General Rudolf Hoffman, number twenty-six, overall commander of Luftwaffe installations, including Stalag Luft III, in Lower Silesia. The men were transferred to the London Cage, where, although cleared of direct involvement in the Sagan murders, they—as witnesses—confirmed the roles of other men being sought by the RAF.
The investigation continued to advance on the hearsay of others. For a detective with nearly two decades’ policing experience, McKenna found it discomfiting. He craved personal interaction with the suspects, longed to confront them with the facts, back them into a corner, and elicit a confession. In mid-December, the Judge Advocate General’s Branch of the British Army of the Rhine forwarded McKenna a dossier on Fritz Panzinger, number seventy-five on the wanted list and onetime adjutant to Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller. Panzinger’s last known address was in Berlin, where he and his wife had lived in a second-floor flat at Yorckstrasse 72. On April 28, with the Red Army closing in, Panzinger joined other Gestapo officials on a flight out of Berlin, bound for Thuringia in central Germany. The aircraft reportedly crashed on takeoff, the fiery impact killing all on board. The story, however, was impossible to verify as the Gestapo had destroyed all pertinent records prior to the capitulation. What Allied investigators had managed to ascertain was that Panzinger’s wife, two days after the plane supposedly went down, bit into a cyanide capsule and killed herself. Panzinger’s mother and brother had been located in Munich and would be questioned in due time.
“The Americans,” the dossier concluded, “are interested in locating Panzinger and will pass on any information they may obtain.”
McKenna was happy to let the Americans worry about it; he had enough to deal with.* He remained desperate for one solid lead, a cornerstone upon which he could slowly build his case.
On the afternoon of December 2, 1945, Dr. F. V. van der Bijil—a Czech lawyer who’d flown with the RAF during the war—returned to his room at the Hotel Esplanade in Prague, took pen to paper, and began a long letter to the British ambassador. A steady rain pummeled the window and distorted the view of the city’s ancient steeples and spires.
Restored after Germany’s defeat, the Czechoslovakian government was conducting its own investigation into wartime atrocities. On May 27, 1942, Prague Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich—“head of the Reich Security Service, Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, administrator of the concentration camps, and a specialist in Nazi terror techniques”—had had an appointment with Hitler in Berlin. He left for the German capital that morning in an open-air car driven by his chauffeur. The black Mercedes pulled away from Heydrich’s villa in the suburb of Paneské Břežany and traveled along the Dresden-Prague Road. At an intersection, where the car slowed to maneuver a hairpin turn, two Czech patriots trained by British Intelligence lay in wait. Shortly after 10:30 A.M., as Heydrich’s car navigated the bend, one of the assassins stepped into the street and tossed a grenade at the vehicle. The resulting explosion wrecked the car and wounded Heydrich, who died several days later in a local hospital. His killers fled and took refuge in Ss. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral. Rather than surrender to the German troops who soon besieged the church, they took their own lives and became martyrs to the cause.
Response to the assassination was immediate and brutal. The Germans rolled into the small town of Lidice on the morning of June 9 and rounded up every male sixteen years of age and older. The 173 men were taken to a local farm and shot. “Seventeen rows of corpses in bloody clothes, with shattered skulls, brains and guts spilling out, lay on the ground in batches of ten” by the time the killing was done. German soldiers destroyed the town’s graveyard and desecrated four hundred graves. Women and children were shipped off to concentration camps, their homes looted and set ablaze.
The Czechs cast a wide net in their search for the perpetrators and hauled in more than their intended catch. Czech officials had been receptive to the British plea for help in the Sagan investigation. The government had a vested interest in the case. Flying Officer Ernst Valenta, a Sagan escapee, was a Czech national and one of the murdered fifty. After the war, Czech officials ensnared in their dragnet a onetime driver for the Gestapo. Under interrogation, the man confessed to participating in the murder of two escapees from Stalag Luft III: British Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green and Canadian Flying Officer Gordon Kidder. Van der Bijil, having informed the Czech government of his personal interest in the Sagan murders, was granted access to the Narochi Vybor prison in Zlín and allowed to question the man.
Now, in his hotel room, writing to the British ambassador, van der Bijil put what he knew down on paper:
Sir,
Detailed information has just come into my possession regarding the alleged murder of two Royal Air Force officers on March 29th, 1944. I have personally questioned a former Gestapo man who was an eye-witness of the murder. I have every reason to believe the complete accuracy of the report, which I submit to Your Excellency, although more than this I cannot certify.
Thomas Kirby-Green. British. Born in Nyassaland on 28th February, 1918. Gave his rank as “Major” of the Royal Air Force; i.e. Squadron Leader. I think there is little doubt this was Squadron Leader Kirby-Green who was formerly officer i/c of training of 311 Czechoslovak Squadron R.A.F. whilst stationed at R.A.F. East Wretham, Norfolk.
He was prisoner of war at Sagan in Lower Silesia. He escaped and was arrested at Zlín, Moravia, at 11.00 hours on the 28th March, 1944 by the German Criminal Police. Charge: “Escape from Prison Camp.”
With Squadron Leader Kirby-Green was a Canadian flight lieutenant, and the story applies equally to him.
Following their arrest and interrogation, wrote van der Bijil, the prisoners left Zlín in two Gestapo cars:
The driver of one was Kiowsky, at present in custody in Zlín. I was invited to personally question Kiowsky at the Narochi Vyber, Zlín, on November 30, 1945. The driver of the other car—Schwarzer—has not been caught.
Also along for the ride was a Gestapo man named Erich Zacharias. According to information obtained by van der Bijil, Zacharias was married and now living in Gartenstadt in the British Zone. Military authorities in the region, oblivious to the man’s past, had classified Zacharias “a harmless person.” According to Kiowsky, Zacharias had already murdered three people in Zlín, one being an eighteen-year-old girl. The letter went on to detail the murders of Kirby-Green and his Canadian companion:
Arriving at a spot somewhere between Frydek and Moravska Ostrava about 10 kms from Moravska Ostrava, the cars were stopped to permit the prisoners to relieve themselves. Kiowsky was some few meters away when, hearing a shot, he turned and saw Erich with a revolver in his hand having shot Kirby-Green in the back by the shoulders. As Kirby-Green swung round from the shot, he then shot him in the head and Kirby-Green collapsed, dead. The Canadian officer was murdered in a similar manner.
It is asserted that these murders were ordered by the Chief of the Gestapo in Zlín, Hans Ziegler…. Ziegler forbade any discussion of this incident for fear of Red Cross investigation.
Van der Bijil concluded his letter with a plea for immediate action:
I, therefore, request [Your] Excellency to arrange for an immediate enquiry into these alleged murders and, in particular, for the immediate interrogation of the alleged murderer, Erich Zacharias.
I would add that I am deeply interested in the fate of S/Ldr. Kirby-Green, who was a gallant and distinguished officer with whom I had the honour to serve in the Royal Air Force.
Van der Bijil signed his name to the page and dropped the letter in the hotel’s outgoing mail.
*The man was never found.