Squadron Leader Tom Kirby-Green, with his mop of thick black hair, Clark Gable mustache, and chiseled features possessed a bohemian streak that both entertained his fellow prisoners and gave him an exotic air. One contemporary remembered him looking like “an overgrown Spaniard.” He wore bright-colored kaftans and played the maracas. He enjoyed Cuban music and was enthralled by Latin American culture. While others sat around and played cards, he reclined on his bunk and read French literature.
The son of a colonial governor, Kirby-Green was born in what is now present-day Malawi. His parents soon shipped him off to school in England, where he earned something of a reputation at Dover College. Accustomed as he was to a more adventurous upbringing on the subcontinent, he irked the headmaster early in his school days by shooting the ducks on the college pond. It did not take long, however, for him to earn the respect of his teachers and fellow students with his intellectual acumen and prowess on the rugby field. When done with school, he joined the ranks of RAF Bomber Command in 1936 intent on becoming a pilot. Coupled with his lust for adventure was a concern over Europe’s growing fascist threat. He served with several squadrons—including a Czech training unit—before joining No. 40 Squadron, flying Wellingtons out of RAF Alconbury in Cambridgeshire. On the evening of October 16, 1941, he took off on his thirty-seventh operation, the target being Duisburg. Enemy fire knocked his bomber from the sky on the return flight and brought it down near Reichswald Forest in north Germany. He was captured near the wreckage. The Germans considered the incident a propaganda coup to the extent that Lord Haw-Haw, the traitorous Briton turned Nazi broadcaster, announced it over the airwaves. Not long thereafter, Kirby-Green ended up in Stalag Luft III.
In a letter to his wife, Maria, dated September 30, 1943, he described the horrifying ordeal of bailing out:
We were on our way home when we were extremely hard hit, all controls were completely “dead” and the aircraft was spinning and losing height extremely fast. I gave the order to jump. My parachute opened almost at the same time as I hit the ground with the result that I injured my spine and could not walk.
The aircraft crashed about three seconds after I landed and about 30 yards from me. Martin was found in the tail of the aircraft dead. The others were found some short distance away but on very much higher ground with their chutes open, killed instantaneously.
During the escape’s planning phase, Kirby-Green helped handle security matters and took part in digging the tunnels. All the while, his thoughts centered on Maria and their young son, Colin. Wandering the camp one afternoon, he paused and gazed through the wire at the surrounding pine forest. The trees, he wrote home later that day in his neat, cursive writing, “don’t do well. Few are growing, but anyway I feel we’ll be together before they grow much bigger.”
And so the days, marked only by the slow lengthening of tunnels and the sluggish growth of the trees, bled one into the other until, at last, all was ready. Prior to the breakout, Kirby-Green partnered with Canadian Flying Officer Gordon Kidder, a twenty-nine-year-old navigator who had done his part helping planned escapees learn German. Prior to the war, he had briefly attended Johns Hopkins University in the States, intent on gaining a master’s in German before deciding to try his luck in the real world. When war broke out, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was posted as a navigator to No. 156 Squadron, a Pathfinder unit that flew in ahead of the main attack force to light the target area with colored flares. On the night of October 13, 1942, Kidder’s Wellington suffered heavy flak damage over Kiel and lost an engine. The pilot fought to maintain altitude as he turned the bomber for home. Over the North Sea, the second engine gave out. The plane came down hard in the water and killed all on board except Kidder—who suffered a broken ankle—and the radio operator. The two men managed to scramble aboard the aircraft’s emergency dinghy and spent the night bobbing about on the waves. They were picked up early the next morning by a German minesweeper. Kidder had subsequently languished in Stalag Luft III since Christmas 1942.
On the night of the escape, as nervous men again checked their forged travel documents, repeated whatever German phrases they had learned, and hoped their civilian disguises passed muster, Kirby-Green took a break from the frantic last-minute preparations and penned another letter home:
March 24, 1944
My beloved adored darling,
I hope you are well and Colin too. My sweetheart, I am thinking so much of you now and I long so hard for you with every part of my soul and body. I am so lonely in my heart and a burning fire consumes my body longing to cool in the heat of yours, my darling lovely girl. I live only for the moment when I shall take you in my arms which have been so sadly bereft of the softness of your waist and hips and thighs, as hungry have my lips been for yours and your lovely body. No love in the world can compare with ours, Maria. Darling love, how feeble are my words, how hard to express the wild tumult of my heart when I think of you. I feel so grateful for your love and tenderness and so humble, my girl, my darling love, and I shall be able to make the world a paradise for you with God’s help, if love and adoring passion can bring joy for you and for Colin. God bless you and keep you Maria. I love you, darling, what more can I say?
Kisses to you,
Your Thomas
Kirby-Green and Kidder were among the first two dozen men to make it through the tunnel. Posing as Spanish laborers, the pair hoped to make it to Hungary and establish contact with friends of Kirby-Green’s. Once Kidder had been pulled through the tunnel, Kirby-Green crawled onto the shaft’s flatbed trolley. He lay on his stomach and held his suitcase out in front of him. Calamity struck when, more than halfway through the shaft, the trolley slipped off the rails. When Kirby-Green tried to fix the problem, he inadvertently knocked a shoring plank out of place and brought three feet of tunnel crashing down on him. It took an hour to pull him free, excavate the dirt, repair the damage, and situate the trolley back on the rails.
Despite the setback, the two men eventually emerged from underground and made their way through the pine forest to the Sagan train station. It was after midnight. Both men saw a number of fellow escapees hanging about the platform, trying to look anonymous. Unfortunately, they also noticed some off-duty guards from the camp waiting for a train. Among them was a female officer who took a sudden interest in Kirby-Green and Kidder. She approached them and demanded, in a barking tone, to see their papers. The other escapees milling about tried to ignore the scene. The two men presented their travel passes and explained to her in Spanish they were foreign workers. The guard told them to stay where they were and ran off to show their papers to a military police officer on duty at the station. The policeman gave the passes a quick looking over and nodded his approval.
The pair, much relieved, boarded the 1 A.M. train to Breslau. They took their seats and felt a flicker of hope as the train pulled away into the night. The journey passed without incident, and they arrived at the Breslau station an hour and a half later. In the booking hall, the men purchased two tickets to Czechoslovakia. They got as far as Hodonin in southern Moravia, where they were arrested on March 28 and taken to a prison in Zlín.
Wing Commander Wilfred “Freddie” Bowes was broad of beam, powerfully built, and possessed a jovial disposition and forceful nature. At forty-two, he had served in the RAF since 1918, the year it was established as the world’s first independent air force. His weathered face conveyed the dual nature of his personality, quick to smile at an off-color joke but just as prone to flash anger at the stupidity of others and what he perceived to be bureaucratic meddling. He never hesitated to speak his mind, caring little for what others thought of his opinions and making good use of profanities when he deemed a situation worthy of blunt language. In his subordinates, he instilled fear, respect, and a fierce loyalty. He did not suffer fools gladly and could harshly dress down those who failed to meet his expectations, but he bristled at the thought of anyone else reprimanding those who served under him.
By early December, Bowes had been promoted to chief of the Special Investigating Branch, British forces, Occupied Germany. He arrived in Germany that month to assume overall command of the investigation. McKenna, also in line for a promotion, was made squadron leader, which gave him greater pull when requesting help from senior officers. The two men admired each other but approached their work differently, one’s personality and methods serving as a good counterbalance to the other’s.
On January 24, 1946, the letter written by van der Bijil—delayed by diplomatic protocol and intelligence assessments—reached Bowes in Germany, along with a directive from SIB headquarters in London:
We can now accept as an established fact that the department charged with the responsibility for carrying out these murders was the Gestapo. The apprehension…of Ziegler and the heads of the Gestapo-stellen at the various places where officers are known to have met their deaths becomes a Category A priority.
Bowes—opting to pursue the lead himself—left Germany for Czechoslovakia on February 12, 1946, accompanied by the newest member of the team. Twenty-eight-year-old Flight Lieutenant A. R. Lyon was quiet by nature and prone to losing himself in thought. He was tall and thin, and enjoyed smoking a pipe, which gave him a professorial air. In civilian life, he distinguished himself as a top student at the Hendon Police Staff College before working his way up the ranks of the Metropolitan Police Service to detective-inspector. He eventually joined the RAF and put the expertise he had acquired questioning criminal suspects to good use with the Air Directorate of Intelligence. His job was to question captured Luftwaffe scientists and learn what he could about Germany’s highly evolved aeronautical technology. Returning to England from one such interrogation, Lyon found himself delayed by weather in Brussels. At the hotel bar he struck up a conversation with one Major Pancheff, deputy commander of the London Cage. During their talk, Lyon mentioned the fact he spoke fluent German. Pancheff suggested Lyon transfer to the RAF’s SIB, which he did shortly thereafter.
Bowes and Lyon arrived in Prague on February 16 and established themselves at the British Embassy. There followed a series of meetings with officials from the Ministry of Defense and Third Army Intelligence in which various permissions were obtained to interrogate members of the Gestapo now in Czech custody.
The men traveled by train to Brno on February 18 and reached the local prison that afternoon. They were given a tour of the facilities and set up an interrogation room in an empty office. Throughout the day, prisoners—malnourished, their skin a sickly pallor—were led into the room at gunpoint. They had all served in varying capacities with the Gestapo. Some were guilty of nothing more than filing paperwork; others had carried out more ominous duties as field agents. Lyon translated Bowes’s questions into German, but their queries only met with defiant stares. Even in the dank confines of Brno Central Prison and most likely facing death at the end of a rope, the onetime Gestapo men refused to cooperate. If anyone had information on Ziegler, the Gestapo chief who oversaw the Kirby-Green and Kidder murders, they were keeping it to themselves. The hours ticked slowly by with nothing to show in the way of progress. Finally, the guards brought in Franz Schauschütz. Bowes quickly glanced over the man’s file. In November 1942, the thirty-three-year-old Schauschütz—having previously served with the criminal police in Berlin—joined the Brno Gestapo as an inspector. His superior was a major named Hugo Roemer. Bowes made note of the name and asked Schauschütz if he knew anything about the Sagan murders or the whereabouts of Hans Ziegler.
Schauschütz pushed a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles up his nose and considered the question. Eyeing the two armed guards who stood on either side of the door, he seemed resigned to his fate and, unlike those before him, started talking. In the middle of March 1944, he said, Roemer dispatched him to Zlín as temporary head of the local police station. The station’s regular commanding officer, Hans Ziegler, was due for leave. Schauschütz, who claimed he knew nothing of the killings, said he arrived in Zlín the morning of March 29 and relieved Ziegler. He spent the following two weeks tending to routine police business and overseeing a manhunt for two enemy agents allegedly dropped into the area during a nighttime air raid. On the evening of April 13, Roemer visited the station for an update on the search. That same night, a senior Gestapo official from Brno, Adolf Knuppelberg, also made an appearance. Because the station was equipped with a run-of-the-mill teleprinter, it could not receive secret messages from Berlin; classified communiqués had to be hand-delivered. And so it was that Knuppelberg arrived with a secret message in hand for Roemer. Sitting in Schauschütz’s office, Roemer opened the sealed envelope, read the document, and shared its contents.
“As he handed me the documents in question, he said briefly that two English fliers, who were to have been transferred to Moravska Ostrava, had been shot on the way in compliance with orders from high quarters,” Schauschütz said. “The facts had to be reported in an incident report to Berlin in such a way as to show that both the English fliers had attempted to escape while relieving themselves on the journey and had therefore been killed.”
It was, Schauschütz said, the first he knew of the murders. Now in the know, he was ordered to write a formal report stating the airmen had been shot while attempting to escape. Knuppelberg, who gunned down one of the fliers, told Schauschütz the airmen had been let out of the car during the journey to relieve themselves but took off running into the woods. Knuppelberg and another Gestapo officer—the name of whom Schauschütz could not remember—were forced to draw their sidearms and open fire.
Schauschütz prepared a report for Berlin, which Roemer and Knuppelberg approved without alteration.
“I had nothing further to do with the affair,” Schauschütz said, angling for merciful treatment. “Right up to the end of the war, I never heard of a case when local Staatspolizei or Sichereitspolizei chiefs ever received authority to decide questions of life and death in respect to prisoners of war.”
“Do you know who else may have been involved in this incident?” Lyon asked.
Schauschütz listed the usual suspects: Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s deputy at the Central Security Office, and Gestapo Chief Müller. At the regional level, he named Wilhelm Nöelle, head of the Gestapo in Brno and last seen in Prague in November 1944. Depending on the rumor one chose to believe, said Schauschütz, Nöelle was imprisoned somewhere in the French Zone or was dead—executed for defeatism in the dying days of the war.
“Nöelle would have had to transmit the orders received from Berlin to the departmental head in question,” Schauschütz explained. “In this case, it was Kriminalrat Roemer. On receiving the orders from Nöelle, Roemer would seek a suitable man to carry out the job. He chose Knuppelberg. I know definitely that another official was involved, but I cannot recall his name.”
“Did Erich Zacharias play a role?” Bowes asked through Lyon.
Schauschütz shrugged. “I can only say that is quite possible,” he said. “I know Zacharias too little to pass an opinion as to whether he was a suitable person for carrying out such an affair.”
At the time of the shootings, Schauschütz said, several Gestapo drivers were employed in Zlín. He provided their names, listing among them Friedrich Kiowsky.
“I have been told that driver Fritz Schwarzer was also involved,” he said. “I can say that I consider this extremely possible. Fritz Schwarzer was Roemer’s personal driver. He’s an extremely safe driver and has a reputation for keeping his mouth shut.”
The interrogation done, Bowes motioned the guards to remove Schauschütz from the room. Bowes considered the man intelligent and believed he would make an eloquent witness when the case went to trial. More importantly, he was able to detail the general channels through which the orders sanctioning the murder were transmitted. Over the course of two days, Bowes and Lyon questioned another one hundred prisoners. One inmate shed light on the possible whereabouts of Fritz Schwarzer, saying rumor placed him in the northern Czech town of Teusing, where he worked as a mechanic. Bowes made a note to follow up on the lead.
As Bowes and Lyon continued their line of inquiry, they were partnered with one Captain Vaca of Czech Army Intelligence, an expert on local Gestapo activity. The captain, eager to assist the British investigation any way he could, felt compelled to shed light on the Nazi atrocities perpetrated in his homeland and took the two investigators to the prison at Pankratz. He led them down a dank, stone-constructed hallway lined on either side by fifteen cramped cells. Here, Vaca explained, the Gestapo imprisoned enemies of the Reich before placing them on trial. Through an arched doorway at the end of the hall, the three men entered the courtroom. Behind the judge’s bench, a black curtain stretched the length of the room. The verdict of those brought before the judge, Vaca explained, was never in doubt. The trials were merely for show. The guilty verdict rendered, the condemned was shoved behind the curtain. Vaca pulled the black cloth aside and revealed a number of nooses dangling from a moveable rail. The Gestapo could efficiently hang one prisoner after the other and move the bodies along the rail, disposing of them accordingly. Through another door, Vaca led Bowes and Lyon into a small room, its only furnishing a guillotine in the far corner. The blade still bore evidence of its bloody work. The RAF men stared at the contraption. Bowes, a man whose vocabulary could rise to any occasion, said nothing.
That evening, Vaca took Bowes and Lyon to a watering hole frequented by members of the local Gestapo during the war. The three men ordered beer at the bar. Bowes took a long pull of his drink and eyed the place over the rim of his glass, noticing for the first time a large mural on one of the walls. In a scene both whimsical and, to Bowes, strangely sinister, determined satyrs pursued naked nymphs through a forest of flowers and tall grass. The satyrs appeared serious about the task at hand, their pointy faces devoid of any joviality or humor. One, its expression particularly intense, with narrowed eyes and furrowed brow, chased a well-proportioned nymph riding atop an angel-winged pig. Bowes put down his glass and approached the wall, struck by an odd sense of familiarity. Closer inspection revealed the satyrs to be more than simply the figment of an artist’s imagination. In the mural, members of the local Gestapo had been rendered by the painter’s brush into randy cherubs. There was Schauschütz and Ziegler, and other men Bowes recognized from various mug shots he had seen. He gave voice to his astonishment and ordered another pint of lager.
“This is Knuppelberg,” said the bartender, jabbing his finger at one cherub in particular. “They never paid a bill in five years.”
Bowes took a picture of the mural, believing it might come in handy at some point. On the morning of February 22, he and Lyon proceeded to Uherske Hradiste and met with Judge Molovsky, a magistrate with the local People’s Court, who granted the RAF men access to Friedrich Kiowsky. The interrogation took place in Molovsky’s office, wood-paneled and elegant; not the sort of place one associated with such proceedings. Kiowsky was forty years old and appeared thin and frail when guards led him into the room. Seeing the RAF uniforms worn by Bowes and Lyons, he swallowed hard and cast a fearful glance at the judge. The guards placed him in a chair, his wrists shackled, and retreated to a corner of the room. A German typist sat off to one side, her fingers poised and ready.
Lyons, speaking German, introduced himself and Bowes and stated the nature of their business. “You are obliged to say nothing,” Lyons said, “unless you wish to do so. Anything you do say could be used in evidence.”
Asked if he understood his rights, Kiowsky answered yes and began talking. Instead of an official Gestapo branch, Zlín had the Frontier Police, with whom Kiowsky had been employed as a driver since June 1939. The police took their orders from the Gestapo office in Brno. On the evening of March 28, 1944, while working the night shift, Kiowsky’s superior, Kriminalrat Hans Ziegler, summoned him to a meeting.
“I entered his office and saw Ziegler, Zacharias, and a Gestapo official from Brno,” Kiowsky said. “I recognized the Gestapo official but don’t know his name.” Bowes silenced Kiowsky with a raised hand. He reached for a folder and placed a number of photographs on the table.
“Do you recognize any of these men?” Bowes asked through Lyons.
Kiowsky sifted through the images.
“This is the man,” he said, tapping a picture of Knuppelberg.
Resuming his statement, Kiowsky said Ziegler ordered him to retrieve two English airmen from the local prison, bring them to the police station for interrogation, and then transport them to Breslau. Sworn to secrecy, Kiowsky left the office and readied his car. He drove to the prison with an interpreter and took charge of the two airmen. He remembered both men wore sports jackets. They sat in the backseat and said nothing on the return journey to the station.
“Both officers were handcuffed,” Kiowsky said. “We drove into the garage, and then Erich Zacharias and I accompanied them to the cells. The larger of the two was then brought out and led into interrogation room number three.”
From the physical description, Bowes and Lyon knew Kiowsky meant Kirby-Green.
“As I was curious, I looked into the room and saw that the handcuffs were being taken off the flier,” Kiowsky said. “It was at this moment Ziegler entered the room.”
Ziegler watched as a guard struggled to remove one of the cuffs from Kirby-Green’s wrist. When it appeared the cuff wouldn’t unlock, Ziegler stepped forward and tore the cuff away, pulling it hard over skin and bone. He turned to the interpreter and said, “Tell him in English that when vagabonds are encountered on the streets, they will be treated like vagabonds.”
Kiowsky left the room and returned to the driver’s quarters to await further instructions.
“I received the order to depart about midnight,” he said. “This order was given by Ziegler personally. I asked Ziegler before our departure what we would do about petrol, as I did not have [enough] to get to Breslau. Ziegler replied, ‘You will not have to drive to Breslau.’ Although I said nothing to Ziegler, I got the impression the two fliers would not reach Breslau alive.”
The prisoners, once again manacled at the wrists, were brought down to the garage and put in two separate cars. Kirby Green rode with Knuppelberg, the Gestapo official from Brno; Kidder traveled with Zacharias and Kiowsky. Guiding his car on the darkened street heading out of town, Kiowsky asked his companion what was to become of the airmen. Zacharias said nothing and simply gave a thumbs-down sign.
“I knew for the first time,” Kiowsky said, “the two were going to be shot.”
Outside of Zlín, he turned the Mercedes onto a country road that ran between the towns of Friedeck and Moravska Ostrava. Knuppelberg’s car followed close behind. Zacharias stared out the window in search of an ideal spot and found one at a point where the side of the road fell away into a drainage ditch. He ordered Kiowsky to pull over onto the grassy shoulder. In his side-view mirror, all Kiowsky could see of the other vehicle was the sharp glare of its headlights. Next to him, Zacharias, one hand buried in a coat pocket, opened the door and got out of the car.
“I knew that he was carrying a gun,” Kiowsky told his interrogators. “I had seen him load it in Zlín and put it in his pocket. He told the officer to get out and relieve himself. The officer was still handcuffed.”
The driver from the second vehicle— Schwarzer—now approached Kiowsky’s car, leaned through the window, and asked for a smoke.
“I gave him a cigarette, and at the precise moment when we were lighting the cigarettes, two shots were fired almost simultaneously: one by my car and the other by the second car. I immediately turned to see what was happening. I saw the officer collapsing on the roadside, to the left and slightly to the front of Zacharias. At the same moment as I saw this officer collapsing, Zacharias fired a second shot,” Kiowsky said. “At the time, this officer was handcuffed with his hands in front of him. The officer fell into the ditch. I immediately got out of the car and saw that the second officer was also lying in the ditch. The Brno official came to Zacharias and told him to take the handcuffs off the officers, so that no one would notice the two officers were manacled. I saw nothing that gave me the impression that the officers had wished to escape or made an attempt. I stood by the ditch and saw the two bodies lying there. There was a lot of blood on the snow, but I saw no wound on the bodies. Zacharias told me—without my asking him—that his first shot was in the back and the second in the head as he was collapsing.”
Knuppelberg ordered Kiowsky and Zacharias to remain with the bodies while he drove to Moravska Ostrava to notify authorities. He returned about two hours later with a police van in tow. In the van, Kiowsky made out one man behind the wheel and another, wearing “the dark uniform of the Czech police,” in the passenger seat. The two men got out of the van and loaded the bodies into the back. Knuppelberg assured Zacharias all would be taken care of and asked him to relay the news to Ziegler. Once back in Zlín, Zacharias did as instructed and reported, “Herr Kriminalrat, everything has passed off smoothly. The bodies have been taken to the crematorium in Moravska Ostrava and a doctor will be there to make an examination.”
“What happened next?” asked Lyon.
“Ziegler then gave us the strictest instructions to discuss this occurrence with no one.”
About one month later, Kiowsky and the others involved returned to the scene of the crime on Ziegler’s orders to coordinate their stories, thus ensuring everyone had his “facts” straight. Otto Kozlowsky, a Gestapo lawyer with the Brno office, accompanied them to the killing field and helped orchestrate their stories down to the smallest detail.
“He showed us a plan of the scene that was completely at variance with the actual facts of the case,” Kiowsky said. “He explained that it was possible that someone might come from the International Red Cross to investigate the matter, and instructed us as to what we should say.”
“And what were you supposed to say?” Bowes asked.
“If asked, that the two fliers had tried to escape whilst relieving themselves and were shot in the fields at a distance of twenty to thirty meters.”
Done for now with Kiowsky, Bowes and Lyon questioned other Gestapo men held in the town. A man named Urbanek—captured in September 1945—said he and Erich Zacharias had both been issued papers by the American military stating they were “harmless persons and ex-customs officials.” Together, they found work on a farm in the Mittenwald region of Bavaria. Zacharias soon moved on, Urbanek said, and was now with family in Wesermünde. Urbanek gave the RAF men what he believed to be the addresses of Zacharias’s parents and brother. The wanted man’s wife, who, by sheer luck, happened to live locally, could confirm the information. She invited Bowes and Lyon into her home and offered them a seat. An electric fire cast a pallid, flickering glow on the worn carpet but did little to heat the room. A young boy materialized from the hallway to check out the visitors and, just as quickly, scurried from the room. Through Lyon, Bowes stated the purpose of their visit. It soon became apparent that whatever feelings Frau Zacharias once had for her husband had died long ago. He was an ardent Nazi, but she had never taken up the cause. He had abandoned the family in April 1945 to escape the advancing Russians. Yes, she said, answering a question put by Bowes, he had family in Wesermünde at the addresses provided by Urbanek. With any luck, they could find him there.
On the morning of February 23, Bowes and Lyon traveled to Zlín and toured the building formerly used by the Gestapo as its regional headquarters. The place had been cleared of all relevant files near the end of the war. In the cellar, they inspected the squalid cells in which Kirby-Green and Kidder were imprisoned prior to their execution. They were dark, cramped spaces of stagnant air and, like the cells they’d seen in Pankratz, not adequately large enough to accommodate a full-grown man. The Zlín authorities made available for questioning a onetime clerk in the building, who recalled seeing the prisoners shortly after their arrest. One of them, he said, spoke excellent German.
“I spoke to both the officers in English,” the clerk said. “The captain was a Canadian. He told me he studied languages at Quebec University and was shot down in Flanders in 1941. He said he improved his knowledge of German during his captivity. He was dressed in grey civilian clothes and told me he was not married. The major was about six feet tall, well-built, and told me he lived in England. He told me he was married and had one child. I was with them about half an hour and, as I was leaving, I saw them being put into the small cells at the end of the corridor.”
Both Ziegler and Zacharias, said the clerk, were present when the airmen were interrogated. At the local civil police station, Bowes examined the Prisoners’ Record Book. An entry dated 28.3.44 showed Kirby-Green and Kidder had been taken into custody at eleven that morning and turned over to the Gestapo at eleven that night. Bowes turned away from the book, satisfied with the progress being made. Now he wanted to see the actual crime scene. Kiowsky was temporarily released into the RAF’s custody and directed Bowes and Lyon to the killing field. The men traveled by jeep, passing through Moravska Ostrava and continuing several miles south on the road to Frydek before Kiowsky told them to stop. Bowes pulled the jeep over. The RAF men got out and surveyed the landscape.
Members of the Royal Air Force Special Investigating Branch reconstruct the shooting deaths of Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green and Flying Officer Gordon Kidder.
BRITISH NATIONAL ARCHIVES: WO 309/1369
“It’s open country,” Bowes said, “which gives no possible cover to anyone attempting to escape.”
Kiowsky led Bowes and Lyon to a nearby ditch, the ground sodden and muddy underfoot. It was here, he said, the officers fell when shot. Lyon snapped pictures of everything. As the camera bulbs flashed, Kiowsky mimicked the positions of Kirby-Green and Kidder before and after the execution. In the car for the return journey, Bowes and Lyon silently pondered the fate of their fellow airmen. They stopped in Moravska Ostrava, where inquiries led them to a policeman who, on orders from the Gestapo, had transported the bodies to the local crematorium. The officer said he arrived at the scene in the early morning hours, sometime between five and six. When he got out of his car, he saw two Gestapo agents pulling the victims from a ditch alongside the road. “The body of the first man was stronger and bigger,” the officer said. “When this body was being put in to the car, I noticed a wound on the right side of the face directly in front of the ear. The area around it was strongly burnt and proved beyond any doubt that the man was shot from close range. I noticed no wounds on the body of the second man. I saw only blood flowing from the nose, mouth, and one ear.”
The bodies loaded in the backseat of his car, the officer followed the Gestapo agents to the crematorium in Moravaska Ostrava. “The two Gestapo men took the bodies into the crematorium, and I drove off to the police station,” he said. “Before I left, I was ordered by one of the Gestapo officials not to talk about this case whatsoever.”
Frantisek Krupa, the crematorium attendant, was still on the job.
Krupa said he arrived at the crematorium on the morning in question to find three Gestapo agents waiting outside. On the ground were two bodies, which they dragged into the mortuary. Krupa watched as the agents patted down the corpses and removed watches, rings, and other personal effects. When done, they sealed the door to the mortuary and told Krupa that no one was to enter. Not until nine-thirty the following morning, March 30, were the bodies destroyed. “The Gestapo men came with two other men,” Krupa said, “and I was ordered to cremate the bodies in succession without coffins. They were cremated in their suits.”
As the bodies were loaded into the incinerator, Krupa made a mental note of the physical injuries evident on each: a gunshot wound was visible in front of the ear of one man and behind the ear of the other. The ashes of the two dead men were placed in separate urns, numbered 6385 and 6386. The next day, a Gestapo agent turned up at the crematorium and took possession of the urns. “I don’t know where the urns were taken,” Krupa said. “I made a notice in the crematorium book of cremations, showing the urns had been sent to the family. This meant the urns had been taken away by the Gestapo.”
On February 28, with multiple corroborating statements implicating Zacharias, Ziegler, and Knuppelberg in the Zlín murders, Bowes and Lyon returned to Prague. From a local war crimes investigator, they learned that a Czech state policeman had seen Ziegler and Kozlowsky at a hotel in Zell Am See, Austria, no more than two weeks ago. Although it was impossible to substantiate the sighting, Bowes deemed it worthy of immediate attention. His plan was to travel to Weisbaden, where McKenna was currently working his end of the investigation. There, he would personally hand over the information acquired on Zacharias and task McKenna with the man’s apprehension. The weather, however, had turned foul in recent days and grounded flights out of Prague. Desperate, Bowes and Lyon hitched a cold and bumpy ride with a U.S. Army transport truck bound for Schweinfurt Airfield. They sat in the cab, alongside the driver, wrapped in coats and struggling to keep warm. The journey lasted well into the night; the later the hour, the greater their discomfort. At the airfield they caught a ride, equally rough, on another truck, heading for Weisbaden. They reached the city aching and exhausted. McKenna met them on arrival and was debriefed on Zacharias. There was little time to socialize. After a night spent in a local hotel, Bowes and Lyon traveled on to their final destination. In Zell Am See, Bowes made contact with the U.S. Military Government and coordinated the raid on the Landhaus Brichta hotel.
A sliver of moon cast watery silver light on the bare tree branches and thin covering of freshly fallen snow as the jeep followed the winding country lane that led to the Landhaus Brichta. With Lyon behind the wheel, Bowes sat in the passenger seat and watched the bleak scenery scroll past his window. A U.S. Army truck with a contingent of armed men followed in the jeep’s wake. The two vehicles reached the crest of a hill and rounded a bend, dimming their headlights in the process. The hotel windows were dark. The jeep and the army truck came to a stop several yards down the road. Men, gripping sidearms and rifles, jumped out of the vehicles and moved quickly toward the hotel, skirting the sides of the road. The Landhaus Brichta was a typical Alpine structure, with a sharp-angled roof and colorful flower boxes, now barren, beneath the shuttered windows. The frigid night air stung Bowes’s eyes and burned his lungs as he closed in on the building. He and Lyon, along with two armed officers, made their way to the hotel’s back entrance. The American soldiers, rifles at the ready, covered the hotel’s front and sides.
Bowes and his team took up position behind a row of foliage and studied the building’s façade. All appeared silent and still. Bowes squinted at his watch: the top of the hour was minutes away. Since Czechoslovakia, he had thought many times of Thomas Kirby-Green and Gordon Kidder, falling in a sodden field and lying in muck. He glanced at his watch again, impatient to get the job done. At 0100 hours, the Americans took the hotel from the front. A violent banging on the door announced their arrival, startling the sleeping guests and dispelling the darkness. The place sprang to life with noise and light. Bowes and his men rushed across a patch of frozen lawn and entered through the back door. Guests who tried to flee their rooms were ordered back inside. It took several minutes to restore some level of peace and order. A bewildered Frau Brichta, in her nightgown, pleaded to know what was happening. Bowes showed his identification and stated his business. The woman seemed incredulous. “No Gestapo from Brno, or anywhere else,” she said, “has stayed here since the capitulation!”
A room-to-room search of the premises turned up nothing. Guests were questioned and the hotel registry examined, without results. That afternoon, Bowes interrogated Herr Brichta at the CIC in Salzburg. He admitted local Gestapo officials had once stayed at a hotel he owned in Brno. “They bled me white,” he said. “They had food and drink for which they offered nothing in return. They said that if events ever went wrong, they would come and stay at my hotel in Zell Am See, but they never did.” Bowes left the camp disappointed. Although he had found the Brichtas to be “undesirable types,” he could see no reason for them to lie. “With regard to the question of harbouring Gestapo officials, they were telling the truth,” he cabled London. “I consider it extremely probable that should Brichta get an opportunity of cutting of their throats, he would do so.”
Two days later, on March 11, McKenna—accompanied by Dutch translator Lieutenant Colonel Vreugdenhil—arrived in the American-held port of Bremen. He met that morning with officials from the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps and presented what information he had on Erich Zacharias. Records showed that a German national by that name currently worked as a clerk at the No. 256 U.S. Army Refrigeration Plant on the city’s main dock. McKenna moved quickly. Through the U.S. Army’s regional public safety officer, Lieutenant Freshour, he arranged a military police escort and descended on the docks that afternoon. The men, armed with automatics and mug shots of the wanted man, dispersed and went in search of their prey. It was 2:14 P.M. when McKenna, standing outside the refrigeration plant, saw Zacharias heading in his direction. McKenna approached the man; Vreugdenhil and Freshour drew their Colt .45s and covered Zacharias from behind.
“My name is Frank McKenna,” he said, as he drew closer. “I’m an officer with the Royal Air Force investigating the murders of fifty British airmen from Stalag Luft III. Show me your papers.”
The man fumbled inside his jacket and produced an American-issued identity card in the name of Erich Zacharias. Because the Americans had classified him as “harmless,” he’d had no reason to assume a false identity. McKenna pocketed the card and took the man by the arm. McKenna drove Zacharias to the CIC at Wesermünde. The prisoner was stripped and searched for poisons before being moved under armed guard to the American-run prison in Karlsburg. Later that day, McKenna sought permission from U.S. authorities to transfer Zacharias to the War Criminals Holding Centre in British-controlled Minden. Approval, he was told, would have to come from U.S. forces headquarters in Frankfurt Am Main and would take several days. Determined not to lose the RAF’s first major catch to the Americans, McKenna settled into a cheap hotel and waited.
He did not have to wait long: the necessary clearances came through the following day. He reported that afternoon to Freshour, who met him with a grim expression and news that Zacharias had escaped. As guards walked him to an army truck parked in the prison courtyard, Zacharias broke free and ran through the open prison gates. He put the truck between himself and the guards, who raised their rifles to fire, and disappeared into the nearby wreckage of a bombed-out building. McKenna phoned Bowes in Rinteln, who voiced his displeasure in the bluntest terms. There was nothing McKenna could do but lend whatever assistance the Americans might need. McKenna returned to Rinteln to let the manhunt run its course, but he held out little hope of success. A break came some weeks later when investigators, monitoring the mail services, intercepted a letter addressed to a friend of Zacharias. “Erich has been ill,” it read, “and will soon be on his way.” The return address was a house in Fallersleben, in the province of Brunswick, mere miles from the Russian Zone of Occupation. American soldiers stormed the house at one o’clock on the morning of March 31 and found Zacharias packing for a long trip. McKenna traveled to Wesermünde on April 2, took Zacharias into custody, and conveyed him to the British holding facility in Minden. A strip search revealed in his possession a silver wristwatch of the kind worn by British aircrews.
“Where did you get this?” asked McKenna, holding up the watch for closer inspection.
“I bought it in Zlín,” said Zacharias, unable to provide additional details.
“Why did you escape from the American prison at Wesermünde?”
“I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“I know why you arrested me,” Zacharias said. “Wasn’t it on account of two English Luftwaffe officers? I only did my duty; I will tell you all about it. I have had many sleepless nights of worry since the happening.”
McKenna informed Zacharias of his rights and allowed him to proceed. Zacharias made no attempt to assert his innocence. From 1938 to 1945, he had served with the Gestapo in Zlín under Kriminalrat Hans Ziegler.
“I last saw him in Zlín just before I left,” Zacharias said. “I don’t know where he is now. I don’t know where any of the other Gestapo are. I would tell you if I knew.”
Zacharias now played a familiar card.
“I carried out the task first because it was an order,” he said, “then because I was assured that nothing could happen to me later, and also because I justified myself in that there was a war on and that the airmen might have killed already many hundreds of civilians by bombing.”
He said that when he and Kiowsky retrieved the two airmen from the prison in Zlín, Kirby-Green voiced his anger at being shackled.
“I reported this to Ziegler at the office,” Zacharias said. “He replied that the two prisoners did not look like officers, but like tramps and therefore could not be treated in any other way until it had been established that they really were captured officers.”
After the prisoners were interrogated and their identities established, they were bundled into separate cars for their alleged transfer back to camp. It was about two o’clock in the morning when the journey commenced.
“I had the Canadian officer in my car,” Zacharias said. “I believe his name was Gordon.”
At four-thirty that morning, roughly six miles outside Moravska Ostrava, the two vehicles pulled over.
“I made the prisoner get out of the car and go to the kerb to pass water there,” he said. “I took up position about one meter obliquely to the left and behind him and observed what was happening at Knuppelberg’s car. I noticed that there, too, everything had gone according to plan and his prisoner was also standing at the kerb. Then Knuppelberg raised his right hand holding the pistol and pointed the barrel at the back of his prisoner’s head. This was for me the time for action. I drew my service pistol, which was all ready for firing, from the side pocket of my coat and fired obliquely in the left side of my prisoner to hit his heart.”
Zacharias said he and Knuppelberg fired their weapons simultaneously.
“I fired a second shot at the prisoner as he was collapsing,” Zacharias said, “hitting him above the right ear.”
Zacharias knelt beside the body, checked for a pulse, and felt none. Shining a torch in Kidder’s eyes, he saw no change in the pupils.
“I ran to Knuppelberg and saw his prisoner lying with a bleeding wound at the back of the head,” Zacharias said. “I then tried to make him hurry up and get to Moravska Ostrava to fetch an ambulance. I wanted the corpses to disappear as quickly as possible from the road so as not to give an exhibition to the many workers going to work.”
Once the bodies had been removed and taken away for cremation, Zacharias returned to the police station with Kiowsky and detailed the killings for Ziegler.
“He replied, ‘Good, that’s all right. You go home and sleep because you look terrible.’ ”