Lieutenants Johannes Gouws and Rupert Stevens, both South Africans, were among the first men to make it out of the tunnel. Gouws joined the air force on May 14, 1940—four days after Hitler unleashed his blitzkrieg on the west—and received his commission early the following year. He was posted to a fighter-bomber squadron in Abyssinia that mostly flew low-level reconnaissance operations. During one such mission in August 1941, engine problems forced Gouws to crash land his Hartbee. When it touched down, the plane flipped over and trapped Gouws under the fuselage, forcing his crewmate to dig him out. Bruised but upright, the two men walked away from the wreckage and spent the better part of a week trudging across the barren landscape, sheltering in the huts of locals at night, before rejoining their squadron. Eight months later, on April 9, 1942, two Me-109s shot down Gouws and his Tomahawk over Egypt. This time, he did not evade capture.
Rupert John Stevens received his wings shortly after Britain’s declaration of war. Less than six months later, he was flying combat operations over the Western Desert. The target for Stevens and his crew on the morning of November 14, 1941, was a German airfield in Derna, Libya. Nine Martin Maryland light bombers took off on the raid and fell into formation over an endless expanse of desert. They made their objective and bombed and strafed the airfield before setting a course for home. On the ground, anti-aircraft guns opened fire and threw up heavy clouds of shrapnel. Flak hit the port wing of Stevens’s aircraft and punctured the fuel tanks. Within seconds, the damaged wing was hemorrhaging fuel. It took only minutes to completely empty the tank. The bomber’s controls grew sluggish and the aircraft began losing altitude. As had been the plan in case of emergency, Stevens turned the stricken bomber toward Tobruk, dropped the plane’s undercarriage, and ordered the crew to fire the colors of the day from their flare guns. The men, however, mistook the German-held port of Bardia for Tobruk. Flak again battered the plane as it came in low. Shrapnel pierced the cockpit, wounding Stevens and knocking him unconscious. The navigator seized the controls but died on landing when the plane’s nose caved in. Although suffering life-threatening injuries, Stevens and the two air gunners survived the ordeal. They were captured and sent to a German hospital, where they slowly recovered from their wounds. Once in better health, they were dispatched to various prison camps. It wasn’t long before Stevens found himself, along with Gouws, in Stalag Luft III.
Their plan the night of the escape was to travel by train to Breslau and then Switzerland. They picked their way through the pine forest surrounding the camp and arrived at the Sagan station only to see their intended train pulling away from the platform. They hung about the station for more than an hour, wrestling with frantic nerves, before boarding the one o’clock express to Breslau. It was in the booking hall at Breslau station the two men were last seen, doing their best to blend in with the other travelers. Their ashes arrived at Stalag Luft III several weeks later. An inscription on the underside of each urn gave the date of death as March 29, 1944, and identified Munich as the place of cremation.
It was all the RAF had to go on.
The investigation commenced in November 1945. Because their canvassing of internment camps in the American sector would take them to Munich, McKenna tasked Flight Lieutenant Courtney’s team with investigating the Gouws-Stevens murders. Early on, Courtney and his men traced a onetime member of the Munich Kripo to the southern Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a ski resort popular with the Nazi leadership before the war. It was here Hitler had opened the 1936 Winter Olympics and presented himself as the benevolent dictator. In preparation for the hordes of spectators, the Nazis removed the numerous “Jews Not Wanted” signs displayed prominently about town prior to the games. Only five months earlier—at the party’s annual rally—the regime had enacted the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws designed to safeguard the “purity” of the German race. By the time Hitler took his seat in the Führer’s Gallery to watch the games, his minions were busy shipping political opponents and those of inferior blood off to concentration camps. It was to this Alpine idyll that Hermann Göring had escaped in the wake of Hitler’s failed coup in Munich in 1923. And it was here Hitler initially planned to build a mountain retreat, before he finally settled on Berchtesgaden.
The Americans now maintained an internment camp at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Flight Sergeant Williams, a member of Courtney’s team, arrived at the facility on January 21, 1946, to interview Anton Gassner. The onetime Kripo agent refused to answer questions put to him by a member of the Royal Air Force. Williams lit a cigarette and explained in a casual manner that a cell awaited Gassner in the London Cage. Cooperation now might go some way in helping his situation in the future. Gassner took a cigarette from the packet Williams placed on the table and signaled his acquiescence by asking for a light.
“Are you a party member?” asked Williams.
“Yes,” Gassner said, “since the first of May 1937.”
“When were you arrested?”
“On 30th June, 1945.”
Gassner said he became a police officer in 1913, at the age of twenty-three, and joined a small gendarmerie in the town of Augsberg. He transferred in July 1919 to the Munich Town Police, which was taken over by the state in 1938 and absorbed into the Kripo. He spent the entire war in Munich and achieved the rank of kriminalrat, or detective. In the waning days of the conflict—with the U.S. Army closing in—he fled Munich and went into hiding at his sister’s house in Reichenhall. It was there the Americans took him into custody.
“Do you remember,” asked Williams, “that in March 1944 there was a mass escape from a stalag at Sagan?”
Gassner said a teleprint from the State Security Office in Berlin had come through to Criminal Police headquarters in Munich on the afternoon of Saturday, March 25, 1944. The message detailed the escape from Stalag Luft III and ordered all regional police agencies to join the search effort. The escapees were officers of the Royal Air Force and most likely carrying false papers and disguised in civilian clothing. Gassner said his superior, a man named Greiner, placed him in charge of search operations in and around Munich. Gassner focused his efforts on area train stations, which quickly led to the apprehension of three RAF officers. Taken first into custody was Lieutenant Neely, arrested on an express train outside Donauwoerth. Neely spoke “excellent German,” Gassner said, and made “a good impression” on his captors.
“The flying officer asked me what would happen to him,” Gassner said. “I gave him to understand that I supposed he would be returned to Sagan, but that instructions would have to come from the State Security Head Office. Until then, he would have to remain in the prison of the police headquarters in Munich. Before taking leave of him, I asked him whether he required anything or had enough to eat and smoke. He indicated to me that he did not require anything. I told him that if, during his stay, he required something after all, he should mention it to me or my deputy.”
Gouws and Stevens were arrested shortly thereafter on separate trains. A Munich police inspector took one into custody on the Buchloe-Lindau express just outside Kaufbeuren, roughly fifty miles from Munich. The other man was riding in a second-class compartment on the slow train from Rosenheim. Both men were taken to Criminal Police headquarters in Munich and questioned. All three arrests, Gassner said, took place between March 25 and April 3. After the two South Africans were apprehended, Gassner had to leave Munich for a War Search Conference in Dresden. Upon his return on April 11, he learned that Neely had been sent back to Stalag Luft III.
“The two other officers,” he said, “had been taken away by the State Police.”
Less than a week later, Greiner’s deputy—a man named Haselsberger—asked Gassner to transport two wrapped parcels to Criminal Police headquarters in Breslau.
“At first, Haselsberger did not want to say what they contained,” Gassner said. “I replied that in that case, we would simply open the boxes—but this, Haselsberger would not permit. Then he intimated to me, pointing out that it was top secret, that the parcels contained urns of two English Air Force officers. He did not tell me from which department this top secret matter had originated, but I guessed immediately it must be a question of the English flyers who had been in custody. How these officers met their death and at whose hands I did not find out at that time.”
Gassner said all evidence relating to the murders had since been destroyed.
“About a fortnight before the arrival of the American Army,” he said, “all secret documents, and thus also the Sagan file at the Criminal Police headquarters in Munich, were destroyed by orders of Greiner.”
“And what happened to Greiner?” Williams asked.
Gassner said the U.S. Army seized Greiner in June 1945. The Americans confirmed they had the former Munich Kripo chief in custody. Courtney handled Greiner’s interrogation but gleaned little information. The man claimed to have been away on sick leave at the time of the Sagan escape, but Courtney pushed forward with his questioning. Greiner, an experienced interrogator himself, offered only vague answers.
“What happened to the two RAF officers?”
“They were handed over to the Gestapo,” Greiner said. “That is all I know. I learned from Gassner that two urns were taken to Breslau by an official.”
“Did you see the urns?”
“No.”
“Do you know what happened before the urns were filled with ashes?”
“I don’t know,” said Greiner. “It was all very hush-hush.”
“As head of the Munich Kripo,” said Courtney, more than a little incredulous, “didn’t you enquire?”
“No,” replied Greiner, matter-of-factly. “The matter finished for me after the Gestapo took the case over.”
Courtney, not wanting to waste any more time, left the room and made the necessary arrangements to transfer Greiner to the London Cage for a more thorough interrogation. In the meantime, the canvassing of American camps continued. For Courtney and his team, it was akin to fumbling about in the dark. They weren’t always sure what they were looking for until they found it. At an internment camp in Ludwigsburg, they came across a man named Josef Achter. A onetime Bavarian police officer turned Gestapo agent, Achter detailed the night Gouws and Stevens were murdered. He was working the night shift at Gestapo headquarters in Munich with another agent named Emil Weil. He remembered the occasion well because one of the on-duty drivers, a man named Schneider, turned up to work with a Russian tommy gun.
“I had not seen a model like that before,” Achter said. “Schneider told me it was his own property; that he had brought it back with him from active service in the East.”
Shortly before eleven that evening, Munich Gestapo chief Dr. Oswald Schäfer summoned to his office Weil, Schneider, and two other men identified as Kriminalkommissar Martin Schermer and Kriminalsekretär Eduard Geith. Achter, whose desk faced Schäfer’s office, said the men met behind closed doors for roughly ten minutes. When the meeting concluded, none of the participants seemed eager to share details.
“Weil resumed his seat opposite me,” Achter said. “I asked Weil what was up. He evaded answering and gave it to be understood he was not allowed to talk about it. I never discovered anything about the nature and purpose of the job—either in the course of conversation, or by rumor—so that I forgot about the incident.”
Not until after his arrest at war’s end, Achter said, did he put the pieces together. In an American-run internment camp, Achter learned from a colleague that two escapees from Stalag Luft III had been murdered in the Munich area.
“Until then,” he said, “I did not know this fact.”
“What happened to Weil, Schermer, and Geith?” Courtney asked.
“I heard Weil worked for the Americans in Munich after the capitulation but had later been arrested,” Achter said. He believed the Americans had also seized Schneider. “According to an eye-witness account, Schermer committed suicide by shooting himself. It’s also been said that Geith is in some American internment camp.”
“What about Schäfer?”
“There are various opinions about Schäfer’s whereabouts,” Achter said. “According to his deputy, he is said to have left on a bicycle with very little luggage the day before the troops marched into Munich. He was supposedly seen in the Tyrol a few days later. It is generally assumed that he first fled and then later committed suicide. As far as I know, his family was living in a village near Prien when the war ended.”
Achter’s information cleared away the fog of mystery long obscuring the murders. Courtney now added Weil, Schneider, Geith, and Schäfer to his wanted list. A search of Munich city records produced a death certificate for Schermer, who apparently hanged himself from a tree prior to the Americans entering the city.
At about this time, interrogators at the London Cage were busy questioning a recently captured staff member from the Central Security Office named Peter Mohr. Mohr had joined the Bavarian Police in 1926 before transferring to the Munich Kripo one year before the outbreak of war. A promotion in February 1944 to the rank of Kriminalkommissar—the equivalent of a detective superintendent—saw him transferred to security headquarters in Berlin. He was assigned to Section C, which helped coordinate nationwide manhunts for wanted individuals. One month later, word reached Berlin of the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III. Believing this episode would provide Mohr valuable insight as to how one organized a large-scale search, Mohr’s superior placed him in charge of the Sagan case files. Consequently, Mohr was well versed in all aspects of the case and possessed knowledge relevant to the Munich investigation. Part of Mohr’s job was to catalogue the possessions of those escapees murdered by the Gestapo.
While processing Gouws’s and Stevens’s personal effects, Mohr learned that the Munich Gestapo had deducted the cost of the coffins and cremations from the cash the prisoners had on them. If the Gestapo had been forced to pay cremation expenses, then the bodies had most likely been destroyed at the city’s only public crematorium, located in Munich’s East Cemetery. No cost would have been incurred had the Gestapo destroyed the bodies at the Dachau concentration camp, Mohr told his London interrogators. In Munich, Flight Sergeant Williams reviewed the cemetery’s records and found copies of receipts for the two cremations. At an abandoned building previously used as the police prison, he discovered a document—left behind in the mad rush to vacate the building prior the arrival of American forces—stating that Gouws and Stevens had been held in cell number thirty-two upon their capture. Williams made his way to the holding area on the lower levels and found the cell in question. “It was two feet wide and about five feet long,” he noted, “and you could see the marks on the walls where the poor devils who were kept there for any length of time had gone demented, and beaten and scratched the wall.”
The search for Emil Weil took Courtney back to Dachau once the Americans confirmed they had the man in custody. On May 16, 1946, a visibly frightened Weil provided Courtney an eyewitness account of the killings. Originally a civil police officer in Bavaria, Weil had been posted to the Gestapo in Neustadt in 1938 to help oversee security during construction of the Siegfried Line, a stretch of fortifications along Germany’s western frontier. The following year—at the age of twenty-nine—he was transferred to the Munich Gestapo and remained there for the war’s entirety, assigned to the Counter Espionage Branch.
The Gestapo in Munich operated out of the Wittelsbach Palais, former royal palace of the Bavarian monarchs. One night, toward the end of March 1944, Weil was catching up on paperwork at his desk. At about ten o’clock, he heard a car pull up in the courtyard below his office window. He glanced out and saw Geith, Schneider, and Schermer exit the car and enter the palace. Roughly two hours later, Weil said, Schermer came into the duty office and told him he would be taking part in the transporting of two prisoners early the next morning. When Weil questioned the assignment, Schermer waved a dismissive hand and said, “Orders are orders.” At four-thirty in the morning, Weil was summoned downstairs to the station’s holding cells. He saw two men in civilian clothing being moved from one of the cells at gunpoint and placed in a six-seater car out back. He, along with Schermer, Schneider, and Geith, got in the car with the two prisoners. They got on the autobahn and drove in the direction of Ingolstadt. They rode in silence. Thirty miles into the journey, Weil said, Schermer ordered the car onto the shoulder. Everyone was told to relieve himself. The air was cold and a frost covered the ground. Weil walked past the front of the car and into a meadow that fell away from the roadside. Behind him, the two prisoners were ushered out of the car and marched to a position about six feet to Weil’s right and less than two feet in front him.
“On the right of the prisoners was Geith, also slightly in front of me,” Weil said. “I did not see whether or not the prisoners were manacled. While I urinated, two shots from an automatic weapon fired in quick succession. I saw the first prisoner on the left falling forward and, immediately afterwards, the one on the right. I turned at once towards the car and saw Schermer standing before the rear right door. At the same moment, I noticed Schneider at the back of the car. He had a submachine gun in his hand. Then I saw Schermer going to the two who were lying there. He looked at Schneider and told him to fire more shots at each. Schneider approached the two corpses and fired a few shots with his sub-machine gun, as he had been ordered. Schermer ordered that a covering be fetched from the car and the bodies covered. I did not go to the bodies nor did I cover them.”
Weil drew a nervous breath before continuing.
“Schermer said he had to drive to the municipal legal official and medical officer, and told me and Geith to remain with the bodies in the meantime. After about twenty minutes, two policemen came along on their beat. Geith showed them his papers and said our commanding officer had gone to the authorities. As far as I remember, one of the policemen remained with us, and the other left us after a while.”
Schermer and Schneider returned in a van roughly one hour later with a police officer and a civilian worker. The latter approached the bodies and pulled back a corner of the blanket.
“They’re dead,” he said.
Schermer summoned the officer and civilian to the back of the van, where they conferred in quiet tones. What they said could not be heard by the others, who remained by the bodies.
“Shortly afterwards,” Weil said, “the civilian and the police officer drove off in the direction of Ingolstadt. At Schermer’s instruction, Schneider, Geith, and I had to put the bodies in a hollow to prevent their being seen so easily from the autobahn. We also had to cover them with pine twigs so that we could take the covering with us. One of the policemen remained with the bodies. Schermer, Geith, Schneider, and I then returned to Munich. At Allerhausen (or some such name) we stopped at the police station where Schermer, I presume, telephoned the funeral office at Munich to collect the bodies. On our return to the office we had to swear an oath of secrecy before Schäfer.”
Not until April 1945, with the Americans only days away from the city, did the matter come up again. A panicked Schäfer dispatched Weil to the local funeral home to remove the airmen’s names from the undertaker’s registry. Weil did as instructed, using a pocketknife and typewriter eraser to eliminate the names from the pages of the book. Reporting to Schäfer upon completing the job, Weil was ordered to do the same with the booking ledger at the police prison, where Gouws and Stevens had initially been held. The police, Weil said, did not object to his mission, as they planned on destroying all records prior to the arrival of the Americans.
Courtney had Weil transferred to the British military prison in Minden and crossed the man’s name off his list. He now turned his attention to combing the American camps for Schneider and Geith. Although the U.S. Army had seized both men in a postwar roundup of Nazi collaborators, locating them among the hundreds of thousands of people now interned in Allied camps posed a significant challenge. Inaccurate record keeping and the in-and-out flow of transfers from one camp to another meant some individuals got lost in the shuffle. Oswald Schäfer’s whereabouts, however, were a different matter. Depending on whom Courtney spoke with, Schäfer was either dead or on the run. Until the man’s fate could be firmly substantiated, his name would remain on the wanted list.
The search for Schneider eventually took a turn in the right direction when Courtney located the man’s wife. She said her husband was being held in Hammelburg, a small town in Bavaria and the site of a large internment camp. The lead was forwarded to the Americans, who confirmed several days later that Johann Schneider’s name appeared on the camp’s list of identified prisoners. The journey from Munich by jeep took Courtney through the snowcapped Bavarian Alps, a stunning reprieve from the depressing drudgery of shattered cities and mud-swollen camps. His arrival in Hammelburg, however, brought him back to reality. The camp sat in a forested area roughly two miles south of the city. Initially a training facility for the German Army, the camp was used to hold enemy combatants during both world wars. It was here the Germans imprisoned Americans captured during the Battle of the Bulge. Conditions at the camp, designated Oflag XIII-B, were grim during the best of times and had grown increasingly dire as the war turned against the Reich.
Each of the seven five-roomed barracks in the camp’s American compound housed nearly two hundred GIs during the war. Lighting in each room, provided by two single fifteen-watt bulbs, was extremely poor—as was insulation against the elements. Temperatures in the barracks during the winter averaged no higher than twenty degrees and forced the incarcerated men to gather whatever clothes and blankets they could spare and burn them in the single stove that furnished each room. Because the camp received no clothes from the Red Cross, staying warm during the cold months became a matter of basic survival for the inmates. There were no washrooms. The men had to retrieve any water they needed from a faucet in the camp’s kitchen to fill the few sinks in their barracks. Because of fuel rationing, the camp was not equipped with hot water. Comfort could hardly be found in the daily rations, which consisted of “one-tenth of a loaf of bread, one cup of ersatz coffee, one bowl of barley soup, and one serving of vegetables.” Occasionally, the diet was supplemented by a teaspoon of sugar and a small slice of margarine. Toward the end of the war, many men in the camp were bedridden by malnutrition.
As the war swung in the Allies’ favor—and air raids over Germany wrought ever-increasing carnage—tensions between the Americans and their German captors ran increasingly high. The camp’s commandant had strict rules in place dictating the proper protocol during an air raid. When air raid sirens in the vicinity of the camp signaled an impending attack, the prisoners had three minutes to get back to their barracks. One evening, the sirens began to wail, and four American officers, standing at the barbed-wire fence and chatting with several Serbian POWs in the neighboring compound, did not immediately seek shelter. They eventually returned to their barracks with a slim margin to spare and were spotted by a guard standing post seventy-five yards away. The guard fired at the four men and struck one in the back. The bullet tore through the prisoner’s lung and blew out his chest. Another POW was shot, on a separate occasion, in the back of the head by a guard after failing to understand an order barked at him in German. One order in particular irked American officers imprisoned at Oflag XIII-B. The camp’s commandant deemed it necessary for all Americans, regardless of rank, to salute German officers first. The regulation, naturally, led to a fair number of ugly confrontations between guards and prisoners.
In late March 1945, Lieutenant General George S. Patton—commanding the U.S. Third Army—ordered the creation of a special task force to penetrate fifty miles behind enemy lines and liberate Americans imprisoned in the camp. Patton issued the order under the official guise of a rescue operation, but his true intent may have simply been to free his son-in-law, who was captured in Tunisia in 1943. The task force, codenamed “Baum” after its commander, Captain Abraham J. Baum, was drawn from Third Army’s 4th Armored Division. Numbering 314 men, 16 tanks, 28 half-tracks, and 13 other assorted vehicles, the task force set off at 21:00 hours on March 26 from the American bridgehead south of Aschaffenburg. They ran into heavy resistance almost immediately outside the nearby town of Schweinheim. Intense German fire destroyed two Sherman tanks and bogged the task force down for hours. Not until the early morning did it punch a hole through the German defenses and continue on its way, thundering along Reichstrasse 26. Reaching the town of Gemünden at 0800 hours on March 27, the force again encountered blistering enemy fire and lost three more tanks. Unable to break through, the Americans were forced to retreat and find another way to the camp. They followed the Sinn River north and turned in the direction of Hammelburg before making visual contact that afternoon with the camp. Seeing men in gray uniforms moving about the compound, the Americans opened fire from a distance, not realizing they were shelling Serbian POWs. The camp’s commandant sent four men—including, by chance, Patton’s son-in-law, Lieutenant Colonel John Waters—to alert the American force to its mistake. As the men approached the tanks, an anxious German guard shot Waters in the back. Waters was carried back to the camp and treated by a Serbian medical team.
Negotiations between camp representatives and Captain Baum went forward despite the incident and carried on for several hours. As thousands of American prisoners gathered at the compound’s perimeter fence to cheer the task force’s arrival, it became clear that there was no way Baum could transport them all back to Allied lines. Baum decided only field-grade officers would be allowed to journey with the task force. The remaining American prisoners were given the option of traveling the fifty miles west back to the American lines by foot, if they so wished. Many wisely opted to stay put until the final liberation. At 20:00 hours, the task force pulled away from the camp. The outward journey had cost Baum more than a quarter of his fighting force. The journey back promised to be just as arduous. There was no moon to light the way. Baum and his men would have to use the lights on their vehicles, meaning they would be easy prey for the German forces stalking the return route.
Several miles from the camp, near the town of Hollrich, the task force’s lead tank was hit by a German panzerfaust. German troops swarmed the vehicle and maneuvered it into a nearby garden. They aimed its gun down the road and took out three more Shermans in rapid succession. Baum ordered his men to pull back. What remained of Baum’s force retreated to a nearby hill, where they spent the remainder of the night. Staring at the four pillars of fire in the near distance, Baum knew their chances of making it back to the American lines alive were slim. Early the next morning, as Baum ordered what remained of his men and machines to move out, the hill rumbled violently to life. Throughout the night, German forces had moved into concealed positions at the base of the hill. They now opened fire from all directions, sending up great columns of blasted earth, obliterating flesh and metal. Baum ordered “every man for himself.” The men scattered and ran into the surrounding woods. The Germans quickly rounded up those who were slow or injured. Baum made it into the woods but was shot in the leg and soon captured. He wound up a prisoner in the very camp he’d been sent to liberate. His stay, however, would prove to be a short one. The U.S. 14th Armored Division liberated the camp ten days later, on April 5, 1945.
The rescue operation proved costly in both men and machines. Baum’s task force lost all 57 vehicles; 26 of its 314 men were killed. The Americans assumed control of Oflag XIII-B at the war’s end. In the camp’s northern compound, the U.S. Army interned known and suspected Nazis. It was here Courtney arrived on a damp March afternoon. He was greeted by the camp’s American commandant and escorted to a room in one of the compound’s stone-built barracks. A small table surrounded by three chairs sat in the center of the room. Courtney took a seat and waited several minutes before two armed guards brought Johann Schneider, shackled at the wrists, into the room.
Courtney studied a file in front of him and reviewed the man’s particulars. Schneider had worked as an unskilled laborer, bouncing between farm work and the odd construction job, before joining the SA (the first Nazi paramilitary organization, its members often referred to as “brownshirts”) in 1932. He soon transferred to the SS and marched with troops into Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, and then Poland the following year. Between 1940 and 1943, he served as a chauffeur with the Security Service on the Eastern Front before taking a job as driver with the Gestapo in Munich. Courtney, done reading, looked up and introduced himself. He urged Schneider to share what he knew about the business at hand. All Schneider could do was nod and give his version of events.
At roughly ten o’clock on the night of March 29, Schneider answered a knock on the door of his Munich flat. A uniformed policeman stood in the hallway with a summons from Gestapo headquarters. Schneider got dressed and rode his bike to the office, arriving within the hour. As he entered the building, Schermer met him and ordered him to prepare a six-seated car for a late-night journey. Schneider went down to the garage and checked out a vehicle. As he finished checking the tire pressure and oil levels, Schermer and Geith appeared.
“We drive to police HQ,” Schermer said.
At the station, the two men disappeared inside and left Schneider behind the wheel. They emerged fifteen minutes later with two prisoners shackled together at the wrists. They drove back to the Gestapo building, where Geith ordered the prisoners out of the car and led them away to an interrogation cell.
“Be ready to leave,” Schermer said when the captives were out of sight. “Make sure you have a machine-pistol with you. This may take a long time, but I’ll let you know.”
It took the better part of three hours. Not until four-thirty in the morning did Schermer return to the garage.
“On Schäfer’s orders, you have to drive in the direction of Ingolstadt,” Schermer told Schneider. “It concerns two prisoners who have often escaped. They are air-raid shelter burglars and looters. Should these two escape, then you will shoot on my orders.”
Weil and Geith placed the prisoners in the back of the car at gunpoint and sat on either side of them. Schneider assumed his position behind the wheel, while Schermer sat in the front passenger seat. In the east, the first slate moments of daylight were evident above the city’s shattered skyline as the car pulled out of the garage. Schneider turned onto the autobahn outside Munich and drove twenty-one miles in the direction of Ingolstadt. The sky had by now sufficiently brightened to a point where headlights were no longer necessary. In the back, the prisoners stared out at a frostbitten landscape, at fields covered in white, and the glistening branches of trees. Eyeing the bleak terrain, Schneider suddenly felt Schermer’s hand on his arm.
“Stop,” Schermer barked. “Pull up to the right.”
Schneider pulled onto the frozen shoulder. As the car slowed to a stop, Schermer turned to the men in the backseat.
“Relieve yourselves,” he said.
Weil and Geith got out of the car and led the prisoners down a slight incline into the meadow. Schermer, standing near the passenger door, leaned through the window, motioned to the submachine gun under the driver’s seat, and told Schneider to exit the vehicle. Schneider got out, retrieving the gun as he did so. He pulled a magazine from his pocket, jammed it home, and slung the gun over his shoulder. He walked to the rear of the car and leaned against the luggage box. From this vantage point, he had a clear view of the meadow and the prisoners—still chained at the wrists—fifteen feet in front of him. Except for the random bush and tree, there were few places for the prisoners to take cover should they make a run for it.
As Schneider surveyed the scene, he noticed Schermer, standing several feet away, excitedly waving his hands. When Schneider looked in his direction, Schermer pointed at the prisoners and, in a hushed but excited voice, said, “Shoot! Shoot!”
“I looked at him again briefly,” Schneider told Courtney, “and then it went through my head. He wants me to shoot the two prisoners here on the spot.”
Schneider took aim with the submachine gun and squeezed off six rounds. He saw the two prisoners collapse in the snow and heard Schermer tell him to “stop shooting.” In the meadow, Weil and Geith knelt beside the bodies and checked for signs of life. Death having been established, the two men signaled Schermer the job was done.
“Take off the chains at once,” he ordered.
Schneider remained by the car, a thin wisp of gray smoke curling up from the gun’s muzzle. He stuck the weapon back under the driver’s seat and, following Schermer’s orders, retrieved a large piece of tarpaulin from a toolbox in the back. Weil and Geith spread the tarpaulin over the two bodies and camouflaged it with fallen fir branches gathered from the base of a nearby tree. Alongside the road, Schermer busied himself collecting the spent shell casings. He ordered Schneider to pull the car fifteen feet forward and scattered the casings about the car’s new position.
“If there is a commission of enquiry,” he said, “you shot from here.”
The remainder of Schneider’s story mirrored Weil’s statement. He and Schermer went off to notify the proper authorities while Weil and Geith remained with the bodies.
“Schermer told me later that nothing had to be mentioned about this case,” he said in conclusion.
Courtney took Schneider into custody and placed him in a cell at Minden. The Americans confirmed they had Eduard Geith in custody, having arrested him on May 5, 1945, and soon turned him over to Courtney. A career police officer before the war, Eduard Geith had joined the Munich Police Force as an auxiliary officer in 1919, shortly after his twentieth birthday. He worked his way up the chain of command, eventually achieving the equivalent rank of assistant senior detective. In January 1938, he transferred to Gestapo headquarters, Munich, and continued his ascent. The war took a personal toll on him in November 1944, when his wife, Magdalene, was killed in an air raid.
Johann Schneider called at Geith’s flat shortly after midnight on March 29, 1944, and said he was to report immediately to local Gestapo headquarters. A car was waiting downstairs. The two men arrived at the Wittelsbach Palais less than half an hour later and reported to Schermer. Reading from a teletype, Schermer said that local police had captured two fugitive RAF officers. The men were to be turned over to the Gestapo and, on orders from Berlin, shot. Schermer filed the teletype in a desk drawer and made Weil, Schneider, and Geith swear to secrecy. The men discussed how to execute the order. They decided the best course of action would be to find open country near the edge of a wood and shoot the men near the tree line, making it look as if the prisoners had made a run for it. Geith said that he and Weil advised against using their Walther service pistols, for fear the weapons were not accurate enough.
“Schneider proposed after long hesitation that he would carry out the matter with a machine-pistol,” Geith said. “He was certain of himself and would also guarantee there would be no mistake. Schermer agreed to Schneider’s solution, and Weil and myself were also content with this solution. Every one of us took an equal part in this plan.”
Following the hour-long meeting, Geith said he and Schermer retrieved the prisoners from the local police station and brought them back to the Palais for interrogation. One of the prisoners spoke broken German, while Weil—present in the room—spoke schoolboy English. Their combined language skills enabled the two sides to communicate in an effective, if not efficient, manner. The process, however, appeared to wear on Schermer’s nerves. Working his way through one cigarette after another as the prisoners gave their statements, he harried them to keep it brief.
“Nothing,” said Geith, “went quickly enough for him.”
During the interrogation, Geith said, the prisoners made it clear they were British airmen and provided personal information, a few scant details about the escape, and the towns they had passed through in their bid for freedom. The prisoners signed their statements, which did not survive the war, and were then ordered to strip. Geith inspected the men’s armpits; Weil looked elsewhere. The search complete, the prisoners were ordered to dress and were chained together at the wrists. Sometime between five and five-thirty that morning, the airmen were bundled into a car for what they believed was the return journey to Stalag Luft III. Geith and Weil each wore a Walther pistol in a holster on his right hip, with a round loaded in the breech. They sat in the back with the airmen and faced them on two fold-out chairs.
They drove through the northern suburbs of Munich and pulled onto the autobahn. They clocked no more than twenty-five miles before stopping on the right shoulder, alongside a meadow that sloped gently upward into a pine forest. Geith said he and Weil got out of the car and led the prisoners into the field, away from the main road. Once satisfied that passing motorists could not see them, they signaled the prisoners to stop and relieve themselves.
“In my opinion, it could only have been a matter of seconds that the prisoners stood there,” Geith said. “Then, there were two short bursts of fire—one immediately following the other. The two prisoners collapsed forward on their knees onto the ground without making a sound. We—Schermer, Schneider, Weil, and I—hurried to the fallen men.”
One of the airmen lay twitching on the ground.
“I’ll see to that,” said Schneider, still clasping the submachine gun, and fired two shots into the prisoner’s head.
Geith knelt beside the bodies and undid the chain that bound the two men together. The shackle had been lightly fastened so as not to leave any trace of a bruise. As Geith unlocked the restraint, Schneider removed and pocketed a wristwatch worn by one of the dead officers. The men quickly gathered branches and fir green from the nearby woods and covered the bodies.
“After all this had happened,” Geith said, “Weil and I fired a few shots with our service pistols in the direction of the forest, aiming mainly at a telegraph pole in the direction of the wood, so as to leave on it marks of the so-called pursuit shots.”
The coroner, summoned to the scene, gave the bodies a quick going over.
“Yes,” he said, “there is certainly no more to be done here.”
The bodies were loaded into a wagon and taken to the crematorium at the Eastern Cemetery in Munich to be destroyed. Returning to Gestapo headquarters, Geith said, he and his compatriots were “inwardly excited” by Schermer’s insistence that an Allied inquiry into the murders would likely follow. They inventoried the victims’ personal items back at the office and divvied up a pack of cigarettes found on one of the bodies. Once Schermer filed his incident report several days later in Berlin, Geith considered the matter closed. Schäfer again swore all participants to secrecy and threatened them with death should even the “smallest detail” come to light. Not long thereafter, the Sagan killings made international headlines. Geith, sitting down one evening to read a newspaper in his Munich flat, found British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden staring up at him from the front page. The article detailed Eden’s recent speech denouncing the German explanation that prisoners had been shot while trying to escape.
“I was compelled to agree without question that the animadversions of Mr. Eden conformed to the truth,” Geith said. “The explanations of the Offices of the Reich stank and lied on all points.”
Geith approached Schermer several days later and voiced his concerns. “This is one hell of a business,” he said.
Schermer said nothing and simply walked away. The two men never discussed the matter again. In the wake of the Normandy invasion, as the Allied armies pushed deeper into Germany, Weil told Geith all records pertaining to the murders would be destroyed.
Geith had now reached the end of his story.
“I did not take part in the happenings of my own free will, or out of personal interest,” he said. “It was an order for me. I could have refused this order, but I am quite convinced that a refusal would have had the severest consequences. I think I can maintain that no other official would have dared to refuse the order, just as I did not do so, and also did not happen in the case of Weil and Schneider.”
He paused, momentarily distracted by some inner disturbance.
“I can give an assurance that in my thoughts I feel the most unhappy man since this happening,” he said. “If I have kept quiet so far, which again was a big mistake on my part, then I did this for personal reasons for the sake of my little daughter, the only member of my family still left to me from this tragic war—not least cause of this was also the fact known to me that Schneider possesses a family of many children.”
Despite the satisfactory progress his team had made thus far in closing the Munich investigation, Courtney remained frustrated by his failure to locate Munich Gestapo chief Oswald Schäfer. Numerous leads, courtesy of information provided by various inmates who claimed to harbor some knowledge as to the man’s whereabouts, had been followed up without success. One such source pointed Courtney’s team to the Bavarian village of Utting, where the father of Schäfer’s onetime secretary now lived. It was rumored that Schäfer had fathered a child with young Fräulein Lore Hebberling—a rumor the girl’s father strongly denied. He said his daughter now worked as an interpreter with the 44th Air Depot, U.S. Army Air Corps, in Schordorf. When questioned several days later, Hebberling confessed to being friends with Schäfer but stressed that their relationship had been strictly platonic. She said she had resigned from her secretarial job seven months before the Americans took Munich and had not heard from Schäfer since. She couldn’t say for sure whether the man was even still alive. It seemed to Courtney that the girl had no reason to lie.
The hunt for Schäfer would continue.