Dennis Cochran joined the Royal Air Force in 1940 after a Luftwaffe raid on London’s East End killed two close friends. The resulting hatred for all things Teutonic fueled a fierce desire to get airborne, which impressed his senior officers—but his war, at least in the skies, proved to be a short one. Enemy fire downed his Whitley bomber in late 1942. Cochran was processed at Dulag Luft, the Luftwaffe transit camp through which most Allied airmen passed following their capture. For the young and impatient flying officer, captivity was akin to torture. One might as well have died in battle than languish helpless and prostrate on the sidelines. Not long after his internment, he tried his hand at escape. He and two other prisoners donned German uniforms, acquired through bribes, and armed themselves with wooden rifles made by a fellow inmate. Feeling sufficiently confident, they stomped toward the main gate and presented the on-duty guard with false identity papers. The guard allowed the men to pass through after giving the documents only a cursory glance. Free of the camp, the men split up, with Cochran going off on his own. His two comrades were recaptured almost immediately when they were spotted and recognized at the local train station. Cochran, however, managed to board a train, only to be caught by an alert soldier several hours later. Not long after this brief adventure, Cochran was transferred to Stalag Luft III.
In Sagan, Cochran was known for his quiet, brooding attitude; a solitary figure who kept mostly to himself, often times lost in a book. All the while, he contemplated escape. His desire to break free became all-consuming when he received word of his mother’s sudden death in July 1943. Because he spoke fluent German, Cochran was number sixteen in the tunnel on the night of the escape. He planned to travel from Sagan alone and believed a partner would only hinder his progress or put him at unnecessary risk. His RAF uniform was altered to resemble the nondescript clothes of a simple day laborer. Once free of the tunnel, he made his way to the station at Sagan and boarded the 1 A.M. train for Breslau. His objective—like many other escapees’—was Switzerland, which he hoped to enter through Basle on the Rhine. It was an ambitious journey of nearly six hundred miles, but he made good progress. On the afternoon of Sunday, March 26, Cochran was spotted by another escapee sweeping a street in Frankfurt with a group of French laborers. Four days later, he had made it to Lörrach, a city in southwest Germany close to the French and Swiss borders, but his forged travel papers failed to pass inspection at a German checkpoint. Cochran, with freedom visible just across the Rhine, was taken into custody by the Kripo and imprisoned in Ettlingen.
Eight weeks later, Cochran’s ashes arrived at Stalag Luft III. On the urn was notated the place of cremation: Natzweiler concentration camp.
In August 1944, Britain’s Special Air Service launched Operation Loyton. The mission called for operatives of SAS 2 Regiment to drop behind enemy lines in the Vosges Mountains, make contact with the French Resistance, and identify targets for future military action. The agents just happened to land at the same time the Germans were reinforcing the area against advancing U.S. forces. The British operatives—realizing their mission was compromised—wreaked havoc behind enemy lines. They sabotaged German patrols and employed guerilla tactics, making use of the heavily wooded landscape and deep stony ravines that snaked their way through the mountains. Suspecting local residents of assisting the British, the Germans entered the village of Moussey and rounded up every male between the ages of sixteen and sixty. The villagers said nothing under interrogation and were subsequently shipped off to concentration camps. Only 70 of the 210 men and boys ever returned home.
An airdrop in September reinforced the SAS team with additional men and six machine gun–mounted jeeps. German supply convoys and staff cars carrying senior personnel now came under heavy fire. One morning, several jeeps sped through Moussey just as an SS commander called his troops out for inspection. The jeeps’ gunmen opened fire with their Browning machine guns and cut down a number of Germans before fleeing into the mountainous terrain beyond the village. So startled was the enemy garrison in town, the commander evacuated 250 of his men out of fear that a much larger British force was on the offensive.
Initially scheduled to last two weeks, the SAS incursion dragged on for two months. The British fought not only the Germans, but encroaching starvation due to dwindling supplies. Of the ninety-one agents who took part in the operation, only sixty eventually made it back to Allied lines. The fate of the missing remained a mystery until July 1945, when military officials in the French Zone unearthed the bodies of thirty British servicemen in the town of Gaggenau. The victims were identified as SAS agents.
Charged with investigating the matter was Major Bill Barkworth of 2 SAS War Crimes Investigation Team. An experienced field operative who spoke fluent German and French, Barkworth traveled to Gaggenau with a dozen agents and established his command post in an old villa near Karlsruhe, where the local Gestapo had based its operations. Barkworth and his team set about canvassing the French internment camps, intent on interviewing former Nazi officials and Gestapo personnel. French disorganization, however, which had thus far hampered the RAF’s efforts, plagued the SAS investigation. Corruption also stonewalled the inquiry. It slowly emerged that a number of French officials had released former Nazis from captivity—or expunged their names from camp records—under threat of being exposed as German collaborators.
Barkworth made slow but substantial progress. Through persistent detective work and forceful interrogation, he learned the men were murdered by the SS at Natzweiler concentration camp. Built high in the Vosges Mountains, surrounded by electrified barbed wire, its barracks overrun with lice and typhus, the chimney above its crematorium constantly belching acrid smoke into the mountain air, Natzweiler was the only facility of its kind built on French soil. Between 1941 and 1945, disease, hunger, routine barbarity, and the gas chamber claimed nearly twenty-two thousand lives. It was at Natzweiler that eighty-six Jewish men and women were gassed to provide anatomical specimens for the Jewish skeleton collection, an exhibit the Nazis hoped to display at the planned Reich University of Strasbourg to highlight the physical inferiority of the Jewish race.
Over the course of his investigation, Barkworth interviewed former members of the Karlsruhe Gestapo, now in French custody. One man questioned was forty-year-old Walter Herberg, a law student turned sports editor who joined the Gestapo in 1934. He was now being held in a prison in Wuppertal. Although Herberg knew nothing about the SAS murders, he told Barkworth he had information regarding the shooting death of an RAF officer in the vicinity of Natzweiler. On June 7, 1946, Barkworth forwarded Herberg’s name to the Royal Air Force.
McKenna received the news lying in a hospital bed in Rinteln. The investigation had taken a physical toll and forced him to seek treatment for exhaustion. On doctor’s orders, he was confined to a bed—a situation not to his liking. Now, with a possible lead into Cochran’s murder, he found his circumstance intolerable. Deciding he had rested enough, he snuck out of the hospital one afternoon. Lyon, in on McKenna’s plan, waited in a car outside. The two men drove to the prison in Wuppertal to interrogate their suspect. Herberg told McKenna that he had taken leave from work in late March 1944 to visit his parents in Mainz. While out one day in the country—he couldn’t recall the exact date—he encountered a number of police officers patrolling a local lane. Herberg asked one officer, who demanded to see his identity papers, what had prompted such a strong police presence in the area. The officer told Herberg a number of British Air Force officers had recently escaped from a prison camp in Silesia.
Herberg decided to cut his leave short and returned to Karlsruhe two days early. He arrived home to find his telephone ringing. On the end of the line was local Gestapo chief Josef Gmeiner’s secretary asking him to report for duty. Gmeiner handed Herberg a teleprint when he arrived at the office. It was addressed to “The Head of the Office of the State Police HQ, Karlsruhe, Oberregierungsrat GMEINER.” It read:
By order of the Reichsführer SS, the British RAF Officer Cochran, who has been recaptured inside the area of that Department, is to be moved in the direction of Sagan immediately by car. During this move, he is to be shot. The body is to be handed over for cremation to the nearest crematorium after having been released by the State Attorney in question. The death certificate is to be sent here. Only a restricted number of persons may have knowledge of the contents of this teleprint. These persons are to be especially bound to silence by hand-clasp.
It was signed, “Müller, Gruppenführer.”
“After I had noted the contents of this letter,” Herberg told McKenna, “Gmeiner explained to me that I was to carry out this order. Greatly shocked by this order, I begged him to entrust someone else with it. I was told that I had nothing to do with the matter itself. All I had to do was negotiate with the crematorium and the State Attorney.”
“I’m still on leave,” Herberg said.
“You’ll get another day off for this,” replied Gmeiner.
The matter seemed set, though issues of practicality remained. Herberg told Gmeiner the order would be impossible to carry out. No state attorney, he said, would issue a death certificate under such circumstances. Gmeiner gave the matter some thought and reluctantly agreed. Instead of transporting the prisoner east, in the direction of Sagan, it was deemed more convenient to head west, toward the concentration camp at Natzweiler. The body could be destroyed there without questions being asked. En route, the car would stop and the prisoner would be told to get out and stretch his legs. Otto Preiss, a fellow agent, would pull the trigger and Herberg would see to it that all evidence was consigned to the furnace. Satisfied with the plan, Gmeiner shook hands with Herberg and committed him to the deed. As Herberg left the office, Preiss and driver Wilhelm Boschert walked in for their briefing.
At seven the next morning—March 31—the men piled into a green V170 Mercedes and drove to the prison in Ettlingen. The car pulled into the prison yard shortly after eight-thirty. Herberg, Preiss, and Boschert entered the administrative office and stated their business. A guard retrieved Cochran from his cell. The airman, Herberg guessed, was twenty-one and roughly six feet tall, his frame slender after two years in captivity. The long face was pale and slightly freckled beneath reddish-blond hair. He wore a uniform dyed lilac-violet and free of insignia that might betray him as an officer or soldier. When spoken to, he responded in fluent German.
“You are to be taken to a camp,” Herberg told Cochran. “From there, you will be returned with other recaptured officers to Stalag Luft III.”
The Gestapo men escorted Cochran out to the car and put him in the backseat alongside Preiss. Up front, Herberg took a map from the glove box and served as navigator while Boschert drove. They took the road out of Ettlingen toward Strasbourg, where they turned in the direction of Natzweiler. Both Preiss and Herberg engaged the airman in casual conversation, Preiss going so far as to offer Cochran peppermints and cigarettes. When Herberg asked about the breakout, Cochran’s relaxed manner became one of sudden defiance.
“I can’t talk about that,” he said. “I gave my word of honor to the British Camp Senior to keep silent on all the circumstances of the escape.”
The men drove on without another word. Neither Herberg nor Preiss, reluctant to follow their orders, suggested pulling the car over to allow the airman a brief respite. Instead, they gazed out the window, lost in thought, as the Mercedes followed a winding route up into the Vosges Mountains. Having now abandoned the map, Herberg left Boschert to navigate the mist-shrouded road on his own. The car eventually reached the crest of a hill stripped of trees. Here, the road led to a compound of squat, single-story buildings surrounded by razor wire. A guardhouse and a large wooden gate crowned in wire marked the entrance to the Natzweiler camp. The sight snapped Herberg and his companions out of their grim reverie. Quickly, Herberg told Boschert to turn the car around and head back the way they had come.
“We’ve lost our way,” Herberg said over his shoulder.
As Boschert sped from the camp, Cochran, oblivious to his captors’ intent, failed to realize anything was amiss. A little more than a mile down the road, a small track branched off to the right at a slight incline, cut its way through a field, and disappeared into woods. Boschert took the turn and drove the car 120 feet up the mud-and rock-strewn path before stopping among the trees. Herberg looked over his shoulder, said he needed to relieve himself, and asked Cochran, still handcuffed, if he cared to do the same. The airman said yes, and all four men got out of the car. Herberg stayed near the vehicle as the other men walked Cochran down the path. Not wanting to witness the scene, Herberg turned his back to the group. A minute later, he heard two shots. When Herberg turned around, Cochran was lying on the ground. He could see that one bullet had passed through the airman’s right eye. Preiss, standing over Cochran’s prostrate form, had fired the second slug through the back of the airman’s heart. The men fetched an old motor blanket from the car, wrapped the body, and carried it back to the vehicle. It was sometime between eleven and noon. The body strewn across the backseat, all three Gestapo agents sat in the front and returned to the concentration camp. They arrived minutes later at the camp’s main administrative office, a single-story building painted forest green. Inside, Herberg met with the camp’s deputy commandant, Adjutant Otto Ganninger.
“We have been unlucky,” Herberg said, sticking with the Gestapo cover story. “We had a prisoner who tried to escape and was shot in flight.”
Ganninger offered Herberg a knowing smile.
“I am already in the picture,” he said without elaborating.
Herberg simply nodded, not caring to know from whom Ganninger got his information. He just wanted to be done with the job.
“Do you now want a death certificate?” Ganninger asked.
When Herberg answered yes, Ganninger led him across the sodden grounds to another wooden barrack, which housed the camp’s registration office. Upon hearing Herberg’s story, the registrar—a member of the Kripo—refused to issue the necessary paperwork on the grounds that the death had occurred outside the camp. Ganninger pressed the issue, but the registrar refused to budge and summoned the camp doctor, who took the same stance. A desperate Herberg explained he was under orders “to produce this death certificate in the highest quarters.” His appeal failed to sway either man. While the stalemate ensued, Cochran’s body was taken to the camp’s crematorium and destroyed in its single oven. Once the ashes were consigned to an urn, Herberg sent a wire from the camp to Gestapo headquarters in Karlsruhe, stating that his mission was complete. He and his comrades eventually left Natzweiler in possession of the urn but not a death certificate.
McKenna slid a pack of cigarettes across the table. Herberg reached for one with a slightly trembling hand and smiled when McKenna offered him a light.
“In Karlsruhe, where I reported by telephone, I think to Gmeiner, I was reproached for not having a death certificate,” Herberg said, blue-gray smoke clouding his features. “Whether this was obtained later, I do not know.”
“What happened next?” asked McKenna.
Herberg leaned back in his chair and took another deep drag on his smoke. Several days after the murder, he said, he went to the local cinema in hopes of taking his mind off recent events. Halfway through the picture show, a Gestapo agent summoned him from the theater and escorted him to a waiting car outside. How the agent found him was a mystery. The man ordered Herberg into the vehicle and drove him to Gmeiner’s flat, where Herberg was told to leave immediately for Berlin. It seemed that Herberg’s handling of the Cochran murder had not satisfied Gestapo Chief Müller. Herberg left that afternoon for the capital with several blank sheets of office stationery signed by Gmeiner.
Arriving at Müller’s office the following day, Herberg discovered that Gestapo agents from various regional offices had also been summoned for a meeting. Müller chastised all of them for their lack of imagination. Every report filed in connection with the killing of a Sagan escapee claimed that the prisoner had tried to escape during a bathroom break alongside the road. Müller took from Herberg the blank sheets of paper signed by Gmeiner and passed them to his secretary, who fed them into a typewriter. Pacing back and forth, Müller dictated a new report, stating that the car transporting Cochran back to camp had blown a tire. During “an unguarded moment,” Cochran leapt from the vehicle and made a dash for the woods while his captors busied themselves with the flat. Herberg and his men had no choice but to open fire, and they downed the airman with two shots. Müller finished dictating, passed the new report to Herberg, and ordered him to return to Karlsruhe and refile the document. Herberg could only nod and do what he had done since the whole sordid episode began: follow orders.
Herberg stared across the table at McKenna and lowered his head. He opened his mouth, but the words seemed to catch in his throat. McKenna felt pity and loathing for this man whose anguish seemed genuine—but the “following orders” excuse served as inadequate defense against a crime so cold and calculated. Was Herberg merely weak-willed and cowardly? Perhaps, for McKenna didn’t believe the man to be sadistic. He offered Herberg another smoke and transferred him from the police prison in Wuppertal to the holding facility in Minden. From there, he would be sent to the London Cage.
Herberg’s statement opened other avenues of investigation. In his notebook, McKenna now had the name of the gunman, Preiss, and Boschert, the man who drove them to the scene. He also had an eyewitness account of Karlsruhe Gestapo chief Josef Gmeiner ordering Cochran’s execution. On June 4, McKenna and interpreter Sergeant J. Van Giessen returned to the prison in Wuppertal and met with Major Barkworth. Did he have any information regarding Ganninger—the adjutant at Natzweiler—or Magnus Wochner, the camp registrar? Indeed, said Barkworth, taking a manila folder from his desk drawer and passing it to the RAF men. McKenna turned back the cover and stared unblinking at the grisly black-and-white photograph. A man lay strewn across a prison cot, his neck opened in a jagged, glistening wound.
“Ganninger?” asked McKenna.
Barkworth nodded. His team had arrested Ganninger two months prior and interrogated him on April 26. Alone in his cell afterward, Ganninger took a razor from the inside lining of his jacket and sliced his throat. Wochner, also captured, was tried before a military tribunal in May and received ten years for his complicity in the atrocities committed at Natzweiler. McKenna’s next step was to find and interrogate Preiss. He journeyed to the American sector and commenced his hunt at Dachau. It was easy, coming to a place such as this, to believe that every German was complicit in what had happened. How could those living in the surrounding village not have known what was going on behind the brick walls and barbed wire? Surely, they harbored some knowledge, an inkling, of the crimes being carried out in their name. And what if they did—what recourse did they have? It seemed to McKenna every simple question gave way to one of greater complexity. Or, maybe the matter wasn’t that vexing; maybe people knew but simply didn’t care. What did that say about humanity? McKenna pushed the thought away and walked to the administrative office, where he commandeered a desk and read through the inmate files. His search, which took the better part of the day, proved futile.
The following day, he drove to Ludwigsburg, north of Stuttgart. Here, the Americans housed Nazi war criminals at the Flak-Kaserne, which, until the capitulation, had served as barracks for the German Army. The files there held nothing on Otto Preiss. Over the proceeding days, McKenna hit two more camps, including a compound in Mannheim that had once served as a satellite branch of the Natzweiler concentration camp. He eventually arrived at the U.S. internment camp at Darmstadt and found his man in the files. From Herberg McKenna had a physical description of Preiss, and he knew he’d caught him when guards brought the man into the interrogation room for questioning. Preiss was forty years old, completely bald, and slender, with a “round, unhealthy face, dark eyes, dark eyebrows, and a brutal expression.” According to his file, he had become a civilian police officer in 1925. He worked in various cities from Baden to Mannheim before being transferred to the Karlsruhe Gestapo in 1939. He initially worked in the press department, before joining Department II E, which specialized in economic sabotage and also handled breach-of-employment matters and cases involving foreign workers. It was in this department that Preiss remained until the end of the war, having achieved the rank of Kriminalsekretär, or detective constable.
“I’m an officer with the Special Investigating Branch of the Royal Air Force,” said McKenna. “I’m investigating the murder of Flying Officer Cochran, and I believe you have information pertaining to that crime.”
Preiss drummed a nervous cadence on the tabletop and seemed reluctant to speak, but relentless prodding soon elicited a confession. He detailed being summoned into Gmeiner’s office the day before the shooting and tasked with pulling the trigger. Why he had been selected, he couldn’t say, for matters involving prisoners of war fell beyond the scope of his department. There was, however, no point protesting the assignment. “The order has been given and is to be carried out,” he remembered Gmeiner telling him. “No discussion is allowed.” The facts, as he related them to McKenna, followed Herberg’s account closely, though their stories diverged when it came to the actual shooting. When the car stopped in the woods, Preiss said, all four men got out and stayed together. With Herberg and Preiss walking on either side of Cochran, and Boschert bringing up the rear, the men trudged another sixty feet into the woods. Herberg chatted amicably with the prisoner before stopping and turning him toward a tree. He nodded at Preiss, who pulled a 7.65mm Walther from his jacket pocket and fired point-blank into the back of Cochran’s head.
“The pistol did not quite touch his head,” Preiss said. “The prisoner fell to the ground, and Herberg ascertained that death was instantaneous. As the body of the prisoner was still twitching slightly on the ground, Herberg requested me to fire another shot. I believe that Herberg used the words coup de grâce. I then fired another shot into the region of the heart of the prisoner.”
Several weeks later, Herberg ordered Preiss back to the concentration camp to retrieve Cochran’s ashes and take them to Kripo headquarters in Breslau. From there, they would be taken to Stalag Luft III.
“I declare that I only acted in accordance with orders and not because of my own free will,” said Preiss, watching as McKenna scribbled in his notebook. “I do not consider myself guilty, but state however that since the position is now said to be different, I am now incriminated by this matter.”
He fell silent, as though pondering a morbid fate.
“This was my first and last execution,” he said.
McKenna secured permission from the Americans and took Preiss into custody. He booked him into the prison at Minden, where Herberg still awaited transfer to the London Cage.
Back in his office at Rinteln, McKenna began making a series of calls and learned that the U.S. Third Army was holding Boschert at the No. 2 Civilian Internee Hospital in Karlsruhe. Initially detained by the French, Boschert had broken his spine some weeks prior under mysterious circumstances. The French, apparently done with him, had passed him on to the Americans, who had no particular use for him. On June 26, McKenna and Van Giessen left Rinteln and traveled by jeep, via Düsseldorf, to Karlsruhe. McKenna found the patient, shackled to his bed and lying in traction, reluctant to elaborate on his unfortunate accident but willing to discuss the murder of Flying Officer Cochran. His story followed the same plot laid down by Herberg and Preiss, although he claimed to have been keeping an eye on the car when the other two men walked Cochran into the woods.
“After about half a minute to a minute, I heard two shots from the direction the three men had taken,” Boschert said. “Herberg and Preiss came out of the woods carrying the dead body of the prisoner…and I saw that he had been shot through the heart and the back of the neck.” At the concentration camp, while Herberg haggled for a death certificate, a guard ordered two prisoners to remove the body from the car and carry it to a building on the other side of the compound. Boschert remembered “the building had a chimney like a crematorium…. I never saw the dead body again.”
McKenna had the Royal Army Medical Corps transport Boschert to a British internment camp near Paderborn. There he would remain until doctors deemed him fit enough for interrogation back in London. With a grim sense of satisfaction, McKenna watched medics load Boschert into the back of an ambulance and pull away. The men who had conveyed Cochran to his grave were now in custody—but the whereabouts of Josef Albert Andreas Gmeiner, their chief, remained unknown. The Americans had no leads to offer, and the Karlsruhe Gestapo had destroyed all their records prior to American forces reaching the city. The French, responding to McKenna’s inquiries, came forward and said they were holding Gmeiner in connection with wartime atrocities committed in Alsace Lorraine but were unwilling to turn him over to the British. Only after the RAF promised to hand him back should he be found not guilty in the Sagan case did the French release him into McKenna’s custody.
Transferred to the War Criminals Holding Center in Minden, Gmeiner portrayed himself as an unwilling participant in the crime. He said that a few days after the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III, a wired transmission came through to his office from Gestapo Gruppenführer Müller in Berlin. Reciting from memory, Gmeiner said the document read, in part:
By order of the Führer, Der Reichsführer SS, and chief of the German Police, has decreed that the English pilots who have escaped from the prisoner of war camp at Sagan are to be liquidated in case of their capture. The executions have to take place because the Englishmen, having escaped, have broken their word of honor! Therefore, it is lawful and necessary!
“Having received the order, it was impossible for me to prevent its execution, although I considered it a crime,” Gmeiner said. “My death sentence, at any rate, would have been the unavoidable consequence, and I could not have prevented or altered the fate of the unfortunate prisoner by sacrificing myself and my family. After my arrest, the prisoner would have been executed even before my own death sentence had been effected. There was nothing left for me but to abstain from taking part in the execution of the dreadful deed. To know of the order and not be able to prevent its execution causes me great and depressing spiritual distress.”
The war, Gmeiner said, had cost his family everything.
“I became a civil servant to earn at least a minimum living for the maintenance of my family,” he said. “Although my income was modest, my wife and I saved a few thousand Marks—denying ourselves all personal enjoyment—for the future of our three children. In April 1944, my wife had to flee with the children from Karlsbad, where we had our family dwelling. She could only take with her what she and the children had on their bodies.”
Gmeiner told McKenna everything his family owned had been destroyed. All he possessed were the clothes he currently wore.
“If in my forty-second year,” he said, “I have nothing before me after years of very hard work and doing without, and after the complete loss of the modest fruits of my work—and when my family is forced to live on the mercy of relatives—then it is only the thought that I have not to reproach myself for any guilt. I was forced to act as I did, which kept me from taking my life, as was done in a cowardly way by those responsible.”
Toward the end of July 1946, McKenna shipped Gmeiner—along with the other Natzweiler conspirators—off to the London Cage. McKenna forwarded the news to Wing Commander Bowes, who, in a progress report to his superiors in London dated August 6, 1946, wrote: “This case can now be regarded as completed.”