What the RAF knew of the Breslau murders came from postwar statements by escapees who had passed through the jail at Görlitz before being shipped back to Stalag Luft III. Thirty-five of the seventy-six men who fled through the tunnel found themselves, shortly after their recapture, in the civilian jail at Sagan. Instead of being returned to the camp as expected, they were driven to Görlitz—some sixty miles away—for interrogation at the local Gestapo headquarters. There, all the officers were questioned in regards to the escape. The interrogators, who wore civilian clothing, tried to scare information from the prisoners by threatening them with execution if they failed to answer specific questions.
On the morning of March 30, 1944, Flight Lieutenants S. A. “Dick” Churchill and R. A. Bethell heard cars pull up outside the jail. They peered through the barred window of their cell and saw three cars idling in the frost-covered courtyard below. “Ten civilians of the Gestapo type” emerged from the vehicles and entered the building. They reappeared several minutes later with six prisoners in tow, including Australian Flying Officer Al Hake, who had overseen the escape committee’s compass factory at Stalag Luft III. From their vantage point, Churchill and Bethell watched the Gestapo bundle the RAF men into the waiting cars and drive them away. Six urns arrived at Stalag Luft III several days later. A plate on each urn, dated March 31, identified the place of cremation as Görlitz. The Gestapo agents returned on the morning of March 31. Through their cell window, Churchill and Bethell saw a large, middle-aged man they recognized from the day before. One prisoner described this particular agent, who appeared to be in charge of the others, as having a “battered-looking, pugilistic type of face.” The Gestapo removed ten prisoners from the jail that morning. Shortly thereafter, ten urns—each stamped with a name, but no date—arrived at Stalag Luft III from the town of Liegnitz, fifty-five miles east of Görlitz.
The dead this time included Czech Flying Officer “Wally” Valenta, head of the escape committee’s intelligence section. “You will never escape again,” the airman had been informed upon recapture. Likewise, murdered Flight Lieutenant Cyril Swain was told he would be shot. Flying Officer A. Wlodzimierz Kolanowski, also among the dead, had appeared severely depressed following his questioning by the Gestapo. Survivors later remembered him sitting quietly in a corner, refusing to say what had transpired during his interrogation. Flight Lieutenant Brian Evans, also among the ill-fated group, had penned a letter to his fiancée just days earlier:
The rock marking the spot where the Great Escapers emerged from Harry and fled into the forest. The inscription, written in Polish, reads: “Allied airmen, prisoners of Stalag Luft III, were Great Escape participants.”
You know darling, I still haven’t got over the idea that we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together. We’re going to have even better times, too, than we’ve yet had. In one of your letters, you said you were going to spoil me when I get home. I’m very anxious to know how you’re going to spoil me. I think you deserve a lot of spoiling, too, dearest; in fact, I’ve got a terrific lot to repay to you. If it weren’t for your letters I don’t know what I’d do, for they’ve helped me tremendously, Joan. I’ve got such a lot of things to say to you, but somehow they just can’t be written; they wouldn’t make sense. In fact, I don’t think this letter reads too well. Hope you can understand what I mean. Letters are unsatisfactory things, aren’t they? Remember, I’m coming home soon to look after you, darling. Until then, remember that I’ll always love you.
On April 2, officers from the Luftwaffe showed up to escort four prisoners back to the camp. By whatever strange reasoning dictated who would live and who would die, Flight Lieutenants A. Keith Ogilvie, Alastair McDonald, Alfred Thompson, and Paul Royle were deemed worthy of survival. For the men still imprisoned in the Görlitz jail, each day became a torturous waiting game. “I remained at Görlitz for eleven or twelve days,” one survivor later told investigators. “From about 30 March, a guard would go into a different cell and call out names. These men would then be taken away, and we did not see them again. We thought that they were being taken out for further interrogation, and when they did not return, that they had been sent back to camp.”
Trench-coated Gestapo agents drove off with another six prisoners on April 6. Among them were Flight Lieutenants William Grisman and Harold Milford, who were told upon recapture that they would never see their wives again. Flight Lieutenant Alastair Gunn, placed in the back of a Gestapo sedan, was threatened with decapitation. The six urns that arrived at Stalag Luft III several days later bore plates indicating the bodies had been destroyed in Breslau, ninety-five miles east of Görlitz. The Luftwaffe returned another eight men, including Churchill and Bethell, to Sagan on April 6. One week later, the Gestapo picked up Flight Lieutenant James Long, the last of the Sagan escapees held at Görlitz. His ashes were shipped from Breslau and soon arrived at Stalag Luft III.
Solving the Breslau-Görlitz murders hinged on finding Dr. Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, head of the Breslau Gestapo. In October 1944, acting on the orders of his superiors in Berlin, Scharpwinkel assumed command of the Breslau Criminal Police. With the Red Army closing in, his mandate was to ensure that the local populace remained defiant to the end. He summoned his subordinates to a meeting shortly after taking control and told them “the work of the Gestapo is, at the moment, more important than that of the Criminal Police.” Present at the conference was Hans Schumacher, a senior police commander irked by Scharpwinkel’s presence. Breslau’s situation grew increasingly dire in the days and weeks that followed. Residents began fleeing the city en masse, as the sound of artillery fire crept ever closer. By the end of January, with the city well within range of Russian guns, Schumacher ordered all “ailing, elderly, and female members of the office” to evacuate Breslau. Only those deemed healthy enough to serve in uniform and carry out their policing duties stayed behind. That left forty officers to police a population of a hundred thousand.
Scharpwinkel studied the Russian positions on a map in his office. The closer the enemy advanced the more militant he became. In a tense meeting with Schumacher, Scharpwinkel demanded the remaining forty officers be relieved of their policing responsibilities and deployed in a fighting capacity. Schumacher resisted. The officers, he said, had no military training. Scharpwinkel again broached the matter several days later and announced the formation of his own military unit. Despite Schumacher’s protestations, he enlisted the forty police officers, agents from the Breslau Gestapo, and the elderly members of the Volkssturm (Home Guard), creating a mixed regiment of questionable fighting ability. Scharpwinkel, asserting his authority, placed sixty of the men under Schumacher’s command and charged him with preventing the Russians from infiltrating a sector of the city behind the front lines. Without enough ammunition or weapons to go around, the men were ill-equipped for the challenge. It was only a matter of days before Scharpwinkel reclaimed the majority of Schumacher’s men and stuck them in the front-line trenches.
An unrelieved seventy hours at the front saw the majority of men succumb to enemy fire and freezing temperatures. An outraged Schumacher confronted Scharpwinkel, only to be accused of cowardice and threatened with execution. Shortly thereafter, Schumacher fell ill with a kidney ailment and was removed from the front line. He never saw Scharpwinkel again.
Schumacher himself conveyed the details of those last desperate days in Breslau to British investigators following his apprehension in February 1946.
“I cannot imagine Scharpwinkel escaped from Breslau,” he told an interrogator at the London Cage. “If he is not already dead, he has probably acquired a pay book with a false name. It is also quite possible he is somewhere in Lower Silesia as a civilian.”
Although he claimed to know little of the Breslau murders, Schumacher was no innocent bystander. Prior to his transfer to the Criminal Police in February 1943, he had served with a police unit in Kiev and investigated “partisan activity, treason, serious cases of sabotage, and unauthorized possession of arms.” Individuals found guilty of such crimes were often shot. Schumacher assumed the role of executioner on more than one occasion. His unit shot anywhere from ten to thirty people a week. Killing was easy, he said, once you had been psychologically numbed to the atrocities on the Eastern Front.
“Frequently, mothers brought their own neglected children and asked for them to be destroyed,” he said. “This demand was always refused.”
To expedite the liquidation of Communist Party members, Berlin dispatched to Kiev a number of “gas lorries”—mobile gas chambers—with their own attendant staff.
“Death,” Schumacher said, “occurred instantaneously and was painless, as an accompanying chemist assured us.”
The search for an eyewitness to the Breslau murders eventually led McKenna’s team back to the U.S. Army internment camp in Moosburg. There, on May 20, 1946, RAF Flight Sergeant R. M. Daniel questioned the recently apprehended Max Richard Hansel, a former Kriminal Inspektor with the Görlitz Gestapo.
“I want you to tell me all you know of this matter, and as we are in possession of a great deal of information already, I would advise you not to attempt lying,” Daniel said. “Do you remember a Grossfahndung in March 1944 after the escape of a large number of British RAF officers from a prison camp in Eastern Germany?”
“Yes,” Hansel said. “They escaped from Sagan.”
“And how many officers were recaptured in and around Görlitz?”
“I do not know. I did not hear.”
“You do know,” Daniel shot back. “Some officers were brought into the Gestapo office at Görlitz. How many were there?”
“Six or seven,” Hansel conceded. “I first saw them when they were brought in from the jail in three cars guarded by about twelve men under the command of Dr. Scharpwinkel. I did not know any of the guards. They were from Breslau and may have been Kripo or Gestapo.”
“What time of day did they arrive?”
“I saw them about 19:30 hours, but I cannot remember the date.”
“What happened then?” Daniel asked.
“All the prisoners were taken into my office for interrogation,” Hansel said. “I was not there all the time, as I was sent out of the room, but I came in from time to time and I heard some of the questions asked.”
“Who carried out the interrogations if you did not?”
“Dr. Scharpwinkel,” Hansel replied. “He interrogated the men separately.”
Fourteen questions were put to each officer, starting with the basics: name, rank, place of birth, and civilian occupation. These questions the prisoners answered freely, but they fell silent when pressed on more sensitive matters. What targets had they bombed prior to being shot down? What squadron did they belong to? Scharpwinkel, and six of his men who sat in on the proceedings, grew visibly agitated whenever an airman failed to cooperate.
“Who are the persons responsible for organizing the escape?” Scharpwinkel asked each captive. Not one of the men answered. “What are the names of the other escapees?” Again, silence was the only response. Prisoners were stripped of all personal items and locked together in a room with an armed guard at the door. “Take care they don’t get away—otherwise something unpleasant will happen to you,” Scharpwinkel told the guard, “or something unpleasant will happen to them.”
Scharpwinkel turned to address Hansel and the other Gestapo men present, including one Hansel recognized as Kriminalobersekretär Lux. He motioned them into an office and closed the door. Taking up position behind the desk, he produced from his tunic a printed order from Berlin. The matter at hand, he said, was top secret (“geheime reichssache”). The prisoners were to be taken away and shot. The Gestapo men accepted the news without comment and began immediate arrangements to see the order through. The airmen were bundled into four black cars parked outside the offices at Augustastrasse 31. Shortly after one that afternoon, the vehicles pulled away in convoy, with Scharpwinkel in the lead. Hansel and his driver brought up the rear, with two prisoners in their backseat. They followed the autobahn past the town of Halbau and continued another eight kilometers before coming to a wood. Traffic was light, and only a few cars passed in the opposite direction. The wood grew thick on either side of the roadway. The lead car eventually pulled to the side of the road, and Scharpwinkel got out. The other vehicles followed suit. They had been traveling for two and a half hours.
“Scharpwinkel announced that a short break would be made here,” Hansel recalled. “The prisoners were to be sent up to the head of the column and guarded there. I directed the two prisoners from my truck to the front where the others were already standing. The guarding was done by Scharpwinkel’s staff, who were equipped with two submachine guns and in SS uniform. As far as I can remember, Kriminalobersekretär Lux had one of the submachine guns.”
Hansel returned to his car and ate a butter sandwich he’d packed for the journey. The prisoners milled about for several minutes under the watchful eye of their Gestapo guardians, waiting for some sort of order. Finally, Scharpwinkel motioned with his hand, indicating the prisoners were to be marshaled deeper into the woods. Hansel, still eating his sandwich, watched the men disappear among the trees. A machine gun clattered somewhere beyond the tree line. Several sharp cracks of a pistol followed in rapid succession. Hansel got out of the car and ran into the woods, where he found the Gestapo men standing over six bodies. The prisoners lay among the dead leaves, their corpses roughly fifteen inches apart. One of the Gestapo agents turned to Hansel and said the prisoners had tried to escape.
“Did you believe that?” Daniel asked.
“No,” Hansel said. “They would have been crazy to try to escape with men armed with machine pistols standing so close behind them. Their chance of getting away was so slight.”
Scharpwinkel observed the carnage and ordered Hansel, who was familiar with the local area, to drive to Halbau and telephone the undertaker in Görlitz. Hansel returned to the car and passed the orders along to his driver. It was four o’clock when they pulled away from the crime scene. It took the better part of two hours to get hold of the undertaker and tell him what had transpired. The undertaker, believing RAF officers had been shot while trying to escape, alerted the Görlitz crematorium.
Hansel and his driver returned to the woods to await the undertaker’s arrival. Scharpwinkel and most of his party had already departed. Only Lux and three other men remained to guard the bodies. At eight-thirty, two vans from the undertaker’s office pulled up to the scene. Three bodies were placed in the back of each vehicle and taken away to be destroyed. Hansel retrieved the ashes from the Görlitz crematorium three days later and brought them to Scharpwinkel in Breslau.
“Who paid the cost of the cremations?” Daniel asked.
“The Breslau office,” Hansel said.
Two or three weeks later, Hansel told Daniel, Scharpwinkel summoned him and the other participants to a meeting at the crime scene to coordinate their cover stories. Scharpwinkel told those gathered that the Swiss government had informed London of the killings.
“I wish only that Scharpwinkel may be captured and have his just punishment meted out to him,” said Hansel, his tone spiteful. “What he has done to us old officials cannot be made good again.”
The same month Hansel detailed what he knew about the Breslau murders, Flight Lieutenant Harold Harrison joined McKenna’s team and quickly decided postwar Germany was an inhospitable place. Unlike other members of the team, Harrison was not a policeman by training. He had learned his investigative skills, including the art of interrogation, on the job. Questioning captured members of the Gestapo left him disturbed, repulsed by what he considered to be their arrogance even under the heel of utter defeat. Germany was a nightmare of ruin and desperation, and he knew he had played a small role in rendering it as such. Dropping bombs had not caused him any great pleasure, though he did enjoy flying and took solace in the fact that Bomber Command’s actions were justified. It was a point disputed by the Gestapo men he questioned. When Harrison asked how they could mercilessly kill another human being without so much as looking them in the eye, the Gestapo men would invariably ask how Harrison could do the same thing. He discovered that normal civilians harbored similar resentments toward British aircrews. “People would recognize my aircrew brevet and say: ‘You must have been on that fire-bomb raid on X or Y. My wife, or my kid, was killed there.’ I learned in the end not to start the arid argument that I had killed on the field of combat and they performed cold-blooded murders. The answer always was: ‘We were both acting under orders.’ I could only wrap the answer up in the beautiful German word vielleicht: ‘Perhaps…take out of it what you will.’ ”
Harrison learned that traveling about Germany could be a hazardous undertaking. Driving one night, he was startled by a muzzle flash just beyond the trees along the edge of the road. Bullets hammered the side of his jeep but fortunately caused Harrison no harm. Whether it was a deliberate attack against a British airman or simply a random assault, he never found out. Highway banditry was not an uncommon occurrence. “One was shot at,” he later recalled, “bricks were thrown and bottles broken on the road.” All RAF jeeps in Germany were equipped with a wire cutter—two sharp pieces of angled iron—that sat atop the front of the vehicle like a hood ornament. Unknown culprits had taken to stringing razor wire across the roadways. Such a trap had almost decapitated McKenna while he drove back to base one night. Only the glint of the wire in his headlights saved him at the last possible second from a grisly death. For Harrison, who “tended to look on life as something to be enjoyed,” postwar Germany “was a completely depressing experience.”
While the newest member of the team acclimated himself to his new surroundings, the Breslau investigation moved slowly forward. There could be no closure to the inquiry, however, without locating Dr. Wilhelm Scharpwinkel. Since McKenna’s arrival in Germany the year before, the former head of the Breslau Gestapo had been one of the RAF’s most wanted. All McKenna and his men had to go on was rumor and hearsay. No one knew for sure if the man was even still alive. A former fingerprint technician with the Breslau Gestapo, questioned by McKenna’s men in early 1946, said he had heard that the Russians had hanged Scharpwinkel. Another survivor of the Breslau siege told Allied investigators the Russians had arrested Scharpwinkel but not killed him. All efforts by the RAF to take the search into the Russian Zone of Occupation had thus far failed. Letters requesting permission had either been denied or ignored. The British attempted to curry favor with Soviet authorities by handing over, in early 1946, “three Germans accused of war crimes against Soviet nationals.” Arrangements were also being made to transfer into Russian custody a “large number of Germans suspected of war crimes against Soviet citizens in Norway, together with all available evidence, which they (British investigators) have been at great pains to collect.”
Even if permission was eventually granted, dispatching an investigation team to the Soviet sector presented considerable problems, namely in the organizing of food supplies, quarters, and fuel.
Although the search for Scharpwinkel proved to be frustrating, news from the American Zone in early December shed light on the fate of Arthur Nebe, the top man sought by the RAF. The onetime Kripo chief, responsible for compiling the Sagan execution list, was indeed dead. Although fond of Hitler when he first came to power in 1933, Nebe soon grew disillusioned with the Führer’s tyrannical behavior. Nebe initially kept his doubts to himself, fearing the consequences should he speak out—but his discontent grew as the Nazis systematically liquidated their political rivals. In 1936, his feelings still a secret, Nebe was appointed national head of the Kripo. Two years later saw the formation of the Central Security Office, which brought Germany’s policing and security agencies under one roof and the overall command of Heinrich Himmler. The Kripo was made Department V of the new security organization, and the Gestapo Department IV. Nebe did not like working in close proximity to Himmler, whom he considered a contemptuous little man. He now began to voice his misgivings to a close circle of confederates and expressed his desire to resign. They urged him to stay on, however, and argued he was ideally placed to monitor Himmler’s activities and catalogue the atrocities carried out in the name of National Socialism. He remained at his post, performing his duties, including designating who from among the recaptured Sagan prisoners would be shot. Four months later, in July 1944, he actively took part in the bomb plot to kill Hitler and was tasked with assassinating Himmler. When the plot proved a failure, Nebe fled Berlin and faked his suicide on the shore of Wannsee Lake, leaving a suitcase full of his possessions at the water’s edge. The ruse failed, and he was soon arrested and tried. He met his end in March 1945, hanged by piano wire from a meat hook in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison.
McKenna could now cross the top man off his list, but it brought him little satisfaction. Although he had paid a price, Nebe would never answer for his complicity in the killings. McKenna wondered what Nebe would have said; what argument would he have put forward as his defense? Why would a man who supposedly opposed Hitler play a role in such an atrocity? McKenna knew from various British Intelligence assessments that Nebe had bloodied his hands before the Sagan murders. Between 1941 and 1942, he commanded Einsatzgruppen B, an SS death squad in occupied Russia—one of four such squads operating in Eastern Europe. Under Nebe’s leadership, Einsatzgruppen B slaughtered 46,000 Jews, Gypsies, and others deemed undesirable by the Reich. How would Nebe have explained this apparent dichotomy?
On another investigative front, the search continued for Gestapo Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, last seen alive in Hitler’s bunker. Flight Sergeant Daniel tracked down the brother of Müller’s onetime secretary Babette Helmut. The brother said his sister had voluntarily surrendered and was now in American custody. It would do no good questioning her, he said, for she knew nothing of Müller’s whereabouts. He instead told Daniel to speak with Müller’s sister, who ran into the wanted man’s wife after the war. Frau Müller said her husband had killed himself as the Red Army fought its way into Berlin. Helmut’s brother gave Daniel Frau Müller’s address, a street in the Munich suburb of Pasing. Upon driving there, Daniel discovered that the brother had slipped him a fake address. He eventually tracked the woman down to a small house she shared with her mother. Taking into account the reputation of Frau Müller’s husband, Daniel showed up at the house with a heavily armed police contingent and raided the premises. They found no evidence of Heinrich. The man’s wife seemed hardly concerned with the true nature of his fate. She told Daniel her marriage had not been a happy one and that she took little interest in her husband’s business. She had fled Berlin in February 1945 to escape the advancing Red Army. One month later, her husband paid her a brief visit. That was the last time the two had seen each other. Just recently, she said, her father-in-law had received a letter from a woman purporting to be Müller’s mistress, claiming the man had killed himself. Frau Müller identified the woman as Anny Schmid and said she lived at Schützenstrasse 4, apartment 3, in the Berlin borough of Steglitz. She also gave Daniel the address of Müller’s father, Kolonie 2, Rembrandtstrasse 22, Pasing. That, she said, was all the information she had to give.
Daniel left and went to see the father. A search of the house turned up nothing. Müller’s nineteen-year-old son, Reinhardt, a Wehrmacht veteran who saw action in the war’s final months, now lived with his grandparents. He told Daniel the Americans had imprisoned him at the end of the war. Once they had established that he held no fanatical points of view and was not a threat to the public, they let him go. Like his mother, Reinhardt said he last saw his father in Berlin three months before the capitulation. In early May, a letter from Heinrich arrived postmarked April 28. The letter, the son said, had since been lost. Daniel, through his interpreter, asked Müller senior for the letter he had received from Frau Schmid. The man complied with Daniel’s request—but only after some hesitation. As Daniel listened to his interpreter read the letter aloud, he understood why:
My relations have told me of your visits and your nosey questions. During all my thirty-two years, I have never known such a cheek. It is a shame that Heinrich is dead to have to undergo such experiences. H. would be very angry if he knew of your present conduct.
However, I have no wish to quarrel with you, only to give a clear statement of fact. You will forgive me if I do not go into the details of H.’s awful last days…because my attitude to you has changed after your recent behavior. I only hope your wife knows nothing of your shady activities. I want to at least keep my faith in H.’s dear loving mother.
You are very curious about his bank account and my allowance.
I could afford to pay for my own holidays and for his leaves as well. As for my fur coats—what are insinuating about my fur coats? I still have the receipts in my possession. The same goes for all your other insinuations.
The whole of the private property including furniture, bank account, etc., were confiscated by the State. What [Heinrich] and I intended to keep after the Russian occupation were one carpet and two photographs, which I wanted to keep as a souvenir, and later as a keepsake for Reinhardt.
As for your fairy tales about your poor wife having to go out as a washerwoman, find somebody else to tell them to. You must think that my relations and I were born stupid. Even if your wife does have to set her hand to earning a living, she has been doing for only one year what I have been doing all my life. Perhaps you will bear that in mind, Herr Müller.
In the same letter, Schmid addressed Müller’s mother and offered condolences for the loss of her son. “We were together until the very last moments of his life,” she wrote, implying she had been there when Müller killed himself. Daniel, impressed by Schmid’s moxie, ordered continuous surveillance on the woman’s flat but decided not to confront her personally. If her reference to Müller’s death was a ploy to throw off Allied authorities, Daniel doubted she would confess to such a thing under interrogation.
While the hunt for Müller stalled, McKenna could at least find solace in crossing another high-profile name of the RAF’s most wanted list. On June 14, 1946, the Russians finally confirmed that they had Scharpwinkel. Negotiations now began to schedule an interrogation. The British, wanting “an expert” to handle the questioning, assigned the task to Captain M. S. Cornish of the Intelligence Corps, an interrogator at the London Cage. In late June, the Ministry of Armed Forces of the USSR agreed to grant Cornish access. Cornish now scrambled to get himself a last-minute visa for the trip and debated what to wear. On July 2, the Foreign Office sent a cipher to its Moscow representative asking, “Should Captain C. wear mufti or uniform?” The first interrogation took place on August 31, in a sparsely furnished room in the Building of the Procurator of the Soviet Union in Moscow. Four German-and-English-speaking Russian officers watched the proceedings. Scharpwinkel, tall and gaunt, his body bent and his hair thin and gray, sat shackled at a long table. In a corner of the room, a secretary readied herself at a typewriter. The Russians told Cornish that prisoner intimidation would not be allowed due to Scharpwinkel’s fragile health.
Scharpwinkel spoke matter-of-factly and told Cornish he had placed Lux in command of the Breslau murder squad. He also named two other men—Knappe and Kiske—and said that they, along with Lux, assumed the role of gunmen. He implicated Max Wielen, claiming the onetime Breslau Kripo chief was disappointed that the Gestapo—and not the Kripo—had been charged with executing recaptured prisoners. Cornish sent the information back to Lieutenant Colonel Scotland at the London Cage, where the sixty-four-year-old Wielen currently awaited trial. Scotland took the signed statement to Wielen, who had never come fully clean as to his role in the Breslau murders. Scotland hoped Wielen, faced with Scharpwinkel’s allegations, would “come across with some admission about his own activities.” Wielen read the statement and angrily cast it aside.
“It’s a damn swindle,” Wielen screamed, “it’s lies, all of it! You have fabricated this to put me in an awkward position.”
“Look at the signature, Wielen,” Scotland said. “See for yourself. That story has been written and signed by Scharpwinkel.”
“I don’t believe you,” Wielen said. “The whole thing is a swindle.”
Scotland, fighting to maintain his composure, leaned across the table.
“If you were not the old man that you are, Wielen, and if I were not the old man that I am,” he said, “I’d give you a punch on the nose for suggesting I’m swindling you.”
The Russians allowed Cornish to interrogate Scharpwinkel twice. The second interrogation took place on September 19.
“I believe,” said Scharpwinkel, “that in my district twenty-seven shootings took place.”
Shortly after the escape, an order from Berlin had reached Scharpwinkel’s office stipulating that six of the British officers recaptured in the Breslau area were to be shot. Lux, said Scharpwinkel, retrieved prisoners from the Görlitz jail “in order to carry out his mission.”
“The first six were shot in the neighborhood of Görlitz, the others, I cannot say for certain, in the region of Liegnitz or Breslau,” Scharpwinkel said. “After each shooting, Lux reported to me that the order had been carried out. He told me also the approximate locality of the shooting. At the same time, he laid before me the teleprint destined for Berlin, which went out as Top Secret as directed and which only I was allowed to sign. It contained only the following text: ‘The British PW (followed by name) was shot at ______ hours, near (followed by name of locality) while again attempting to escape.’ Further details did not interest me, particularly as they were not explicitly asked for from Berlin. Other important work of a police nature prevented me from asking Lux for detailed particulars.”
Scharpwinkel said he played observer only to the first six shootings.
“My driver was Schröder,” he told Cornish. “The British were brought to the headquarters. As I speak English, I put one or two questions to the prisoners while they were being interrogated: were they married? had they children? etc. Lux explained to the prisoners that by order of the Supreme Military Commander they had been sentenced to death. Then we drove away. When the Reichsautobahn was reached the summary shootings were carried out. Everybody got out. The prisoners were placed in position. It was revealed to them that the sentence was about to be carried out. The prisoners showed considerable calm, which surprised me very much. The six prisoners stood next to one another in the wood. Lux gave the order to fire and the detachment fired. Lux shot with them. By the second salvo, the prisoners were dead.”
Based on information provided by airmen imprisoned in Görlitz after the escape, Cornish knew that the first six men shot were Flying Officers Al Hake and Porokuro Patapu “Johnny” Pohe, Squadron Leader Ian Cross, and Flight Lieutenants Mike Casey, Thomas Leigh, and George Wiley.
“As regards my activities and those of all the accused of my HQ, I should like to say I hope that whoever is judging the matter will take into account the condition in Germany, and the fact that soldiers and officials in Germany who had taken the oath had to obey every order,” Scharpwinkel said. “Non-compliance would have resulted in court-martial proceedings.”
Negotiations began immediately to transfer Scharpwinkel into British custody. If Scharpwinkel was not brought to trial, it would be impossible for the RAF to “account for the murder of 29 out of the 50 British officers concerned.” The British, in a show of good faith, turned over to the Russians forty-three Germans formerly employed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, twenty-three of whom “held positions of importance on the camp staff.” Established in 1936 some twenty-one miles north of Berlin, the camp was a training facility for SS officers who went on to serve at other camps. It was “intended to set a standard for other concentration camps, both in its design and the treatment of prisoners.” Thousands of Red Army prisoners ended up in Sachsenhausen. Of the thirty thousand inmates who died of disease, starvation, and execution, the majority were Russians. Two days before Soviet forces liberated Sachsenhausen on April 22, 1945, thirty-three thousand inmates vacated the camp on a forced march to the northeast. The guards shot those who, weakened by malnutrition and barbaric mistreatment, collapsed. Most prisoners did not survive. The camp now lay in the Russian Zone of Occupation and was being used as an internment facility by the NKVD, who showed little mercy to those under their charge.
After three months of bureaucratic back-and-forth, Soviet authorities informed the British government they could have Scharpwinkel if they tracked down “the former Counselor of the German Embassy in Moscow, Von Walter Hephart, and Engineer Lieutenant Gershkov Michael Vasilievich, who…committed a serious crime in the Soviet Union.” The Russians refused to elaborate on the nature of the crime. Unwilling to hand the two men over on the basis of such a vague accusation, the British turned down the Soviet request. Consequently, negotiations to extradite Scharpwinkel stalled. The Soviets held on to their prisoner, much to McKenna’s frustration. Following his statements to Cornish, Scharpwinkel was hospitalized with pneumonia and pleurisy. It seemed the man would never answer for his crimes—at least not in a British court.
Nothing about the Breslau case was straightforward. Scharpwinkel, in his statement, said he was present only at the execution of the first six prisoners taken from the Görlitz jail. The RAF tracked down Scharpwinkel’s deputy, SS Officer Erwin Wieczorek, whose scarred upper lip twitched when he spoke. He told investigators he remembered Scharpwinkel being present at the shooting deaths of Pilot Officer Sortiros “Nick” Skanziklas and Flight Lieutenants Antoni Kiewnarski and James Wernham. He said Lux and Scharpwinkel retrieved the men from a prison in Hirschberg. The party traveled in four cars, with Scharpwinkel and his driver taking the lead. Although he could not remember the date, he recalled it was an evening in late March, sometime after six. As they drove along a forested road, Scharpwinkel’s car came to a slow stop in the middle of the lane. Wieczorek, in his car, watched Scharpwinkel’s driver exit the lead vehicle and check under the hood. Scharpwinkel also got out and said they were having engine trouble. He ordered everyone out of the cars and demanded that the prisoners stand between the second and third vehicles in the convoy. Wieczorek wandered up to Scharpwinkel’s car, where the driver still toiled beneath the hood. In a quiet tone, he told Wieczorek that Scharpwinkel had instructed him to stage the breakdown. The driver pretended to work on the engine for another ten minutes or so, as Wieczorek watched over his shoulder. The sound of screaming and machine-gun fire startled Wieczorek and drew his attention down the line of cars. The glare of headlights made it hard to see what was happening. He and the driver ran to where the shots had been fired and witnessed a scene of pandemonium.
“The officials were running around excitedly,” Wieczorek said. “I saw a number of officials running around on the field adjoining the road, and they were shining torches on dark shadows which were lying in the field. The last car turned round and set off at great speed towards Hirschberg. I heard somebody report to Scharpwinkel, ‘They are all dead.’ ”
Wieczorek was taken into British custody and charged with complicity in the killings. His capture proved only a small victory. The Russian refusal to hand over Scharpwinkel was not McKenna’s only frustration with the Breslau investigation. Most of the gunmen—identified by Scharpwinkel in his statements to Cornish—were dead, killed in battle during the final days of the war. Information reached McKenna via an informant that one executioner, a man named Laeufer, had committed suicide. McKenna was skeptical. Through an associate who last saw Laeufer two days before the German surrender, McKenna learned that the man was eager to reunite with his wife and child. Laeufer’s wife lived in Berchtesgaden and said that the last she had heard, her husband was making his way home. In the event, Laeufer never showed up and was now presumed to be hiding under a false name. Even more frustrating for McKenna was the death of Kriminalobersekretär Lux, the chief executioner. Two eyewitnesses traced by McKenna’s team confirmed that Lux had died fighting in Scharpwinkel’s unit in Breslau. McKenna was bitterly disappointed. More than half the Sagan escapees had died at the hands of men who would never answer for their deeds.
Four years after the event, the RAF tracked down Scharpwinkel’s driver, Robert Schröder, who said his superior witnessed the shooting of the ten officers taken from the Görlitz jail on March 31. The prisoners—Flight Lieutenants Edgar Humphreys, George McGill, Cyril Swain, Charles Hall, Patrick Langford, and Brian Evans, and Flying Officers “Wally” Valenta, A. Kolanowski, Robert Stewart, and Henry Birkland—were loaded into the back of a military transport truck. On the Sagan road, halfway to the camp, the truck pulled over so the men could relieve themselves. The weather that night was frigid. Scharpwinkel, riding with Schröder in the lead vehicle, got out of the car and walked to where the officers stood on the shoulder of the road, stomping their feet in an effort to keep warm. Dr. Gunther Absalon and Lux, armed with machine guns, stood nearby with their weapons at the ready. “The lorry stood forty meters behind me,” Schröder said. “I was sitting alone in the car when I suddenly heard shouts followed immediately by a mad firing of machine pistols. I jumped out of the car and ran to the rear. Behind the lorry lay the prisoners scattered on the ground. Some of them were right on the road, others were on a slope nearby, but they were all close together. When I had asked one of the officials what had happened, he said that some of the fellows had tried to escape and that they had all caught it.”
Schröder’s statement confirmed the RAF’s long-held suspicion that Absalon “not only investigated the escape from Stalag Luft III but had participated in the shootings.”
By the end of 1946, McKenna and his team had yet to nail down any solid leads on Absalon’s whereabouts. If alive, he most likely had a new identity and corresponding papers.