In the days following the mass breakout, the Gestapo delivered four urns to Stalag Luft III, each adorned with a single Roman numeral in place of a name and location of cremation. The consecutive numbering on the urns, I to IV, suggested that the four victims had died together. A method of elimination determined the urns most likely belonged to Squadron Leader James Catanach, Royal Australian Air Force; Pilot Officer Arnold Christensen, Royal New Zealand Air Force; and Lieutenants Hallada Espelid and Nils Fuglesang of the Royal Norwegian Air Force. No one knew their decided course of action after fleeing the tunnel. Indeed, a shroud of mystery obscured everything about the killings.
As a young boy, James Catanach charmed friends and family with his easy smile and relaxed humor. He enjoyed athletics and adventure, spending his summer vacations exploring the rugged brush of Victoria’s Mount Macedon and the volcanic terrain of Hanging Rock. It was a hunger for excitement that prompted him at eighteen to join the air force when war broke out in Europe. Before shipping off, Catanach gave his cousin a treasured family heirloom, a broken antique pocket watch. “Take care of it,” he said, “and I’ll fix it for you when I come home.”
He arrived in England in April 1941 after completing his flight training in Australia and Canada. Posted to No. 455 Squadron—the first Australian bomber squadron—he soon developed a reputation for his steel composure and brazen flying. It was not uncommon for his Hampden bomber to return from an operation ravaged by flak. On the night of March 13, 1942, Catanach and his crew took off for the killing skies over Cologne, Germany’s fourth-largest city, behind Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich. There was no moon as the 135 bombers winged their way across the North Sea. Catanach and his crew passed through the European coastal defenses without incident and turned on course for the final run to the target. The leading aircrews dropped green and red flares and incendiary bombs to adequately mark the target area. Searchlights canvassed the sky as Catanach steadied the Hampden on its attack run and followed the slight alterations to the course suggested by the bomb aimer in the nose of the aircraft.
Photographs of Lieutenants Hallada Espelid and Nils Fuglesang, Squadron Leader James Catanach, and Pilot Officer Arnold Christensen taken by the Kripo shortly after their arrest in Flensburg. BRITISH NATIONAL ARCHIVES: WO 235/431
Bombs finally gone, dropped into a sea of fire, Catanach turned the Hampden for home. As he put distance between his bomber and the target, a piece of flak punctured the Hampden’s nose and smashed its way into the cockpit, wounding Catanach and leaving him partially blinded. “Boys,” he said calmly into his mic, “I think we’d better be getting home now.” For his bravery and skill, Catanach was promoted to flight lieutenant less than one month later. In June, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and became, at the age of twenty, the youngest squadron leader in the RAAF. His squadron had by now transferred from Bomber to Coastal Command as a torpedo-bomber squadron. He and his crew spent two months training in their new role, patrolling the North Sea and attacking enemy shipping when the opportunity presented itself. In September 1942, the squadron flew to Murmansk in Russia on a special mission to target German warships preying on Allied Arctic convoys. The planes took off from Scotland on the night of September 4. Over Vadso, with only an hour flight time remaining, anti-aircraft fire struck Catanach’s Hampden, taking out an engine and puncturing a fuel tank.
Losing altitude, Catanach was forced to bring the bomber down on a flat expanse of open wilderness. The uninjured crew climbed out and encountered a group of soldiers dressed in white winter gear devoid of any military markings. It was just their misfortune that the men were members of a German patrol. Catanach and his crew, promptly captured, were shipped almost immediately to Germany. By September, the young Australian, still only twenty, found himself behind the wire in Stalag Luft III. Not long after his arrival, he met another twenty-year-old pilot, Pilot Officer Arnold Christensen of the Royal New Zealand Air Force.
Like Catanach, Christensen was eighteen when he joined the service. He earned his wings and commission in 1942 and arrived in Britain in March of that year. For one who had always loved learning, the island’s ancient architecture and monuments to history proved to be a source of endless fascination. He spent his first couple of months flying single-engine fighters with an operational training unit, before being posted to No. 26 Squadron. He hardly had time to settle into his new surroundings. On August 19, six days after his arrival on base, Christensen took off on a reconnaissance flight over Dieppe. It was his first operational flight against the enemy. More than six thousand soldiers—mostly Canadians supported by the Royal Navy—had stormed the Dieppe beaches that morning with the aim of temporarily seizing the port. Christensen and his wingman flew the last two sorties of the day and thundered low over the beach in their Mustangs to assess the field of battle. For twenty minutes they circled overhead while maneuvering through flak and small-arms fire from enemy troops below. Several rounds found their mark and struck both aircraft. The men turned their fighters for home, but Christensen’s wingman went down in the English Channel. Christensen struggled to maintain altitude—but to no avail. As the engine began stuttering and the nose dipped toward the water, Christensen bailed out. He landed in the Channel uninjured, inflated his emergency dinghy, and climbed aboard. He remained adrift for two days before washing ashore on the French coast, where German soldiers soon captured him. He then joined the ranks of other inmates at Stalag Luft III.
Christensen’s family was of Danish lineage. In captivity, he exchanged letters with loved ones in Denmark. When Roger Bushell’s X-Organization launched preparations for the mass breakout, Christensen joined the committee’s intelligence section. Its task was to gather information on all parts of Europe that might prove useful to escapees on the run. Christensen collected intelligence on Denmark. Gathering information for the committee on Norway was twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Hallada Espelid, who had escaped to England by boat when the Germans invaded his home country in April 1940. He joined the Royal Norwegian Air Force the following year and was flying Spitfires with No. 331 Squadron by 1942. On August 27 that year, while he was on a reconnaissance operation over Dunkirk, flak struck Espelid’s Spitfire and forced him down in the Pas de Calais. The Germans captured him as he staggered from the wreckage. After arriving at Stalag Luft III, he met Lieutenant Nils Fuglesang, a fellow countryman who had also fled to Britain in the war’s early days and wound up flying Spitfires for the Royal Norwegian Air Force.
Fuglesang’s war came to an end on May 2, 1943, while flying his eighty-fifth sortie. Over Flushing, he engaged a Focke-Wulf 190. The enemy aircraft charged Fuglesang’s Spitfire in a frontal attack. Cannon fire set Fuglesang’s machine ablaze. In the smoke-filled cockpit, he struggled only briefly with the controls before realizing the fighter was lost. He bailed out and came down in a field, not far from where a German Army unit happened to be training. Soldiers were soon marching him off at gunpoint.
McKenna charged Flight Lieutenant Lyon with the Kiel investigation, which commenced in earnest in September 1946. Lyon, accompanied by interpreter Van Giessen, arrived in the city with little to go on. No witnesses, no named suspects. From the Intelligence Division of the BAOR (British Army of the Rhine), Lyon had with him a copy of the Kiel Gestapo’s “battle order,” a comprehensive listing of names and ranks. A considerable number of those listed were already in camps scattered throughout the British Zone. It fell on Lyon to work his way through the list and identify those who had played a direct role in the killings.
On his first day, he stopped by the city’s crematorium and questioned the long-serving keeper. Arthur Schafer seemed not the least bit surprised when confronted by an officer in the dark dress blues of the Royal Air Force. He told Lyon four members of the local Gestapo had delivered four corpses to the crematorium one evening in late March 1944 and demanded they be destroyed. The agents refused to identify the victims, saying only that they were French spies arrested near Flensburg and shot while trying to escape. From his desk drawer, Schafer produced for Lyon a leather-bound volume and turned to a particular page. The date and time of the cremation were noted: 29 March 1944 at 18:30 hours. Three quarters of the way down the page, on consecutive lines, Schafer had penned the Roman numerals I through IV. Because the cremation of an individual without proper identification or police authorization was forbidden, a member of the town’s administration at the time had called the Gestapo in Berlin. An official on the phone told the town clerk that the Gestapo did not require permission to conduct its own business. The clerk hung up and dialed the local police. He was surprised when the police chief said he wanted nothing to do with the matter.
“The corpses were cremated,” Schafer said. “Two officials remained almost until the end of the cremation, and about one week later the urns were taken away by two Gestapo officials. The urns had no names, no dates, no cremation number, but only the figures from I to IV. I asked where the urns were going to be taken, and the officials told me they were to be sent to Berlin.”
“Did you know the officials who brought the bodies to you?” Lyon asked.
“No,” said Schafer. “I didn’t know their names, but I might be able to recognize them. Two were in civilian clothes and two were in uniform. The official who acted as chief wore four stars on his SS uniform, so he must have been a Sturmbannführer or an Obersturmbannführer. This man ordered everyone around.”
Schafer described an individual roughly five and a half feet tall, thirty-five years of age, a man of stocky—but powerful—build, with dark brown or blond hair atop a well-rounded face. Lyon made note of the specifics and asked Schafer if anything else came to mind. The keeper thought momentarily before remembering one final point. He said a Russian laborer working at the crematorium saw the bodies before they were consigned to the furnace. He whispered in Schafer’s ear that he believed the dead men, based on their dress, to be British Russian said he knew an officer of the Empire when he saw one.
Schafer gave Lyon the name of the local undertaker, who still lived in town. Wilhelm Tischendorf remembered the night in question and told Lyon two Gestapo officials stopped by his house that evening and said there were four bodies lying in a field outside Kiel, near the Rotenhahn Public House. One of the Gestapo agents, when asked, told Tischendorf the deceased were British airmen who had recently taken part in the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III. Tischendorf ordered two workers to retrieve the bodies and take them to the crematorium.
“I cannot remember the date and times very clearly because all my documents were destroyed during air attacks in August 1944,” he said. “I do know, however, that the bills for the transport and two coffin supports were paid by the Gestapo after several requests for payment.”
The following day, Lyon and Van Giessen drove to Flensburg. The road out of town took them past the Rotenhahn Public House and the site of execution. Lyon stared out at bucolic fields and sagging barns, at meandering hedgerows and dark woodlands. Had he been ignorant of this landscape’s recent history, he might have considered the scenery idyllic. Instead, he pondered his fellow officers facedown, bleeding out in the mud. They reached Flensburg in the late afternoon and sought out the headquarters of the local criminal police. Chief Paul Linke, head of police operations in Flensburg since 1927, ushered the two men into his office. He said all police departments throughout Germany received notification of the Sagan breakout on the afternoon of March 25, 1944. That night, four men—believed to be escapees—were arrested as they made their way through town. Linke said he personally interrogated the men, all of whom confessed to being British Air Force officers. The men willingly revealed their names, the time of their escape, and the route they had traveled once free of the camp.
“Concerning the escape proper, as well as the possession of false identity papers and the money they carried,” Linke said, “they refused to provide detailed information.”
The men were photographed and their personal details registered on an index card. Linke got up from his desk and walked to a large filing cabinet. He rifled through a drawer, pulled four cards from a folder, and handed them to Lyon. Each card bore a black-and-white mug shot in the top left-hand corner. A record number and name was typed alongside each photograph:
| 99/44 | Halder Espelid |
| 100/44 | Nils Fuglesang |
| 101/44 | James Catanach |
| 102/44 | Arnold Christensen |
“Where were they captured?” asked Lyon.
“In the built-up area of the town, in groups of two,” Linke said. “Espelid and Fuglesang were arrested on the Marienhelzungsweg, and Catanach and Christensen on the Helm. I cannot state the names of the persons who at that time arrested them. The records have since been destroyed.”
Berlin was duly notified of the arrests. Four days later, on March 29, Linke received word by telephone that the Gestapo would be taking the men into custody. Sturmbannführer Johannes Post of the Kiel Gestapo arrived at the police prison that afternoon, signed the necessary release papers, and squired the men away in a black sedan. Linke assumed the men were being returned to the camp. Not until later, when the killings hit the headlines, did he learn the truth.
Although Lyon now had a suspect to pursue—Johannes Post—the task of identifying the man’s associates remained. Over the weeks that followed, Lyon tracked down two women formerly employed as typists by the Kiel Gestapo who were present when the four RAF officers were interrogated. Both confirmed Post as having conducted the questioning, but they could not identify the other Gestapo agents in the room at the time. A canvassing of internment camps in the British Zone began. At a compound in Hemer, Lyon questioned Herman Clausen, a former officer with the Security Police in Kiel. Clausen said he knew that the local Gestapo had taken four RAF men into custody but did not learn their fate until after the war. From his former senior officer, interred in the same camp, Clausen learned that Post and another man named Oskar Schmidt had removed the prisoners from the police prison in Flensburg. Inmate Erich Mueller, who once oversaw matters of security involving foreign laborers for the Flensburg Gestapo, corroborated the story.
“Officially,” said Mueller, “I had nothing to do with the case, but I know that these four officers were taken away from Flensburg by members of the Kiel Gestapo a few days after their arrest. I have heard from comrades of mine that Post, Oskar Schmidt, Kriminalassistent Jacobs, and a few more Kiel officials carried out the transportation.”
Additional combing of the camps and inmate interviews yielded the names Hans Kaehler and Franz Schmidt. Two more men, Artur Denkmann and Wilhelm Struve, were identified as being the drivers who most likely chauffeured Post and his associates about. Four of the men—Kaehler, Jacobs, and Franz and Oskar Schmidt—were currently interred at the Allied prison camp in Neuengamme. On the afternoon of October 6, 1946, Lyon and a squad of armed RAF police officers showed up at the camp to take the men into custody. The officers retrieved the Germans from their barracks but did not disclose the reason for their arrests. The four men each glanced in Lyon’s direction and observed his RAF uniform as they climbed at gunpoint into the back of a military transport truck. With a grim expression, one prisoner turned to another and uttered, “Dies sieht schlecht aus” (“This looks bad”). The men were transferred to the holding pen in Minden, where interrogations immediately got under way.
During individual questioning, the suspects told Lyon that Kiel Gestapo chief Fritz Schmidt summoned them to his office on the afternoon of March 29, 1944, and read a teleprint from Berlin, demanding the four RAF officers recently captured in Flensburg be shot. The order was signed by Kaltenbrunner and Müller. The men were “sworn under penalty of death and degradation of their families to absolute secrecy about the whole affair.” The agents traveled to Flensburg to retrieve the prisoners. The RAF men were placed in two cars, driven to the killing field just outside of town, and gunned down. The bodies were placed side by side near a hedge and left there for the local undertaker’s men. That evening, they were taken to the Kiel crematorium and destroyed. Not until two weeks later did Walter Jacobs collect the urns and deliver them to the Flensburg Kripo for shipment to Sagan. Several months later, Fritz Schmidt summoned all participants to his office and warned them a Red Cross Commission would likely be investigating the incident. The gunmen returned to the crime scene to coordinate their stories and reconstruct the RAF officers’ alleged escape attempt. Near the end of the war, as the Allies advanced on Kiel, Schmidt and Post fled the city and vanished into the post-conflict chaos.
Only Franz Schmidt, when questioned by Lyon, confessed to actively participating in the murders. He stood several feet behind one of the RAF officers and put a bullet in the back of the man’s head. He knew the prisoners were British POWs when he pulled the trigger, but there were orders to obey. Lyon sent Schmidt back to his cell with a notepad and a pencil and told him to write a full statement. Shortly thereafter, a guard checking on the inmates made a gruesome discovery. Peering into cell no. 11, he saw Schmidt, the man’s shirt wrapped around his neck in a makeshift noose, hanging from a ventilation grate high in the wall. The notebook’s blank pages lay scattered beneath the man’s dangling feet. It appeared he had stood on a chair—the cell’s only furnishing besides a cot—knotted the other end of his shirt through the bars in the grate and kicked the chair out from underneath him. The guard fetched Lyon, who, cursing, ran to the cell, grabbed Schmidt by the legs, and tried to ease the tension in the noose. The guard produced a knife, cut through the shirt, and helped Lyon lower Schmidt to the floor. Lyon placed his fingers on Schmidt’s neck but felt no pulse. The prison doctor arrived with a large hypodermic needle in hand and plunged it through the chest bone, right into Schmidt’s heart. “Schlechter mann, schlechter mann”—(“Bad man, bad man”)—the doctor said to himself as he worked feverishly to revive the prisoner.
Lyon got to his feet and watched the doctor wage a losing battle. The color had already drained from Schmidt’s features. For several frantic minutes, the doctor remained hunched over the prisoner’s prostrate form, before surrendering to the inevitable. Franz Schmidt was dead. A disgusted Lyon left the cell and ordered guards to retrieve Oskar Schmidt and Jacobs for further interrogation. Both men, as they had done during the first round of questioning, claimed they couldn’t bring themselves to fire and stood a good six or seven yards back from the prisoners when Franz Schmidt and Post shot the men at point-blank range. Oskar Schmidt detailed how one of the fallen officers tried to get back on his feet, only to be shot in the head by Post. The following morning, Schmidt said, he was summoned to Chief Fritz Schmidt’s office and reprimanded for not following orders.
“He told me that he would merely believe I missed my target, such was his regard for my family,” Schmidt said. “He said he would accept such an excuse, otherwise he would have to report the matter to the SS Polizeigericht. I uttered my disgust about the shooting and Post’s behavior, but Schmidt interrupted by ordering me to leave his room.”
Sweating in the interrogation chair, Jacobs also played innocent. He, too, expressed his revulsion at Johannes Post’s brutality and the shooting of the wounded officer. He claimed to have been so disturbed by the callousness of the act that he turned his back on the whole bloody scene. He said he then heard Post shoot the remaining three RAF men in the head one last time for good measure.
“I wish to emphasize that I am willing to swear upon the fact that I myself did not shoot,” he said. “My conscience did not agree with the shooting at all, and I most definitely condemn it. I regret to have been obliged to take part in the shooting.”
Kaehler, however, said the two Schmidts and Jacobs—along with Post—were directly behind the RAF men with Walther pistols in their hands and willingly took part in the killings. Post, he said, took considerable pleasure in the act.
“All of the prisoners fell forward on the ground after the shots were fired,” Kaehler said. “Post noticed that one of the executed men, namely the one who, according to my memory, was lying on the extreme right of the group, still moved. Post shouted at me that I should fire a shot on this still-living man and, seeing my hesitation, took the carbine out of my hands and fired a bullet into the head of the prisoner. This shot made one single head wound from which blood and brain came protruding.”
For each interrogation, Lyon arranged on the table between himself and the prisoner photographs of the four murdered men. Kaehler pointed to the picture of James Catanach and told Lyon he specifically remembered the young airman because of his proficiency in German.
“I can just as well recall the prisoner Fuglesang,” said Kaehler, picking up another mug shot. “I remember him because of the gaudy woolen socks that he was wearing.”
He detailed attempts by the Kiel Gestapo to cover up the crime and thwart any ensuing investigation by the Red Cross. He concluded with a familiar refrain.
“I wish to finish this statement,” he said, “by emphasizing the fact that I myself did not fire one single shot from either the carbine issued to me or the duty pistol in my possession.”
Lyon made arrangements to transfer the men to the London Cage, where Lieutenant Scotland’s interrogation techniques would undoubtedly elicit full confessions. Before being shipped to Britain, Oskar Schmidt volunteered one final statement and conceded, perhaps to garner goodwill, that he may have fired one of the fatal shots.
“If Kaehler says that I shot, it is possible that in the shock of the moment I was not conscious of having done so,” Schmidt said. “I am, however, still of the opinion that I never shot.”
In the days that followed, Lyon tracked down the two drivers. Wilhelm Struve had returned to his hometown of Preetz after the war. Denkmann was confined by illness to a hospital bed in Kiel. Lyon placed an armed guard at his door until he was well enough to be transferred to Minden. Struve told Lyon he drove Oskar and Franz Schmidt, Jacobs, and three of the British officers to the killing field in a six-seat Adler. Denkmann drove Post, Kaehler, and Catanach in a Mercedes 231. Struve said he pulled in behind Post’s car at the intended spot and watched the two Schmidts and Jacobs escort the prisoners from his backseat into a meadow on the opposite side of the road. When the men disappeared behind a hedgerow, Struve drove his car a short distance down the road to stop passing traffic. As he opened his car door to get out, he heard the sound of gunfire. The shots seemed to occur simultaneously, resulting in “one loud detonation.” Struve drove back to the meadow. Oskar Schmidt approached the driver’s side window, pointed at the hedgerow, and said, “They are lying there.” A quick glance over the hedge revealed four bodies side by side in the damp grass. Post and Denkmann returned to Kiel, Struve said, while the others stayed put until the undertaker retrieved the corpses an hour later.
“On the return journey,” Struve said, “I learned from conversation in the car that Post had acted once again with particular brutality, for which he was already known. Apart from this, Oskar Schmidt mentioned that Post intended to go to the theater that same day.”
Lyon now turned his full attention to locating Post and Fritz Schmidt. A progress report on the Kiel investigation sent to the provost marshal of the Air Ministry on November 18, 1946, declared: “Sturmbannführer Schmidt and Kriminalkommissar Post, both men of very bad reputation, are still at liberty.… The evidence obtained as to the identity of the four officers, the manner in which they were murdered and the Gestapo officials responsible for the murders is conclusive. When Schmidt and Post are located, this particular angle to the case will be complete.” Lyon launched his manhunt in Hamburg. Winter had by now set in and pushed temperatures well below zero. All he had at his disposal for getting around Germany was a canvas-topped jeep, which he now took to, wrapped in multiple layers of clothing. “I believe this was the most-bitter winter of the century,” Lyon later noted. “Fuel for heating was almost non-existent, and the undernourished Germans were dying like flies. In Hamburg, the authorities constructed what they called heating halls where people could go to warm up. Between Christmas 1946 and March 1947, the temperature in Germany never rose above zero.” Lyon traversed the country in conditions he called “appalling” to pursue whatever leads came his way.
Temperatures in Germany dropped that winter to thirty below zero. The conditions proved fatal for roughly twelve thousand people who lacked food and shelter. Circumstances hardly improved for those with a roof over their heads: many had insufficient coal and fuel to heat their homes. “Whenever I think of the winter of 1946 to 1947,” one German would later write, “I always recall the glitter on the walls and in the interiors of houses, that I must have seen a hundred times in German homes and which resembled the sparkly sheen of the unpolished side of a granite block. It was the glitter of a wafer-thin layer of white frost, an icy blast of damp; the frozen moisture in the atmosphere created by men, sweat, coughing and breathing; men whose clothing was sometimes soaked through with snow, and who dried out slowly when they got home.”
Lyon’s hunt in these miserable conditions took him to Denmark, where he hoped to interview former Gestapo agents imprisoned in Aalborg, in the far north of the country. The trip almost proved his undoing. “I shall never forget that drive,” he wrote. “Although there was only one main road to Aalborg, it became almost untraceable. The snowstorm increased until it was something out of Scott of the Antarctic. The road was utterly deserted, and I do not remember passing or being passed by any other vehicle the whole way. The surrounding landscape appeared utterly desolate. The surface of the road was solid ice, and the snow was beginning to deepen on it. To top everything, well before the halfway mark, the windscreen wiper packed up and I was forced to lower the windscreen. The lights on the jeep were not too good, and it was extremely difficult to make out where the roadway ended and the ditches and fields at the side began. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Dickie, my boy, if you ditch this jeep, you’re bloody well going to freeze to death.’ ”
Lyon drove through the night with both hands clamped tightly on the wheel. Almost frozen to his core, he reached Aalborg after what seemed endless hours on the road. He visited several internment camps and interviewed a number of captured Gestapo officers, none of whom had any worthwhile information to share. Frustrated, before returning to Germany, he drove to Copenhagen. There, a policeman friend introduced Lyon to a young, blond actress of statuesque build and considerable charm. “After the rigors of the winter,” he later wrote, “and an accumulation of unclaimed leave, this meeting resulted in my return being delayed rather longer than had been originally scheduled.”
He arrived back in Germany several days later, adequately refreshed and ready to resume the hunt. At Neuengamme, he located a former Gestapo driver named Baumann who had traveled briefly with the two wanted men after the war. He told Lyon that Post and Schmidt, fleeing the advancing Allied armies, arrived in Flensburg on May 2, 1945, and used their contacts in the SS to land jobs with the German Customs Police. Post went to work under the alias Pohlmann; Schmidt went by Schmundt. The men were posted three days later to a customs office in Kappeln. They remained employed as customs officials for the better part of a month before deciding to move on. Each man possessed identity papers under his false name. They acquired a yellow Ford V-8 truck and drove to Hamburg, where they filed a movement order with local custom officials. According to the order, the men planned to travel to Itzehoe, roughly thirty miles northwest of Hamburg. They arrived in Itzehoe at three-thirty on the afternoon of June 12. Baumann, who had accompanied Schmidt and Post on their travels, now parted ways with the two men. He landed a job as a farm laborer just outside the town, where a war crimes unit eventually picked him up. From that point forward, the whereabouts of Post and Schmidt remained a mystery. Both men had mentioned their desire to use the Ford to establish a truck rental business in the Russian Zone.
Schmidt grew a mustache in an effort to avoid capture. He was thirty-eight, with a stocky build, thinning hair, and a wrinkled forehead. Although Baumann said he last saw Schmidt wearing the uniform of a customs official, he did possess civilian clothing, including a garish leather coat with a thick fur lining that often attracted stares from passersby. Schmidt, who prior to the war had been a lawyer, was single and had little family. His father was dead, but his mother was believed to be living near the Bodensee, a lake at the northern foot of the Alps. Baumann told Lyon her address could be obtained from one of Schmidt’s former shorthand typists, who lived in Kiel. Post, the same age as Schmidt, was more physically imposing: broad of shoulder, with a heavy walk more akin to stomping. He was married with three children, ages four to eight, but the union was not a happy one. Post had long enjoyed the company of Marianne Heidt, his shorthand typist from Gestapo headquarters in Kiel, and had little to do with his family. Baumann said there was still a chance Post maintained contact with his mistress. The woman’s father worked as an inspector with the War Damage Office in Kiel and lived at Hanastrasse 8. One of Heidt’s girlfriends also lived nearby. Either one of them, Baumann said, might know where to find her.
It was here Lyon’s hunt came to an end. In April 1947, his discharge orders came through and he was shipped back to England for demobilization, leaving McKenna to pick up the trail. Despite the information Baumann had passed along, the search for Post and Schmidt proved to be a frustrating one. McKenna, with armed backup, raided the house of Heidt’s parents. They were shaken, but cooperative, and said they hadn’t heard from their daughter in some time. They gave McKenna a snapshot of Marianne and Post on a skiing holiday in the Harz Mountains. The pair made for an attractive couple, fit and smiling, with snowcapped trees crowding the background. Also from the parents, McKenna obtained the addresses of those Heidt considered friends and acquaintances. In Kiel, the RAF stormed several houses and turned up correspondence that suggested Heidt might be found in the Wesermünde area. In Hamburg, McKenna interviewed Frau Inge Stege, Heidt’s cousin. Stege told McKenna that Heidt had spent three weeks at her house in August 1945 but left without providing a forwarding address. Three months later, a man showed up on Stege’s doorstep and inquired as to Heidt’s whereabouts. When McKenna asked Stege what this random caller looked like, she described a man who matched Johannes Post’s physical description. In the event Stege spoke with Heidt again, the man had left a mailing address: Kiel Post Office, Box no. Jo.P. Intrigued by the initials, McKenna contacted 91 Field Security Section, Kiel, and asked them to intercept anyone who accessed that particular box at the post office.
That night, McKenna studied the picture of Post and Heidt on their skiing holiday. He was struck by Post’s apparent normalcy: the hint of a smile, the relaxed posture of a man enjoying several days away from it all. It was a dichotomy he had encountered multiple times throughout the course of the investigation: how could someone capable of such barbarity be normal in other aspects of his life? It was a question that he, as a police officer, often pondered. Hitler’s executioners had wives and children; they expressed concern for their family and loved ones, yet displayed a total disregard for the fathers, brothers, and sons of others. How did one compartmentalize such differing mind-sets? McKenna knew he would never wrap his brain around it. As the war neared its end, the Nazi regime had only grown more barbaric, liquidating at a frantic rate those it deemed subhuman. The average German citizen was also made to suffer. War-weary Germans who did not display adequate enthusiasm for the Nazi cause, who expressed their lack of faith in final victory and refused to fight, were executed. Three months before the German surrender, Kaltenbrunner effectively gave all local police commanders free rein to murder. “From all police offices,” he wrote in a February 1945 order, “[I] expect the highest state of readiness, responsibility, robust action, no hesitation. Ruthlessly eliminate any defeatism in one’s own ranks with the harshest measures.” The German military was not immune to Nazi brutality. Fanatical SS men lingered behind the front lines and shot soldiers whom they believed to be deserting. In Berlin, where the Red Army was closing in, the SS made a public display of those it deemed defeatist, shooting such people in the street or hanging them from trees with signs around the necks of the deceased identifying them as cowards.
On the Western Front, following the Normandy invasion, there had been acts of barbarity that went far beyond the scope of traditional warfare. Indeed, along with the Sagan murders, the British were investigating a rash of war crimes perpetrated against Allied soldiers in France. Details had crossed McKenna’s desk as part of the routine information swap that such investigations entailed. One document listing various crimes made for disturbing reading:
June, 1944—A Canadian prisoner of war who was being marched through Caen saw the bodies of British soldiers lying in rows beside the road. He was informed by the Germans that all had been wounded and then tanks had been run over them to kill them. (Reported by the eye witness who subsequently escaped.)
June, 1944—A party of one Canadian officer, 23 Canadian other ranks and two British other ranks were shot at Chateau d’Audrieu by members of the 12th S.S. Reconnaissance Battalion of the 12th S.S. Panzer Division (Hitler Jugend). (The facts of this case have been established by a Court of Enquiry convened by Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force).
July, 1944—A British fighter pilot made a forced landing at Champs Rabats and broke his leg. He was found by a German officer who shouted at him, “You swine, you are still alive,” and shot him. (Reported by a German prisoner of war who was an eye witness.)
July, 1944—24 American soldiers in a crater were surrounded by S.S. troops. They were ordered by an S.S. officer to surrender and throw down their arms. This they did. The S.S. officer then shot all 24 himself. (Reported by a German prisoner of war who was an eye witness.)
August, 1944—A party of 8 prisoners of war from the S.A.S. Regiment were taken to a wood near Noailles by German soldiers in charge of two S.S. officers and one Gestapo official. Sentence of death was read out and the German escort opened fire. (Reported by two of these prisoners of war who escaped.)
How had so many succumbed to such murderous fanaticism? That was a question the investigation would never answer. Some of the men questioned by McKenna and his team said they only pulled the trigger to save their families from the torturous SS. Was this a valid excuse? McKenna did not believe that Emil Schulz, most likely to hang for killing Roger Bushell, was a monster. Nevertheless, he shot an unarmed man in the back of the head. A husband and father could not be faulted for wanting to protect his family, but that did not legitimize murder. So what alternative did that leave? It was an uncomfortable question.
Based on Baumann’s information, McKenna found Fritz Schmidt’s mother living in a small house near the Bodensee. The setting seemed a world removed from the shell-shocked cities and crowded internment camps McKenna had come to know so well over the previous months. Frau Maria Schmidt—“very old and and an imbecile”—smiled when McKenna mentioned her son’s name. She seemed to have no inkling of her son’s wartime activities and could only tell McKenna she had last seen him three weeks ago. She was unsure when he’d be home for another visit. McKenna—sitting in the woman’s living room, looking at the glistening mountain vista beyond the window—suspected Schmidt’s visits home were now a permanent thing of the past. He thanked the woman for her time and left. The search for Schmidt would continue for another two decades.
The weeks slowly passed without leads on Schmidt or Post. All the while, demobilization thinned the ranks of the investigation team. By May 1947, the RAF had one wing commander (Bowes), one squadron leader (McKenna), one warrant officer, and three Dutch interpreters assigned to the case. The investigation had now taken on a “spasmodic” quality, the result—McKenna explained in a progress report—“of information given to various officials in the countries visited, who, from time to time, obtain information on persons still wanted in connection with these murders.”
Indeed, the investigation appeared to be winding down. The RAF—since launching its inquiry in September 1945—had tracked down 329 suspects, twenty-three of whom were directly complicit in the Sagan murders. Two of those individuals—Seetzen and Franz Schmidt—were dead by their own hand, and one—Friedrich Kiowsky—was in Czech custody. Currently, twenty-one suspects sat in cells in London and Minden awaiting trial. The British, hoping to charge and try Scharpwinkel, were still negotiating his release with the Russians. Venediger of the Danzig Gestapo remained on the run, as did Munich Gestapo chief Schäfer. The hunt for Hans Ziegler, head of the Gestapo in Zlín, continued. His seventy-two-year-old mother was traced to a house at Katzmeyerstrasse 71 in Munich, where she lived with her daughter and three-year-old grandson. Flight Sergeant Daniel raided the premises but found no physical evidence suggesting Ziegler had been there recently. The mother and daughter were questioned in separate rooms, the younger woman making no secret of the hatred she felt toward her interrogators. If she had information, she refused to part with it. Her husband, a former Gestapo agent, now languished in an Allied internment camp. The mother tried to placate Daniel and his interpreter and told them she had last seen her son three weeks prior. Daniel asked his interpreter to speak with the grandson, who sat playing in another room under the eye of a military policeman. The boy, when questioned, said Ziegler had come to visit the previous Sunday—a mere four days ago. Ziegler’s mother said nothing when Daniel pressed her further. Where, Daniel asked, was her son? The woman insisted she didn’t know.
With no strong leads to go on, it was now a waiting game. McKenna spent his days working the phone and traveling to various internment camps to check on recent arrivals. On May 19, 1947, the commandant of the holding facility in Minden called McKenna and told him the North West Europe War Crimes Unit had just brought in a man named Johannes Pohlmann. A witness had recognized Pohlmann—working as “a haulage contractor” in the town of Celle—as Johannes Post. He was arrested “in connection with the murders of 300 people at the notorious A.E.L. Nordmark Concentration Camp” near Kiel. Formal charges had yet to be filed. The man was still insisting a case of mistaken identity had been made. McKenna traveled to Minden on May 21 to see the prisoner for himself. After checking in with the facility’s commandant, he walked to cell no. 4 and peered through a spy hole in the cell door. The prisoner was sitting on a small cot, staring in McKenna’s direction, his features haggard. McKenna pulled from his tunic the picture he had of Marianne Heidt and Johannes Post on their skiing holiday. True, the face was thinner—but the eyes and prominent chin left no doubt. He peered into the cell once more and knew the search for Johannes Post was at an end.
He placed an urgent call to the head of the North West Europe War Crimes Unit and obtained permission to interrogate the prisoner. A guard unlocked the cell door and stood watch as McKenna dropped the photograph on the man’s lap. Pohlmann hardly glanced at the image. “That’s me,” he said, neither surprised nor disturbed. “I am Post.” McKenna asked the guard to bring an interpreter to the cell. Post, his cover blown, freely admitted to knowing all about the Kiel murders and added with apparent pride that he was in command of the execution squad. McKenna listened as Post detailed the murders of Catanach, Espelid, Fuglesang, and Christensen. Post mentioned, with some amusement, how Catanach balked when told he would soon be shot, and Post described the young airman’s puzzlement when he realized Post had not been joking. “Why?” had been the last word Catanach uttered, according to Post, who shot him through the back without dignifying that simple and desperate question with a response. The bullet pierced the airman’s heart. Over the course of the investigation, other suspects had expressed—even if untrue—remorse for their actions. They acknowledged that their deeds were wrong. McKenna now sat looking at Post, waiting to hear some word of regret—but none was forthcoming.
“How could you do such a thing as this?” McKenna finally asked. “How could you be so inhuman?”
McKenna listened to the translator convey the question to Post.
“Inhuman! I was dealing with sub-humans,” Post spat, “yet I always gave them a full night’s warning before I shot them, so that they could prepare to meet their fate. For the glory of the Führer, I have killed any number of sub-humans. I have liquidated non-Aryans, gypsies, vagrants, Jews, and politically unreliables. The Führer has shown his appreciation by personally awarding me the highest political decoration in the realm. For the glory of the Führer, I only regret that I have not killed more. People like you. I wish I had had the chance to wipe out more people like you, who have left our cities in ruins and killed our women and children. These terror-fliers I disposed of were of no more good to the Reich than to all the other sub-humans whom I sent on their journey to Heaven for the glory of the Führer, who has presented me with the Order of the Blood.”
McKenna, his hunt all but over, left the cell sickened. The RAF charged Post with murder the following month, after the Nordmark case went nowhere. With Fritz Schmidt the only man wanted in connection with the Kiel murders, McKenna and Bowes considered the matter closed. On June 30, 1947, Bowes penned a report to SIB headquarters in London:
It has now been established where all [50] RAF officers were murdered and, in most cases, the names of the Gestapo officials involved. At Hamburg on the 1st July, 1947, the trial will commence of 18 accused Gestapo officials in connection with the murder of these officers. Two others have committed suicide following their arrest; the death of another has been definitely established; one has been executed by the Czech authorities and another is held in custody by them and will almost be certainly sentenced to death for war crimes against Czech nationals. One is still at the London Cage and Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, chief of the Gestapo at Breslau and organizer of the murder squad responsible for the death of 29 of those officers, is held by the Russians at Moscow. So far, all efforts to effect his transfer to British custody have been unsuccessful, but it is still possible that he will be handed over and stand trial for his part in these murders. In all, 25 actively concerned in the death of these officers have been accounted for.
Bowes read what he had written and made a few minor changes before adding the closing line: “This can be considered the final report on this case.”