There were thirty-eight men still being sought by the RAF. Throughout July and August 1947, McKenna met with occupation authorities in the American, British, and French zones, distributing more than ten thousand photographs of the wanted men. Among those still unaccounted for were former Munich Gestapo chief Dr. Oswald Schäfer and onetime head of the Zlín Gestapo Hans Ziegler. McKenna traced Schäfer’s wife to an address in the town of Braunfels. Lisalotte Schäfer told McKenna she had neither seen nor heard from her husband in two years and believed he was dead.
The photographs were disseminated throughout the Allied armies and agencies investigating Nazi atrocities. The U.S. Army published the photos in Rogue’s Gallery, a widely circulated sheet profiling those being sought for war crimes. The new wave of publicity led to Ziegler’s apprehension in late 1947. He was shipped to the London Cage to answer questions regarding the Kirby-Green and Kidder murders. On the night of February 3, 1948, a guard looking into Ziegler’s cell saw the man lying dead on the floor in a pool of blood. The tin dinner tray he used to slice his throat lay beside him.
Eighteen defendants in the Sagan case went on trial at the British Military Court in Hamburg on July 1, 1947. Presiding over the trial were a major general, three army officers, and three representatives of the Royal Air Force. Charges against all eighteen men were read into the record:
(i) “Committing a war crime in that they at diverse places in Germany and German-occupied territory, between 25 March, 1944, and 13 April, 1944, were concerned together with SS Gruppenführer Müller and SS Gruppenführer Nebe and other persons known and unknown, in the killing in violation of the laws and usages of war of prisoners of war who had escaped from Stalag Luft III.
(ii) Committing a war crime that they at diverse places in Germany and German-occupied territory, between 25 March, 1944, and 13 April, 1944, aided and abetted SS Gruppenführer Müller and SS Gruppenführer Nebe and each other and other persons known and unknown in carrying out orders, which were contrary to the laws and usages of war, namely, orders to kill prisoners of war who had escaped from Stalag Luft III.”
Additional charges of murder were leveled against the defendants for their role in the killings of individual POWs. Emil Schulz and Walter Breithaupt were charged with killing Squadron Leader Roger Bushell and Lieutenant Bernard Scheidhauer; Alfred Schimmel was charged with shooting Flight Lieutenant Anthony Hayter; Heinrich Boschert, Josef Gmeiner, Walter Herberg, and Otto Preiss were charged in the death of Flying Officer Dennis Cochran; Eduard Geith, Johann Schneider, and Emil Weil were charged in the shooting deaths of Lieutenants Johannes S. Gouws and Rupert J. Stevens; Walter Jacobs, Oskar Schmidt, and Wilhelm Struve faced murder charges in the deaths of Lieutenants Hans Espelid and Nils Fuglesang and Pilot Officer Arnold J. Christensen; Erich Zacharias was charged in the slayings of Flying Officer Gordon Kidder and Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green; Artur Denkmann, Hans Kaehler, and Johannes Post were charged with shooting Squadron Leader Catanach, Pilot Officer Christensen, and Lieutenants Espelid and Fuglesang.
The first two charges, faced by all defendants, were charges of conspiracy to commit murder. The chief defendant, Max Wielen—the former head of the Breslau Kripo who sounded the national alarm following the escape—was brought to trial on these charges alone and was not charged with participating in any particular killing. Wielen was the only Kripo official in the defendant’s dock; the other seventeen men represented six regional Gestapo offices. All eighteen defendants pleaded not guilty. The prosecution’s underlying argument was simple: “Owing to the Grossfahndung (the nation-wide search), notified to every police headquarters, all policemen in Germany must have known that prisoners of war were at large and that therefore the accused, being members of the Gestapo, could not be heard to say that they did not know the identity of the prisoners they went out to kill.”
The defense had a much tougher case, as it had to prove the defendants were unaware of their victims’ identities or the illegality of their actions. Lawyers representing Post wanted to call character witnesses who would testify that the ardent Nazi had once saved a British airman from an outraged mob. Post bluntly refused. “I could not have been a National Socialist for so many years,” he said, “and suddenly put in affidavits from Communists or Jews or freethinkers.” The main foundation of the defense’s case, however, was “the plea of superior orders”—orders the defendants were powerless to disobey. The defense argued that, “according to laws prevailing in Germany at the time of the offense,” orders issued by Hitler were legal; disobeying them was not. International law, however, deemed the following of such orders to be illegal. “International law,” defense attorneys proclaimed, “must not place the subject in an insoluble dilemma where he has only two possible courses of action, both of which are criminal, thus leaving him ‘no way out.’ In order to be able to say that a person has committed an offense, there must be an alternative course open to him, which does not constitute an offense.”
Post testified to this issue while on the stand.
“My attitude is quite clear,” he said. “If I received an order as I received it then—that is, if I had been told by order of the Führer four British prisoners are to be shot—this would be a violation of international law, but for the officer who carried it out it would be an entirely legal action. I will prove this. We live in an authoritarian state headed by a Leader, and there can be no doubt that an order given by an authoritarian Head of State is law.”
The argument lacked obvious merit in the eyes of the court. While it could be argued that countless Germans assumed what Hitler said to be law, there was no “statute or decree…to the effect that a spoken command of the Head of the State had legal force, or as some counsel suggested, replace the finding and sentence of a court of law.” Furthermore, the prosecution, in countering the plea of superior orders, cited the case of the Llandovery Castle, “a British hospital ship which was sunk by a submarine” during the First World War. The submarine’s commander, Lieutenant Helmut Patzig, ordered his men to kill all the survivors. Torpedoes sunk two of the ship’s three lifeboats and killed all on board. Patzig and two of his lieutenants were eventually arraigned on war crimes. Patzig fled Germany and escaped prosecution, but his two subordinates were tried and found guilty. “Patzig’s order does not free the accused of guilt,” said the Sagan prosecutor, quoting the court’s findings in 1918. He referenced the German Military Penal Code, which states that a subordinate who obeys an order he knows to be an “infringement of civil or military law” is “liable to punishment.”
Multiple other arguments put forward by the defense came up short, including one that stated only combatants—and not civilians—could commit war crimes. The prosecution countered by reading into the record an excerpt from chapter 14 of the Manual for Military Law: “The term ‘war crime’ is a technical expression for such an act of enemy soldiers and enemy civilians as may be visited by punishment or capture of the offenders.” Despite the shortfall of various defense arguments, the prosecution’s case wasn’t necessarily clear-cut, relying, as it was, “on the uncorroborated evidence of an accomplice or of accomplices and that one accused cannot corroborate another.” In short, the defendants could only be convicted on the corroborative statements of their onetime comrades if the court was convinced “that the evidence given was true.” The defendants took the stand in their own defense and expressed in their testimony everything from remorse to pride in their actions. The interrogation tactics employed at the London Cage were also put on trial. On the stand, Erich Zacharias claimed that he confessed to the killings of Thomas Kirby-Green and Gordon Kidder only after Lieutenant Colonel Scotland tortured him by shoving an electrical probe up his rectum.
Taking the stand to refute the defendant’s account, Scotland said he neither tortured Zacharias nor sought a murder confession from the man. What he wanted, he testified, was “information on Gestapo hot-iron methods of torture in Czechoslovakia.” Scotland said Flight Lieutenant Lyon had at one point visited the London Cage to interrogate Zacharias, something Scotland acquiesced to with a measure of reluctance. In questioning the prisoner, Lyon learned that Scotland had made Zacharias strip to the waist and kneel for hours on a cement floor. Beaten down, Zacharias confessed to murdering the two RAF men.
“I can only die once. I will tell you the truth,” he said. “The officers were murdered. I am sorry. They were handcuffed. They did not try to escape. The officers were killed under Ziegler’s orders.”
Now, on the stand, Scotland said he was angered by the confession.
“I did not want Lyon to be successful,” he said.
“Why not?” asked Frau Dr. Oehlert, defense counsel for Zacharias.
“I thought that the torture story was a very much more important one from Zacharias than a confession of shooting guilt,” Scotland said. “If I had a confession of shooting, I could not get a confession of torture.”
Oehlert grilled Scotland on the methods employed at the London Cage.
“Surely, as a British soldier,” she said, “you are familiar with the types of Army punishment?”
“The only army in which I have served for any length of time is the German Army,” Scotland testified. “I do not know the punishments in the British Army.”
“When were you a member of the German Army?”
“I served in the German Army from 1903 to 1907.”
“Have you ever heard of the punishment of cleaning up a room with a toothbrush?” Oehlert asked.
“It sounds very stupid,” said Scotland. “I have not heard of it.”
“I am very surprised that you, with four years’ service in the German Army, do not know anything about that,” said Oehlert, her tone incredulous. “Would you be astonished that my client alleges that such singular punishments were given in the London Cage?”
Scotland kept a straight face: “Yes.”
Oehlert told the court that Zacharias complained of being severely beaten on several occasions while at the London Cage. He also accused guards of denying him food for days at a time and depriving him of sleep. Oehlert asked Scotland if he cared to address the accusations. Scotland’s response lacked conviction. “If that were true,” he said, “he should have made a complaint and we would have done something about it.”
Other allegations of torture at the Cage put forward during the trial included incidents of hair pulling and electrocution. One defense lawyer accused Scotland of telling Nazi prisoners they would die at the end of a rope and their wives “would become common property” in Siberia. Scotland dismissed them all as “manufactured tales” and worried the accusations of torture would soon overshadow the trial and “the brutal fate of those fifty RAF officers.”
Zacharias, called once more to the stand, now said his confession at the Cage had been a lie—an attempt on his part to actually spare the reputation of the German people. Asked by his attorney to explain, he said, “I did not make this statement upon oath, so I did not regard it as too important. I left quite important facts out, of which the most important was the Sagan Order, the fact that the killings had to take place on higher orders, which I assumed to be Hitler.… Secondly, I felt that because of the interests of my own colleagues and because of the reputation of the whole German people, I really could not make such a damaging revelation as this reference to Hitler’s orders to kill the fifty.”
It was a creative, if not pathetic, defense; one destined for failure. As for Scotland, he would continue to defend his interrogation methods. “It was to be expected,” he later wrote, “that the world should be intrigued by the success with which we had persuaded substantial numbers of Nazis criminals not only to confess their role in murder plans, but also to write the detailed story of the events surrounding the crimes and the activities of their own colleagues.… But how was it all done? What were the secret methods employed to obtain such confessions? There was no mystery. It was no easy task, but there was no mystery. Consider the situation of our German guests at the London Cage.… They were eager enough to tell sufficient of their story to demonstrate their individual blamelessness. Many, however, committed the fatal error of underestimating our intimacy with German habits, personalities and language, as well as the facts of the Sagan outrages.”
While other defendants on the stand acknowledged taking part in the Sagan murders, they sought to justify their participation. Otto Preiss, who shot Dennis Cochran through the back of the head, said he did not consider himself guilty. He was only acting under the orders of a superior officer. Heinrich Boschert—also charged in the Cochran murder—said he never considered himself a typical Gestapo thug, despite the fact he always took pride in wearing his Gestapo uniform. The prosecutor questioning Boschert voiced his incredulity. “It is only when you lose the war,” he said, “that you become a timid little mouse.” Eduard Geith, of the Munich Gestapo, said depression had plagued him since he took part in the murders of Lieutenants Johannes Gouws and Rupert Stevens. Adopting a unique strategy, Albert Schimmel—the Strasbourg Gestapo chief who had Flight Lieutenant Anthony Hayter shot the day before Good Friday—played the religion card. Two church officials testified on his behalf, detailing for the court the man’s piousness and devotion to God. Indeed, on the stand, Schimmel said he spiritually struggled with his role in the crime and considered ignoring the orders from Berlin. He knew such an action, however, would be met with dire consequences.
“Why did you not carry out this killing yourself?” the judge advocate, presiding over the trial, asked Schimmel. “That would have made one less person in the secret, would it not?”
“No,” Schimmel said. “I could not do this.”
“And you salved your conscience by making another man do it, is that it?”
“The execution of this order,” said Schimmel, “was just as difficult for me as passing on the order to another official.”
While many of the defendants said they feared their families would be shot if they disobeyed orders, not one of them could ever recall hearing of an incident where the wife and children of a Gestapo officer were executed by the state. On September 3, 1947, the eighth anniversary of the outbreak of war, the court rendered its verdicts. Not surprisingly, all were found guilty. Wielen was the only defendant found guilty of the first two charges, mainly conspiring with Müller and Nebe in the planning of the fifty murders. The other seventeen defendants were found guilty of actually carrying out the killings. In determining the verdicts, the court pondered two questions: What role did the accused play in the actual shootings? And did they know the victims were prisoners of war? Standing in the dock, the defendants listened to the court pronounce their fates.
Emil Schulz, Walter Breithaupt, Alfred Schimmel, Josef Gmeiner, Walter Herberg, Otto Preiss, Emil Weil, Eduard Geith, Johann Schneider, Johannes Post, Hans Kaehler, Oskar Schmidt, Walter Jacobs, and Erich Zacharias were all sentenced to hang. Gestapo drivers Artur Denkmann and Wilhelm Struve received ten years imprisonment for their role in the Kiel murders. Heinrich Boschert was sentenced to hang for his involvement in the Dennis Cochran murder, but his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Max Wielen, for his involvement in planning and concealing the murders, received a life sentence.
On October 17, 1947, one month after the trial, Soviet authorities sent word to the British government that Dr. Wilhelm Scharpwinkel—the man who oversaw the murders of more than half the Sagan escapees—had died in a Moscow prison. Four months later, on February 27, 1948, at Hameln Gaol in Westfalia, on gallows built by the British Army’s Royal Engineers, the fourteen Sagan murderers went to their deaths at the end of a rope.
Ten months later, Breslau Gestapo officers Erwin Wieczorek and Richard Hansel went on trial for their involvement in the murders of twenty airmen. Also in the dock was Reinhold Bruchardt, onetime member of the Danzig Gestapo, who claimed a Ukrainian execution squad had murdered Flight Lieutenants Gordon Brettell, Romas Marcinkus, and Gilbert Walenn, and Flying Officer Henri Picard. Wieczorek was found guilty and sentenced to hang, but the verdict was later overturned based on the fact that he had not actually pulled a trigger. Hansel was acquitted. Bruchardt’s death sentence was later commuted to life in prison after the British government announced a temporary suspension of the death penalty. Eight years into his imprisonment, Bruchardt was released under general amnesty.
Kiel Gestapo member Johannes Post stands in the dock in a Hamburg courtroom during his murder trial. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang for murdering Lieutenants Hallada Espelid and Nils Fuglesang, Squadron Leader James Catanach, and Flying Officer Arnold Christensen.
Members of the upper Nazi hierarchy complicit in the Sagan killings who did not successfully go underground escaped justice via self-inflicted gunshot wounds and cyanide pills. In the case of Kripo Chief Arthur Nebe, he was executed by his own people. Himmler killed himself not long after British troops captured him in May 1945. Ernst Kaltenbrunner—Himmler’s deputy at the Central Security Office—and Wilhelm Keitel, head of Germany’s armed forces, were both tried and found guilty at Nuremberg. They were sentenced to death and went to the gallows on October 16, 1946. Hermann Göring, also scheduled to hang, poisoned himself the night before the execution.
Decommissioned out of the RAF, McKenna returned to England and his job at the Blackpool Borough Police on January 1, 1948. For their work on the Sagan case, McKenna and Wing Commander Bowes—who remained in the service—were awarded the Order of the British Empire. Four months later, in May 1948, the Russians sent word to the British government that Dr. Gunther Absalon, head of prisoner security in the Sagan region and participant in the Breslau murders, had died in a Soviet prison the previous October.
In September 1948, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin announced that the British government would no longer prosecute war crimes. Bowes wrote a letter to the provost marshal of the RAF, urging that those still being sought in connection with the Sagan murders be tried if captured. His efforts were in vain. Consequently, a number of Gestapo men wanted at one time by the RAF escaped justice. Munich Gestapo chief Dr. Oswald Schäfer came out of hiding in 1950 and never answered for the murders of Lieutenants Gouws and Stevens. Dr. Gunther Venediger of the Danzig Gestapo emerged from the Russian Zone in 1952. A German court acquitted him two years later on charges he murdered four RAF officers. Bowes fiercely pursued the matter, prompting a judicial review of the case. Venediger consequently received a two-year prison sentence. Likewise, Fritz Schmidt—the former Kiel Gestapo chief—eventually wound up in front of a German court in 1968, only to receive two years in prison for his role in the deaths of Squadron Leader Catanach, Pilot Officer Christensen, and Lieutenants Espelid and Fuglesang.
Although sentenced to life in prison, Max Wielen was released in October 1952 “by British authorities as an act of clemency.” He was sixty-nine and in failing health.
For McKenna, tracking down the killers had always been about justice—not revenge. It was an airman’s “duty to avoid capture” and his “duty to escape” should he ever be caught. After the war, McKenna expressed his thoughts on the matter, saying those who broke out of Stalag Luft III “didn’t see escaping as a sport—and when they used the word ‘duty,’ they did so with typical British reserve and a degree of embarrassment. Those murdered men were doing no more than what they accepted as being their duty, and it seemed to me—and the chaps working with me—that to be murdered in cold blood for doing one’s honorable duty as a serviceman must always be unacceptable to any decent human being. We saw it as being our duty to find the miscreants and thereafter bring them before a court of law.”
McKenna died at the age of eighty-seven on Valentine’s Day 1994, having never sought publicity for his pivotal role in the Great Escape story.
The work of the RAF’s Special Investigating Branch was nothing short of remarkable when one considers the conditions and circumstances under which it conducted the Sagan investigation. With no crime scene, physical evidence, or actual eyewitness accounts to the fifty murders, McKenna and his men launched their inquiry in utter darkness. They had every reason to fail and little prospect of success, but sheer determination and dogged detective work yielded results perhaps not even McKenna initially thought possible. The RAF ultimately identified seventy-two men who played an active role in the Great Escape murders. Of those seventy-two individuals, twenty-one went to the gallows, seventeen received prison sentences, six were killed in wartime, seven killed themselves, five defendants saw the charges against them dropped, three had their sentences eventually overturned, one turned material witness, and another remained free in East Germany.
Not all seventy-two men were fanatical Nazis brainwashed by Hitler’s deluded ambitions. Many were simple family men who returned home each evening to their wives and children. When questioned by McKenna and other RAF investigators, a good number expressed dismay over what they had been ordered to do. Even if such remorse was sincere, one cannot forget that for every airman gunned down alongside a desolate road, there were families in England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and a handful of other countries, left to suffer a grievous loss. In the end, justice adequately served those complicit in the killings.
In planning the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III, Roger Bushell hoped to “harass, confuse, and confound the enemy.” He achieved just that, if only for a short time. The Germans assigned one hundred thousand men to the Sagan search. Although any impact it may have had on the German war effort was negligible at best, the Great Escape was a symbolic victory—an act of outrageous defiance and a triumph of ingenuity. But was it worth the lives of fifty men? Perhaps that’s a question only those who took part in the event could have answered.
The stone memorial to the fallen fifty, as photographed by the RAF in 1946, built by inmates at Stalag Luft III shortly after the Great Escape. BRITISH NATIONAL ARCHIVES: AIR 40/2487
A part of Germany during the Second World War, Sagan today is in eastern Poland. It is still possible to visit the site of Stalag Luft III. Nature is slowly reclaiming the area. All that remain are the stone foundations of the barracks and other buildings that once comprised the camp. In 2010, the Royal Air Force built a replica of Hut 104—the barrack block from which tunnel “Harry” extended—near the camp site. Stretching from where the real hut once stood, a gravel pathway marks the length, width, and location of the actual tunnel. A large rock now sits at the spot where the seventy-six escapees emerged just shy of the tree line beyond the camp wire. A simple inscription on the rock reads, “Allied airmen, prisoners of Stalag Luft III, were Great Escape participants.” At the rock’s base, some visitors leave fresh flowers—vibrant life and color in an otherwise bleak landscape. It’s a fitting tribute to the men whose story will continue to touch both young and old for generations to come.