Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (32 page)

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:

“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.”