Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (29 page)

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:

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.