Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (4 page)

The order charged the
Kripo
with apprehending the Sagan fugitives and selecting who, upon recapture, would be handed over to the Gestapo. Kaltenbrunner delegated the logistics to his two immediate subordinates, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller and General Arthur Nebe, national head of the
Kripo
.

The same day the Sagan order went out, Nebe summoned SS
Obersturmbannführer
Max Wielen, head of the Kripo in Breslau and the man who sounded the national alarm after the escape, to his Berlin office. Wielen arrived by car at eight-thirty that evening and was ushered in to see his superior. Nebe occupied a ground-floor office at Central Security headquarters. Damage to the building from Allied bombs had forced Nebe to move offices several times in the past year. While the artwork he hung on the walls changed from one office to another, the furnishings—chairs in red leather and a slightly battered settee—remained the same.

“You look tired,” Nebe said, as Wielen entered and observed the familiar furniture. “I’ll order some sandwiches and coffee to buck you up.”

Wielen, surprised to find his chief in a generous mood, took a seat. Nebe picked up a phone and requested the refreshments be brought to his office. When finished, he tapped a typewritten communiqué on his desk. Hitler, he explained, “was very angry” and had ordered more than half the Sagan fugitives be shot. He slid the official order across the desk and allowed Wielen a moment to review it. Nebe made it clear to his subordinate that nothing could be done against a Führer Order. Wielen understood the implication and listened without protest to his assignment. Because most of the escapees had already been captured in the Breslau area, the majority of shootings would take place in Wielen’s jurisdiction. Naturally concerned for his own skin, Wielen said he wanted no official responsibility in the killings. Nebe—who, according to Wielen, “looked extremely tired and was obviously suffering from very severe emotional strain”—said the Gestapo would be assuming full liability. Wielen’s task was to hand over any condemned prisoners in his custody to Dr. Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, Gestapo chief in Breslau, who would assemble the necessary execution squads.

Wielen returned to Breslau on the night train and scheduled a meeting with Scharpwinkel early the next morning. The local Gestapo headquarters sat directly opposite the regional
Kripo
building. Wielen cared little for Scharpwinkel and the Gestapo in general—not out of any moral indigation, but for the Gestapo’s penchant to view the Criminal Police as an inferior organization. He kept the meeting brief and relayed the order from Berlin. Scharpwinkel seemed pleased with his new responsibility.

“Yes,” he said. “I shall do this personally.”

By Wednesday, March 29, five days after the breakout, thirty-five escapees languished behind bars, four to a cramped cell, in the town jail at Görlitz. Those who remained on the run hoped to make destinations in Czechoslovakia, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden. Luck, however, worked against them. They were seized at checkpoints, betrayed by informants, or simply thwarted by freezing temperatures. Before long, all but three of the Sagan fugitives were back in captivity. That same
week, a stack of index cards from the Central Registry of Prisoners of War began appearing on Nebe’s desk. Each individual card contained the name, date of birth, rank, and other personal details of a Sagan escapee. He summoned his assistant, Hans Merten, a forty-two-year-old lawyer, to his office and pointed to the cards.

“You have heard about the Führer Order?” Nebe asked. “Then you know what to do. Müller, Kaltenbrunner, and I are lunching together. I will take them a list of men to be shot when I see them at lunchtime.” Nebe shoveled some cards across the desk. “Have a look to see whether they have wives or children.”

Merten did as instructed and returned the sorted cards to Nebe, who shuffled the deck and began flipping through them one by one, pausing momentarily to read the short biographical sketch of each man.

“He is so young,” Nebe muttered, staring at one card. “No!”

He placed the card upside down on his desktop and picked up another.

“He is for it!” he said, slapping the card down.

This process continued for some time, until Nebe had two separate piles of cards on his desk, one larger than the other. He stared momentarily at both stacks, swapped one card for another, and at last seemed satisfied with his work. He handed the larger stack to Merten.

“Now, quickly,” he ordered, “the list!”

Merten took the cards to Nebe’s secretary and read her the list of names. He deliberately misstated the location where some prisoners were being held, in the vain hope that orders of execution would be misdirected. The “mistake,” however, was noticed before the orders were sent down the wire. Nebe promptly dismissed Merten and sent him off to teach criminology at a school in Fürstenberg. It was, all things considered, a merciful decision—but Nebe’s magnanimity did not extend beyond his office. He had a list of fifty names and an order to obey.

The killings began on Wednesday, March 29.

^*
Otherwise known as the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt
(RSHA).

“I have to acquaint you with a top secret matter.”

Kiel Gestapo chief Friedrich (Fritz) Schmidt sat behind his desk with a single sheet of paper in front of him. It was Wednesday, March 29.

“It is an order from the Führer. Four prisoners, who are with the
Kripo
at Flensburg, will be shot at a place determined by me. They are enemy agents who were condemned to death and tried to escape to Denmark. You, Major Post, will go to Flensburg and interrogate the prisoners. It is not expected they will make any statement. You will leave Flensburg by car and shoot them at a pre-arranged spot. Oskar Schmidt will see that the cremation is carried out and all formalities complied with. For the firing, service pistols will be used. If, contrary to expectations, an escape should be made, service rifles will be used, as pistols will not be sufficient.”

Thirty-eight-year-old Johannes Post was an ardent Nazi, fanatical in his loyalty to Hitler and intimidating to all who knew him. Although only five and a half feet tall, he boasted a solid physique—what some considered corpulent, and others thought imposing. His eyes—an arctic blue beneath a thick main of blond hair always brushed backward—rarely betrayed any emotion. Whatever moral convictions he possessed were solely defined by Nazi policy. He had, since the outbreak of the war and for the glory of the Reich, killed many he deemed inferior.
Married with three young children, he spent little time with his family, preferring instead the company of his mistress.

Next to Post stood forty-three-year-old Oskar Schmidt
^*
and three other Gestapo officers. They received their instructions without protest, though some would later claim feeling ill at ease with their assignment. No such reservations burdened Post. He knew the condemned were British airmen, and he considered death by bullet too merciful. He listened attentively as Fritz Schmidt detailed what needed to be done. The shootings would take place in a meadow along a rural stretch of road about eight miles south of Kiel in the direction of Neumünster. The prisoners were to be escorted a good distance from the road so as to prevent any passing motorist from witnessing the murders. No official record of the slayings would be kept. Post was placed in charge of the overall operation.

“Anyone not complying with this order will have to reckon with immediate sentence of death and punitive measures against his family,” Fritz Schmidt said. “The same applies to anyone talking about the matter with outsiders.”

Schmidt walked around his desk and shook each man’s hand, binding him to secrecy. The meeting, having lasted no more than ten minutes, was over.

At that moment, unaware of the dark machinations at work, Australian Squadron Leader James Catanach sat in a cell in the police prison in Flensburg. Freedom had seemed so close just three days prior. For two years he had sat in Stalag Luft III, having arrived there after being shot down over Norway. The twenty-two year old spoke fluent German and believed, the night of the escape, that he harbored a fair chance of ultimately making it to neutral Sweden. Before the breakout, he partnered with pilot officer Arnold Christensen of the Royal New Zealand Air Force. In the hours following the escape, the two men managed to
make their way to the Sagan railway station and catch the 3:15
A.M.
express to Berlin.

On the same train, also hoping to make Sweden, were fellow escapees Hallada Espelid and Nils Fuglesang, Norwegians with the Royal Air Force. They reached the capital shortly before 7:30
A.M.
, their journey having passed without incident. In the gray light of that cold winter morning, the men were perhaps satisfied to witness at ground level the devastation wrought by Allied bombers. The city was one of shattered architecture and gaunt, hollow expressions. They spent the night in Berlin, avoiding detection, and purchased train tickets the next day—March 26—to Flensburg on the Danish border. It was here, in this ancient city on the Baltic coast, that their bid for freedom came to an end. Catanach and Christensen were taken into police custody while walking along the Holm, a pedestrian thoroughfare in an area of the city that had thus far escaped bombardment. The two arresting officers were specifically on duty that night as a result of the Sagan breakout. In another part of town, Espelid and Fuglesang were apprehended at a police checkpoint on the Marienhölzungsweg. What aroused police suspicions and led to the arrests has been lost to history, the records having been destroyed by Allied bombs.

Once in custody, the men were taken to the local
Kripo
headquarters and briefly interrogated. Confessing to being officers of the Royal Air Force and fugitives from Stalag Luft III, they refused to surrender details regarding the escape’s planning and execution. They gave only their names and ranks, military identification numbers, and the route they had traveled while on the run. Their information was noted and forwarded to the Central Security Office in Berlin, where it followed a bureaucratic paper trail to Kaltenbrunner’s desk. From
Kripo
headquarters, the men were transferred to the city’s police prison and put in a cell. Three days had now passed since their recapture; three days with no official word on what fate awaited them. They assumed the Germans would return them to a prison camp, as was normal protocol. The question was, were they destined once again for Sagan or a different compound altogether? On that Wednesday afternoon, an answer seemed close at hand.