Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen (8 page)

Back at his desk one evening, McKenna lit a smoke and pondered his next move. With no crime scene to examine, no witnesses to interview, and no evidence to analyze, the investigation lacked a clear starting point. Alongside the wall map he pinned mug shots of the murdered men, their solemn, black-and-white stares offering grim encouragement. Two of the victims were Flying Officer Robert Stewart and Flight Lieutenant Edgar Humphreys. Both men had been among the thirty-five prisoners to end up in the jail at Görlitz. McKenna flipped through the statements of the survivors who’d passed through the jail. The Gestapo had threatened to behead and shoot some of the recaptured men. Several prisoners were told outright that they would never see their homes or loved ones again. On the morning of March 31, 1944, roughly a dozen Gestapo agents—dressed in leather overcoats and fedoras—showed up at the prison and took ten inmates, including Humphreys and Stewart, away. Their ashes arrived at Stalag Luft III several days later in urns bearing their names and the place of cremation: Liegnitz. Humphreys was twenty-nine, Stewart thirty-two. McKenna took a drag on his cigarette and blinked the smoke out of his eyes. As a civilian police officer in Blackpool, he had become friends with a number of aircrew serving at RAF Squires Gate, the local air base. He often downed pints in the mess hall with Humphreys, a good-humored sort who showed him around the airfield and sparked an enthusiasm for the air force. A Blenheim pilot with No. 107 Squadron, Humphreys took off on December 19, 1940, for a daylight operation against the Channel ports and never returned. Stewart had also become a friend before being shot down over Duisburg on the night of April 27, 1943.

McKenna stared at their photographs and felt the weight of responsibility on him. He hoped to provide the fifty men with an epitaph worthy of all they had suffered. He stubbed out his cigarette, switched off the desk lamp, and retired for the night. The next day he dispatched
a report to London, summarizing his first ten days in Germany. The odds of conducting a successful investigation were daunting but not impossible. His immediate plan was to comb the files of regional war crimes record offices in the hopes of establishing a lead, whether it be a name or an address that might put him on track. He also intended to visit the “camps and concentration areas” where the Allies were holding German prisoners. The challenge lay in the sheer numbers. There were a multitude of such facilities, housing millions of Germans, whom the Allies had to clear through a process of elimination. While there was a register listing all those in captivity, it was most likely, McKenna wrote, that many prisoners had assumed false identities prior to their apprehension. Despite such obstacles, McKenna believed the investigation would last several months at most. It was an optimistic assessment.

Listening to the voice at the end of the line, McKenna reached for a pen. He scribbled down an address and read it back to ensure he had it correct. The chief of the Düsseldorf Criminal Police confirmed the house and street number. McKenna uttered his thanks and hung up the phone. He held a short council of war with Williams and the newest member of his team. Fluent in German and English, Wilhelm Smit—a sergeant in the Royal Netherlands Air Force—had recently been seconded to the RAF’s Special Investigating Branch and assigned to McKenna as an interpreter.

“We have a possible line of information,” McKenna said, holding up the scrap of paper with the address. Responding to the wanted list he had wired out to regional police departments, McKenna said, authorities in Düsseldorf had just called with the address of Dr. Gunther Absalon’s parents, who lived in the old Düsseldorf district of Heerdt.

Early the next morning, McKenna and his team set off by jeep. They traveled south through open country and small towns in the direction of Dortmund. The fields and hills on either side of the road at first appeared untouched by war, but the scenery morphed as they
drew closer to the city. The greenery faded away and the woodlands thinned, consumed by scorched earth and a cratered landscape. Dortmund itself was mostly ash and rubble. The buildings that still survived stood without roofs or windows. On many, the walls had been blasted away, allowing passersby to stare at the devastated rooms within, the furnishings smashed and splintered, a lifetime of mementos and memories blown to pieces. People wandered aimlessly through the streets, pulling what possessions they still had in carts or simply carrying them in a bundle on their back. The RAF men steered clear of wreckage and bomb-ripped chasms, before passing once more into the country. They traveled the remainder of the way through battered terrain and finally reached Düsseldorf by mid-afternoon. The carnage here mirrored that seen in Dortmund. McKenna looked out at queues of people waiting for their weekly rations. Many appeared indigent and their clothes threadbare. The investigators made their way through the ravaged city center—blasted numerous times during the RAF’s five-month campaign against the Ruhr in 1943—before crossing the Rhine into Heerdt.

Paul and Martha Absalon lived in a small house at Kribbenstrasse 20. The elderly couple answered the door, surprised to find three men wearing the dress blues of the British Royal Air Force standing on their doorstep. Speaking through Smit, McKenna introduced himself and stated the purpose of his visit.

“We’re trying to locate your son,” he said. “We need his help resolving an important matter.”

The couple led them into a small living room, its windows still taped as a precautionary measure against bomb damage. Martha Absalon, unnerved by the British presence, remained shielded behind her husband. McKenna took a seat, offered what he hoped was a reassuring smile, and asked the couple when they last saw their son.

“It’s vital we find him,” he said, mindful not to mention the true nature of his visit.

Paul Absalon spoke in a halting voice, as though worried each word might reveal some transgression on the part of his son.

“We have not heard from him in a long while,” he said. “He was
in Breslau and wrote to us regularly, but we haven’t received a letter from him since February 7. We don’t know what’s become of him or his whereabouts.”

McKenna nodded and, with the couple’s permission, ordered Williams and Smit to search the house. They turned out every drawer and closet but found nothing to suggest the Absalons were lying. McKenna looked about the sitting room. On the wall was an old family portrait, a picture of the Absalons in happier times, posing with their young son.

“Was Gunther married?”

“Yes,” replied the mother. “She lives in Düsseldorf.”

With an address in hand, the three RAF officers drove a short distance to Brunnenstrasse 42. Frau Gerda Absalon, having been left to care for two small children and her mother, appeared a pretty, though tired, woman. At her side clung a young girl, whom she gently ushered down a hallway into a back room. When she returned, she sat in an armchair, brushed a strand of dark hair aside, and rested her hands in her lap. McKenna noticed she wore no wedding ring. She caught him looking and managed a weak smile.

“You are here about Gunther,” she said.

Smit translated and McKenna nodded.

“What can you tell us?” he asked.

“Not much,” she said, explaining that the last she’d heard from him had also been a letter in February posted from Am Anger 10, Breslau. The missive had been brief, simply letting her know he was still alive. Her casual tone suggested the news bore little emotional weight. At thirty, she was three years Absalon’s junior and eager to be done with him for good.

“Relations between my husband and myself have always been somewhat strained,” she said. “My family and I are not members of the Nazi Party, whereas my husband was always a devoted follower. I’m sure he was in Breslau at the end of the war, and was either killed or taken prisoner by the Russians.”

She paused and stared briefly at her bare left hand.

“If I do hear from him again,” she said, “I will be asking him for a divorce.”

She got up from her chair, moved across the room to a small writing desk, and retrieved a photograph from the drawer. Without giving it another glance, she passed it to McKenna.

“You can have this,” she said.

McKenna looked at the picture and saw a young man of Aryan stock, about thirty, looking back at him. His blond hair shorn close to the scalp, he wore at a slight angle on his head a military cap bearing the death’s head insignia of the SS. The mouth was a thin, straight line, the eyes cold, and the stare distant. From a British Intelligence report, McKenna knew Absalon always appeared “well groomed and smartly dressed.” He pocketed the photograph, thanked Gerda Absalon for her time, and left.

They traveled back to Rinteln, traversing the same battered landscape in the dark. While Smit and Williams were quick to dismiss Absalon as dead, a casualty of the Russian onslaught, McKenna refused to accept the notion. Absalon could have survived and gone underground, or simply slipped away in the chaos of battle. Russian forces had encircled Breslau—the largest city in eastern Germany—on February 15. The fifty thousand defenders, a motley crew of depleted army units and local militia, faced thirteen Soviet divisions. Russian artillery and fighter planes blasted and strafed the city, leveling entire blocks, littering streets with rubble and human wreckage. The fighting raged among the ruins and exacted an awful, bloody toll. Hitler, despite an urgent plea from the commander of German forces on April 6, refused to surrender the city. On April 30, Hitler killed himself. Two days later, on May 2, Berlin fell to the Russians, but the fighting in Breslau continued four more days. Roughly sixteen thousand German civilians and soldiers were dead by the battle’s end, and two-thirds of the city lay in a smoldering heap. The siege cost the Russians eight thousand lives.

McKenna arrived back in Rinteln desperate for a lead. He spent the days that followed visiting internment camps and cross-referencing the names of German prisoners with those on his wanted list. His rounds took him to Belsen near Hanover, now a place of incarceration for onetime Gestapo members. The British, for sanitary reasons, had torched the camp with flamethrowers shortly after its liberation in April.
SS guards, fleeing the advancing Allied armies, had left thirteen thousand bodies unburied. The living lay among the dead. So emaciated and racked with typhus and typhoid were the survivors, they were hard to differentiate from the corpses. The bodies were bulldozed into large trenches and quickly covered up to stop the further spread of disease. Now, five months later, macabre monuments to the atrocities committed in the camp still remained. The smell of decomposition and human waste lingered. Human bones, not yet buried, were stacked in large piles. Walking to the camp’s registration office, McKenna eyed one large mound of earth after another, his revulsion growing at the realization they were mass graves.

His review of camp files turned up nothing, but being eager to put Belsen behind him, he found that the futility of his efforts hardly upset him. McKenna walked slowly back to his jeep. As a detective, he had witnessed man’s capacity for violence in its infinite forms—but the camp defied understanding. Slaughter on the battlefield had a rationale behind it one could grasp, if not accept. Even the indiscriminate bombing of British and German cities served strategic aims one could argue for or against. The atrocities in the camps, however, went beyond any human reasoning. McKenna took comfort in his faith and did not believe in a vicious God, but how did one explain such barbarism? Lacking answers, he gunned the engine and turned the jeep around. As Belsen fell away behind him, he pondered the men on his wanted list. Would they express remorse for what they had done or simply swear blind allegiance to their cause? He mulled the questions over as he drove back to Rinteln, the sides of the road littered with rusting armored vehicles. He occasionally passed a bedraggled procession of the bombed-out and homeless, wandering from one town to another in search of food and shelter.

The dislocation of millions added another layer of complexity to the investigation, though it favored the men being sought by the RAF. Establishing the identities of those blasted or forced from their homes was all but impossible, as the vast number of displaced people had no way of confirming who they were. Those wanted by the authorities for war crimes and other transgressions could pass themselves off as anyone they so desired and disappear among the ruins. As McKenna considered this,
something in his mind suddenly clicked. Noncombatants would have been evacuated from Breslau before the Russian siege began, and combatants desperate to avoid capture most likely slipped out before the Red Army overran the city. If he could find out where evacuees from Breslau were now located, he might get a line on Absalon or Scharpwinkel.

Back in Rinteln, McKenna paid a visit to the town’s
Bürgermeister
—equivalent to a mayor—who said survivors of Breslau had fled to Rinteln and the surrounding area. Of course, he warned, some might have moved on, but many were likely to still be in the vicinity. Would the flight lieutenant care for the names and addresses of the host families? McKenna could hardly believe his luck and returned to his barracks with a long list of doors to knock on. He showed the list that evening to Smit. The two of them, he said, would have to start canvassing neighborhoods the following day. It was old-fashioned detective work and certainly preferable to the drudgery of cross-referencing files. They would work separately to save time, each covering his own ground. Although having been in the country for only three weeks, McKenna had picked up enough rudimentary German to stumble through the questions he needed to ask.