The Nazi Hunters (10 page)

Hislop did a headcount. Somehow, he’d lost Davis. He’d also gained an additional three, all Maquis: a sixteen-year-old boy who appeared utterly terrified, an old man who seemed to be shell-shocked, plus a young man called Marcel – the only one of the three Frenchmen who still seemed in charge of his wits.

They lay there, catching their breath, bodies pressed into the soft detritus of the forest floor, the cries of their pursuers echoing through the trees. Orders were called back and forth in German, followed by the odd burst of fire. Finally, the noise of the shooting seemed to grow more faint, and eventually the gunshots faded away to nothing. All around them the forest fell silent.

It was early evening by now, and Hislop suspected that the enemy might have left a hidden force behind to keep watch for any survivors. He decided they would stay exactly where they were and try to get some sleep, then move off at first light. Marcel offered to guide them to a neighbouring valley where the villagers were friendly. There, they could scavenge some food and seek news on the whereabouts of the enemy, plus the rest of their scattered party.

It was a plan of sorts, but it did little to disguise the fact that their fortunes had taken a sudden and very dramatic turn for the worse. Some of the men were missing, and Hislop had no idea where Druce was located, or of the fate of their rearguard. He could only hope that they’d reach Druce’s RV to find the rest of the party awaiting them, and that they could salvage the mission from there.

During the trek through the midday heat Hislop had stripped down to his para-smock. He’d lost all the rest of his kit during the mad dash to escape. As he settled amongst the undergrowth and the night chill descended, he rued getting rid of his warm clothing. But he figured his discomfort was as nothing compared to those unfortunates who may well have been injured, captured or killed.

Druce’s group had fared little better than Hislop’s. After charging downhill, they’d run into a German on the lower path wielding a Schmeisser. Fortunately he’d proved to be a hopeless shot, and Druce had managed to lead his men across without anyone being hit. Lieutenant Dill had gone back to try to nail the lone German. Despite a vicious exchange of fire he had proved to be in good cover, and Dill failed to hit him.

By the time Druce stopped to do a proper headcount, he had several Maquis – including Lieutenant LeFranc – with him, but Seymour, the Jedburgh who’d injured his foot on the DZ, was missing. Seymour had had to be carried from the Maquis base by four stretcher-bearing Resistance fighters. No one was about to flee down this precipitous slope laden with a stretcher, and it seemed highly likely that Seymour had been captured or killed.

On Lieutenant LeFranc’s advice Druce’s force set out for a remote farmstead, positioned in the forests above Moussey village. Their route took them in a southerly direction, sticking to the forested high ground and keeping away from both the Celles Valley and that of the Rabodeau. They marched into the evening. Relieved of their heavy loads they set a punishing pace, seeking to put the battleground and the enemy well behind them.

They arrived at the farmer’s run-down homestead in good time. Known to all simply as ‘Père George’ –
Père
, meaning father, was a respectful reference to his advanced age – he lived on his own in a single barn, with only his cats, pigs, cows and a dog for company. Père George farmed about four acres of rough pastureland, set amidst the crowding forest. More importantly, he was a diehard communist, which made him a natural enemy of the Nazis.

Lieutenant LeFranc had led the force here, relying upon the age-old adage ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Père George was no great fan of Churchill, but as the SAS men had come here to fight the hated Germans, he was happy to offer them a place in his barn.

It was a rough lodging, but after the intensity of the day’s firefight and the forced marches, Druce and his men could have slept practically anywhere. Crucially, Père George’s farm offered the perfect hideaway from the marauding forces of the enemy. Set in a fold of the hills and surrounded by thick pinewoods, it had never once been visited by the Germans.

There was little food on offer, and what there was seemed borderline edible. When his wife had still been alive, they’d eaten fine potages – thick soups and stews – Père George explained. But since her death there was no one to cook, so he lived off similar fare to his livestock, eating out of a
pot de chambre
and sharing his meals with his animals.

‘Like all really good farmers, I feed my livestock very well,’ he declared, defiantly.

As Captain Druce, Lieutenants Dill and LeFranc and party settled down to sleep, Père George proceeded to wax lyrical on his favourite topic: politics. He sat in his rough peasant garb and wooden clogs, his enormous moustache twitching as he spoke and animating his deeply lined features.

‘
Churchill, il est bien. De Gaulle, bien
. But it was after Churchill visited Moscow that the tide of victory finally turned . . . Stalin: he is the one. Ah, Stalin, he is the great man. It is a pity that Churchill isn’t a communist.’ And so it continued.

The only response from the soldiers lying prone in the hay was a series of muted snores.

Two or 3 miles to the north-east of Père George’s barn, Druce’s rearguard had run into the worst trouble of all. Half a mile from the Lac de la Maix base they had stumbled into a ferocious ambush. Robert Lodge was leading, when all of a sudden he froze and signalled for the others to hit the dirt.

Moments later they found themselves in the midst of a savage firefight. Canadian airman Lou Fiddick was armed with only a Colt .45, and facing savage bursts from Schmeissers, plus rifles and Lugers. The enemy was no more than 30 yards away, and firing at them through a thick screen of scrub.

‘Neither side could really see each other because of the undergrowth,’ Fiddick remarked, ‘so we just fired when we saw movement in the bushes and hoped we hit someone.’

The battle proved claustrophobic and confusing, as both sides exchanged fire at close quarters. One of Fiddick’s better-armed SAS comrades spotted movement, and raked the bush with his Sten gun. Agonized screams revealed where he’d hit one of the enemy. But then SAS man Wally ‘Ginger’ Hall, a Grenadier Guardsman with a shock of bright ginger hair, took a blast to the chest.

Hall went down. He was still conscious, but he urged his fellows to leave him. By the time Fiddick and the few survivors managed to extricate themselves in a fiercely fought withdrawal, Sergeant Robert Lodge, the renowned SAS veteran and German Jew, was also found to be missing.

By nightfall, Druce’s party had been scattered to the four corners of the Vosges. There were dead, injured and very likely captives on those forested hills and several groups of men were on the run. The bulk of their weaponry, kit and equipment was missing.

Worse still, in their flight from the enemy they’d lost all their radios.

Chapter Six

Stage one of Isselhorst’s Waldfest had proved spectacularly successful, capturing a good deal of Maquis weaponry, much SAS kit, and dispersing or wiping out their fighting units. Isselhorst could have wished for no better start. On 18 August, stage two was scheduled to begin: the SS and Gestapo’s clampdown on those villages seen to be the breeding ground of the Resistance.

But first, Isselhorst and his fellow commanders had a rich haul of captured equipment and papers to study, plus captives to interrogate. Amongst the most sensitive of all was the so-called ‘Forgotten List’ – a Maquis document recovered from the Lac de la Maix base, naming some of the key figures in the Vosges Resistance. It included many of those who had been present at the 13 August airdrop onto the Raon L’Etape DZ. Worse still, it identified their home villages. For Isselhorst, Schneider, Uhring and Gehrum, this was dynamite.

At dawn on the morning of 18 August, the
Einsatz-kommandos
moved into the villages that had been named – including Raon L’Etape, Allarmont and Moussey – on a seek-and-capture mission. All civilians were warned to keep off the streets, as the German troops proceeded to mount house-to-house searches.

SS commander Lieutenant Karl Fischer set up his headquarters in the Moussey village crèche. He demanded that ten ‘hostages’, among them Jules Py, the local mayor, and Achilles Gassmann, the village priest, give themselves up. Once they had done so, all males between the ages of seventeen and sixty were made to line up on the village square. Those named on the Forgotten List were told to step forward, or the lives of the hostages would be forfeit.

By the evening of the 18th, eighty-eight males of fighting age had been arrested across the several villages. After a night of interrogation and torture, they were loaded aboard trucks and driven away.

Ten miles to the east of Moussey lay the garrison town of Schirmek, which doubled as the nerve centre for Waldfest. It was from there that Schneider, Uhring and Gehrum were overseeing operations, along with Isselhorst, when he was not working out of his Strasbourg HQ. On the outskirts of Schirmek lay a
Sicherungslager
: a security camp.

The
Sicherungslager
were supposedly the more ‘respectable’ face of the Nazi concentration and death camp system. Schirmek came complete with ranks of wooden huts, subterranean prison cells, electrified-wire perimeters and watchtowers. It had been put at Isselhorst’s disposal, so that the anticipated influx of Waldfest captives could be ‘processed’. But for those destined for ‘termination’ – first and foremost the Maquis – an even darker fate awaited.

A few miles to the south of Schirmek lay a former ski resort. Before the war, Natzweiler had been a place of fun and holidaying. But few visited of their own volition now, or even spoke of it. Under Nazi rule Natzweiler had been transformed into a place of darkness and evil. It was a concentration camp – the only one ever built on French soil – and within its confines tens of thousands would be starved, beaten, tortured and gassed to death.

Natzweiler was one of Hitler’s so-called
Nacht und Nebel
camps. In a chilling order issued in response to the rise of the Resistance, Hitler had decreed that all such ‘terrorists and enemies of the Reich’ were to disappear into the
Nacht und Nebel
, the Night and Fog. They were to be eradicated utterly without trace, so that their loved ones would never learn of their fate. Hitler saw this as the ultimate deterrent to the Maquis: that their every trace would be wiped off the face of the earth.

It was to Schirmek’s
Sicherungslager
that the eighty-eight villagers – the Maquis suspects taken captive – were headed. After ‘processing’ there, many were destined to pass through the dark gates of Natzweiler.

One member of the Op Loyton force had preceded those villagers to Schirmek. The stretcher-bound state of Seymour had made him easy prey. Taken captive in the forest, he had at first faced an execution squad. But a senior German officer had saved him, making it clear that he was wanted alive, for questioning – hence Seymour was the first to arrive at Schirmek’s
Sicherungslager
.

He was delivered into the hands of the notorious camp commandant,
Hauptsturmführer
Karl Buck. Buck, a civil engineer by training, had overseen the construction of the camp
,
and it was very much his baby
.
He had fought and been wounded in the First World War, losing a leg. Still troubled by his injuries, and a gangrenous infection that refused to heal, Buck used morphine to dull the pain. His tempers were the stuff of legend, and with his pristine white uniform and pencil-thin moustache he cut an unmistakable figure as he stomped around the camp on his false leg, plagued by unpredictable mood swings.

Upon arrival in Karl Buck’s domain, Seymour was asked to explain what his winged SF Jedburgh badge might signify. He answered that he was one of a group of paratroopers, making up a ‘recce party’. He had no idea what had become of his fellow Special Forces operators, and little sense of what fate awaited him. As a soldier captured in uniform, by rights he should have enjoyed all the protections afforded by the Geneva Convention.

But for now Seymour was presented with a collection of captured radios, code books and explosives, and told to explain exactly what it all might signify. Seymour was left in little doubt what would happen if he refused to talk: life would become very unpleasant for him. As he was left to think things over for a short while, a second British captive was driven through the camp gates.

Injured, but still very much alive, it was Corporal Gerald Davis – Hislop’s bulletproof and reliable Phantom operator. Having lost the others during the firefight in the forest, Davis had had the misfortune to place his trust in one of the least trustworthy of locals. He had approached a church and asked for help. The priest, Clement Colin, had offered to contact the Maquis. Instead, he had returned leading a force of Gestapo – hence Davis joining Seymour at Schirmek camp.

Both men were presented with the same ultimatum: tell us all you know, or darkness, pain and bitter death will follow.

Captain Victor Gough – Seymour’s fellow Jedburgh – had managed to escape the 17 August firefights unscathed. Via the Alsace Maquis he got a radio message sent back to London, reporting on the devastating impact that Waldfest had had so far, and reflecting what desperate straits he now found himself in as the hunt for the Maquis continued.