The Nazi Hunters (27 page)

Barkworth’s other major quality as a Nazi-hunter was his gift for languages; he spoke German like a native and was almost as well versed in French. Brought up in the postcard-perfect seaside town of Sidmouth, Devon, Barkworth had served in the Somerset Light Infantry before joining the SAS, as had the missing Jedburgh operator, Victor Gough.

With Major Barkworth at his side, Captain Sykes returned to the Vosges. It was a very different place from the one that he had left some two months earlier. As General Patton’s forces had streamed across the Meurthe, the Germans had been driven out of the valleys. For four long years they had held the Vosges in a vice of grey-uniformed and jackbooted steel. Now the hills and their people were free again, and Sykes found the experience almost overwhelming.

‘It was wonderful simply to stand in a street in broad daylight,’ Sykes wrote of his return. ‘I must confess that it was with a feeling of some trepidation that I returned to our town [Moussey]: so much had been suffered, and so much of it for our unworthy sakes. But their loyalty was without stint. I was acclaimed as if I had saved the world. We had become a legend.’

In returning to the Vosges, Sykes came face to face with what had been hidden from the Op Loyton party when immersed in the fight of their lives: how successful their mission had proved.

‘It has not yet been explained why the Germans did not remain to fight in those easily defendable valleys. Is it possible that they
still
felt too uncertain of their position,
still
believed in a vast hidden host waiting for the sign to rise in all their thousands?’

By that ‘host’ Sykes meant the Vosges Maquis, armed and directed by a few dozen Op Loyton fighters. In the Vosges the SAS had ‘caused panic to the enemies of France in a whole province . . . dislocated German military dispositions in a whole sector of the front line . . . raised an army in defence of all that makes human life honourable and endurable, and . . . inspired a loyalty and love . . .’

Sykes revisited those locals who had played such a vital role in the SAS’s fortunes, including the indomitable Mme Rossi. After the Op Loyton force had been withdrawn, she had had her final confrontation with her oppressors.

‘The Boche were always around the house,’ she told Sykes. ‘They guessed all right. So one day I called out to their Sergeant: “Hi, you! Are you looking for billets for your men? Come in here. I have plenty of room and plenty of hay!” They went.’

Sykes could well imagine in what spirit Mme Rossi had made such an offer. He’d brought with him a form to complete, so she could be put forward for the King’s Medal. Mme Rossi cut Sykes short as he tried to get her to fill out the form, placing a firm but gentle hand on his shoulder.

‘But no,’ she told him. ‘Look – this is not for me. This – it’s for the soldiers, the military.’

Sykes met again with the many with whom friendship had been forged in dark adversity: Albert Freine, the long-suffering gamekeeper and Maquis intelligence chief; Simone, the legendary sylph-like Maquis guide, who had led Major Power and his men across the war-ravaged mountains; plus the Celles Valley forester who had served as Colonel Franks’ go-between.

From those and others he would hear the first intimations of what horrors had befallen the missing. But it was to be Abbé Gassman, the Moussey village priest, who would lead Sykes and Barkworth to the first indisputable evidence – the human remains.

Abbé Gassman was one of the only leaders of the Moussey Maquis who had remained at large. In one of
Standartenführer
Isselhorst’s final round-ups, Moussey’s redoubtable mayor had joined the many hundreds already incarcerated in the concentration camps. The mayor had argued that if all the men of Moussey were being shipped to the camps, then he had to join them. That was his responsibility as mayor.

Under Gassman’s guidance, Sykes and Barkworth headed to a farm called La Fosse, set several miles to the north-west of Moussey. They steeled themselves for what they feared they would find there.

‘In the outhouse, which had been demolished and burnt, a complete vertebral column was found,’ recorded Barkworth. ‘The destruction by fire was so complete that very little remained, but it was possible to trace deeper in the ashes the positions of at least two bodies.

‘In each case the knee bones and the powdered mass of bone which represented the skull were easily distinguishable. Amongst those remains the following articles were found . . . which are part of an SAS parachutist’s clothing and equipment . . .’ Barkworth listed the identifiable artefacts discovered in the ashes.

Labels from parachute pack.

Buckles from braces (stamped ‘Police and Firemen’).

Zip fastener clasp.

Steel from jumping jacket clip.

Hook and eye from battledress.

Part of suspender.

Two buckles from battledress blouse.

One buckle from rucksack.

Nine parts of parachute harness.

That was all that remained of three murdered SAS men. Sergeant Fitzpatrick, and Troopers John Conway and John Elliot had gone missing during the airdrop of the first week of September in the hills above Pierre-Percée. The parachutists had drifted into the fog-bound trees, one breaking his leg upon landing, and they had gone into hiding in a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village of Pexonne.

In his post-operation memo, Colonel Franks had listed all three men as ‘Missing – believed PW’. Now the truth had been revealed beyond all doubt.

Showing his early flair for such detective work, Barkworth interviewed several local witnesses. Leon Muller was a neighbour of the farm at La Fosse. He told Barkworth: ‘On Tuesday 19th September 1944, at or about 10.00 hours, I saw a saloon car and lorry approach from Pexonne. The car was blue-grey. The truck, army colour. They asked my wife the way to La Fosse . . . There was one man in the lorry sitting between two Germans.’

Barkworth had brought with him mugshots of the thirty-one missing men. He showed Monsieur Muller a photograph of Sergeant Fitzpatrick. Muller confirmed that this was the figure he had seen in the truck cab. ‘I recognise him from the photograph as Sgt. Fitzpatrick. I heard three bursts of a light machinegun from La Fosse, in all about ten shots, and then I saw the shed burning. The truck then left.’

In light of such testimony – corroborated by several witnesses – Barkworth was able to write conclusively of Fitzpatrick, Conway and Elliot: ‘Murdered by Germans at a farm, La Fosse, near Pexonne, on 17.9.44.’

There was worse to come.

At Le Harcholet, a tiny hamlet lying just to the south-east of Moussey, more SAS had perished. They had lost their lives in the most horrifying of ways. Three men dressed in khaki uniform had been herded inside a barn adjoining a house called the Maison Quiren. Eyewitnesses spoke of two sporting ‘red berets’ and one a peaked mountain cap. That latter figure was handcuffed and wearing wire-rimmed glasses, and the others had their hands tied.

The barn was set on fire. ‘The victims were hung up before the burning, as I could see human forms through the flames,’ recounted Madame Beneit, a neighbour and witness to the murders.

Victor Launay, another Le Harcholet neighbour who had sheltered one of the SAS victims, identified that man as being Lieutenant Silly. Before leaving, the German soldiers had shot up the barn and thrown in grenades. ‘As they left they were laughing,’ remarked Madame Beneit.

Little had survived the intense heat of the conflagration, but Barkworth and Sykes did find what appeared to be SAS officer Silly’s smashed glasses lying in the burnt-out ruins of the barn, plus a British military dog tag. That ID disk had belonged to SAS trooper Brown, a man who had been burned to death alongside Lieutenant Silly.

Lieutenant Silly had been one of Colonel Franks’ most resourceful raiders. The last that Franks had seen of him had been when he’d ordered his men to split up and make for the Allied lines. Silly had been one of a party of ten who’d tried to cross the River Meurthe. They’d been split up, Silly getting captured by the enemy on 10 October. And, somehow, the SAS lieutenant had ended up getting burned to death in a barn in Le Harcholet six days later.

As Barkworth and Sykes discovered, Silly, Brown and a third, as yet unidentified soldier, had been taken by the Gestapo to be killed where they had once been sheltered. The SAS men had come to rely upon one Le Harcholet household during those dire days when they had been on the verge of starvation. In the home of the Feys, Madeleine Fey – then just seventeen years old – had prepared a daily tureen of soup for the British raiders.

The famished SAS men had come at dusk in threes and fours to eat. At the rear of the Feys’ garden a small bridge led across a stream, a faint path snaking into the thickly wooded high ground. If it was too dangerous for the soldiers to come to the house, Madeleine would carry the soup tureen up to their hidden camp and feed them there.

One October night the four SAS men had been in the Feys’ kitchen when there was a harsh rapping at the door. Madeleine had bundled them out of the rear and thrust them into the pigsty, a rough wooden and stone lean-to tacked onto one end of the house. Meanwhile her father, Auguste, had made a show of throwing open the shutters at the front, so as to check who was visiting at this late hour.

Then he encountered ‘problems’ getting the key to turn in the lock to let the Gestapo in. Finally he got it open, declaring: ‘
Voila! On ouvre!
’ (There! It’s open!) By then the British soldiers had been hidden where they would never be discovered, although in the rush for the pigsty one had managed to drop his weapon down the Feys’ well.

While the Feys hadn’t witnessed Lieutenant Silly and his fellows being murdered, a near neighbour, Mme Renée Haouy, had. Mme Haouy’s husband was one of those seized during the 24 September mass arrests in Moussey. He would never return from the concentration camps. On the day that Lieutenant Silly and his fellows were murdered, Mme Haouy was ordered by the Gestapo to stay inside her house and to close all the shutters.

She had acted as if complying, but had kept one open a crack so she could spy on what was happening. She saw the three men being thrown into the burning building, and the shots fired into it to finish them off.

By now, Barkworth and Sykes had discovered beyond doubt the fates of five of the missing, but what they thirsted for more than anything were the names of their killers. A final eyewitness was to provide that crucial lead.

A doctor living in the nearby village of Senones had seen three British soldiers – Lieutenant Silly amongst them – driven to Le Harcholete. When none had returned, he’d asked a Gestapo officer billeted locally what had been done with those men.

‘Paratroopers captured in battle are treated normally,’ he had replied. ‘But
Nachtschirmfalljäger
dropped behind the lines in small parties are shot as spies and saboteurs. ‘
Ils n’existent plus
,’ he continued. ‘
Nous leur rendons la politesse
. They do the same to our paratroopers.’

The German word
Nachtschirmfalljäger
means ‘night-parachutist-fighters’. The French translates as: ‘They no longer exist . . . We return to them the favour done to us.’

That officer was identified as
Oberscharführer
(Company Sergeant Major) Max Kessler.

Kessler had just leapt to the top of Major Bill Barkworth’s most-wanted list.

Barkworth and Sykes’ report was delivered to Colonel Franks in early January 1945. Marked ‘TOP SECRET’, it contained some hugely perceptive conclusions. ‘A definite policy lies behind German treatment of paratroopers. None of the atrocities discovered indicate murders committed in the heat of combat.’

Of the cases concerning Sergeant Fitzpatrick’s and Lieutenant Silly’s groups – where the burned remains had been discovered, confirming who had died – they wrote: ‘[They] follow a similar technique of planned murder carried out several days after capture.’

Barkworth and Sykes had scored one further breakthrough in the Vosges. All witnesses had spoken of SAS captives being held and interrogated by the Gestapo. Moreover, some papers belonging to an SAS Lieutenant Black and his group had been discovered at the former Gestapo headquarters. Whatever was happening to the SAS captives, the Gestapo was clearly at the centre of it all.

In their report Barkworth and Sykes listed two dozen Op Loyton men as either ‘missing’, ‘prisoner of war’, or ‘probably prisoner of war’. If those twenty-four individuals were still alive, then it seemed there was still real cause for hope. But Barkworth and Sykes’ unpalatable conclusion was that the fate of each man taken captive lay in the hands of the Gestapo.

‘All SAS prisoners remain in permanent Gestapo custody, and no complacent view can be taken of them.’

Chapter Eighteen

On 15 January 1945, just days after receiving the Sykes-Barkworth report, Colonel Franks penned a letter to Brigadier General Roderick McLeod, the outgoing SAS brigade commander. In it he pointed out that Sykes and Barkworth had proved ‘beyond all doubt that six men were murdered, of whom five have been identified . . . The possibility of further atrocities cannot be ruled out.’