The Nazi Hunters (30 page)

Barkworth and his men rounded up some German prisoners to do the digging. They were the former managers of the nearby Mercedes-Benz factory, which had used the prisoners from the Rotenfels camp to build the cars and trucks that they had supplied to the
Wehrmacht
. Most of the forced labourers had been processed through Natzweiler – Rotenfels being a substation of the ‘mother camp’ – and they were kept in the same kind of terrible state as all Natzweiler victims.

In spite of their protestations, the factory managers would have known full well the savagery visited upon their labourers and that they were quite simply starving, not to mention being worked until they dropped dead, or were ripe for termination.

‘We felt that they had been responsible for the people being shot and killed,’ Rhodes remarked of the Daimler-Benz factory managers. ‘We thought that nobody could shed that responsibility. So many of them said they didn’t know anything about it. Well, I don’t believe that.’

With thick rags wrapped around their faces to try to filter out the stench, the former factory managers were forced to dig. Retching and wretched, they began to uncover the first of the remains. Colonel Chavez’s pathologists had set up a temporary ‘morgue’ in a chapel of rest at a cemetery in the forest. The first of the gruesome remains were carried into the makeshift morgue so the pathologists could get to work.

A few weeks before, Barkworth and Sykes had uncovered the burned remains of their six comrades in the Vosges. That had been bad enough. But the most they had discovered there were the charred remnants of human skeletons. This exhumation in the Erlich Forest would prove infinitely worse.

As Barkworth, Sykes and Rhodes watched the former factory managers shovelling out the dirt, they felt certain that here lay the bodies of men that they had known personally and fought alongside in the most testing theatres of war. Operating under such extreme conditions as they had experienced on Op Loyton, friendships had been forged on a deeper and more heartfelt level that was ever possible in normal life.

The tension and the emotions were running high.

‘Sometimes, there was just the faint resemblance . . .’ reflected Rhodes, of the bodies. ‘You could pick out the features of certain people you knew so well. You could say: Yes, this is Captain So-and-So. But you couldn’t always do that, and identification like that wasn’t sufficient for the authorities. You had to have formal identification.’

It was by comparing the teeth in the victims’ skulls with known dental records that several of the victims were named. Some of the corpses were dressed in what was still recognizable as civilian clothing, but one was found to be wearing British Army-pattern shirt and pants. His teeth were found to match exactly the dental card of SAS Trooper Griffin. Number six on the list of the Op Loyton missing had been found and identified.

A body dressed in a British Army pullover was found to be wearing blue swimming trunks. His teeth seemed to correspond to the dental records of SAS Parachutist Ashe, another of the Op Loyton missing, but it was only a partial match. The clincher proved to be the blue trunks.

In his report on the exhumation Barkworth noted: ‘Examination by the American war crimes team revealed that the swimming trunks had the following markings: ‘Nicol Brown & Coyle Ltd. Halifax’ and ‘UMBRO’ on separate tags.’ An SAS colleague remembered that Ashe had deployed on Op Loyton wearing just such a pair of blue trunks.

The corpse of Victor Gough was the next to be identified. All that remained of his clothing was one grey Army-pattern sock, but the teeth did seem to match the Jedburgh Captain’s dental records. The clincher was the post-mortem carried out by the Americans; the body had had its appendix removed, which matched Gough’s medical records perfectly.

Captain Victor Gough, the leader of Jedburgh team Jacob – who alone had soldiered on with the Alsace Maquis heroically, having lost his fellow Jedburghs to death and to capture – had survived so much, only to be murdered in a forest on the outskirts of Gaggenau, and disposed of in a mass grave.

The fourth Op Loyton victim was a particularly poignant one. A body was unearthed wearing an airborne-pattern jump smock of the type that fastened between the legs, to prevent it billowing up during a parachute jump. In the chapel-cum-morgue the teeth were examined, but they didn’t seem to match any available dental card. Another means of identifying the body would have to be found.

Barkworth noticed that on the left wrist there was an Army-issue watch. All such watches had a dedicated number and had to be signed for. Barkworth decided to check. He found that the number of the watch corresponded to that signed out by Lieutenant David Dill – the baby-faced SAS officer who’d proved himself so astonishingly tough and calm under pressure during Op Loyton.

Lieutenant Dill had commanded the rearguard left at the SAS’s final Moussey base. Dill and his force of six had been surrounded by the massive German force and they had fought to the last bullet. ‘You are my prisoner,’ the German officer had told Lieutenant Dill. ‘You are a soldier and so am I.’

From one patch of war-ravaged woodland Lieutenant Dill had somehow found his way to another, but in far darker circumstances. His identification was confirmed beyond all doubt when the American pathologists discovered that the right elbow had been previously broken, matching Dill’s medical records. They also recovered two metal stars – the ‘pips’ of a Lieutenant – on one shoulder of his shirt, and some English chocolate in one of his pockets.

Other identifications proved more straightforward; in the cases of Major Dennis Reynolds and Captain Andy Whately-Smith, the partially decomposed bodies were found to be still wearing their dog tags. At some stage after Colonel Franks’ force had made for Allied lines, the SAS major who was recovering from being shot in the arm, and the captain who had stuck loyally by his side, must have abandoned their cave at Pierre-Percée. But whatever journey they had intended to take, it had ended here in this dark woodland.

Two other corpses were similarly identified via their tags. They were Curtis E. Hodges and Michael Pipcock, two of the American airmen that Colonel Chavez and his team had come here hoping to find.

Five of these men – Dill, Gough, Reynolds, Whately-Smith, and the American, Pipcock – had been listed in the Red Cross letter send to Colonel Franks, in November 1944. On 8 November 1944 they had been present and alive, held as prisoners at Schirmek’s
Sicherungslager.
Somehow, from there they had ended up being thrown into a mass grave here in the Erlich Forest.

By 20 June 1945 the exhumations were complete. Two more corpses had been tentatively identified as American. The remainder were dressed in civilian clothing, and were mostly members of the French Resistance. Their details, such as the teams had been able to establish, were passed to the French authorities.

As a result of the Erlich Forest exhumations six more of the Op Loyton missing had been found. The list of the unsolved cases was shrinking; eighteen remained. The challenge now for Barkworth was to discover just how those six Op Loyton men had been killed and who was responsible, and then to track down the perpetrators.

Piecing together the history of the killings proved less problematic than Barkworth had feared. Witnesses – mostly former prisoners of the Rotenfels camp, but also some of the former camp staff – stepped forward to tell Barkworth the harrowing tale.

On 25 November 1944 the chief of the Rotenfels camp, Commandant Wunsch, had received orders to execute all British and American POWs held there. Those orders had originated from
Standartenführer
Isselhorst, and this was the first concrete mention that Barkworth had come across of his part in orchestrating such killings. Isselhorst’s name and role were duly noted.

Abbé Alphonse Hett, a French priest held at Rotenfels as a suspected Maquis, related to Barkworth what he had witnessed on that fateful day. Fourteen prisoners had been ordered to parade outside their huts; they included ten men wearing British or American military uniforms, plus four dressed as civilians (including two fellow priests, Abbé Roth and Abbé Claude).

The commander of the camp guards, a Lieutenant Nussberger, ordered the fourteen prisoners to climb aboard a closed truck. As they tried to mount up clutching their meagre bundles of possessions, Nussberger’s men – Ostertag, Ullrich, Zimmer-mann and Neuschwanger – wrestled their baggage away from them. Everything was to be left behind. On seeing this, Abbé Hett knew instinctively that these men were being taken away to be murdered.

The truck pulled out. It was the last Abbé Hett was to see of the prisoners. The story was then taken up by Albert Arnold, a French POW forced to work at Rotenfels as a driver. He was at the wheel of the truck that day. He was told to drive to the edge of the Erlich Forest. He drew to a halt where instructed, and the first group of three prisoners was marched away. The driver heard shots ring out, as did all aboard the truck.

The remaining prisoners were taken away in groups of three. Those about to be killed were forced to stand on the lip of the bomb crater, where they could clearly see their dead comrades. The corpses were partially undressed and their clothes and boots either looted or piled up and burned, presumably to hide the evidence of their identities. At the last moment one of the priests had tried to break away. He made it 100 yards into the woods before being gunned down.

Once the fourteen had been killed, a group of Russian POWs was marched into the forest and made to shovel earth on top of the corpses, filling in the bomb craters. One of those POWs managed to remove a crumpled photograph from the pocket of one of the victims. It showed what had to be his loved ones.

On the liberation of the Rotenfels camp that photo had been handed over to a Swiss consul living locally, who subsequently got it into Allied hands. It was passed to Barkworth, and those who knew SAS Trooper Griffin confirmed that it was his.

Abbé Hett related to Barkworth the kind of treatment meted out to the captured men during their dark weeks of captivity. They had been held longest at Schirmek’s
Sicherungslager
, only being transferred to Gaggenau when US forces overran the Vosges. At Schirmek one man in particular,
Oberwachtmeister
(Lieutenant) Heinrich Neuschwanger, had unleashed savagery on the British prisoners. They were dragged to the camp washroom, strung up by their hands and beaten so severely that their bones showed through their skin.

Neuschwanger was a particularly bloodthirsty individual, who was never happier than when he had beatings or killings with which to ‘amuse’ himself. According to what the priest told Barkworth, Major Reynolds had remarked ‘that he would not have thought it possible for the body to withstand such pain without death occurring’. In other words, he could not understand why he was still alive.

Amongst the prisoners Neuschwanger had earned the nickname ‘Stuka’, which resulted from his predilection for stamping on the prostrate forms of his captives, like the pouncing dive-bomber of the same name. Major Reynolds, Captains Whately-Smith and Gough, plus Lieutenant Dill had been beaten to within an inch of their lives while in captivity, which would explain why none had tried to escape when they were driven to their deaths in the Erlich Forest.

According to witnesses,
Oberwachtmeister
Neuschwanger had argued that all British and American POWs needed to be shot, ‘since when the Allies came camp staff would be killed’. Neuschwanger was supposedly the foremost triggerman who had gunned down the captives as they stood on the edge of their mass grave.

Oberwachtmeister
Heinrich Neuschwanger had just leapt to the top of Barkworth’s list of the most wanted, ahead even of Max Kessler, the Gestapo officer who had overseen the murders and the burning of the bodies in the Vosges.

Following his Gaggenau investigations, Barkworth understood more fully the roles played by Schirmek’s
Sicherungslager
and its relationship to Natzweiler. Writing of Natzweiler, he noted: ‘Here was the full machinery for the elimination and destruction of prisoners, and it was hither from Schirmek that these were sent for execution.’ Generally, prisoners were held, interrogated and tortured at Schirmek; but they were sent on to Natzweiler for termination.

Other names were added to Barkworth’s most-wanted list, including more key figures from the camps. At the top of a Barkworth report entitled ‘War Criminals – Wanted reports have been made out against the following’, was
Hauptsturmführer
Karl Buck, Schirmek’s one-legged, morphine-addicted camp commandant. Barkworth listed Buck as being responsible for ‘giving, transmitting or carrying out orders to shoot ten British and American victims’.

Amongst those listed as responsible for ‘impromptu atrocities in the Vosges area’ was
Sturmbannführer
Hans Dietrich Ernst, the SS officer who had sent eight hundred French Jews to their deaths at Auschwitz, and whose
Einsatzkommando
Ernst had perpetrated the worst predations of Waldfest. There was also a Julius Gehrum, the former head of the border guard force, and one of Isselhorst’s most brutal enforcers. And of course, there was
Standartenführer
Dr Erich Isselhorst himself, the grandmaster of it all.

Somewhere out there in the fluid chaos of Germany, these men – these guilty men – were hiding. The hunt was about to begin in earnest. ‘All details known including Rank, Christian name and home address are shown where available on the Wanted Reports,’ Barkworth noted. Those wanted reports were to be circulated via London to all Allied authorities.