The Nazi Hunters (31 page)

Barkworth’s full report on the Gaggenau atrocities was completed by 15 July 1945. It concluded: ‘Those who have had the patience to read this . . . will realize the urgency of bringing the German criminals to justice.’

As luck would have it, Barkworth was about to seize the first of his most wanted.

Chapter Twenty

By the summer of 1945 the survivors of the Waldfest deportations had returned. Of the 231 who had been taken from Moussey, 178 did not come back. Of those who did, some were so weakened and sickly from the effects of what they had suffered that they too would die. Across the Rabodeau Valley a thousand-odd villagers had been taken, most of whom never returned to their homes.

The valley of a thousand tears had become the vale of the widows.

As the dark and bitter truth began to emerge about Hitler’s Commando Order and its impact upon Allied victims, the news hit the world press. On 7 June Reuters released a front-page story entitled ‘The 168 Steps of Torture’. It revealed that the remains of forty-eight parachutists murdered by the SS had been discovered at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

The Reuters story read: ‘According to liberated prisoners, they were made to carry rocks up 168 steps leading to the top of a quarry, while guards lashed them with whips and threatened to shoot if the rocks fell.’ They were then made to throw the rocks off and repeat the entire process all over again. The torture ended on 6 September 1944, when, ‘on the orders of Himmler, the half-dead men were shot as they struggled up the steps’.

Elsewhere it was reported how the private effects of men missing from 1 SAS had been recovered from Belsen, leaving little doubt as to the soldiers’ fate. But the sheer scale of the atrocities and the numbers of Nazis involved remained mind-numbing. It was as if an avalanche of atrocities had thundered across Western Europe, burying it in horror, and in spite of Barkworth’s ‘Wanted’ reports many war criminals were escaping the Allied dragnet.

On 12 June 1945, just as Barkworth was about to issue his report on the Gaggenau atrocities,
Standartenführer
Dr Erich Isselhorst was captured – or, rather, he handed himself in. Ironically, it was to the soldiers of the US 7th Army – those who had helped drive his forces out of the Vosges – that Isselhorst had chosen to give himself up.

Together with his wife, Isselhorst had spent weeks lying low in a remote lumberjack cabin in Sachenbach, a mountainous area of southern Germany close to the Austrian border. Until recently, he had remained an unreconstructed Nazi and apparently unrepentant. He’d written a letter to his wife, boasting of how he’d shown himself to be a true disciple of the Führer, unlike those just ‘paying lip service’. Isselhorst had described his ‘unshakeable faith in the good and pure nature of National Socialism [Nazism], the spirit of the Reich and its people, and the invulnerability of our leader’.

Dressed in civilian clothing and holding false papers in the name of Georg Horst, at first Isselhorst had tried to ride out the storm of the Allies’ arrival by remaining in hiding. But by June 1945, he had clearly made the decision that his fortunes would be best served if he could ingratiate himself with the most powerful of Germany’s occupying forces: the Americans.

From the records of his subsequent interrogations, it seems clear that the Americans were torn about Isselhorst. On the one hand, the US 7th Army’s War Crimes Branch suspected the SS and Gestapo commander of being involved with atrocities. On the other, its counter-intelligence staff realized that Isselhorst had fought on the Eastern Front, and that could make him useful.

‘The following leads on Counter Intelligence personalities have been provided by SS
Standartenführer
Dr. Erich Isselhorst, now in custody,’ notes a ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ letter from Headquarters, United States Forces, European Theatre. Those leads concern Isselhorst’s SS and Gestapo colleagues who had either fought against the Russian Red Army, or spied upon Stalin’s regime.

Isselhorst quickly made his intentions clear to his captors. ‘Isselhorst has offered to work for us in the capacity of an informer,’ concluded one typewritten US memo. A handwritten note in the margin stated: ‘IC not sure of him yet’ – IC stood for the 7th Army’s ‘Interrogation Centre’. The US Army’s interests in Isselhorst were listed as: ‘A. Organisation and personalities of Amt IV RSHA. B. The Sipo in Russia.’

‘Amt IV’ was the Gestapo, and the ‘SIPO’ was the Reich’s security police, but the focus of the American’s interest was clearly Isselhorst’s Russian experiences and expertise. Commenting on Isselhorst’s time serving on the Eastern Front, the interrogation report stated: ‘Political police; anti-Maquis measures in close collaboration with local anti-communists, making use of the age-old hatred between Ukrainians and White Russians.’

For an American military contemplating a new war – the Cold War – such experiences might well prove invaluable. As to Isselhorst’s personality, the interrogation officer stated that while he ‘tried to make a good impression . . . He has an unpleasant personality and a character that seems cowardly. He is worried about his wife and mother and obviously concerned about his own fate.’

At the same time the Americans were liaising with the British over Isselhorst. A ‘SECRET’ July 1945 cable from London advised caution over Isselhorst. ‘STILL CONVINCED NAZI,’ it warned. Yet in spite of this, the Americans were clearly tempted to work with him.

‘Greying hair, light blue eyes . . . very intelligent, hard worker, good appearance,’ concluded a US 7th Army assessment of Isselhorst’s professional abilities. ‘Suggest Isselhorst be used as lead present locations,’ concluded a ‘SECRET’ 7th Army cable, urging that he be employed to help round up valuable Gestapo officers, and to further the 7th Army’s intelligence outreach into the Soviet zone and Stalin’s Russia: the new enemy.

So far, Isselhorst’s detention and his ingratiating behaviour towards the Americans had escaped Barkworth’s notice. But as luck would have it, another of the most wanted had already fallen into the SAS commander’s hands:
Hauptsturmführer
Karl Buck, Schirmek’s former commandant, was safely ensconced in the Villa Degler’s cellar-cum-prison-cell, and singing like a canary.

At this early stage of proceedings, word had yet to get out that the hunt for the Nazi war criminals was on. Incredibly, many of the ‘wanted’ didn’t appear to think that they had done anything particularly wrong. Karl Buck was one of those. Returning to his family home, he’d planned to slip back quietly into the life that he had led as a civilian before the war. That was until Barkworth had arrived on his doorstep to take him to the Villa Degler’s interrogation cell.

With his level, unshakeable gaze and fluent German, Barkworth would prove an interrogator almost without equal, although his means and his methods would surprise some. He had already stressed ‘the urgency of bringing the German criminals to justice’. He felt that urgency most personally. He was utterly driven and unrelenting, and he fuelled his murderously long hours with both drink and drugs.

Barkworth’s team had now been boosted to thirteen to help cope with the punishing workload. In a letter to Colonel Franks, one of his men explained just how intensive was their schedule – in part to excuse his terrible handwritten scrawl.

‘It is now about two in the morning and I’ve been working the last two days on the Barkworth system,’ SAS Captain Henry Parker wrote, ‘. . . a mixture of whisky, Benzedrine and no sleep – also I’m not good at typing at the best of times.’

Old habits died hard.

Barkworth and his team’s relentless, Benzedrine-fuelled work routine meant that an interrogation visit to the Villa Degler cellar could happen at any time of the day or night. But other than that, Barkworth treated his captives with a remarkable politeness and decency, almost as if by doing so they might be convinced that he empathized with them. Yet he never offered them more than these two stark choices: either they confess and turn evidence against their superiors, or they should expect zero clemency in the forthcoming war crimes trials.

‘Few Germans interrogated by him, even the many who had signed confessions of guilt and even the most hardened of Gestapo men have failed to comment on his courtesy and consideration,’ noted Captain Prince Galitzine, in a handwritten assessment of Barkworth’s interrogation methods. ‘Some have even mistaken him for the ex-Gestapo chief of that area whose physical likeness and even the German accent is so like Bill that it startles the prisoners.’

One of the Rotenfels staff, Siegmund Weber, had recently faced a Barkworth interrogation. Weber had played a minor role compared to ‘Stuka’ Neuschwanger or Camp Commandant Buck. He had served as the Rotenfels camp quartermaster – a glorified storeman. His value was that he was a witness to Neuschwanger’s beatings and his savagery.

But shortly after Barkworth had interrogated him, Weber had attempted suicide – testimony to the steel that the SAS officer could put into his questioning. Barkworth’s methods likewise worked wonders with Karl Buck.

‘During the summer of 1944 a number of camps were constructed east of the Rhine, which came under my command,’ Buck recounted to Barkworth, regarding the Gaggenau atrocities. One of those was the Rotenfels camp. ‘These were in connection with . . . the Daimler Benz Company, in order to provide labour for their factories.’

Buck tried to paint himself as whiter than white, while laying the blame at Isselhorst’s door. ‘I wish to place on the record that during the whole time that I was commandant of this camp no prisoner was killed by my orders.’ One of Isselhorst’s deputies had come to him that summer, Buck explained, with orders that ‘any bailed-out airmen or parachutists who might be taken prisoner and brought to my camp, were to be killed. He suggested this might be done in the surrounding woods.’

Buck claimed that he had refused Isselhorst’s orders. The most that he had been willing to do was send such airmen and parachutists to Natzweiler, where the camp executioner,
Hauptscharführer
Peter Straub, might deal with them. He described Straub as having, ‘extremely small eyes, pale face, reddish hair and an impediment in his speech which caused him to pull the corners of his mouth’.

Buck spoke about one of Straub’s final mass executions. ‘On 18 October [1944], a party which I estimate at 125 strong, which had arrived at Schirmek from Strasbourg was sent to Natzweiler.’ This group was summarily killed, confirming Natzweiler’s role as a liquidation centre for those no longer deemed ‘useful’ to the Reich, and Straub’s role as the mass executioner.

As US forces had advanced into the Vosges, Buck had driven to Gaggenau and ‘arranged with the Mercedes Benz firm for a supply of sufficient trucks to evacuate the prisoners across the Rhine. This was in accordance with a secret order that I had received from Dr. Isselhorst. This order was accompanied by verbal instructions to shoot certain prisoners, including the British and American POWs.’

Buck had disobeyed his orders, because ‘I did not consider that it would be wise to leave fresh mass graves behind.’ Instead, he took all the prisoners direct to the Rotenfels camp. But Buck professed to Barkworth that ‘I stood in fear of Dr. Isselhorst, who I know would not only have had me executed, but also would attack my family should I act contrary to his orders.’

So it was that Buck had passed the buck; he’d ordered Wunsch, the Rotenfels commandant, to shoot the British and American prisoners, thus carrying out Isselhorst’s command. ‘I told him to destroy any evidence which might lead to the discovery of this crime, and take such precautions as would be normal – such as destruction of papers bearing their names, and any uniforms or any other aids of identification that might be on their bodies.’

By anyone’s reckoning, this was an explosive confession. It bore the signature of ‘Karl Gustaf Wilhelm Buck’, and had a typewritten note beside it, signed off by Barkworth: ‘I certify that the above statement was read to the witness, in his own language, prior to his signature . . .’

With Buck’s testimony secured, the case of the Gaggenau atrocities had been largely solved. Barkworth now knew how the British Special Forces and their US airmen comrades had ended up in Gaggenau, and why. He knew on whose orders those men had been executed, and who had done the killing. And with Buck firmly in custody, one of the key architects of their demise was ready to face trial.

More suspects would doubtless be tracked down. But Barkworth was keen to stress the need for secrecy if they were to succeed in getting those they most sought into the Villa Degler cell. In a telephone call to London he urged: ‘Extreme care should be taken to ensure that no news that the SAS are searching for [X suspect] should reach the wanted man’s ears.’

Colonel Franks’ subsequent letter to Brigadier Calvert, the overall SAS Commander, reflected how well Barkworth and his team had done. ‘I had a long talk with Col. Chavez [the American war crimes investigator] and was much impressed by his desire to help us. He expressed amazement that the British investigation . . . should be left in the hands of one single officer. He showed great gratitude for the assistance he had received from Barkworth . . .’

Chavez’s surprise at the size and scope of the British team reflected his own, impressive set-up. His Gaggenau unit included two pathologists, several professional interrogators, two legal experts, plus shorthand typists and photographers to help document the crime scenes and to take witness statements. By contrast, Barkworth’s unit consisted of no specialists whatsoever; it was the 2 SAS intelligence cell reconstituted as a DIY manhunting unit, which only made it all the more impressive that they were doing so well.