The Nazi Hunters (36 page)

‘We . . . roared off in a high state of fever to Cirey,’ Galitzine recalled, which was set about eighty miles away, on the far side of the Rhine – in France. It was early on a winter’s morning by the time the Secret Hunters reached the village, and the locals were just heading out to go and till their fields.

A pair of flying boots was recovered from one of the Cirey villager’s houses. Three unmarked graves – those of the Lancaster crew that had died upon crash-landing – were discovered in the churchyard. Finally, they found some villagers who knew of the shootings. They were led into the woodland, which was thick with lime trees, and shown the location of the killings. Sure enough, when they dug they turned up two bodies.

Upon their return to Gaggenau, a radio message was waiting. CROWCASS had discovered that the French were holding a German prisoner of the name thrown up by the Ouija board. He claimed to be a private in the
Wehrmacht
, but once Barkworth drove over to interrogate him, the man soon cracked. He had actually served in the Gestapo, and he became the chief suspect in the Cirey killings.

When Galitzine returned to London, he passed the scribbles that he’d made recording the question-and-answer session around the Ouija board to his elderly War Office secretary. She was used to taking down interrogation notes, and she began to type away. But all of a sudden this prim and proper lady reached the moment where the Ouija board spelled out, ‘I was killed at Cirey in the Vosges’.

Galitzine’s secretary let out a scream and rushed out of the room. Shortly thereafter Galitzine was called before three senior-ranking War Office officials to explain himself.

‘How dare you do anything like this?’ they demanded of Galitzine. He was accused of conduct unbecoming in an officer and a gentleman, in ‘dealing with Ouija boards’.

Galitzine held his ground. He pointed out that despite the unorthodox means, they’d unearthed two bodies in the woods and arrested a German suspect.

The War Office mandarins glanced at each other. There were raised eyebrows. ‘Well, if you
hadn’t
got two bodies and a prisoner you’d be court martialled.’

The two men murdered at Cirey had nothing to do with the SAS. They had served with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Yet Barkworth had pursued their killers as avidly as if they had been two of the remaining Op Loyton missing.

Of
their
fate and whereabouts all leads seemed to have gone cold. In desperation, Barkworth turned again to checking through some of the key documents seized in the earliest days of his operations – the papers that he’d found in Isselhorst’s Strasbourg headquarters, detailing the names and roles of his units and their men.

One name jumped out at him: Georg Zahringer. Zahringer had served on
Einsatzkommando
Ernst – the unit commanded by
Sturmbannführer
Hans Dietrich Ernst. Barkworth knew of the
Einsatzkommando
’s
unsavoury reputation.
Working on the presumption that a leopard never changes its spots – a death squad is a death squad, no matter where it is deployed –
Barkworth figured
Zahringer would be well worth talking to.

As it happened, a man with that name had just been arrested. When Barkworth went to interrogate him, he quickly realized that here was his long-awaited breakthrough. It was the winter of 1945, and Zahringer’s testimony would prove to be a game-changer. What Zahringer described to Barkworth would enable one of the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to fall into place.

Lieutenant David Dill’s murder had already been solved; he had been killed with the other Special Forces officers at the Erlich Forest massacre. But the fate of the rest of his rearguard party – those left to keep watch over the SAS’s final Basse de Lieumont base – remained a mystery. Now Zahringer would solve that mystery, painting a terrible picture of the final hours of Dill’s command.

After Dill and his men had been captured, their Panzer division captors had held them for forty-eight hours. But then they were delivered into the evil embrace of
Sturmbannführer
Hans Dietrich Ernst. At his Saales headquarters, situated some 6 miles to the south-east of Moussey, Ernst separated the SAS officer from his men. While Lieutenant Dill was Schirmek-bound, the eight other ranks were destined for a far more immediate and gruesome reckoning.

On 15 October – nine days after their capture – they were loaded aboard a truck, which Zahringer happened to be driving. He was ordered to head for La Grande Fosse, a farmstead that lay just to the west of Saales.

‘We came to a spot where there was a thick fir wood on the left hand side,’ Zahringer related to Barkworth. ‘I noticed no one until I saw Opelt . . . standing by the turn-off of a track to the left . . . He waved to me to back my truck up this track, which I did . . .

‘Opelt ordered me to open the back of the truck and the first prisoner was made to get down,’ Zahringer continued. ‘They were all hand-cuffed . . . Schossig, who spoke English, told him to take his clothes off. This the prisoner did. He was then taken, held by the arms by Wuttke and Gaede into the wood . . . Wuttke was carrying a . . . pistol, and Gaede also had a weapon with him. Practically immediately I heard a shot.

‘The remaining English prisoners in the truck did not say anything, but remained silent,’ Zahringer recalled. One of the two priests must have told the men to kneel, and he began to administer the last rites. The prisoners were heard praying in a language that Zahringer presumed had to be English. One by one they were led away, as further shots rang out through the trees.

It came to the last man. ‘Just before he was taken away, he said something to Schossig, in English,’ Zahringer told Barkworth. ‘I asked Schossig what he said, and he told me that the Englishman had said: “We were good men.” I followed this last prisoner and saw how he was made to stand near the edge of an open grave which contained the naked dead bodies of his comrades . . . He was not trembling.’

That last prisoner was shot, and pushed into the open grave. The discarded clothes were gathered up and burned.

After confessing to so much, Zahringer seemed to get cold feet, at least when it came to leading Barkworth and his men to the site of the mass grave. Perhaps he feared he would end up joining the corpses. He feigned forgetfulness. It had been a wet and foggy autumn day, Zahringer argued, and he couldn’t remember exactly which turn-off he had taken into the forest. Barkworth and his men knew the rough location, but that was pretty much all.

Barkworth sent Dusty Rhodes to Saales, with the seemingly impossible task of scouring several square kilometres of woodland. It was the first week of November 1945, over a year after the killings had happened. No matter how large the clearing for the grave had been, the forest would have reclaimed it by now.

On a bitter November morning Rhodes and three others set out driving west from Saales. He had a rough idea of the kind of location he was looking for, based upon Zahringer’s testimony.

‘They were driven through the forest, down this lane to the side of a small embankment,’ Rhodes recalled. ‘A very shallow grave had been dug . . . One by one they were ordered out of the vehicle, moved to the top of this small embankment and shot through the back of the head.’

Rhodes needed to find a lane leading into the forest large enough to take a German Army truck, and with a small embankment lying to one side. But the terrain here was extremely challenging. The road climbed steeply as it neared La Grande Fosse, switch-backing around precipitous bends and snaking through the dark pinewood. The ground was cut with ancient First World War trench systems – the Vosges had also formed the front line of battle in that war – which made the task of finding the grave doubly challenging.

There was one apparent upside. The forest bisected by the road stretched for a quarter of a mile, no more. Though it was exceptionally dense, it was within this relatively small area that the bodies had to lie. Here and there, to either side, rutted forestry tracks sliced into the gloom. Zahringer had been certain of one thing during his interrogation: he’d taken a left-hand turn off the road.

Rhodes and his fellows looked closely as they drove along the road. At each track they stopped the jeep, but neither that day’s search nor the next yielded any results. Fortunately Rhodes was as doggedly determined as his boss. ‘It seemed to us to be an impossible task, but at the end of the day we weren’t going to give in until we’d searched every square inch if it came to that.’

Rhodes set out for a further try. He was a horticulturist by training, and he’d worked as a municipal park gardener prior to the war. He knew his vegetation well. At one point he halted, realizing that a patch of undergrowth was noticeably younger than that surrounding it. He pulled out a shovel from the jeep and began to dig. He’d little more than scratched the surface when he unearthed a big toe.

‘I knew then that we’d found the eight missing SAS personnel,’ Rhodes remarked. ‘The big toe which came out I put into a matchbox and took back to Gaggenau with me.’ He presented it to Barkworth. ‘[I] gave it to him, with my compliments, because he was concerned we were not moving fast enough on that one.’

On 6 November 1945 Rhodes returned to the site, together with one of the American pathologists, plus a work party of German prisoners. They were made to dig up the bodies of their fellow countrymen’s victims. The rapid burial of the corpses meant that they emerged remarkably well preserved. For those who had served with them, most would be recognized by sight alone.

They were Sergeants Hay and Neville, Lance Corporals Robinson and Austin, and Troopers Bennet, Weaver, Church and McGovern. Sergeant ‘Jock’ Hay was of course Captain Henry Druce’s redoubtable troop sergeant, the man Druce had insisted on taking with him when given his eleventh-hour orders to take command of the Op Loyton advance party.

A 7.65mm bullet – the same calibre as used in a German Luger pistol – was found embedded in the head of Trooper Church, whose body was the first to have tumbled into the grave. Spent rifle shell cases were found scattered amongst the bodies, suggesting that more than one ‘shooter’ had been engaged in the killing.

Barely a month previously the BAOR’s war crimes investigator, Lieutenant Colonel Genn, had stated that ‘only a miracle’ would provide the evidence to solve the outstanding cases of the missing Op Loyton eighteen. Well, Barkworth had had his (partial) miracle. Eight more had been found, and the eighteen had become ten.

A crucial aspect regarding these murders was picked up by Barkworth. Ernst had sent a radio message to his superior, Isselhorst, claiming that the eight ‘parachutists’ had been shot ‘whilst trying to escape’. This was clearly not the case; they had been murdered in cold blood. It looked as if Ernst had acted upon his own initiative in deciding to shoot the men, for Isselhorst had wanted them brought to Schirmek, for ‘processing’.

Following the discovery of the La Grande Fosse killings,
Standartenführer
Isselhorst remained at the top of Barkworth’s wanted list. But a new name was vying with him for pole position:
Sturmbannführer
Hans Dietrich Ernst, the man who had disregarded orders from a superior officer so that he might have eight SAS murdered in the woods of the Vosges.

By now 1945 was almost at an end, and the more horrors Barkworth uncovered the more he hungered for justice. As the year blew through to 1946, he would find that his hunger would finally be sated.

Chapter Twenty-four

In spite of the stunning results that they had achieved, sending Barkworth’s team ‘dark’ had its problems. They could hardly hide their activities from one of their greatest detractors – the BAOR. In the winter of 1945, the BAOR knew full well that Barkworth’s unit was still in operation.

The BAOR’s reaction was to try to draw the Villa Degler operators into their own clutches. If they couldn’t discredit and shut down Barkworth and his team, they would trap and take control of them. A wireless message from the BAOR’s legal unit summed up the kind of pressure that the Villa Degler mission was being subjected to.

‘Message to Barkworth. Quote one. Your team for ADM is part of this unit. Your ADM controlled only by this unit, not, repeat not by . . . London. Two. Fwd all requests, complaints or ADM to this unit as instructed. Three. FWD immediate nominal roll and arrange exchange views this HQ. Unquote.’

‘ADM’ stood for administration. ‘Nominal roll’ meant all the names of those in Barkworth’s Villa Degler operation.

The BAOR legal team was doing its damnedest to drag Barkworth’s outfit out of the shadows. That would sound the death knell, burying the Villa Degler team under an avalanche of mindless bureaucracy and toady protocol. More importantly, it would sever Barkworth’s direct command and control via London, which in turn would threaten to blow wide open the Secret Hunters’ deniability.

By now – and in spite of the SAS Regiment being ‘no more’ – Barkworth had working under him three officers and twenty-one men. In the search for the wanted, he had his ‘SAS’ scouring the POW camps, where they had already discovered war crimes suspects hiding amongst the prisoners. But trawling through dozens of camps set hundreds of miles apart was a massive undertaking.

Galitzine summed up the enormity of the task: ‘All vehicles of the unit average over 200 miles a day when they are on the road. Trips are being made the whole time throughout the French and American zones, from the Czech border to Saar, from Hanover to Lake Constance – and now trips to Holland . . . Schleswig-Holstein and the Ruhr . . . Next month visits are scheduled to S.W. France, Paris and Austria. These journeys have nearly all resulted in the capture of at least one accused – the total now being “under arrest” is 51.’