The Nazi Hunters (40 page)

But the mileage accumulated in this way piled pressure upon the Villa Degler’s ramshackle vehicles. The pace of the hunt and the dearth of drivers were so acute that Barkworth was forced to press-gang his radio team into taking stints at the wheel: ‘Owing shortage drivers am compelled use both signallers on runs. Intend cut skeds forthwith 09.00–10.00 every other day until further notice.’

Yet no amount of such inventiveness could fix the Secret Hunters’ make-do-and-mend transport fleet. Being a unit that did not exist certainly had its downsides. ‘Reach MUNICH yesterday but had to return for spare parts to replace broken back axle . . . Am leaving for MUNICH again in morning . . . This typical example of impossibility work to programme when we do not get adequate support . . . At present another [vehicle] is having a new engine put in.’

In yet another frantic April 1946 radio report, Barkworth informs Galitzine: ‘Am leaving for EAST. Returning here Tuesday. Repeat that dispatch of two drivers to BAOR will hamstring all further movement this end so am taking no action . . . Hope this doesn’t sound high handed but you and Hunt keep cracking the whip and therefore I can’t stop work here.’

‘Hunt’ was Major Alastair Hunt, a judge advocate general (JAG) – a military lawyer attached to Galitzine’s team to help prepare the war crimes cases for prosecution, and now working out of Eaton Square. Their planned journey ‘EAST’ appears to have been in search of the elusive
Sturmbannführer
Ernst.

Towards the end of April 1946 Barkworth sent an excited-sounding radio message to Galitzine and Major Hunt: ‘Following accused are known with utmost certainty to have been taken prisoner by 3rd US Army: HANS DIETER [sic] ERNST in cage at VOGLAU from 8/6/45 until transferred to officers’ camp . . .’

In June 1945
Sturmbannführer
Ernst had been held in American custody. He’d turned up in a temporary POW camp, at Voglau, dressed in civilian clothes and of course denying that he was ever an SS
Sturmbannführer
or the commander of
Einsatzkommando
Ernst. But if he could be traced to the ‘officers’ camp’ that he was moved to, or if there were leads thereafter following his release, Barkworth might have a trail to follow.

Galitzine’s follow-up radio message to the US War Crimes Branch shows how he was hot on that trail. ‘Please obtain complete list of names PW held in VOGLAU CAMP in US Zone. Was a Camp containing 1000 PW for 5/6 weeks May/June 45, then closed. Definitely known ERNST was there during that period. If camp list can be obtained SAS WCIT can check false name which ERNST using.’

There followed a description of Ernst. ‘Born 3.18.08 [date of birth in US format] . . . 1.75 metres height: dark hair: dark eyes: slim build: wears glasses for reading: prominent scars on left side of face (forehead and mouth): married with 4 children . . .’

The response that came back from the Americans was that following his transfer to the officers’ camp, Ernst had slipped beneath the radar. By 9 April 1946 he was classed as ‘unlocated’, which was as good as ‘lost’ as far as Barkworth was concerned.

The Villa Degler chief had one last possible lead on the man. Barkworth had secured intelligence that Ernst may have gone eastwards, to cross the border into the Russian zone. The Ernst family kept a log cabin in the forests of eastern Germany as a summer vacation home. There was just a chance that he might be hiding out there.

‘We were very close to catching Ernst,’ recalled Dusty Rhodes. ‘We were on the border and we knew . . . the person we were looking for . . . was hiding away in this small cabin affair, which was about five or six hundred yards into the Russian Zone. We staked him out for about two to three days, and we were then prepared to make the effort and go and fetch him out of there.’

The Secret Hunters had no authority to cross into the Russian zone, and so the snatch would have to be timed to perfection. If they messed up and anyone was captured, it would be a massive diplomatic incident in the making, not to mention spelling disaster for the Villa Degler operation. A clandestine unit made up of individuals from a Regiment that no longer existed would be exposed to the full glare of international publicity. But the prize – SS
Sturmbannführer
Ernst – made the risks worth taking.

Barkworth, Rhodes and their team watched Ernst’s place of hiding closely, recording all of his movements in preparation for launching their smash-and-grab raid. They noted down ‘timings of when he came out and walked so far and how long it would take him to get back and how long it would take us to get there,’ explained Rhodes. ‘When we’d done that we decided: “Yes, that’s it – that’s exactly how we’ll do it.” Then along came a car and picked him up and took him away, so we lost him again. Somebody was moving him about who shouldn’t have been.’

During repeated cross-border stakeouts Rhodes had several run-ins with Ernst’s equally objectionable wife and mother-in-law. The two hatchet-faced women remained utterly devoid of remorse regarding all that Ernst had got up to during the war. Rhodes was tempted to ‘choke the buggers at times, when you knew they knew where he was and we were so close to catching him, but . . . they wouldn’t give in whatever we did to them’.

Rhodes stressed that Ernst’s family were never mistreated or harmed in the course of the hunt. ‘We didn’t ill-treat them in any way. I mean, that’s not on. We wouldn’t do that. But we’d do all sorts of tricks – baiting one to the other, or taking the kids away from them . . . But that still wouldn’t break them, or make them tell us where he was.’

Barkworth and Rhodes decided to play the long game in the hunt for
Sturmbannführer
Ernst. ‘It was only a matter of time before we went to pay a visit and he would be at home.’

But, as luck would have it, it was to be
Oberwachtmeister
Stuka Neuschwanger whom the Secret Hunters would first lay their hands upon.

Chapter Twenty-seven

It was a misty May 1946 morning when Barkworth, Rhodes and team led a stiff and reluctant figure into the woods of the Erlich Forest, near the former labour camp of Rotenfels. That figure had shown not a shred of remorse for all that he had done. He’d never once dropped his demeanour of brute arrogance and supposed superiority – he was, after all, one of the so-called
Übermenschen
; the Aryan master race – ever since his capture.

Now, the Secret Hunters were returning a sadist and a mass murderer – a man who had revelled in causing others unspeakable suffering and pain – to the scene of one of his many crimes, to see if that would make him crack. Superficially, there was nothing that seemed to mark out
Oberwachtmeister
Neuschwanger as a brutal killer. With his swept-back, slightly thinning hair, fine features and prominent, almost pointed nose, he resembled a typical junior Nazi officer.

It was only when you looked into the man’s dead eyes that you could read the bottomless pits of cruelty that resided deep in his soul. Neuschwanger was led to the lip of the bomb crater in which the bodies of the murdered Special Forces men – Major Reynolds, Captain Whately-Smith, Lieutenant David Dill, Captain Gough, amongst others – had been buried.

Dusty Rhodes had personally known most of the murdered men. But for him, bringing Neuschwanger here was about one thing only: nailing him for his crimes. ‘Revenge didn’t come into it, as far as we were concerned . . . We had a job to do and that was to bring these people to justice, and once we’d achieved that then we thought we’d done our work. But revenge, no. We didn’t seek revenge.’

Barkworth forced
Oberwachtmeister
Neuschwanger to look into the pit into which the bodies had tumbled, one after the other – defenceless men, each of whom had been dispatched with a bullet to the head.

‘So, what do you feel now about the murders that took place here?’ Barkworth demanded. ‘Now that the war is over?’

Neuschwanger shrugged indifferently. He made it clear he felt nothing; no sense of guilt, no regrets. Rhodes found the man’s blatant arrogance enraging.

‘When he . . . turned and looked at me and I looked at him,’ Rhodes recalled, ‘and thinking about the people that you knew personally . . . That’s when my temper went.’

Rhodes lashed out, launching a punch that knocked Neuschwanger clean off his feet. The
Oberwachtmeister
tumbled down the wall of the crater, coming to rest in some 18 inches of dirty water lying in its bottom.

‘He was fortunate, because he was coming out,’ remarked Rhodes. ‘The people that had gone in there before weren’t. We allowed him to come out and took him back to prison . . .’

Barkworth’s stalking of Neuschwanger – carefully
tracking his movements and unmasking his false identity – had finally paid off. But in his interrogation the man gave a sense of his appalling lack of remorse for all that he had wrought. In the
Oberwachtmeister
’s
matter-of-fact recounting of the Erlich Forest killings it was clear that he felt that he had done nothing remotely odious or reprehensible.

‘Ostertag asked me how many prisoners we should do at a time. I suggested three, so he gave the order for the first three to jump down . . . I remember as we were marching them down the track one of them took a photograph out of their pocket and looked at it. We turned into the wood for a distance of 20 to 30 metres until we came to the bomb crater . . . We each fired at the prisoner in front of us.’

‘My pistol had a stoppage,’ Neuschwanger continued. ‘The prisoner in front of me ran away through the wood . . . He was stopped by a shot from either Niebel or Korb, and killed as he lay wounded on the ground by another shot through the head. We then took most of the clothes off . . . to make the bodies unrecognizable.’

Neuschwanger and his fellows then returned to the truck for another three. ‘We each shot the respective prisoner in front of us through the back of the head . . . Everyone . . . took either some clothing or shoes back with them. I know that Ostertag had a ring and a gold pocket watch. I had a pair of black boots and Dinkel had a leather case with a zip fastener containing travel necessities . . . An identity disk was lying on the ground . . . I took this and threw it away in the woods.’

Those last words were a crucial admission. In getting Neuschwanger to confess to his efforts to conceal the murdered men’s identities, Barkworth figured that he had him bang to rights. He might well try to use the defence of ‘superior orders’ at his trial, but he had clearly known what he was doing was wrong, or else why try to hide the evidence of the identity of the victims?

During his interrogation Neuschwanger also admitted to taking two men – most likely SAS Trooper Gerald Davis and downed US airman Flight Officer Peabody – into the underground cells at Schirmek. One of Neuschwanger’s jobs at Schirmek was to move the condemned men from there to Natzweiler, for termination. Davis was subsequently murdered at Natzweiler and his body dumped at Abbé Gassman’s church, as a warning. US airman Peabody was very likely also killed at Natzweiler.

Neuschwanger’s testimony had his signature appended to it, above the following words: ‘SWORN by the said Deponent Heinrich Neuschwanger, voluntarily, at Gaggenau Germany . . . before me, Major E.A. Barkworth . . .’

Finally, the ‘SAS’ major had got his man.

In Barkworth’s definitive Missing Parachutists report – the one that quoted Shakespeare:
But in these cases we still have judgment here 
– he listed dozens of war crimes suspects. In one case alone – the Erlich Forest killings – there were sixteen ‘Accused and Suspect Accused’, including the rogues’ gallery of Erich Isselhorst, Wilhelm Schneider, Robert Uhring, Julius Gehrum, Karl Buck and Heinrich Neuschwanger.

By the late spring of 1946, all these men were in custody and scheduled to stand trial. With many, it was the ‘domino effect’ that had got them – one captive leading to another. As just one example, Isselhorst’s deputy, Schneider, had been seized as a result of the evidence Isselhorst had volunteered.

Upon being taken into captivity by the US 7th Army, Isselhorst had given his captors chapter and verse about the command that he had run, enabling them to draw up flow diagrams of the entire Gestapo and SS set-up. Isselhorst also told them about the whereabouts of his key staff. Of Schneider at the end of the war he noted: ‘SCHNEIDER was retired and joined his family, living in a small town in northern Baden.’ This was enough to lead the Secret Hunters to him.

‘Surprisingly . . . prisoners themselves are best able to give information concerning the whereabouts of others, by some mysterious bush telegraph,’ wrote Barkworth in his Missing Parachutists report. ‘The easiest Germans to find were those who stayed at home . . .’ Schneider was one, claiming to have played a supposedly ‘innocent’ role during the war. ‘Schneider had for example described himself to the American prison authorities as a simple “frontier guard”’.

In one of the most celebrated snatch operations – at least within the tiny community who knew about the Secret Hunters – a suspect (it remains unclear who, exactly) had been lured into Barkworth’s clutches by means of a black-market ruse. In post-war Germany everything was in extremely short supply, and the black market was thriving. For those wanted on charges of war crimes, and living false lives under false identities, the black market was an obvious way to scratch a living without drawing unwanted attention to oneself.