The Nazi Hunters (47 page)

From 1959 to 1972 he was the managing director of the Hyde Park Hotel in London, and he also worked for the Trust Houses Forte group. Having been made honorary colonel of 21 SAS, he went on to become colonel commandant of the reformed SAS Regiment. He married and had two children, and passed away in 1982, in Suffolk.

Major Bill Barkworth emigrated to Australia, where he built himself a new life far from the dark realities of Nazi war crimes. He married and set himself up in business. He died of a heart attack in January 1986.

After his time working out of Eaton Square, Captain Prince Yurka Galitzine set up a London public relations company in Mayfair. It took him a very long time to forgive the German people as a whole for Natzweiler, and the many other horrors he had witnessed. ‘I didn’t recognize the difference between Germans,’ he remarked. ‘To me all Germans were cruel, and as a result I was very vengeful . . . Time is the great mellower.’

Galitzine was married four times, had two sons and three daughters, and became a successful international businessman. He retired to the East Midlands county of Rutland – England’s smallest county – where he became the chairman and then president of the Rutland Society. He remained proud of his Russian heritage, and was pleased to return to the country of his forefathers following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some of his private papers are filed in ‘The Prince Yuri Galitzine Room’ at the Rutland County Museum. He died in November 2002 after a short illness.

Captain and then Major Henry Carey Druce was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Croix de Guerre with Palm for his work during Op Loyton, his DSO citation praising his skill, daring and complete disregard for his own safety. In the Vosges Druce had won ‘the admiration of not only all British troops with whom he came into contact, but also of the local French people amongst whom his name became a byword’.

Having crossed over the lines to rejoin Colonel Franks’ Op Loyton force, and failing to find them, he then crossed back over the lines for a third time and made it safely to the American forces, although they – temporarily – arrested him as a suspected ‘German spy’. He then went on to serve with distinction with the SAS in Arnhem, where he commanded a fleet of ten jeeps that pushed behind enemy lines, ambushing German columns and seizing an airfield.

Post-war he joined MI6 – the British Secret Intelligence Service – serving in Holland and Indonesia. He was honoured again by the French in 1951, when he was invited to rekindle the flame at the Arc de Triomphe. That year he left MI6, moved to Canada with his wife and three children and launched a marine shipping business. He died in 2007 at the age of eighty-five.

Throughout his active life after the war, Druce was a regular visitor to Moussey. On one occasion he visited the bar from which he had been forced to escape from the Germans by stealing and riding off on a child’s bicycle. The barman remembered him, and reminded him of the episode. Druce subsequently sent him a model of a child’s bicycle, which to this day the bar owner keeps proudly above his bar.

SAS Captain and then Major Peter Lancelot John Le Poer Power survived the war, earning a Mention in Dispatches and a Military Cross (MC). He worked as a tea planter in civilian life, and died in February 1998, aged eighty-six.

Captain John Hislop – fine amateur jockey and Op Loyton Phantom – survived the war and went on to become a successful sports journalist, writer and racehorse breeder, as well as winning 102 races on the flat, and being champion amateur jockey for thirteen consecutive seasons. Hislop was racing correspondent for the
Observer
for sixteen years and he authored numerous books on racing, including his excellent mixed horse-racing and wartime memoir,
Anything but a Soldier
. He married and had two sons, and died in February 1994, in Suffolk.

Captain Chris Sykes, the Op Loyton Intelligence Officer, was awarded a Mention in Dispatches and a Croix de guerre. He survived the war and went on to become a novelist and biographer in civilian life, being invested as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He authored more than a dozen books, including
Four Studies in Loyalty
, the final part of which deals – somewhat tangentially – with his experiences of Operation Loyton.

He counted the author Evelyn Waugh and, prior to the war, Robert Byron, amongst his close friends. He reported for BBC radio extensively, and also wrote for British and American magazines, including the
New Republic
, the
Spectator
and others. He was married twice and had one son. He died in December 1986.

Ralph ‘Karl’ Marx – the Op Loyton raider extraordinaire – was awarded an MC for his part in Op Loyton. The effects of the Vosges missions on his health resulted in him being given a 100 per cent disability benefit at the end of the war. After that Marx went to Cambridge to read engineering, and won a Blue for boxing; he insisted on handing back his disability pension. He went on to forge a successful career as an engineer. He married, had a son and two daughters, and died in December 2000, aged seventy-eight.

Lou Fiddick, downed Canadian airman and honorary Op Loyton SAS operative, survived the war and returned to his native Canada, from where he kept in regular touch with his one-time SAS comrades, Captain Druce first and foremost, who became a fellow Canadian resident.

French guide and honorary SAS man Roger Souchal survived the war and became a successful lawyer in the French city of Nancy.

Sergeant Fred ‘Dusty’ Rhodes returned to his native Barnsley after his stint with the Secret Hunters, taking up again his job with the local council in the parks department. In 1985 he returned to Moussey and laid wreaths in the graveyard on behalf of his comrades and to honour those buried there. He returned to La Grande Fosse and left a plain black cross bearing the inscription: ‘At this place, eight members of the 2nd SAS Regiment were murdered on 15 October 1944.’

Rhodes was one of those who refused to remain silent about the work of the Secret Hunters. After the war he gave various interviews, some of which are lodged with the Imperial War Museum. In one Rhodes made clear his feelings on the official files regarding the SAS war crimes work being closed for seventy-five years:

‘What constituted the records of Loyton . . . why they put a seventy-five year restriction on that I really don’t know. I wonder if that seventy-five years applies to any other [files]?’

Rhodes granted the interviews that he did in an effort to help break that silence.

Today Moussey, Operation Loyton and its aftermath forms part of the legend of the SAS Regiment. To those who know of it, Op Loyton is often referred to as ‘the SAS’s Arnhem’. The manhunting operations of the Secret Hunters are still studied by the Regiment today, as a model for modern-day war crimes snatch operations like those pursued by the SAS following the conflict in the Balkans.

Members of the Regiment still return regularly to that small village in the Vosges to honour the fallen; both their own SAS comrades and those hundreds of French civilians who perished alongside them. On the last Sunday in September every year, the village of Moussey remembers. Following a service in the church – in which hangs an official SAS Regimental pennant – wreaths are laid on the graves of the SAS men buried in the churchyard, and on the memorial to those villagers who were deported, never to return.

One of the dwindling band of survivors reads out the long list of those who disappeared, and after each name another veteran pronounces the words: ‘
Mort pour la patrie
.’

End Note

Several decades after the war ended, a man called Peter Mason published a book called
Official Assassin
. In it he claimed to be a former SAS soldier who worked for a beyond-dark arm of the SAS, killing off those war criminals who, for whatever reason, could not be brought to justice. Mason’s supposed exploits received some coverage in the newspapers at the time: ‘British Hit Squad “executed” Nazis’ ran a December 1977 headline in the
Sunday Times
.

Mason claimed he worked from a converted stable block near Stuttgart, and that his activities were covertly supported by the War Office. He claimed to have executed sixteen Nazis who would otherwise have escaped ‘justice’. Mason related how they would collect the wanted man from a POW camp, execute him covertly, and then claim that he had either committed suicide or was shot trying to escape.

There is no documentation in any of the archives that would directly support such claims. This doesn’t mean that they are untrue. There was a Parachutist P. Mason listed as one of the SAS men on Operation Loyton. He was one of the fourteen-man stick that dropped into the Vosges on the night of 21–22 September 1944. P. Mason was also the ‘fitter’ on Colonel Franks’ jeep that tore about the Vosges, shooting up German targets.

Of course that does not mean that the P. Mason of Op Loyton and the Peter Mason who authored
Official Assassin
are one and the same person. But one of Peter Mason’s claimed assassinations is of Fritz Opelt. A Fritz Opelt served under
Sturmbannführer
Hans Dietrich Ernst in the Vosges. Opelt was one of those who made up the team of killers who shot dead the eight men of Op Loyton in the forests above La Grande Fosse.

In 1946 Opelt was listed as wanted by the British for ‘the murder of 16 British parachutists’ – sixteen of the Op Loyton missing. There does not appear to be any evidence that the Fritz Opelt wanted for war crimes was ever brought to trial.

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