The Nazi Hunters (49 page)

Jeeps parachuted into the Vosges often had to be retrieved from trees. ‘Even worse was getting rid of the parachutes, so the Germans wouldn’t know we’d been there’, remarked Canadian airman and honorary SAS man Lou Fiddick.

The jeeps’ Vickers machine guns were perfect for shooting up staff cars, to terrorise the enemy’s high ranks – a key aim of Colonel Brian Franks’ force in the Vosges. With heavier armour the SAS men scattered explosive charges disguised as rocks to blow apart passing vehicles, as with these captured half-tracked rocket launchers.

The unbreakable spirit of SOE officer Victor Gough.
Captured, beaten and tortured horrifically, he found the strength to draw these cartoons while incarcerated in Schirmek’s
Sicherunglager
(security camp) and held in underground cells. They served to bolster his fellow SOE and SAS captives’ morale.

The usual suspects.
Concentration Camp Natzweiler’s
Lager Wache
– the camp guard – those who oversaw the murder of hundreds of French Resistance , ghters, as well as the SAS and SOE who had fought alongside them in the Vosges.

Last stand.
SAS Lieutenant Black and seven others were surrounded in this building, and fought to their last bullet. They were taken captive by those who were under orders from Hitler to exterminate all captured Allied Special Forces, ‘without mercy wherever they find them.’

A French Resistance fighter, more commonly know as ‘the Maquis’. In the Vosges, thousands joined forces with the SAS to rise up against the hated enemy, only for the Gestapo and SS to inflict terrible vengeance.

Captured SOE agents Diana Rowden and Vera Leigh (pictured) – together with Sonya Olschanezky and Andrée Borrel – were sent to Natzweiler for termination. Their cases would become a key focus of the SAS Nazi hunters, in particular tracking down the SS camp doctor who had injected each woman with a supposedly lethal toxin.

The furnace at Natzweiler.
When the four female SOE agents were fed into the ovens by the camp’s chief executioner,
Hauptscharführer
Peter Straub, one at least was still alive. Resisting to the last, she reached up and raked his face with her nails, the scars from which enabled the SAS Nazi hunters to track down and identify her killer.

The Natzweiler gas generator.
Inmates were used as live human guinea pigs on which to test the Nazi’s fearsome chemical weapons, plus the antidotes to them.

In the summer of 1945 SAS Major Bill Barkworth’s Nazihunters exhumed this mass grave, in the Erlich Forest, on the outskirts of the German city of Gaggenau, unearthing the bodies of their former SAS and SOE comrades. In doing so they solved the fate of some of the thirty-one missing SAS and SOE operators captured in the Vosges.

SOE Captain and Russian Prince Yuri ‘Yurka’ Galitzine, whose discovery of the horrors at Natzweiler would transform him into a Nazi hunter without equal. Captain Galitzine was the driving force behind the secret SAS man-hunting teams.