Article: The Great Escape And The Great Aftermath

The Great Escape murders: How the Nazi slaughter of escaped heroes led to one of post-war Europe's biggest manhunts

By SIMON READ

Immortalised in the film The Great Escape, the mass breakout from PoW camp Stalag Luft III on March 24-25, 1944, was swiftly followed by terrible retribution – the cold-blooded murder of 50 recaptured prisoners, on Hitler’s direct orders

Fifty of the Allied airmen who tunnelled out of Stalag Luft III were executed in chilling scenes like this. 
In 1946, RAF Special Investigation Branch officers reconstructed the murders of Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green and Flying Officer Gordon Kidder near Zlín, Moravia, (above). Gestapo officer Erich Zacharias was hanged for his role

On March 29, 1944, Australian Squadron Leader James Catanach and three fellow Allied airmen found themselves languishing in a Nazi prison just a few miles short of the Danish border.

After being prisoners inside Stalag Luft III, a notorious PoW camp located 100 miles south-east of Berlin, freedom had seemed so close just days before.

Two years after being shot down over Norway, Catanach had been part of the most daring escape of the war. Some 76 Allied airmen had tunnelled out, before attempting to disperse across Europe and escape back to Britain.

The 22-year-old Aussie spoke fluent German and believed – wrongly, as it transpired – that he had a reasonable chance of making it to neutral Sweden.

Catanach and Arnold Christensen of the Royal New Zealand Air Force had managed to make their way to the railway station at Sagan, the town nearest the camp, and catch the express to Berlin. They spent the night in the capital, avoiding detection, and purchased train tickets to Flensburg.

It was here, in this ancient city on the Baltic coast, that they were spotted and arrested.

Now, with Christensen and fellow escapees Hallada Espelid and Nils Fuglesang, Norwegians with the Royal Air Force, Catanach sat wondering what awaited them. They assumed the Germans would return them to a prison camp, as was normal protocol.

STILL IN THEIR ESCAPE CLOTHES: Photographs of (from left) Lieutenants Hallada Espelid and Nils Fuglesang, Norwegians with the RAF, Australian Squadron Leader James Catanach and Pilot Officer Arnold Christensen of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, taken by the Kriminalpolizei shortly after their arrest in Flensburg in March 1944. All four were murdered by the Nazis

But that afternoon, Major Johannes Post of the Gestapo and his comrade Oskar Schmidt arrived to question the quartet.

Post, 38 years old and a stocky five-and-a-half-feet tall, was an ardent Nazi, fanatical in his loyalty to Hitler and intimidating to all who knew him.

The interrogation proving futile, the prisoners were handcuffed and marched to the waiting cars outside. Post took custody of Catanach in his car and set off with his driver, eyeing his captive in the rear-view mirror. Out in the countryside, where the road curved sharply to the right, the Mercedes came to a halt.

Catanach was told to get out and cross the road, where a gate opened into a meadow. Without uttering a word, Post then pulled a Luger 7.65mm pistol from his pocket and shot Catanach between the shoulder blades, killing him instantly.

As Post pocketed his weapon, the second car arrived. Schmidt ordered his driver to pull in behind the Mercedes. The journey back to Sagan, he told his three prisoners, would take several more hours. The men would be wise to relieve themselves.

Schmidt and his two partners marched the prisoners across the road. One of the airmen saw a dark object lying in the grass. The realisation that it was Catanach drew a panicked scream.

Frances McKenna had been a detective-sergeant in Blackpool, where his dedication had earned him the nickname 'Sherlock Holmes'

All three jumped backward and tried to scramble away before three gun reports echoed across the meadow.

Two of the airmen fell lifeless; the third hit the ground but struggled, opening his mouth as though wanting to speak. Post approached the airman and put a bullet in his head.

Built on Hermann Göring’s orders, Stalag Luft III sat in a clearing in pine forest 200 miles south of Germany’s Baltic coast. The camp holding Allied airmen was designed to be escape-proof. The barracks were set on stilts.

Concrete pilings that served as foundations for each washroom and kitchen were dug into the earth. Prisoners would have to dig through these before they even hit soil.

And the Germans sank microphones 10ft underground to pick up the sounds of any subterranean activity.

Squadron Leader Roger Bushell was 32 years old when he arrived in 1942. He had already been a prisoner for two years and had a reputation as a veteran escape artist.

Assuming command of the escape committee, Bushell hatched a plot to break out 250 inmates.

The audacious plan called for the simultaneous digging of three tunnels named Tom, Dick and Harry. To avoid the microphones, vertical shafts would be dug 30ft down before horizontal digging commenced.

To reach the cover of the nearby forest, he estimated that tunnels would have to reach at least 200ft.

Disaster struck in September 1943 when Tom was discovered, but by March 1944 it was thought Harry – at 336ft – had reached the cover of the trees. The escape was set for Friday, March 24, a moonless evening.

On the night, freezing temperatures had hardened the ground. It took more than an hour to open the exit shaft, only to reveal a near-catastrophe: Harry fell a good 20ft short of the forest, meaning escapees had to risk crawling across open, snow-covered ground to the trees.

By four in the morning, it was decided the 87th man in the tunnel would be the last to go. Above ground, meanwhile, a sentry patrolling the perimeter approached the edge of the woods to relieve himself, only to notice steam rising from the ground.

As he approached, three escapees broke cover with their arms raised high. Startled, the guard fired a single shot into the air.

Armed guards swarmed the compound and eventually a roll call was taken. The numbers tallied were startling. Seventy-six men had escaped.

Hitler’s rage was all-consuming. He summoned SS chief Heinrich Himmler and Reichsmarschall Göring and ordered that all 76 fugitives be executed upon recapture.

Word of such an atrocity, Göring explained, might result in fierce Allied reprisals. Himmler agreed, prompting Hitler to order that ‘more than half the escapees’ be shot. Random numbers were suggested until Himmler proposed that 50 be executed. Hitler ordered his SS chief to put the plan in motion.

The Kriminalpolizei (the criminal-investigations department of the Reich police) issued a Grossfahndung, a national hue and cry, ordering the military, the Gestapo, the SS, the Home Guard and Hitler Youth to put every effort into hunting the escapees down. Nearly 100,000 men needed to defend the Reich were redirected to the manhunt.

By Wednesday, March 29, five days after the breakout, 35 escapees languished behind bars in the cramped cells of the jail at Görlitz, not far south of Sagan.

Those who remained on the run hoped to make destinations in Czechoslovakia, Spain, 

Denmark and Sweden. Luck, however, worked against them.

They were seized at checkpoints, betrayed by informants or simply thwarted by freezing temperatures. Before long, all but three of the fugitives were back in captivity.

Two weeks after the escape, the whereabouts of the escapees remained a mystery to the prisoners inside the camp. Just six men had thus far been returned to Stalag Luft III and marched directly into the cooler, the solitary-confinement block.

Murdered in cold blood: A list of the escapees, with photos, who were shot. Among the dead were 25 Britons, six Canadians, three Australians, two New Zealanders, three South Africans, four Poles, two Norwegians, one Frenchman and a Greek

But on April 6, Group Captain Herbert Massey, the senior British officer in the camp, was to learn the fate of so many of his men.

The camp commandant, Colonel Braune, informed him that 41 had been killed while resisting arrest or attempting to escape after being captured; not one had been merely wounded. Braune was unable to look Massey in the eye as he told him the lies.

On April 15, a list identifying the victims appeared on the camp’s noticeboard. The list now contained not 41 names, but 47. Two days later, a representative of the Swiss Protecting Power visited Stalag Luft III on a routine inspection and was given a copy of the list.

Among the dead were 25 Britons, six Canadians, three Australians, two New Zealanders, three South Africans, four Poles, two Norwegians, one Frenchman and a Greek.

The Swiss government then reported the killings to the British government, including three additional victims, bringing the total number of those murdered to 50. Churchill was incensed, and even amid the final push for victory made finding the killers a priority.

‘His Majesty’s Government must record their solemn protest against these cold-blooded acts of butchery,’ Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told Parliament.

‘They will never cease in their efforts to collect the evidence to identify all those responsible… When the war is over, they will be brought to exemplary justice.’

In August 1945, three months after the Allied victory in Europe, the man to mastermind the hunt for the killers was found. Tall and lean, Frank McKenna had been a detective-sergeant in Blackpool, where his dedication had earned him the nickname ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

He could have spent a relatively safe war in the police, but instead joined the RAF and volunteered to join a bomber aircrew, flying on 30 missions.

He subsequently secured a posting with the Special Investigation Branch (SIB)  of the RAF Police, where Group Captain WV Nicholas, the head of SIB, quickly came to admire McKenna’s puritanical work ethic. When the Sagan case file hit his desk, Nicholas knew who to send it to.

In McKenna’s view, the odds of conducting a successful investigation were daunting but not impossible.

His plan was to comb the files of regional war-crimes record offices in the hope of establishing leads.

Despite the obstacles and the sheer numbers involved, McKenna believed the investigation would last several months at most. It was an optimistic assessment.

Joining McKenna in the hunt for those responsible for the 50 murders was Wing 

Commander Wilfred ‘Freddie’ Bowes, chief of the Special Investigation Branch, British forces, Occupied Germany.

Powerfully built, he had served in the RAF since 1918, the year it was founded, and didn’t suffer fools gladly.

Their investigation saw them criss-crossing the rubble-strewn landscape of post-war Germany and Europe. Each murder case proved to have its own challenges, as they pursued every clue in the search for justice.

In February 1946, Bowes left for Czechoslovakia to pursue a lead in the murders of Squadron Leader Tom Kirby-Green and Canadian Flying Officer Gordon Kidder.

The two airmen had got as far as southern Moravia in their attempt to reach Hungary before they were murdered. Now, a prisoner called Friedrich Kiowsky had implicated Gestapo officer Erich Zacharias in the killing.

Two years earlier, while working as a driver for the Frontier Police in Zlín, Kiowsky had seen Zacharias take part in the killing of the two Allied prisoners. The handcuffs were taken off the dead men, and everyone present was given the strictest instructions to discuss what had happened with no one.

A Gestapo lawyer later helped witnesses orchestrate their alibis should the International Red Cross launch an investigation. They were to say the two fliers had tried to escape while relieving themselves and were shot at a distance of 20 to 30 metres.

Bowes wanted to see the actual crime scene for himself, so he and a member of his team travelled by jeep until Kiowsky told them to stop.

Bowes pulled the jeep over and surveyed the landscape: open country, with no possible cover for anyone attempting to escape.

Johannes Post at his trial, at the moment the death sentence was passed

A few weeks later, McKenna arrived in the American-held port of Bremen. Records showed that a German national by the name of Erich Zacharias worked as a clerk at the U.S. Army Refrigeration Plant at the docks.

McKenna arranged a U.S. Army military police escort, and that afternoon descended on the docks, where he spotted Zacharias standing outside the refrigeration plant. He was taken under armed guard to an American-run prison while McKenna sought permission to transfer him to British control.

In the interim, however, Zacharias managed to escape, running off and disappearing into the nearby wreckage of a bombed-out building.

Weeks later investigators intercepted a letter addressed to a friend of his and sent American soldiers to storm the return address – a house in Brunswick – where they found the fugitive Zacharias packing for a long trip.

McKenna took Zacharias into custody and placed him in a British holding facility in Minden. A strip search revealed a wristwatch of the kind worn by British aircrews. Zacharias made no attempt to assert his innocence.

On April 5, 1946, McKenna then escorted Zacharias to the London Cage: three large white mansions in Kensington Palace Gardens operated by MI19, the branch of the War Office charged with the interrogation of captured enemy personnel.

Lieutenant Colonel AP Scotland oversaw the facility’s operation. When Scotland received Zacharias at the London Cage, the Gestapo man struck him as being ‘a wild young brute’. McKenna warned the colonel that his new inmate had a penchant for escaping, but Scotland dismissed McKenna’s concerns.

Zacharias was soon transferred to a holding facility at Kempton Park Racecourse in Middlesex. But on the night of May 13, he took his tin dinner plate and began scratching away at the wood surrounding the lock on his cell door, eventually scraping away enough to release the mechanism and escape for a second time.

Officials sounded a national alarm, while the BBC broadcast news of the escape, warning that Zacharias, ‘a Nazi police officer’, was extremely dangerous.

He was not at large for long, for later that morning a member of the public spotted a man hiding in a local park. Zacharias was discovered beneath a bush, nursing a sprained ankle.

By May 1947, the investigation appeared to be winding down. The RAF had tracked down 329 suspects, 23 of whom were directly complicit in the Sagan murders. Two of those individuals were dead by their own hand, and one – Kiowsky – was in Czech custody.

Soon afterwards, the commandant of the holding facility in Minden called McKenna to say that the North West Europe War Crimes Unit had just brought in a man working as a haulage contractor.

The man’s name was Johannes Pohlmann, but he had been identified by a witness as former Gestapo officer Johannes Post. McKenna went to see the prisoner, and pulled from his tunic a picture of Post.

The face was thinner – but the eyes and prominent chin left no doubt in his mind.

His cover blown, Post freely admitted to knowing all about the murders of Catanach, Christensen, Espelid and Fuglesang, adding with apparent pride that he was in command of the execution squad. He even admitted that the last word Catanach had uttered was ‘Why?’

On July 1, 1947, 18 defendants in the Sagan case went on trial at the British Military Court in Hamburg charged with committing war crimes by killing and ordering to kill prisoners of war who had escaped from Stalag Luft III. All the defendants pleaded not guilty.

The defence argued that orders issued by Hitler were legal; disobeying them was not. International law, however, deemed the following of such orders to be illegal, and on September 3, 1947, the court rendered its verdicts. All were found guilty.

Post, Zacharias and 12 others were sentenced to hang.

Six months later, on gallows built by the British Army’s Royal Engineers, the 14 Sagan murderers went to their deaths at the end of a rope, bringing to an end one of the most extraordinary manhunts of the 20th century.