SAS Band of Brothers Read online

  From his dental records, Captain Victor Gough was also identified. Gough had served with the Jedburghs, a unit set up to liaise with the French Resistance and most often consisting of three-man teams, including a Frenchman, an American and a Brit. The specific mission of ‘the Jeds’ had been to act as what would now be termed ‘military advisers’, calling in supplies of weaponry and advising on targets and tactics. As such, Captain Gough had been only loosely tied in with Op Loyton.

  Two other SAS men – Troopers Maurice Griffin and Christopher Ashe – were also identified by their dental records. For Barkworth and his team, the gruesome work proved intensely emotional. In many instances, they had known personally the murdered men and counted them as friends. In Barkworth’s case, he had personally seen Whately-Smith off from Fairford, when the SAS captain had boarded his aircraft to deploy into the Vosges.

  Though neither Barkworth nor Rhodes had deployed on Op Loyton, Rhodes had ridden on a number of the resupply flights, dropping in desperately needed food and arms to the men on the ground. ‘Sometimes, there was just the faintest resemblance,’ Rhodes remarked of those they had exhumed. ‘You could pick out the features of certain people you knew so well. You could say: “Yes, this is Captain so-and-so.” But you couldn’t always do that.’

  In November 1944 Colonel Franks had received a letter from the Red Cross, listing Major Reynolds, Captain Whately-Smith, Captain Gough, Lieutenant Dill and the US airman, Pipcock, as being present at the Schirmeck Sicherungslager (security camp) – a satellite facility to the Naztweiler concentration camp in the Vosges. They had certainly been alive then. Now, some seven months later, they had been positively identified in this Gaggenau mass grave. Barkworth and his team’s role was to trace what had happened in the interim, and to track down those responsible.

  It was 20 June 1945 by the time the exhumations were complete. There were many who would argue that Barkworth’s was a true mission impossible. But in the Gaggenau case, he and his team were blessed with having former camp inmates, and in many cases former camp guards, step forwards to give evidence. Barkworth’s star witness was Abbé Alphonse Hett, a young Catholic clergyman who’d been held at Rotenfels as a suspect member of the Resistance. He was an eyewitness to the forming up of the execution party. He’d seen the ten prisoners dressed in British and American uniforms loaded aboard a closed truck, little doubting what lay in store for them.

  A French POW, Albert Arnold, had been forced to drive that truck. He provided eyewitness testimony to the shootings. The prisoners were marched into the Erlich Forest in threes, by German soldiers Ostertag, Ullrich, Zimmermann and Neuschwanger, where they were shot dead. A group of Russian POWs were made to bury the bodies. One had removed a photograph from one of the corpses. That had also made its way into Barkworth’s hands, and it showed the loved ones of the murdered SAS Trooper Maurice Griffin.

  Within days of the exhumations, Barkworth had secured detailed eyewitness accounts of the crime, and the names of his first suspects: Ostertag, Ullrich, Zimmermann and Neuschwanger. According to the French priest, Abbé Hett, that last man was a notorious torturer and sadist. SS Oberwachmeister (Lieutenant) Heinrich Neuschwanger had excelled in unleashing savagery on Allied prisoners. Strung up by their hands, they were beaten until the bones showed through their skin. Neuschwanger extracted great amusement from doing so. He had been nicknamed ‘Stuka’, after the distinctive German dive-bomber, due to his predilection for stomping on prisoners.

  At Rotenfels, Major Denny Reynolds had confided in Abbé Hett about his own beatings, remarking how ‘he would not have thought it possible for the body to withstand such pain without death occurring’. Somehow Reynolds had survived the beatings, but not his Erlich Forest executioners, as Barkworth would discover. His 15 July report on the killings stressed ‘the urgency of bringing the German criminals to justice’. Barkworth had realised that he had stumbled across ‘the full machinery for the elimination and destruction of prisoners’, just as Hitler’s Commando Order had called for.

  First blood fell to Barkworth and team, and quickly. ‘Weber. First arrest,’ Rhodes scribbled, his notes reading like those of a Scotland Yard detective, though he had no formal training, of course. ‘In between identification and official burials, the local businessmen were now to be involved to track down SS.’ The arrest in July ’45 of Sigmund Weber – a man whom Barkworth and Rhodes described as the ‘Rotenfels camp Quartermaster’, and a ‘beater’ of SAS captives – was the first real milestone. Weber was dragged into the Villa Degler basement, the first of many such prisoners to partake of its hospitality.

  There, he faced Barkworth. Unfailingly polite and eschewing violence, somehow Barkworth would prove himself an inquisitor without compare. ‘Few Germans interrogated by him . . . even the most hardened of Gestapo men have failed to comment on his courtesy and consideration,’ remarked one of Barkworth’s colleagues. ‘Some have even mistaken him for the ex-Gestapo chief of the area, whose physical likeness and even the German accent is so like Bill that it startles the prisoners.’ Shortly after interrogation, Weber would attempt suicide – testimony to the psychological rigour with which Barkworth broke his captives.

  Weber would go on to serve seven years’ hard labour for his crimes. But shockingly, he had been ‘traced by Major Barkworth . . . living in comfort with a pass signed by a junior French officer stating that he, Weber, was a “harmless German”’. This would prove typical. Even at this early stage of proceedings, there seemed little appetite for apprehending Nazi war criminals, and what systems did exist were a complete shambles. Such issues weren’t restricted to the French zone. If anything, the problems Barkworth would experience at the hands of the British occupation authorities were even worse.

  In early August, a team of ‘official’ war crimes investigators was sent south from the British zone to ‘assist’ with Barkworth’s efforts. Fresh from investigating the horrors of Belsen, the team didn’t stay long. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Leo Genn, confided to Barkworth: ‘The difficulties of organisation are so great that I am only marking time.’ The SAS major – driven, resolute and deeply personally motivated – had no time for such an attitude.

  After Barkworth had sent Lieutenant Colonel Genn and his team packing, Genn would pen a report concluding that Barkworth’s efforts ‘have now reached a dead end . . . missing members of 2 SAS still remain untraced and . . . no avenue remains which can be usefully followed up’. Barkworth countered Genn’s criticism with the perfect putdown: ‘It is not agreed that no avenue remains; it is however agreed that [Genn’s team] is perhaps most usefully employed elsewhere.’

  Barkworth’s detractors upped their criticism, declaring that ‘only a miracle’ would lead to the missing SAS being traced. Hearing of this, Franks felt deeply frustrated: ‘I very much doubt whether even a small percentage of the perpetrators of these crimes will be brought to justice. I feel personally responsible, not only to the families of these officers and men but also to the men themselves. There are no lengths to which I would not go to ensure that action is taken.’ At Gaggenau, Barkworth shared Franks’ steely conviction. There were no lengths to which he wouldn’t go, either.

  Having got Weber, at the top of Barkworth’s wanted list sat Oberwachmeister Heinrich ‘Stuka’ Neuschwanger. But Barkworth was soon to add another suspect, this being a senior member of the Geheime Staatspolizei. On the liberation of Paris in August ’44, the Avenue Foch Gestapo had retreated east, re-establishing itself in and around the Vosges. The Gestapo unit that had fallen under Barkworth’s spotlight was named Gruppe Kieffer, after the man who commanded it – SS Sturmbannführer Hans Josef Kieffer. As Barkworth discovered, it was Kieffer who had dispatched Major Denny Reynolds and Captain Whately-Smith to their torture and death, and he had done so in the most devious of ways.

  One morning in mid-September 1944, Captain Whately-Smith and Major Reynolds had been sent to reconnoitre a new base of operations in the Vosges. In the process of doing so they
were ambushed, and Reynolds was shot and wounded. While hiding in a cave and being helped by French villagers, Captain Whately-Smith had scorned all opportunities to escape, as to do so would have left his wounded brother officer in dire straits. Having lost contact with the main Op Loyton force, the two men had carried out a little freelance raiding, before setting out on 30 October to try to make it back to Allied lines. In the process, they had been captured by a unit of regular German troops.

  The two SAS officers were initially treated with all proper consideration due to Allied prisoners of war. But after forty-eight hours Kieffer had appeared on the scene. Upon arrival he had promised that the SAS men would be treated as bona-fide POWs, and not executed under Hitler’s Commando Order, as their captors feared would be the case. Indeed, the Wehrmacht officers were ‘convinced that we had by our opposition saved the two officers from being shot as spies . . . both British officers were very pleased with the treatment accorded to them . . . and both hoped to see us after the war. What became of them after they were taken by Kieffer in his car I have no idea.’

  Kieffer had pledged to take ‘personal charge’ of Whately-Smith and Reynolds. His idea of doing so involved driving the two SAS officers direct to Schirmeck, after which their hellish treatment and murder had followed. In short, an attempt to extend to two SAS officers operating in uniform the rights and protections they were due had been scuppered, at SS Sturmbannführer Kieffer’s hands. Of course, Whately-Smith and Reynolds were just two such victims consigned to the Nacht und Nebel by Kieffer – but it was their case that had brought him under Barkworth’s unyielding glare.

  Barkworth felt under particular pressure to solve Major Reynolds’s case, for the SAS major was both a close personal friend of Lieutenant Colonel Franks and a well-known and colourful character within SAS circles. Born to Irish parents, Reynolds had owned and bred racehorses before the war, riding many winners himself. Of his Sandhurst officer training, it was recorded: ‘Has any amount of character and grit, is cheery with it all and will make an excellent officer. Grade A.’

  After Sandhurst Reynolds had joined the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, along with Major Ian Fenwick, the SAS commander who would be killed on Operation Gain. Fenwick had made Reynolds the subject of many of his cartoons, captioning one, in which Reynolds is about to execute a parachute jump: ‘Had been a pre-war amateur steeplechaser, and hence was unfit through multiple injuries. Later he was passed fit, learnt to parachute and joined he SAS . . . was a charming shooting companion at Strensall (snipe and partridge) and a perfect team worker.’

  Franks felt Reynolds’s loss most personally, writing of the thirty-five-year-old major’s death: ‘Everyone in the SAS Regiment who knew Denny had a sense of personal loss. He was the best second-in-command anyone could wish for and he was a great friend and it is difficult to say how much I miss him.’

  Barkworth and Reynolds had also shared a particular bond. One of Reynolds’s most infamous exploits had been to try to drop into the Vosges with his dog, Tinker, whom he had taught to parachute. He was only stopped when Franks radioed: ‘We don’t want a bloody dog here.’ Reynolds went everywhere with Tinker, which was something that Barkworth could relate to, for he had picked up strays all through the war years. In Italy he’d found a beautiful – abandoned – Apulian sheepdog, and had had it flown back to the family home in Britain, so he could adopt it at war’s end.

  Both Barkworth and Reynolds had never been without a dog if they could help it. Now Barkworth had had to exhume the semi-decayed corpse of his murdered SAS comrade. Halfway through the grim work, Colonel Franks had radioed, asking: ‘Have you any more clues Denny etc.?’ Barkworth had replied: ‘Bodies of Denny and Andy [Whately-Smith] identified.’ It was Rhodes himself who’d got down into the grave, to remove the SAS officers’ identity tags. They had also retrieved ‘a shoulder strap bearing the insignia of a crown, as worn by a major in the British Army, also a black button bearing the insignia of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, which was major Reynolds’s parent unit’.

  By the autumn of 1945 SS Sturmbannführer and Gestapo man Hans Josef Kieffer was firmly on Barkworth’s radar, particularly since Gruppe Kieffer was found to have orchestrated other murders in the Vosges in which the SAS victims had been forced to change into civilian clothing, just as had Captain Garstin and his men. A modus operandi was emerging here of how Kieffer and his Gestapo henchmen endeavoured to bury forever – Nacht und Nebel style – their heinous crimes.

  For Barkworth and his team there was much to be done, and as they repeatedly proved their mettle, the scope of their work kept expanding. Tracing the Op Loyton missing was the trigger that had led to the SAS war crimes team being dispatched. But as Rhodes noted, it was also the catalyst to ‘three years spent by SAS War Crimes in tracing’ those wider Nazi suspects ‘who had committed the terrible acts’.

  With both the Gaggenau mass grave and the Noailles Wood murders, Kieffer and his Gestapo team were the common thread: Barkworth had double the reason to want to nail them. But there was a problem, as unexpected as it was to prove potentially disastrous. In September 1945 the decision was made that the SAS was to be disbanded. In wartime, the unit had served a vital purpose. In a time of peace, there was no role for the winged-dagger raiders, or so the military and political hierarchy argued.

  And that meant that the SAS War Crimes Investigation Team was slated to die with it.

  Chapter 23

  At the end of September 1945 there was a surprise visitor at the Villa Degler. Captain Yuri ‘Yurka’ Galitzine was an Anglo-Russian nobleman in his early twenties who’d served with the SOE during the war. In autumn ’44 Galitzine had commanded the search team that had discovered Natzweiler – the first Nazi concentration camp to be found by the Allies. Shocked, sickened and enraged at what he had found – the first thing that had struck him was the sickly sweet smell of burned human flesh hanging heavy in the air – Galitzine had been an overnight convert to the pressing need to hunt down the Nazi war criminals.

  Now he was here at Villa Degler, at Lieutenant Colonel Franks’ urging, bringing both good and bad news. The bad news was the coming disbandment of the SAS, which by then was very much official, and had an air of absolute, nail-in-the-coffin finality about it. An ‘Urgent Memorandum’ had been issued by the War Office, which read: ‘It has been decided to disband the Special Air Services Regiment . . . Disbandment will commence on 5 Oct. 45 and will be completed by 16 Nov. 45 . . . Complete disbandment will be reported to the War Office.’

  Free-wheeling, free-spirited and unorthodox, the SAS had rarely proved popular with those in high places, and for the very reasons that had made it such a spectacular success waging war behind enemy lines. Indeed, Winston Churchill was one of its few dedicated and unrelenting backers. But in that July’s general election Churchill had been voted out of power, and so the SAS’s greatest benefactor was no longer in an unassailable position to safeguard the unit’s future. In short order, the naysayers had got their way and the axe had come down. Of course, disbandment was made all the easier in that the SAS had been so secret. There had been precious little news reporting of their daring operations and few people had even heard of the unit, so who was there to object to their passing? There was hardly likely to be a public outcry.

  While work had already started on destroying the SAS’s most sensitive files, questions had been raised about a certain bespoke unit working overseas. ‘Will you please say in the case of Major Barkworth and his team what was the originating authority for dispatch and to what headquarters or unit are they accredited,’ wrote the War Office, in a letter dated 29 September. Franks had little intention of answering, or at least not in any direct fashion. Instead, with Galitzine’s help, he intended that the entire Villa Degler team would go dark – becoming a secret, deniable and covert unit, one that officially did not exist.

  In the Villa Degler’s plush drawing room, and with a bottle of spirits set on the polished wooden table between them, Barkworth a
nd Galitzine plotted. Around the room sat Rhodes and others, one man using his Commando knife to slice off hunks of bread, as the candelight flickered around the walls and a smog of cigarette smoke hung thick in the air, conspiratorially. Galitzine explained that Franks had paid him a visit, in light of the coming disbandment of the SAS. ‘I’m going to ask you a very big favour,’ Franks had told Galitzine. ‘Is there any means by which you can keep this team going?’ By ‘this team’ he meant the Villa Degler outfit, and Franks – who was ‘extremely well connected’ – had made it clear he had backing from the very top.

  Churchill was a keen proponent of seeking retribution amongst the guilty across Europe. He was a die-hard backer of the SAS’s Nazi-hunting team, and, with the assistance of his son, Randolph, he was determined to ensure that their operations continued unhindered. In short, it was inconceivable that they should let the SAS war crimes hunters die. Galitzine proposed that Barkworth and his men would drop from the record, ceasing to exist. He intended to ‘hide’ them amidst the post-war chaos and confusion. Galitzine was well placed to do so. Under public pressure following the horrors of the liberation of Belsen, the War Office had belatedly founded its own war crimes investigations team. It operated out of 20 Eaton Square, a grand Georgian building just a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace, under the cumbersome title of ‘Adjutant-General’s Branch 3 – Violation of the Laws and Usages of War’ – or AG3-VW for short.