DOWN IN GERMANY LEFT:
BRITAIN AT WAR
While the surviving crews headed for interrogation at Oberursel, the wreckage of thousands of aircraft downed over Europe was collected in huge salvage yards. This is a small part of the scrap yard at Beutepark 5. Located at Paris-Nanterre, the nose of Boeing B-17F Fightin’ Pappy of the 379th Bomb Group, which was shot down on 9 October 1943, can be seen in the foreground. At a Beutepark salvaged equipment was sorted and separated into that which could be repaired, overhauled or re-used, and that which was declared scrap and then sent to a smelter. A typical Beutepark had a relatively small German staff and employed large numbers of foreign workers. Beutepark 5 was abandoned to advancing Allied troops in mid August 1944. (Bundesarchiv)
BELOW:
One of two Armstrong Whitworth Whitley V bombers lost on a raid to Dortmund on 6 July 1941. Z6752, from 77 Squadron, was shot down near Eindhoven, Holland, and crash-landed in shallow water. This picture was sent to one of the crew, Pilot Officer J. Simmonds, after the war by a German officer involved in the aircraft’s recovery. (Via author)
intelligence officer. Another example of the expertise gained by the Germans was the fact that aircrew from 103 Squadron based at RAF Elsham Wolds in Lincolnshire were recognised by the lettering used on their escape kits.
A whole card-index at Dulag Luft was given over to American ration cards, such was their usefulness in providing unit identification. Aircraft wreckage often gave up formation charts and details of the weapons carried, while laundry marks on underclothing and handkerchiefs frequently supplied the clue as to the unit of a captured crewman.
A typical ‘find’ was a dirty oil-stained piece of paper picked up near the wreckage of one of sixteen Avro Lancaster bombers shot down during the RAF raid on Leipzig on 20 October 1943. This proved to be the briefing notes and gave the plan of attack, bomb load, method of target marking, turning points on the route of approach, and instructions on the release of ‘Window’ (metal strips used to confuse German radar). All was fair game in the intelligence war.6
*
American troops entered Auswertestelle West on 25 April 1945, and found an empty camp, its last occupants having left ten days earlier as the Allies closed in. They found its notices in English and German still hanging along its corridors, the doors to the 240 solitary confinement cells left ajar. The microphones had been disconnected, and the vital records burnt or removed by the interrogators to the new base at Nürnberg-Buchenbühl.
Now it was time for the interrogators to be interrogated and a search was made to find those whose reputation had been known to the Allies for some years. It took only a short while to locate Erich Killinger who was discovered in a US Army prison camp. He had been treated correctly while imprisoned and reluctantly accompanied his captors back to the scene of his former triumphs, Auswertestelle West, before being flown to Britain for extensive questioning.
Six months later, on 26 November 1945, Erich Killinger and four other interrogators from Auswertestelle West appeared at the British Military Court at Wuppertal. All five had been charged with the ill-treatment of prisoners of war under the terms of the Geneva Convention by way of threats and poor living conditions. At the end of the week-long trial, sentences were handed down on three of the five defendants. Killinger and Major Heinz Junge were found guilty, each receiving a five year prison sentence, whilst Major Heinrich Eberhardt was given a three year sentence. Gustav Baur-Schlichtegroll and the political interrogator, Otto Boehringer, were acquitted.7
Surprisingly, the camp at Oberursel soon returned to business when the US Army, recognising a ready-made intelligence- gathering centre, established a presence there after the war. Former Major General Rheinhard Gehlen, Chief of Department 12 in Hitler’s wartime Abwehr, also moved in briefly from 1946 to December 1947, bringing with
him his staff and valuable files on the Soviet Union to establish the nucleus of the Federal German Intelligence Service.
Later named Camp King, the enlarged complex became the European Command Intelligence Centre until the mid 1990s when the US handed it back to the German government. They in turn sold it for civilian housing and the area underwent considerable change from its former military and intelligence roles. However, among the new buildings, a small number from the war survive with memorial plaques to remind today’s occupants of the estate’s somewhat unsavoury history. ■
NOTES: 1. Richard Pape MM, Boldness Be My Friend (Pan
Books, London 1955), pp.83. 2. The National Archive, WO208/3269.
3. Much of this text is précised from accounts of interviews conducted by the British of former Luftwaffe interrogators at Dulag Luft, including the Commanding Officer of the camp, Oberstleutnant Erich Killinger. These appeared in the weekly Air Ministry Intelligence Summaries released in June and July 1945. Once apprehended, the Germans were flown to the United Kingdom for interview to determine the extent of the results obtained by the Air Intelligence Centre at Oberursel as well as their possible culpability in the ill- treatment of PoWs.
4. Rumpel was an aristocratic officer who had flown in Goering’s squadron in the First World War. 5. Edward Lanchbery, Against the Sun – The Story of Wing Commander Roland Beamont DSO, OBE, DFC (Cassel, London, 1955), pp.181-182. 6. Air Ministry Intelligence Summary, 9 June 1945, pp.41-43.
7. Case No.19 in the British Military Court at Wuppertal, 26 November 1945 to 3 December 1945.
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