Free Human Game: The True Story of the 'Great Escape' Murders and the Hunt for the Gestapo Gunmen by Simon Read

Breslau at the end of the war, and was either killed or taken prisoner by the Russians.”
    She paused and stared briefly at her bare left hand.
    “If I do hear from him again,” she said, “I will be asking him for a divorce.”
    She got up from her chair, moved across the room to a small writing desk, and retrieved a photograph from the drawer. Without giving it another glance, she passed it to McKenna.
    “You can have this,” she said.
    McKenna looked at the picture and saw a young man of Aryan stock, about thirty, looking back at him. His blond hair shorn close to the scalp, he wore at a slight angle on his head a military cap bearing the death’s head insignia of the SS. The mouth was a thin, straight line, the eyes cold, and the stare distant. From a British Intelligence report, McKenna knew Absalon always appeared “well groomed and smartly dressed.” He pocketed the photograph, thanked Gerda Absalon for her time, and left.
    They traveled back to Rinteln, traversing the same battered landscape in the dark. While Smit and Williams were quick to dismiss Absalon as dead, a casualty of the Russian onslaught, McKenna refused to accept the notion. Absalon could have survived and gone underground, or simply slipped away in the chaos of battle. Russian forces had encircled Breslau—the largest city in eastern Germany—on February 15. The fifty thousand defenders, a motley crew of depleted army units and local militia, faced thirteen Soviet divisions. Russian artillery and fighter planes blasted and strafed the city, leveling entire blocks, littering streets with rubble and human wreckage. The fighting raged among the ruins and exacted an awful, bloody toll. Hitler, despite an urgent plea from the commander of German forces on April 6, refused to surrender the city. On April 30, Hitler killed himself. Two days later, on May 2, Berlin fell to the Russians, but the fighting in Breslau continued four more days. Roughly sixteen thousand German civilians and soldiers were dead by the battle’s end, and two-thirds of the city lay in a smoldering heap. The siege cost the Russians eight thousand lives.
    McKenna arrived back in Rinteln desperate for a lead. He spent the days that followed visiting internment camps and cross-referencing the names of German prisoners with those on his wanted list. His rounds took him to Belsen near Hanover, now a place of incarceration for onetime Gestapo members. The British, for sanitary reasons, had torched the camp with flamethrowers shortly after its liberation in April.SS guards, fleeing the advancing Allied armies, had left thirteen thousand bodies unburied. The living lay among the dead. So emaciated and racked with typhus and typhoid were the survivors, they were hard to differentiate from the corpses. The bodies were bulldozed into large trenches and quickly covered up to stop the further spread of disease. Now, five months later, macabre monuments to the atrocities committed in the camp still remained. The smell of decomposition and human waste lingered. Human bones, not yet buried, were stacked in large piles. Walking to the camp’s registration office, McKenna eyed one large mound of earth after another, his revulsion growing at the realization they were mass graves.
    His review of camp files turned up nothing, but being eager to put Belsen behind him, he found that the futility of his efforts hardly upset him. McKenna walked slowly back to his jeep. As a detective, he had witnessed man’s capacity for violence in its infinite forms—but the camp defied understanding. Slaughter on the battlefield had a rationale behind it one could grasp, if not accept. Even the indiscriminate bombing of British and German cities served strategic aims one could argue for or against. The atrocities in the camps, however, went beyond any human reasoning. McKenna took comfort in his faith and did not believe in a vicious God, but how did one explain such barbarism? Lacking answers, he gunned the