Hans Kieffer
|
Hans Josef Kieffer (4 December 1900 - 26 June 1947) was a German SS-Sturmbannführer and head of the Paris office of the Sicherheitsdienst during the German occupation of France. He was convicted in 1947 of ordering the murder of captured SAS soldiers in 1944 and executed later that year.
Biography edit
Kieffer was born in Offenburg in 1900. He joined the Nazi Party in the 1920s and began working for the criminal police, being promoted several times due to his skills at getting information out of suspects. After the occupation of France in 1940, he was transferred to the Gestapo's Paris headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch to command the local SD (intelligence agency) alongside commander of security police Helmut Knochen.
Kieffer's main role was counter-espionage against the SOE and French Resistance. His men had, in April 1443, captured SOE radio operator Marcus Bloom and confiscated his equipment, allowing Kieffer to initiate funkspiel operations; his subordinates would mimic Bloom's Morse code transmissions in order to feed false information to the enemy and lure agents into traps. These prisoners would then be interrogated for information to further counter-espionage operations. Kieffer favoured friendly interrogations, convincing prisoners that all was lost and they should collaborate with the Nazis to survive, but those who did not collaborate would be tortured for information in nearby prisons. Kieffer would also sometimes use "soft sabotage", blowing up unimportant targets in France in order to keep up the appearance that captured spies were still active.
Noailles Wood Massacre edit
On 5 July 1944, Kieffer sent a team of Waffen-SS troops led by his lieutenant Karl Haug to intercept what he believed to be a routine supply drop in the Forest of Fontainebleau. However, it was in fact a covert parachute drop by the elite SABU-70 SAS team, eight of whom were apprehended. On Kieffer's watch, the prisoners were tortured by Richard Schnur and Alfred von Kapri except for Lieutenant Rex Wiehe, who was in hospital with bullet wounds, although he was threatened with having surgery performed without anaesthetic if he did not give up any information.
After an escape attempt, Kieffer and Knochen were ordered by Horst Kopkow to execute the prisoners in line with the Commando Order. On 8 August, all the prisoners except for Lieutenant Wiehe were dressed as Resistance captives and taken out into Noailles Wood under the guise of a prisoner transfer. Their firing squad consisted of Haug, Schnur, von Kapri, Julius Schmidt and two others. However, just before they were shot Captain Garstin ran towards the firing squad, giving the other prisoners the opportunity to run away while he was shot down. Five of the prisoners, including Garstin, were shot, but two, Serge Vaculik and Thomas Jones, escaped.
Post-war edit
As World War II ended in the German defeat, Kieffer and Lieutenant Haug attempted to flee to Garmisch. However, Haug was soon captured by the SAS War Crimes Investigation Office and fully implicated Kieffer in the Noailles Wood Massacre. Kieffer, already linked to similar massacres of prisoners he had handed over to the SS, was declared the War Crimes Office's number one most wanted.
Kieffer was the last of the Noailles Wood perpetrators to be captured, working at a hotel in Garmisch under the pseudonym "Hans Kiefer". He and the rest of the suspects (aside from von Kapri and Schmidt, who were dead) were tried for war crimes in March 1947. Kieffer and Knochen's defence was that they had been specifically ordered to execute the SABU-70 team and would have been shot if they refused. Kieffer, testifying in his defence, continued to maintain this and denied knowing what happened to prisoners he had handed over to the SS, only to immediately contradict himself: "It was shameful to shoot them without trial". His claims were undermined by the testimony of his superior Horst Kopkow, who told the tribunal that to his knowledge nobody had ever been executed for failure to comply with the Commando Order. Furthermore, the prosecution noted that Lieutenant Rex Wiehe, although threatened with death, had not been executed; therefore, Kieffer and Knochen had obviously not been unable to spare the SABU-70 team. The only witness for the defence was John Starr, a former Avenue Foch prisoner who had agreed to cooperate with Kieffer, who testified that he had never seen Kieffer mistreat prisoners. This was contrary to the testimony of Vaculik and Jones, who both testified that they had been tortured and mistreated on Kieffer's watch in the lead-up to the massacre.
On 14 March 1947, the tribunal found all defendants guilty and sentenced Kieffer, Knochen, Schnur and Haug to death. Kieffer turned to the gallery and saluted Starr, who was in the audience, before being led out. Knochen's sentence was not carried out as he had been extradited to France to stand trial for crimes against humanity, but Kieffer, Schnur and Haug were hanged at Hamelin Prison on 26 June 1947.