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CHAPTER 5 Thorough Investigation Is Requested” early on march 13, a guard telephoned the camp’s new provost marshal “that he believed there was a dead man in Compound 4.” First Lt. Cecil s. Parshall, an ex-policeman, inspected the shower room before calling the post surgeon and the commandant. in Drechsler’s barracks, he found “a large bloodstain about two and a half feet in diameter” in front of a cot. The neighboring bed held “a bloody comforter and a piece of ragged hemp rope, also bloodstained .” Parshall would give these items to Capt. Leland Hebblethwaite, the post’s internal security/identification/signal and summary court officer, who took charge. Hebblethwaite would lose them.1 Hebblethwaite began making photographs and taking fingerprints to confirm Drechsler’s identity by comparing them with his personnel record —according to which Drechsler was nothing but an ordinary prisoner.2 The two camp doctors who performed a gross autopsy (without lab work) at a local funeral home disagreed as to whether he had died from being garroted or hanged, but both decided that his injuries could not have been self-inflicted.3 Drechsler had been murdered. unfortunately, the commandant , Col. means, had already informed the press that a prisoner named “Breschler” had committed suicide. some camp official concluded that whoever had beaten Drechsler so savagely must also have bruised himself. At the noon roll call, a medical officer examined everyone in the compound, without success. These naval prisoners always formed up “in the German way,” packed together as if standing on a narrow submarine deck. Helmuth Fischer easily hid his bitten finger by slipping up into another row. (Camp rumor credited stengel with this maneuver.)4 51 “ 52 MURDER AND MARTIAL JUSTICE Next, Capt. Hebblethwaite tried disinformation. He announced that fingerprints had been found on the corpse’s neck.5 Guenther Kuelsen also heard rumors that camp officers only wanted the “names of the men who had participated in the crime in order to have proof for a report to Germany through red Cross channels.”6 of course none of the prisoners talked, but few knew anything definite. some thought Drechsler had been dispatched by members of his own crew, others that his victims had done the killing. Not even the bystanders knew how many killers had been involved. on the third day, Capt. Hebblethwaite decided to isolate the men he considered the most likely suspects. He shifted Drechsler’s forty-seven barracks mates and ex-spokesman Hox to another compound. Drechsler’s boatmates from the u-118 went into the stockade, along with all suspected Gestapo agents. stengel’s barracks mate Gerhard richter was doubly suspicious, an alleged Gestapo man who worked in the camp personnel office with someone from Drechsler’s boat.7 For two futile weeks, these men were bullied by Hebblethwaite, other officers, and possibly an FBi agent. (When the PoW Norbert Gabler described Drechsler’s hanging as “German ‘quick justice’ [schnellgericht],” his questioner “showed his police certificate and said: ‘this was the Gestapo just as much as in Germany.’”)8 As soon as they could, Gabler and other outraged suspects exercised their Geneva right to complain to their Protecting Power.9 Two NCos from the u-118, Paul reum and Werner reinl, reported hearing someone in the next room of the stockade “screaming pitifully as if he were being hanged” or “struggling for his life.” reinl described how his interrogators placed Drechsler’s bloodstained noose around his neck, demanding “whether it was Capt. Wattenberg or Coxswain Hox [spokesmen for the camp and Compound 4] who gave me the order to commit the act”—or had he, himself ordered it, as Drechsler’s senior NCo? He might as well confess, reinl was told, since two of his mates had already “told everything.” Hours later, reinl was shut into a cold, empty cell where he “stood the whole night leaning against the wall.” The next evening he was given access to a “toilet and washing facilities . . . in a condition not fit for human use.” His treatment, he wrote the swiss Legation, “was not in accord with the provisions of the Geneva Convention, and was not that of a German prisoner, but of a criminal.”10 Wattenberg was demoted. The new camp spokesman, Fregattenkapitän Paul Keller, collected these letters to the Protecting Power and added one of his own, which listed “a series of violations against the Geneva Convention and against the principles of criminal trial law”: These men had been...

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