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60 MURDER AND MARTIAL JUSTICE CHAPTER 6 Are You a Member of the Volksgemeinschaft?” Although the service Commands were not authorized to use their security and intelligence Divisions to investigate crimes, Ninth service Command’s Gen. mcCoach ordered Lt. Col. Gerald L. Church, Chief of intelligence, to find Drechsler’s killers. Three weeks later the rule was changed for the sake of fighting Nazi terrorist conspiracy.1 Col. Church’s investigating board included two German-born majors. Hermann J. Zabel was about to retire. Francis P. Walsh was also Chief of the military Justice Branch of the command’s Judge Advocate office. They were aided by two sergeants, a German-born interpreter, and a recorder. The only record of the board’s work would be a secret report (Br) assembled after the fact by maj. Walsh. it would be an english-language document containing neat transcripts of suspiciously orderly interrogations, surely the result of protracted off-scene grilling and canny editing. Ninth service Command’s investigating board was in for some rough work. No German PoW would cooperate with it, whether from dislike of their country’s enemy, loathing for a traitor, sympathy for Drechsler’s victims , or fear of reprisals. Furthermore, being interrogated by a board of enemy officers was particularly intimidating. in the eighth service Command the previous January (1944), Lt. Col. Leon Jaworski had explained this fact to a conference on PoW affairs. Jaworski had been appointed to prosecute the Beyer Five, whose trial would shortly begin. (The general who introduced him remarked that he “understands these Germans perhaps better than some of us as he speaks the German language.”) Jaworski warned his high-ranking listeners that using a board of officers to interview German PoWs “is certainly not” a method 60 “ “ARE YOU A MEMBER OF THE VOLKSGEMEINSCHAFT?” 61 “that seems to work well,” since German trials were held by boards of judges. if prisoners felt they were “about to be tried and sentenced, they [would] certainly not cooperate.” evidently this message did not reach the newly appointed board in the Ninth service Command, though it seemed to take to heart a statement by the colonel who led eighth service Command’s PoW symposium: “spare nothing in the investigation.”2 Col. Church’s investigating board began with Papago Park’s American personnel . it swore all witnesses to secrecy, including the medical orderly who had driven Drechsler into camp alive and out of it dead, and the senile post surgeon who had to be taken to the shower room to jog his memory of the crime.3 After a search for the autopsy report, which had gone missing, two doctors cheerfully described their task. The board was particularly interested in Drechsler’s severe bruises: “Just for the record, what is the scrotum?”4 The camp’s assistant engineer presented maps, upon which Lt. Parshall marked Drechsler’s cot, the blood spots, and so forth. Capt. Hebblethwaite authenticated the photographs he had taken and told of matching the corpse’s fingerprints with Drechsler’s record.5 His personnel record seemed perfectly ordinary. it noted Drechsler’s transfers from the naval hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, to Fort meade, maryland ,and—afterablankspace—toFortLeonardWood,missouri,andPapago Park, Arizona. most u-boatmen went through Fort meade. even assuming that Col. Church knew that this transit camp camouflaged a secret interrogation facility, he was ignorant of Drechsler’s role there. The board assumed, when it began interrogating prisoners on march 31, that the camp spokesman Wattenberg had ordered Gestapo agents and NCos to hold a “kangaroo court,” which had condemned Drechsler to death for being a “good” (cooperative) prisoner. These assumptions reflected Wattenberg’s notoriety and War Department bias. even after the board discovered Drechsler’s career as an sP, weeks later, it never quit trying to incriminate Wattenberg and the NCos. As a result of its mind-set and the prisoners’ universal unhelpfulness , the board faced a very frustrating month. since the Geneva Convention ordered Custodial Powers to treat war prisoners in the same way as their own accused soldiers, the Board report scrupulously documented its obedience to the Articles of War. When it began to interrogate any prisoner (at least for the record), someone read him AW 24: No witness “shall be compelled to incriminate himself or to answer any question the answer to which may tend to incriminate him, or to answer any question not material to the issue when such answer might tend to degrade him.” Then, the report...

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