The London Cage and the Germans
Alice Park had an underground bunker which connected to the Burlington bunker located at Corsham, in west Wiltshire. In World War II, Corsham became a key administrative and manufacturing area for the Ministry of Defence (MOD). There were numerous facilities above and below ground and in the old quarry tunnels. Churchill ordered the construction of several bunkers to ensure his safety against any German attacks. There was about sixty miles of underground roads that connected to the MOD and to Porton Down, a government military science park, situated northeast of Porton near Salisbury.1958
Scientists brought many horses “for rifle and ammunition tests” until they replaced them with pigs which have a “closer resistance to bullets, much like humans. After the war, these scientists used German nationals in their experiments at the London Cage. Anthony Trevor-Stokes reminds us that while we regularly hear about Josef Mengele’s purported experiments at Auschwitz, we never hear about the eugenics experiments performed at Porton Down.1959 Sir Joseph Barcroft, Professor of Physiology at Cambridge supervised the British Government poison gas unit, totally supported by Churchill, a longtime eugenicist, racist, and an advocate of forced sterilization. Barcroft was also the head of the Physiological Department at Porton Down.1960
MI19, a division of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, part of the War Office, operated the London Cage, a transit camp with space for sixty prisoners (July 1940-January 1949). Similar facilities existed in nine other command centers in southern England and in Scotland. The British used various Victorian villas, located at Kensington Palace Gardens, to systematically torture and interrogate 3,573 German officers and soldiers before they sent them to prison camps. From those prisoners, nine officers, aided by a dozen NCOs, persuaded, with torture, 1,000 of them to sign a confession admitting criminality or that they were willing to be a witness against others during the upcoming prosecutions. One of those individuals, incarcerated in October 1946, was Fritz Knöchlein who the British claimed had ordered the killing of 124 British soldiers in northern France during the Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940. 1961
The British interrogators in London, hearing continuous stories about Nazi atrocities, justified torturing Knöchlein, a captive German SS officer who they deprived of sleep for four days, until he confessed and was later found guilty. Despite conventions about the humane treatment of POWs, the British engaged in the torture of their German prisoners. Ian Cobain, an investigative reporter, through Freedom of Information requests to the Foreign Office, acquired numerous documents regarding World War II and a British detention center, the London Cage, located in an upscale London neighborhood. The British processed thousands of Germans through that facility, where the British beat them, deprived them of sleep and threatened them with death and needless surgery. 1962
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland, head of Prisoner of War Interrogation Section (PWIS) of the Intelligence Corps, directed the entire operation because of the interrogation techniques he had developed against the Germans during WWI. After the war, the British transitioned the PWIS into the War Crimes Investigation Unit (WCIU). The London Cage then became the headquarters for questioning and torturing suspected war criminals. In 1954, he submitted his book, London Cage, to the War Office. In his book, Scotland said, “If any German had any information we wanted, it was invariably extracted from him in the long run.” He admitted that the British continued their torture after the war. Instead of torturing the prisoners to gain military intelligence, they tortured to extract convictions for war crimes. After reading the manuscript, an MI5 attorney confirmed that Scotland and his “fellow interrogators” violated the Geneva Convention and were guilty of war crimes for Scotland for compelling “prisoners to stand to attention for more than 24 hours at a time; forcing them to kneel while they were beaten about the head; threatening to have them shot; threatening one prisoner with an unnecessary appendix operation to be performed on him by another inmate with no medical qualifications.” 1963
Officials of the War Office and the Foreign Office immediately instructed him to abandon the book or face prosecution, for his disclosures, under the Official Secrets Act. Officials at the Foreign Office suppressed the book because it would lend credibility to people defending the German “war criminals.” Scotland threatened to publish the book elsewhere. In 1957, after negotiation, officials allowed Scotland, Churchill’s chief “torturer,” to publish a highly-redacted, censored version of the book minus all of the incriminating evidence. In it, he said, “If any German had any information we wanted, it was invariably extracted from him in the long run.” He admitted that the British continued their torture after the war. Instead of torturing the prisoners to gain military intelligence, they tortured to extract convictions for war crimes. 1964
In numerous trials, Scotland denied accusations of torture and claimed that his complainants were untruthful. Yet, later, with no fear of recrimination, he was willing to divulge the practices he used at the London Cage. In his book, he admitted that his interrogators coerced the prisoners to confess to crimes they had not committed, some of whom the authorities executed. Scotland acknowledged that his men used psychological and physical torture to acquire confessions. 1965
Tough British interrogators often used Russian-speaking interpreters dressed in a KGB uniform to intimidate a German prisoner’s fear of being relinquished to the Soviets. The “Russian” would stamp the prisoner’s file NR which meant Nach Russland (to Russia) if the prisoner did not cooperate. Werner Meier, an American intelligence officer, after Normandy, admitted that American interrogators also threatened to surrender newly captured prisoners who were still in “battle shock,” to the Soviets, a tactic that usually worked, especially when they had captured the prisoner in a “fire fight.” An Allied soldier with a “trigger finger” was just as apt to shoot the German and so, by the time the prisoner got to the interrogator, he was willing to talk. 1966
Scotland resisted having the Red Cross visit the Cage, due to numerous complaints, maintaining that he was not required to admit them since his prisoners were Gestapo agents who technically were civilian police officers or “criminals within the armed forces.” The Guardian evaluated thousands of documents held at Britain’s Public Record Office and in the ICRC repository and determined that the British interrogated hundreds of German civilians up to 1948. War Office records indicated that his superiors regarded Scotland as a maverick whose methods they either disregarded or officially approved. However, the ICRC, highly suspicious of the activities at the Cage, listed as a POW camp, viewed things differently. The British again turned an ICRC representative away when he appeared at Kensington Palace Gardens in March 1946. Scotland continued to argue that the Geneva Convention did not protect his prisoners and it was at least eighteen months before they allowed the ICRC to inspect the facilities. Ultimately, ICRC officials failed to take any action as the British assured them that they were soon going to close the London Cage. 1967 Conversely, German officials welcomed ICRC inspectors at all of their camps. A German who both the Gestapo and the British had incarcerated said that the British treated him much more harshly than the Gestapo.
Initially, Germany was reluctant to allow ICRC representatives to observe the well-being of the prisoners. Yet, beginning in August 1942, Germany permitted the ICRC to distribute food packages to the key concentration camps in Germany and from February 1943 forward, to every other camp or prison. From the fall of 1943 until May 1945, the ICRC delivered as many as 9,000 parcels each day, for a total of 4,500 tons and 1,112,000 parcels containing food, clothing and pharmaceutical supplies. The recipients were Belgians, Dutch, French, Greeks, Italians, Poles, Norwegians and stateless Jews. 1968
The British operated another top-secret interrogation facility following World War II called Camp 020, in South-West London where they processed almost 500 Germans. They took their first prisoners there in September 1940 where they quickly and fo
rcibly, under the direction of Colonel Robin Stephens, wrested facts about an imminent German invasion. They subjected prisoners to simulated executions, below-zero temperatures, beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation, threats with red-hot pokers and electrical devices in order to break them emotionally and physically. They used the same techniques at Bad Nenndorf, in occupied Germany. MI5 imprisoned, tortured and interrogated 95,000 Germans (1945-1949). A British intelligence officer told a German inmate, “We are not bound by any rules or regulations. We do not care a damn whether you leave this place on a stretcher or in a hearse.” No international tribunal punished any of the British staff members for their abusive practices against the Germans.1969
Torturing the Germans for Revenge
Mark Potok, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the grandson of Lola Potok, is a critic of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, among other issues. Lola, born March 20, 1921, a Jewish girl from Poland, had, beginning on January 20, 1944, spent several months in concentration camps, first at Auschwitz, surviving typhus and drastic food shortages, leaving there on January 18, 1945 and going towards Breslau, ahead of the Red Army. She escaped and headed towards Bedzin, her home. After arriving in Bedzin, she found a Polish family occupying her former home. On Tuesday, February 13, Lola applied for a job at the Office of State Security, where a childhood friend occupied the position of the Secretary of State Security. He offered and she accepted the commandant’s job at the prison in Gleiwitz, one of the many Polish-run prisons. She was an efficient officer in the Jewish-dominated organization consisting of hundreds of Jews who were operating throughout Poland and Polish-administered Germany to “take revenge on the Germans.” Jewish generals in Warsaw directed the agency, established by the Polish Provisional Government. According to John Sack, “Their mission was to hunt for SS, Nazis, and Nazi collaborators, to punish them and, if appropriate, kill them, and in this way to take revenge against the Jew-killers of Germany.” 1970
Members of the Red Army lined up to rape eight-year old children and eighty-year-old nuns. In November 1943, in Tehran, Stalin arranged to acquire all of Eastern Poland while Churchill proposed that the Soviets acquire Eastern Poland and that Poland should have Eastern Germany. FDR acquiesced and the Allies, by January 1945, decided to relinquish Gleiwitz, Breslau, Stettin, Stolp, and 44,000 square miles of Germany to Poland. However, at the Yalta Conference (February 4-11, 1945), Stalin asked Churchill and FDR for ten billion dollars and 200,000 German laborers. On Wednesday, February 14, Lola began her job, the same day that the Soviets put up a poster in Gleiwitz demanding that 1) all male Germans, from sixteen to fifty report within forty-eight hours to the Labor Conscription Office located at the Gleiwitz prison; 2) they were to bring at least two complete sets of winter clothes, blankets, cooking utensils, and food for at least ten days. 1971
Lola waited in Kattowitz until the Soviets completed their selections for the Soviet camps before going to Gleiwitz. Then the Soviets transferred the responsibility for the Gleiwitz prison to Poland and to their capable commandants. According to their orders, the Germans of Gleiwitz reported to the occupying forces. The Soviets went looking for the Germans who failed to report to the prison, where authorities loaded Germans into cattle cars in which they would stand for the 500 miles to camps in Russia where they would labor in temperatures from sixty-five degrees below zero to 120 above. 1972
Josef, an early associate of Lola, was chief of the Office of State Security for Silesia. He opened an office in Kattowitz and placed Jews in powerful positions. Stalin liked Jews and they understood that he wanted them to pursue the Germans with a vengeance. Stalin was in Vienna at the same time that Hitler was. He did not hate Hitler; he hated the Germans. At Tehran, he suggested that the allies execute 50,000 German officers following the war. In December 1943, he was so partial to Jews that he declared some Jewish and Catholic Poles as the Polish absentee government. He made the son of an individual who perished in Treblinka the chief of the Office of State Security who then filled the majority of the departments with Jews who would alter their name so to sound Russian. These officials would then place Jews in the highest positions in Warsaw and in the provinces of Poland. 1973
In late April 1945, Germans, men and women, arrived at the Gleiwitz camp. Eager informants targeted various Germans, often civilians, as SS, lower-level Nazis or collaborators, even teenagers who could not possibly have been participants in the NS government. The Germans arrived at the camp from the local community and other areas. When they arrived, guards instructed them to undress and prepare for the showers. Thereafter, guards sprayed the prisoners with Lysol to eradicate lice, the carriers of the deadly typhus which had killed so many Jews at Auschwitz. Barbers cut the prisoner’s hair. Within a few weeks, Lola had almost a thousand prisoners at Gleiwitz where there were at least eight to a cell, and two to a bed. Overflow prisoners slept on the floor. Each cell had a pail for excrement which soon made the air in each enclosed fly-filled cell overwhelmingly dense and putrid. Within a month, the prison population grew to the point that there were three or four in each straw-covered bed. 1974
Lola left most of the interrogation tasks to others but she conceived the terrible techniques designed to extract confessions. There were so many Germans, over a thousand, so that they had to find other rooms for interrogation purposes at Kattowitz. At Gleiwitz, Adam was the chief interrogator. Initially, he used his bare hands but it was also painful to him so he began using a cane on the Germans. His assistants used mop-sticks, broomsticks, and an enhanced club, something the Germans called the beater-to-death. The interrogators could use any creative form of torture, including shoving pins under the fingernails, slamming their heads into the wall or floor. They would do anything to get the Germans to confess. One fifty-year old, one-armed German, a veteran of World War I, turned in by an informer who received $200, would not confess to being a NS Party member. The impatient interrogator became brutal and slammed the man’s head into the wall at least ten times. Then he threw the man on the floor, then, with his heavy boots, pounced on the man’s chest several times. Six other interrogators, all Jews, shoved the man onto a couch, pulled off his pants and then began hitting his bare body with rubber clubs and rubber hoses full of rocks until they were sweating profusely. To halt his screaming, they stuffed his mouth with rags. They continued to daily beat the man until he finally confessed but it would be a month later. 1975
Lola, because of her hatred for Germans, neglected to enforce the Office’s rule that guards not punish any emaciated, starved prisoners because of their own prejudices. The Office of State Security had 227 prisons exclusively for Germans. Lola overlooked the times that the guards got drunk and beat and raped the prisoners. At Auschwitz and presumably at the other German camps, officials would hang any guard who raped a prisoner. 1976 Not only at other camps, but also in every other situation, German soldiers adhered to a higher standard than the Allies did.
On July 7, 1940, Adolf Hitler issued a decree, “All members of the Wehrmacht must exercise restraint in their relations with the civilian population of occupied territory, as is proper and fitting for a German soldier. Inordinate consumption of alcohol is unbecoming to a soldier and frequently lies at the root of acts of violence and other outrages. Self-induced drunkenness is not an extenuating circumstance in determining the degree of punishment. I expect that every member of the Wehrmacht who as a result of drunkenness commits a crime—also vis-à-vis the civilian population—shall be brought to justice and severely punished. In serious cases, the law provides for the death penalty. I declare it to be the official duty of superiors to set an example and to ensure the high level of German discipline by appropriate instructions.” 1977
One day, a Pole chased and caught a German in a uniform and took him to Lola’s prison. Some of the female guards pulled off the fourteen-year-old German’s black pants which were part of a Boy Scout uniform. The female guards began torturing him. Guards developed various wa
ys of torturing their prisoners—slathering excrement on a prisoner’s head, whipping, knocking the teeth out, beating with clubs and other items, and whatever else they could think to use. Locals grew accustomed to hearing the constant screaming emanating from the prisons. The female guards held the boy down and burned him with cigarettes. Then they poured gasoline on him and set his hair afire. A local priest intervened in the boy’s behalf and the guards finally released the boy who ended up in a mental institution from which he never left. 1978
At Gleiwitz prison, interrogators and guards tortured 1,000 non-NS German prisoners. Only twenty of the prisoners were actually Nazis. At night, guards, using horse-drawn carts, took dead bodies to the local cemetery where they buried them in mass graves. John Sack, author of An Eye for An Eye, said that the Germans in Lola’s prison were far worse off than the Jews that had been incarcerated in Auschwitz. The authorities at Auschwitz did not lock up the inmates, like Lola, in a room, night and day. They did not torture the inmates night after night. Lola told Sack that, at Auschwitz, the Germans did not try to rape us. At Gleiwitz, under Commandant Lola, all of this regularly occurred. The guards repeatedly raped the German girls. 1979 There is substantial corroboration for Sack’s work, including Sixty Minutes. 1980
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