by John Bryden
Trying to assess the German intelligence effort was going to be challenging in any case. The Abwehr’s chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris — he who had taken it over in 1935, built it up under Hitler, and guided it through the war years to early 1944 — was dead, supposedly killed in an Allied air attack after his arrest, according to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the former head of the RSHA. Some of Canaris’s closest aides and confidantes and his immediate successor, Georg Hansen, were gone also, executed for their parts in the 1944 attempt to kill Hitler. The Abwehr’s heads of espionage (Abteilung I) and counter-espionage (Abteilung III), Hans Pieckenbrock and Franz von Bentivegni, were prisoners of the Russians. The consequence of all this was that while most of the body, arms, and legs of the Abwehr had survived the war, its controlling minds in Berlin had not. As far as the British and American intelligence officers of the War Room knew, the Abwehr’s headquarters leadership had ceased to exist.
On the other hand, most of the top leaders of the Nazi security service had been captured. The RSHA — and its Nazi-party predecessor, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) — never did develop much of a foreign espionage operation. Before the war, they had been primarily focused on spying on Germans at home to safeguard the Nazi grip on political power and on identifying those elements of the population — Jews, Freemasons, and Communists — that should be persecuted in the interests of racial and social purity.8 There was also an agreement, made under Hitler’s eye, that the Abwehr would have sole responsibility for military and economic espionage abroad while Amt VI of the RSHA was to confine itself to gathering foreign political intelligence.
As for the second-tier senior Abwehr officers — the section heads in the various branch offices in Germany and throughout Europe — there was cogent reason for them to tell as little as possible. The Soviet Union had been given custody of the eastern third of Germany, and its secret services, the NKVD and GRU, were on the prowl for their former adversaries. Any Abwehr officer who had been in a position of responsibility risked being chloroformed and whisked away to the Russian zone if he hinted at the true extent of his knowledge. The Americans and British were receiving reports of kidnappings, which they must have assumed represented only a portion of the total.9
Many of the captured German intelligence officers were also looking beyond the present catastrophe. It was clear who Germany’s next major adversary would be — the Soviet Union. It was in anticipation of this that the German army intelligence agency for Eastern Europe, Fremde Heere Ost, disbanded on its own, its records going into caves and its staff into hiding to await the day when Britain and the United States woke up to the fact they had defeated one enemy only to be faced with another.10
There was also concern that what was revealed to the British or Americans might get back to the Soviets. In the middle of the war, in a tour-de-force of counter-espionage, the Abwehr had discovered and rooted out a ring of Soviet-controlled spies that had penetrated the German army and foreign service at the highest levels. Dubbed the “Red Orchestra,” these spies were mainly German idealists of good backgrounds who had been seduced by the noble promises of communism. It was only logical that senior Abwehr officers, aware of the Red Orchestra, would surmise that the Soviets had cultivated individuals of similar sentiment inside the British and American secret establishments. This fear was justified, as later events were to prove.
Possible war crime charges were a worry too. The Allies had advertised loudly and widely their intention to bring the perpetrators of the Second World War to justice. The Nuremberg War Crime Trials, which the Americans vigorously supported, advanced the principle that political and military leaders should be held accountable for atrocities committed in their names. The torture and execution of prisoners, the extermination of the Jews — these were crimes against humanity, and declaring that one was only “obeying orders” or that what was done was only done “by the leader’s decree” was to be neither justification nor acceptable defence. The trouble was, even officers of the Abwehr who had been under the strictest orders to fight a fair war could not be sure what the Allies would deem a crime. Until the definition of war crime was sorted out, senior Abwehr officers had to be cautious on certain topics.11
Last, and most important, was the desire to protect operational techniques for the sake of the new German secret services that would inevitably be restarted as the country rebuilt. If the British and Americans apparently did not realize that some of their double agents were deliberately planted on them, why tell them? If Allied deception schemes had been allowed to go ahead in order to deceive the deceivers, why reveal it? The tricks of counter-intelligence are the most precious articles in a secret service’s tool kit.
The job of a good interrogator, however, is to get information out of a person no matter how reluctant he might be to reveal it. Theoretically, the British were the most practised at this art. For them, the struggle with Germany began in September 1939, more than two years before the Americans got involved. When war was declared, MI5 had to deal with known Nazi sympathizers at home and foreign nationals who might be tempted to spy. Next came thousands of refugees — up to 150,000 of them — when Germany overran Western Europe in 1940. All ought to be screened. At the same time, there was a flurry of enemy agents dropped by parachute or brought in by boat as vanguard to Operation Sealion, Hitler’s aborted cross-Channel attack. And there was also a modest but steady stream of miscellaneous minor spies and suspects taken off boats or arrested in the colonies. It was entirely logical that SHAEF G-2 should defer to British expertise and give Camp 020 in London and its subsidiaries first pickings among German intelligence service prisoners.
Unfortunately, Camp 020 was run from the start by a man who was more bully than brains. During the First World War, MI5 was teamed up with the Special Branch of Scotland Yard, and it was the latter, led by the redoubtable Sir Basil Thomson, that did the interrogations of espionage suspects. This entirely successful arrangement was abandoned prior to the Second World War in favour of MI5 doing everything itself. For the first year of the war, this meant that the interrogation of refugees and suspect persons was done ad hoc by MI5 officers who were sometimes recent recruits with minimal police or secret service experience.12 Lieutenant-Colonel R.W.G. Stephens, later the commandant of Camp 020, was one such person.
Born in Egypt in 1900 to British parents, Stephens was educated in England from the age of twelve, first at Dulwich College and then at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He served in the Indian Army for a time before returning to England in 1933; he then knocked about in odd jobs until joining MI5 in 1939. His name was put forward by his former commander in India, Sir William Birdwood (who failed famously at Gallipoli in 1915), in conformity with the practice of personal referrals by which the British secret services then normally acquired recruits. Indian Army veterans were well-represented in British intelligence, so Stephens’s lack of police experience did not stand in his way. He did know something about courts martial, however, for he had helped write a book on the subject.
By complaining to higher authority in mid-1940 about the lack of proper facilities to question detainees, Stephens appears to have contributed to MI5’s decision to set up an institution dedicated to hard-case interrogations. Latchmere House fitted the purpose because it was easily converted to a high-security prison and stood isolated in an open space called Ham Common in Richmond, a southern suburb of London. “Ham” became how staff informally referred to it. Stephens was made commandant.
In 1946, Stephens produced a memoir entitled “A Digest of Ham” as his contribution to the series of after-action reports that MI5 chief David Petrie had ordered be prepared. The idea was for each department to sketch out its wartime experiences; these would be used as the basis for an in-house history of MI5 from 1908 to 1945. Stephens’s memoir was not finished in time, so an earlier Camp 020 report was used. It is too bad; it would have been interesting to see whether MI5’s official historian still would have condoned Stephens’s technique of “a
pparent severity” if he had had a chance to read in detail how he treated his prisoners.13
According to Stephens, a good interrogator must begin with “an implacable hatred of the enemy” and “above all a relentless determination to break down the spy.” These attitudes translated into a routine procedure for first-time prisoners at Camp 020 that is best described in Stephens’s own words:
A board of officers is appointed. The atmosphere is that of a General Court Martial.
One officer interrogates. In no circumstances whatever may he be interrupted.…
The prisoner is marched in and remains standing to attention throughout the proceedings. No liberties, no interruptions, no gesticulations. He speaks when he is spoken to. He answers the questions; no more, no less.
Studious politeness, the courtesy of a chair, the friendliness of a cigarette, these things bring familiarity and confidence in a spy. Figuratively, a spy in war should be at the point of a bayonet.…
What should be the attitude of the interrogator? The bitter uncompromising approach is as effective as any. And as with a man, so with a woman — no quarter…. Pressure must be maintained…. The requirement is a driving attack in the nature of a blast which will scare a man out of his wits.…14
This was not the way Scotland Yard did it in those days — probably ever. Stephens developed his own techniques as he went along, devising novel forms of intimidation that included all-night questioning and the threat of solitary confinement until insanity or death. He appears to have been making up his own version of interrogations to the “third degree,” romanticized in the detective novels of the 1920s and ’30s.15
By way of contrast, it is instructive to read the views of someone who actually was experienced. Lieutenant-Colonel Oreste Pinto was one of the security experts loaned to the British by the Dutch government-in-exile to help screen the huge influx of refugees that followed the 1940 German victories in Europe. He had trained and served in the First World War with the Deuxième Bureau, the French equivalent of MI5. He became the chief examiner at the London Reception Centre for refugees. Here is how he did it:
The first interrogation of any arrival should be not so much an interrogation as the taking of a complete statement in detail by the examiner;
This interrogation should in all cases be conducted with complete courtesy; at no time should the examiner express by word or mien, any doubt, surprise, or any other human emotion, except perhaps admiration;
Obvious lying or bragging should be encouraged, not squashed. Contradictions should not be pointed out….;
The more doubtful or suspicious a story is, the more the examiner should appear to accept it without hesitation. No questions or remarks of any kind whatsoever should be made by the examiner which might put the examinee on his guard and lead him to realize his story is disbelieved.16
The advantage of this soft approach, Pinto explained in his postwar book Spycatcher (1952), was that if the suspects were first put at ease it was easier to discern the likely innocent from the possibly guilty. The second interview was when to move in for the kill.
The idea behind both techniques was ultimately to “break” the prisoner, to get him or her to tell everything and sign a confession. The British judicial system was still functioning normally, so even spies caught red-handed were entitled to a fair trial and the courts still adhered to the principle of presumption of innocence. Consequently, the most egregious of spies could tell a good story and get off. One of the best tactics was for an accused to claim he or she only agreed to work for the Germans in order to escape to England. Or he was blackmailed into doing it. Or she didn’t know the suitcase contained a wireless set. And so on. English juries were not in a hurry to send people to the hangman; consequently, even the best evidence was unpredictable as to result. A confession guaranteed conviction.17
Physical torture was not used because Camp 020 and the London Reception Centre were held to be civilian facilities and the Home Office strictly forbade it. The vicious mental methods Stephens used, however, were not much better. When the satellite interrogation centre opened in Bad Nenndorf in 1945, Stephens transferred there as commandant. There he gave his vicious streak full expression, and prisoners, many of them former Abwehr officers with German army commissions, were cruelly abused. Other British officers, appalled by what was going on, complained, and the subsequent investigation by Scotland Yard led to the start of court martial proceedings against Stephens. The charges against him included,
Providing insufficient clothing;
Intimidation by the guards;
Mental and physical torture during interrogations;
Solitary confinement for long periods with no exercise;
Commitment to punishment cells, not for any offence, but because the interrogators were not satisfied with their answers.…
Stephens was cleared, and it is not surprising. Had he been prosecuted, the harsh light of inquiry would have turned on what he might have being doing during the war. There had been little oversight. “The Home Secretary and his nominees took an ever-decreasing interest,” Stephens wrote, “and visits from officials became increasingly rare with time.”
During the last year of the war, Camp 020’s busiest time, it was not inspected at all. The investigation by Scotland Yard, however, revealed that there probably had been torture. For example, there had been a “cage” that Stephens had put out of bounds to visits by the Red Cross. It was hushed up and the court martial charges dropped.18
Stephens also comes across as a bigot. In “A Digest of Ham,” he frequently, perhaps always, notes when a suspect had a connection with someone Jewish. MI5’s counter-intelligence chief, Guy Liddell, recounts in his diary a particularly ugly scene at a staff party in 1944 where a “fairly tight” Stephens made rude remarks to Victor Rothschild, MI5’s staff scientist. Rothschild was the younger man and others had to intervene to prevent a “standup fight.” The slur had to do with Rothschild not being a soldier but wearing an officer’s uniform. Instant officers in wartime Britain were a common phenomenon; however, Rothschild was one of the most prominent Jewish names in England.19
Other ethnic groups and nationalities were not spared Stephens’s disparaging generalities in his description of Camp 020. These attitudes appear to have sprung partially from a lack of general knowledge of the world beyond India and England. Any Canadian would be bemused to read Stephens’s explanation of how the German spy Werner Janowski gave himself away after being landed from a submarine in mid-winter on the coast in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Stephens wrote, “He attracted immediate attention by ordering a bath in his hotel, for in those northern regions no one bathed at that time of year.” Janowski, who was as tough a customer as any spy could be, told his Camp 020 interrogators this silly fiction. Stephens believed it.
Stephens occasionally found something to admire in a prisoner. He was impressed by the 1941 parachute spy Josef Jakobs, who never admitted anything and told the British firing squad to shoot straight; he also relished the deviousness of the British safecracker Eddie Chapman, who claimed he had fooled the Germans into releasing him from prison in Jersey (one of the Channel Islands) by offering to spy against England. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Nazi security service, also came in for praise. Stephens acknowledged that the man was a “genius of evil,” but he liked the way he stuck to his story (“everybody below me did it”) and showed no fear. Kaltenbrunner was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty of multiple mass murders, and hanged. Stephens wrote that he was a “worthy” enemy and regretted that he did not get the opportunity to interrogate him.
The character and competence of Stephens is important historically. Any assessment of German intelligence efforts during the Second World War must rely heavily, now as then, on the quality of the interrogations Stephens oversaw and how truthfully the results of those interrogations were conveyed to other branches of the British secret services and through the War Room to the Americans. For starters, was Stephens able to persuad
e the senior Abwehr officers who passed through Camp 020 and Bad Nenndorf to talk freely about their accomplishments and failures? The Abwehr chiefs of station at Hamburg, Brussels, Bremen, Paris, Oslo, and so on were the real spymasters. Did Stephens get them to talk candidly?
More than three-quarters of the spies Stephens describes in “A Digest of Ham” were minor. Up until D-Day, the June 6, 1944, invasion of France, they comprised mainly neutral-nation suspects taken off ships or arrested at Gibraltar or Trinidad, the easily captured parachute spies of 1940, and a surprisingly high number of individuals who had turned themselves in and offered to be double agents. Many were poorly trained, ill-equipped, and many of their assignments were advertised beforehand by intercepted Abwehr wireless chat.20 This was the human material that Stephens scorned and on which he practised his “uncompromising” tactics.
A hint of the very different kind of prisoners that were to come occurred in early 1944 when a real Abwehr officer arrived at Camp 020. Otto Mayer had been captured in an ambush by Communist partisans in Yugoslavia, and in a gesture of good will for the help they were then getting from the British, the Communists turned him over. Although in uniform and entitled to be treated as a prisoner of war, he was sent to Camp 020. Stephens gave him the works, but to no avail. Stephens wrote, “… the root trouble from an investigation point of view, the fact that he was a German patriot, remained. He was courageous enough to be indifferent to his fate.”
After “months of interrogation,” Mayer still gave away nothing.21