London Cage

by Helen Fry

  The following day, he received a phone call at the hotel to say that Herr K’s colleagues were interested in talking further with him. A car would be ready to collect him. Scotland arrived back at Herr K’s house to find a silver coffee service laid out in the dining room surrounded by half a dozen chairs. As coffee was poured, the entourage of expected guests entered. Scotland found himself being introduced to the Führer himself. What did the Nazi leader want with him? If Scotland’s memoirs are to be believed, Hitler commanded him to be seated and asked him about his years in South-West Africa, whether he was still an army officer, and what the situation in South America was. Coffee was passed to Scotland and the two aides who had accompanied Hitler, but the Führer ‘was given a separate jug on a small silver tray and a plate of plain biscuits which he proceeded to nibble throughout the interview’.16

  It was an informal chat rather than an interrogation. The Führer commented that ‘South-Africa is a rich country. It should come back to German control.’

  Scotland disagreed: ‘Your German residents there simply do not want the return of the old stiff-necked officials telling them how to run their farms and businesses.’

  ‘What stiff-necked officials?’ retorted Hitler. Did the German dictator have a sense of humour? Scotland replied: ‘Did you ever meet Herr Governor Seitz?’

  Hitler is said to have pulled a face and replied: ‘Yes, I know what you mean.’ His parting words to Scotland were: ‘You are an ingenious man, Schottland. Now I understand the reports we have on our files about you.’17

  What exactly was known? Had the Führer been shown a German intelligence file on ‘Herr Schottland’? It is perhaps surprising that Scotland was not arrested on suspicion of espionage – after all, he was in Germany gathering vital information on the ground and meeting interesting political figures in local government. Unfazed by this meeting with the Nazi leader, Scotland continued his tour and searched out comrades from his days in the kaiser’s army; some turned out to be pro-Nazi, others anti-Nazi. Eager to share their views, they sat down with him, deliberated on the country’s current circumstances and analysed the latest events. From them Scotland gained an important insight into the political situation and true state of affairs in Germany. He wrote:

  The enemies of Nazism, Jewish or non-Jewish, were being disposed of with ruthless speed. In addition, vast sums of money were being made available to engineering firms engaged on the production of armaments. Throughout Europe and South America and many other parts of the world, Nazi intelligence men were at work, and from sources on both sides of the fence I was learning, with some alarm, about the fantastic scale of the plans for setting up penal camps by the hundred.18

  Scotland had no hesitation in crediting himself with much of the useful intelligence being gathered for London. The emerging picture crystallised as he travelled the country further, noting how the SS conducted themselves and how they watched the German populace closely. The nature of Nazi Germany was well known from information supplied by people like Frank Foley and Thomas Kendrick, and attachés across Europe.

  On his return to London, Scotland wrote a paper for the War Office on the fast-changing political situation in Germany, the formation of a new army of SS and the rearmament programme that threatened the stability of Europe. His paper underscored the value of studying manpower in the German armed forces as a prerequisite for any intelligence service to understand the capability of the Nazi regime in the event of another war. When Scotland submitted his report, war was less than twelve months away.

  The Second World War

  After Hitler’s annexation of Austria on 12 March 1938, Scotland offered his services again to the War Office. But it was two years before he was back in uniform. On his re-enlistment papers he declared the countries of which he had knowledge to be Germany, South-West Africa, Paraguay, north-western Argentina and Uruguay. In March 1940, Scotland was summoned to the War Office and given instructions to fly to Amiens in France, and from there to Arras for an interview with General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, the then director of Military Intelligence. Two decades after the last world war, Scotland found himself back on intelligence duties in France and promoted to the rank of major. At Arras, he was greeted by Lieutenant Colonel Jock Whiteford, a former colleague from the First World War, who was working for Mason-MacFarlane.19 Whiteford had briefed his superior on Scotland’s extraordinary background and knowledge of all things German.

  The interview with Mason-MacFarlane was brief. He wanted Scotland to organise prisoners of war in France, far away from his own headquarters. He was to establish a suitable site as a ‘cage’ to process and interrogate captured German POWs for special military information. After looking around for a suitable location, Scotland chose the Normandy port of Dieppe for the interrogation quarters. The War Office approved his choice. Scotland was promoted to lieutenant colonel and (from July 1940) re-enlisted in the Intelligence Corps. From an office in the former Metropole Hotel in London he began the task of selecting suitable interrogators. From there, his team was dispatched to France and he arrived as commanding officer.

  The swift and unexpected invasion of the Low Countries and France by German forces in May 1940 meant that the cage in Dieppe never opened. Scotland was forced to evacuate his personnel. He commandeered two fishing vessels at Dunkirk and arrived back in England with his team and seventeen German prisoners of war, most of them Luftwaffe pilots. He handed the prisoners over at Newhaven and headed to London to organise the setting-up of cages around Britain, believing that he would soon have prisoners to fill them. He was tasked with increasing the number of interrogators who could move between the various cages, depending on the workload. Not only did he select his interrogators, but he also trained them. The training included lectures by Scotland himself, based around what he had learned about Germans in South-West Africa after the Boer War, in France in the First World War and in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich in the 1930s. On 13 July 1940, he formally established the Prisoner of War Interrogation Section (Home Section), with twenty officers as interrogators.

  In those early days, Scotland posed a direct challenge to his own boss, Major Rawlinson, the head of MI9a. Scotland refused to sign the Official Secrets Act when presented with it by Rawlinson, arguing that, as an interrogator, he would be discussing secret matters with German prisoners that would necessitate him breaking it. Rawlinson insisted that Scotland and his intelligence officers sign it. To break the impasse, or perhaps because he was a man who traversed conventional boundaries, Scotland devised a special statement for his interrogators to sign:

  British secrets must not be discussed with German prisoners-of-war except in the presence of the British officer who wants the information the German may have. German secrets, if known to the enemy, are not secrets under the Act. What is secret is that we know them.20

  Until the cages were fully functioning, Scotland travelled from the War Office in London where he was mainly stationed to interrogate newly captured German prisoners of war at various locations around Britain. He also placed single interrogators at strategic points around the country to conduct interrogations should lone German pilots be shot down there.

  In June 1940, a batch of over 400 German prisoners who had been captured by the British during the retreat from Dunkirk entered England via the port of Southampton. They comprised mainly young soldiers with only a superficial understanding of weapons and fighting. But among them was a small number of older soldiers who had served in the German armed forces for a number of years as part of the limited 100,000-strong army permitted by the Treaty of Versailles. They had received first-class military training and were found to be highly efficient soldiers. From them, Scotland and his interrogators were able to evaluate the German army’s capabilities, and could report to British intelligence that the Germans’ fighting ability and efficiency in the early stages of the war was mixed. The fall of France and the retreat from Dunkirk yielded no more German army prisoners for two years unt
il the influx of prisoners captured in North Africa. Instead, Scotland and his staff received naval and air force prisoners.

  Scotland himself admitted that his years of experience living among German nationals after the Boer War, serving in the German army and later interrogating thousands of German prisoners of war in the First World War enabled him to form an opinion as an intelligence officer rather than as a politician. He believed that this provided a unique tool for understanding how to glean information from his prisoners.

  Scotland analysed Nazi philosophy and observed an unqualified respect for all things military. As he noted, ‘the common desire for a leader and a national identity with which all sections of the German nation can be content, or reasonably content, is engrained deeply’.21 He detected that professional rivalry in the German army had always been fierce, because its base was tribal and not national. There was also a belief that the army had never really been defeated in 1918:

  The force of 100,000 men allowed to Germany by the Versailles Treaty ensured the unbroken continuation of the German Military Spirit; and since the Wehrlister [sic] (which contained the names and particulars of all men due for military service) had been left intact by the Allies in 1918, it was a comparatively simple matter to select an elite force and for Hitler to build on it.22

  During the 1930s, Germany had expanded its armaments and spy networks and had re-established contacts in South America, South Africa, Australia and elsewhere. Scotland also argued that the German respect for strict authority made it easier for Hitler to gain blind obedience from his people. Hitler brought new traditions to German culture – the oath of secrecy and ‘loyalty in the SS’. This ‘broke family ties and encouraged men to inform on family and friends who criticised the Third Reich. The army was loyal to its old traditions, but the Waffen SS and Gestapo were not. Their loyalty was to Hitler.’23

  Introducing equality of rank and no hierarchy in the SS created a virtually impenetrable brotherhood of blind obedience. It led Scotland to conclude of the SS that the removal of any hierarchy was ‘the wrong way for Germans to be controlled’:

  They are content to take orders from above – it fits in with the old family tradition of parental authority and also of the state being led by a single leader, but give the Germans equality with one another and they rapidly became arrogant, domineering and fools.24

  It was this premise that led Scotland to ensure that, wherever possible, a German prisoner was interrogated by a higher-ranking British officer, because the prisoner would respect his authority and rank and be more likely to cooperate.

  It was largely due to Colonel Scotland’s expertise that by the end of the Second World War British intelligence had an impressive and adaptable interrogation policy that produced intelligence of the highest quality, unequalled in any other country. It was because of this that in February 1946 he was decorated with the American Bronze Star by Major-General William Biddle,

  for outstanding cooperation in enabling field interrogation detachments of G-2, ETOUSA [European Theatre of Operations, United States Army], to be quickly established, for generous sharing with United States Field Interrogation Detachments of the British experience for the speedy and complete reporting of the results of PWIS interrogation; and for exceptional contribution to Anglo-American cooperation and outstanding devotion to duty.25

  However, allegations of a sinister nature began to emerge publicly. Colonel Scotland’s conservative, gentlemanly, military appearance belied a man with a penetrating gaze, Afrikaans twang and tight-clenched manners that made him feared by most German prisoners. To those on his side, Scotland was a charmer, but he was brutal and ruthless to anyone who stood in his way, especially the German prisoners who refused to cooperate in his cage.

  3

  CAGE CHARACTERS

  The interrogators

  The majority of enemy prisoners captured in the early stages of the war were not willing to give away information voluntarily. They believed that Germany would win the war. And who could challenge that belief, given that England faced the very real threat of invasion in 1940–41? Obtaining vital intelligence from prisoners as quickly as possible became the immediate task for the London Cage interrogators and for those at other cages around the country.

  ‘Interrogation is an art,’ wrote Scotland. ‘A good interrogator is partly born, partly made.’1 The role of interrogators was critical in the immediate period after a prisoner’s capture. Timing was all. In a fast-moving war, a piece of intelligence one day was history the next. But the interrogators’ role in the London Cage has been obscured, even by Colonel Scotland himself, who makes no reference to them in his memoirs (apart from a fleeting mention of senior interrogator Major Terry). Nevertheless, they were essential to the ‘success’ of the London Cage: without their skills, a vast number of pieces of the intelligence jigsaw would have been unavailable to the British military authorities. Having signed the Official Secrets Act, they knew the consequences of talking about their work – consequences that Scotland himself faced when he crossed the intelligence services by trying to publish his own memoirs.2

  The interrogators were all male; the London Cage was no place for women. Only two Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) women were known to have worked there for a few months after the war, when it became a centre for war crimes investigations: the British-born Lucy Haley and the German émigré Miss Metzler, neither of whom ever saw any prisoners in the cage. They were billeted in a building of the Music College next to the Royal Albert Hall, and every day travelled the short distance to the London Cage, where they were engaged in taking down letters in English for the sergeants. Before the end of the Second World War, it was rare for the military to use female interrogators. The exception was Naval Intelligence and MI19’s Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre in Cairo.3

  Scotland’s experience had taught him that German prisoners in uniform were very different in attitude and behaviour from the civilians in peacetime Germany. His interrogators faced soldiers who were indoctrinated in Nazi ideology – especially the SS officers, who belonged to highly efficient units that had sworn blind allegiance to Adolf Hitler.

  The art of interrogation

  The interrogator had to produce immediate results while a prisoner was still disoriented by the shock of capture. His duty was to obtain from the prisoner all information required by the army and security services as swiftly as possible. This included building a picture of the prisoner’s war service since enlistment; where he had served before capture; his regiment and training; the Germans’ fighting capability; and the state of morale among the general population in Germany. Prisoners could be talkative and egotistic, which boded well for their interrogation because it often took little for such men to cooperate. Prisoners could also be timid and fearful of punishment, or just plain foolish and unable to see the verbal trap that was being laid for them. The hardest prisoner to interrogate was the polite, cheerful one who suspected various ruses and was firm in his refusals. He could only be overcome with perseverance.

  The London Cage was a tight-knit unit, and Colonel Scotland insisted on hand-picking his interrogators. Although fluency in German was a requirement of the job, Scotland insisted that any good interrogator or intelligence officer had to have an intuitive understanding of the German mindset: understanding the psyche of the prisoner meant that information could be extracted from him. He honed his interrogators’ intuitions, so that they could conduct interrogations methodically and extract information in the shortest possible time, before the prisoner became uncooperative.

  Scotland looked for five qualities in an interrogator: 1) a first-class memory; 2) keen observation; 3) infinite patience; 4) knowledge of psychology; and 5) the ability to act.

  A good memory enabled an interrogator to check a prisoner’s story for consistency. Sharp powers of observation meant he could detect subtle changes in the prisoner’s mannerisms and behaviour during interrogation. Infinite patience was required to see t
he job through to its conclusion, however long it took: there could be no shortcuts and an interrogation could not be rushed. At the London Cage there was sufficient time to study prisoners, unlike at some of the cages near the front line, where prisoners needed to be moved on quickly.

  An interrogator had to be a practical psychologist with an ability to appraise character rapidly and swiftly understand the type of man about to be interrogated. He needed to understand when to change his mood; a swift judgement had to be made as to whether to adopt a friendly or tough attitude. The interrogator had to judge whether a prisoner could be won over by a soft approach of discussion, argument and befriending; by a hard approach of anger and even veiled threats; or by small favours, such as extra chocolate, cigarettes or alcohol.

  Some German prisoners could be bluffed into obedience by a reminder of military authority. Interrogation was found to be more effective when the interrogator was of a higher rank than the prisoner. Successful interrogation was based on an interrogator’s personal art, playing a confidence trick, getting the prisoner to talk, often without knowing that he was revealing new information. The interrogator was the master – or was to give the impression of being the master.

  Another successful technique was for two interrogators to play off against each other. The one who failed to induce a prisoner to talk could indicate to the prisoner that he was about to be interrogated by a sterner officer. The other officer was called in and the two interrogators pretended to disagree over how the prisoner was to be treated – with harshness or mercy. It was often enough for a prisoner to begin to cooperate.

  The best interrogators came from particular professions: lawyers and academics, who were used to sorting through volumes of unfamiliar evidence, and journalists and businessmen, trained to worm their way into a new situation. In essence, an interrogator had to be a good actor. Displays of impatience or anger could be effective, but loss of temper was always fatal. Scotland believed that ‘an interrogator must be subtle and disarming in his approach to a prisoner’.4 This could be achieved by talking to him about his background, family life, grievances and political beliefs. This enabled an interrogator to build a comprehensive picture of the prisoner. The main disarming technique employed on a prisoner was to reveal so much information about him that he felt the interrogator knew everything and so he might as well cooperate.