by Helen Fry
By the time German prisoners arrived at the London Cage from North Africa, they were invariably ready to talk. Communications personnel held grievances against Hitler for being posted away from the comparative safety of their German homeland to the conflict in Africa. It seemed to make little sense to them to send them to an area where they risked capture and interrogation. They had vital knowledge of German communication lines and signals, as that was what they had been working on. Once captured, predictably they provided British interrogators with a wealth of intelligence on the railway network in Germany and underground cable communications. The interrogators played on the prisoners’ discontent to soften them up. They needed little encouragement and spoke freely to British technical experts, readily drawing detailed sketches and plans of sites and technology. Again, later this was to prove of immense value to the Allies during the invasion of Germany.
Italian soldiers were also taken prisoner in North Africa. They were found to harbour a deep mistrust of Germans, an attitude which British interrogators could use to their advantage. Of these prisoners, only one refused to talk in interrogation. This unnamed Italian was transferred to the London Cage, where Colonel Scotland decided to see him personally. He found the prisoner feeding breadcrumbs to the sparrows from the window of his room. A period of solitary confinement had been prescribed to break his silence, but the tactic had failed. Now Scotland needed to know this man’s particular war service. However, the prisoner told him there was nothing he could do to make him talk. Scotland left him for a while, then asked the guards to bring him to his office. Scotland explained to him that he knew everything there was to know: his staff had the testimony of the other prisoners, as well as the captured documents. It was one of the oldest tricks in the trade: convince a prisoner that everything was already known about him. Persuaded now that there was no point in holding back, the Italian finally opened up.
The most valuable German prisoners were those whom Hitler had transferred to the front line in North Africa from the secret weapons development site at Peenemünde. They resented being moved away from their interesting work on the V-1 and V-2 programme on the north German coast. After capture, they readily provided British interrogators at the London Cage with information, sketches and drawings of the secret programme.
The London Cage was still assisting the security forces with the interrogation of special prisoners from North Africa in 1943 – a task that took three months to complete because there were so many of them. These particular prisoners were deemed more likely to open up under stricter military conditions, and so they were interrogated at either the London Cage or at another cage at Bourton, Gloucestershire. Much of the early work was routine, but the progression of the war saw the arrival of die-hard Nazis and SS officers who changed the tone of life inside Kensington Palace Gardens.
999 Division
The most difficult prisoners of the war began to arrive at the London Cage after the defeat of Rommel in 1942. Described by Colonel Scotland as ‘rabid Nazis’, they included SS officers and indoctrinated members of the Nazi armed forces.6 The staff became efficient at quietening them. Among them was an unusual set of prisoners – men from 999 Division, made up of men who had been incarcerated for a time in a concentration camp and had volunteered to serve in the German forces in order to avoid a slow and painful demise in Dachau or Bergen-Belsen; the risks of fighting on the front line were preferable. These men came under the command of SS divisions and were formed into 999 Division. One of these prisoners harboured a deep hatred of Hitler and the Nazis, in spite of having served in the German forces. He spoke freely to interrogators and fellow prisoners about the terrible things he had suffered in the concentration camps. Scotland believed it important that other prisoners should hear about these atrocities, and encouraged the guards to put certain men together in the same cell. There is no doubt that Scotland and his staff knew of the atrocities in Nazi Germany and of the brutality of the regime. Sometimes that played out in incidents inside the cage, as in the case of two men from 999 Division who arrived for questioning. They were taken to Room 22 for initial interrogation. They stood in front of a table at which sat two interrogators. On hearing the door open, the prisoners turned to see the guards march in with a rabid Nazi. Again, he is not named in Scotland’s memoirs, but his Hitler salutes in another POW camp, as well as his refusal to obey orders, were causing problems. He had been transferred to the London Cage for disciplining. The guards left him to face the interrogators.
What transpired next calls into question why this prisoner was brought before the two men of 999 Division during an interrogation session. The interrogators watched as the two prisoners began to shout at the Nazi, lunging at him and beating him. The two interrogators leapt up from behind the table and tried to separate the fighting men as punches were thrown. The assault was serious enough to call back the guard, who separated the prisoners and hauled the Nazi out of the room.
The interrogators wanted to know what had provoked the outburst of violence. Composing themselves, the two men explained that the Nazi had been one of the guards at a concentration camp and had assaulted them on numerous occasions. They had promised each other that if they were ever captured by the British and their paths crossed with the Nazi guard’s, they would kill him. What happened next to the Nazi is not recorded, but Scotland does comment that he was ‘made to submit’ and returned to his original prisoner-of-war camp a subdued man.
Men of 999 Division continued to be used in Scotland’s attempt to confront ardent Nazis and SS prisoners with their past. They poured out their stories of the terrible suffering that had been inflicted on them, their loss of homes and possessions. The Nazis had no response, but neither were they cured of their ideology. However, it gave the staff satisfaction that the Nazis were being confronted with their brutal and sickening actions.
Intelligence asset
Intelligence gathered from POWs at the London Cage could be used to identify key targets in Germany that could be bombed or sabotaged. In July 1943, 122 Polish prisoners of war arrived at the cage. Short summary reports of their interrogations survive in the National Archives and provide an insight into the kind of intelligence being gathered by the interrogators.7 High on the interrogators’ list of priorities was to obtain economic information about the Nazi regime and the relocation of key German industries to the east. However, most of these prisoners were young men from subsidiary occupations (waiters, barbers) who had been conscripted into the German armed forces. They had been told to report to German police headquarters, where they had unexpectedly been handed their call-up papers. From 1940, this had been happening to many Poles who were working in Germany. Sometimes financial incentives were offered to join up.
These particular prisoners are not named in the intelligence files. The first is simply called ‘Informant A’ and was born in Graudenz (Polish Grudziądz) in 1921. He told interrogators about a firm where he had worked as a draughtsman and construction engineer. After the invasion and occupation of Poland by the German forces on 1 September 1939, the firm received contracts for the construction of new aerodromes and factories that would manufacture new German planes. The first to be built was the Flugzeugwerke (aircraft factory) in Graudenz, which became a subsidiary of the famous German industrial company, IG Farben. Informant A said that from the end of 1942, the factory was producing fifty Ju 88s (fast bombers) a month; it manufactured various parts, like wings and rudders, but it imported the engines. He told the interrogators that the aeroplanes were tested at an adjacent airfield and collected by operational crews. The airfield accommodated a technical school that could train eighty men. The next airfield to be constructed was at Rippin in Prussia, and came directly under the Luftwaffe.
From 10 October 1942 until 3 December 1942, Informant A had been stationed at Delmenhorst, Lower Saxony. He told interrogators how the workers were marched past the local airfield and saw operational two-seater planes along the road and how they were camouflaged:
‘In the woods, ammunition dumps and bomb dumps were disguised as barns with camouflage nets in place of roofs. In a couple of cases, these were built to look like hills or mounds.’8
Informant A was not the only prisoner to provide intelligence on IG Farben. Informant M said that the company was building chemical works at Auschwitz in 1941, ‘covering an area of about 13 sq. km, in the triangle formed by the villages Oswiecim–Dwory–Monowice’.9 He had worked there until March 1942 building shops and had witnessed the construction for himself.
Informants B and C had worked in a factory concealed in the woods between Vistula and Birkenthal. They provided interrogators with a sketch of the layout of the factory. It showed that wooden barracks adjacent to the factory’s pumping station were living quarters for foreign workmen. The factory itself consisted of numerous bunkers dispersed throughout the woods and protected by flak guns. Informant B was able to provide precise details of the concrete mix used in the construction of the 6-metre-by-6-metre bunkers. The walls were reinforced with rods, but the foundations were not. The roof was dome-shaped and reinforced, extending over half the bunker, and was concealed by earth and trees. The bunkers were so well camouflaged that they were invisible from the air, and were so spread out that any individual bomb would only cause localised damage. Only the destruction of the pumping plant could put the factory out of action. Construction of the factory had begun in November 1939, first using a German workforce, then thousands of French, Russian and British prisoners of war. Production output began in February 1942. Informants B and C were able to describe the cylinders and other parts being manufactured. Informant C provided information that the machinery used in the factory was brand new and came from Essen, Düsseldorf and places in Belgium. The electrical machinery was sent from Siemens in Berlin.
Informant D’s interrogation was particularly disturbing. He had been sentenced to two and a half years in a detention centre in 1935 for distributing socialist newspapers, then two and a half years under preventive arrest in Buchenwald concentration camp, where he had worked long hours on camp construction. The intelligence files record:
The stories he has to tell of this camp are of such a nature that they could not be committed to paper, but it may be recorded that of 12,000 men in the camp, the average death toll was 200 men monthly and in June 1939, apart from other deaths, 400 Jews were killed.10
He told interrogators that he had witnessed the ceremonial hanging of a Jewish man in Buchenwald. The man had killed an SS guard, escaped and had eventually been found in Czechoslovakia. From there he was abducted by Gestapo agents and brought back to Germany. Informant D also witnessed the shooting of the Hamburg socialist leader Hans Brehm. He confirmed that the camp leader was SS General (Obergruppenführer) Koch and his second-in-command was Roedel. Those men would eventually be hunted down at the end of the war and stand trial for war crimes. Informant D provided important information that the Hermann Göring works on the Gleiwitz–Laband–Heidebruch road was making liquid air bombs and shells.
The continued build-up of the industrial Nazi war machine was clearly evident from the testimony of the Polish prisoners. Another prisoner spoke about a new factory that was producing synthetic petrol from coal and outputting one trainload a day. By-products of the factory were lubricating oils, tar and turpentine. The factory had been steadily enlarged and employed a few thousand men, working in twelve-hour shifts.
Informant H had been employed as a joiner for the firm of Wilhelm Ritterhauser at Neuenhagen near Berlin. It produced large plates for U-boats and small aircraft parts. All its products were dispatched by rail. He told interrogators: ‘Hidden in the woods at Neuenhagen is a vulcanisation factory re-treating old tyres for the army. About 400–500 men are employed but no foreigners because the process is highly secret.’11
Informant I worked at a factory that employed 2,000 people in the production of gas masks, lifebelts and rubber equipment for the German army. He also knew about a small shell-filling factory and bunkers scattered in the hills near Graudenz, employing around 200 people. Informant J spoke about a former machine factory in Upper Silesia that was milling parts of large guns, aeroplanes and tanks. Informant K worked from January 1941 until September 1942 in a factory at Graudenz producing ammunition and bombs, thought to be the same ammunition factory that Informant A referred to. Informant K also spoke of an airfield near Graudenz that employed 1,000 men and was producing Messerschmitt planes. Other prisoners told of the military build-up, much of the information not available from RAF reconnaissance missions, thus underlining the importance of the interrogations at the London Cage.
Various prisoners talked about factories outside Berlin that were building component parts for aeroplanes; of work at Schildau-Ebbing on the production of Tiger tanks; chemical works near Riesenberg, East Prussia; and an underground munitions factory at Münsterlager that employed 1,000 Polish workers. Mention was made of a Krupp factory in Poland that was well camouflaged in the forest and that in 1940 had had an output of 30,000 hand grenades a month; by April 1942, it was outputting 150,000 a month. Another prisoner spoke about a U-boat factory in the forest north of Lübeck that employed 6,000 Polish men and women.
The value of this kind of information gathered from prisoners of war cannot be underestimated. From them, British intelligence could map a comprehensive understanding of the Nazi military capability and see that the pace of rearmament showed no sign of slowing down. These prisoners were interrogated a year before the invasion of Europe by the Allies on 6 June 1944. But in 1943, the Allies were already preparing for D-Day, and intelligence such as this was used in military planning and strategic bombing raids on the German industrial heartlands, whether in the cities or the countryside. Copies of these interrogation reports were distributed among the key intelligence agencies: MI5, MI6, the Foreign Office, MI3, MI10, MI14, CSDIC, Naval Intelligence Division, Air Intelligence, the Joint Intelligence Committee, the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, and American intelligence in Washington.
British intelligence issued guidelines on interrogation that stated: ‘the interrogator must be careful to avoid any suggestion of having threatened the prisoner with physical violence. His art must consist of suggestions and innuendo rather than the use of threats.’12 Naval Intelligence Division, which undertook many interrogations for MI9 and MI19, also concluded: ‘Instruments of torture, drugs, etc., are pointless.’13 Group Captain Denys Felkin, head of Air Intelligence Section ADI(K) attached to another MI19 site, wrote: ‘It is always easy enough to persuade any prisoner to say what the interrogator thinks he ought to say, but the essence of interrogation is the honest reporting of unprompted statements made by the prisoner.’14 Intelligence gathered under duress was always suspect and was of no use to the intelligence services, because they could not act on unreliable testimony.
There is no doubt that the interrogation work at the London Cage was absolutely vital to the war. What is particularly sensitive and controversial today is not what was gleaned in interrogation, but how that intelligence was obtained. Colonel Scotland commented: ‘There was no need to use force here; disgruntled and disillusioned men will invariably speak freely with others, even though they be enemies, when they talk the same technical language.’15 But what about the uncooperative prisoners? And how did that affect life inside the cage?
5
DOWNSTAIRS
Interrogation methods
How do you make a difficult German talk? That was one of the main challenges that faced interrogators throughout the war. Colonel Scotland stated in his unpublished memoirs that, from time to time, ‘it was necessary to discipline tough, arrogant and impudent prisoners. We had our methods for these types.’1 During training, Scotland taught the interrogators techniques that were underpinned by his belief that ‘One of the most important aspects of a war is to know as much as possible about the enemy, not only about his military forces, his weapons and the distribution of both, but above all about his mi
nd – how he thinks along certain lines and why.’2 The ideal scenario was to break a prisoner in interrogation through a combination of cunning and psychological deception; but what if that failed? It can be argued that at various points in its history, the London Cage slipped into unorthodox interrogation methods that went against official policy. The authorised military manual on interrogation in war stated: ‘The interrogator must strictly adhere at all times to the terms of the Geneva Convention … Interrogation by torture or ill-treatment in any way is not, in any circumstances, permitted.’3 That manual was not declassified until decades later. The general public knew nothing of interrogation techniques, and during the war did not give them a thought.
When MI5 censored Scotland’s original manuscript in 1957, it catalogued a list of offending pages where clear contraventions of the Geneva Convention were deemed to have taken place at the London Cage.4 Mistreatment of uncooperative prisoners appeared to have been commonplace there, and extended to a variety of methods usually associated with Soviet Russia. Prisoners were allegedly locked in narrow sentry boxes for hours and doused with cold water; forced to clean their rooms with a toothbrush; subjected to sleep deprivation for up to five or six days; and endured periods without food. Field Marshal von Rundstedt was allegedly asked to scrape a toilet with a razor.
The interrogators also seem to have used various intimidation techniques and innuendoes that they knew played on the German psyche and ingrained fears. Relying on the prisoners’ unqualified respect for military discipline, whether German or British, the prisoner was reminded that he fell under British military rules in the cage. This was known as ‘soft’ brainwashing. If that failed, ‘hard’ brainwashing was used, extending to verbal threats of being deported to Russia. It was believed that German prisoners feared the Russians most because of possible imagined reprisals and brutal revenge for the atrocities committed by the German army on the Russian front from 1941. An interrogator at the London Cage could play on that and stamp a prisoner’s file NR, which the prisoner assumed meant Nach Russland (‘To Russia’). In fact, it meant ‘Not Required’ – i.e. the interrogators had finished with him.5 If a prisoner saw NR swiftly stamped on his file in front of him, he generally backtracked and became cooperative.