London Cage

by Helen Fry

  A second hearing was convened at the London Cage on 29 August 1945 to establish whether six of the original suspects in the Comrie murder were guilty of manslaughter. Klein, Wunderlich, Recksiek, Steffan, Bienek and Jelinsky found themselves back in Kensington Palace Gardens. There was insufficient evidence to find them guilty.

  On 6 October 1945, Pallme Koenig, Zühlsdorff, Goltz, Brüling and Mertens were hanged at Pentonville prison by Albert Pierrepoint, the death warrants signed by George VI. It was the largest multiple hanging since 1883.21 Josef Mertens appreciated the fact that he was guilty and faced his punishment. Just nineteen years old, he stepped onto the scaffold and remarked: ‘So jung, doch muss ich sterben’ (‘So young, yet I must die’).22 It is true, though, as Scotland himself ruminated, that ‘He died more quickly and humanely than Wolfgang Rosterg.’23

  For Scotland:

  To me personally the outcome of the Devizes case was a tragedy. I reproached myself for having allowed Rosterg to go to Comrie and for not keeping him back and sending him to a fresh camp. But I had not anticipated that all the Devizes prisoners would be lumped together in one hut at Comrie where their bitterness could be allowed to ferment.24

  9

  GERMAN-JEWISH ÉMIGRÉS

  As Allied forces battled through France after D-Day and the liberation of Belgium and Holland grew nearer, uppermost in the minds of Allied intelligence chiefs were the war crimes committed by the Nazi regime. The regime had been responsible for horrendous crimes, racial hatred and the Final Solution that had led to the murder of 6 million Jews. By the time the Allies liberated Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald concentration camps, the Nazis had already wiped out two-thirds of European Jewry and devastated the continent’s culture on a scale never before seen. The unimaginable crimes also extended to the murder of 5 million others: Russians, Poles, homosexuals, the infirm and the elderly. Throughout the war, British intelligence had gathered first-hand and comprehensive evidence of mass murder and atrocities via the decoded Enigma messages at Bletchley Park and the bugging operation by CSDIC under Scotland’s colleague, Colonel Kendrick. Thus, the London Cage shifted its focus from intelligence gathering to hunting down those Nazi war criminals responsible for the murder in cold blood of surrendering Allied airmen and soldiers. In addition, between June and September 1944, the cage received forty-seven complaints of war crimes by German forces against civilians.

  Colonel Scotland did not have sufficient time to train new officers for the enormous workload ahead, and so he sought to bolster his staff with personnel from non-commissioned ranks who were totally familiar not only with the German language, but with the German character, and who had some knowledge of German laws and customs. He turned to the British army’s Pioneer Corps, where thousands of German-Jewish émigrés, affectionately known as ‘the king’s most loyal enemy aliens’, were serving in British military uniform. Many had been interned in 1940 on the Isle of Man and in camps around Britain, before swearing allegiance to George VI and enlisting in the forces of the country that had saved them from the death camps. Among them were Martin Eversfield, Gary Leon, Felek Scharf, Wilhelm Bonwitt, Michael Ullman, Sergeant Rhodes, Sergeant Macintosh, Sergeant Herbert Kyval and Arthur Morgenthau.

  Sergeants Leon, Bonwitt and Ullman all transferred to the Intelligence Corps on the same day,1 and were later described in a report as having ‘rendered outstanding service and developed considerable ability in the interrogation of prisoners, especially where the taking of statements was required’.2 Sergeants Rhodes and McIntosh originally arrived in England on the Kindertransport, the rescue scheme that permitted 10,000 children fleeing Nazi persecution to enter the country on a special visa without the full paperwork. They became a vital part of Scotland’s team, engaged in translation and interrogation work.

  Lieutenant R.A. Hepton was described as being ‘exceedingly keen and proving a valuable addition to the staff’.3 Captain C.D. Macintosh had experience of handling prisoners in CSDIC (and was later loaned as an interpreter to work at the Nuremberg trials). Sergeants Kyval, Morgenthau and Scharf initially worked at Kempton Park. Scharf later teamed up with Captain Pantcheff, Sergeant Morgenthau and Warrant Officer Bonwitt and travelled overseas for a time, working on the Emsland war crimes investigation.

  In the absence of any female staff (apart from two ATS sergeants who worked for just a few weeks in 1945), Sergeants Rapp and Siegel were the translator typists. They were highly efficient, but, wrote Scotland, ‘cannot deal completely with the present rush of work’.4 Major Asche, a bilingual Norwegian speaker, was detailed to keep the records of the staff in order. The work of the intelligence officers was only possible because of the support staff at the London Cage: three officers undergoing training in interrogation duties, four sergeants, and eventually two temporary ATS sergeants maintaining efficiency in language and translations.

  For all the controversy surrounding Scotland and his rough approach, he did demonstrate an understanding of his refugee staff. Indeed, he may have been particularly sympathetic to their plight as he had conducted his own rescue mission in 1933, while running a company in Argentina. According to his memoirs, he had petitioned and arranged for over 250 German-Jewish families at risk in Germany to leave the regime for South America. Not only were they resettled in Argentina, but they worked for the company. Colonel Scotland has never received recognition for his rescue efforts.

  Facing evil

  Now in the London Cage, the German-Jewish refugees came face to face with the SS, Gestapo and other Nazi war criminals. The irony was not lost on them. They had fled the Nazi regime, members of their family had been killed in the concentration camps and now they faced the perpetrators. For them, the war suddenly became personal. Gary Leon had witnessed the Gestapo come for his father, Bernhard; he had been thrown down the stairs and had died instantly. Gary’s mother was transported to Theresienstadt, where she died. Facing Nazi war criminals in the cage was never going to be easy. It must have been tempting to exact revenge. But the staff realised that the legal proceedings of the war crimes trials had to take their course and would bring them justice.

  Leon’s story is quite typical of the German-Jewish refugees who came to England to escape Nazi persecution and served in the British forces. He was born Gerhard Leon in Berlin in 1911, the youngest child of Bernhard and Gertrud. Having fled Nazi Germany, he was married at Hampstead Town Hall on 2 April 1938. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, he became an ‘enemy alien’, subject to restrictions; but he was fortunate in not being caught up in the mass internment of German-Jewish refugees on the Isle of Man (and at other internment camps around Britain). On 1 May 1940, he enlisted in the Pioneer Corps and undertook vital labour work for the war effort in Bermondsey, clearing the heavily blitzed areas of south London with his company before they moved to Somerset.

  In March 1944, Leon noticed an army advertisement for fluent German speakers and applied. A series of interviews followed, one with a panel of German-speaking officers, the other with MI5. On 5 June 1944, he received a telegram ordering him to the War Office the following day. It was D-Day, 6 June, when Leon made his way to be given his instructions. He was to report to the cage at Kempton Park racecourse – ironically the site where some of his fellow refugees had been interned in 1940, under Churchill’s policy of ‘Collar the Lot!’ Now the racecourse was being used for assessment and interrogation of captured German prisoners of war.

  Leon arrived there with nine other German émigrés and was greeted by tough guards who he described as the scum of the earth. ‘Rough, dishonest, thieving and often violent,’ he later wrote.5 Within hours, he and his colleagues were dealing with a new batch of prisoners. They were paraded and their identity papers confiscated for intelligence officers to go over for vital information about their units and military service history. That first day, the new refugee staff witnessed quite chaotic scenes, but things soon settled into a pattern of daily briefings from a member of the War Office. The cage becam
e a very efficient unit in processing German prisoners of war. Gary Leon was promoted to sergeant, then sergeant major, and was posted from Kempton Park to the London Cage. He described his job at Kensington Palace Gardens as ‘interesting and responsible’.6 Apart from the guards, the intelligence staff were billeted in accommodation elsewhere, and walked to work each day. Leon wrote very little about he did at the cage, perhaps feeling that he was still bound by the Official Secrets Act, but he did still make some reference in his memoirs to hearing about the V-1 and V-2 ‘secret’ weapons from the prisoners’ interrogations.7

  The Wehrmacht in the aftermath of D-Day

  The biggest influx of Wehrmacht prisoners came after D-Day. Captured German prisoners of war now included men from other nations who had been conscripted to fight for the Nazi regime, among them a large number of Russians who were processed through the London Cage. They included several Russian boys aged between ten and fourteen who had been captured with various German units. When the Russian Military Commission heard about them, the commanding officer arrived at the London Cage to protect their interests. Colonel Scotland showed him around the cage and interrogation rooms to reassure him about conditions there, explaining that the boys were being well treated and were receiving food and shelter. They were eventually repatriated.

  After D-Day, half a million Axis prisoners passed through reception centres in Britain.8 In all the various cages under Scotland’s command, the intelligence officers classified them and selected those who merited special interrogation. It was a massive organisational and logistical task. In November 1944, 21st Army Group urgently requested interrogators from Scotland’s unit to help field interrogators in Belgium. Once the Allied forces finally crossed the border into Germany, a steady stream of prisoners was transferred to England for interrogation, first of all at the cage at Kempton Park. Their numbers varied from 1,000 to 5,000 a day.

  Kempton Park was now under the charge of interrogators Captain Kieser and Captain Pantcheff, assisted by Warrant Officer Bonwitt. Sergeant Scharf was responsible for taking down statements and typing them up, aided with translation work by Sergeant Kyval. Prisoners’ statements could run to many pages and were frequently written in a German script that was almost indecipherable. The contents were transcribed and subjected to careful scrutiny before being sent to proceedings, because they had to be accurate. The work of copying, translating and duplicating had to be carried out at the point of interrogation, so that any alterations that the prisoners wanted to make could be incorporated into the final document. Scotland issued instructions that every prisoner must be shown all documents before they were finally passed to the Judge Advocate General’s Office. To ensure the swift movement of prisoners at any time between duty stations or other cages, the London Cage had at its disposal a 15-hundredweight lorry, a four-seater car, a two-seater car, and two prisoner-of-war vans supplied by 328 Motor Transport Company, so that there was no need to rely on public transport or special escorts.

  The hundreds of interrogation reports yielded some valuable intelligence. For example, interrogators learned vital information about bunkers in the Henneville region from junior officer Ernst Schmidt, who had been captured on 25 June 1944. He provided detailed structural sketches of an armoured bunker at Wimereux in France.9 Armed with some knowledge of the bunkers at Wimereux, the interrogators were then able to question other prisoners captured in the area. Johann Bonson, who was interrogated on 5 July, supplied their measurements, and gave details of how they were constructed and reinforced. He told his interrogator, for example, that the roofs and walls were between 1.8 and 2 metres thick, and that they had iron-reinforced gun encasements. This information would be important if the RAF were planning to attack the bunkers.

  Lieutenant Herbert Krupke of a Panzer division, captured on 30 June 1944 at Greville, was interrogated at the London Cage on 11 July by Captain Sinclair, who described the prisoner as ‘security-conscious and unwilling to talk’.10 Jakob Grosser was captured north of Caen on 8 July 1944. During his interrogation at the London Cage by Captain Sinclair on 18 July, Grosser spoke about SS Division Frundsberg, which had a penal platoon consisting of SS men who had complained about conditions. To prevent widespread mutiny, the SS men were sentenced to serve five months at Danzig–Matzkau, a concentration camp for regular forces and Waffen-SS. Grosser said that there was a special unit of these men fighting in the east.

  Josef Siegel was interrogated by Captain Kettler on 18 October 1944. He had surrendered in Paris on 26 August 1944. Kettler’s report concluded that ‘he speaks fluent English with a strong American accent and claims to be strongly anti-Nazi’.11 Siegel was called up to the German army in 1941, and from 1944 was attached to the German Secret Service. He was subjected to very detailed interrogation by Kettler to ascertain whether his connections were as harmless as he made out. Kettler concluded: ‘This prisoner cannot be considered reliable.’12 Unreliable maybe, but Siegel did reveal the living quarters in Paris of a section of the Abwehr known as ‘Adverso’, a cover name for agents who were being used as stool pigeons among American prisoners of war. All spoke English with an American accent, had complete American uniforms and identification badges, and before going on a mission were given fake papers, photos, dollar bills and genuine French money printed by the Allies.

  Captured soldier Bernhard Podlaszewski had been based at headquarters at Bretteville and spoke about coastal defences near Cherbourg.13 He confirmed that his company numbered approximately 300 men with a mobile reserve of thirty cyclists, and that it defended six concrete emplacements. He provided MI19 with information that a large hotel near La Panne was being used as a German wireless station. At the top of the dunes was a series of bunkers situated 100 metres apart, and three lines of trenches from the French frontier to Nieuport. The trenches were about 70 centimetres deep, banked with sand and covered with bundled reeds, and connected by communication trenches dug under the road. Copies of information from this interrogation report were distributed to numerous branches of the intelligence services, including MI5, MI6, MI10, MI14, MI19, CSDIC, Air Intelligence ADI(K) and Naval Intelligence Division. After D-Day, a number of Panzer division prisoners were interrogated about order of battle and troop movements. They confirmed that German military vehicles were well camouflaged with tree branches.14

  Corporal Florian Pucher handed over a photograph of a group of British prisoners in Germany taken in 1943, and told his interrogator, Captain Kettler, that they were billeted 30 kilometres south-south-east of Graz, where they worked the land under the watch of a single German guard.15 He knew this because his father had had two rooms requisitioned by the German government to house the prisoners. The photograph was passed to MI9’s escape and evasion headquarters at Wilton Park in Buckinghamshire.

  Colonel Scotland proved a match for any of the German generals, including Major-General Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, who found himself in the London Cage in the summer of 1946. Ramcke was described as a bombastic, nasty man who sought to blame others for the crimes of the regime, ‘a dark, swarthy, hairy individual, aggressive and self-assured’.16 On arrival in the cage, Ramcke had written his memoirs and proceeded to read extracts to the guards – extracts that included alleged atrocities committed by New Zealand troops while Ramcke was serving in Crete in 1941.

  Prior to questioning Ramcke, Scotland ensured that all chairs were removed from the office except his own. The 57-year-old paratroop general, who been captured near Brest after the Allied invasion of France, was then brought in by the guards. Scotland told Ramcke that he understood that the general had made trouble in the cage. Ramcke was offended by this accusation, and told Scotland that he resented it. Scotland stood up and began pacing to and fro. This was to be a battle of minds. Scotland alleged that Ramcke had breached international law by moving his fighting troops in vehicles flying the Red Cross flag. Ramcke denied the charge and became furious with Scotland.

  Scotland then turned to the offending pages in Ramcke’s memoir
s and read aloud the section where Ramcke made allegations that New Zealand troops had cut off the ears of captured German paratroopers and mounted them on their hats as a victory prize. He reportedly bellowed at Ramcke that these allegations were unworthy of a German officer and of his rank as a general, and demanded that a letter be written immediately withdrawing the allegations. Ramcke refused. Scotland called in the guard and Ramcke was marched back to his cell to reflect on his lack of cooperation.

  In his cell, Ramcke perhaps did realise that the tables might be turned on him and he could find himself accused of war crimes; the best option, then, would be to cooperate and get out of the London Cage as quickly as possible. He penned a letter immediately to Scotland:

  The derogatory remarks which I have made in my book Cabin Boy to Paratroop General regarding the behaviour of British troops in Crete, particularly the Maoris, resulted from ignorance and from the feeling of bitter indignation which overcame the paratroops there after the conclusion of the fighting in Crete … I therefore humbly ask that this declaration be accepted and made use of to clear up existing misunderstandings. Humbly, H.B. Ramcke.17

  His full statement withdrawing all allegations was signed on 11 August 1946.

  Commando Order: No quarter

  On 18 October 1942, Adolf Hitler issued the Commando Order, which stated that ‘no quarter’ was to be given to captured members of the special forces – in other words, there was to be no clemency. Hitler had become enraged at the Allied commando raids behind the lines and the successful sabotage missions. The Commando Order read:

  All men operating against German troops in so-called Commando raids in Europe or in Africa are to be annihilated to the last man. This is to be carried out whether they be soldiers in uniform, or saboteurs, with or without arms, and whether fighting or seeking to escape … I will hold all Commanders and Officers responsible under Military Law for any omission to carry out this order.18