by Helen Fry
During the First World War, Scotland had not been tortured by the Germans while a prisoner in Windhoek prison, but he had been kept in solitary confinement. He knew from personal experience what it took for a prisoner to hold out and what would make him break. The official British military guidelines on captured prisoners were clear: ‘Prisoners are not to be made to adopt any stress positions.’3 The tactic used in the interrogation of suspected war criminals was to confront them with all the knowledge in the possession of the interrogators. If that did not induce them to talk, they lost their status as prisoners and became suspects, with no rights. If the prisoner was former Gestapo, then he was required to kneel during interrogation. No reason was ever given to justify that practice.4 Scotland summed up the methods:
It was true that all the confessions of guilt were obtained by psychology and a knowledge of the German mind. It was not difficult. No German will tell the whole truth when he is accused, but will tell a little and reserve what he can for his defence. Once he has been presented with statements made by others which implicate him, he will volunteer more information which although to his disadvantage, will also implicate others with whom he had been associated. Time after time we built up our information by this method of getting a fact and ‘putting it back’ to a prisoner, invariably with the same result – eventually the writing of a full statement or confession. No force was necessary.5
Major Terry was back at the London Cage as the most senior interrogator below Scotland, coordinating and working on the war crimes investigations. Captain Ryder and Lieutenant Hepton continued their work as interrogators, aided by Warrant Officer Ullman, who also took down statements from the prisoners. Sergeants Rapp and Siegel carried on with the translating and typing of statements. Warrant Officer Gary Leon and Sergeant Martin Eversfield were responsible for tracing prisoners on the Allies’ list of wanted war criminals. Finding the whereabouts of prisoners from records kept by the British, American and French departments was a painstaking task, and required Leon and Eversfield to be completely au fait with the details of the allegations. It was one thing for them to be native German speakers, but for their searches to be productive, they also had to have knowledge of the German army and its formations.
Sometimes an encounter with a prisoner took an unexpected turn. There was one interrogator who had been captured on a special mission during the war. When he was finally released from the German camp, he resumed his duties at the London Cage. There, he came face to face one day with a Gestapo officer who had physically abused him while he had been a prisoner of war. Although the interrogator was not named in reports or in Scotland’s memoirs, he is thought to have been Major Terry, who was captured during the Saint-Nazaire Raid in 1942. No charges could be brought against the Gestapo officer, because permanent injury had not been inflicted on the interrogator; but Scotland saw no reason why they should not indulge in the same sort of treatment. The stage for the re-enactment was Scotland’s office. It was a much milder version of the abuse suffered by the interrogator: a swagger cane was pushed down the back of the Gestapo officer’s neck (as had been done to the British prisoner), his hair was pulled and he was gripped aggressively on the shoulder, while Scotland bawled in his ear in German. As a further punishment, the Gestapo man was given three days of cleaning toilets in the cage. It was enough to break his will to resist and he became introverted and contrite.
The London Cage investigated some of the most notorious war crimes ever committed against Allied soldiers and airmen, including the Emsland, Wormhoudt (page 135), Le Paradis (chapter 11) and Sagan (chapter 12) cases. A significant number involved British personnel. For example, the interrogation team had to try to establish the whereabouts of Lieutenant Gerhard Preil, wanted in connection with the shooting of members of the 2nd SAS Regiment at La Fosse farm, Pexonne, north-eastern France, on 19 September 1944 (several SAS deaths were investigated at the London Cage).6 Amidst all this, interrogators also interviewed German civilians in connection with the conditions endured by Polish workers in the Modrow and Niwka mines, where there had been numerous deaths. Heinrich Hautau was one such civilian. As the manager overseeing the treatment of Polish workers and giving out daily orders, he was brought to the London Cage for questioning. The issue of slave labour was uppermost in the mind of his interrogator, Captain Cornish, to whom he gave two signed statements on 5 and 12 March 1946.7
Other war crimes included the murder of five British special forces prisoners near Noailles on 9 August 1944.8 The previous month, a party of nine SAS had been dropped near Paris, where they had been ambushed. One was shot and later died; another was wounded and taken to hospital in Paris. The remaining seven were taken to Gestapo headquarters at 84/86 Avenue Foch in Paris and interrogated, although not tortured. On 9 August, the prisoners were moved north of the capital to be executed; two made a break for it and got away. The other five were shot in a murder that was ‘particularly brutal and cold blooded’.9 All attempts by the military to find the culprits had failed, and the case was given to Colonel Scotland. He and his team tracked down the Gestapo officers and interrogators who had worked at the Avenue Foch headquarters. Their interrogation reports now survive in the National Archives.10
The SS and concentration camps
The vast volume of work had to be juggled with routine daily requests to the London Cage from other Allied organisations for information and evidence about certain war criminals for their own investigations. Most pertained to atrocities committed by the SS. Scotland’s unit created a card index for every SS prisoner held in camps in Britain. Some 23,000 SS prisoners were catalogued – a task that took three months to complete.
Cells at the London Cage began to fill with SS prisoners, the ultra-tough die-hard men who had sworn an oath of loyalty to Hitler to fight to the bitter end. Now that they faced Scotland and his interrogators they seemed resolved to remain defiant and unrepentant for their crimes. The interrogators heard details of some of the worst crimes committed by the SS. One of the most difficult accounts to hear must have been when SS prisoners gave details of the slaughter of 42,000 Polish-Jewish men, women and children in a single fourteen-hour period near Lublin. The order had been given by SS Lieutenant-General Jakob Sporrenberg, acting on the direct orders of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, who had sent 2,000 SS troops and 250 expert killers from the Auschwitz concentration camp.11 With Sporrenberg now in the London Cage, the interrogators found it difficult to restrain themselves. The SS man stood before them, accused of directing one of the most shocking slaughters of the Hitler regime.
‘Sporrenberg was typical of the thugs used by the Nazis to carry out their policies,’12 said Colonel Scotland. Sporrenberg’s file describes him as a man of very little education, who had risen through the ranks of the Nazi party and into the SS, to become SS chief in the areas of Minsk (Belarus) and Lublin (Poland). It contains graphic details of Hitler’s orders for the killing of the Jews in Lublin.13 Facing Colonel Scotland across the room, Sporrenberg maintained that he and his men were innocent of the Lublin killings, but under close interrogation he appeared to know that around 16,000 Jews from Łódź had been killed, along with 14,000 from Camp Poniatowa and 12,000 from Camp Trawniki. During interrogation on 25 February 1946, Warrant Officer Ullman confronted Sporrenberg with the fact that these figures added up to a total of 42,000 people. The atrocity had involved 150 SS, who on average had each killed 250 people an hour.14
In the London Cage report, dated 25 February 1946, Colonel Scotland concluded of Sporrenberg that he was
one of Hitler’s earliest and most fanatical supporters who, by his efficiency, zeal and success quickly rose to high rank and important position with the SS, and security police … His guilt in the extermination of scores of thousands of Jews, including Polish prisoners of war, is obvious, and even if the main burden of the work of killing 42,000 innocent human beings rested on his henchmen, such a task could not have been carried out by a mere handful of men in 14 hours. Sporrenberg
’s commanders had brought the victims to their place of execution and then provided guards to see that none would escape their fate.15
Sporrenberg was handed over to the Polish authorities to stand trial. He was convicted of war crimes in 1950, sentenced to death and executed in December 1952.
Prisoners arrived in the cage who had served in the Panzer divisions. One was Franz van Lent of 1st Company, 17 SS Panzergrenadier Division, who had been captured on 3 August 1944. His interrogation report shows that he was questioned at the London Cage about atrocities committed against Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Part of his file reads:
18 April 1944. 0400 hrs. Trained soldiers entered the Ghetto to round up the Jews. The Jews who were well armed put up such a defence that the SS troops had to leave the Ghetto after approximately one hour. Order was then given to the Turkestan Unit to open fire with their two Russian guns until the first houses were set aflame. The SS troops then entered the Ghetto to drive the people who had survived the shelling onto the market square where they were shot down by M.G. [machine gun] fire. This procedure was systematically carried out from block to block from the outskirts of the Ghetto towards the centre. The operation lasted one month.16
Franz van Lent told his interrogators that 45,000 Jews had lived in the ghetto before 18 April 1944, and that virtually no one was left after the atrocity. He was told by SS men from his company that a number of Jews had been taken to the concentration camp in Litzmannstadt (Łódź). He named SS personnel in the units whom he had witnessed murdering Jews in the streets and on the main square of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Hans Aumeier, the son of a rifle-factory worker, was interrogated on 28 January 1946 in connection with his activities as penal camp leader in Auschwitz concentration camp, between June 1942 and May 1943. Interrogators knew that between 15 January 1934 and April 1936 he had served at Dachau concentration camp, where he had first been ‘trained’, and then had been at Flossenbürg from 1 May 1939 until 15 February 1942.17 He maintained that during his whole service at Dachau, he had no contact whatsoever with the prisoners, and had never committed any acts of murder or ill-treatment: he had been engaged solely in training new personnel outside the prisoners’ compound.
Aumeier was not prepared to admit the full extent of his own guilt in the mass executions carried out at Auschwitz during his tenure, and blamed it on his superiors, Himmler and Rudolf Höss (the commandant at Auschwitz). It was clear, though, that he had been quite willing to pass on orders to his subordinates to undertake killings and other atrocities. His intelligence report summed him up thus:
In appearance he does not conform to the standards set by the Third Reich leaders for the Master Race. Undersized, ugly, and unintelligent. Aumeier has resigned himself to being brought to account as a member of the Auschwitz staff for the bestialities perpetrated there and to take the punishment due to him. Prisoner has admitted to other prisoners that the information he has so far given of his activities represents only part of his story, and he is of the view that if the Allies want to know any more let them find out.18
The interrogators were primed to ask exceptionally detailed questions about prisoners who had worked in the concentration camps. Aumeier provided so much detailed information on the killings and camps that his interrogation report ran to several pages. Some of the information that he volunteered concerned gas chamber executions:
Prisoner states that during his period at Auschwitz between 15,000 and 18,000 people were gassed to death in the gas chambers. He denies responsibility, alleging that gassings were carried out by a special task-force and camp guards directly responsible to the camp commandant. Prisoner says he witnessed these gassings on several occasions, sometimes together with the Camp Commandant, sometimes alone.19
Aumeier denied selecting prisoners for the execution, maintaining that that had been the responsibility of the doctors who, on the arrival of new batches of prisoners, immediately picked out those who were unable to perform heavy work. They were then taken by lorry to the gas chambers and crematorium about 2 miles from the camp. What happened next was described in graphic detail by Aumeier:
On arrival they were taken into a hut where they had to undress after which they were driven into the gas-chambers. They were told that they were to be disinfected, and in fact the word Disinfection was written on the outside of the gas-chamber. Then the doors were closed and a member of the execution squad poured the gas into the chamber through a small opening at the top or side. The gas was Zyklon B which, prisoner states, led to death within half to one minute. On the following day the corpses were taken by lift to the actual crematorium and burnt, but not until other prisoners had been forced to remove gold teeth from the bodies. During the second half of [prisoner’s] service at Auschwitz, the bodies of females had their hair cut off, but prisoner states that he does not know the reason for this. The gold of the teeth was collected by the camp dentist, and as far as prisoner knows, sent to Berlin.20
Steadily, the interrogators built up a picture of their prisoner, who had been in direct command of the SS camp guards. It was he who gave orders for the mistreatment of camp inmates. Aumeier had no problem in admitting that he gave orders for the flogging of prisoners, and that he and his men frequently hit prisoners in the face. As some kind of justification, he maintained that they only used their hands and fists. Aumeier admitted that he was present at most floggings. Interrogators wrote on his interrogation report:
A great many prisoners were killed at Auschwitz by members of the guard commanded by Aumeier, quite apart from the mass-executions in gas-chambers. Although Aumeier tries to shift responsibility for everything that happened on the Commandant, he admits that he interpreted the Commandant’s orders and passed them on to the men under his command … During the Commandant’s occasional absences, prisoner deputised for him, and on these occasions the mass-executions, the ill-treatment and wanton killings of prisoners at Auschwitz were continued by Aumeier in sole charge.21
Thousands of prisoners died in Auschwitz due to the appalling conditions, in which epidemics could not be avoided. Despite their inadequate rations, prisoners were forced to carry out heavy physical work and, on many occasions, were killed during the work by the guards. Aumeier claimed that approximately 3,000 prisoners died at Auschwitz from ‘natural causes’.
Evidence of Aumeier’s guilt was confirmed by other prisoners who had been at Auschwitz under his command and had then served in Norway with SS personnel, before being captured and interrogated by the war crimes unit working in Norway. Major MacLeod and Captain Broderman of that unit hunted them down, interrogated them and collected their damning evidence against Aumeier to send back to Colonel Scotland. It was established that Aumeier had been attached to the SS Construction Brigade of 3 SS Panzer Corps from May 1943, building secret fortifications in the area of Oranienbaum, near Leningrad, Russia. He had been in charge of the 7,000 Jews from Russia and Lithuania who were employed by the notorious unit and who were quartered in several camps specially built in northern Russia and northern Estonia. He denied that atrocities had been committed against these Jews. As the Red Army advanced at the end of the war, he had to evacuate his prisoners several times, until they were finally transported back to Stutthof concentration camp, built in a secluded area some 20 miles from Danzig.
A number of men were now being held who had committed atrocities while under the command of Hans Aumeier, including Josef Remmele, an SS guard at Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps.22 Broderman wrote back to Colonel Scotland in London: ‘If attempts at suicide are any indication of guilt, this man must have a very uneasy conscience.’23 Another was Kurt Heinrich, who had served at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Riga, and had committed atrocities against Jews in Russia. Being held in Norway, too, were former guards at Auschwitz: Eduard Schmid, Karl Spieker and Herbert Lecker. Captain Broderman wrote to Scotland that investigations into Aumeier’s men did not get far ‘owing to lack of time and witnesses. It has been impossible to fix any definit
e guilt on these men, their war career is of such a nature that there can be little doubt that they were at least partners in crime.’24
The Wormhoudt massacre
News of the Wormhoudt massacre in France first emerged in early 1944, when the first British prisoners of war returned to England and told their stories. The London Cage was given the task of investigating the atrocity, which had occurred in May 1940. It had one aim: to bring those responsible to justice. Their investigations were aided by the remarkable fact that there were survivors. Under oath, on 14 March 1944, Private Albert Evans of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment swore a testimony at Birmingham and provided full details of what had happened. Two days later, Richard Tudor Parry, a gunner of the Royal Artillery, swore a statement in Westminster. On 9 November 1944, a statement was taken under oath by Private Charles Edward Daley of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment; and on 7 August 1945, another survivor from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, Sergeant Robert William Gill, took an oath and submitted his statement in York.25 At that time, it took great courage for these men to recall the details of their ordeal.
The Wormhoudt massacre occurred on 28 May 1940, while the British evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk was in full swing. Eighty surrendering men from 2nd Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, the Cheshire Regiment and the Royal Artillery, as well as French soldiers, were murdered by German soldiers after capture near the French village of Wormhoudt.26 All evidence gathered at the London Cage pointed to the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (Life Guard Regiment of Adolf Hitler – LSSAH) as being responsible. This was an SS regiment that had been formed in 1933 as Hitler’s personal bodyguard.27 Its commander was known to be SS General Sepp Dietrich, who was commander-in-chief of the 6th SS Panzer Army.