London Cage

by Helen Fry

  At the end of October 1945, Colonel Scotland dispatched interrogator Bunny Pantcheff to Wormhoudt, with surviving gunner Parry, to gather evidence. They obtained statements from key eyewitnesses: farmer Monsieur Mercier, Madame Backot, Monsieur Devienne, farmer Jonchere and the grave-digger Monsieur Smagghe. Gradually, the facts began to emerge.

  Just prior to 28 May 1940, General Dietrich was driving around the region looking for his 2nd Battalion, accompanied by Max Wünsche, his driver. His troops had seen fierce fighting with the British in recent days. Well camouflaged and still hidden in the hedges were men of the Royal Warwicks. They opened fire as the car approached. Dietrich and Wünsche flung themselves from the car into a nearby ditch for cover. The car caught fire, rolled down into the ditch and burst into flames. Dietrich and Wünsche remained there for several hours, with Wünsche slightly injured. Meanwhile, the LSSAH – consisting of eighteen companies, all elite hand-picked troops – was heading for Dunkirk to cut off the remaining British troops. It met with stiff opposition from the British Expeditionary Force.

  LSSAH’s 1st Battalion was already feeling humiliated by a recent heavy defeat at the hands of the Royal Artillery, Royal Warwicks and Royal Cheshires. What the SS regiment did not realise was that the British regiments were running out of supplies and ammunition, and hence had retreated to Wormhoudt. On 28 May, 2nd Battalion, LSSAH was given the order to clear the British soldiers from Wormhoudt. Dietrich was again driving around in his car when he strayed into no man’s land and his car was hit for a second time. He was wounded and trapped in unoccupied territory. In his absence, SS Major (Sturmbannführer) Ernst Schützek took over and ordered 5th Company, 2nd Battalion, LSSAH to penetrate Wormhoudt and attempt a rescue of General Dietrich. The SS received a severe pounding from British troops and Schützek was killed in action.

  Wilhelm Mohnke then took charge of 2nd Battalion. German anti-tank guns backed by German air power mounted a heavy attack on Wormhoudt. The British headquarters was overrun and prisoners were captured. Otto Baum, commander of 7th Company, 2nd Battalion, LSSAH ordered the British troops captured in Wormhoudt to be rounded up. A column of British prisoners set off under the guard of the German Corps of Signals, which had orders to take them to a location and shoot them. The prisoners were marshalled into an empty barn in La Plaine au Bois and hand grenades were lobbed in, causing panic and injuring some of the British prisoners. When the SS realised that two British soldiers, Sergeant Stanley Moore and Company Sergeant Major (CSM) Augustus Jennings, had thrown themselves on top of the grenades to shield others, the remaining prisoners were ordered out of the barn, five at a time, and shot. Those left inside witnessed the men being led out and then heard the gunfire. Some prisoners refused to leave the barn and were sprayed with bullets. The SS left the scene, believing that no one could have survived. But around a dozen of the wounded men were still alive. They lay there for two days before a unit of the German Red Cross passed by, looking for wounded SS men. The unit was shocked by the scene in the barn, where, by then, all but six of the soldiers had died. The survivors were taken to hospital, and after they had recovered were transferred to a German prisoner-of-war camp.

  The French buried the dead soldiers in a shallow grave near the barn. Towards the end of the war, they moved the bodies to the Esquelbecq Military Cemetery, near the Belgian border, 24 kilometres south of Dunkirk.

  Major Terry sent out a request to all POW camps for any members of the LSSAH to be transferred to the London Cage. It resulted in the arrival of two prisoners in early July 1946: Max Reimelt of 7th Company, 2nd Battalion and Otto Baum, commander of 7th Company.28 Reimelt professed to know nothing about the shooting in the barn. However, he did provide interrogators with information on the LSSAH command structure, indicating that Mohnke had succeeded Schützek as commander of 2nd Battalion. But nothing that he said brought the investigators any closer to the truth. Otto Baum was brought before Colonel Scotland in July for rigorous questioning, but he remained equally evasive. He was interrogated again on 13 August 1946, this time by Warrant Officer Ullman; this time Baum spoke in vague terms about the German offensive on Wormhoudt.

  High on the list of those wanted by the London Cage in connection with the Wormhoudt massacre was Wilhelm Mohnke. The Canadians also put out a search for him, because he had ordered the shooting of three Canadian prisoners of war on 1 June 1944. But his whereabouts were not established at the time, and it was concluded that he had died during the final battle for Berlin in April 1945. In fact, he lived on until 2001.

  SS General Sepp Dietrich was also wanted by the British in connection with Wormhoudt. Having been captured by the Americans, he was handed over for interrogation and dispatched to the London Cage. In his defence, Dietrich argued that he had been stuck in the ditch and knew nothing of the shootings. His undated signed statement at the London Cage was witnessed by Warrant Officer Ullman and Captain Kieser.29 In it, he claimed that he had given orders that no prisoners were to be shot after capture. He did not deny the killings at Wormhoudt, but stated that the incident had not come to his ears. He conceded that some SS officers may have carried out the shootings, but it was on their own initiative. Because of the SS oath of undying loyalty, Dietrich was unwilling to compromise any other SS soldiers. But Scotland remained optimistic that eventually one of the SS men might speak. Then, quite unexpectedly, during an interrogation one of the SS prisoners who had denied any knowledge of the shootings said: ‘I don’t know who was responsible for the shootings, but there is one man in England from the LSSAH signals and he knows. His name is Heinz Druwe.’30

  The immediate priority became to find Druwe. A search of card indexes located him in a POW camp in Kent. There he was popular with staff and the other prisoners. Once in the London Cage, he proved no help at all and answered none of the questions in interrogation. He denied any knowledge of the shooting of British soldiers at Wormhoudt. But he was to level his own allegations of torture and brutality while at the London Cage.

  The Wormhoudt case was one of the few failures of the London Cage in terms of bringing perpetrators to justice. However, Sepp Dietrich did not completely escape his past. He was eventually tried at a US military tribunal at Dachau for his part in ordering the execution of American prisoners of war and was sentenced to life imprisonment on 16 July 1946.

  Scouring Europe

  Some of Colonel Scotland’s most experienced interrogators were dispatched to Europe to track down named Nazi war criminals and compile evidence of their crimes. This involved interviewing eyewitnesses to atrocities, photographing relevant locations in France, Germany and Norway where the mass shooting of Allied soldiers had taken place, and working closely with other Allied bodies. Bunny Pantcheff was sent to Germany to work on a number of cases, including the Emsland case, which concerned the investigation into atrocities committed in penal camps around Emsland.31 From there he wrote to Colonel Scotland: ‘Emsland is quite the most unpleasant place I’ve ever been to, and this must be the worst time of year for it. I know now why some sadistic swine picked it as a site for concentration camps. It would break the stiffest morale in no time at all.’32

  On 29 December 1945, he sent another chatty six-page letter to Scotland with news of their progress. In brackets, next to the date at the top of the letter, he wrote ‘My birthday!’:

  Egger and Bonwitt safely made that journey to Brussels as scheduled. Morgenthau met us in Bad Oeynhausen after a record sea and rail journey. Scharf and myself spent 2½ days at Bad Oeynhausen at HQ BAOR getting everything organised in a water tight way. Bad Oeynhausen is a shocking place. In fact it stinks. If anybody’s thinking of waging another war just now, I recommend them to go and have a look at Julich near Aachen, and see what we could do even before the atomic age. There are literally not two bricks on top of one another in the whole town, not one part of the wall, one room of one house standing.33

  Pantcheff reported that his team had already located the major war criminals on their list, as well
as fifty to sixty minor war criminals. They zigzagged across Europe, picking up the accused in hiding, trailing death records and collecting statements from prisoners and witnesses. Their work took them to Belgium, where they interviewed up to 250 prisoners in the camps there. Pantcheff wrote to Scotland: ‘The interrogation of the accused is intended to be a preliminary measure. The final detailed interrogations will have to be carried out in more favourable surroundings with more facilities.’34

  Bonwitt was working out of the northern area of the British zone of occupation in Germany, and Morgenthau the southern zone. Between them they had to plough through 7 tons of valuable documents and death records from concentration camps. Felek Scharf continued to interview Polish witnesses, and Pantcheff travelled to Czechoslovakia to pick up Czech witnesses. Egger also took down statements from Belgian witnesses.

  In January 1946, Pantcheff wrote again to Colonel Scotland to inform him that they had found two or three mass graves ‘which will have to be dug up by the accused, of course. I like a little poetic justice; the bodies medically examined and photographed and then given a funeral.’35 On the first day of the following month, an exhumation of the grave took place at Camp Aschendorfer Moor and thirty-six bodies were subsequently given a Christian burial.36

  The punishing schedule of gathering evidence of the most terrible war crimes took a psychological toll on Pantcheff and his team. As he wrote to Scotland, ‘Whenever anyone gets to the stage of dreaming about the bastards, we take half a day off. All of us here have bad dreams at one time or another – they are such a God-awful shower.’37 But it would not be for too much longer. On 14 February, Pantcheff wrote to Scotland again: ‘This is the news I’ve been wanting to give you for so long. We have almost finished our job over here. We have all the major criminals and the vast majority of the minor ones safely arrested and locked behind bars.’38

  One member of the detachment was tasked solely with recovering documents from concentration camps. In attics, cellars and buried chests throughout Emsland, tons of documents about the administration of the concentration camps were discovered.39 Yet challenges remained as Pantcheff and his men prepared to leave Germany. Where were all the accused (half of whom needed further interrogation) to be temporarily incarcerated in England? And how would staff manage with the translation of over 250 statements and affidavits, and working through the piles of original documents?

  By the end of March 1946, the team had all returned to the London Cage, where they studied the statements taken from prisoners, sifted through documents and urgently compiled reports to hand to prosecutors so that the war crimes trials could begin. Intermittent visits to the continent were made by members of the team to follow up on clues as to the whereabouts of suspected war criminals yet to be found.

  In August 1946, Scotland dispatched Bonwitt, Morgenthau and Scharf to Belgium, to investigate further the shooting of British soldiers at Wormhoudt and Le Paradis (see chapter 11). From Belgium, they drove to Camp 2226 (Zedelghem) to report to Major Broderman and Company Sergeant Major Richter, both of PWIS. Between 16 and 20 August, they screened all SS personnel in the camp – around 100 men. They combed the Belgian and German countryside for eyewitnesses to the massacres. On 26 August, they arrived at the civilian internment camp at Esterwegen, where they screened 1,000 SS prisoners and interrogated 30. When they were investigating the Sagan case, they interrogated 134 Gestapo and SS prisoners of war at Esterwegen.40 The following day, having been billeted overnight with the RAF police in Hamburg, they proceeded to the former Neuengamme concentration camp. Over the next three days, they screened all 6,000 SS personnel in order to establish where they had been in action; this led to the detailed interrogation of 300 of them.

  Between 31 August and 1 September 1946, they worked in the civilian internment camp at Neumünster, screening 2,500 SS personnel (which led to the detailed interrogation of 80). From there they moved on to the camp at Sandbostel to screen 4,500 SS officers and interrogate 98 of them. At Fallingbostel they interrogated 20 SS of the 180 or so being held there. Between 2 September and 9 September, the team visited three other major camps (Recklinghausen, Iserlohn and Paderborn), screening 4,500 SS personnel.41 The figures give an idea of the enormity of the task facing Scotland’s teams – and that is just one section of the workload in one country.

  From an office in 6–7 Kensington Palace Gardens, Pantcheff wrote the team’s concluding report in April 1947:

  Our success was considerable. We have placed in custody 120 persons responsible for the murder and ill treatment of nationals of many countries … and every individual camp commandant who is still alive … It is fitting that the last words of praise and commendation should be for Captain Egger, RSM Bonwitt, CSM Scharf and Staff Sergeant Morgenthau. Only the high quality of their work and resource made this operation possible in anything like its present forms.42

  11

  KNÖCHLEIN

  The butcher of Le Paradis

  In April 1945, Colonel Scotland dispatched two officers to Le Paradis in France to investigate another massacre of British soldiers that had occurred during the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940. He instructed them to photograph anything of relevance and to find eyewitnesses. Their photographs survive in files at the National Archives and include pictures of the deserted farmhouse and barn where the soldiers had been shot.1

  It was during October 1944, as the liberating armies had been heading through Belgium towards Germany, that the British first heard details of the massacre at Le Paradis and brought it to the attention of the London Cage. The French authorities reported a mass grave of at least 100 British soldiers nearby, which appeared to be the result of a war crime. The London Cage was tasked with investigating and bringing to trial the commander who had ordered the shooting. The problem: Colonel Scotland and his team had scant details to go on. No one knew who the commander was or which German troops had been responsible; it had happened early in the war and much had occurred in the intervening years. It was far from certain that the perpetrators would still be alive and could be brought to trial. But these obstacles did not prevent the investigations from going ahead.

  It turned out to be a major war crime, involving the deaths of nearly 100 surrendering British soldiers at Le Paradis on 27 May 1940. Colonel Scotland resolved that the massacre could not go unpunished. He and his teams discovered that Hitler’s SS Totenkopf Division was implicated in the mass murder. With this knowledge, he instructed his staff to contact all POW camps and transfer to the London Cage every SS prisoner who had ever served in the Totenkopf Division. The cage soon had a steady stream of SS officers in its interrogation rooms – over 100 in total. Although many had joined the regiment after 1940, rumours about the horrific nature of the war crimes had continued to circulate among the newer SS officers. Work now focused on establishing which SS regiments had been in the area at the time. During the interrogations, certain names began to emerge: Emke, Schneider – and SS Lieutenant Colonel Fritz Knöchlein as the possible commander.

  Information came into the London Cage that Albert Leonard Pooley and William Reginald O’Callaghan, both of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, had survived the massacre. Their testimony was to be crucial as the events of May 1940 were gradually pieced together in the rooms of the London Cage. The British Expeditionary Force had been forced to retreat and evacuate after Hitler invaded France. Small fishing vessels and boats were already involved in evacuating nearly 300,000 soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk. It emerged that the SS units had been wholly unprepared for frontline fighting, having been told that they would be acting as Hitler’s personal bodyguard, and in actuality having guarded the concentration camps where ‘enemies’ of Hitler were incarcerated.

  Survivors of Le Paradis

  By the end of May 1940, three regiments of the SS Totenkopf Division had moved into France.2 The town of Béthune became their headquarters. Across the canal there was camped a British battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment and the Royal Scots. They had knoc
ked the 1st Totenkopf Regiment out of battle, leaving the 2nd and 3rd Totenkopf Regiments to try to cross the canal. Knöchlein dispatched his friend First Lieutenant Harrer on a reconnaissance mission to check British positions across the canal. Harrer never returned, killed by a single bullet. Fighting continued long into the night before the SS regiments withdrew. At dawn, they were showered by mortar and gunfire. Many of the partially trained SS soldiers died. Even German tanks could not repel the British attack and were forced to withdraw. Eventually the SS retaliated with infantry guns. The Royal Scots lost the battle and the hamlet of Le Cornet Malo was captured.

  After the fierce fighting against the British, Knöchlein found himself burying his closest friend, Lieutenant Harrer. At the graveside after the eulogy, Knöchlein suddenly declared: ‘No prisoners! From now on, we take no prisoners. Every damned Britisher is to be shot!’3

  Meanwhile, the Royal Norfolks were still engaged in a heavy battle near Le Paradis against the 3rd Totenkopf Regiment, the men battle-fatigued after eighteen days under attack. There were no imminent reinforcements and ammunition was low at their headquarters in a farmhouse just outside Le Paradis. The commander, Major Ryder MC, ordered the company to continue fighting.4

  The 2nd Totenkopf Regiment now linked up with the 3rd Totenkopf Regiment to attack Le Paradis. By this point, the British forces had run out of ammunition and their headquarters had been hit. Major Ryder ordered all wounded soldiers to be moved from the cellar to a barn to protect them from mortar fire. He commanded his men to destroy all records and break up the wireless sets. Some of the men moved down the road towards the village of Lacon, surrendered to the 3rd Totenkopf Regiment and were taken to its headquarters.