London Cage

by Helen Fry

Scotland had no time for such nonsense and told him: ‘The German army has ceased to exist. There are no German officers any longer. You have to do everything the guard orders you to do.’28

  On 13 December 1946, Knöchlein was transferred to Camp 17, a POW camp near Sheffield.29 When Scotland and his staff had finished interrogating SS officers, they were transferred to the same camp as Knöchlein. It was here that Knöchlein learned that Colonel Scotland’s case against him was making substantial progress, and decided to write down his own statement concerning the Le Paradis murders. He asked to see Scotland. His request was granted, and he was escorted back to the familiar rooms at the London Cage for a second time; there he stayed from 17 to 24 September 1947. It was during this particular period that he made a statement about the mistreatment of Oskar Schmidt that had occurred the previous year.

  One of the interrogators was sent to his cell. Knöchlein handed over his statement on the Le Paradis massacre, in which he argued that the decision to shoot the British soldiers had been made by a Standgericht (a standing court). Such a court could be formed in the field; and at least three of its members must agree that life can be taken in the field. That could allow for the shooting of a deserter or of a man suddenly refusing to obey orders. Afterwards, for it to be legally binding in the German army and to prevent repercussions, the action had to be lodged in writing, signed and handed to a superior officer.

  When Colonel Scotland read the statement, he was furious. He ordered the guards to bring Knöchlein to his office and the two men faced each other again.

  Scotland challenged him: ‘Just because you decided at a Stand Gericht [sic] to shoot your British prisoners does not mean that your action was legal in international law.’30 He then went on to contest the legal validity of a Standgericht in German law, telling Knöchlein that his action was illegal because he had not lodged a written copy with his commander.31 Scotland admitted:

  Knöchlein aroused the worst side of my nature. His evilness, his bombast, lying and brutal nature, and the thought of the brave men he had caused to be slaughtered – good British soldiers who had given the hated, vaunted, inefficient SS a bloody nose and who had only been captured because their position was hopeless and when they had used all their ammunition – all these things made me long to give him a taste of the SS medicine … He was, in my opinion, the worst German we ever had in the London Cage. I could hardly look at Knöchlein without wanting to hit him.32

  On 24 September 1947, Knöchlein left the London Cage for a POW camp in Northumberland. But it would not to be the last time he would see Kensington Palace Gardens.

  1948: Farewell London Cage

  On 15 June 1948, Knöchlein was escorted back to the London Cage for the final time, in transit to Germany for his trial.33 For two days, the staff were on high alert for an attempted escape or suicide, and Knöchlein was placed under constant watch. A routine search revealed money hidden in the lining of his coat, suggesting that he might have thought he could escape. Knöchlein kept the other prisoners awake all night with his shouting and demands to see Colonel Scotland. His requests were denied. Sergeant Prion was the guard on duty that night. He entered Knöchlein’s room and cautioned him that if he continued shouting, someone would lose their temper and might lay a finger on him. It was believed that Knöchlein’s actions were deliberately intended to provoke physical assault from the guards.

  The following day, 16 June, at 5 p.m., Colonel Scotland paraded all the guards outside Knöchlein’s cell.34 He looked straight at Knöchlein and said: ‘Your behaviour last night was unworthy of a German officer. We want no further nonsense from you.’

  Scotland turned to Sergeant Prion and, with the other guards listening, said: ‘Tonight you will leave the lights on in the prisoner’s room, but you will remove his bedstead. People have been known to fall out of bed and break their necks. We’ll have no accidents here. The prisoner may have his mattress and his blankets. And we hope that tonight he will behave as a German officer should.’ That night, Knöchlein gave no further trouble. He spent his last hours crying in his cell.35

  On 17 June 1948, Scotland watched in satisfaction and with some relief as Fritz Knöchlein was escorted out of the London Cage, handcuffed to the guard under standing orders from the RAF. He was moved towards the escorting van for his final journey through the capital to the airport, for a flight to Hamburg for his trial. It was not the last time he would see Colonel Scotland.

  Knöchlein’s trial took place between 11 and 25 October 1948. Throughout it, he maintained his innocence, arguing that he had never received or given an order to shoot prisoners, and nor did he have any knowledge that men in his division had been guilty of the crimes. Under cross-examination he told the court: ‘I find the unfavourable testimonials which are held against me incomprehensible and they can only be based on confusion of persons, errors of memory or an ill-will.’36 He maintained that he had learned about the murders at Le Paradis from rumours in the following days. The court had enough evidence to establish that he was lying. One of the key witnesses who travelled to Hamburg was Madame Castel, now almost seventy years old. In the courtroom, in her best black dress, the tall Frenchwoman pointed a finger at Knöchlein and said: ‘I know this man!’ Her identification of Knöchlein was a chilling moment, watched by Colonel Scotland who was present.37

  As the trial progressed and as his fate became clear, Knöchlein became less composed. He issued a formal complaint about his treatment in the London Cage and claimed that other prisoners had been beaten up in ‘Scotland’s establishment’, as he called it. Knöchlein recounted examples of sleep deprivation, mistreatment and torture, of beatings, trampling on fingers, kicking, use of a hippopotamus-hide whip (a sjambok) and application of an electrical device to extract confessions; he also alluded to the fact that prisoners could ‘vanish without trace’.38 He complained that he had only half a plate of food at breakfast, no midday meal, one cup of tea in the afternoon and water in the evening.

  Knöchlein began to target his allegations at interrogator Captain Cornish. The unsubstantiated accusations led to Colonel Scotland taking the dock and robustly arguing in Captain Cornish’s defence that he could not have been implicated in mistreatment, because he was engaged on the extensive investigation into the massacres at Wormhoudt and Le Paradis with Major Terry. It led Scotland to remark that Knöchlein was ‘in the experience of the London Cage guards by far the most troublesome and difficult prisoner we ever had’.39

  In an ironic twist, the tables were turned and Scotland found himself in the dock again to answer charges of war crimes. Under oath in court, he firmly refuted Knöchlein’s accusations that he had contravened the Geneva Convention. The situation was serious enough to threaten to derail the whole prosecution case against the Nazi war criminals – and it very nearly succeeded. Scotland was required to produce his own detailed statement refuting the allegations. He called the allegations ‘a rigmarole … the product of the inventive mind of Frau Ohlert’ (Knöchlein’s defence lawyer).40 He argued that Knöchlein, like the other prisoners, had been held in a transit camp, and as such it was legitimate to ask him to carry coals to heat his room and to keep the cage generally clean and tidy. But he refuted claims that Knöchlein had been required to clean the lavatories. He pointed out that other camp staff – its administrative commandant and his officers, and Scotland’s seven interrogators – would have noticed any abuse of prisoners.

  In defence of Scotland and his interrogators, a witness statement was provided by Private Ballantyne of the Royal Pioneer Corps, one of three warders on duty in the London Cage on the night of 16 June 1948. He confirmed that orders were given to visit Knöchlein’s room every fifteen minutes. He said that when he called on Knöchlein at half past midnight, the German was still awake and ‘apart from being visited every fifteen minutes, the prisoner had nothing to complain of’.41

  The court concluded that the allegations of mistreatment were irrelevant to the crimes for which Knöchlein was
standing trial: it was ‘self-evident that the allegations against Colonel Scotland, even if they have any truth in them, can have no bearing upon the findings or sentence passed by the Court’.42 Although Scotland was cleared of any charges of brutality, the accusations and rumours would rumble on for decades. There was some satisfaction that the evidence gathered at the London Cage against Knöchlein had been sufficient to secure a conviction.43 In August 1948, he was sentenced to death by the court for the Le Paradis massacre and was hanged at Hameln prison on 21 January 1949. Nevertheless, the whole affair left serious questions hanging over the reputation of the cage.

  12

  THE SAGAN CASE

  One of the major war crimes being pieced together in the London Cage during 1945 and 1946 was the Sagan case – an investigation into the escape of eighty Allied airmen from Stalag Luft III, a secure German prisoner-of-war camp 60 miles south-east of Berlin, near Sagan in Silesia (now Żagań in western Poland).1 Fifty of them had been swiftly recaptured and shot. It was on 25 March 1944 that they had made their daring night-time escape through a secret tunnel dug under the camp. The episode was immortalised in the famous Hollywood film The Great Escape.

  Colonel Scotland first heard about the mass escape via a coded message sent to London from the British military attaché in Stockholm, just two days after it had happened. Further secret reports followed from Sweden and Switzerland, including rumours that a number of British airmen had been shot, although the precise number was unknown at that point. In discussing the situation with military colleagues, Scotland’s advice was decisive: broadcast the case, because to keep it secret would give Hitler the idea that the British were afraid of causing panic among the public. Scotland said: ‘Tell Hitler we shall treat German prisoners in exactly the same way as he treats ours – and we have many more German prisoners than he has British.’2 Eventually, Scotland would travel to Germany to see for himself the cells where some of the British pilots from Stalag Luft III had been interrogated after their escape and recapture.

  The role of the London Cage in bringing the Sagan war criminals to justice has been overlooked in accounts of the Great Escape, whether in books on the subject or in online articles. Yet it was considered by the Allies to be one of the most important investigations ever undertaken into atrocities committed against Allied prisoners of war. It was not known who the perpetrators were, or who had been responsible for giving the order to shoot. Two survivors and British prisoners (not escapees) who had been repatriated to Britain on health grounds provided the main evidence. The case was complicated by the fact that the escaped pilots had been recaptured in different areas at different times, then subsequently shot in secret locations. This meant that Colonel Scotland and his team had to undertake a huge amount of detective work. They often had to follow several leads before they could piece together the full story of who had committed the killings and when. The pattern was always the same: escaped airmen from Stalag Luft III were picked up in hiding, instructions were issued by the local Gestapo chief to carry out Hitler’s order to shoot them, and a gang was assembled to carry out the killings.3 All those involved were sworn to secrecy, and the bodies were swiftly cremated. At Stalag Luft III, the other prisoners learned of the fate of their comrades when the names of the victims were pinned up as a warning to the others. Horror and shock swept through the camp and a memorial service was held for the dead airmen.

  The efficient head of the Gestapo in Berlin, Heinrich Müller, had amassed a large collection of reports on all the Stalag Luft III prisoners who had been shot. On 15 April 1944, Stalag Luft III was visited by a Swiss inspector and the killings were reported to the British government. Prime Minister Winston Churchill raised the matter in the House of Commons. The Germans became twitchy about the case. Himmler asked for full details from Müller, who arranged for new versions of the Gestapo reports on the Sagan case to be written, and for phrases to be inserted showing that the prisoners were shot while trying to escape or resist arrest. The files were sent to Berlin in case there should be an international inquiry. The German Foreign Office tried to cover up the unlawful killings by contacting the Swiss government in Berne to explain that a mass escape of prisoners from Stalag Luft III had necessitated ‘some shootings for security reasons’ and fifty airmen had been shot while trying to escape.4 On 23 June 1944, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden made a statement in the House of Commons telling MPs, ‘It was cold-blooded butchery, and we are resolved that the foul criminals shall be tracked down.’5 The following month, the German Foreign Office announced that no more information would be made available on the deaths of the airmen.

  In autumn 1945 and during 1946, suspects in the Sagan case began to arrive at the London Cage, unrepentant and determined to cause disruption.

  The Great Escape

  The events surrounding the Sagan case were gradually pieced together some 1,200 miles away from the original crime scenes. Interrogators at the London Cage discovered that at 4.20 a.m. on 25 March 1944, the commandant of Stalag Luft III, Wilhelm von Lindeiner, had received a phone call to say that a group of British airmen had escaped from the camp. The exact number was initially unknown. The airmen had chosen the least expected time to execute their escape plan: the ground was still covered in thick snow and it was bitterly cold. This was not the first attempt to tunnel out of the camp; six months earlier, in October 1943, airmen had ventured an escape using a wooden gymnastic vaulting horse that they had constructed. While fellow prisoners exercised on it near the perimeter fence, others hidden inside its hollow cavity secretly dug a tunnel beneath them. It was an ingenious escape plan and almost succeeded; but the airmen were recaptured and warned then that if they ever tried to escape again, they would be shot. This is the escape attempt that was captured in the British film The Wooden Horse (1950).

  By March 1944, the airmen had completed three tunnels under the camp, nicknamed ‘Tom’, ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry’. The 2-square-foot tunnel ‘Harry’ was a masterpiece of engineering: an impressive 363 feet in length, 20 feet below ground and supplied with electricity, a roped trolley and primitive air conditioning. This was the tunnel that enabled eighty airmen to successfully crawl out of the camp, emerging on the other side of the perimeter fence.

  The German guards discovered the tunnel’s exit and raised the alarm. Commandant von Lindeiner ordered an immediate roll call and was incandescent with rage when he discovered that eighty prisoners had escaped. Four were swiftly recaptured, leaving seventy-six on the run. Two of those captured pilots were sent straight to solitary confinement; the other two were threatened with being shot. Lindeiner could see his distinguished career on the line – one that stretched back to the First World War. News of the escape travelled fast. By the end of the day, a significant line-up of prominent Nazis had arrived at Stalag Luft III: Colonel Richard Waelde (chief of staff of prisoner-of-war camps in the Breslau region), Dr Gunther Absalon (of the security police in Breslau) and Heinrich Müller (head of the Gestapo in Berlin). Absalon fired Lindeiner from his post as a massive manhunt was ordered to recapture the remaining pilots. Fearing that they would undertake acts of sabotage, an order went out across Germany for roadblocks and searches of houses and farms.

  By the end of the first night, fifty of the escapees were in jails in the Sagan area. Of the remaining twenty-six, seventeen were eventually recaptured and sent back to Stalag Luft III; four other recaptured pilots were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and two to the secure camp at Colditz. Only three of the eighty airmen managed to get back to England.

  At the time of the escape, Adolf Hitler was staying at his mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden when news was passed to him from Heinrich Himmler, the supreme head of the SS. Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, was also informed. At Berchtesgaden, a heated argument over the escaped pilots erupted between Hitler, Wilhelm Keitel (supreme commander of the German armed forces) and Himmler. Hitler shouted at them that an example must be set.6 General von Graevenitz, chief of the Priso
ner of War Department, looked gravely on as Himmler and Hitler agreed that the prisoners were to be hunted down and shot as an example to others.7 Graevenitz commented that it was against the Geneva Convention, but he was ignored. Keitel interjected and ordered that the names of those shot were to be posted up in Stalag Luft III for all to see, and the urns with their ashes returned to the camp and buried there. He issued a strict prohibition on anything being recorded in writing about the shooting.8 On the journey back, General von Graevenitz turned to his colleague and said that there was nothing to be done, because the case had been handed to the Gestapo. They could only make sure that their own officials were not involved in the killings.

  The day after the mass escape, the infamous Sagan Order was issued from Hitler’s headquarters. It read, in part:

  The increase of escapes by officer prisoners of war is a menace to internal security. I am disappointed about the inefficient security measures. As a deterrent the Führer has ordered that more than half of the escaped officers are to be shot. After interrogation the officers are to be routed to their original camp and to be shot en route. The shootings will be explained by the fact that the recaptured officers were shot whilst trying to escape or because they offered resistance, so that nothing can be proved later.9

  Himmler passed the Sagan Order to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a leading Nazi figure and director of the Reich Main Security Office, who relayed it to Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo in Berlin. The order was to apply not only to the RAF pilots who had escaped from Stalag Luft III, but to all future escapers.

  Piecing together the evidence

  The two main regions where the majority of RAF pilots were killed were Breslau and Sagan in Upper Silesia, then part of Nazi Germany. Colonel Scotland’s team discovered that no fewer than twenty-nine men had been murdered in the Sagan area, and their bodies cremated in the Breslau district. Tracking down the names of the perpetrators was to prove more straightforward now that the regions of the killings had been narrowed down to just two. The task of investigating the deaths within Germany was given to Wing Commander William Bowes of the Special Investigation Branch of the RAF, because the incident had involved British airmen. The first priority for Bowes and his team was to track down every German with any connection, or suspected connection, to the Sagan case and transfer them to the London Cage for detailed interrogation. If the suspects were being held by other European governments, they were interrogated by Bowes in Germany, and the reports sent on to Colonel Scotland in London.