London Cage Read online

  THE LONDON CAGE

  Copyright © 2017 Helen Fry

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

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  Set in Adobe Garamond Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd

  Printed in Great Britain by Gomer Press Ltd, Llandysul, Ceredigion

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942331

  ISBN 978-0-300-22193-0

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Frank Gent

  ‘A small body of determined spirits

  fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission

  can alter the course of history.’

  Mahatma Gandhi

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: Impounding the evidence

  1Genesis of the cage

  2A very ‘German’ Englishman

  3Cage characters: The interrogators

  4Cage characters: The ‘guests’

  5Downstairs: Interrogation methods

  6Prison quarters

  7Caged lies: The truth drugs

  8The German ‘Great Escape’

  9German-Jewish émigrés

  10A matter of justice

  11Knöchlein: The butcher of Le Paradis

  12The Sagan case

  13Norway and war crimes

  14Befriending the field marshal

  15Death in the cage

  16Torture: Myth or reality?

  Epilogue: The legacy

  Appendix: Staff at the London Cage

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration credits

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My sincere thanks to Heather McCallum, managing director at Yale University Press, for commissioning this book and for being so enthusiastic about the project; also to Marika Lysandrou of the editorial team for her excellent insights and sharp observations, which have significantly enhanced the book, and Rachael Lonsdale and staff at Yale for their professional advice, patience and expertise in publishing the book. These sentiments are echoed, too, for my copy editor, Clive Liddiard, who has been meticulous. I am very grateful to my incredibly hard-working and dedicated agent, Andrew Lownie, for his support for my projects, particularly this book, and for understanding what makes me tick (thus enabling me to write the books that I feel drawn to write).

  This book could not have been written without the generous support of veterans and their families: to the veteran who wishes to remain unnamed – a real gentleman, who has discussed his memories of the London Cage over coffee and lunch in wonderful restaurants in London – thank you. Also to Second World War veteran and MI19 secret listener Fritz Lustig for translating extracts from the original German; Lucy Sheffel; Mrs Pamela Coate (widow of Randoll Coate); Geoffrey Marx; the late Marika Rotter; Peter Leon; Nigel Morgan; Barbara Lloyd, granddaughter of Colonel Thomas Joseph Kendrick; and Carol Curties, granddaughter of Bertie Acton Burnell.

  A huge amount of support has been given to me by Mark Birdsall and Deborah McDonald of Eye Spy Intelligence Magazine. They have also kindly provided photographs for the book. From museums and archives, I am indebted to Fred Judge and Joyce Hutton for giving access to unpublished material at the Military Intelligence Museum, Chicksands, and also to staff at the National Archives and Historic England. A number of colleagues, fellow historians and researchers have advised and shared the fruits of their research. Sincere thanks to Derek Nudd for material relating to Naval Intelligence and MI19 from his own research; historian and expert on SOE, Steven Kippax; MI5 expert and historian Phil Tomaselli; Lee Richards, historian of psychological warfare (psywar.org); military historian Dr Roderick Bailey; Julian Putkowski, Mark Scoble, Peter Lawrence, Colonel John Starling and Norman Brown of the Royal Pioneer Corps Association; and Dick Smith for information on Camp 21.

  Sincere thanks to a number of friends – too many to list – who support me throughout my work, but especially Alexia Dobinson, James Hamilton, Daphne and Paul Ruhleman, Frank Gent and Brana Thorn, Stanley Gilbert, Alan Perkin, Claudia Rubenstein and Trudy Gold.

  Sincere thanks to my family, who are a constant support and who enable me to carry out my research and writing. And finally, to my creative, artistic friend Louisa Albani, without whom this book would not have happened.

  1 A photograph of Nos. 8 and 8a Kensington Palace Gardens, taken in 1938 by ‘the German Section of the Foreign Office, Hayes’ during the search for suitable premises to requisition ‘for special purposes’ after the outbreak of war.

  2 The northern gatehouse entrance to Kensington Palace Gardens, taken by ‘the German Section of the Foreign Office’ in 1938. On the left can be seen Nos. 6 and 7 which later became the London Cage during the Second World War.

  3 Floor plan of the basement rooms of No. 8 Kensington Palace Gardens in the 1930s when the building was leased by Lord Duveen. During the war these basement rooms were soundproofed and used for interrogations and various other treatments of prisoners. One of these rooms was kitted out as ‘Cell 14’.

  4 Colonel Alexander Paterson Scotland.

  5 German prisoners of war newly arrived at the Kempton Park ‘cage’, being briefed by British soldiers about their status and camp discipline.

  6 German prisoners being searched after the Bruneval raid, 1942.

  7 Major Lovatt’s forces marching for embarkation upon the raid on Bologne, accompanied by an intelligence officer from the London Cage.

  8 Interrogator Randoll Coate.

  9 Interrogator Kenneth Morgan, sketched by a German prisoner at the London Cage.

  10 A Second World War intelligence poster.

  11 Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who was befriended by Colonel Scotland while being interrogated at the London Cage as a possible war criminal.

  12 Nazi war criminal SS General Kurt Meyer, interrogated at the London Cage.

  13 An RAF aerial photograph of the paddock of Kensington Palace which became a temporary annexe camp alongside the London Cage, ‘for secret purposes’, in preparation for the increased numbers of prisoners captured after D-Day. It is possible to see the forty-nine bell tents and ancillary buildings used for the canteen, wash facilities and some preliminary interrogations. The camp has a triple barbed wire fence around it. This photograph was taken in 1946 just after the camp annexe was vacated by the War Office.

  14 The special entry pass to the London Cage held by Major Bertie Acton Burnell of MI19.

  15 Members of the battalion of SS soldiers who carried out the massacre of surrendering British soldiers at Le Paradis, France, 1940.

  16 SS Lieutenant Colonel Fritz Knöchlein, the commander who gave the order to shoot the captured British soldiers at Le Paradis, which constituted a war crime.

  17 The farmhouse where the Le Paradis massacre took place, the bullet holes in the wall still chillingly visible.

  18 SS General Sepp Dietrich.

  19 The site of the Wormhoudt massacre, 1940.

  20 A rare news report, one of the few to ever emerge about the London Cage during its existence, which appeared in the Evening News, 7 March 1946. The prisoner has not been publicly named.

  21 The written statement by Major-General Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke made during his time at the London Cage, August 1946.

  22 Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt interviewed at th
e London Cage in connection with war crimes.

  23 The War Crimes Investigation Unit outside the London Cage. Seated in the middle of the front row is Colonel Alexander Scotland. He is flanked on his left by Miss Metzler, and on his right by Lucy Haley. On the back row, third from left is Gary Leon, and furthest left is Martin Eversfield.

  24 The Russian Embassy today, Nos. 6–7 Kensington Palace Gardens.

  25 At his desk, Ian Fleming, who recruited Antony Terry, senior interrogator and deputy at the London Cage, to work for the foreign section of The Sunday Times from 1949–80.

  INTRODUCTION

  Impounding the evidence

  In 1940, Kensington Palace Gardens, a gated street known as ‘Millionaires’ Row’ and belonging to the Crown Estate, boasted one of the most exclusive and expensive residences in the capital. The broad tree-lined private road was home to the Russian Embassy and some of the richest men in the world, including the shah of Persia and the premier prince of India. For the neighbours, there was no inkling of what was going on behind the bravura Victorian façades of Nos. 6, 7, 8 and 8a. Here, set up in the unlikeliest of locations, was the London Cage, a clandestine Second World War interrogation centre where German prisoners of war who could not be broken under normal conditions of interrogation at any of the other eight ‘cages’ in Britain were subjected to ‘special intelligence treatment’, designed to break their will to resist. As a transit camp, the London Cage should have appeared on the wartime lists of the Red Cross. It did not – because officially it did not exist. Its commanding officer, Colonel Scotland, set the cage rules; and this is where the controversy emerged. At the end of the war, he faced repeated allegations from German prisoners of mistreatment and even torture. And all this just a stone’s throw from Kensington Palace.

  In June 1954, officers from Special Branch at Scotland Yard drew up outside 19 Clarence Gate Gardens, the residence of Colonel Alexander Paterson Scotland, a retired officer of the British Secret Service and nephew of famed Nobel Prize-winning playwright George Bernard Shaw. As the former head of the London Cage, Colonel Scotland was about to go public with sensitive revelations.

  How far was Scotland prepared to go? The intelligence services were taking no chances. Scotland’s memoirs had been written in collaboration with Alan W. Mitchell, a published author and client of literary agent John Farquharson, and neither MI5 nor the Foreign Office had any idea how explicit they would be. So, at exactly the same time as officers went to Colonel Scotland’s residence, Scotland Yard dispatched two other teams across the capital to raid the offices of John Farquharson Ltd and publisher Evan Brothers. The brief from the intelligence services MI5 and MI6 was the same – to seize all copies of a typed manuscript that ran to over 350 pages and described life inside the secret wartime interrogation centre.

  The papers, when they arrived back at headquarters, sent shockwaves through the corridors of MI5, the War Office and the Foreign Office. They landed on the desk of Colonel Lionel Johnson Wood, the man responsible at the War Office for reading any manuscripts that were intended for publication by former members of the armed forces. The opening phrase of the second chapter was dynamite enough: Scotland had written ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’

  Transit camp or interrogation centre?

  Having conducted intelligence work for the British for over four decades, Scotland should have known that his revelations were not only explosive, but also highly sensitive. (His early intelligence career abroad is outlined in more detail in chapter 2.) The problems for both MI5 (the home security service) and MI6 (the foreign security service) were numerous: the memoir revealed precise irregularities in the interrogation of prisoners, disclosed methods used during interrogation and provided details of infringements of the Geneva Convention. It prompted Lieutenant Colonel J. Broughton of the Directorate of Military Intelligence to write to MI5:

  The publication of a work giving considerable insight into British military methods of interrogation and the lines of enquiry that our interrogators pursue in wartime, is highly undesirable from the point of view of security.1

  Part of the problem stemmed from a blurring of the boundaries between the cage’s original function as a transit camp and its role as an interrogation centre. The Geneva Convention made provision for prisoners to be assigned basic chores for the daily running of a transit camp, but the intelligence services did not consider the London Cage to be such; therefore, Scotland’s allocation of chores to prisoners could be interpreted as a contravention of international humanitarian law. MI11, part of the War Office and the section of the Directorate of Military Intelligence that dealt with field security, raised objections along similar lines.

  But the issue went far deeper than a disagreement over whether the London Cage should be categorised as a prisoner-of-war camp or a transit camp. Section 2(1) of the Official Secrets Act 1911 contained an absolute prohibition on the communication of any information that a Crown servant ‘has obtained, to any other person without authority’. And Section 2(2) made it an offence for any person to receive information ‘knowing that it had been communicated to him/her in contravention of the Act’. Although the official MI6 response to the ‘Colonel Scotland crisis’ remains classified, its views are known because of copies of documents in the files of other government departments. MI6 argued that Scotland’s knowledge was only gained by virtue of his privileged position:

  If permission was granted [for Scotland to publish his memoirs], it would be paramount to allowing an ex-military officer to recount actions which he took in the performance of his military duties and in compliance with his military orders. We have always maintained that where such duties and orders contain secret information, no publication of them should be allowed.2

  Methods of interrogation used by British intelligence in any theatre of war could not be disclosed, because the same techniques might be used in a current conflict. Britain and the West were entering a dangerous period in the Cold War – an era fraught with danger from the old Soviet enemy, and a time when neither MI5 nor MI6 wished to expose operational methods and weaken their position. Ongoing intelligence operations were critical in preventing the world from sliding into nuclear war and possible extinction.

  As far as MI5 was concerned, the decision on the Scotland case was straightforward: it ordered his damaging memoir to be suppressed, and three copies were successfully consigned to a basement of the War Office. (One of those had been seized from the editor of Empire News, who had purchased the serial rights for 100 guineas.) However, Special Branch failed to retrieve a fourth copy, which was being held by the publisher, Evans Brothers. It agreed not to publish the memoir, but wished to hold on to the manuscript for its own legal records. In the end, the problem for the intelligence services was not the publisher, but the 72-year-old maverick colonel himself, who appeared not to care much for boundaries.

  On 20 January 1955, seven months after the three manuscripts had been impounded, Scotland appeared in person at the War Office, threatening to go ahead with publication. His motivation for such blatant disregard of the Official Secrets Acts was never clear. Did he believe he had the right to tell his version of events? Was he driven by money or the prospects of fame? Or was it simply that he had always invented the rules and never played by any of them?

  The dispute rumbled on, with Scotland issuing a veiled threat that if the book was banned completely, he would simply publish in America. But the intelligence services were taking no chances.

  Search warrant

  On 7 February 1955, Chief Superintendent George Smith of Special Branch called at Colonel Scotland’s home and, armed with a search warrant, formally asked Scotland to hand over all official papers retained by him after he had relinquished his appointment in the army. Scotland’s response revealed a man of deep patriotism: ‘Certainly, as a Lieutenant Colonel and in regard to the honour and duty which I owe to my country, I will produce and let you have any other matter which I brought with me when I left the Lo
ndon Cage.’

  Smith, who could see that Scotland had not given up on the idea of pub-lishing his memoir, also secured the following signed statement from him:

  As an officer of H.M. Forces with more than fifty years service in this country’s interest as a volunteer intelligence officer, I refuse to give any such undertaking [not to publish his book], but should the War Office agree to collaborate with me in modifications in the wording of material used in the book, I am willing to rewrite, I think to their complete satisfaction those portions of the book to which they take exception, before attempting to have it published.3

  A list survives in the National Archives of nearly 100 items seized that day. They included a typescript of ‘The Scotland Story, Part 1’, typed articles categorised as ‘Intelligence and Various case Reports’, a folder of miscellaneous papers with a 126-page case file index detailing names of cases and places crimes were perpetrated, plus transcripts relating to various major war crimes investigations: ‘Wormhoudt: 28.5.1940’, ‘The Le Paradis Murders’, ‘Sagan’ and ‘The German Police’. There was also a scrapbook that ran to 134 items, including a signed letter to Colonel Scotland from Field Marshal Montgomery (1947), an aerial photograph of an unnamed prisoner-of-war camp, numerous memos from members of the intelligence services and Naval Intelligence Division, reports on the interrogation of high-ranking German prisoners such as SS Lieutenant-General (Gruppenführer) Jakob Sporrenberg and SS Lieutenant-General Oswald Pohl, and a report on ‘Atrocities Committed by Units of the Waffen SS’. It was believed that Scotland had no right to hold on to these documents after retiring from government service. Papers of a personal nature were eventually returned to him, but all official documents and reports relating to the London Cage were retained. Their whereabouts today are unknown.