Helen Fry
Britain’s Secret World War II Interrogation Centre

Helen Fry | Britain’s Secret World War II Interrogation Centre

- So today, we’re going to look at what was one of the most controversial interrogation centres during the Second World War. It’s something that, as you can see, I’ve written a book about. So if you’re interested in some of the moral dilemmas of this secret interrogation centre that didn’t appear on any lists of prisoner of war camps in the war or any of the other centres where prisoners were processed. It was based right in the heart of London, in Kensington Palace Gardens in what then was known as Millionaires’ Row. Well, today, it’s Billionaires’ Row, isn’t it? And you can see the sort of shadowy side of the house. These are beautiful, huge mansion houses in the heart of Kensington Palace Gardens. And they were requisitioned, three or four of these properties. I say four because it was 8A and 8, so it was 6, number 7, number 8, and number 8A, Kensington Palace Gardens. Those four beautiful properties, 8 and 8A are no longer there today. They’ve been rebuilt on, but 6 and 7 are, and today one of those houses, as you’re probably aware, is the Russian Embassy. So where else to hold the Russian Embassy than in a formally World War II secret interrogation centre. Next slide please. But just as a way of backdrop, the building itself has a very interesting history because it was owned by this chap immediately before the Second World War. So this was Baron Joseph Duveen of Millbank, an absolutely fascinating character, a philanthropist, an art collector. He was, in the 20th century, one of the most wealthy and prominent art dealers, and he had very close connections with other high profile collectors in the art world. He was a fascinating character.

Quite a discreet character too, about his personal life. But he was the eldest son of Sir Joseph Joel Duveen, who was a highly successful businessman of Dutch origin. And Duveen himself was, the family were originally from Sephardi Jewish origins. So, a quote from my book actually about Duveen, just to give a flavour, that Europe at the time had a great deal of art and America had a great deal of money, and Duveen actually harvested the two. And he was an incredibly interesting chap. He actually funded the galleries and the Elgin Marbles, which of course are still controversial today and funded quite a lot in the British Museum. So he’s an interesting character. So you might want to look up a bit more about him. But he actually died in May, 1939. And so that house, his house in Kensington Palace Gardens, was actually requisitioned. And we’re talking about the end of Kensington Palace Gardens. That’s away, it’s not the Knightsbridge end, it’s not the end where the Israeli Embassy is today. It’s the other end of Kensington Palace Gardens, the other end of Kensington Palace because it’s not that far away from Kensington Palace itself. Next slide please. And you can see they had the beautiful exterior of these buildings, quite, quite extraordinary in a row there. And one of them on the corner of Kensington Palace Gardens. And who would’ve thought that this in the Second World War was the most secret interrogation centre that Parliament certainly didn’t know about, the public didn’t know about. It was on no lists, as I said, of prisoner of war camps. And it was so hush hush. And anyone walking past would have no idea, during the war, what was going on behind those closed doors.

So just to give you a sort of timeline, there are two parts of this history, which will be really interesting, I think, for all of us today. The first part is when it’s an interrogation centre in the wartime for military intelligence. And I’ll speak a bit more about that shortly. So between 1939, when it’s requisitioned, and the outbreak of war, this is operational from early 1939, it’s the outbreak of war in September ‘39, and all the way through to 1945. But before the end of the war, before 1945, it’s already transitioning into its second role. Its second role was as one of the most important war crimes investigation units outside Germany. And that part we will come to later in my lecture. It’s an extraordinary history that not many people know about. And a lot of people focus, if you Google it, you’ll see sensationalist headlines about torture in the London Cage. And we’ll come back to that. And so it’s had a controversial history. It’s been sensationalised, particularly in a Daily Mail article in 2010. And so when I was tasked to write its history, using the now declassified files, I didn’t know what I was going to discover. I mean, nothing too horrendous actually. And a lot of its history has been completely sensationalised. But what isn’t focused on is that at the end of the war, from 1945 or just before, by the autumn of '44 already, it’s morphing into what was actually called the War Crimes Investigation Unit, and it went on to investigate some of the worst Nazi war criminals that could not be dealt with at Nuremberg. It’s a fascinating history. But it’s full of moral dilemmas as well. Next slide please. So what’s the controversy? This is functioning from 19- as a war crimes investigation centre, from 1945. So it’s an interrogation Centre before that.

And then, so from '45 until 1948, when it closes, it’s the War Crimes Investigation Centre. Within just four years, it’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel, he’s later Colonel, Alexander Paterson Scotland actually decides to write his memoirs. And he is an intelligence officer. He’s working for British Intelligence. He’s worked in the Intelligence Corps in World War I, and we’ll come back to some of his interesting intelligence in South Africa at the end of the Boer War. But he’s already got a career in intelligence. He signed the Official Secrets Act, and in World War II, he’s back in uniform in the Intelligence Corps, running this highly, well what becomes known as a highly controversial, top secret interrogation centre. And within four years of it closing, he’s about to write his memoirs. What is he going to reveal? That’s the problem. And unfortunately for him, he had a visit. So Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, were tasked by the Security Service MI5, to pay a visit to Colonel Scotland. And basically they impounded the four manuscripts, so he had four copies of his memoirs and they took the lot. And after a while he decided, “To hell with this, I’m going to publish it. And if I can’t publish my memoirs in the UK, I’m going to publish them in America. They can’t touch me in America.” And if you remember the whole controversy, later in the 1980s, over Peter Wright, “The Spycatcher.” And that book was banned and subject to a whole range of legal cases, not just in the UK, but in Australia and elsewhere. So huge sensitivity over any intelligence officer publishing their memoirs, but especially this colonel who had run this controversial, highly top secret interrogation centre, right in the heart of Kensington, in what today is Billionaire’s Row, in Kensington Palace Gardens.

So Colonel Scotland said, “Just to the hell with this, I’m going to publish it anyway and I’m going to publish it abroad.” And he went in to Special Branch and he gave him that ultimatum, “If you don’t give me my manuscripts back, I’m going to publish them, I’m going to write it, I’m going to publish them anyway, in America.” Well, MI5 came to a deal with him. It’s a really unusual situation, but they came up with a deal. They said to him, “Okay, we’re going to go through your memoirs and we’re going to take out everything that you’re not allowed to publish and you can publish the rest.” And this was the result. This is the book. You can still get it. It’s not got very much in it actually. All the interesting stuff has come out. There’s quite a bit on war crimes, but not very much on the investigations after the war, but precious little about its time as an interrogation centre. So those files remained classified. And his original manuscript, one of them, one of four, as I said, was quietly slipped into the National Archives in London on his death in 1965. And they were not discovered until the 2010s when Ian Cobain, a journalist, actually wrote about it and it was sensationalised by the Daily Mail. But the other files, the official files, remained classified until recent times. Next slide please.

So what was MI5 worried about? Well, the second chapter begins like this, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” And of course they must have been worried about methods of intelligence, giving up methods of interrogation and anything else that could be sensitive around operations. And don’t forget that in the time that he is publishing his memoirs, MI5, the Home Security Service, equivalent to the FBI, and MI6, equivalent to the CIA, both of them technically officially don’t exist. We don’t get official recommendation that they actually exist until almost 2010, a little bit before that, and then their official histories start coming up. But for all this period, they don’t exist. So you can’t have anything about them. And this wonderful photograph was taken in November, 1938, when already the intelligence sections, the German section of the “Foreign Office,” so the German Section of British Intelligence, were actually looking for a secret interrogation centre in London. And this was the place that they’d hit on. And on the left hand side, you can just see that little notice there, you can see the silhouette of the buildings and those are the buildings that were used as an interrogation centre. Now most of those buildings, apart from 8A, are still there today, you can walk past. As I said earlier, for those of you who didn’t join at the very beginning, today one of those buildings is the Russian Embassy And the gates are still there. It still looks like this. I love this photograph. It looks like something out of Dickensian England and so atmospheric for an interrogation centre. Next slide please. So its beginnings, in the early part of the war, fell under the branch of military intelligence called MI9. And this photograph here was taken, again in November, 1938, hidden by the trees. Most of those trees, if I’m not mistaken, are gone today.

But it was ideal because you couldn’t really see what was going on behind the facade. It was all, you know, just a sort of millionaire’s home at that time. So it was ideal from that sense and shrouded by the trees. But MI9 was in charge of intelligence from prisoners of war, whether they were ours, in prisoner of war camps, helping them to escape, or whether it’s collecting intelligence across the three eavesdropping sites I’ve talked about. Trent Park, Latimer House, and Wilson Park. For those of you who are interested, the subject of my book, “The Walls Have Ears.” But alongside that, if the charm offensive didn’t work, a prisoner, a diehard, 'cause you have to be a diehard Nazi, and particularly SS, could find themselves in this interrogation centre if all the other techniques didn’t work. And later, when MI9 became so big, in 1942 it split and the London Cage fell under the split version, which was MI19. So MI9 then retained escape and evasion and our guys, looking after them and intelligence from them, when they got back from behind enemy lines. And MI19, from 1942, dealt with the whole eavesdropping programme under Colonel Kendrick and also his colleague, Colonel Scotland, that we’re talking about today, of the London Cage. Next slide please. So we’ve now finally, in a moment got a picture. I should have put a picture up of Colonel Scotland earlier.

And in the official files which are now declassified and that I’ve worked on, it said that the primary purpose of this interrogation centre in Kensington Palace Gardens, quote, and don’t forget, these files were not released before our intelligence services officially acknowledged that they themselves existed. But in the actual files it says that they were, “to assist MI5 and MI6 in gaining information through the interrogation of German prisoners whose examination under military conditions had a stronger chance of yielding results.” It would be a place where you would feel the sort of discipline, there were no comforts or luxury even though the outside of the building looked pretty luxurious. Next slide please. It was a pretty uncompromising place to be. All the furniture was taken out, it was cold, excuse me, it was cold in the winter, not really the kind of atmosphere where you’d want to be. And in the top there you can see Alexander Scotland. He’s a nephew of George Bernard Shaw. Fascinating. And a stepbrother to Lawrence of Arabia. So this is fascinating history. And you can see from his unpublished memoirs that were not redacted by MI5, those stayed under lock and key until 1965, when I said they were slipped into the archives and I was able to work on those uncensored manuscript. Fascinating. It runs to over 300, nearly 400 pages. And he has the same colour and flair in his writing as George Bernard Shaw, so utterly fascinating. So during the time that it was an interrogation centre, until late '44, when it morphs into being a war crimes investigation unit, it starts to process German prisoners of war.

These are some of the prisoners pictured here that come off the Bruneval Raid. Some of them who were tightlipped, who didn’t give up anything to the microphones at those three other sites, could find themselves in the London Cage. And it was just a bit of a sort of tougher environment. I found no evidence at all, in the wartime, of torture. No waterboarding, no torture. The conditions were harsh, yes. There was sometimes sleep deprivation, not very much food, but no physical torture. Sometimes a little bit of sort of psychological destabilising, you know, the expectation that prisoners didn’t know what was going to happen next. But no, I will stress, and I had no idea when I started the research, there was no evidence of physical torture in the London Cage. And our intelligence services knew, and Colonel Scotland knew that, you know, you cannot get reliable intelligence if you rough up those prisoners in interrogation. And it’s against the Geneva Convention. But why was he chosen to head this interrogation centre? Next slide please. Because he had a very interesting past. He was described, and I call him in the book, a very `German’ Englishman. So he grew up in the UK but he spent a lot of time in South Africa at the end of the Boer War. Next slide please. He was 25 years old and in 1907, then he’d crossed paths with Major Wade. He was a British attache to the German forces in South-West Africa. And he was actually liaising with the Germans. We weren’t at war with Germany at that point, but we were monitoring them because there were rumours, even then in South Africa, that Germany was developing a special gun.

I mean nothing like the technology of the Second World War, but if you could observe the German troops and their armaments, not only in Germany but also in the occupied areas of Africa, then you can gain intelligence. So Colonel Scotland, as he later became Colonel, the young Colonel Scotland, was recruited to spy on the German army. It’s there that he met a guy I’ve written about, Thomas Kendrick, and Scotland would travel the parts of South Africa and Transvaal on horseback. He was working in and out of the diamond mining communities. But essentially he set up a business which supplied the German army with all kinds of goods and food supplies. He made a lot of money I think at the time. But it was interesting because he had to, at some point be stationed with German forces. And so he began to think and understand a German mindset. And Major Wade told him, as he dispatched him on that mission, “Learn all you can about the German army and one day you will be a valuable man for your country.” And he absolutely was. Next slide please. So as I said, he’s working out of the diamond mining communities. He’s working for an enterprise company. I’ve written more about this in one of the early chapters of my book, “The London Cage.” So he’s travelling between Cape Colony and German South-West Africa. And then of course, we know already by 1907, that Germany is the next threat. That’s why we’re spying on them in South-West Africa and elsewhere. Then comes the outbreak of World War I in 1914. And immediately, Colonel Scotland is actually, he’s not colonel at this point of course, but Scotland is actually interned.

He’s arrested and interned. They’re not sure if he’s a spy or not, at this point, but he’s imprisoned in Windhoek Prison and he’s there until the hostilities end in July, 1915. So the war is raging elsewhere across Europe, but there is a peace signing, the war in South Africa with the German troops comes to an end in July, 1915. And that’s when he’s then transferred on intelligence work with prisoners of war in France with the Intelligence Corps. But his period in Windhoek Prison is fascinating because he’s there for nine months and in that time he says he lived with the daily reality of being shot, because he would hear some of the fellow prisoners go out, be taken out and they would be shot. And sometimes he was taken out to be shot and then he wasn’t, and taken back in. And he observed the interrogations, he was interrogated himself and he said he knew- Next slide please. He knew what it took for a prisoner to hold out against his captors and what made him break. So you can imagine, if we’ve got some of our worst diehard German prisoners of war in World War II, Colonel Scotland has already spent nine months at the behest of the German military, in really horrific conditions, in solitary confinement for pretty much eight out of those nine months with no literature, absolutely nothing to do. And he creates a sort of encyclopaedia in his head and writes a sort of facts and things in chalk on his prison walls. So he keeps mentally fit, but incredibly challenging. And he understands from his own personal experience what it takes to break in interrogation or under those circumstances. So if you can sort of create that, up to a point in wartime, without crossing the boundaries of the Geneva Convention, you might just get results. Next slide please. So we’ve got another photograph of these beautiful houses where the interrogation centre was. Next slide please. And an interior shot.

So you get an idea, I mean, before the war, this one isn’t actually Duveen’s place, this is one of the other ones along there. But before the war these had the most incredible artworks, ornate furniture. They were just beautifully- But of course during wartime everything was taken out and it was stone floors, it was cold, it was bare, the rooms had just a basic, you know, army bed and a bucket. So very, very little in their rooms. Next slide please. But Colonel Scotland’s interesting because he made it clear that he would train every single one of his interrogators. So they were all trained and he wrote, and I love some of what he writes in his unpublished memoir. He wrote, “Interrogation is an art, a good interrogator is partly born and partly made.” So what do you need to be a good interrogator? Well he identified five characteristics. Next slide please. I wonder how many of us would make a good interrogator? He said you had to have a first class memory because you had to remember, if you’re interrogating someone several times, across a few days, you have to remember their original story and whether there are cracks in their story. So, and also keen observation for detail, infinite patience and knowledge of psychology, how to ask the right questions, how to understand the prisoner who stood in front of you so you can get the intelligence you need, intelligence which could be vital to the Allied forces, and an ability to act. So some of them would pretend to be a tough interrogator and others would be the soft interrogator and they would play off each other.

So you know, the tough interrogator, and then he would go out and the softer one would come in and start asking questions and then he’d say something like, “Well, you know, he’ll be back in a minute, did you just want to, you know, tell me because you know you don’t want to cross him.” So there’s a lot of acting going on and nothing really happened, but the prisoners didn’t know that. So it’s very, very good. And the best interrogators, in actual fact, were actors, not surprising, in their civilian life, and journalists. There you go. Next slide please. And he wrote in those memoirs, “One of the most important aspects of a war is to know as much as possible about the enemy. Not only about his military forces, his weapons and the distribution of that, but above all about his mind. How he thinks along certain lines and why.” So that’s fascinating because our intelligence services at this time believed that certain cultures have a way of thinking, of behaving and if you can understand that- and Colonel Scotland, by the time he’d left Windhoek Prison after nine months, could speak fluent German of course, that he taught himself. He felt he could speak, eat, drink, act, completely think like a German. It’s extraordinary. Next slide please. One of the things he’s got them to do, this is one of the files that I worked on and there are thousands of them, at the London Cage, there were a number of Polish conscripts that come through in actual fact. And they’d been conscripted to work on some of the installations along the coastline. But they were particularly tight-lipped at the other sites. And we knew from where they were captured and that they were part of this enforced labour, that they had intelligence. So they needed to be held for a bit longer in this interrogation centre. So this is an idea, a typed up report summary of it.

Their names are never given. They’re just given like A132, B43 or whatever. They’re given like code numbers. We don’t know, there were around a dozen of them, we don’t know their original names. But in the end they gave up some extraordinary amounts of intelligence that we didn’t know, on the coastal defences of along that whole Atlantic Wall. So those prisoners are eyewitnesses and have an awful amount of intelligence. And there were thousands of German prisoners of war and then some of the Polish conscripts, who were in the German army, or in a German workforce, who were picked up because we knew where they’d served. And we knew that they might have intelligence. Now this one you can see just on the top, it’s very small, but this report was 30th of July, 1943. So this is, that they came in, through the London Cage in 1943. Next slide please. So the workforce was incredibly small. One woman there and the two, sorry beg your pardon. Two women there. We now know there were three in total that actually worked through the London Cage. They were only there for a couple of weeks. It was no place for women. It was just incredibly tough, uncompromising atmosphere. And this was taken at the end of the war when it becomes a war crimes investigation centre. And at least half of the men standing behind are German Jewish refugees who served in the War Crimes Investigation Centre in Kensington Palace Gardens. This is a really rare photograph and you can see Colonel Scotland there sat in the middle. And some of his interrogators told their children later that he was not really the kind of chap you’d want to have at your dinner table. And yet others found him fascinating. He does have quite a soft kind face.

He’s not as harsh as one of his colleagues, Colonel Stephens, who ran MI5’s interrogation centre for German spies near Richmond, Latchmere House. He looks like a sort of diehard, he kind of dressed almost with his monocle, almost like a diehard Nazi. But Colonel Scotland was tough and uncompromising, but he also had a soft side to him as well. He could be fun, but some of his staff did find him particularly severe. So the London Cage should be remembered, more needs to be done to go through those files, to see what intelligence did it gather. For all the controversy that goes around how those prisoners may or may not have been treated. You know, it collected intelligence that we didn’t get from elsewhere or that corroborated elsewhere. And they also started to pick up a mass of information about the concentration camps. From those prisoners, some of them who’d been in a concentration camp, some of them who’d then from a concentration camp, not Jewish, were conscripted into a workforce and then captured by the Allies. They gave up some of the most details. And for me, I’ve worked on a lot of intelligence files that have intelligence information on the Holocaust and on the camps, on the Shoah. But the material that was coming out of the London Cage, mainly from diehard SS officers about the atrocities, in such detail, was amongst some of the worst accounts I’ve ever heard of some of the things. They went into explicit detail, graphic detail, of what was going on in the concentration camps beyond anything I’ve read in any of the other books. And we know that what’s being published about the Shoah is horrific.

But some of the descriptions are beyond horrific and were shocking and they were so shocking, I didn’t feel it was appropriate to put them in the book. I may revisit them again sometime because I think it is important to put this stuff on record. But it wasn’t necessary or important for this book. I mean, I’d run out of word count for a start, but necessarily in the sense that it has to be done properly. You can’t just do it in a page or two. Next slide please. So it’s a very, very interesting site, this London Cage that was based in Kensington Palace Gardens. Where we get to the end of the war and it becomes a war crimes investigation unit, Colonel Scotland, one of the questions he sort of asks in his unpublished memoirs, you know, “How do you make a difficult German speak?” And particularly those diehard SS. You’ve got on the left there SS Kurt Meyer, horrific crimes. He actually was found guilty as a result of the war crimes trials. Sepp Dietrich on the right there, another one responsible for atrocities in France. Next slide please. And although he doesn’t go into explicit details, he just says, in those memoirs, “From time to time it was necessary to discipline tough, arrogant, and imprudent prisoners. We had our methods for these types.” Next slide please.

So what about that? Well, the worst I found, yes, you know, there were lights turned on at night or kept on at night, the sleep deprivation. But in his unpublished memoirs, and this was something that was not, MI5 did not allow him to publish in his redacted version that came out in the 1950s. He wrote, “Hour after hour the Nazi stood in my room. The light was kept on during the time, during the night, and he was not allowed to sleep. He stood there for 26 hours. Then this young Nazi, who had information of value to the Allies, he stood there, he said, "I give in.” And he then asked one of the guards to speak with Colonel Scotland. And Colonel Scotland mellowed, he says, “I mellowed towards the submissive German, offered him a chair and a cigarette.” And in his memoirs he says, “What we were doing, the prisoners they received were those,” to quote his words, “Whose will to resist could not be broken elsewhere.” If they’ve got intelligence, you have to find a way of cracking their armour, for them to give up this intelligence. It’s not easy and you cannot cross the line into torture. Although some people would say that this is actually very borderline. Next slide please. So when it becomes this war crimes investigation centre, these are just some of the many Nazi war criminals that were brought to trial as a result of the London Cage. Nuremberg didn’t have the manpower, the resources, to actually deal with all the war crimes. And so there’s a whole raft of, which I’ll come to, areas in war crimes investigation that come under the London Cage. And people just don’t know this history. You can read far more about it in my book, “The London Cage.”

I think, you know, many more people need to know about this because without its work, for all the controversy, some of the worst Nazi war criminals would not have been brought to justice without it. And neither would this work have been complete without the German Jewish refugees serving in the British Army. They had been involved in all kinds of work in the wartime itself. And then by about 1944, not much before though, but by ‘44 they’re transferred- Some of them did work in other prisoner of war camps, but they’re transferred to the London Cage, just a small number of them. One of them, Trudy Gold, knew very, very well, Felix Scharf. I never got to interview Felix 'cause he’d already passed away, but he was very, very secretive about his war. But I found his name in the official files for the London Cage. So there are a whole raft of these German emigres, these Jewish emigres who were working on, they were sitting in on the interrogations, they were witnessing the interrogations, doing important translation work. We’re not clear if they actually undertook, if they did the interrogations themselves, that is by no means clear. But very quickly, Colonel Scotland needed them to go off in groups to investigate war crimes abroad. So war crimes in France, in Germany, in Norway and elsewhere. And it was a huge task for a very, very small team of only around a dozen of them. Next slide please. And I thought I’d throw this in. So I didn’t know this at the time that I wrote the book, but Vera Atkins, I’ve talked about a lot before. She sent the female and the male agents into France with the Special Operations Executive.

They were parachuted in, they were dropped in as part of the SOE to sabotage and all those kind of operations in France. But at the end of the war, she becomes an interrogator. She’s a self-appointed interrogator because she says she wants to discover the fate of all of her agents, the agents that didn’t come back. She said, “Missing, presumed dead is not good enough. We need to know. It’s no good you packing up and going home at SOE headquarters. We need to honour their legacy, to honour what they’ve done.” And so she’s one of the, well, as far as we know, she’s the only female interrogator in Nuremberg. And she’s pictured alongside some of the prosecutors, the famous prosecutors. She’s also, I can’t go into the details of her life as an interrogator, utterly fascinating. But I accidentally discovered, when I was working through interrogation reports about a year or so ago, she’d signed one of the interrogation reports as having, you know, conducted it, along with Anton Walter Freud, Sigmund Freud’s grandson. And the two of them had done this and they’d witnessed the signature of this Nazi war criminal, and she’d gone into the London Cage. She had conducted one of two of these interrogations in the London Cage. And this was not the place you wanted to be. By 1946, we had some of the worst diehard Nazi war criminals there in Kensington Palace Gardens. Who knew that? March, 1946, there were a hundred of them, packed into these three houses, strutting up and down in their rooms, completely, there’s no compromise, there’s no remorse.

And they are arrogant and they are boasting about their war crimes. Really difficult for the interrogators. It really stretched the psychological wellbeing of those interrogators, what they had to listen to and the detailed atrocities. Just horrifying. Next slide please. So Vera Atkins was one of those that went in, and this will give you an idea. This is General Ramcke. He’s there for a short time as a witness actually, not as a war criminal at this point. He’s there as a witness, LDC at the top there, London District Cage, you can see he’s there 7/46. So he’s there in July 46. And this is his German testimony, there are several pages. And Colonel Scotland was really clever because what he got them to do, whether they were there as a witness, because he’s investigating some of the crimes or whether they’re there as a Nazi war criminal, he gets them to write down their version of the events and he gets them to sign it. And they’re pretty honest actually, because they’re trying to justify their perspective. And it’s interesting because they give away quite a lot of interesting information and he gets them to write it down and he gets them to sign it. And it’s witnessed by two members of the London Cage. So it’s then legally admissible in court. Really clever. Next slide please. And one of the atrocities that they are investigating is Le Paradis, the end of May, 1940, almost sort of six years by the time Colonel Scotland’s given this case to actually investigate. And at that point, the liberating armies were heading through Belgium, towards Germany. And as they’re going through, they’re starting to pick up details that back in 1940, there’d been this massacre at Le Paradis, which is south of Calais, or southwest of Calais. And this was brought to attention of the London Cage and they couldn’t investigate it at Nuremberg. So the military authorities said to Colonel Scotland, “You need to investigate this.” And the French authorities had found this mass grave, at least a hundred British soldiers. And what detail does Colonel Scotland have to go on?

He has to find out who gave the order. Next slide please. And you’ll be able to read in more detail in my book. And this is a photograph of some of those diehard SS that were part of the hit squad, that massacred a hundred surrendering British soldiers in May, 1940 in France. And the commanding officer who’d been arrested by the Americans was Fritz Knoechlein. You can see, a thoroughly despicable character there on the right hand side. And we had no idea, number one, who had given that command. So what Colonel Scotland does is he goes through, sends a message out to all of the Allied prisoner of war camps and says, “Every single SS officer that you’ve got, or SS, who’s been in an SS regiment, I want them.” And they all start coming through the London Cage and he starts debriefing them on what they know. And eventually it comes down to this guy, Fritz Knoechlein. And of course he does survive the war. There’s no way of knowing that he would still be alive, but they find him in custody, in an American prisoner of war camp. And he’s brought to the London Cage. Next slide please. So he had given the order for the complete- it’s a war crime, the slaughter of a hundred surrendering British soldiers on the 27th of May, 1940. It’s not the only one that happened at that time. There are a whole number of them. Wormhoudt is another one that was investigated by the London Cage. And so every, eventually, SS prisoner who’d ever served in the Totenkopf were actually brought to the London Cage. And this guy, it looked like he was the one responsible. Next slide please.

But Colonel Scotland sent teams to the exact site of this mass grave in France. There were two survivors, and you can read about their stories in my book, Pooley and O'Callaghan, who, one of whom had been in a prisoner of war camp, he hadn’t been killed, they’d survived. One of them had survived under the bodies of his dead comrades, completely traumatised. And when he got back to the UK, one of them was repatriated during the wartime, nobody believed him. I mean, he had this, you know, the little, he did, he’d started to talk about, nobody believed him. And so, you know, it took a while to actually track him down, but eventually Colonel Scotland and the teams took down their testimonies. And so this was the farmhouse where this massacre took place. And this is an original photograph, in the National Archives, taken by one of the teams from Colonel Scotland’s London Cage that was investigating. Next slide please. And eventually it was the testimony of the French farmer who owned this farm, Monsieur Creton- He’d just fled the farm with the advancing German army in May 4th, 1940. And he’d returned on the 2nd of June and been aware of this sort of hastily, you know, in the ground, the hastily dug area. And of course he believed that this will be communal grave. And then he’d put a small cross by it. And he’d noticed the bullet marks on the stable wall and the blood and bits of brain, I mean, horrific, from where they’d just been shot against the wall. Excuse me, some of them have been shot inside a barn and it was just horrific.

And this was part of his statement. Next slide please. And this is one of the photographs and you can just see, because the original photograph is in black and white, but you can just see on the wall there, the parts of the blood that were still there. The blood stains were still there when Colonel Scotland’s teams went to investigate at the end of the war. Next slide please. Colonel Scotland had quite a bit to say about Knoechlein. the two men, of course, when they first saw each other when Knoechlein crossed the threshold of the London Cage. I mean, you know, Scotland just looked at him and he said in his memoirs, it was the 10th of October 1946, he said this, the “tall, fierce, disdainful, highly strung, excitable SS General Fritz Knoechlein was brought to the London Cage from American custody.” And this begins 615 days in British detention. 64 of them in solitary confinement at the London Cage. And Knoechlein said to Colonel Scotland, “I’m not giving you anything,” you know, “interrogate me to it-” And Colonel Scotland just looked at him and said, “I’m not even going to give you the luxury of being interrogated.” And he stuck him in solitary confinement. and he didn’t allow Knoechlein to write down his version of events. Next slide please. And exactly that, I’ll move on to the next one. I explained that.

Yes, Knoechlein was described, and you can see how colourful Colonel Scotland was in his memoirs, that Knoechlein was, “a Nazi of the first order, the worst order, a German who’d dedicated himself to brutality, irresponsible in the possession of power, ruthless in execution.” And there were so many of them like that, that crossed the threshold of the London Cage. Next slide please. So it needed somebody tough like Colonel Scotland. And again, he then says in his memoirs, “On the 17th of June, 1948, I watched in satisfaction and with some relief as Knoechlein was escorted out of the London Cage, handcuffed to the guard, under standing orders from the RAF.” And he was moved eventually for a flight to Hamburg for his trial. But it wasn’t the final time that he would see Colonel Scotland. Next slide please. Because in court during the war crimes trials, Knoechlein turned the tables and he started to say that he’d actually been subjected to torture, to all kinds of contraventions of the Geneva Convention. And it nearly derailed that war crimes trial. And the irony was that Colonel Scotland was called to the trial and he found himself, Colonel Scotland found himself in the dock answering charges of war crimes. I mean, excuse me, this is not what, this is not the outcome that we’re expecting. Knoechlein is clearly the Nazi war criminal. And he was making claims that he’d be like he’d had to scrub the floor and he’d had sleep deprivation, cold water treatment. You know, this is the only testimony that we have, one other that’s a bit suspect as well, that claims that anything like this happened in the London Cage. There is no evidence.

It’s coming from a Nazi war criminal himself. There is no other evidence and no evidence- I interviewed one survivor, a staff member of the London Cage who said there was nothing, during the time that he was there. And he was the administrative person in charge, on an administrative level. He was British, a Jewish officer, serving in the British Army in the intelligence. So he was involved in the administrative side and he said, you know, he didn’t see anything. And so Colonel Scotland under oath, refuted any contravention of the Geneva Convention. And fortunately- Next slide please. He, you know Knoechlein, was found guilty in the end, all kinds of reasons why. And his accusations against Colonel Scotland were thrown out. Knoechlein was sentenced to death and he was hanged in Hameln Prison on the 21st of January, 1949. But he’s not the only high profile Nazi. There’s a whole raft of them that come through the London Cage that you can read about in my book, we don’t have time to talk about, but we have SS General Jakob Sporrenberg. I don’t know if you’ve read anything about him, but he’s brought to the London Cage. He’s accused of war crimes, and in fact he’s ultimately found guilty. He ordered the killing of over 42,000 Polish Jews in Lublin within a space of just 14 hours. And he’s brought to the Cage in February, 1946. And there were other SS who were brought to the London Cage who’d committed atrocities in the Warsaw Ghetto.

I mean, it’s such a fascinating history, this whole history when the London Cage becomes the War Crimes Investigation Centre. Unheard of in all the mass of literature that’s been written on the war crimes trials. And here they, you know, they’re working long hours, those interrogators who now become investigators, they’re almost like investigative journalists, police detectives almost. And they are looking into atrocities and all kinds of, the mass murder of Jews in concentration camps. They are looking into the Great Escape of those British, mainly airmen, from Stalag Luft III. The famous “Great Escape,” the film, that’s based on the breakout of Stalag Luft III in March, 1944. And over 50 of those were shot in cold blood. There were also war crimes in Norway under General von Falkenhorst. So they’re investigating that. And you look at the sheer detail that they need to piece together, the evidence. It’s not just a few pages long. These are long meticulous hours on top of the interrogations. So they’re doing the interrogations and they’re also amassing the physical evidence of war crimes. It’s a really important history. And controversially at the moment because again, there’s a lot more research that needs to be done. They looked into the atrocities on the Channel Islands and in particularly on Alderney, and I don’t know if any of you have picked up, but Alderney is quite controversial at the moment. There are all kinds of attempts to try and find the truth behind what happened in the Channel Islands, and particularly in Alderney, and how many Russian workers were put to death, how many Jews lost their lives.

Part of the difficulty is because they didn’t die necessarily, most of them didn’t die on Alderney. They were taken or transferred to concentration camps. So piecing together those exact numbers and recognising that history is now a really big ongoing project by groups working out of Alderney. But the war crimes investigations were examined at the London Cage. Next slide please. And then there’s a case of Kesselring who Colonel Scotland had in the London Cage and said to him, “Well look, you know, we’ve done our investigations, you are not guilty of war crimes.” And he says, “But I was in charge of my men in Italy.” And Colonel Scotland said, “If you take that line, you are going to be done for war crimes and you are not guilty,” particularly for one of the massacres outside Rome. He had not given that order. Next slide please. And we knew exactly who had. So Kesselring was given one of the more comfortable rooms in the London Cage. He was free to walk around and he didn’t really have the same supervision from the guards. He was always there to greet him. And Kesselring had been transferred, he was a witness at one point at Nuremberg. He was transferred, and Colonel Scotland wrote, “I saw a tall, well-built man with a strong face, a keen and direct look and an air of authority.” And the two men actually became friends- credibility. We have to make sure that justice is done and that we cannot just exact so-called justice if someone is not guilty of the offences, of the crimes. And Colonel Scotland attended the trial in Venice and he later went on, Kesslering was found guilty, he was given like a prison sentence. And Scotland would every now and again go and visit him in prison. Kesselring later had his sentence commuted. Next slide please.

But there’s also controversy because in March, 1946, the Evening Standard ran these headlines, “War Criminal Kills Himself.” And there were in total, between this period and 1948, four suicides in the London Cage. And many conspiracists have said, “Oh, well, you know, they’re not really suicides.” Well it’s very difficult to tell this far away. And they, it says, “Because of,” in this case, this criminal, war criminal, “his complicity in war crimes, the name and nationality of this man will be kept secret.” So I have a whole section in my book on the journey of trying to find how difficult is it to find out who this man was that was found hanging in the London Cage. Next slide please. Well, it took a very long time and it was an accidental find in the end because I came across a report, dated the 22nd of March, 1946 and it said this. “Following,” and it’s the language. “Following the unfortunate demise of SS Ostubof Tanzmann at the London District Cage, alias Lieutenant S Koch,” et cetera, et cetera. And then there’s a second reference a bit further on. “Since Tanzmann committed suicide, we’ve not tried to trace the wanted men,” or whatever that means. So you look in the indexes for a death certificate. There is no death certificate under his real name, Tanzmann. He was part of an SS commando group that committed atrocities in Norway. And there around 120 of them that were eventually brought through the London Cage and they’d all come over and they were hiding under pseudonyms. And Tanzmann’s pseudonym and false papers was Lieutenant S Koch. So I then looked under Koch, S Koch, nothing. Next slide please. But then, when I looked through the indexes there was a death certificate for Koch, a Hans Koch. And it was within the Kensington area. So I took a punt and I ordered it up. And this was a 39-year-old Hans Koch, whose real name was Tanzmann. And he died, and it said in Kensington Palace Gardens on that date. Cause of death was given, “Asphyxia due to strangulation by Hanging at a Prisoner of War Cage. Did kill himself while the balance of his mind was disturbed.” Next slide please.

Just coming to our last two or three slides. And the other one I managed to uncover was Hans Ziegler. Hans Ziegler had been involved with atrocities against our men that had escaped from Stalag Luft III. And he was 49 years old and his death certificate was quite difficult to find, to even get their names. They are not named in the files. Two of them I still haven’t found. I don’t know if a more detailed search will ever bring up, you know, who they are and whether their death certificates, you know, whether we can get those. And again, the coroner concludes, excuse me, he died from a haemorrhage wound of the neck, self-inflicted from suicide, from strang-, you know, hanging himself. “He did kill himself while the balance of his mind was disturbed.” That’s what it actually said on his death certificate. So we won’t know really. But ultimately, there is of course more research that can be done. The coroner’s files don’t survive anymore. But we don’t on one level, do we really want to start investigating. What if the relatives of Nazi war criminals then start suing various Allied governments? Do we really want to be paying compensation to families of Nazi war criminals? I dunno, moral dilemma, perhaps, maybe not. Next slide please. There are lots of kind of moral dilemmas that I raise in the book. But later, because after the war, when it came out about the London Cage, there was a whole furore in parliament and Jeremy Thorpe, then of course leader of the Liberals, actually instigated some investigations. I never actually found the files or any of his personal papers surrounding this. They must be somewhere, but I couldn’t locate them. So there was a court of inquiry, at Wellington Barracks in 1947, to satisfy- all this was starting to make it out into the public headlines.

And it was quoted, it was concluded, “That there was insufficient evidence to prove that physical violence was used at the London Cage. It does not however, rule out the possibility that violence was in fact used.” Next slide please. So researching the London Cage, this is today is, of course is the Russian Embassy, in Kensington Palace Gardens. Love it, you know absolutely love it. Can’t make this stuff up, can you really? But the challenges for historians, we cannot know, when there’s secret- Well, a lot of intelligence history is secret, but particularly around the secret intelligence and whole interrogation centres, particularly in Kensington Palace Gardens, there is a sense that this is still sensitive today. You know, as I said throughout, I’ve not found any evidence of physical torture at the London Cage. It doesn’t preclude that happening. But I dug really deep and I did not want to sensationalise this. And ultimately we needed intelligence that was reliable. So the legacy- Next slide please. My final comments really is to remember really the incredible work of those interrogators who did, for all the controversy, actually got intelligence during the wartime that was essential. And the challenge I suppose they faced and they were led by Colonel Scotland, the challenge that he faced, if, and I suppose we can do a parallel with terrorism today. If you have a room of, I don’t know, a hundred youngsters at a disco, and you know that the person in front of you, that you’re trying to interrogate, knows where the next attack is coming, how far do you go? How far can you go?

A very fine line. In a way, Colonel Scotland’s colleague, Kendrick, didn’t have that dilemma at the eavesdropping sites because, you know, it was a charm offensive, it was a much more straightforward operation. But what do you do when you have a diehard terrorist? And of course this book was written just a few years ago. We’re coming up to the anniversary of October the seventh. You know, we cannot get soft on terrorism. We, you know, we have to make our mark and stand up for our democracy. How far do you go? And I think that’s still a relevant question to prevent these, hopefully, if you can prevent them before the attacks happen. But how far do you go if you have a diehard Nazi, if you have a terrorist in front of you, to get the information that’s reliable? And that was the fine line that Colonel Scotland had. And so my final comments then, today, is to say, I mean do, not 'cause I’m just promoting my book, but do get hold of this if you can, whether through the library, whether you download it as an audio, whether you buy this paperback, it’s such an important history. It’s important, because of the interest and the moral dilemmas of interrogation in wartime, particularly when it is the most sensitive, top secret interrogation centre, really that we’ve had in our history.

That in itself is fascinating. You have the contribution of the German Jewish emigres who helped with Colonel Scotland. They were a vital part of his team. He needed them when it morphs into the War Crimes Investigation Centre. And this history is so important, there’s a lot more to be done in the research of the other war crimes that were committed and were brought to justice as a result. So the legacy of the London Cage, I want to get away from that whole, what steals, not the limelight, but what steals the history of those sensationalist claims of torture, as I said, that I didn’t find. And it takes away from the real legacy of a centre, a secret cage, interrogation quarters, that brought intelligence that did help the Allies. You can see that when you read the documents. But for me also, we have to really spread the word and look more at what it delivered towards the end of 1944 until 1948 in bringing to justice some of the worst Nazi war criminals that had walked the earth during that period. And Nuremberg could not cope with it all. And so I think we really do need to understand and to learn more and to acknowledge that personnel that worked under the most intense, difficult circumstances to bring justice to our world. Thank you.