On the first day of February 1946 in Emsland, Lower Saxony, near the border with the Netherlands, stood a group of men holding spades and shovels. At least two dozen of them were about to start digging. Encircling them were tens more, watching. They were all standing in what used to be part of the Emslandlager, a network of fifteen labour and penal camps for people prosecuted by the regime, including deserters, homosexuals and anti-Nazis. Most were German but there were others, among them French, Russians and Yugoslavs. The bodies of 136 of them were about to be recovered that morning. They had been murdered together the previous April, when a group of around fifteen German soldiers, determined to prevent the prisoners from being liberated alive by the approaching Allied forces, arrived at the Emsland claiming to have orders to execute everyone. Leading them was nineteen-year-old Willi Herold, a lance corporal who had stolen a captain’s uniform; it is with that authority that he waved around what was a fake order. He was eventually believed and was allowed into one of the camps, within which prisoners from all Emsland camps had been brought. Marching in with a gun carrier, they pulled some of the prisoners together – in what a witness described as a ‘tightly-pressed mass of humanity’ – and turned the gun carrier towards them.¹ If anyone survived the shooting, they did not survive the grenades that were thrown at them immediately afterwards. Even more prisoners were murdered by Herold and his men over the next few days.

Now, ten months on, the purpose of the exhumation was justice. The bodies were counted, examined, photographed and reburied following a Christian funeral. The resulting postmortems were used in the trials of those accused of the murders, including Herold, who was found guilty and executed by the guillotine later in 1946. But justice had a more symbolic dimension whenever possible, as it did in the Emsland that February morning. Those brought to dig up the bodies were Herold and his group, as well as some of those who had previously staffed the camps. They were now detained by the British as suspected war criminals. The spectators surrounding them were the residents of the district who used to be members of the Nazi Party. They were summoned to attend by the British Military Government, since the Emsland was now part of the British Occupation Zone. ‘I like a little poetic justice’, was how Major Theodore Pantcheff, the officer leading the investigation into the murders, put it when organising the exhumation.

The task of investigating a fraction of the countless horrors that made up the Second World War in Europe was assigned mainly to interrogators. Some were based in Germany, in what was called the War Crimes Investigation Unit. The others were based in Britain, in what was too similarly called the War Crimes Interrogation Unit.² Such a team was needed in Britain because of the half a million German soldiers who were in the country, thousands would have either committed or witnessed war crimes. While this period tends to be associated with the ‘major’ war criminals tried in Nuremberg’s International Military Tribunal, jointly formed by the four major Allies to deal with key decision-makers and high-ranking leaders of the Nazi regime, thousands more were pursued in the years after the war. These were concentration camp guards, doctors and soldiers of all ranks who had physically committed crimes or ordered their subordinates to commit them. The exact numbers are difficult to establish, but by March 1948, close to 40,000 Germans, Italians and Japanese nationals had been charged with a war-related crime. This figure includes the charges by powers such as Britain, France and the US but not the thousands of additional charges brought by the USSR, who were less forthcoming with their numbers.³ Only a fraction of them ended up being eventually prosecuted. In the case of Britain, a third of the just over 3,000 charged ended up in a British military court on a war crime charge, these being violations of the 1929 Geneva Convention or other laws of war in force at the time. The others escaped justice for all sorts of reasons, ranging from the inability to locate them to their perceived usefulness to British or American interests, usually against the Soviets.⁴

Yet the arbitrariness surrounding who ended up being tried was not reflected in how Britain actually investigated war crimes. Take the Emsland case, which entailed much more than that moment of ‘poetic justice’ during the exhumations. The search for witnesses and accused had taken Pantcheff’s team to Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium and France, during which they interrogated almost a thousand people.⁵ The additional paperwork they recovered from all over the Emsland, explaining how the camps were managed between 1933 and 1945, weighed over 12 tonnes.⁶ It is because of these efforts that people did face justice in a court of law in this case. Other cases that were also thoroughly investigated were never tried.

This is why Pantcheff’s team was vital: without it, Britain would have been much more restricted in pursuing the judicial route the Allies chose. For Britain in particular, this route entailed procedural justice as well. Put another way, the ambition was not to hold ‘show trials’, where people like Herold would go through the motions of being in a courtroom but whose guilt would be a foregone conclusion. Rather, trials became another opportunity to press on the Germans that the British were truly just, the implicit message being that they were unlike the Soviets. All these investigations and trials were, after all, unfolding in parallel with the emerging Cold War, which was becoming quite visible in this context.⁷ This aim made the role of interrogation much more important than its overlooked history may suggest. It was only through proper investigations that there could be proper trials, which the Germans could attend and reach their conclusions about Britain. Interrogation was thus at the core of a fundamental post-war aim: to ensure that Britain would have influence in Germany.

5.1 Chaos

Why was all of this necessary? Even saying that the crimes of the Second World War had to be investigated may sound perverse – as if questioning cruelty we know occurred. Did people like Herold really need to be interrogated to prove their guilt? Some may argue he did not even need to stand in front of a judge. The possibility of summary executions had been discussed by the ‘Big Three’ Allies in the final war years as a likely way to deal with the most senior figures of the regime – the ‘arch-criminals’, as an American plan from 1944 called them. Although Herold was not on arch-criminal by that definition (Pantcheff preferred to call him an ‘arch-bastard’), the idea of summary executions was not beyond the pale. And there was an intention to deal with people who were not ‘arch-criminals’ too. This was formally announced during the Moscow Conference in October 1943, when Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt jointly and publicly pledged that ‘Germans who take part in [war crimes will] be brought back to the scene of their crimes and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged’. More than that, they warned that the Allies would ‘pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusors in order that justice may be done’, so that they could be tried ‘according to the laws of [those] liberated countries’.⁸

What that meant was unclear. Would the accused be punished according to established legal norms or ‘judged on the spot’? Who would pursue suspects to ‘the uttermost ends of the earth’ to arrest them? Who would initiate proceedings? Would there be a judge or a jury? Right before the public statement in Moscow, Churchill agreed with Molotov that justice should be ‘stern, swift’. They were responding to Cordell Hull’s confession that if he was to have it his way, he would ‘take Hitler, and Mussolini and Tojo and their accomplices and bring them before a drum head court martial and at sunrise on the following morning there would be an historic incident’.⁹ But what about less senior figures? Where would the line be drawn? When a month later at Tehran Stalin said that at least 50,000 of the German General Staff should be executed, Churchill was appalled. ‘The British Parliament and public will never tolerate mass executions’, he said, before declaring that he would ‘rather be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself rather than sully my own and my country’s honour by such infamy’.¹⁰ He left the room, but returned when Stalin reassured him he was joking. Such was the discourse surrounding war criminals during the war, and a more specific course of action only became clearer with Germany’s surrender. Precisely to avoid summary executions getting out of hand, as well as to establish enduring legal norms out of this war’s barbarities, the decision was that all cases should be pursued in courts of law. Once that decision was taken, evidentiary standards of proof became relevant, and so people like Herold did have to be interrogated, the sites of their murders did have to be visited and witnesses did have to recall – usually more than once – what they saw them do.

The legal route was articulated in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal signed in August 1945. What this did was to establish an inter-Allied tribunal to deal with senior Nazi leaders, and try them not only under the established category of ‘war crimes’ but also under two new categories now stipulated in the Charter: crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. The conventional category of war crimes, which covered the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians under occupation, was simply not wide enough to capture the scale of Nazi criminality. This is what the new categories attempted to do. And they did so first by extending responsibility to cover crimes against peace, understood to mean the planning and waging of aggressive war (such as the invasion of Poland), and crimes against humanity, including the systematic persecution of and atrocities against civilians on political, racial and religious grounds. Other than the acts they would cover, the new categories also expanded notions of who the victims were. War crimes could only be committed by a state against the nationals of another. Crimes against humanity, however, would now encompass crimes committed against any civilian population, including a state’s own. After all, millions of Germans suffered under the Nazis. The desire was also for crimes against humanity to expand beyond acts that happened during armed conflict – because, once again, people had been suffering under Nazism before September 1939. Hence there was a desire to cover peacetime as well as wartime conduct. Peacetime conduct, however, was deliberately turned into a separate category during the negotiations for the Charter, so that crimes against humanity would still be limited to actions committed during war. The reluctance to make peacetime conduct part and parcel of crimes against humanity was the colonial mentality shared by all involved in the negotiations. Taking action against Germany for how it treated its own people during peace could later open the floodgates to claims against the Allies by their own citizens and colonial subjects. So, while the International Military Tribunal (IMT) could focus on more crimes against more people, the focus would remain on the 1939–1945 period to avoid setting precedents that could later boomerang.

That was, in essence, the main innovation of the Charter: whereas war crimes could only apply to events on the battlefield and to occupied territory, it was the new categories that would capture what we now know as the Holocaust, the genocide of Europe’s Roma and Sinti populations, and the targeting and systematic murder of other minority groups. But the IMT was the only united Allied front that existed around trials. When it came to deciding what to do with anyone other than the ‘major’ war criminals, policies permanently diverged. And they diverged not only between the Soviets and other Allied powers, but between everyone involved, with each power making its own decisions about who it wanted to deal with and under what legal system. The Americans, interested in establishing certain precedents in international law, decided to continue dealing with both war crimes and crimes against humanity. These could have been committed anywhere in Nazi Europe during the war (again excluding peacetime conduct) so long as the suspect was now in US custody. The French too pursued both war crimes and crimes against humanity but prioritised those involving French victims committed in France. As for what was happening to war criminals east of Germany, ‘only occasional scraps of war crimes information’ were emerging about that.¹¹

That Britain also had to deal with ‘minor’ war criminals was a given; the question was how extensively to do so. Reasoning within government varied, but all were pointing towards a very reserved policy. There was the Foreign Office, which was concerned about the emerging Cold War and German economic recovery, and was reluctant for Britain to commit to an extensive trials programme or cooperate with the Soviets over it.¹² There was the War Office, which wanted crimes involving its own soldiers to be prioritised over those of Allied nationals. And there were also the lawyers – the Attorney General, the Treasury Solicitor’s Office, the Judge Advocate General’s Office – who were concerned with questions of evidence and process, and with how crimes could actually be proven in court. The result was a reluctance to use anything other than the traditional category of war crimes. Part of the logic was that the acts stipulated in instruments such as the Hague and Geneva Conventions were specific, individual crimes (murder, rape and looting) that could more easily be proven in court, as opposed to the more ‘adventurous’ new categories of ‘murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts … or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds’, which was the definition of crimes against humanity. The government’s decision was therefore that Britain would go after war crimes only, not crimes against humanity. To implement this, a Royal Warrant was passed in June 1945 which allowed Britain to prosecute war crimes, and British military courts were set up for the purpose in Germany, Austria, Italy and, from mid-1946, across Asia.¹³

This decision, which meant to result in a more straightforward legal environment, did not respond to the realities of the Second World War, and Britain kept running into crimes which the narrow remit of the Royal Warrant could not address. The Emsland case was one of the first examples. With most Emsland inmates having been German men who were persecuted by their own regime, their deaths and persecution were not war crimes. The fact that the Emsland was also in Germany rather than in occupied Europe took it even further away from conventional war crimes territory. Yet Britain could not simply ignore the criminality it had stumbled upon, involving an entire network of camps and hundreds of victims in the last month of the war alone. Unable to do much under the Royal Warrant but also unable to simply drop the case, it pursued a parallel legal avenue created by an instrument known as Control Council Law No. 10. Soon after occupying Germany, the four occupying powers, through their Allied Control Council, passed this law which was meant to enable courts in Germany to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace. Simply put, Control Council Law No. 10 extended the reach of the IMT Charter to courts in Germany as well. This is how Herold and eleven others were pursued, rather than under the Royal Warrant. The charges against them were those of murder, charged under the relevant section of the German penal code, with Herold specifically also being charged with a crime against humanity.¹⁴ Six of the twelve accused, including Herold, were found guilty and were decapitated. The other six were acquitted.

This may sound like a convoluted case, especially for such an obvious crime, but what the Emsland example illustrates are the practical implications of the Royal Warrant. It left entire crimes affecting millions of victims outside its scope, with alternatives having to be found in cases that could not simply be shelved. But with the practical implications there was also an intellectual consequence. Despite the innovations of the Charter, of which Britain was part, the government was now reverting to a position in which each crime was seen in isolation rather than as part of systematic and deliberate patterns of violence, thus missing much of the essence of the Second World War.

Yet within the legal corner that it carved for itself, Britain undertook to investigate anyone under its control suspected of having committed war crimes against any Allied national.¹⁵ This cast a very wide net, one which would catch the German prisoners of war who were in Britain, German prisoners of war held by Britain elsewhere as well as German civilians in the British Zone of Germany. These were millions of people. The aim was to identify the war crimes suspects among them, consider the evidence against them but not take all of them to court. Only those with strong evidence against them would be prosecuted. Having flexibility in choosing which cases to try would also help to deal with the awkward fact that the Allies too had committed war crimes. Cases involving German reprisals against Allied prisoners of war were for this reason considered problematic, because they risked the defence bringing up potential British wrongdoing.¹⁶ But if there was no undertaking to prosecute all cases identified, those situations could be controlled.

A perhaps unintended consequence of this liberal undertaking to investigate any suspect under British control was that Britain ended up actually investigating cases which in the process proved to be crimes against humanity – such as the case involving Herold. But instead of dropping such cases completely, it would hand the evidence over to other interested nations so that they could try those cases themselves. So, while Britain’s trials policy was limited and not fit for purpose, Britain ended up investigating many more crimes than it tried, some of which were crimes against humanity and some of which were tried as such by other Allied nations.

Investigating anyone under British control suspected of a war crime proved to be an immense task – beyond what anyone could have imagined. It was not just a question of finding the suspect – which in itself was not straightforward – but also of locating witnesses and in some cases visiting the sites of crimes. But Europe was chaos. Germany alone was chaos. Millions of people – liberated concentration camp inmates, refugees, soldiers, ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe – were moving across the country in search of somewhere to settle or hide. An equally enormous number of German prisoners of war were held there. Crucially, in a country now controlled by four separate powers, suspects and witnesses sought by Britain were often under the control of another power, while locations of crimes needing to be investigated by one power were often under the control of another. There was some cooperation when it came to exchanging wanted persons – Britain itself would hand 3,000 prisoners over to various others for trial by May 1947 – but the realities of occupation created delays and obstacles, preventing many cases from reaching a court.¹⁷

In Britain, too, there was chaos. Leaving aside the economic, imperial and social situations, all of which were enormous and grave, the situation surrounding the hundreds of thousands of German soldiers in the country was chaotic enough. The basic question of their identity was unknown in too many cases. This is because it was not an uncommon occurrence for soldiers to lie about who they were, precisely to avoid being implicated in war crimes. And even when they were honest about their particulars, how could anyone know what they had done during the conflict? Prisoners could not be expected to volunteer that they might be war criminals simply by being asked. Hopes were raised by the United Nations War Crimes Commission – predecessor of the United Nations – established in October 1943 following the Moscow statement in order to collect evidence of war crimes and compile lists of perpetrators. The Commission then established the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, known as Crowcass, containing the names of all persons wanted by its members and all prisoners of war held in their hands. This meant Britain could cross-check its prisoners’ names (once it was sure of them) against Crowcass and identify suspects that way. And once it began investigating a specific war crime, it could again use Crowcass to identify more suspects and witnesses it needed but who were held by others. Valuable as it was, the registry was far from perfect because the USSR joined neither the Commission nor Crowcass. So, while there was some infrastructure in place for identifying suspects at a transnational level, the USSR’s non-participation posed a serious obstacle to investigations.

Identifying a suspect was necessary, but evidence – in the form of witnesses or documentary proof – was still needed to make a case pass from Crowcass to court. Such evidence was not collected in a systematic way by Britain during the war despite the rhetoric promising to pursue war criminals, mainly because the Combined Chiefs of Staff were worried that taking steps in that direction while the war was ongoing would risk German reprisals against Allied prisoners. Some interrogators on the Continent were told in the second half of 1944 to start asking German prisoners about war crimes, but that was all.¹⁸ Not much else was done until the middle of 1945, when it was properly realised that thousands of prisoners of war had been interrogated ‘without being asked whether they have witnessed any war crimes’.¹⁹ What did exist was information that had been incidentally collected, as part of operations to collect military intelligence. One obvious example were CSDIC’s bugged conversations, in which prisoners did discuss crimes. The organisation selecting prisoners for CSDIC – the PWIS (Home) – as well as the Royal Patriotic School interrogating refugees were also in possession of intelligence on several concentration camps, collected before these were liberated, including Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Natzweiler-Struthof, Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Mauthausen. But to make matters difficult, the DMI, which was responsible for all of the aforementioned intelligence organisations, quickly washed its hands of any involvement in investigations, since war crimes were not considered to be a military intelligence concern.²⁰ With that logic, they also ruled out the possibility of suspects being interrogated in CSDIC, and the prospect of using CSDIC’s reports as evidence in trials.²¹

With the DMI out of the picture, all matters relating to both investigations and trials came to fall under the Judge Advocate General’s Office (JAG), the part of the War Office dealing with legal matters.²² Yet the reality was that although the DMI did not regard investigations as a military intelligence matter, it inadvertently possessed much of the evidence required by the investigations. What investigations really needed were therefore people with DMI experience. It is only through the skill and expertise of intelligence officers that suspects could be identified, cases investigated and the evidence passed on to the lawyers who would decide whether the case would be prosecuted, extradited or shelved.

5.2 Backbone

In this context of mass improvisation, however, it would take some time for JAG to realise the extent to which intelligence officers were necessary for its work. And so investigations were first assigned to people who proved unsuitable for the task. Some of the first investigators sent to Germany did not speak German, for instance, which meant that they had to rely on locals to translate what suspects were telling them.²³ This was hardly the way to investigate any crime, but even less so atrocities involving a society that was now completely fragmented. The resulting miscommunications were the reason why Pantcheff’s team – what eventually became the War Crimes Interrogation Unit – was brought into the picture. At that point in mid-1945, this was a team of interrogators belonging to the DMI since 1940, when they were known as the PWIS (Home), tasked with briefly interrogating all enemy prisoners of war sent to Britain, a number that by 1945 had reached 300,000. The primary purpose of these interrogations was to select the few prisoners sent to CSDIC. But the same unit also helped train other interrogators – including for CSDIC as well as US interrogators – and sent some of its own officers to accompany British commando missions during the war, in order to interrogate prisoners and civilians on the spot.²⁴ From mid-1944 onwards, they also started collecting intelligence on atrocities, and so by the summer of 1945, it was decided to focus the team’s efforts towards supporting JAG’s investigators. In that capacity, they quickly proved able to lead the investigations rather than merely support them. By the autumn of 1945, it was already thought that Britain would be ‘unable to proceed with their preparation of cases against many individual war criminals’ without those interrogators.²⁵ By January 1946, their name was changed from Prisoner of War Interrogation Section to War Crimes Interrogation Unit (WCIU), and they were moved from the DMI to JAG.

One thing that remained constant, however, was that both the wartime and post-war iterations of this team were headed by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland. As we have seen, although he had retired in 1935, Scotland was summoned back in 1940 specifically to interrogate prisoners of war. His experience was important: he had served in the German army in German South West Africa, where he migrated in 1902, and had gained some knowledge of how that Army was organised and how it worked. But in 1914, he was imprisoned for a year by that Army as a suspected spy, an experience which gave him ‘first-hand knowledge of the hopes and fears of a prisoner of war’.²⁶ In reality, Scotland was likely not a spy at that point, nor was his pre-1914 service in the German Army important in any sense: he was asked to join nominally as a war volunteer, so that he could continue running a grocery shop supplying local German soldiers.²⁷ Still, his experiences meant that upon his release in July 1915, he became a British intelligence officer, responsible for interrogating German prisoners of war. This is why he was taken out of retirement in 1940, when there were no trained interrogators in the country apart from veterans like himself.

Those under Scotland after 1945 were a combination of existing wartime interrogators and new recruits.²⁸ One of WCIU’s most senior interrogators was Major Antony Terry, a journalist in civilian life and a bilingual English and German speaker with good knowledge of French. He had a long service as an interrogator, having been attached to PWIS(H) during the war. In that capacity he had joined the commando mission to St Nazaire in France in 1942 to interrogate prisoners of war. He was, though, captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war himself. When he returned home, he resumed his duties as he had left them. He was thirty-two when he started interrogating suspected war criminals, and at that point Scotland described him as a ‘highly efficient’ interrogator. Similarly, Captain W. E. Kaiser, also a fluent German speaker, was an experienced interrogator who was particularly effective with interrogations involving technical subjects. His civilian profession was of a school master and, eager to return to that job, he applied for early release. Others voluntarily deferred their demobilisation. One of them was Pantcheff, also an interrogator of prisoners of war since 1942 – a role he had assumed following his studies – and a ‘naturally gifted investigator’ in Scotland’s eyes. This is why he was trusted with leading the Emsland investigations, among others. Another who deferred his demobilisation was Captain Arthur Ryder, who before the war was a civil servant. Now, he was a ‘painstaking interrogator’ who was more effective with prisoners who were more ‘ready and willing’. This was in contrast to Captain M. F. Cornish – who too had deferred – who was ‘successful with the difficult sort’ of prisoner, even though he had only joined WCIU at the end of the war, having previously served overseas. Another new recruit was Lieutenant R. A. Hepton, who was fluent in German and ‘exceedingly keen’ to learn WCIU’s ways, quickly proving himself to be ‘a valuable addition to the staff’. What made all these people, with their different backgrounds, better qualified than the first JAG investigators was that most had some experience in interrogating German personnel, and all spoke German.²⁹ These were therefore not just fluent German speakers but fluent in German military formations, ranks and equipment.³⁰

A further advantage of the WCIU team was that they were authorised to take statements from suspects and witnesses. British investigations outside the UK involved people who had no authority to obtain affidavits, which meant that even when they were successful in obtaining evidence, they had to wait for legally trained personnel to obtain it in writing.³¹ Contrarily, WCIU were authorised to produce affidavits themselves, a task assigned to Warrant Officers Wilhelm Bonwitt and Michael Ullman.³² Both were Germans, likely Jewish, who had escaped from Nazi Germany; Bonwitt, for instance, escaped to the UK in 1933 and was sent to Canada in 1940, following the mass rounding up of ‘enemy’ nationals.

The fact that between 1940 and 1945 this unit had been part of the DMI meant that they also knew how to track down the scattered evidence collected over the previous years. This was not necessarily intelligence explicitly describing a crime. Rather, the starting point of any investigation proved to be the very simple fact of establishing which German unit was at the location of the crime in question. This was the kind of information the DMI had, and the kind of information Scotland’s interrogators were already using during the war to confirm what prisoners were telling them. Having been part of the wartime interrogation system, WCIU were also in the know about CSDIC and so were able to informally use its reports to find where they stood in relation to specific individuals, even if they could not use that material to prove someone’s guilt. Former CSDIC staff also joined WCIU in 1945, including Captains Egger and Hay, in order to support WCIU’s use of microphones. During the war, and although concealed microphones were seen as strictly a CSDIC method, PWIS(H)’s London Cage was deemed special enough to also have microphones hidden in some of its rooms. What warranted this special status was the fact that the Cage – which was not part of CSDIC – was interrogating in depth prisoners who had intelligence in areas not covered by CSDIC but which was of interest more generally, as well as cases of prisoners who had tried to escape from their camps.³³ This is why it had its own special status within the interrogation hierarchy – not as important as CSDIC but more important than other cages.

Those microphones kept recording after 1945. The process surrounding secret listening at the Cage does not appear to have been written down, which is unsurprising, but Scotland once described it when updating JAG about a specific case. The case concerned two Gestapo officers who had served in Italy, where they were involved in the torture and executions of Italian partisans. In updating JAG, Scotland explained that the ‘the usual [London Cage] process’, was used with them:

It was possibly after they were ‘brought to gather again’ that secret listening was used, otherwise why would two suspects be placed together in that sequence? Unlike CSDIC, however, neither the wartime nor post-war London Cage seems to have produced verbatim reports of what prisoners were saying. And it is difficult to see how the Cage could have produced such material, because it did not seem to have the necessary staff for it. Rather, the Cage likely had a process that was less regimented than CSDIC’s, one which would allow interrogators to informally gauge whether a suspect was hiding something, but without writing everything down; having written notes also ran the risk of such transcripts being leaked, deliberately or otherwise, and frustrating the course of trials back in Germany.

These various strengths – the linguistic expertise, the use of microphones, the DMI experience – combined to make the quality of WCIU’s work very high, which turned them into the main team investigating war crimes in Britain. Their work consisted of several different tasks. One of their main priorities was screening prisoners en masse. Screenings were usually done by having prisoners fill up specific forms, where they would declare their particulars and history, and then the information would be cross-checked with Crowcass. This task had initially been delegated to individual prisoner-of-war camps, but some did not have access to Crowcass and others did not know how to establish whether a prisoner whose name was on Crowcass was the same as the one in their camp – which was often the case with common surnames such as Koch or Müller.³⁵ And so WCIU had to do much of that work. Then any matches (or close matches) would be interrogated by WCIU in order to establish what was going on. A further screening exercise concerned SS personnel in particular. Some 25,000 SS members of all ranks were in Britain at the end of the war, but very little was known about which divisions they belonged to, and nobody had considered whether those divisions were now part of investigations, be it by Britain or others. This was another task assigned to WCIU: they asked the 25,000 men to fill in ‘special pro-formas’, which WCIU then assessed and selected a few thousand for interrogation.³⁶

There were also prisoners whose names were not on Crowcass but who had been denounced by fellow prisoners, or whom camp staff suspected were hiding something. For instance, when a camp in Sheffield realised that one of its prisoners used to be a member of the Bremen Gestapo, the next step was for WCIU to travel to the camp and interrogate him about his past. Their conclusion was that the man, who was indeed in the Gestapo, was ‘of low intelligence and rather frightened. He is not dangerous, of no value for War Crimes and is only anxious to “work his passage”’.³⁷ Dozens such cases were investigated, and for most of them the verdict was that the man was of no use to investigations. But to formally reach that conclusion, the prisoner had to be interrogated.

In parallel with these various siftings, which spanned from 1945 into 1947, the core of WCIU’s work centred around a hundred or so cases of war crimes they investigated in depth. Once it was ascertained that there was a case to be investigated, WCIU had to work backwards to identify whom they needed to interrogate. Sergeants Gerhard (Gary) Leon and Martin Eversfield – both of them refugees from Germany – were responsible for tracking down where specific individuals were, having ‘developed their own method’ of hunting down suspects and witnesses. That method, which required them to know what kind of records were kept by Britain and other Allied powers, made them into ‘the most successful team in this difficult operation’. Identifying and locating people was an incredibly difficult task and some cases worked out through nothing more than luck. As an example, a ‘Hauptmann Jung’ was wanted after a British prisoner accused him of ill-treatment – Jung was the doctor in charge of a hospital for British prisoners in Kloster Haina, and had a habit of forcing amputated and injured prisoners to walk to the station where they had to report with all their luggage, some 9 kilometres away.³⁸ He would also lock them up in the hospital with the windows shut and refuse to order artificial limbs or allow the British doctor to access surgical instruments.³⁹ When searching for Jung, the only information held other than his approximate age and height was that he was ‘not unlike Mussolini in appearance’.⁴⁰ The resemblance must have been striking because he was located the next day and brought in for interrogation.⁴¹

Miscommunications, however, caused many complications to WCIU’s already complex work. When WCIU interrogated Lieutenant Leo Rosenau about the death of 106 British prisoners in Bayreuth, they found discrepancies between his statement and the affidavits implicating him; a ‘freezing order’ was issued so that he would not be repatriated until the matter was clarified.⁴² But having been taken to a hospital in the meantime, Rosenau was repatriated as a sick person by mistake.⁴³ He was eventually located and sentenced to two years, but much additional labour was spent in searching for him.⁴⁴ More stress was caused by the sheer disorganisation that existed within the relevant bureaucracy. For example, when Pantcheff was working on the Emsland investigations, he was looking for Werner Schaefer, former Commandant of the Emsland, and Willi Herold. The two had already been arrested and were in British custody, though no one had informed Pantcheff, and so he travelled to Germany to look for them himself.⁴⁵ ‘The left hand very often doesn’t even know of the existence of the right hand, never mind what it’s doing’, he remarked upon learning that they had for a while been in British hands.⁴⁶ Similarly, when a WCIU detachment team visited Belgian camps and identified witnesses for cases they were working on, these men were then accidentally released.⁴⁷ An additional month was spent trying to find enough of them, illustrative of the kind of problems that were frequent and which made a difficult job even more so.

Once a suspect or witness had been located, in-depth interrogations would follow. Approximately 3,600 individuals were interrogated in detail by WCIU about specific war crimes cases, and their interrogations usually took place either at the London Cage or the Kempton Park Cage. Interrogations, however, were not simply aiming for a confession. Both British and American trials saw fewer admissions of guilt than Soviet ones, which ‘almost always’ produced one, many of them no doubt unwillingly.⁴⁸ Interrogators instead aimed to obtain verifiable details which would corroborate admissions of guilt or be used to prove them independently. For this reason, the aim was to interrogate more people than just the main suspect. As part of the effort to obtain verifiable information, identification parades were also organised so that the identity of suspects could be confirmed by witnesses, while for some of the cases, such as the Emsland, interrogators would also visit the location of crimes to gather evidence themselves – which occasionally meant exhumations in order to establish the number of victims.

All four zones of Germany, various parts of Europe and even Russia were visited by WCIU interrogators in the process, looking to find people and evidence. For example, in spring 1946 Major Terry visited the Dachau camp in the US Zone to interrogate General von Falkenhorst, who was eventually convicted for implementing Hitler’s ‘Commando Order’, stipulating the execution of Allied commandos after capture. He then visited Rotenburg and Korbach, also in the US Zone, to identify witnesses for other trials.⁴⁹ Then Terry went to Bückeburg to appear as a witness in a trial, after which he proceeded to France for further interrogations.⁵⁰ In another case, an entire WCIU detachment travelled across Germany and Belgium for three weeks in order to collect evidence for a number of different cases involving the murder of British prisoners of war. To identify those who had any information, they first visited nine internment camps, where the team of three screened 28,000 SS members. Of those, they interrogated some 765 and then made arrangements for around 60 of them to be transferred to the London Cage for in-depth questioning.⁵¹

Alongside their own cases, WCIU also assisted other Allied nations with their own investigations. At the very minimum, WCIU would notify others about people of potential interest – ‘the American, French, Belgian, Dutch, Jugoslav, Polish, Czech and Russian investigators’ all found out about people of interest through WCIU.⁵² An important example of such liaison concerned the Yugoslavs. It was on account of Major Terry that they were notified that some 1,500 members of what used to be the SS Prinz Eugen and the SS Handschar divisions were now prisoners of war in Britain. Even though this was now 1947, these divisions had committed horrific crimes against thousands of civilians, partisans and prisoners of war in Yugoslavia, and so the Yugoslavs – who were holding their own trials – were more than eager to investigate them. Accordingly, those 1,500 prisoners could not be repatriated until those investigations were completed, all of them in Britain.⁵³ In cases where Allied investigators would arrive to interrogate suspects, if those investigators did not speak German, WCIU would serve as interpreters.⁵⁴ In other cases, they were asked to interrogate people on behalf of other nations. Between December 1946 and February 1947, for instance, WCIU interrogated eighty-five individuals on behalf of others. For example, Allied powers left it up to WCIU to interrogate their suspects if those people were in hospital and could not be moved.⁵⁵ A further way in which WCIU served the interests of others was when it came to repatriation. From early 1947 onwards, when repatriation was underway, WCIU was instructed to individually screen prisoners of war who were to be repatriated to allied and neutral countries (as opposed to Germany and Austria), in order to notify those countries of any potential war crimes suspects they were about to receive.⁵⁶

The administrative work of WCIU was immense, as a result of these tasks. Leaving aside the screenings and siftings, the workload was substantial for those cases that were investigated in depth alone. All of the material produced had to be translated, mainly by the ‘highly efficient’ Sergeants Rapp and Siegal, supported by staff from the Adjutant General’s Corps. This is because while almost all interactions between WCIU and prisoners were in German, not everyone associated with trials – in some cases not even the prosecutors – spoke German.⁵⁷ And so all material had to be translated into English. The process of circulating reports – 1,000 of them were eventually produced by WCIU – was also painstaking, since those documents had to meet the standard necessary for JAG to decide whether a case merited prosecution. This involved a number of steps.⁵⁸ The lead interrogator would make a draft report of each interrogation, which would then be checked by the second interrogator who was present during the questioning. As the interrogation had been in German, the same process would be repeated to create an English translation, and both the English and German versions would then be typed up and dispatched to the appropriate recipients, which always included sections of JAG and of the DMI but on occasion others, such as the Admiralty, the Air Ministry and the French War Crimes Commission. This elaborate process was necessary so that any documents produced could be admissible in court, if a case was to go down that route. This may make the WCIU establishment sound like a large organisation, when in reality, in January 1946, WCIU had ten officers and ten other ranks.⁵⁹ If anything, by March 1947 its intelligence staff was reduced to seven officers and nine other ranks; and right before winding down in August 1948 there were only three officers and two other ranks.⁶⁰ So, at its strongest, WCIU’s intelligence section was a team of merely twenty-two people.

Yet despite how immense and necessary it was, WCIU’s work was constantly undervalued. When Ullman and another warrant officer, R. L. Richter, arrived in Bückeburg to interrogate prisoners, they discovered that no accommodation had been arranged for them by the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), nor had the people they wanted to interrogate been made available.⁶¹ An officer even refused to give them a car for what he called the purposes of ‘swanning around Europe’.⁶² This dismissive attitude was seen as a response both to Ullman and Richter’s ranks and possibly the fact that they were not British, and demonstrated a total lack of appreciation of WCIU’s work. While Scotland did give BAOR headquarters a piece of his mind for judging his men’s work based on their ranks, the director of personnel services also intervened to explain that WCIU ‘undertake interrogations of a very specialised nature and almost all their cases are exceptionally important due to the enormity of the crime or to the complexity of the case’.⁶³ Knowing that this kind of work was being undervalued, and to avoid Pantcheff from finding it difficult to get things done when he was conducting investigations on the Continent in 1945, Scotland also appears to have given him the insignia of a major (Pantcheff was still a captain at that point). In a letter to Scotland (which Scotland took home with him and the War Office recovered with other documents in the 1950s), Pantcheff told him: ‘Well, this crown you gave me has been a great help to me – in fact to us all. It makes things so much easier that it will be very hard to take it down again when I get back. People here are really very cooperative when you hammer at them.’⁶⁴

If this was indeed a crown to make Pantcheff look like a major, he did not have to abandon it for too long once he returned home, as he was soon promoted to (temporary) major. And while this does say something about Scotland’s irregular tactics, the fact that WCIU was put in this position of having to use false insignia to be able to investigate war crimes also reveals how their work was perceived. That the enormity of the task facing WCIU was not comprehended is also clear from the expectations that existed in 1945, when the decision was taken to convert PWIS(H) into WCIU. There was a realisation that these interrogators would be useful, but exactly what they needed to do to identify war criminals and investigate cases was nowhere near being realised. As such, the expectation was that WCIU would last up to four months.⁶⁵ In the end, WCIU continued for thirty-three months and until September 1948, the point after which no new war crimes trials would be initiated by Britain.

5.3 Procedural Justice

Knowing that a crime occurred and prosecuting it were two different matters. Even within the narrow remit of what type of crimes Britain could prosecute, the task of investigation was enormous. And it was assigned to a small team. Those who had to identify the suspects on paper also had to locate them physically, interrogate them (usually several times), translate their statements and, if needed, organise exhumations or search crime scenes for more evidence. Only then could JAG decide whether the case would be prosecuted. All these tasks also had to be done by the book, as much as possible, so that the resulting evidence could be admissible in court. This only added to interrogators’ duties, especially when it came to statements which prisoners wrote themselves, giving their version of events:

What would be discussed in court if a case reached that stage was of paramount importance, both to WCIU and to the government. Britain could not be seen by the Germans as holding show trials, forcing confessions or fabricating evidence. Indeed, when instituting British courts in Asia for Japanese war criminals, it was thought that the machinery for them ‘need not be as elaborate as that for war criminals in Europe’.⁶⁷ Even small slip-ups were seen as major incidents that had to be avoided. In one trial in Germany, the (British) judge was infuriated when the counsel for the defendant did not show up. He adjourned the case and reported the incident to his Chief of Staff, saying that ‘the court room as usual here was packed with Germans … you can judge for yourself the view the Germans take over such incidents’.⁶⁸ Aspects such as giving enough time for German lawyers appearing for the accused to prepare their defence were also key, and it was considered important to give them at least two weeks’ notice ahead of proceedings.⁶⁹ And while it was not a requirement for counsels on either side of a case to be legally trained,⁷⁰ there was an effort not to use trained British lawyers to prosecute when the defence was carried out by a non-legally trained individual – again so that ‘the German public [was] to be suitably impressed with the merits of the British Judicial procedure and the justice of the trial’.⁷¹ The overarching concern was therefore to give the opportunity for the accused to be properly defended. How often these ambitions were met is unknown. Proceedings were still invariably far from perfect. Reflecting on the Emsland trials, Pantcheff (who attended those proceedings) remarked that ‘witnesses for the prosecution … get away with much more than they would if they were cross-examined properly, and witnesses are called for the defence who, when cross-examined by the prosecution, do more harm than good to the defendant’s case’.⁷² The reasons for such instances, however, seemed to have been contextual rather than deliberate. From when the question of legal proceedings was raised during the war, a key discussion point was the different legal systems that would be involved. In the case of British military trials, and despite efforts to make proceedings fair, the fact was that German lawyers were trained in a civil rather than a common law tradition. There was also the problem that for years, German lawyers were practising whatever Hitler said was law.⁷³

Despite these inescapable imbalances, the aim of not being seen as holding show trials was not simply an unspoken ambition but one that was constantly mentioned – by investigators, judges and politicians – and steps were taken to uphold proper standards. As part of this, it was also considered ‘indispensable’ to have WCIU’s interrogators present at the trials of those they had investigated. Even the ‘most willing of prosecutors [could] never master the detail of background’ that interrogators had acquired. Being more familiar with cases than the prosecutors, interrogators had to be physically by them in court in order to ensure adequate interpretation of evidence, especially because ‘small details of misinterpretation if undetected may cost a man his life, and if detected lose the court much time in argument and discussion’, as Pantcheff put it.⁷⁴ How much judges ultimately relied on WCIU’s evidence is unknown, because judges would not write down their opinions, only the verdicts.⁷⁵ But the amount of work WCIU ended up doing was down to the fact that the quality of investigations was at the heart of this broader aim to conduct trials properly.

The professed concern with legal process may appear to be hypocritical, considering that, at its core, trials were a form of victor’s justice. But the trials were only an element, albeit a major one, of the policy that Britain was pursuing in Germany. Another was re-education: ‘re-educating’ the Germans away from Nazism and communism and towards more Western democratic norms. This policy too had its origins in the war but was soon adjusted to post-war realities. Developed by the Foreign Office, it was aimed first towards the German prisoners in Britain, with the aim then being to extend it to schools and universities in the British Zone. In very literal terms, the aim was to use educational activities – English language courses, lectures on politics and history, discussion groups, books and propaganda newspapers – in order to make German soldiers see the value of democracy. Then, when they returned home and assumed civilian positions, they would be inclined to adopt political outlooks that were compatible with the West, this way guarding against communism or a Nazi revival. The large-scale effect of this policy was likely very limited, even if it did influence some soldiers at an individual level. Nor is it implied here that the sole aim of war crimes trials was re-education – they had much more to do with punishing perpetrators as well as with setting legal precedent.⁷⁶ For Britain, however, re-education remained an overarching aim and framework during this period: the idea that a future war could be forestalled ‘by drastically changing the political behaviour and social outlook of the German people through a fundamental restructuring of all the means of opinion and communication’.⁷⁷ The way trials were being conducted had therefore to be compatible with the image Britain was trying to project in Germany.⁷⁸

The Germans were not, in the end, impressed with the trials. That the German public would be watching carefully was something that became obvious in the opening session of the Belsen trial – the first in a British court – which was attended by some 400 people.⁷⁹ In the Ravensbrück trial the following year, 120 extra seats were allocated to members of the public, as attendance had turned into a German ‘social convention’.⁸⁰ Far from being apathetic, ordinary Germans were involved in proceedings – at least initially – and the concern with how these trials would be perceived by them extended beyond the courtroom. From at least spring 1946, the Air Ministry made it its practice to write to relatives of German airmen suspected of war crimes and inform them of their impending trial, ‘to protect them against the shock of a newspaper report’.⁸¹ But unlike later generations of Germans, those witnessing these trials had fundamental doubts over their legality and morality, especially as they continued to go on for years and alongside Germany’s occupation. The chief criticism was that military personnel should never have been tried for their actions, because these were dictated by the specific political context in which they existed. And so they called these people not war criminals but ‘war-guilty’ and ‘war-convicted’, a narrative that eventually led to many of them being released in the early 1950s.⁸² It was also the case that for the Germans, Britain’s trials were happening alongside those of the other occupying powers, as well as alongside the parallel ‘denazification courts’ through which former members of criminal organisations – the SS, Gestapo and so on – were also being given prison sentences and prevented from holding positions of influence.

It was not just for the Germans that life was beginning to move on from the war; in Britain too there was a sense of fatigue associated with the trials, creating a pressing need for the government to show tangible results from this pursuit. Yet progress could not be easily assessed. The concerns with procedural justice on the one hand and the enormity of investigations on the other meant that on paper things moved very slowly. In terms of actual trials being held, Britain was not prosecuting nearly as many as it thought it should be, based on the resources spent on investigations. As early as October 1945, and although in theory BAOR in Germany had 695 cases to prepare prosecutions for, in reality it only had the accused for fewer than half (40 per cent).⁸³ In other cases, the suspects were in custody but witnesses had not been found.⁸⁴ Then there was the international politics dimension. Britain predominantly investigated cases committed against non-Britons and so would then hand over the case to the country whose nationals were the victims, so that they could try them and give a sense of justice to their publics – as promised in Moscow in 1943. So just because a suspect was in British custody and Britain may have built a case against them, this did not always mean Britain would prosecute them. For reasons that had nothing to do with a lack of evidence itself, these cases would be delayed, extradited and some simply shelved. For those that did end up in court, concerns with process meant that proceedings would not last a matter of minutes but could often go on for days.

But trials were a politicised topic, and soon enough progress became a question of headcounts rather than the substance of the proceedings. In November 1945, the Attorney General, Hartley Shawcross, even set a target of how many individuals he wanted to see tried in Germany in the next six months. That number was 500 people.⁸⁵ When he announced that figure, those involved in the investigations and trials dismissed it as completely unrealistic. The critics included Major-General Chilton, Commander-in-Chief of BAOR.⁸⁶ His criticism was based on the fact that a single case often concerned multiple victims and accused, requiring hours for investigations and then time to prove it in court.⁸⁷ His scepticism proved well-founded, for the target was nowhere near being met when the six-month deadline arrived in April 1946. At the end of that month, only 65 cases had been tried in British courts in Germany, involving 189 individuals.⁸⁸ This was not even close to half the number that Shawcross wanted to see. It was not until a full six months later, in October 1946, that April’s target was met.⁸⁹ Writing in his memoirs years later, Shawcross thought the failure to hit his target was down to the reluctance of the War Office to organise these trials, calling their efforts ‘dilatory in the extreme’. ‘[I]f instead of Montgomery I had been in charge of the matter’, he told Prime Minister Attlee, ‘we would have got much nearer to our targets’.⁹⁰ Yet by looking at WCIU’s work, it is clear that Chilton’s reasoning was closer to the truth.

This leads to the broader point that the pursuit for war criminals was full of conflicting realities. While British policy itself was narrow in terms of what crimes it would cover, this made no one’s job easier because it was combined with the very broad commitment to investigate all suspects in British control. This proved impossible to execute, because of the scale of Nazi criminality and also geography. In the final months of the war, as the Soviet advance was unfolding, concentration camp staff were moving north-westerly to escape, and many ended up in what became the British Occupation Zone.⁹¹ Put simply, there were many more ‘minor’ war criminals in British custody than was anticipated. The broad commitment to investigate any war crime committed by anyone under British control was formally abolished in 1947, when the focus turned exclusively to cases in which the victims were British servicemen. Even among this smaller group only the most serious cases were to be investigated and prosecuted. The other conflicting reality had to do with the length of the trials. There was a strong political desire to win over the Germans as part of this process, but there was also political impatience when the resulting trials were not swift. Similarly, the investigation teams on whose shoulders all of this fell were receiving little assistance and were operating on meagre resources. The counterparts of WCIU in Germany – the War Crimes Investigation Unit – noted this tension in an exasperated note to BAOR in June 1946. In it, they pointed to the contradiction between the pressure to work even faster to achieve the same thorough results, while their numbers were constantly being cut due to demobilisation.⁹²

The result was that investigations were inevitably slow and only hindered further by various factors, but those investigations were conducted as properly as possible. This was, in many ways, a thankless task. It was only the fraction of cases that ended up in court that counted, not all the cases investigated; the disparity was considerable. And it was the trials that grabbed the attention, not the investigations behind them. It is, of course, understandable that it is not the procedures that stay in memory but the gruesome details made public in courtrooms, as well as the characters of the accused. But all of that was made possible because of those who, like Pantcheff, Terry, Ullman and Bonwitt, tracked down people, took statements, searched crime scenes, translated documents and made everything available for presentation in court. Many of those efforts were put into investigating crimes that never reached a British court. Some reached Polish, Yugoslav, French, Greek, Soviet, Dutch, Belgian courts and so on; others were simply shelved. But they were investigated as much as the evidence allowed. Like many others involved in intelligence, the people doing these investigations spoke little of their efforts. Not only was their work allowed to be forgotten, but it also seemed not to have been recognised at a formal level at the time either. At the end of 1946, Scotland recommended six of his interrogators – including Terry and Pantcheff but also Ullman and Bonwitt – for OBEs and MBEs. He had received an OBE in 1919 and saw his interrogators as deserving some kind of formal recognition for their work as well. None of them appears to have been awarded the honour at that point and for that work.⁹³

The town of Alyth in Perthshire, Scotland does not come to mind when thinking about the war criminals of the Second World War. Neither does Bourton-on-the-Hill in Gloucestershire, Bourton-on-Dunsmore in Warwickshire or Colchester in Essex – or any place in Britain for that matter. Instead we think of Nuremberg. But Nuremberg was only one part of the ‘justice’ story. For someone to end up in a courtroom in Nuremberg (or Hamburg, Gdansk or Paris and so on), they had to be taken there from wherever they ended up after the war. Often this was a camp in rural Britain: close to 1,000 camps existed across the United Kingdom, and at their peak they accommodated half a million German and Austrian prisoners. A case against war criminals was built long before they stood at the dock. It started with on-the-spot interrogations in these camps, and continued with more intensive interrogations in London, sometimes accompanied by evidence-gathering missions across Europe. Then, if deemed suitable for prosecution, the evidence and the prisoner were dispatched either to legal teams in the British Zone of Occupation or extradited elsewhere.

Pursuing these ‘minor’ war criminals presented a completely different set of challenges to pursuing people like Hermann Göring and Joachim von Ribbentrop. First, these suspects were difficult to identify. Beyond the legal questions surrounding what counted as a war crime and the political questions surrounding which cases were worth pursuing, there was the basic problem that the authorities did not always know who was who, and where they were. Take the example of Alyth, which WCIU interrogators specifically visited in December 1946 in order to interrogate a single prisoner. The request came from the Foreign Office, which had received a letter denouncing the man as a member of the SS (something he had not disclosed) and a ‘dyed-in-the-wool Nazi’ who had burned synagogues in Konigsberg. Somebody had to go to Alyth, interrupt him from the kind of labour most prisoners were doing while waiting for their repatriation – from feeding chickens to construction – and check whether he was a war criminal.

It is not clear whether this specific man in Alyth had served in the SS and then lied about it, but many others did. When WCIU was asked to screen all prisoners ahead of the commencement of repatriation in 1946, to make sure no wanted men would slip through, they discovered several ‘undeclared’ SS members detained as regular soldiers in places such as Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Yorkshire. It was precisely the fear of being implicated in war crimes that made them lie. Organisations like the SS – as well as the SA, the Gestapo and others – were declared as criminal by the IMT and their members were automatically considered suspects. Hence they hid their identity, and so WCIU had to drive all over the country to check who was who.

The second challenge facing the investigations, other than finding the suspects, was finding witnesses. The value of witnesses to investigations is another reality that a singular focus on Nuremberg can hide, because the strategy that the American prosecutorial team in particular adopted in the IMT placed a heavy emphasis on documentary evidence. Put simply, in those proceedings they wanted to prove Nazi criminality using Nazi documents – orders, directives, minutes.¹ With ‘minor’ war criminals, documentary evidence usually did not exist. Take the case of a prisoner interrogated in March 1946 in the camp in Bourton-on-the-Hill. He had boasted to fellow prisoners that in Brest he had dragged French civilians out of a shelter and shot them, point blank. One of the other prisoners told the camp staff and they told WCIU. When confronted, the man claimed not to remember saying this, let alone to having committed the crime. His explanation was that he may have ‘led these friends [prisoners] up the garden path (for lack of other topics I several times dished up as “experiences” things which I dreamt)’. Another possibility, he surmised, was that he concocted this story in order to prove his Nazism, after being accused by another prisoner of being a social democrat.² What kind of document could prove whether he had actually killed civilians, or whether he was just a troubled man? Only eyewitnesses could, or his own confession. Neither was forthcoming, and so WCIU decided not to pursue him further. Many similar cases were reported to WCIU in the months after the war, some of which could not be investigated in any meaningful sense. Witnesses were therefore imperative to these investigations.³

That only this type of case – concerning specific incidents against Allied civilians or prisoners of war – was pursued may suggest that the resulting investigations were parochial. This is not true. It was the policy that was parochial because it was unable and unwilling to capture the nature of the war. The persecution of minority groups, particularly the Jews, which was excluded from the investigation boundaries, still kept coming into view because the witnesses and survivors being interrogated kept referring to the perpetrators singling out Jews among them. But the policy was such that these references were not probed further. Still, the investigations concerned instances of cruelty and destruction that were indicative of patterns of violence during the war. These cases, in other words, did merit investigation. The distinction is that they should have been investigated together with other crimes, rather than instead of them.

The distinction between the policy and the investigations is important. And it can only be seen by looking at WCIU’s work on the ground. What can also be seen more clearly through the perspective of the investigations – in contrast to the legal or political perspectives – is the emotional aftermath of this war. The types of case investigated were ones based on people’s own words and very little else. This renders the history of these investigations a history of the interactions between investigators, those they suspected and those who had witnessed crimes being committed. Through such a lens, it becomes possible to appreciate at a human level the messiness of this search for justice.

6.1 Suspects

The examples of Alyth and Bourton-on-the-Hill may sound arbitrary, but they illustrate certain recurring problems facing WCIU. The first was that ascertaining who was detained in the country and what exactly they had done during the war was far more difficult that can be imagined. Cases such as the man in Alyth who concealed his true past eventually led to WCIU having to screen all prisoners ahead of repatriation. Precisely because some prisoners were trying to evade detection, everyone was viewed with suspicion, regardless of any involvement with criminal organisations. Was the soldier Herbert Kuhnert now in Britain the same Herbert Kuhnert whom the Dutch wanted to prosecute for mistreating Allied airmen in Oberursel in Germany? The information he had given about where he had served and in what capacity did not match those of the wanted man, but on its own his words meant little. It was only after WCIU interrogated him that they confirmed that he was not the wanted man, as he was on the Eastern Front when his namesake was in Oberursel.⁴ Was Ferdinand Hibel, wanted for the robbery and murder of a Jewish family in Amsterdam in December 1942, the same Ferdinand Hibel who was now in Britain? This also proved not to be the case, as the man being held in Britain joined the German forces two years after the crime was committed.⁵ And when the more common name Ludwig Wagner appeared both on Crowcass and as a prisoner in Britain, it was WCIU that had to establish whether this was the same man, now wanted by the Dutch for a murder in Liessel in 1944 and one in Ridderkerk in 1945. They interrogated him about the whereabouts of the unit he claimed to have been in, matched what he told them with existing intelligence they had from others from his unit and confirmed that he was telling the truth. They could prove that the soldier they were interrogating in mid-December 1946 had never served anywhere near Liessel, and that he was already a prisoner at the time of the Ridderkerk murder.⁶

The reason why only WCIU could clear up such cases fairly quickly was their familiarity with the German military and their access to intelligence from the war, helping them to pinpoint where each German unit was at a particular time. Other cases were less straightforward. This was true for a prisoner who gave his surname as ‘von Alten’, until intelligence reached WCIU from Germany in late 1947 that his real name was Schaffstein. A check through Crowcass returned that surname as a member of the Geheime Feldpolizei who was wanted by the Belgians for murder. In the meantime, ‘von Alten’ was laying low in a camp in Roxburghshire, Scotland, keeping himself busy with correspondence he had established after putting ‘an advertisement in the Berlin papers asking for female pen friends’.⁷ Although he was taken to the London Cage, WCIU did not manage to get to the truth, not least because he kept changing his story which made him look all the more suspicious. The recommendation was to send him to Belgium where an identification parade could be held to establish whether he was indeed Schaffstein.

The second problem facing WCIU, which can already be gleaned from some of the cases mentioned, was the strange dynamics that existed in prisoner-of-war camps. Group dynamics and cliques are bound to develop in any place holding a number of people for a prolonged period. In this specific case, these were defeated soldiers who had been raised in Nazi Germany. The dynamics that developed between them continued to reflect Nazi social norms, adapted to post-war realities and confusion. Denunciation, which had been institutionalised in Nazi Germany, became a frequent occurrence, though now it was the Nazis who were the target. Violence, once normalised and glorified, was something many instinctively wanted to boast about but could no longer do without consequences. With their most senior leaders having killed themselves and the rest standing trial, many of these young soldiers took it upon themselves to debate the reasons for defeat and Germany’s post-war fate. Such discussions were, after all, encouraged by the Foreign Office’s ‘re-education’ policy, which introduced such discussions as part of the activities made available in camps. They also formally sorted prisoners into Nazi, non-Nazi and anti-Nazi categories (based on criteria that Henry Dicks had developed in CSDIC in 1943–1944), and eventually prisoners discovered which label they had been assigned. Those labels were then used to determine who would go home first, something which only fuelled existing enmities between those considered Nazis and the rest. There were of course stories of friendship in those camps, but politics remained central and governed both the interactions between the prisoners and the bureaucratic mechanisms that developed to manage their detention.

One of the effects of these dynamics is exemplified in the prisoner in Bourton-on-the-Hill claiming that he had not actually killed civilians in Brest, but had only claimed to have done so in order to prove to the other prisoners that he was not a social democrat. He may well have killed them, but the label of a liar was preferrable to that of a war criminal. Yet his logic – that he was using this story in ‘self-defence’ – did not appear absurd to WCIU because many others had similar stories. Using an atrocity to prove one’s politics, unthinkable as it sounds several decades on, was part of the logic of the time. A similar case was that of a man who told various stories in his camp about civilians being murdered in Italy and France. When interrogated, he said that those stories were imaginary and used, again, almost in self-defence. He claimed that other prisoners wanted to kill him because he was an anti-Nazi, and so talking about murdering civilians would make them leave him alone.⁸ Others seemed baffled at themselves for what they had claimed. When interrogated, a man who had been boasting about shooting a soldier and other similar incidents involving civilians, refused to have done anything like that: ‘I have been piecing things together from the newspaper reports and boasting. There had never been any foundation to my story. I really do not know the reasons for my bragging. Now I wonder how it was ever possible to tell such tales.’ On being pressed further, he added: ‘I do not know why I told this. I must have been mad. At the time in question I was in great anxiety about my wife and children, as up to this day I have not had any news from home. The shooting story is not true.’⁹

At the other extreme were prisoners well aware that they had committed war crimes and terrified of being discovered. But they still needed to tell someone, either to get it off their chest or to quietly boast. This was the case of Richard Kaaserer who was taken to the London Cage from Norway, after he told a prisoner that ‘his activities in the Balkans could prove his undoing unless he succeeded in hiding the truth’. The interrogators found that he was an Austrian who had joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932. He had had to leave Austria soon after due to his subversive Nazi activities, and was ‘a brutal and unscrupulous SS type’.¹⁰ Soon after his interrogation in January 1946, he was extradited to Yugoslavia where he was tried later that year. His activities in the Balkans did, in the end, prove his undoing and he was hanged a year after his interrogation.

Denunciation was the other side of this coin. German soldiers were betraying other Germans not just because denunciation was institutionalised in Nazi Germany, but also because they saw war crimes as unsoldierly. Take a case that unfolded in Botesdale in Norfolk in April 1945. There, a prisoner reported to the commandant that one of the other prisoners was thought to have murdered Allied pilots in France. The rumour was that his unit, despite being ordered to capture plane crews who made emergency landings, would sometimes shoot them instead in order to ‘make short work of it’. His report was sent all the way to the Under-Secretary of State for War, and was then assigned to WCIU (still operating as PWIS(H)) to investigate.¹¹ They found the suspect – a dairy farmer – to be an ‘uneducated, unobservant and unintelligent’ man, known in his camp for ‘telling tales, the veracity of which is in inverse ratio to its bravado’.¹² They did not exclude the possibility that he may have killed prisoners of war, but more witnesses were needed to determine the truth. As he was not prosecuted, witnesses were likely not found. What is more interesting was the reasoning of the prisoner who turned him in, however. He told the commandant that he wanted to report this case because he did not ‘want to live and go back to Germany together with people of that sort, who call themselves soldiers’.¹³

Rivalries also played a role in determining who would denounce whom. Some of the investigated prisoners suspected that they had been framed. This was the case of a prisoner accused of shooting a British soldier in Normandy in 1944. After interrogating him, WCIU confirmed that the man had indeed shot a British soldier, but that this may have been a soldier killed in action, not a prisoner of war who was not given quarter.¹⁴ There was a general suspicion that Allied soldiers killed after D-Day were deliberately not given quarter, with the interrogator characteristically saying that by June 1944, ‘Germans were made to realise that particularly every American soldier was the source of good and plentiful supply of cigarettes and also of wrist watches. These were more easily obtained from dead men that from living [prisoners]’. Yet he continued that this general suspicion could not be proven in this specific case.¹⁵ This is also when the suspect claimed that his fellow prisoners were trying to frame him by twisting the facts of the case.

There is, of course, the possibility that this too was a genuine allegation which simply lacked further evidence, but it appears that WCIU tended to err on the side of caution and simply move on. Even in cases with more convincing evidence, WCIU were still inclined to explain away what had happened. An example concerned two prisoners who claimed that their commander had given them a no-quarter order in August 1944. There was little doubt in the interrogators’ minds that the men were telling the truth, not just because their stories matched but also because they had been warned that they too could be implicated in a court case against their commander. They still stuck to their story. Yet after interrogating the company commander, WCIU believed the order was given ‘in a spirit of carelessness than cruelty’. What led them to that conclusion was that the officer ‘was in action for the first time’ after being treated for a severe head wound. This, they continued, made him ‘possibly afraid that his nerves might be unequal to the strain of a situation which was already hopeless’, and so he ordered his company to spare no one.¹⁶ This suggests that, with some of the interrogators having seen active fighting in this war, they occasionally had sympathy even with war criminals. That this was their personal opinion, however, did not stop WCIU from sending the facts to JAG, and JAG deciding to prosecute. A court soon after found the officer guilty of issuing that order; it also found one of the two witnesses guilty, and both received short prison sentences.¹⁷

The personal views of WCIU did not change the evidence. Their opinions would determine how quickly they would abandon a case without ready evidence, but they would not affect the evidence itself. Take the case of a suspect – also a company commander – whom WCIU did not like due to his uncooperative manner and because he had lied to them before. What existed against him was a single testimony that he had given a no-quarter order in June 1944. That, WCIU believed, must have been true. But they could not find any further evidence to support this. They interrogated twenty-eight soldiers from his company and none of them, other than the initial witness, could recall being read such an order.¹⁸ With no further evidence, the case had to be shelved. Whatever WCIU’s opinion of a prisoner, it was ultimately the evidence that mattered. Another example was a prisoner who used to be in the Gestapo. His camp (again the one in Bourton-on-the-Hill) only learned this in June 1946 via another prisoner – an anti-Nazi – who recognised him.¹⁹ After interrogating him in August 1946, Major Terry bluntly concluded that ‘although we do not like the man there is nothing we can pin on him’.²⁰

Many of those interrogated as suspected war criminals were, quite simply, odious characters. But WCIU were conscious that they were looking for evidence of war crimes, not evidence of fanaticism or of other behaviours. In one such case, WCIU found a prisoner to be a fanatic Nazi but not a suspected war criminal. The man was still openly devoted to Nazism in mid-1946, something he put largely down to his anti-Sovietism. So strong was the latter that he declared he never wanted to see his parents again, as they were now caught up in the Soviet Zone of Germany. The conclusion that WCIU reached was that this man was ‘likely to prove a rough cog in any machine, and would upset his fellow prisoners anywhere’. They advised to send him to a non-working camp in order to avoid disturbing prisoners who wanted to work.²¹

Even in cases where WCIU, with their evidence-based mandate, had managed to gather enough to warrant someone’s prosecution, successful prosecution was not a given. One example was Heinrich Albers of the 12th SS-Panzer Division, who admitted to shooting Allied prisoners of war in June 1944.²² His pulling of the trigger was also supported by the testimonies of members of his division, one of whom recalled seeing the prisoners being led away and ‘after a very short while I heard the rattle of a sub-machine gun’.²³ But Albers claimed that he was only following orders, ‘as we had learned as soldiers’. He maintained this during his trial and was acquitted. Many more used the ‘superior orders’ defence during their interrogations. An example was SS officer Fritz Kranebitter who had been head of the Gestapo in Verona. He admitted to arranging the execution of seventy Italian partisans from the Fossoli prison but claimed only to have done it because of superior orders.²⁴ He was never prosecuted for war crimes by the British – who possibly saw this as a case for the Italians – or the Italians. His superior, Generalleutnant Wilhelm Harster, was also interrogated about the treatment of Italian partisans.²⁵ There were other crimes Harster had committed which were nevertheless outside of WCIU’s remit, notably those concerning the fate of Italian Jews and Dutch Jews, with Harster’s previous wartime service having been in the Netherlands. In both countries, Harster oversaw the rounding up of thousands of people to extermination camps, and it is for that reason that the Dutch were looking for him. He was extradited there and found guilty, but was set free eight years later. In the 1960s, his case was reopened and he was sentenced by a West German court to fifteen years’ imprisonment for his role in the Holocaust. He was shortly afterwards released early again.

Cases such as these also show how genocide was something that WCIU kept encountering but not specifically probing, resulting in people such as Kranebitter and Harster being investigated about seventy Italian partisans but not about thousands of Italian Jews. Hans Aumeier, Auschwitz’s second-in-command and for a period its deputy commandant, was interrogated about gas chamber executions and other ways in which inmates were ill-treated and murdered, but there was no discussion about who they were and why they were targeted. Possibly by monitoring his conversations at the London Cage, his interrogators knew that Aumeier was still withholding details about how many people were murdered and the method of their killing, and was known to have told other prisoners that ‘if the Allies want to know any more let them find out’.²⁶ Later in 1946 he was extradited to Poland, where he was sentenced to death and was hanged almost two years after his WCIU interrogation.

A kind of etiquette developed among Allied nations that resulted in people like Aumeier and Harster facing charges in court for crimes against humanity. Had it been that cases investigated by Britain could only be prosecuted by Britain, such people would have been charged for specific crimes against specific individuals, or may have been passed over entirely. Another example of a prisoner being extradited was Max Daume, who during the war was kept in CSDIC and gained a reputation as ‘an unpleasant type, an out-and-out Nazi and an opportunist’.²⁷ Yet he was released into a regular prisoner-of-war camp in Northumberland which had to discover for itself just how unpleasant he was when he started boasting of crimes he had committed in Warsaw. It was the camp, however, that made him sign a declaration on the spot of what he was saying, before WCIU got near the case. The resulting words were much more explicit than what was usually covered in WCIU documents, which were inevitably framed around events that could be covered by the Royal Warrant. ‘I hereby confess’ read the declaration the camp made Daume sign, ‘that I am responsible for the executions of Poles and Jews carried out by the Police Regiment Warschau at the time when I was Commanding Officer and later G1 Ops of this Regiment’. He continued that:

Before WCIU could be informed of the case by the camp, the Foreign Office was already aware because its own interrogators were in the process of screening the Northumberland prisoners into Nazis, non-Nazis and anti-Nazis for the purposes of re-education. The Foreign Office interrogators made Daume sign a further statement that orders for mass executions were issued at regiment level, that they targeted Jewish men in particular and that he was ‘aware of the fact that the Ghetto at Warsaw was designed with the intention of concentrating the Jewish Community into an extremely confined space in order to promote conditions conducive to an enormous increase in the death rate’.²⁹ He too was extradited to Poland where he was sentenced to death.

Who would try whom was not always clear from the beginning, unlike in Daume’s case. An example concerned the case of four generals involved in the occupation of Crete. They were wanted for a list of crimes including the mistreatment of Allied prisoners of war and Allied civilians, thus putting the cases firmly within the narrow borders of British policy. As with most cases, when WCIU were handed the case at the end of 1945, it was still unclear which German units were in Crete and when.³⁰ After scouring British and American intelligence reports as well as CSDIC’s transcripts, with a couple of the generals involved having spent time in Trent Park during the war, WCIU were able to make a proper start on investigations.³¹ What also helped was the vanity of one of the generals – Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, whose parachute regiment was involved in capturing Crete – who had already published his autobiography in 1943. That also enabled WCIU to piece together who was who in ‘Fortress Crete’.³² Eventually Ramcke – who was kept in the US – was sent from Missouri to London, four months after WCIU made a request for him.³³ Most of the senior figures involved in the occupation were also held in the London Cage: General Kurt Student, who took command of Crete for the first week of the occupation; Alexander Andrae who succeeded him for a year; and Bruno Braüer, in command for a further two years until mid-1944. Even details that may seem obvious had to be confirmed by WCIU, such as who Andrae was. When a search for him was made, there was only one Andrae in British custody but he had declared his rank as General der Artillerie, when the Andrae involved in Crete was known as a General der Flieger. Despite this being an unlikely coincidence, WCIU had to be sure this was the same man. They compared the prisoner’s signature with a wartime letter that Andrae had signed and confirmed that the two were the same (Andrae held both ranks during his career).³⁴ And even in this case another prisoner confused matters once again. He was taken to the London Cage to confirm whether he had taken part in the Battle of Crete, as his surname was similar to a soldier WCIU wanted to investigate. He confessed to witnessing and taking part in war crimes in Crete, but as it turned out, the man had never even been to Crete, he had lied about his real name and particulars, and eventually admitted that he was once treated for ‘psychopathic hysteria’. In the meantime, ‘the story which he had produced incriminated several German Generals and was a very full and detailed version of imaginary events’.³⁵ Once the interrogations of those involved in Crete commenced, all these figures were interrogated individually and in different combinations. The focus of those interrogations was the mistreatment of prisoners of war – not whether it occurred but whether it was the result of orders and if so from whom. Both Student and Andrae refused issuing such orders; the latter even attempted to pin crimes on the prisoners themselves.³⁶ With affidavits from Allied prisoners of war, however, enough evidence was gathered to prosecute them for what had happened under their watch.

The next logical step would have been for Britain to present the evidence it had pieced together in a British military court. Yet there was no British ‘stake’ in this case, other than the fact that the investigation was largely done by WCIU. The Allied prisoners who suffered were not British and the civilians who suffered were Greek. After the investigation, the generals were therefore divided up among different nations. In the case of Ramcke, who was also implicated in a case concerning the murder of French civilians, the French claimed him and he was extradited to France where he was eventually tried in 1951. Despite being found guilty, he was released on account of his long pre-trial detention.³⁷ Instead of Ramcke, Britain tried Kurt Student, who received a short prison sentence for crimes committed under him during his week-long command of Crete.³⁸ His successor, Alexander Andrae, was extradited to Greece where he was hand-delivered by Major Terry in January 1947.³⁹ He too received a long prison sentence later that year but was released early in 1952. His successor, Bruno Braüer was also handed to Greece, who found him guilty and executed him by firing squad in 1946.

The case against Otto Wagener, who in the final year of the war was Commandant of the Eastern Aegean and Military Governor of the Italian Dodecanese, also fits this pattern of WCIU investigations being tried in a non-British court. With his headquarters in Rhodes, there were several accusations of what happened there under Wagener, including that Greek and Italian prisoners of war were ill-treated, Red Cross parcels intended for the islanders were appropriated, local produce was sent to Hitler when the population was left to starve and that Wagener also had gold secretly buried there. The fact that many of Rhodes’s Jews ended up in the gas chambers of Auschwitz was not specifically investigated. A handful of his officers, as well as Wagener himself, were taken to the London Cage to establish the story and the evidence. A German lieutenant taken to the Cage as a witness warned WCIU that one of Wagener’s associates, Helmut Meeske, who was also now at the Cage, had already approached him to make their ‘statements tally’.⁴⁰ He told WCIU that both Wagener and Meeske ‘were heedless in matters involving lives and held summary trials on their own initiative’. A second officer serving as a witness spoke of civilians dying ‘almost daily of hunger and weakness’. Both these officers were joined by others in concluding that the casualties suffered in Rhodes were ‘to a great extent attributable’ to Wagener, who was described as an ‘unscrupulous, ambitious, and opportunistic megalomaniac’.⁴¹ As for Wagener himself, he made a faint attempt at self-reflection during his interrogations:

The four key witnesses – all of them German officers – provided enough evidence to have him prosecuted, together with Meeske and a few others interrogated by WCIU about the case. Yet once again, when the investigation was concluded it was felt that it was not up to Britain to prosecute, as no British prisoners appeared to have been deliberately mistreated in Rhodes. It was instead up to the Italians to prosecute those involved in the Rhodes case, since it was the Italians who had controlled most of the Dodecanese.⁴³ A year later, in December 1946, the Italians decided to apply for Wagener, Meeske and seven others – which also meant that up to that point, both suspects and witnesses had been kept in limbo in Britain.⁴⁴ Four of them, including Wagener, were found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment, and the remaining five, including Meeske, were acquitted. The four found guilty were released by 1951, as part of broader releases of fascist and Nazi functionaries by the Italian government.

There were of course also cases which WCIU investigated and Britain did prosecute. One of those considered among the most complex as well as important was the shooting of fifty Allied airmen attempting to escape from Stalag Luft III near Sagan, Poland in spring 1944. The interrogations spanned from at least December 1945 to the end of August 1948 – the entirety of WCIU’s existence. With Sagan now under Soviet control, and many suspects and witnesses living as free men, it was mainly through WCIU (with assistance from the RAF’s Special Investigation Department) that a case was built against eighteen individuals, most of whom were interrogated by WCIU.⁴⁵ All eighteen were eventually convicted.

6.2 Witnesses

Identifying the accused was never enough: there also had to be witnesses. Witnesses, however, were generally not afforded any special treatment. To start with, in line with WCIU’s effort to stick to the facts, witness statements were scrutinised rather than accepted at face value. One example concerned the killing of Polish nationals in Graudenz in November 1939. As the massacre was unfolding, a Polish man managed to hide behind a bush and watch what he estimated to be around 180 people being murdered. He was then made to join the German forces and so six years later he found himself as a prisoner of war in North Burton, Yorkshire. In his camp was also a soldier – a Pole of German descent – whom he recognised as being one of the perpetrators of the Graudenz massacre. When he confronted him, asking him ‘how many people he killed in Poland’, the man responded ‘not many’.⁴⁶ It is then that the witness reported the case to the commandant, and eventually both were interrogated by WCIU.⁴⁷ The suspect, after having been read his rights, denied any involvement in the murders. Instead, he put the allegation down to ‘personal spite’ on the part of the witness.⁴⁸ The interrogators, too, questioned the witness’s motives. What they thought was particularly strange was that he was able to recognise the man some six years later. They also made much of the fact that the witness had initially said that the accused was wearing an SS uniform during the murders. Yet as a Volkliste 2 German, he would not have been allowed to wear it. Instead – and based on the accused’s own admission – he was in SA uniform in 1939. When this was put back to the witness, he responded ‘it might not have been an SS uniform but was certainly SA uniform’. Witnessing 180 murders may well explain the discrepancy, but it was still pointed out rather than glossed over, perhaps because if WCIU did not question it, a defence counsel further down the line would.⁴⁹

Despite these details, an identification parade was held at the London Cage where a third prisoner also identified the man as one of the perpetrators of the events in Graudenz. The interrogators themselves thought that the suspect was a type ‘well capable of having committed the deed and, although denying it stoutly, he was shaking from head to foot during the whole interrogation’. They also found in his ‘Ausweis der Deutschen Volksliste’ certain stamps that signalled he had ‘obtained favours from the Germans’ and that he was ‘undoubtedly a traitor of Poland’.⁵⁰ He was eventually prosecuted by Britain but was found not guilty.

Not only were witnesses not treated with any favour, in some cases giving evidence worked to their detriment. When Ramcke was being investigated in relation to crimes in Crete, a German non-commissioned officer was brought from the US in order to give information on Ramcke’s other crimes in France, and specifically the murder of civilians by German troops in Brest. He arrived in May 1946 and gave evidence that was considered important for whenever Ramcke was to go on trial. As a result, a ‘freezing order’ was issued for the witness. Many other witnesses had a ‘freezing order’ in their name – as did the accused – which meant that regardless of their political outlook and reliability, they could not be repatriated without special permission. In the case of this specific witness, and because there was a debate about whether Ramcke was to be tried by Britain for his crimes in Crete or by France for his crimes in France, the witness was stuck in Essex, whose Camp 186 was earmarked for those with ‘freezing orders’. In February 1947 he finally took the initiative to write a letter to remind the authorities that he was still in Essex, and pleaded with them to let him return to Germany where he was the sole breadwinner for his family. He was repatriated later that year but given he was considered an anti-Nazi, this was at least a year later than he would have otherwise returned home.⁵¹

What is more obvious to us today is that some of these witnesses were, to varying degrees, also victims. The Polish man in Graudenz was a victim of the war in more ways than one – witnessing whatever unfolded in front of him in 1939, then being made to fight for Nazi Germany and then having to convince WCIU that he was telling what he believed to be the truth rather than trying to frame an innocent man. Another example was a German prisoner who had once been an inmate in Dachau and was then forced to serve in the German army. He was brought in to identify a senior SS officer who had served in Dachau and who was being investigated for the mistreatment and death of Allied nationals there.⁵² This witness too was a victim of the regime. Victimhood in WCIU’s investigations, however, had a narrower definition, one that applied only to those who had died. Those who managed to survive were neither automatically trusted nor was their suffering consistently recognised.

There therefore seemed to be little incentive for witnesses to share all they knew, other than their conscience – especially those witnesses who came forward first rather than because they were identified by WCIU, like the man who did not want to ‘go back to Germany together with people of that sort, who call themselves soldiers’. But many witnesses who had managed to survive the ferocity of Nazi violence now saw it as a duty to speak for those who no longer could. Take the example of the Emsland camps. Systematic investigations began in the winter of 1945, and the case soon began ‘to grow like a snowball’.⁵³ Prisoner-of-war camps in the UK were duly searched for inmates and guards, all of whom would have ended up in British hands. At least twenty-seven prisoners were interrogated and signed affidavits within a month of investigations being initiated, where they corroborated each other’s accounts about beatings, forced labour and murder. Some 1,000 people were interrogated in the following months, but those first witnesses – almost all of them Germans who were imprisoned by the regime for desertion or similar – were enough to give WCIU a good idea of what the Emsland camps were about.

Central to those testimonies was that of Heinz Kuckelsberg-Alexander, a German who was imprisoned for ‘undermining the fighting spirit’. When Willi Herold’s group aimed their gun carrier at the 130 or so prisoners they had arbitrarily rounded up in April 1945, Kuckelsberg-Alexander was watching from the window of his hut. He watched the whole terror unfold, and it is he who first described it in detail to WCIU. He also told them of other shootings he saw, including an instance where one of Herold’s men, drunkenly walking outside prisoners’ huts, decided to pull his gun and shoot towards them from the road. His bullets killed four men. Another bizarre experience he recalled was when, amid these rampages over the course of a few days, Herold tasked him to throw a party for his men. The reason Kuckelsberg-Alexander was asked to do this was because he was serving as prisoner-clerk of the camp administration. Having to oblige, he chose some of his fellow prisoners who were musicians and artists, and together they organised a ‘festive’ evening for those they had witnessed execute people like themselves. They also had every reason to believe they would be next. Between the singing and drinking, Herold told them that ‘not one of the prisoners must imagine that he will fall into the hands of the English alive’.⁵⁴ In fact, one of the prisoners knew for certain that he was due to be executed by them in a matter of hours. What he did not know was that Kuckelsberg-Alexander, by including him in this absurd event, had managed to remove his name from a list of those about to be executed and thus saved his life. Aside from the Herold affair, Kuckelsberg-Alexander reported more long-term patterns of behaviour in the camps, such as a cook who would let food rot before feeding it to the prisoners, the guards regularly hitting prisoners, the information on death certificates being falsified and his own testimony that he had witnessed two prisoners being murdered – all before Herold had arrived.

Not only did his evidence help interrogators reconstruct events in much more detail than they otherwise would have been able, he had also saved crucial documents about the management of the camps. Various important documents passed through his hands during the war, including the fake order that Herold used and the personnel files of officials and guards. Aware of their importance, Kuckelsberg-Alexander bricked up some of those documents behind a hollow wall, in the hope that they would be found after the collapse of the regime. He probably did not expect to live and be the one to recover them, but he did. After WCIU interrogated him, they took him back to the Emsland to unbury them. They were then studied by Kuckelsberg-Alexander and WCIU’s Staff Sergeant Arthur Morgenthau – another of WCIU’s German refugee staff – who spent over a month sifting through those documents together.⁵⁵ The evidence was then sent from the London Cage to the Legal Division of the Military Government in Germany as part of a special consignment of documents, from which the legal cases against Herold and others were built. These documents were so valuable that WCIU sent along one of its interrogators, a captain of the Gordon Highlanders, to escort and hand-deliver them.⁵⁶ Although he was relied upon, Kuckelsberg-Alexander does not seem to have been afforded any special status – Pantcheff referred to him as ‘our stooge’.⁵⁷

One of the other Emsland witnesses stressed that while everyone in the Emsland camps suffered, the Jews among them were singled out for the worst treatment, including one of them being beaten to death for stealing a hen. Others mentioned witnessing prisoners being operated on with kitchen knives and no anaesthetic; prisoners being given injections that would give them a fever; and that guards would be awarded leave and some money ‘for every man they shot whilst trying to escape’. Another former inmate – a man who had deserted from the Eastern Front and was for this reason imprisoned – spoke about prisoners not being given enough to eat and being regularly beaten. Another deserter who came from a communist family spoke of being forcibly sterilised, being made to walk barefoot in the snow, and repeating others’ claims of regular beatings as well as insufficient rations. Another German who was imprisoned for ‘undermining the fighting spirit’ was the barber of the camps. He too gave the names of those he had witnessed mistreat prisoners.⁵⁸ A prisoner who had been an inmate both in the 1930s (after being arrested for smuggling currency) and the 1940s (after deserting) said that while the treatment of prisoners was poor in the 1930s, it was during the war that physical brutality began. He recalled how in July 1940, an inmate was made to wear six tunics and, hardly able to move in them, was beaten up and made to push a cart full of sand over a heath; he died the next day. All of these people spoke freely and at length.

Another of Emsland’s German deserters was Rudolf Buegler. What he was able to tell WCIU was not just what he had witnessed – including an inmate being beaten to death, and that he too had been severely beaten – but he was also able to name some of the guards responsible for such beatings.⁵⁹ One of them was Anton Eiting, who too was eventually brought before WCIU. His account followed a familiar pattern of partial admission. He admitted to committing certain acts but minimised their significance:

Those involved in the administration of the camp followed a strategy similar to Eiting’s, including a guard who said that although guards used to get drunk at night, they were never drunk during the day and that prisoners were never ill-treated. Or a judicial officer who said that only one case concerning ill-treatment had ever come to his attention. Some of the senior camp officials interrogated by WCIU also completely denied knowledge that anything was wrong in the Emsland camps. They said that cases of ill-treatment were few, that there were no problems with the food and they could not remember the names of any permanent staff. Since most of the Emsland victims were Germans, most of the cases were handed over to Control Commission courts that had been established in Germany. This meant they would be tried under the German penal code, albeit under a British judge.⁶¹ The dozens of testimonies were therefore not for nothing.

Being Nazi camps, the Emsland network was, of course, not a unique place. A former inmate interrogated at the London Cage happened to have also been held in a German prison in Norway as well. His claims of conditions in the latter were similar to Emsland, including inmates being awaken from sleep in the middle of the night to run in a snowstorm, occasionally being made to work for twenty-four hours straight and witnessing prisoners freezing to death in their sleep. Those victims were simply thrown from a cliff into the snow. Nobody noticed until spring came and the snow melted. That was when the locals complained of the stench, and the prisoner now at the Cage was among those who had been sent to bury the bodies properly. He remembered counting forty corpses.⁶²

But while the Emsland complex was not a unique camp by Second World War standards, for WCIU it was unique in that it had multiple survivors. Other cases they investigated did not. This was especially true for cases that fell into British policy’s remit that concerned single events. This was why many cases had to be dismissed as ‘rumours’, since they could not progress. Even cases supported by a handful of survivors were still thwarted. The most striking example was a mass murder that took place in Wormhoudt in Northern France, a short distance from Dunkirk. There, at the end of May 1940, ‘the savagery which developed in the hearts of the frustrated enemy’ led them to murder over eighty British prisoners in a barn. Only thirteen were thought to have survived the massacre and twelve of those the war. Upon being assigned the case, the first task for WCIU was to ascertain which German unit was in the area at the time. The evidence pointed to the 1st SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (initially the Bodyguard Regiment of Adolf Hitler, one of the most fanatical units).⁶³ A trip to the Continent allowed WCIU to confirm which specific company was involved and to start identifying individuals they could interrogate. These, together with the few British survivors, allowed WCIU to reconstruct as much as possible the events of that day.

In the chaos that was France in late May 1940, British soldiers from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, the Cheshire Regiment and the Royal Artillery were all trying to reach Dunkirk from different directions. They were driven by German tanks towards a river which they could not cross, and thus surrendered. Instead of being given quarter, they were forced to start walking, with wounded prisoners being shot and stabbed if they walked slowly. Eventually the men – only one of them was an officer, Captain Lynn-Allen – made it into a barn. Once inside it, they realised that the plan was to murder them. When the first German escort grabbed his hand-grenade and went to throw it towards the prisoners, Captain Lynn-Allen tried to reason with him. The escort knocked him down and threw his grenade; the other escorts did the same. Two of the men, Stanley Moore and Augustus Jennings, heroically fell on two of the grenades to try to save their comrades. But the SS were determined not to let anyone survive. They re-entered the barn to identify who was still alive, and of those they dragged the first five outside, lined them up and shot them. Then the next five were lined up in the same way. One of the wounded soldiers saw the executions outside from gaps between the planks. He saw the five men being dragged outside, turned to face the wall, but on their own volition they turned to face their killers. Not wanting this back-and-forth to continue for long, the SS men simply entered the barn one last time and started firing at the bodies. They waited for a while, to make sure nobody was moving, and left.

One of the few who survived was Private Evans. In the explosion caused by the first grenades, Evans’s right arm was shattered. But in the ensuing commotion, he was pulled outside by Captain Lynn-Allen and together they managed to leave the barn and take cover in a pond. Their hope was that the trees surrounding the pond would hide them. But they did not. An SS man still spotted them and shot at them from the distance. Both went underwater though miraculously, Evans came back up within seconds. With a shattered arm and now shot twice in the neck, he stayed in the water for some twenty minutes to try to find his captain. When he got out of the pond, he could still hear shots being fired in the barn, these being his comrades being executed. He gathered whatever strength he had left, walked to a farmhouse which was occupied by a German medical unit who saved his life. The remaining survivors too gathered their strength and found help nearby, while the rest of the bodies were buried by the barn, who knows by whom.⁶⁴

As was to be expected, there were discrepancies between the multiple statements obtained. Many of the SS members interrogated only spoke of seeing the prisoners being led into the barn, and also repeated the official German version of the story, which was that one of the prisoners shot at one of the escorts and the massacre was in retaliation. Some also gave information that proved the incident was known about at regimental level, and a few said that Wilhelm Mohnke, the commander of the Second Battalion, had given an order to kill the prisoners.⁶⁵ One of the SS men interrogated had witnessed Mohnke, on being presented with the prisoners, ‘raving’ at the platoon leader of the company that captured them, and then ordering him to take them to the barn and ‘eliminate them’. Being interrogated by WCIU in 1947, this witness said that he had heard Mohnke telling the platoon leader, ‘What do you mean by bringing in prisoners contrary to my orders’. Having very likely witnessed the exact same interaction but from a distance, one of the British survivors described a ‘German officer who looked like a Prussian … giving orders to his subordinates’, and that ‘from his gestures I should say about ourselves. He was raving blue murder’. The big question was what Mohnke might say in his defence. This was to remain unknown because he was in Soviet custody. Despite WCIU’s numerous interrogations and their trips to Wormhoudt, the Soviets appeared unwilling to give information on his whereabouts, let alone extradite him. The Der Tagesspiegel even published that he had died in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, but WCIU believed that he was still alive somewhere in the Soviet Union. They were right. He was alive and he remained alive until 2001, when he died aged ninety, never having faced justice for Wormhoudt. Nobody was ever tried for it. Perhaps it was believed that taking to court only those who escorted the prisoners – who would very likely plead superior orders, or contradict each other – would not stand up to legal scrutiny, and that not pursuing them was better than seeing them be acquitted.

What Wormhoudt shows is that, even for cases that were firmly within the remit of British policy, their prosecution was not a given. There were of course exceptions, the most comparable to Wormhoudt being Le Paradis, which unfolded only a day earlier. This too involved the rounding up and killing of around a hundred British prisoners, this time members of the Royal Norfolk Regiment. When WCIU became involved, it was once again unclear which SS unit was involved in the murders. Those screenings however allowed WCIU to close in on companies of the SS Totenkopf Division that were in the area, and from there they also obtained substantial witness statements against Fritz Knöchlein, the Commander of the 14th Company, who was eventually convicted and hanged for the crime. The witnesses included British and German servicemen but also French civilians, whom WCIU’s Ullman and Richter travelled to France to interrogate in November 1946.⁶⁶

Ultimately, the decision to pursue only war crimes did not make the process straightforward at all: the suspects were too many, the witnesses were either dead or very few, or they contradicted each other because war crimes happened in such conditions that testimonies were inconsistent (Wormhoudt and Le Paradis happened under general fire). Witnesses must have felt under an enormous burden. Their experience of giving evidence about such incredibly traumatic events can only be imagined, as can their feelings where justice in the form of a guilty verdict was not achieved. While the realities of war made investigations difficult, the realities of peace also complicated matters. Only in rare cases was the consistency of testimonies such that the suspect was not even interrogated about it. This was the case of Wilhelm Menzel, an officer accompanying prisoners of war during a forced march in early 1945. There were sufficient affidavits from British soldiers saying how Menzel assaulted them during that march that interrogating him for his own version was unnecessary. Instead, he was interrogated on the general conditions of the camp, as well as more generally on the march, with a view to obtaining evidence against others.⁶⁷ A couple of months later, in February 1946, a British military court in Hamburg found him guilty of mistreating Allied prisoners.

6.3 Closure(s)

For interrogators, too, the investigations were hard. Their job was no longer what it used to be during the war, when they were confined to a camp, isolated from other operations and usually in the dark about what would happen to the information they were extracting. Now, this had completely changed. The nature of their work, together with resource pressures, meant that interrogators would not merely interrogate whoever was put in front of them but also see investigations through from start to finish. It is hard to see how prosecutions would have been possible without them. That they took this job seriously is clear from how they performed their job, where they tried to stick to the facts, checking and cross-check information, even trying to see the other ‘side’ of the story whenever possible and assessing the evidence in the way a court would.

But while they did try to remain objective in their judgement, they were not indifferent to what they were doing. Each investigation, even the straightforward ones, required hours of work. The more complex cases stretched over months and years. For Emsland alone, the number of people interrogated across Europe was huge, resulting in 400 statements being written up and translated.⁶⁸ And then there were the exhumations, the funerals and the trials, with people like Pantcheff always present. When investigating a case like that, the emotional strain was enormous; a few of the interrogators visiting Emsland as part of the investigation into Herold and his men admitted that occasionally one of them would get ‘to the stage of dreaming about the bastards’.⁶⁹ Whenever that would happen, the team would take the cue and take the day off. It was therefore not just the physically demanding nature of the job that made this work difficult. It was the enormity of having to investigate the crimes of a war they had themselves experienced. Interrogators also were, in various ways, victims of that war; some were refugees who had escaped Nazi Germany while others had seen active service, been taken prisoner or lost loved ones. Even those who spent the war at home had worked for the war effort without rest. Now, after the stress of six war years, they were still deferring their return to civilian life until some kind of conclusion was reached with trials.

The problematic judicial framework surrounding the investigations must have been the most exasperating aspect for interrogators, though they never seemed to complain about it. What must have been deeply frustrating was the fact that, as some investigations unfolded, they proved to be outside the scope of British policy. In some cases, this simply meant extraditing the prisoner. In other cases, however, it meant dropping the case entirely, simply because it no longer fitted specific criteria rather than because the investigation had run out of steam. One of the first and most significant such examples concerned the two SS concentration camps and two Organisation Todt camps in Alderney.⁷⁰ The reason why Britain wanted to investigate these camps was obvious: this was likely a case of war crimes involving a Crown dependency. And so Pantcheff was sent to make the first inquiries on the ground. When he arrived on the island of Alderney on 5 June 1945, there was little on the ground to examine due to the ‘scorched earth’ strategy employed upon surrender. It took the screening of over 3,200 people to begin to understand what had happened there during the occupation, to draw up a timeline and a table of personalities involved in Alderney’s administration and to reconstruct the layout of one of the camps.⁷¹ With no reliable documents indicating the number of victims and their nationalities, let alone their cause of death, Pantcheff visited local cemeteries to open up a number of graves in order to establish the number of victims himself. Despite Pantcheff’s painstaking searches, four periodical reports he produced between June and September 1945, and various testimonies he had obtained confirming that the camps were marked by hunger, beatings and exhausting work (which were the cause of hundreds of deaths), it was decided not to pursue the case due to the majority of the victims having been Russians and Eastern Europeans. The evidence was instead passed on to the Soviets, who did nothing. Incidentally, Kurt Klebeck, the SS-Hauptsturmführer who had responsibility for one of the camps, was later prosecuted in a British court for his deeds in Hanover, but this was a matter of chance (and he was released in 1952). When WCIU’s files were declassified in 1992, the question of extraditing Klebeck to the UK to be tried for Alderney was brought up in Parliament, though the matter was shut down quickly because it was against the German constitution to extradite Germans.⁷² For Pantcheff, what he learned during those investigations were not things he could simply forget. Neither was the fact that the case was dropped. Years later, in 1981, he decided to tell the story himself. He published a short book discussing his investigations and what he believed happened in Alderney, where he had now retired. He dedicated that book ‘to all those, of whatever nationality, who died in Alderney … and who were therefore unable to speak for themselves’.⁷³

It was unavoidable that this kind of work would weigh heavily on interrogators’ conscience. Much as they tried to be dispassionate towards those they were interrogating, they still felt a need to do right by the victims – even if, as in the case of Alderney, this meant writing their story years later. Perhaps the right way to describe what interrogators must have been looking for was closure for their cases. Closure seemed to be what WCIU’s Michael Ullman was also seeking when he travelled to Germany – from which he had escaped in the 1930s – for the last time as an interrogator in the autumn of 1946, including to finalise the Wormhoudt investigations. That was the trip in which he and Richter were not taken seriously due to their non-commissioned officer ranks. When Alexander Scotland wrote to BAOR to complain on their behalf, he thought it important to say that this trip was to be Ullman’s ‘final act before he left the Army and we brought the accused into court’. It was as if BAOR had deprived Ullman of the opportunity to gain closure on a crime he spent months investigating. Scotland went on to ask that Ullman be assisted ‘so that when the story is given to the press … we can disclose that all possible guilty prisoners are in the bag, and all witnesses are waiting ready for the trial’.⁷⁴ This was the impression interrogators were under: that a case like Wormhoudt must get some kind of closure in court. That this never happened must have cost them, as it must have cost the few British survivors.

In this context, it is hardly surprising that ‘poetic justice’ was sought – as in the Emsland exhumations, where the bodies were dug out by the accused on Pantcheff’s orders. Nobody could guarantee to WCIU that those they knew for a fact to have been criminals would ever set foot in a courtroom. Having them dig up the bodies of those they had murdered was a way to secure some retribution, in case that was the only encounter they would ever have with the horror of their crimes. Poetic justice was also a more general, Allied attitude rather than one confined to WCIU, however. The Americans decided to detain some suspected war criminals in the premises of Dulag Luft, a wartime Nazi interrogation centre notorious for using torture against British and American prisoners. Then, two of the Anglo-American camps for high-ranking Nazis were codenamed ‘Ashcan’ and ‘Dustbin’. Other examples included calling suspects names or having them do chores they were not used to, such as officers being made to clean their own cells, something that was normally done for them by lower ranks.⁷⁵

The line between poetic and vigilante justice can however be very thin, and that line seems to have been crossed on occasion, not so much by WCIU as an organisation but by its Commandant personally. What contradicts the professionalism of WCIU as it has so far emerged from its investigations are the few allegations of mistreatment made against Alexander Scotland and the London Cage in particular. A small number of such claims were made at the time, and some cases of excessive treatment were also described by Scotland in his own memoirs a few years after the war.⁷⁶ When he wrote his memoirs, and sent the 360-page manuscript to the War Office in 1954, it was decided that permission to publish should be refused because the book would reveal ‘some infringements of the Geneva Conventions’.⁷⁷ Potential infringements as proudly described by Scotland included the wartime case of a prisoner who was made to stand for twenty-six hours; another who had his ears ‘boxed’; and a case where Scotland challenged a prisoner to remove another prisoner’s appendix.⁷⁸ The latter occasion concerned two officers who lied that a third prisoner – a medical student – was a doctor so that he could get officer’s privileges; it is then that Scotland called their bluff, forcing them to admit the lie.

The unpublished manuscript also contained what can be described as instances of self-congratulation for the way in which Scotland, who saw himself an authority on the psychology of the German soldier, gained prisoners’ respect by demonstrating to them how familiar he was with their own language and culture. The officer who had his ears ‘boxed’, for example, suffered this beating because Scotland wanted to show him that he knew the disciplinary practices of the German army and would not hesitate to use them. He also wrote about one similar instance concerning the post-war Cage. This involved a British captain who seems to have been notified that a Gestapo guard who had ill-treated him was now detained at the Cage, and so he paid him a visit. Since the captain had no injury to formally complain about, Scotland told him he should ‘reconstruct’ the abuse instead – and offered to inflict it on the prisoner on his behalf. The prisoner consequently received a ‘mild version of the Gestapo treatment’ by having his hair pulled and being bawled at in German by Scotland, after which he was made to do chores around the Cage. He was released to a permanent camp two days later.⁷⁹ Even Robin Stephens, the commandant of MI5’s Camp 020, saw Scotland’s tactics as going too far. When Camp 020 was opened in 1940, Scotland was allowed to interrogate some of its prisoners. In one of his visits, he hit a German agent, something that led to Stephens and MI5 banning him from ever setting foot there again.⁸⁰

Beyond Scotland’s memoirs, a few complaints were made about the Cage to the War Office as they happened. In 1943, some commotion was caused within the War and Home Offices when Otto Witt, a German who insisted he was anti-Nazi, was detained at the Cage to establish whether or not he was an enemy agent. This was an irregular case because MI5’s Camp 020 had already opined that he was not, yet SOE insisted its own sources said otherwise. And so despite being a civilian, Witt was taken to the Cage, which also failed to incriminate him. After his removal to Dartmoor, Witt wrote a petition claiming to have been physically and mentally abused at the Cage, including being kicked and punched, and being told that information against his family would find its way to the Gestapo.⁸¹ ‘I confess I am not particularly shocked by anything which may have occurred’ at the Cage, wrote MI5’s Buster Milmo, indicating an awareness within British intelligence that the Cage was testing the boundaries of legitimate behaviour. Yet Milmo defended the Cage’s use of threats. The Home Office ‘appear to consider that enemy agents should be dealt with in a cotton wool atmosphere’, he continued, ‘and that it is improper to exploit fear as a means of extracting truth. To my mind this is indeed a shocking proposition when we are engaged in a total war against unscrupulous enemies’.⁸² Even less amused by the furore caused by Witt’s claims was Guy Liddell: ‘It seems incredible that two Secretaries of State should be drawn into a matter which involves a lying little Nazi having had his face slapped by a Czech [interrogator].’⁸³

Then in 1946, two German naval officers who had been interrogated about helping members of a commando unit flee France disguised as naval ratings complained that at the Cage, they were forced to change into a prisoner uniform and do chores. When confronted by JAG, Scotland wrote that the two prisoners had disobeyed an order, and so he forced them to do chores for forty-eight hours as punishment. He went on to remind JAG that ‘our success in this Cage is based on the strictest discipline being maintained as between [prisoner] and interrogator’, and that the two officers ‘connived in a crime in smuggling’ wanted men into the country.⁸⁴ In a way, as with war criminals following a certain format in justifying their criminal actions, Scotland too had his own format. He would admit to some kind of disciplinary action, caused by the prisoners’ own behaviour, explain why it was fair in the circumstances and remind the recipient of the criminality of the prisoner in question.

Further complaints were made by three more prisoners taken to the Cage for war crimes investigations. One was a prisoner interrogated in connection with Wormhoudt who claimed that he was punched during interrogation. A court of inquiry was called in 1947 to investigate, but having had his word on the one hand and the word of interrogators on the other, they found for the latter. They nonetheless expressed concern that the rules regulating interrogation were not put in writing.⁸⁵ The Cage was not exceptional in this respect – interrogations were not regulated by written policy, while in the Allied interrogations of war criminals on the Continent it was again up to individual officers to decide how to conduct themselves. Some believed Germans would only talk ‘under pressure’ while others preferred a more conversational approach.⁸⁶ A second complaint was made by Erich Zacharias, one of those convicted for the Stalag Luft III murders. He claimed that he was beaten up, deprived of food and sleep, and made to clean his cell with a toothbrush – which his lawyer claimed was a German army punishment and the reason that Scotland used it.⁸⁷ The allegations could not be proven and neither could similar allegations made by a third complainant, Fritz Knöchlein, responsible for the Le Paradis massacre.⁸⁸ When the question of an inquiry resurfaced in 1948 as a result of a petition by Knöchlein, who was attempting to have his death sentence for Le Paradis quashed, the Attorney General did not see reason for further investigation.⁸⁹ At around that time, the Manchester Guardian received ‘private letters from Germans and others’ about ‘beatings, strippings, ice-cold showers, and forced confessions’ while at the Cage.⁹⁰ Responding to that editorial, a former prisoner wrote to deny such events, instead saying that treatment ‘was always correct, and at times even friendly’.⁹¹

The fact that when the International Red Cross (IRC) asked to inspect the Cage in 1946 they were turned away does nothing to ease suspicion. The existence of the Cage deliberately remained undisclosed to the IRC though that policy dated back to the birth of the interrogation system in 1940, when neither WCIU’s predecessor nor any of the CSDIC camps were registered as prisoner-of-war camps to avoid them being inspected in case of an invasion. Such inspections had to be avoided not because prisoners were being mistreated but because their conversations were bugged. But the Cage was put on the IRC’s radar in 1946 when it was inadvertently included in a list sent to the IRC by the British. It was then that an official appeared to inspect the Cage unannounced, only to be sent away. The visit was permitted a couple of days later, when the official was able to talk to staff but not access the entire Cage or talk to prisoners.⁹² In a letter to JAG over the issue, Scotland was adamant that the IRC should not be given access to the entire camp because if such a visit were to happen, ‘the secret gear which we use to check the reliability of information obtained must be removed’.⁹³ He insisted on this in a second letter, saying that one visit by the IRC would be followed by a flurry of other requests, including by solicitors. ‘In my view’, he continued, ‘war criminals are not entitled to this form of protection and to grant it would often make interrogations useless and would to a great extent defeat the ends of justice.’⁹⁴ He was nevertheless ignored. By September 1946 – five months after the original visit – the IRC inspector was given access to the entire camp.⁹⁵ Some have speculated about what this ‘secret gear’ was and whether it was a reference to some kind of torture equipment. Almost certainly, it was the microphones.⁹⁶ In documents about WCIU’s staff, Captain Egger and Captain Hay are listed ‘as assistant interrogators and operators of special gear’ and elsewhere as ‘experts on the control gear operations’. That Egger and Hay were previously serving at CSDIC makes it far more likely that this ‘gear’ was actually the concealed microphones rather than anything more sinister.⁹⁷ The reality was that the Cage was bugged, both during the war and after. This was an exception to the general rule that only CSDIC establishments could be bugged, and much useful information was gathered that way: Scotland was already praising the value of the ‘indirect method of interrogation’ in 1940, as part of a plan to install microphones in other cages of WCIU’s predecessor.⁹⁸

Microphones also explain the contrast noted at the time between the effectiveness of WCIU’s investigations and the ineffectiveness of their counterparts in Germany. So reliable was the quality of WCIU’s material that other British teams in Germany, unable to match it, questioned what kinds of methods WCIU were using to obtain its evidence. When he returned from a trip to Germany, Pantcheff told Scotland ‘of the feeling of disquiet’ which existed in BAOR ‘about the methods we adopt here in London District Cage to obtain the seemingly wonderful statements by prisoners, in which they give considerable detail as to how crimes were committed … in many cases even complete confessions of guilt’.⁹⁹ The thinly disguised allusion to violence was taken up by Scotland, who wrote to BAOR to say that:

He continued with two further valid points. The first was the sheer number of prisoners who had passed through the Cage during and after the war – 20,000 during, and over 3,000 after. Only a fraction ever reported wrongdoing, even though it was clearly possible to complain against the Cage and those complaints were taken seriously rather than suppressed. The second point was that, ultimately, the prisoners now passing though the Cage could appear in courts in Germany, ‘and if this is to take place without bringing a blush of shame to the cheeks of our court officials, we must be at least humane in our treatment’. This was true. Some of those who were held in the post-war Cage were witnesses, others suspects; some were to be convicted, others not; some were sentenced to death, some to imprisonment and others were acquitted to live as free men. Even some of those convicted gained their freedom quickly due to amnesties granted in the 1950s. As an intelligence officer put it, the post-war Cage had become a ‘hot-house of guilt, defiance and fear’.¹⁰¹ It was the place where victims, witnesses and perpetrators all intersected. Had WCIU ill-treated prisoners systematically, the matter would have resurfaced much more, be it during trials or at a later time. Moreover, institutions such as the Foreign Office – particularly interested in German public opinion – held WCIU in high regard. When they received the letter denouncing the Alyth prisoner as a former member of the SS, they immediately asked for WCIU to visit him, because they saw it as ‘the best place to deal’ with such rumours.¹⁰²

Excesses clearly occurred under Scotland. He described them himself and appears to have been the one responsible for many of them. And they did not suddenly come about in 1945 when the Cage started dealing with war criminals, which could be explained by a desire for revenge. As Scotland put it to BAOR ‘[w]hat the average man would do with a [prisoner] who glibly talks of murdering thousands of helpless civilians or the brutal treatment and murder of our own chaps during the war I cannot judge’; the Cage was dealing with them so often that ‘any feelings of revenge against the miserable specimens of humanity we find connected with those crimes have long since disappeared’.¹⁰³ Any excesses instead seem to have been driven by Scotland’s own desire – both during and after the war – for recognition and never to have his authority or importance questioned. This was, after all, a man who in his memoirs claims to have had coffee and biscuits with Hitler, at a meeting requested by the Führer. ‘You are an ingenious man’ were Hitler’s parting words to him at some undefined point and place in the mid-1930s; ‘Now I can understand the reports we have on our files about you.’ This almost certainly imagined interaction is described in order to make it appear as though Hitler asked to meet Scotland to get his views on the ‘German colonial problem’ due to his knowledge of German South West Africa, as if Scotland were the only one who had ever been there. As Scotland was opining, an impressed Hitler was nibbling on plain biscuits.¹⁰⁴

Whatever his need for recognition – which seemed to loom large in everything he did – Scotland existed in a system that prevented abuses from systematically occurring: Scotland was not WCIU, and mistreatment was not part of the toolkit WCIU was using. Left to his own devices, Scotland may have more regularly exceeded what was acceptable because ‘to make the bully feel small gave great pleasure to certain interrogators’, most of all to him.¹⁰⁵ Those instances were nevertheless the exception, not the rule, and not what the work of WCIU was built upon. Rather, they were scouring the Continent, screening tens of thousands of people, interrogating them, holding identification parades and mediating between JAG, hospitals, camps and other nations’ investigation teams. Their investigations had hundreds of hours’ work behind them with huge amounts of material being written and translated, all in the hope that some of those involved would end up in front of a judge, where there would be ample opportunity to reveal any mistreatment inflicted upon them. Not only would British justice be humiliated, the suspects would also be acquitted.

What must also be particularly noted is the value of the microphones as a partial reason for WCIU’s success. While Scotland attributed much to his deep understanding and skilful manipulation of the ‘German mind’, even he acknowledged the value of microphones to the investigations. When writing up what he believed were the lessons learned from WCIU in 1948 – writing for future intelligence officers, not for the public – he stressed the importance of rooms ‘fitted up for interrogation’.¹⁰⁶ Microphones and experience, rather than abuse, were the secret behind WCIU’s effectiveness, with Alexander Scotland’s interventions in rare cases disrupting established norms.

On 1 November 1944, the most important people involved in interrogation attended a meeting in Camp 020’s Latchmere House. They included the commandants of Britain’s three interrogation units: CSDIC’s Colonel Thomas Kendrick along with his second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Rawlinson; Camp 020’s Colonel Robin Stephens; and PWIS(H)’s Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland. Also in attendance were other senior figures from MI5, the War Office and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), the central command of the Allied forces in north-western Europe. At that point, and although war still raged, everyone’s focus was beginning to shift towards peace. In the House of Commons that very morning, the first questions put to the government concerned German war criminals, post-war reparations and the terms of a hypothetical armistice. In Latchmere House, the question was whether to set up a new interrogation camp on the Continent. While the camps in Britain were at their busiest and no one knew how much longer the war would continue, it was clear that plans had to be in place for moving operations to the Continent in the near future.

For the War Office, the reason a camp would still be needed even after the war ended was to deal with the large numbers of soldiers that were being captured and would continue to be captured whenever Germany surrendered. For MI5, the concern was that the Abwehr would go underground; that Nazi organs, such as the SS and Hitler Youth, would reorganise; and that there was even a prospect of Nazi-Soviet collaboration against the West.¹ And indeed, once an interrogation camp did start to operate in Germany in 1945, one of its first tasks was to find out what kind of ‘testament’ and instructions Hitler had left behind. The prospect of a ‘Fourth Reich’ was dismissed fairly quickly after those interrogations, but in 1944 it was seen as a serious possibility. A week on from that meeting in Latchmere House, Stephens and Rawlinson travelled to the Continent to discuss likely locations for this camp as well as other details about its staff numbers and the seniority of their ranks. They returned on 20 November and put a proposal for an establishment to both SHAEF and the 21st Army Group.² It was agreed to set up a ‘hybrid’ camp as soon as possible, combining the microphones of CSDIC and the counter-espionage experience of Camp 020.

It would nevertheless be about a year before a permanent camp was actually opened, mainly due to the turmoil that existed on the ground in defeated Germany, long after the surrender.³ Millions were left homeless, sick and starving, and all this before even considering the psychological impact of the conflict – grief, depression, suicide and the uncertainty of what lay ahead. An enormous number of surrendered soldiers were held in Allied camps, hundreds of thousands of soldiers who made up the Allied invading armies were also there and so were the thousands of Allied officials being sent to establish the occupation. A country in which large parts were bombed out, where food and fuel were scarce, was now overcrowded. Famine and typhus were some of the problems that followed.⁴ For Britain, the task was finding a balance between imposing an occupation, guarding against Soviet infiltration of their Zone or a Nazi resurgence in Germany, and managing the food and health crises affecting millions.⁵

Finding that balance had much to do with identifying those who posed a threat while allowing the majority of the German population to resume some kind of normality. This had important implications for the role of intelligence. While in war it was there to support operations, in peace it would be at the forefront of international security. Interrogation in particular rose in prominence at this moment, because the other methods relied upon extensively in the recent conflict – air reconnaissance, signals intelligence – would not be as useful without a state of war. Even spies – the quintessential feature of the emerging Cold War – could not be expected to be as useful in the initial stages of peace, because new agent networks had to be established. In contrast, there was much opportunity for interrogation, with millions of prisoners and internees under British control.⁶

While some of these concerns were anticipated in the Latchmere House meeting in 1944, priorities had changed by the time it was possible for the camp to open in September 1945. Whereas initially the War Office wanted the camp to interrogate selected prisoners of war for operational intelligence as a matter of procedure – much like CSDIC in Britain – by September, and with demobilisation underway, they had limited interest in such an operation. They still wanted some soldiers to be interrogated, but these would be specific individuals with something in their past that needed to be investigated. The counter-intelligence needs of MI5, on the other hand, now took centre stage.

The camp that was to accommodate all of this was CSDIC(WEA: Western European Area).⁷ It was established in the spa town of Bad Nenndorf, near Hanover and its Commandant was Camp 020’s Robin Stephens.⁸ Yet the camp was closed down after about a year and a half following revelations about its abusive practices. In the interim, 416 detainees (including 44 women) passed through it. Those detainees reflected the changing priorities of the occupation: denazification, neo-Nazi activities and Soviet espionage. Some detainees were high-profile individuals, such as men who were in Hitler’s Führerbunker and whose testimony it was hoped would shed light on what went on there in the spring of 1945. Others were former officers or Nazi Party functionaries, some of whom were implicated in war crimes but who were taken to this camp for intelligence on how the regime functioned. Others were caught in the cross-currents of the early Cold War and were for various reasons suspected of working for the Soviets. Some warranted detailed interrogation, but others were taken there on little evidence or denunciations.

Thus, while the camp was meant to be a continuation of wartime practice, in reality it marked a radical departure. During the war there was a clear distinction between the interrogation of civilians and of prisoners of war, but no such distinction was made here. Civilians who had played no significant role in the regime were confined with SS and Gestapo officers. How people came to be held in this camp was also no longer the result of careful screening. There was, in fact, no screening system in place. Instead, there was only this one camp for anyone who required detailed interrogation. People would be detained there not through a single route but by several ones, including being sent there by MI5, the police or the War Office. Nor was it clear who had ultimate responsibility for the camp’s running: it was not under the War Office (as with the wartime CSDIC) nor could it be under the Home Office (as in the case of the wartime Camp 020), being in Germany. Since the camp was an intelligence matter, it was under the Intelligence Division of the British Control Commission, which was under the Foreign Office.⁹ Obviously though, civil servants were not interrogating prisoners; the camp was still staffed by MI5 and the War Office. This administrative structure was to prove highly significant, because it resulted in the camp not being subject to inspections and oversight, which the wartime camps regularly had been.

With the external context and framework destined to cause problems, the camp’s internal arrangements were also doomed in their own way. While in 1945 some of the personnel of the wartime CSDIC and Camp 020 had travelled to Germany to join CSDIC(WEA), demobilisation soon replaced most of them with new, unsuitable recruits. One reason why they proved to be unsuitable was that the salaries assigned to those in the camp were very low, which affected the type of candidate prepared to work there. The original proposals drawn up by MI5 and the War Office were later assessed to be ‘too luxurious’ for 1945 standards, and so the number of higher ranks was reduced in order to save money.¹⁰ The quality of this new staff was a source of frustration for Stephens who, two months in, reported that ‘We are having considerable difficulty in obtaining reinforcements of good character, and up to the present have had no less than 15 suspended sentence personnel sent to us … Quite clearly a large number of such personnel create a dangerous element’.¹¹

With some of the staff already having been tried by the army for crimes, discipline was unsurprisingly a problem, with recorded cases of warders stealing detainees’ property.¹² Also, not all staff were replaced. The resulting shortages necessitated several ad hoc measures, such as German prisoners of war being used to help with various tasks around the camp, including a doctor who assisted the camp’s medical officer. With the camp seeking intelligence on Soviet espionage, it also employed some Red Army deserters, despite the UK having agreed to turn all Soviet prisoners over to the USSR.

With the likelihood for escalation being arguably self-evident, it is impossible to pinpoint exactly when things started going wrong. But the particularly severe winter of 1946–47 across the Continent revealed the degree to which things had gone astray. So severe was the cold that it froze and destroyed the camp’s water system. Even the prized microphones that were hidden across the camp were destroyed due to the leaks at this point; nor does it appear that they were used much before then. More seriously, without water everyone in the camp (staff and detainees) had to use bucket latrines instead of proper lavatories, rendering the place not only ‘in an extremely dirty and neglected state’, but full of disease.¹³ While people across Europe were struggling to heat their homes, in the Bad Nenndorf camp prisoners were also staying in cells with broken windows and on beds without mattresses.

Cold and material shortages did not account for everything. The psychological strain in the camp was severe. Solitary confinement was common and many detainees spent days or weeks entirely alone. Solitary confinement was formally allowed, as it had been in Camp 020 during the war, but here it was pushed to extremes. And whereas in the war physical abuse of any type was prohibited, in this case some detainees spoke of being stripped and left naked in their cells as a form of humiliation and exposure. Sleep deprivation was also reported, with guards waking prisoners during the night to prevent rest. Food was another problem. Formally, detainees were on the scale set for non-working prisoners of war (2,200 calories per day), yet many lost weight incredibly rapidly. Across Germany shortages were severe, with rations much lower than 2,200 calories, but within the camp the problem was made worse by deliberate neglect. Four men upon release weighed between 49 and 56 kilos (108 to 123 pounds). These conditions combined to weaken prisoners physically and mentally before they entered the interrogation room.

Beyond neglect and intimidation, there is evidence that outright violence was also contemplated and likely used. An inquiry into the camp in 1947 found ‘documentary evidence of an agreed plan’ between three interrogators to ‘go beyond mental pressure’ when dealing with two detainees, suspected of planning a rising in Hanover on the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday:¹⁴ ‘the guards had apparently been instructed to carry out physical assaults on certain prisoners with the object of reducing them to a state of physical collapse and making them more amenable to interrogation’.¹⁵ Details of the plan were recorded on the intelligence file of the prisoners which was available to Stephens and his senior interrogating officer, suggesting that it was neither taboo nor extraordinary practice. The timing also matters, as it indicates that the deterioration in standards did not merely come about in the harsh winter of 1946–47; the plan was dated 10 April 1946, seven months into the camp’s existence.

The cumulative effect of cold, hunger and mistreatment was fatal for some. At least two deaths were directly attributed to those conditions. The first was Franz Österreicher, who had been detained for about three months after crossing over from the Soviet Zone with fake identity documents.¹⁶ He died in hospital in February 1947 because ‘his organs and the muscles were atrophic’ and his body had no ‘resistance against infection’.¹⁷ And yet the medical report that accompanied him to hospital from the camp claimed that he was simply suffering from indigestion.¹⁸ Another detainee who died in hospital soon after was Walter Bergmann, who arrived in such a state that it was impossible to hold him up to measure his weight.¹⁹ He died of ‘severe malnutrition and severe tuberculosis of the lungs’; his medical report from the camp reported him as suffering from ‘debility’.²⁰ While Bergmann was held in relation to Hitler Youth activities,²¹ it was later believed that he had ‘no Nazi record’, he had entered the camp ‘quite voluntarily in order to give us valuable information’ and yet he ‘was so abominably treated that he died’.²² His mother was given an unofficial ex gratia payment for her loss. Other fatalities might have followed had a scandal not erupted soon after these deaths. At that point in early 1947, several other detainees had to be transported to hospital when their health problems were exacerbated by the extreme weather. Some were taken to a neighbouring British camp’s hospital. The (British) Governor of the camp, Major Morgan-Jones, was made aware of those cases in February by his medical staff, and he visited to see their state for himself. The sight of Adolf Galla, a German in his thirties, suspected of underground Nazi activities, ‘was one of the most disgusting sights’ of Morgan-Jones’s life, and ‘a figure which may well have been one of the Belsen inmates’.²³

His comments were confirmed by the medical report, which described Galla as being unable to speak and having ‘no sign of any fat under his skin’; in the four months he had been in the camp he lost 30 kg (66 pounds).²⁴ A second detainee, Robert Buttlar, who had swallowed a spoon handle in order to end his life, was in the hospital too. Upon admission, it was found that he was suffering from frostbite and had to have some of his toes amputated, even though this had apparently gone unnoticed by CSDIC(WEA)’s medical officer. Some of Buttlar’s health issues were caused by being forced to stand still for long periods of time, being chased by the guards around the camp – even after he was diagnosed with inflammation on his legs – then having to scrub the walls of his cell with water and sleep on the wet floor. In between such instances, he was called in for interrogation.²⁵ Other detainees reported similar treatment, designed to weaken them before interrogation. Like Buttlar, at least four others had tried to kill themselves and more were diagnosed with depression.²⁶ A fifth man, university student Hans Habenicht, took his life by hanging in June 1946. Month-long delays ensued before his family were informed, with his body secretly buried beneath the camp’s football pitch. Two years on, the family was still unable to establish the circumstances surrounding his death.²⁷

It was Major Morgan-Jones who, shocked by what he saw, asked the hospital’s doctor to write a report detailing all cases brought to him in the three months to February 1947. Soon after, in a meeting with other camp governors, Morgan-Jones was joined by another governor who said that several individuals sent to him from CSDIC(WEA) were also ‘in a deplorable condition which indicated serious ill-treatment’.²⁸ Shortly after, a British medical inspector was sent to this second camp to examine the patients. In his report, he described having seen up to eight malnourished individuals, one of whom was close to dying; this inspector too joined the governors in calling for an investigation into the camp.²⁹ The evidence quickly reached the Military Governor, Air Marshal Sir William Sholto Douglas, who ordered a court of inquiry into the camp within a week and the removal of the camp’s current administration. Together with Stephens, this affected Captain Smith, who was the medical officer, and Lieutenant Colonel Short, who was the camp’s senior interrogating officer – effectively Stephens’s second-in-command, as he had been in Camp 020 during the war. No other member of staff was allowed to leave Germany, and responsibility for the camp was passed from the Intelligence to the Legal Division of the British Control Commission.³⁰

The investigators visited the camp and interviewed both staff and prisoners. Their bottom line was that the camp’s aim was ‘to extract information from internees at all costs’. Faced with these allegations, the government back home needed to act, because this was unfolding against the backdrop of British claims that Germany had to be rebuilt and democratised, neither of which sat well with a British camp using torture. The government responded with a court martial, that decision being taken at the highest level by Ernest Bevin (the Foreign Secretary) and his deputy, Lord Pakenham, in order to show the Germans that such behaviour was unacceptable, whatever the nationality of the perpetrator. As a result, Robin Stephens, along with his medical officer and an interrogator – who had received intelligence training for only two weeks, and who in CSDIC(WEA) was ordered to ‘use mental pressure, but no bodily violence’ – were court-martialled for breaching various clauses of the Army Act.³¹

Nevertheless, Stephens was acquitted, his defence being that he had explicitly prohibited the use of violence and there was no proof that he had authorised the actions in question. The acquittal lead to his dispatch to the Gold Coast as MI5 security liaison officer, a form of demotion. The interrogator was also acquitted because the defence failed to present enough evidence against him personally. It was the medical officer, Captain Smith, who was singled out for repeatedly ignoring obvious cases of frostbite and malnutrition. He was found guilty of neglect and dismissed; his own responsibility was more difficult to defend given the misleading medical reports he had issued. But considering that Stephens was conducting some of the interrogations, he must have seen with his own eyes the state many individuals were in, even if he had not ordered them to be in that condition. However, unlike the medical officer, he also knew better than to leave a paper trail behind.

The court martial did not end British interrogations, but it did force a change in Germany where the political stakes were high: Britain’s reputation as an occupying power mattered not only for how it was perceived by the Germans but also internationally. As a result, the interrogation centres that followed in the British Zone and in West Germany were placed under much tighter oversight, with procedures clarified and premises regularly inspected. This shift did not mean that coercion disappeared entirely. Isolation and mental pressure continued to be used, but they were highly regulated and the abuses that had characterised Bad Nenndorf – starvation, illness and deaths in custody – were avoided. Yet while the immediate reputational damage was managed, in recent years this history has been appropriated by neo-Nazi groups for revisionist commemoration of CSDIC(WEA)’s prisoners, many of whom were communists, a detail which many of the neo-Nazi marchers are possibly unaware: from 1946 onwards, many held there were suspected of communist activities, or interrogated to give intelligence on Soviet-occupied Germany.

The question nevertheless remains: if abuse and torture were so alien to Britain during the war, how had they taken place almost immediately after it? In many ways, the potential for escalation was always embedded in the logic of interrogation camps: the basic idea was to assert superiority over a detainee. This was also the aim in Camp 020. But there, the institutional constraints of wartime Britain imposed limits on how far such behaviour could go. Here, without oversight, the boundaries changed. They might have changed even further due to the perceived criminality of the prisoners, even though the prisoners of the wartime Camp 020 had also not been seen as legitimate combatants.³² Some non-intelligence personnel in the camp in Bad Nenndorf, such as guards and warders, nevertheless did seem to operate on the assumption that these were Nazi criminals – and some of them were, but not everyone was.³³ The investigators in 1947 noted that a number of the prisoners ‘had committed no offence, the purpose of their detention being that they were believed to hold information of security interest’.³⁴

The answer lies in the fact that structural problems created the environment, but within that environment, individuals acted with cruelty. It is clear that the British Zone was under extraordinary strain. Food and fuel were short everywhere, not only in camps. The winter of 1946–47 brought widespread hunger and cold across Europe, not only in Bad Nenndorf. In this context, the suffering inside the camp reflected the wider shortages and conditions of the time, made worse by the lack of inspections and external support. Yet there was clear evidence of individuals choosing cruelty within this context. Medical treatment was refused even when problems were obvious. Food was withheld not because there was a shortage but as a means to weaken the prisoners ahead of interrogation. The mere thought of being called in for interrogation was meant to instil fear.

That the government acted so quickly and completely reformed the camp’s successors in West Germany could demonstrate that torture did, actually, remain ‘un-British’ – a claim held widely during the war. When those being interrogated during the war were captured soldiers, harsh methods of any kind were out of the question and treatment had to be good, so that the Axis would reciprocate (a policy that was left as an instruction in the aftermath of the First World War).³⁵ When those being interrogated during the war were spies rather than soldiers, the bar was lower but confined to threats and intimidation. With Alexander Scotland, too, abuse in the form of ‘discipline’ affected a small proportion of prisoners that passed through his hands during and after the war, and there too some of the allegations were investigated by a court of inquiry. And so one could say that while CSDIC(WEA) did mark a stark departure from those legacies, it was not condoned. From the time when Morgan-Jones blew the whistle to the matter reaching the prime minister and the Foreign Secretary, action was swift and decisive.

Yet similar camps resurfaced in other contexts, mainly in the British Empire during the process of decolonisation where coercive interrogation techniques became part of counter-insurgency operations, conducted by makeshift and badly organised Special Branches. Similar allegations emerged in 1950s Cyprus, 1950s Kenya and 1960s Aden.³⁶ In all of these cases, there is ample proof that beatings, stress positions and humiliation were systematically used during interrogation. In Northern Ireland in the 1970s, Britain faced renewed allegations of torture for using the so-called five techniques – standing, hooding, noise, sleep deprivation and food deprivation – against detainees suspected of IRA involvement.³⁷ The parallels with CSDIC(WEA) are clear, not just in the methods used but also in the administrative set-ups involved and in perceptions of the enemy’s legitimacy. Seen in this light, the camp in Bad Nenndorf was not an anomaly – an ‘un-British’ affair that can be explained by its post-war context – but an early episode in a longer pattern of abusive practices occurring in British interrogation camps.

Disbanding WCIU in September 1948 also removed what was left of Britain’s wartime interrogation system. That system had started as a few prison cells in the Tower of London, earmarked for the small number of German prisoners who were expected to be brought to Britain. It ended nine years later and only six miles away, in Kensington’s London District Cage, where some of the crimes of that war had been investigated. In the intervening years, Europe’s Jewry was almost completely wiped out; millions more were systematically targeted, dying in combat, during forced labour or by starvation, and others were simply murdered in their towns. Large parts of Europe were bombed out, economies were completely devastated, regimes had fallen and civil wars erupted.

As the reality of the conflict was unfolding, assumptions of what response it needed changed, as did beliefs about what individuals knew that could assist the war effort. This transformed the role of interrogation. The initial idea that a few cells in the Tower of London would suffice for an interrogation camp was abandoned very quickly. Dozens of sites – schools, mansions, racecourses – were repurposed in order to facilitate interrogation. Hundreds of thousands of people were caught up in those camps. This was, after all, a total war and so the people of interest to intelligence services spanned well beyond a few soldiers. The reach of the resulting interrogation system was vast and unprecedented, affecting every single prisoner of war, every refugee and every civilian who was believed to be in Britain clandestinely. All of these people underwent some kind of questioning. Most were sifted out, but a fraction were interrogated in detail on a broad spectrum of topics. Those select few were also the ones whose conversations were recorded. A similar process had to be repeated before anyone could leave the country, this time to ensure that no war criminals slipped through the net. Those believed to have either committed or witnessed war crimes were interrogated in detail and some of those also had their conversations recorded.

The nine-year history that the Tower and the Cage bookended was, as a result, far more compelling than one might expect of interrogation. It is a history neither of a mundane process nor, at the other extreme, of an activity that was by design sinister. It is instead a history of improvisation, of expertise, of unequal dynamics, of psychology and of the emotional charge of war. At its core, it is the history of how a process that was absent from Britain’s intelligence machinery in 1939 developed into one capable of producing a remarkable flow of information on different topics.

Certain broad conclusions emerge from the three case studies examined in this book, one being that interrogation was an important and central part of the wartime intelligence system. This is not because it was producing intelligence on a specific topic, but because it was in constant dialogue with various other parts of the intelligence machine. When it came to soldiers, their interrogations often refined information already known through signals intelligence, aerial photographs or mail censorship. This was precisely the aim. The ‘eyewitness’ angle that soldiers possessed helped to corroborate and explain what other sources could only hint at, ranging from timelines of events, descriptions of people, weapons and tactics, to living conditions across Europe and to Nazism as an ideology. It also worked in the opposite direction. When completely new intelligence came from interrogation, it would be up to other sources to investigate it. A vast amount of information was collected as a result and, as expertise expanded across the intelligence system, was either checked with other sources or stored for later use. When it came to spies, here too much was already known about them by the time they were held in Camp 020. Yet under interrogation, the Abwehr’s recruits would put real names to aliases, they would describe people and confirm cover addresses and codes, all of which helped to build a clearer picture of enemy espionage. This is therefore not a case of a hierarchy in which interrogation can be easily placed above or below sources such as signals, telegraphic and postal communications, photographic reconnaissance or agents in the field. When it came to war criminals, on the other hand, interrogations were absolutely vital. With Britain determined to pursue ‘show-off’ trials in Germany rather than true show trials, it was only through interrogation that evidence could be secured for successful prosecutions.

Spies, soldiers and war criminals did not produce comparable intelligence, but their interrogations did deliver. While we cannot easily isolate the pieces of information that were operationalised, what is clear is the fact that each camp extracted the intelligence it was asked to extract. Soldiers offered tactical, operational and strategic-level impressions, almost all spies confessed their missions and when suspected war criminals refused to recount their past actions to interrogators, witnesses did that for them. Even if it were possible to isolate the information that was actually used, judging interrogation’s value solely through that information would miss the point. What interrogation was fundamentally about was producing and sustaining a constantly updated body of knowledge that could be referred to whenever needed, even in another war; after all, a future war with Germany was widely regarded as a question of time, and so some of the intelligence was kept explicitly due to its long-term value. Indeed, that wartime body of knowledge was returned to when investigating crimes after the war. The success of interrogation can therefore not be separated from the successes of the intelligence system overall, which was producing a stream of information that was ‘so comprehensive, though never complete’ that it allowed interpretations drawn from it to be ‘generally correct’.¹

This information was the product of a process shaped entirely through improvisation. None of the operations in this book – those of Camp 020, CSDIC and WCIU – had any direct predecessors from which to draw lessons. Even WCIU, which came with six years of interrogation experience, did not have a direct predecessor dealing with the type of investigation that it embarked upon. At the core of this history is therefore improvisation. It all started with a strong suspicion that interrogation could be a useful intelligence-gathering activity and should be utilised more than in the past. Much of that confidence stemmed from a belief that concealed microphones would capture what was needed. And the belief did bear out in practice, but only in part. Interrogators were quick to realise that microphones would be an aid rather than a panacea. They saw that microphones needed to be part of a more deliberate process through which prisoners would first be selected before their conversations would be recorded. The idea that all prisoners should be screened – briefly interrogated – for selection was then applied to all non-British civilians escaping to Britain from the Continent, so that Camp 020 could focus on the few who were almost certainly working for the enemy. By the time war crimes had to be investigated, screening all prisoners who were in the country was a given. What started as an understandably naive operation in the Tower of London turned interrogation into a sophisticated process and a network of camps that was well-coordinated, thorough and useful in different ways.

Responsible for these improvisations were the staff attached to those camps, and who initially were amateurs. Some of their roles did not even have peacetime equivalents, especially those associated with operating the secret microphones and doing the secret listening. Even face-to-face interrogation was something of an unchartered territory for intelligence. But responsiveness to pressure and dedication turned them into experts. At the same time, precisely because interrogation is so heavily reliant on people, bias was always a concern, hence the initially clear division of labour in order to minimise bias and maintain secrecy. In the camps dealing with soldiers, secret listeners were not interrogators. Interrogators were not decision-makers. Much of the time they were not even told why they had to ask prisoners specific questions. Even in the case of spies, where MI5’s Robin Stephens was privy to other intelligence about the people he was handling, he was still not the sole arbiter of what would happen to them after interrogation. This division of labour was lost as soon as the war ended, with near-bankruptcy and demobilisation both underway. At that point, interrogators became translators, liaison officers, assistant legal advisers and almost coroners. Yet they still made an effort to handle individuals based on the evidence rather than their personal views. And thus, for all the wartime innovations that were introduced, interrogation was never perfected: the targets kept changing and improvisation remained necessary.

The deeply human dimension of interrogation brought with it the question of fallibility, which applied to all involved – prisoners and staff. The people working in these camps had their own attitudes and limitations. This was recognised at the time, and measures were put in place to ensure that intelligence was as untainted as it could be. These measures were on the whole effective, in that individual pieces of information were considered reliable, as were the overall assessments of whether a prisoner was being truthful. But there were biases that ran so deep that they were not recognised, and which we can now see. This applied to anything that concerned the Jewish people, be it Jews under interrogation or information about what was happening to Jews in Europe. That Jews agreed to work for the Abwehr as a way to escape occupied Europe was simply not an excuse Camp 020 could accept; they were just as contemptible as anyone else. The language used to describe them, particularly but not only by Stephens, is a strong reminder that antisemitism was a European, not just a German, phenomenon. In CSDIC, too, information about what was happening to Jews in Europe was being recorded but seems not have been joined up; it was instead part of the more generic effort to learn about ‘atrocities’, a catch-all term that made no distinction between different forms of violence and who they were targeting. This remained after the war. But at that point, it became part of a deliberate political decision for WCIU not to differentiate between victims – so long as they were of Allied nationality – and not to deal with crimes against humanity. It may be possible, if one chooses, to explain away what happened in each individual case. Camp 020, for instance, dealt with a small number of Jewish prisoners, while CSDIC was producing an enormous amount of intelligence, much of which was fragmented. Explaining away events is not possible when looking at both the information and attitudes that emerge from these different camps, and the war crimes trials policy Britain pursued after 1945. It is the combination that confirms Britain’s failure to grasp the extent and nature of mass murder and genocide as told by its own sources – as it started to unfold, as it was underway and after the fact.

Interrogation’s success depended upon the willingness of those being interrogated to cooperate. To persuade someone to lower their guard and share useful information – be it when talking to an interrogator or unwittingly – required certain conditions. As a result, interrogation processes were always underpinned by psychological manipulation. Take the most obvious case of soldiers and concealed microphones. The conditions in which microphones were used allowed CSDIC to exploit this technology to the fullest, specifically by using stool pigeons and ‘matey entertainment’ (favourable treatment) which coaxed prisoners to eventually open up. This ‘simulated kindness’, as it was called, was only one way in which psychology was exploited, however. Matey entertainment and the like were not even considered by Stephens in Camp 020, because those were not soldiers captured doing their job but civilians who chose to side with Nazi Germany. For them, psychology was used to demoralise and scare them into admitting all they knew. Matey entertainment was, for more obvious reasons, also not entertained when interrogating suspected war criminals. Instead, witnesses of war crimes made a substantial difference in supplying key evidence where the suspect was uncooperative.

Individual commandants determined much of the psychological atmosphere within each camp. For Stephens and Alexander Scotland, their behaviour during the war was on the borders of what was acceptable even by 1940s standards and even during conflict. In Camp 020, solitary confinement and threats were used to drill into prisoners that they could not fool their interrogators. In the London Cage, Scotland bullied some of the prisoners who disobeyed orders or lied, all under the guise of emulating German-style ‘discipline’. There is nothing in the archive to suggest that CSDIC’s Thomas Kendrick permitted even a trace of the practices associated with Stephens and Scotland.

Yet individual commandants did not determine everything. This is because no individual commandant was going unchecked by higher command, and higher command had reasons to wish humane treatment for all of these groups. With suspected spies in Camp 020, MI5’s primary concern was that coercion or outright violence were counterproductive and would lead to false intelligence. They were also accountable to the Home Secretary, who would have to answer for any scandals if they were to break out. For the soldiers in CSDIC, higher command was concerned that mistreatment of any kind risked reprisals against Allied prisoners. For WCIU’s conduct with war crimes suspects, higher command’s concern was bad publicity in Germany or a defence lawyer casting doubt over how his client’s confession was obtained. Indeed, while initially we may think that the level of secrecy surrounding these camps enabled mistreatment, the opposite was true: the desire to keep these camps secret acted as a counterweight to mistreatment. The effect of secrecy was instead that it created a number of additional questions, particularly what to do with someone once their interrogation in such a top-secret place was concluded. But it did not enable abuse, either by design or negligence. So while abusive practices did occur, and by the commandants no less, they affected a relatively small number of those under interrogation and were out of sync with the overall good standards that were kept in interrogation camps.

For all the intrigue involved in interrogation, the administrative dimension of this history is therefore consequential. Spies, soldiers and war criminals underwent a similar process of screening and interrogation, but each fell under a different administrative structure and, importantly, one that was always discernible. For CSDIC, there was never a doubt that this was a War Office organisation, even if it had permanent Air and Navy Sections stationed within it. For Camp 020, MI5 was certain that this was an MI5 institution, even if they had to liaise closely with the Home Office about it. The same went for the work of the post-war WCIU, which was part of the JAG’s Office, and hence of the War Office. Perhaps had Britain interrogated no one other than the people mentioned in this book, the importance of administration would not have been appreciated. But then Stephens was sent to the chaos that was post-war Germany to set up a successor of Camp 020 and CSDIC. There, he was left to his own devices, without much direction and without any inspections from higher command. Soon enough, both in order to elicit information and to take revenge, prisoners who were a combination of former Nazis and suspected communists were systematically mistreated in ways that fell short of physical beatings (and even those may have occurred).

This brings us back to the point that interrogation was not an insular process, but one that was firmly embedded into the rest of the intelligence apparatus. When interrogation was successful – as it was with spies, soldiers and war criminals – those successes rested heavily on the workings of the broader intelligence machine. It was the iterative process between the three interrogation units of this book and other sections and organisations that allowed interrogators to furnish information that was both useful and accurate. In contrast, when interrogation was either fruitless (as in the Tower of London in 1939) or abusive (as in post-war Germany), this too was a symptom of problems with the broader system, rather than an outlier case.

All of this proves that interrogation is not an abstract event nor is it isolated from other social and military developments. It is instead a complex, human process that reflects assumptions and attitudes of the time. When it is also well recorded, as in the cases studied here, it can provide a ‘first oral history’ of its time, told by individuals whose experiences are otherwise difficult to capture in any large numbers. The majority of the people in these camps were insignificant to Britain. Most of the soldiers that CSDIC interrogated were not distinguished or high-ranking officers. Most of those detained in Camp 020 were not professional spies. War crimes investigations relied much on soldiers denouncing each other and on witnesses recounting what they had experienced. These are not the figures we usually associate with intelligence work. Yet they are the protagonists of interrogation. To view interrogation only through its extremes, or only through the lens of torture, is therefore to overlook its real significance: that taken as a whole, interrogation reflects the deeper workings of the society that produced it.