DID BRITAIN REALLY STOOP AS LOW AS THE NAZIS?
This week the liberal media worked itself into an outrage over claims German war criminals were tortured at a sinister and secret interrogation centre known as ‘ The London Cage’. Here is the other side of the story...
GLOWING in the pale November sun, the grand stucco- fronted mansions of Kensington Palace Gardens make up not a mere ‘ millionaires’ row’ but a ‘billionaires’ boulevard’. The most exclusive road in all London, this is home to the super- super-rich — men like the Sultan of Brunei, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal and Russian oil baron Leonard Blavatnik.
Here, on land owned by the Crown and adjacent to Kensington Palace, the few private houses change hands for £ 50 million or more. Police barriers at either end control the flow of traffic in and out — adding to the leafy street’s air of elegance, privilege and power.
But behind one grand façade lurks a dark secret. Last week it was claimed that during World War II, No. 8 Kensington Palace Gardens housed a government-run torture camp, in which German prisoners- of- war were interrogated, allegedly the most brutal of methods.
It has long been known that in Kensington Palace Gardens was the wartime interrogation centre known as the London PoW Cage.
Top-ranking German officers and troublesome prisoners such as Luftwaffe ace Franz von Werra — the only German serviceman ever to escape from a British camp and get home — were taken there for questioning by a section of military intelligence known as MI-19.
But what is now alleged to have gone on inside this shadowy institution, particularly in the 18 months after the end of the war, appears in a different league, provoking horror and outrage from the liberal Left.
According to the report published in The Guardian and said to be based on longsuppressed information unearthed in the National Archives at Kew, prisoners were systematically starved, beaten, threatened with red-hot pokers and electric shocks, deprived of sleep, subjected to heat and cold and forced to stand to attention for more than 24 hours without respite.
If true, such behaviour clearly flouted the Geneva Convention’s rules on the treatment of a surrendered enemy. On the surface, these revelations go some way to undermining the moral high ground from which Britain and its allies pursued the war against Nazi Germany, and afterwards prosecuted its leaders and many of their underlings for crimes against humanity.
In some minds it raises an uncomfortable question — and one with echoes in Iraq, where cases of prisoner abuse again cloud the moral issues involved. So were we British, in fact, as bad as our Axis enemies? Did what went on behind the barbed wire and bolted cell doors of that grand house in Kensington put us on a par with the Nazis?
As someone who has spent years investigating the fate of British PoWs in Germany during World War II, I say the answer is simple and unequivocal. No, it most certainly does not.
If the accounts of what went on at the London Cage are true — and that is far from certain — they are a blot on our humanitarian record. But it is nothing compared with the vast, bloody stain that Hitler and his inhuman apparatchiks on the map of Europe. When news of the alleged events in the Cage were publicised last weekend, my thoughts turned immediately to an horrific picture I have in my files of an emaciated prisoner.
The gaping ribs, the shrunken limbs, the gaunt face are not that of a Nazi concentration camp survivor but of an Allied PoW after his liberation from Stalag XIB at Fallingbostel in north- west Germany in April 1945. When I first saw it, while researching my book The Last Escape, it shocked me to the core. I was familiar with the brutality meted out in the concentration camps to the Jewish and Romany people of Europe.
But I had little realised that the treatment of PoWs was equally barbaric — and certainly in a different league from anything that happened to German PoWs in the London Cage.
In their tens of thousands, men like those in this picture were forced to trudge hundreds of miles across Germany through the worst winter of the 20th century, simply to stop them being liberated by the advancing Allies.
They were marched at gunpoint on the orders of Himmler’s SS.
Rather than being released, men who had been kept behind barbed wire for years were held to the bitter end — either as hostages to be traded for the lives of Nazi criminals or to be slaughtered in an act of pure Aryan revenge on what the SS chief called Niederlagstag, the Day of Defeat.
Thankfully, that finale to the Third Reich did not happen and, miraculously, most of the PoWs survived. But not all. Thousands died of exhaustion, dysentery and cold. Some, too tired or too ill to carry on, fell out of the columns and were shot where they lay.
Those who survived fed themselves by scavenging along the way. But once herded into camps at the end of their long march, many starved. When, finally, liberation came, their saviours could scarcely believe what they saw.
Airman John Parsons was just five stone when he was liberated. RAF pilots who flew in to ferry him and those like him home wept at the sight of these bedraggled, emaciated shells of once-fit fighting men.
Their fate was an atrocity that went largely unnoticed in the euphoria at the end of the war. But men such as Private Les Allen of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry still bear the scars.
He walked 500 miles from Stalag XXB in Poland to western Germany in wooden clogs. Sixty years on, his crippled feet are a constant reminder, as are the nightmares he still has of comrades lying dead in the snow.
And his is just one among thousands of similar stories of casual brutality by German officers that make events at the Cage seem tame by comparison.
PoWs arriving at Stalag Luft IV on Germany’s eastern border were forced through a gauntlet of rifle butts and slashing bayonets wielded by sadistic guards and fanatical members of the Hitler Youth.
If they panicked and ran for cover into the surrounding forest, machine gunners were waiting to mow them down — along with cameramen ready to cynimade
cally record that they were killed ‘while trying to escape’.
One guard, known as ‘Big Stoop’ because of his massive frame, was renowned for punching men so hard in the head that their eardrums burst. Prisoners who displeased him were kicked to the floor and his hobnail boots raked their backs mercilessly.
Such mistreatment of PoWs by the Germans had been going on since the start of hostilities. In 1940, thousands of British troops left behind after the Dunkirk evacuation were herded into columns and marched towards Germany on foot. They went days without food. They were barracked and bullied and liable to be shot if they fell out of the line.
With a bullet in his side picked up during the last- ditch defence of Calais, Lt Airey Neave ( later a prominent Conservative politician, murdered by Irish terrorists in 1979) recalled trudging for weeks ‘ from one foul transit camp to another’. On that same march, Sgt-Major Charles Coward, in agony from shrapnel in his leg and a wound to his head, was plunged into a cattle trough and his head held under by laughing German soldiers. He was released only just short of drowning.
But Neave and Coward were lucky compared with the 99 men of the Royal Norfolk Regiment who, in the battle for France, put up stiff resistance to an SS battalion.
The fighting was fierce and many Germans died. When the outgunned British troops surrendered, they were marched into the paddock of a farm in the village of Le Paradis, lined up and machine-gunned.
The story is doubly significant. For the SS officer accused of this very massacre was later imprisoned at No. 8 Kensington Palace Gardens. Moreover, it was his letter of complaint about his treatment there that forms a central part of the latest revelations.
In late 1946, some 18 months after the end of the war, SS Obersturmfuhrer Fritz Knoechlein was identified in Germany and brought to England for investigation, suspected of being the battalion commander who ordered the unlawful executions at Le Paradis.
At the Cage, he later claimed, he was deprived of sleep, starved, forced to walk in a tight circle for hours on end and kicked by guards each time he passed them. He was doused in cold water, pushed down stairs and beaten with a cudgel.
All this was allegedly undertaken with the consent of the Cage’s commanding officer, Lt Colonel Alex Scotland, in order to force a confession from him, which he did not give.
That was hardly surprising. Knoechlein was fighting for his life, knowing that he faced the gallows for his part in the massacre, and his complaint may well have been an attempt to deflect the blame.
Were we persecuting the wrong man? Knoechlein denied ever having been at Le Paradis, let alone giving the order to shoot.
But he was convicted on the eyewitness evidence of the only two soldiers to survive — they slipped away from under the pile of bodies — and of a Frenchwoman who witnessed him supervising the round-up. The evidence was incontrovertible and he was hanged in January 1949.
Other Germans who complained of being tortured at the London Cage were also accused of crimes against British PoWs, notably those responsible for shooting 50 RAF officers after the mass breakout from Stalag Luft III in March 1944, the so- called Great Escape.
Once again, nothing at the London Cage could compare with their fate after being recaptured — each gunned down with a bullet in the back on the direct orders of Hitler.
From that moment the threat of a violent end to their internment hung over the 200,000 Allied PoWs.
After the war, some — perhaps all — of the 21 Gestapo officers accused of the Great Escape killings were tracked down in Germany and brought for questioning to the Cage.
One, Sgt Erich Zacharias, was said to have been convicted and hanged on the basis of a confession made under duress. It has been claimed this was the only evidence against him and that a miscarriage of justice took place as a result.
But not according to one historian, who says Zacharias was implicated by other defendants in the coldblooded shooting of two of the 50 escapees. Even his own wife denounced him as ‘a swine, a liar, a cheat and a murderer’.
There can, of course, be no excuse for a confession obtained by force — though they were commonplace in the courts of Nazi Germany. When a trial was held at all, that is. The entire male population of the town of Lidice in Czechoslovakia was butchered in 1942 after the assassination of SS commander Reinhard Heydrich.
In 1944, the 600-plus inhabitants of Oradour- sur- Glane in central France — men, women and children — were shot or burned alive by soldiers of the SS Das Reich regiment in revenge for Resistance attacks. For the SS, the question of guilt, proven or otherwise, was irrelevant.
Terror of falling into the clutches of the men in leather coats ran through occupied Europe like a cancer. And with good reason.
The torturer who worked on fighter pilot John Prothero in a Gestapo prison cell ‘loved his work, had been well trained and must have had plenty of practice’, recalled Prothero, remembering the baseball bat- sized club scything into his side and then into his ear.
The beating was just a start. A rope was then tied round his genitals and he was jerked into the air. The pain was ‘searing’ and only surpassed when petrol was poured into open wounds on his battered body.
Sgt Stan Hope fell into Gestapo hands, and at its sinister headquarters on the Avenue Foch in Paris he was interrogated about the French people who had helped him while on the run: ‘I was blindfolded and handcuffed, and they threat- ened to torture me, take me down to the cellar and do all sorts of things to me. I was scared to death.’
For Roy Davidson, another Allied airman, the sound of a fellow prisoner being beaten with a nailencrusted leather strap was enough to have him concocting some sort of story to stave off similar treatment: ‘I have never heard such screaming in my life.’ He knew the Geneva Convention offered him no protection.
Nor did that Convention save some British PoWs from entering the inner circle of hell that was the SS- run concentration camp system. Wing Commander ‘Wings’ Day, an inveterate escaper, was just one Allied officer who ended up in Sachsenhausen and then Dachau under sentence of death.
Day, like all the Allied PoWs quoted here, survived. Millions of other victims did not. From time to time, we need reminding of the horrors of those Nazi death camps of little over a half- century ago — if for no other reason than to put in perspective the sort of stories now revealed about the London Cage.
We need to hear stories like those of Mary Lindell, an Englishwoman who ran one of the underground escape lines for Allied airmen in occupied Europe. The price paid by this phenomenally brave woman was to be sent to Ravensbrück.
The inhumanity she witnessed there — starvation, slave labour, medical experiments on women and children, beatings, random executions, the queues for the gas chamber — makes the blood run cold .
Above all, what such stories should tell us is that there are many degrees of evil. So whatever inappropriate behaviour took place in Kensington Palace Gardens, it can only have been a pale shadow of the barbarities perpetrated by the Nazi state.
By all means let us take on board the ‘ secrets of the London Cage’ now revealed and regret them.
But let us also set them against the death marches of British PoWs; the Gestapo dungeons in every town in occupied Europe; and the unimaginable bestialities of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Treblinka and Ravensbrück.
Is there then any doubt which side the balance falls? ■ Tony Rennell is a military historian. His latest book with co-author John Nichol is Tail-End Charlies.