London Cage

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The London Cage ( Engl. For "London Cage") was an in homes Kensington Palace Gardens 6-8, London and September 1948 existing between July 1940 interrogation center Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center (CSDIC) of section MI19 of the British War Office .

It was used to obtain information from civilians and the military during World War II in Nazi Germany by means of torture. These activities became public in 2005 as a result of the Freedom of Information Act when The Guardian inspected the files of the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office).

The cage, which offered space for 60 prisoners, passed through 3,573 people during its existence, of whom around 1,000 were charged with war crimes and most of them were hanged. After the war ended, civilians and suspected Soviet agents, some directly from German concentration camps, joined them. It was led by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland , a former member of the colonial troops of German South West Africa , who had already interrogated German prisoners during the First World War and who was reactivated for this purpose in 1939.

There were five interrogation rooms in which ten investigators and a dozen translators worked. The guard was carried out by soldiers of the guards regiment.

Conditions of detention

Scotland welcomed the newcomers in the style of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy (inscription on the gates of Hell ) with the words: "Whoever enters here, forsakes all hope." ( Abandon all hope ye who enter here. ) Memoirs from: "If any German had any information that we wanted, then we would get it out of him in the long run. " ( For if any German had any information we wanted, it was invariably extracted from him in the long run. ) Its activities violated the Geneva Conventions . It is unclear whether he acted on his own initiative or under official instructions - the headquarters of the British Army on the Rhine seems to have tolerated his approach.

Prisoners had to stand at attention for up to 26 hours; they were threatened with mock executions and with the fact that they could 'disappear' and they were starved. They were hit on the head - kneeling - or systematically flogged until some asked to be killed, as well as tortured with cold showers, hunger and electric shocks . The cells were bugged.

The former SS Obersturmbannführer Fritz Knöchlein , according to the Guardian article, which came into the cage in October 1946 and did not provide the desired statements, was not fed and prevented from sleeping for several days and nights . The guards kicked him at every opportunity, and the interrogators boasted of being “better than the Gestapo on Alexanderplatz ”. He had to walk in circles for hours, was pushed down stairs and hit with a club. 21 police and Gestapo officers sat in the cage in 1947, 14 of whom were executed after interrogation and torture for the illegal shooting of 50 RAF officers prisoner of war after attempting to escape from Stalag Luft III (later filmed as The Great Escape ) found guilty.

The British RAF Sergeant Tony Whitehead, who delivered a prisoner, said he saw a German naval officer in uniform who was said to have cleaned the hallway on his knees while his guard had set foot on his back and was smoking. When he picked up his inmate three days later, he was completely submissive, rarely looked up and addressed him as sir .

Overall, the prison conditions were similar to those of the Bad Nenndorf secret prison , which existed until July 1947, and other CSDIC interrogation centers in the British occupation zone . There was evidence that the interrogation methods at these centers in Germany tended to be worse than those at the London Cage .

closure

In 1946, the Red Cross became aware of the Cage because it was inadvertently sent to the organization in a list of POW camps. Visits were denied and a Scotland report to the War Office indicated that the inmates were criminals and that it would take a month to dismantle the "secret devices".

A year and a half later, the Red Cross managed to enter the facility. The inspector, who found no illegal facilities, said in a report that the detainees had been intimidated and ten in particularly poor health had been transferred the night before. The Red Cross did nothing further as the government promised to close the facility. This presumably happened at the end of 1948 as a result of health reports by British doctors from the military hospitals in Hamburg and Bremen about Cage prisoners who had been brought there, as well as the fear of the Clement Attlee government that the Soviet Union might become aware of the torture of its NKVD agents. Alexander Scotland's memoir went unprinted because of the War Office's concerns about the reputation of the British Army.

supporting documents

  1. ^ A b c Ian Cobain: The secrets of the London Cage. Beatings, sleep deprivation and starvation used on SS and Gestapo men. POW camp in Kensington kept secret and hidden from Red Cross. The Guardian , Nov. 12, 2005.
  2. ^ Ian Cobain: Britain's secret torture center ( Memento of December 21, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) . The Guardian, December 17, 2005
  3. ^ Ian Cobain: The postwar photographs that British authorities tried to keep hidden; Revealed: victims of UK's cold war torture camp ( memento from July 31, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) . The Guardian, April 3, 2006

Coordinates: 51 ° 30 ′ 28.3 "  N , 0 ° 11 ′ 27.3"  W.