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Revealed: UK wartime torture camp
By Ian Cobain
11/12/05 "The
Guardian" -- -- The British government operated a
secret torture centre during the second world war to extract
information and confessions from German prisoners, according to
official papers which have been unearthed by the Guardian.
More than 3,000 prisoners passed through the centre, where many were
systematically beaten, deprived of sleep, forced to stand still for
more than 24 hours at a time and threatened with execution or
unnecessary surgery.
Some are also alleged to have been starved and subjected to extremes
of temperature in specially built showers, while others later
complained that they had been threatened with electric shock torture
or menaced by interrogators brandishing red-hot pokers.
The centre, which was housed in a row of mansions in one of London's
most affluent neighbourhoods, was carefully concealed from the Red
Cross, the papers show. It continued to operate for three years
after the war, during which time a number of German civilians were
also tortured.
A subsequent assessment by MI5, the Security Service, concluded that
the commanding officer had been guilty of "clear breaches" of the
Geneva convention and that some interrogation methods "completely
contradicted" international law.
On at least one occasion, an MI5 officer noted in a newly
declassified report, a German prisoner was convicted of war crimes
and hanged on the basis of a confession which he had signed after he
was, at the very least, "worked on psychologically". A number of
people who appeared as prosecution witnesses at war crimes trials
are also alleged to have been tortured.
The official papers, discovered in the National Archives, depict the
centre as a dark, brutal place which caused great unease among
senior British officers. They appear to have turned a blind eye
partly because of the usefulness of the information extracted, and
partly because the detainees were thought to deserve ill treatment.
Not all the torture centre's secrets have yet emerged, however: the
Ministry of Defence is continuing to withhold some of the papers
almost 60 years after it was closed down.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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