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The interrogation camp that turned prisoners into
living skeletons
German spa became a forbidden village where Gestapo-like techniques
were used
By Ian Cobain
12/17/05 "The
Guardian" -- -- Despite the six years of bitter
fighting which lay behind him, James Morgan-Jones, a major in the
Royal Artillery, could not have been more specific about the
spectacle in front of him. "It was," he reported, "one of the most
disgusting sights of my life."
Curled up on a bed in a hospital in Rotenburg, near Bremen, was a
cadaverous shadow of a human being. "The man literally had no flesh
on him, his state of emaciation was incredible," wrote Morgan-Jones.
This man had weighed a little over six stones (38kg) on admission
five weeks earlier, and "was still a figure which may well have been
one of the Belsen inmates". At the base of his spine "was a huge
festering sore", and he was clearly terrified of returning to the
prison where he had been brought so close to death. "If ever a man
showed fear - he did," Morgan-Jones declared.
Adolf Galla, 36, a dental technician, was not alone. A few beds away
lay Robert Buttlar, 27, a journalist, who had been admitted after
swallowing a spoon handle in a suicide attempt at the same prison.
He too was emaciated and four of his toes had been lost to
frostbite.
The previous month, January 1947, two other inmates, Walter
Bergmann, 20, and Franz Osterreicher, 38, had died of malnutrition
within hours of arriving at the hospital. Over the previous 13
months, Major Morgan-Jones learned, 45 inmates of this prison,
including several women, had been dumped at Rotenburg. Each was
severely starved, frostbitten, and caked in dirt. Some had been
beaten or whipped.
The same week that Major Morgan-Jones was submitting his report, a
British doctor called Jordan was raising similar concerns at an
internment camp 130 miles away. Dr Jordan complained to his
superiors that eight men who had been transferred from the same
prison "were all suffering gross malnutrition ... one in my opinion
dying".
They included Gerhard Menzel, 23, a 6ft German former soldier who
weighed seven stones, and was described as a living skeleton.
Another, admitted as Morice Marcellini, a 27-year-old Frenchman,
later transpired to be Alexander Kalkowski, a captain in the Soviet
secret police, the NKVD. He weighed a little over eight stones, and
complained that he had been severely beaten and forced to spend
eight hours a day in a cold bath.
Prisoners complained thumbscrews and "shin screws" were employed at
the prison and Dr Jordan's report highlighted the small, round scars
that he had seen on the legs of two men, "which were said to be the
result of the use of some instrument to facilitate questioning". One
of these men was Hans Habermann, a 43-year-old disabled German Jew
who had survived three years in Buchenwald concentration camp.
All of these men had been held at Bad Nenndorf, a small,
once-elegant spa resort near Hanover. Here, an organisation called
the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) ran a
secret prison following the British occupation of north-west Germany
in 1945.
CSDIC, a division of the War Office, operated interrogation centres
around the world, including one known as the London Cage, located in
one of London's most exclusive neighbourhoods. Official documents
discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west
London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where
German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were
beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with
unnecessary surgery.
As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was
far worse. Last week, Foreign Office files which have remained
closed for almost 60 years were opened after a request by the
Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act. These papers, and
others declassified earlier, lay bare the appalling suffering of
many of the 372 men and 44 women who passed through the centre
during the 22 months it operated before its closure in July 1947.
They detail the investigation carried out by a Scotland Yard
detective, Inspector Tom Hayward, following the complaints of Major
Morgan-Jones and Dr Jordan. Despite the precise and formal prose of
the detective's report to the military government, anger and
revulsion leap from every page as he turns his spotlight on a place
where prisoners were systematically beaten and exposed to extreme
cold, where some were starved to death and, allegedly, tortured with
instruments that his fellow countrymen had recovered from a Gestapo
prison in Hamburg. Even today, the Foreign Office is refusing to
release photographs taken of some of the "living skeletons" on their
release.
Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former
members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi
insurgency. A significant number, however, were industrialists,
tobacco importers, oil company bosses or forestry owners who had
flourished under Hitler.
By late 1946, the papers show, an increasing number were suspected
Soviet agents. Some were NKVD officers - Russians, Czechs and
Hungarians - but many were simply German leftists. Others were
Germans living in the Russian zone who had crossed the line, offered
to spy on the Russians, and were tortured to establish whether they
were genuine defectors.
One of the men who was starved to death, Walter Bergmann, had
offered to spy for the British, and fell under suspicion because he
spoke Russian. Hayward reported: "There seems little doubt that
Bergmann, against whom no charge of any crime has ever been made,
but on the contrary, who appears to be a man who has given every
assistance, and that of considerable value, has lost his life
through malnutrition and lack of medical care".
The other man who starved to death, Franz Osterreicher, had been
arrested with forged papers while attempting to enter the British
zone in search of his gay lover. Hayward said that "in his struggle
for existence or to get extra scraps of food he stood a very poor
chance" at Bad Nenndorf.
Many of Bad Nenndorf's inmates were there for no reason at all. One,
a former diplomat, remained locked up because he had "learned too
much about our interrogation methods". Another arrived after a
clerical error, and was incarcerated for eight months. As Inspector
Hayward reported: "There are a number against whom no offence has
been alleged, and the only authority for their detention would
appear to be that they are citizens of a country still nominally at
war with us."
Today, the older people of Bad Nenndorf talk about August 1 1945,
the day the British arrived, with undisguised bitterness. A convoy
of trucks pulled into the village, and the Tommies took over from an
easygoing US infantry division. Within hours, the British had
ordered everybody in the centre of the village to pack their
belongings and leave. Bad Nenndorf was heaving with refugees from
the bomb-ravaged ruins of Hanover, 18 miles to the east: hundreds of
people were given 90 minutes to pack some food and valuables, and
get out.
"We thought everyone would be allowed back in a few days," recalls
Walter Münstermann, now a retired newspaperman, but then a
14-year-old. "Then the soldiers started putting barbed wire fences
around the centre of the village, and slowly we began to realise
that this was going to be no ordinary camp."
Walter and his neighbours realised that the centre of their village
was being transformed into a prison camp when they heard that the
British were converting a large, 40-year-old bath-house, ripping out
the baths and installing heavy steel doors to turn each cubicle into
a cell. They saw the first batch of prisoners arrive in the back of
a truck. Later groups arrived at the village railway station in
cattle trucks.
Ingrid Groth, then a seven-year-old, said locals claimed that if you
crept up to the barbed wire at night, you could hear the prisoners'
screams. Mr Münstermann, who passed the main gate on his way to
school each day, insists that the opposite was true: that it was a
sinister place precisely because "you never, ever saw anyone, and
you never heard a sound". Among the people of Lower Saxony, Bad
Nenndorf became known as das verbotene dorf - the forbidden village.
The commanding officer was Robin "Tin Eye" Stephens, 45, a monocled
colonel of the Peshawar Division of the Indian Army who had been
seconded to MI5 in 1939, and who had commanded Camp 020, a detention
centre in Surrey where German spies had been interrogated during the
war.
An authoritarian and a xenophobe with a legendary temper, Stephens
boasted that interrogators who could "break" a man were born, and
not made. Of the 20 interrogators ordered to break the inmates of
Bad Nenndorf, 12 were British, a combination of officers from the
three services and civilian linguists. The remaining eight included
a Pole and a Dutchman, but were mostly German Jewish refugees who
had enlisted on the outbreak of war, and who, Inspector Hayward
suggested, "might not be expected to be wholly impartial".
Most of the warders were soldiers barely out of their teens. Some
had endured more than a year of combat, at the end of which they had
liberated Belsen. Some represented the more unruly elements of the
British Army of the Rhine, sent to Bad Nenndorf after receiving
suspended sentences for assault or desertion. Often, Hayward said,
they were the sort of individuals "likely to resort to violence on
helpless men".
The inmates were starved, woken during the night, and forced to walk
up and down their cells from early morning until late at night. When
moving about the prison they were expected to run, while soldiers
kicked them. One warder, a soldier of the Welsh Regiment, told
Hayward: "If a British soldier feels inclined to treat a prisoner
decently he has every opportunity to do so; and he also has the
opportunity to ill-treat a prisoner if he so desires".
The Foreign Office briefed Clement Attlee, the prime minister, that
"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 of making them more amenable to
interrogation".
Former prisoners told Hayward that they had been whipped as well as
beaten. This, the detective said, seemed unbelievable, until "our
inquiries of warders and guards produced most unexpected
corroboration". Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture
and murder their wives and children were considered "perfectly
proper", on the grounds that such threats were never carried out.
Moreover, any prisoner thought to be uncooperative during
interrogation was taken to a punishment cell where they would be
stripped and repeatedly doused in water. This punishment could
continue for weeks, even in sub-zero temperatures.
Naked prisoners were handcuffed back-to-back and forced to stand
before open windows in midwinter. Frostbite became common. One
victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar, who swallowed the
spoon handle to escape. An anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a
prisoner of the Gestapo. "I never in all those two years had
undergone such treatments," he said.
Kalkowski, the NKVD officer, claimed that toenails were ripped out
and that he had been hung from his wrists during interrogation, with
weights tied to his legs. British NCOs, he alleged, would beat him
with rubber truncheons "while the interrogating officers went for
lunch". Hayward concluded, however, that "there was not a shred of
evidence to support these allegations".
Whatever was happening during the interrogations must have been
widely known among many of the camp's officers and men. In common
with every CSDIC prison, each cell was bugged, so that the
prisoners' private utterances could be matched against their
"confessions".
Inspector Hayward's investigation led to the courts martial of
Stephens, Captain John Smith, Bad Nenndorf's medical officer, and an
interrogator, Lieutenant Richard Langham. The hearings were largely
held behind closed doors. A number of sergeants - men who had
carried out the beatings - were told they would be pardoned if they
gave evidence against their officers.
Langham, who had been born in Munich and fled to England with his
parents in 1934, at the age of 13, denied that he had mistreated
prisoners and was acquitted. Charges of manslaughter against Smith
were dropped but, after a court martial held entirely in secret, he
was found guilty of the neglect of inmates and sentenced, at the age
of 49, to be dismissed the service.
It is unclear whether any of Stephens's superiors knew, or condoned,
what had happened at Bad Nenndorf, although his lawyers said they
were prepared to spread the blame among senior army officers and
Foreign Office officials. Before his court martial began there was
nervous debate among ministers and government officials about how to
avoid the repercussions which would follow, should the truth become
known.
Ministers were anxious that nobody should learn that CSDIC was
running a number of similar prisons in Germany. There was also what
the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Frank Pakenham, later to
become Lord Longford, described as "the fact that we are alleged to
have treated internees in a manner reminiscent of the German
concentration camps". The army, meanwhile, said it was determined
the Soviets should not discover "how we apprehended and treated
their agents", not least because some would-be defectors might have
second thoughts.
Finally, there was the inevitable fall-out for Attlee's Labour
government. As Hector McNeill, foreign minister, pointed out in a
memo to Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary: "I doubt if I can put
too strongly the parliamentary consequences of publicity. Whenever
we have any allegations to make about the political police methods
in Eastern European states it will be enough to call out in the
House 'Bad Nenndorf', and no reply is left to us."
Stephens was eventually court martialled behind closed doors. Amid
complaints of a half-hearted prosecution, he was acquitted of two
charges, two others were withdrawn, and he was free to apply to
rejoin MI5.
In Bad Nenndorf, the remaining prisoners were shipped out, the wire
ripped down, and the prison shut down. The baths were reinstalled in
the cubicles and, gradually, the spa returned to its traditional
business of catering for the health needs of elderly German
tourists.
The closure of Bad Nenndorf was not the end of the story, however.
The archives reveal that three months later a custom-built
interrogation centre, with cells for 30 men and 10 women, was opened
near to the British military base at Gütersloh. The inmates were to
be suspected Soviet spies, and would be medically examined before
interrogation.
When Frank Pakenham complained that most of the interrogators had
been at Bad Nenndorf, and demanded that "drastic methods" should not
be employed, Major-General Sir Brian Robertson, the military
governor, put his foot down.
Why, he exclaimed, if the military authorities were required to
justify the arrest of each inmate, and then handle them according to
the standards "enforced by the prison commissioners in our own
enlightened country", there was little point in having an
interrogation centre at all.
Death subterfuge
One of the most bizarre episodes at Bad Nenndorf followed the death
of a former SS officer called Abeling. He had been so severely
beaten during his arrest in January 1947 that he was unconscious on
arrival at the prison, and died shortly afterwards.
The camp's officers instructed a local gravedigger to prepare a
grave for a British officer who had died of an infectious disease.
Abeling's corpse was sewn into a blanket, lowered in, and covered
with quicklime. A firing party was on hand to ensure that the dead
man was buried with full British military honours, and a white
wooden cross with a false name was erected over the grave.
The reasons for such subterfuge are made clear in declassified
Foreign Office papers at the National Archives. Abeling, formerly a
member of an "annihilation squad" in Warsaw, had been working as an
agent for the Americans at the time of his death, spying on his old
Nazi comrades under the codename Slim.
The report notes that the Americans "insisted that 'Slim's' death
must be kept a very closely guarded secret, because of the fact that
the US authorities had been employing him in the full knowledge that
he was wanted by the Polish government as a major war criminal".
Today the wooden cross over Abeling's grave has been replaced with a
gravestone. It still bears the name of the man that local people
believe to be buried there: John X White, born 1.8.1911, died
17.1.1947.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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