British Interrogation Techniques in the Second World War E-Book

Sophie Jackson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The British system of interrogation has always been distinctly different from other countries. Subtler, quieter and far more devious than its contemporaries, it has been admired by those who have inadvertently succumbed to it. So much so that the Nazis adopted some of the British methods in their own intelligence operations. During the Second World War the system became highly developed and vast numbers of people were employed in the collating and recovery of information. Vital data regarding military advances such as the Enigma machine and the Tiger Tank were wrung from prisoners not by force but by trickery and deceit. The eccentric, quirky, but also very successful, wartime interrogation methods of the British are revealed in this book, including their triumphant discoveries and also their occasional disastrous mistake.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

1 Britain vs. Germany

2 Making a Man Talk

3 The Smallest Detail

4 The Usefulness of Traitors

5 Masters of the Microphone

6 Tiger Tanks and Enigma Machines: the Great Successes and the Disastrous Failures

7 The London Cage

8 Post-War Interrogation: Bad Nenndorf

9 Chained Lions: Characters of the Interrogation Files

Bibliography

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

A war can be won or lost on information. Believing the wrong rumour or disbelieving the right one can have devastating effects on a country’s war effort.

Yet the intelligence network of Britain was a late bloomer. First used to great effect in the First World War, between the wars, what would become MI5 was dismantled, disregarded and disposed of. When the Second World War broke out there was a scramble not only to re-enlist useful intelligence men from the last war, but to find new candidates.

The result was that the first organised British intelligence agency began to take shape. The British were novices at the spy game, though fortunately so were the Germans. Blunders and mishaps marred the early days, but with the urgency of war people quickly honed their skills and soon Britain’s secret service was not only impressing Churchill, but also our enemies in Germany.

The highest compliment our system received at the time came when German interrogators chose to adopt some of our techniques when interviewing enemy prisoners and spies.

What shone out in the eyes of the Germans were our methods of interrogation. We seemed to have ways of wheedling the smallest detail from men and then turning it against them. Franz von Werra, the famous Nazi escapee, would be stunned to discover how much his British captors knew about him; down to his pet lion cub’s name and an injury to his finger.

But none of this happened over night. Techniques developed and were often adapted from disastrous mistakes. Departments were created and staffed by a close-knit team of men and women, but often they fell prone to rivalries with other teams and constant backstabbing dangerously undermined successes. Spies were turned or executed. Prisoners were wrung for useful military secrets. Alien civilians were examined for potential treachery, and all this largely on an ad hoc basis.

Without the men and women who spent those war years examining reams of information and sorting the useful from the irrelevant, talking to endless captives, listening for hours to hidden microphones to catch a snippet of useful knowledge, Britain could have easily lost the war. Yet while spies and espionage have often been glamorised and portrayed in film and television, the quiet work of the interrogators has largely been forgotten outside of academic tomes.

Although it may not at first seem as thrilling as spying or sabotage missions, a spy, at the end of the day, is only a man relaying information – a man who must rely for his own safety on those interrogators working in cramped rooms night and day gathering reliable information.

The story of interrogation has been sidelined, yet the interrogators were the true heroes of the intelligence game, without whom no spy could have succeeded, no military deception would have been believed and no army could have marched secure in the knowledge of where the enemy was. Indeed, it could be argued that interrogation was the key to winning the war.

1

BRITAIN VS. GERMANY

Imagine a small cell, painted in uniform grey, the only furniture a heavy table and two chairs opposite each other. A bare bulb swings from the ceiling and minimal light comes in from a heavily barred window. A man (or woman) is escorted into the room by unsympathetic guards who deposit their charge in the nearest chair. In the far chair an unassuming man sits, perhaps bespectacled, but always with a calculated smile and a file of papers before him.

He sets forth a series of questions to his prisoner, which are stonily ignored so, with a grin, he begins describing various tortures and, when his victim continues to withhold their information, he sets about acting upon his threats. A huge number of Hollywood movies, television dramas and books can now fill in the gaps when it comes to the imaginative tortures inflicted on our ‘hero’, whether they are a spy, criminal or a Second World War soldier.

This is the typical image the word interrogation brings to mind; a picture reinforced by recent revelations of Guantanamo Bay and popular media. It has become stereotypical that should any hero, real or fictional, be captured, they should expect physical torment, and that image is strongest from the Second World War, with Germans usually portraying the evil interrogators.

Ironically, however, torture was not as prolific in the war, either on British or enemy soldiers, as is commonly portrayed. There is no denying it occurred, but the evidence for it being a universal practice in the interrogation services is simply not there. In fact the best and most successful interrogators, British or German, refrained from torture, deeming it ‘unproductive’. Lieutenant Colonel R.W.G. Stephens, the fearsome commandant of British Camp 020, where numerous spies and suspect civilians were interrogated, was clear on his views of torture: ‘Violence is taboo, for not only does it produce an answer to please, but it lowers the standard of information. There is no room for a percentage assessment of reliability.’1

Torture was therefore viewed as the tool of amateurs or the inefficient. What reliability could be placed in the words of a man who has been made to confess under physical duress? It is an age-old question that has been asked time and time again, whether during the seventeenth century witch trials or the early days of interrogation in the First World War.

These views were not the enlightened opinions of peaceful men who abhorred violence, however, they were ideas bred from practicality. Stephens knew what others would come to realise: torture provoked easy answers, but not necessarily true ones. It was considered a great failing of the German intelligence services that they relied so heavily on blackmail and violent threats to gain information and recruit spies. Those same spies were so easily turned by their British interrogators that it was almost laughable; once out of the clutches of their Nazi masters they willingly divulged their missions.

Unfortunately. a minority did not share Stephens’ views. The London Cage, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Scotland, became infamous for its supposed use of physical torture, and even Stephens detested his counterpart Scotland, who was banished from Camp 020 after hitting a recalcitrant suspect over the head.

The same applied in Germany; there was no universal code for extracting information in either countries, and both British and German interrogators were free from limitations other than those of their conscience or pragmatism. The cases of Bad Nenndorf, mentioned in a later chapter, show that the British could equal the Gestapo and Nazi concentration camps for violence and lack of humanity.

While for the British these detestable practices were the rarity, it was often the reverse in Germany. Why these two countries diverged in their information gathering is as much a case of culture as a case of the fledgling system of intelligence gathering. The early history of spying is vital to the understanding of the interrogators’ role and attitude.

How to Build an Intelligence Service

It is strange to realise that intelligence gathering as an organised body is really the creation of the twentieth century. The game of spying is as old as civilisation, but the organised compiling of the information these men and women found, and the interrogation of enemy agents, is relatively new. Prior to Queen Elizabeth I diplomats or courtiers were expected to pick up useful information from reliable sources and pay for it out of their own purse. It was not exactly a system and certainly not efficient or reliable. That all changed with the appointment of Sir Francis Walsingham in 1573, the iconic spymaster who excelled at the game of information gathering.

Walsingham’s greatest triumph was successfully ending the war against Spain and the defeat of their armada, in part achieved by his intelligence network. Unfortunately his success was spying’s downfall, and the lack of a significant enemy threat made intelligence gathering rather redundant. Throughout the history of the intelligence game it has always been the case that in peace it is neglected, only for that neglect to be regretted when another war threatens seemingly out of nowhere. Various leaders failed to realise this lesson. Cromwell employed spies to gather news on Catholic Spain before attacking them, and then proudly declared his superior intelligence system had enabled the victory. Yet once again, as soon as conflict ended the system was disbanded.

For the next two centuries British agents were a loose band of individuals employed by whoever footed the bill. The government’s creation of the Secret Service Fund was commonly tapped into by MPs wishing to fund their election campaign or bribe other MPs (Lord Bute stole £80,000 for this purpose). No wonder the British people saw the secret service as a money-making scheme for corrupt politicians. This view was not helped when Irish Republicans began a bombing campaign in England in an attempt to gain Irish independence, and the intelligence service was unable to cope with the new threat. Even so, it took the Boer War to convince the War Office that they needed a properly developed and maintained intelligence service.

When Britain found itself in an arms race with Germany, for the first time intelligence gathering was viewed as a true priority. In 1909 the Security Service Bureau was established with Captain Vernon Kell of the South Staffordshire Regiment and Captain Mansfield Cumming of the Royal Navy heading it. Despite being formally recognised, Kell still found his service woefully undermanned. He only had fourteen staff to deal with finding and arresting German spies and counteracting espionage prior to the First World War. The government was regularly, and rightly, accused by intelligence men of failing to recognise the importance of the system.

Meanwhile, Germany was also developing a network of intelligence agents and spies, whom it regularly attempted to get into Britain. Twenty such spies were rounded up by Kell before the outbreak of the First World War, but he was still aware that a large spy ring was in operation and that useful information on the Royal Navy was being relayed to the kaiser. The spy ring could have had serious repercussions for Britain had one of Kell’s officers not overheard a chance conversation on a train in 1911. The conversation concerned a strange letter received from Germany by the proprietor of the Peacock Hotel in Leith, wanting details of Britain’s war preparations. The Germans presumably considered the proprietor a possible agent, though his confusion suggests he was not the man they wanted.

In any case, he was interviewed and agreed to allow future communications to be intercepted by Kell’s team. Through this not only were Kell’s team able to develop a scientific means for reading the secret ink the Germans used (which would be invaluable during the war), but on 4 August 1914, as war against Germany was declared, they were able to launch an operation to arrest twenty-two enemy agents. All but one were caught and interned. It was a deadly blow against German intelligence and Kell was rightly proud of his success.

Yet capturing a spy was only half the story. Without a dedicated band of interrogators who could work tirelessly to extract information, uncovering an espionage suspect would have been difficult. Confirming his (or her) guilt and wringing military secrets from them would have been impossible (or, at least, a hit-and-miss affair).

The Security Service Bureau became MI5 in 1916, but a name change did not give Kell any new powers. The service, as it is today, was purely advisory. Arrests and interrogation had to be left to the police, perhaps with MI5 agents looking on but without the ability to interfere. It was frustrating for those working at the forefront of intelligence, but their hands were tied.

The main interrogator of the many suspects MI5 brought to the police was Sir Basil Thomson, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Typical of his age, Sir Basil had little time for ‘foreigners’, was deeply patriotic and damning of the Germans: ‘… it is characteristic of the German mentality to underrate the intelligence of other nations and really to believe that anything German must be uber alles. It was largely owing to this self-satisfied obtuseness that they lost the war.’2

He possibly had a point and certainly his views would be carried over into the Second World War, when Lieutenant Colonel Stephens made similar comments about the German Abwehr and the state of their spy network. Yet it could also be argued that these same interrogators, who condemned their enemies for being arrogant and self-confident, suffered from exactly the same syndrome. In any case, Sir Basil was laying down the foundations and guidelines that two decades later his successors would follow.

Interrogators maintained a strong sense of honour and patriotism and respected this in enemy agents. More favour and sympathy was shown to a spy who served Germany because he believed in the cause than in a spy who was merely working for money. Spies that cracked too easily or willingly offered to switch sides were viewed with such distaste that often interrogators seemed all too eager to have them sent off to the firing squad or gallows.

The patriotic German spy Hans Karl Lody struck a particular chord with Sir Basil and drove him to declare that it was a crying shame that a distinction could not be made between spies driven by patriotism and those by money, and that the former could avoid execution. Lody was described in glowing terms as he faced his firing squad, and ‘died as one would wish all Englishmen to die – quietly and undramatically …’3

In fact Sir Basil broke a cardinal rule that Stephens and other Second World War interrogators would insist upon – he became friendly with an enemy agent. When the interrogators of twenty years later questioned POWs and suspected spies it was always with professional and conscientious detachment, but then they had learned from the errors their predecessors had made. The First World War interrogators were, in many respects, having to make it up as they went along. They were in new territory and while the police may have been used to questioning criminals, it was a far cry from questioning men trained to betray an entire country. Even at this early stage those working in intelligence were frustrated with the minimal training the police interrogators were given. They did not have the knowledge to deal with espionage suspects and many of those sitting on the outskirts watching longed to get into action themselves.

One such man was Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland. He would later become notorious as the commandant of the London Cage, but he learned his art on the battlefields of France in the latter years of the First World War.

Scotland began his career spying on the German military in South Africa and he claimed proudly to have ‘infiltrated’ the German army. In fact he was a supplies agent for them, given an honorary military rank to enable him to move about the army lines more easily when delivering goods. But it was typical of Scotland to exaggerate his involvement and to come across as single-handedly winning the intelligence war.

With the air of someone who had grown up on boyish adventure stories, but the appearance of someone more suited to sitting behind a desk (Scotland readily admitted that his outward appearance was ‘least impressive’),4 he offered himself to the War Office to serve as an intelligence man and was promptly turned down. It took some persistent wrangling and heavy name dropping before he was finally accepted and sent out to France. In actuality, Scotland did have some highly useful assets – he was fluent in German and from his time in the German army in South Africa was familiar with their various protocols and procedures, something that regularly baffled the other British intelligence officers.

His first mission was to go to a prisoner transit camp at Le Havre to try and answer the rumours that the Germans were rehabilitating sick soldiers and getting them back to the front far faster than the British could. Intelligence needed to know if this was true and whether it meant the Germans were already feeling ‘the pinch’ in their manpower.

Scotland approached the problem laterally; instead of confronting each man individually with questions he assembled them on parade and, speaking in German, summoned the senior NCOs. He then issued them with paper and pencil and instructed them to work through the other men and ask each one if he had been in hospital, the nature of his injuries and how long he had been out of action. Two hours later he had a stack of grubby, but legible, papers with the information he wanted. By midnight they were in the hands of a dispatch rider and heading for GHQ. Scotland remarked: ‘It seemed to me a reasonable reflection that the war could not last long if only the direction of affairs were left in my hands!’5

Modesty indeed! However Scotland’s efforts did earn him the accolade of German experts at GHQ, and he now spent a great deal of time interrogating prisoners. He was a natural intelligence officer with a knack for holding on to the smallest detail and thinking on his feet. He could bend his mind around corners if he needed to and knew when flattery or tact would work better than force. In the later controversies that emerged about him, his earlier skills were obscured; possibly with age he found it harder to keep pace with prisoners and to out-think them, thus resorting to violence and abuse. But that is for a later chapter.

Scotland started to build the basis of a true interrogation system out of the prison camps in France. Unlike Sir Basil, who allowed familiarity and fondness for a prisoner to get the better of him, Scotland always maintained distance and kept in mind he was dealing with the enemy – a tactic that Second World War interrogators would readily adopt as part of their professional guise.

In 1916 he was sent to a camp called The Cage, which was used for prisoners from the Somme. There was a field hospital right next door for both British and German casualties. It was here that Scotland employed his methods in what he called ‘the first war crime’. A German plane flew over The Cage one night and dropped several light bombs on the field hospital, wounding numerous people and, ironically, killing one of their own comrades who was having emergency surgery on the operating table. The surgical section took a direct hit and the German patient stood no chance.

A short time later a pilot was captured and brought into The Cage, and Scotland instantly suspected this was the culprit (largely based on the man’s ‘sullen, shifty expression’).6 Getting the man to admit to the crime was another matter. Normal questioning failed and the Prince of Wales started breathing down Scotland’s neck for results. He decided to escort the enemy pilot to the ruined hospital and show him the body of the dead German patient. Making it clear this was the direct result of the bombing the pilot broke down; this was enough proof of his guilt for Scotland, though the pilot later escaped trial by committing suicide.

On another occasion, when he questioned a German oberleutnant, he was more tactful in his approach. The oberleutnant, who arrived at The Cage with a letter of recommendation from the Australian troops who had captured him, had apparently led his machine-gun unit in such fearsome resistance against the Allied soldiers that he held them up for four days.

Scotland realised this man would be likely to resist normal interrogation and, due to his dogged determination that had so impressed the Australians, it seemed disrespectful to single him out for interview and chance the scorn of his fellow prisoners. So Scotland walked to the prison tent with the letter, asked for the oberleutnant to step forward and announced to the prisoners that he had a letter from the Australians praising the man’s bravery. He explained he wanted to know more about the incident, and the oberleutnant left the tent with his fellow prisoners smiling at him approvingly.

Praising the man in front of his comrades had the desired effect, and when Scotland began talking with him he was open enough to talk of his upbringing in South Africa. Another piece of luck now presented itself to Scotland and he pounced on it; he happened to know of the oberleutnant’s father. Aided by this coincidence the conversation quickly developed and soon they were talking about German morale and the state of the country; the prisoner never suspected that four men were stationed around the outside of the tent with notebooks, taking down every detail.

Thus Scotland had already mastered two of the most common tactics of the interrogation service – confrontation and conversation.

However, the end of the war brought a familiar conclusion to the intelligence (and therefore the interrogation) system. Most of the interrogators, who had perfected their skills in France on enemy prisoners, were stood down, including Scotland, who went with characteristic bad grace. Meanwhile, Vernon Kell at MI5 started clandestine infiltrations of communist cells with a staff that had been reduced to barely a dozen. He firmly believed that Bolshevism was the biggest threat to peace and that Hitler was not about to launch another intelligence offensive against Britain. Germany could, effectively, be ignored.

Kell’s disastrously misdirected attentions had a number of causes; in part he had been separate from the First World War working to uncover spies in Britain not talking to the various German officers who were being interned in France. Kell thus had a one-sided view: spies were either paid mercenaries or extremists, and could be written off as the minority. Interrogators in Europe, however, could talk to thousands of men and learn how prevalent the idea of rebuilding Germany and thus starting the war all over again was, especially among the officer ranks.

Other factors influencing Kell were that Russia was a turbulent power, their agents more organised and discreet, and more feared than German spies who were often viewed as bumbling and inadequate. How accurate this view was is debatable, but throughout both wars and peacetime the Russian espionage threat was often deemed greater and more dangerous, simply because their agents proved harder to corner.

Kell was also swayed by his warm feelings for Hitler – the same warm feelings that much of the aristocracy were developing – and the growing fascist threat stemming from Mussolini in Italy, which started to take priority in the 1930s with the rise of British fascist movements and the ‘fifth column’ scare.

For others the misinformed efforts of Kell and the government were frustrating. Scotland fumed after a luncheon meeting in 1939 with various London executives who spent the meal voicing idiotic, pro-Nazi views. He had had the misfortune of meeting Hitler and had to wonder how close he had been to being another of the dictator’s casualties. He also had in-depth knowledge of the rising German power and the danger it posed.

Scotland was so infuriated he wrote a detailed report on the Nazi threat and offered to lecture on intelligence and interrogation for the War Office. He was quietly declined with a postcard acknowledging the receipt of the paper.

When war did break out there was yet another scramble to rebuild the intelligence services of the First World War. In 1940, now aged 60, Scotland was called up to head an interrogations department and set to work picking POW campsites in France where interviews could be carried out. He was disgusted by the woefully under-prepared British army in this regard. With the exception of one or two men who had some experience of intelligence work from the First World War, his new employees were pathetically under-trained and had no concept of how to interview Germans who came through their camps.

MI5 was equally struggling. While the staff had been increased to thirty, it was nowhere near enough manpower to deal with the extra work of the war. They were simply drowning in paperwork – reports, vetting requests and enquiries overwhelmed them, and during the second quarter of 1940 they were receiving 8,200 vetting requests each week alone.7 Civilian internment also took its toll on resources, with 64,000 people of various nationalities being detained (all having to undergo security interviews), and then there was the fifth columnist fears and the surveillance of suspected Nazi sympathisers, such as Sir Oswald Mosley.

Kell’s health rapidly declined with this increased workload; the easy pre-war days discussing potential communist threats and ignoring Hitler were gone. Perhaps his previous brush-off of the Nazi threat was the final nail in his coffin, for when Churchill came to power in 1940 the prime minister fired Kell with little formality and replaced him with Brigadier Oswald Harker (who only lasted a year before being replaced by Sir David Petrie).

It was an inauspicious start for the security service and for many it felt as if the lessons of the First World War had been utterly forgotten.

Meanwhile, in Germany

The First World War brought German espionage crashing down. Kell’s success against the enemy agents in Britain was just a part of it, and after the war Germany had to disband its secret service network – the only concession the Allies made was that the country could retain an intelligence unit for defensive purposes. This became the Abwehr in 1921, which frequently cropped up in interrogation reports as the usual source of enemy spies. However, when the Second World War broke out Hitler was already happily breaking the promise to the Allies of only having a ‘defensive’ intelligence network. Various organisations came into existence, such as the German Intelligence Service (GIS), the Nazi Security Service – Sicherheitsdienst (SD) – and the Reich Main Security Office – Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA). These could easily fill several books in their own right.

But to understand the British interrogation story it is also necessary to understand some aspects of the enemy agencies it had to deal with. Whether it was through spies, refugees or POWs, time and time again the names of German security services cropped up and had to be understood by the interrogators if they were to be successful.

There was also the peculiar aspect of ‘idea sharing’ between the two systems. The most significant, and potentially the most damning to the British, was the escape and return to Berlin of POW Franz von Werra (his story was recorded in the book and film The One That Got Away). Von Werra had been through the whole interrogation system during his stay in Britain, and every trick in the book had been thrown at him without success – aside from a hidden microphone in his room that he failed to spot. On his return to Germany von Werra was attached to the intelligence division of the German air force and wrote a twelve-page pamphlet on his experiences as a POW and the various interrogation tricks used against him. Not only did this enable men to be briefed on what to expect if they were caught, but also how to outmanoeuvre the British. The ideas he listed were even incorporated into the interrogation tactics of Nazi intelligence, as they proved more successful than their own methods.

At the other end of the spectrum it was reported (and still remains a matter of controversy) that certain British interrogators had adopted Nazi methods, including physical torture. One intelligence officer, Professor Kennedy, would cause great controversy in the 1960s when it was rumoured that he had been involved in brainwashing POWs. But it is Lieutenant Colonel Scotland’s name that regularly crops up in connection to such accusations. Complaints about him were numerous, the most significant being a long letter written by Fritz Knöchlein, an SS officer of the Totenkopf (Death’s Head) Division, who was responsible for the massacre of around ninety POWs from the Royal Norfolk Regiment (see Chapter 7).

In his letter he quoted one interrogator at the London Cage saying to him: ‘The Alexanderplatz in Berlin is not the only place where Gestapo methods existed. Here we can apply them much better … here we can smash you up much better … we’ll smash you up miserably here. Here in this room you’re going to be beaten so frightfully that you will whimper.’8

Knöchlein’s actual experiences were fortunately the exception, with most British interrogators finding actual torture a pointless art, but playing on the idea of physical harm and inducing fear was a frequent tactic. The Germans’ own interrogation system played into this game.

The mere word Gestapo is still enough to summon images of brutality and horror, but while time has faded the reality of those notions in modern minds, the soldiers and other prisoners coming into the hands of British interrogators would have a vivid picture of the work of their more dastardly comrades. The Gestapo, after 1939, came under the control of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), run by Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most notorious Nazis of the war. He had also built up the SD, which now formed two sections for home intelligence and foreign intelligence. The Gestapo therefore became interlinked with the secret service and exploited its powers in interrogation.

There is no denying the horrors the Gestapo and associated authorities inflicted on Jews, subversives and POWs. Britons and Americans were not exempt from these treatments; their Prisoner of War status was usually signed off first, giving their captors unlimited scope for cruelties. Of Allied POWs in German hands, 28.6% witnessed and experienced torture and 57.1% suffered intimidation tactics. However, only 21.4% experienced an actual beating, while 50% stated they had witnessed beatings. (Compare this to Allied POWs in Japanese hands, where 71.4% suffered torture and 85.7% witnessed it.)9

Floggings, beatings, partial asphyxiation in cold water, electric currents attached to sensitive areas, crushing of male genitalia, hanging from the wrists until arms dislocated, burning and immersion in ice-cold water were just a few of the ‘standard’ procedures used. Despite the London Cage interrogator’s boast that he could apply Gestapo methods far better, the complaints German prisoners made of the type of torture they experienced at British hands almost seem mild in comparison. There were similarities, however. Knöchlein talked of being regularly beaten and being forced into an ice-cold shower repeatedly until he became ill. Lieutenant Colonel Scotland was said to have told more than one prisoner that he had a hippopotamus whip he wanted to test out and regularly described a variety of tortures he could use on a man.

Knöchlein’s story is compelling, but equally it can raise suspicions. He was, after all, an SS man on trial for his life based, in part, on his own confessions. The methods he described depicted Gestapo techniques he was no doubt deeply familiar with, and while Scotland undoubtedly used talk of torture to induce fear (a common enough tactic even in camps where torture was prohibited), whether this was put into practice remains in doubt.

On the other hand, Scotland’s own denouncement of any physical abuse also sounds slightly hollow when it is known Lieutenant Colonel Stephens banned him from Camp 020 for hitting a recalcitrant suspect. There were also independent witnesses to prisoners being humiliated and forced to scrub floors with a guard casually kneeling on their back. So it seems some truth lies between the two accounts.

Undeniably Knöchlein’s accounts, and even his experiences, were shaped by his knowledge of German torture techniques. Nazi propaganda at the start of the war made it clear that the British would indiscriminately torture any enemy they captured and most likely shoot them. Vilifying the enemy, however, only played into British hands and that fear could be exploited time and time again. It was also common practice to behave in a friendly and sympathetic way to new prisoners, alleviating their fears of brutality and generating such relief that the men almost eagerly talked to their new ‘pals’.

Even after Franz von Werra exposed the fallacies of British torture, men still believed it and drove themselves into acute terror just by imagining what might happen to them. At Camp 020, Hendrik van Dam, who was proved innocent of spying, was thrown into such paroxysms of fear he began hallucinating that a woman was being tortured in a nearby cell and that he could hear her agonised screams (see Chapter 6). This was in fact a favourite game of the Gestapo, who would torture a woman in hearing distance of a male prisoner they wanted to break and often told him the terrible screams were that of his wife. Van Dam had no doubt heard of this practice from rumours, and when he realised his interrogators doubted his innocence, he tormented himself into delusions of horrendous torture being committed nearby.

Some Germans realised torture was an inadequate method of interrogation. Indeed, the Gestapo and other bodies employed it more for the sake of supposed expediency and to obtain confessions, caring less about the accuracy than about loosely incriminating more and more people.

A prime example is that of Wing Commander Forest Frederick Yeo-Thomas, a British subject who was raised and worked in France. During the Second World War he served as a British agent co-ordinating the various resistance movements in Europe in expectation of D-Day. His code name was ‘Shelley’, and he became somewhat of a legendary figure among the resistance in a short span of time – with the inevitable result that the Gestapo exerted a great deal of energy trying to catch him.

Yeo-Thomas was eventually betrayed, caught and immediately subjected to a vicious beating before being dumped before an interrogator. Stripped naked and beaten again, he was then questioned with limited results before being taken to a bathroom to be half-drowned in a tub of cold water and then artificially revived. Every time he came around he was asked the same question about the location of ammo dumps, and every time he feigned ignorance he was half-drowned again. In the first forty-eight hours in Gestapo hands, Yeo-Thomas spent considerably more time being tortured than he did answering questions. After a time he was so dazed by the abuse that he was only half-aware of what was going on and by that point he would have found answering any complex question, even if he wanted to, extremely difficult.

Forty-eight hours of torture and all the Gestapo learned was the name, rank and number of one of Yeo-Thomas’ aliases – Kenneth Dodkin. British interrogators would have been disgusted by the failure. It was also obvious that the Gestapo only believed answers they wanted to hear. After further beatings, whippings and being suspended from his wrists from the ceiling until his shoulders nearly dislocated, Yeo-Thomas finally revealed a snippet of information. He gave the address of an apartment that one of the keys in his possession would unlock, content in the knowledge that having been missing for forty-eight hours, his colleagues would have abandoned the place.

The Germans rushed to the scene, but finding the place deserted they came to the conclusion that they had been hoodwinked and barely searched the place. Such was the ironic nature of much of their torturous interrogations that appeasing lies were believed and truths were tossed aside. Time and time again this was Yeo-Thomas’ experience until it became clear that no answer would save him from pain, so where was the benefit in speaking any truth?

Modern studies of torture victims have only confirmed the negative psychological effects people experience under physical torment. Victims develop anxiety and depression, they tend to withdraw into themselves and become numbed to reality. From an interrogator’s point of view, most disastrously, their intellectual abilities are actually impaired, resulting in difficulty in concentrating, confusion, memory loss and trouble following a line of questioning or similar conversation. Therefore torture can effectively ruin an interrogation.

These were Lieutenant Colonel Stephens’ exact feelings on the use of torture – it only produced answers a prisoner thought their interrogator wanted to hear. There were so many risks involved; men who broke quickly under torture were unlikely to have any valuable knowledge, and the British were careful to pick agents who had the courage to stand up against pain and suffering. Also, it was a set rule that an agent was expected to reveal as little information as possible for the first forty-eight hours, giving time for his associates to disperse and go into hiding. Men were expected to eventually break under torture and, as this was understood, any agent that missed an appointment signalled a mass exodus of his colleagues to safe houses.

The threat of torture also induced intense fear and measures were taken to avoid it, such as standard-issue cyanide pills. When this failed, suspects would do anything to die quickly, saving themselves from pain and betraying their friends. Yeo-Thomas, after having his cyanide pill discovered, attempted to jump from a fourth-floor window to prevent the subsequent interrogation.

On the other hand, the British interrogators’ more subtle means tended to lead agents into unwitting over-confidence, and this led them to relax and accidentally reveal information. In fact the closest Yeo-Thomas came to revealing any important information to his captives was when he was faced with an interrogator who just wanted to chat.

So why did the Germans resort to torture while the British refrained? In part it was the culture of the Gestapo and similar bodies. Men recruited for such divisions were expected to be brutal, unhesitatingly loyal to Hitler and prepared to do anything to their prisoners. Men were picked who enjoyed violence and who believed firmly in the Nazi mantra that they were superior to all others, especially Jews, Russians, partisans and French Resistance fighters. Extreme over-confidence led time and again to sneering disbelief in prisoners, which resulted in torture for predetermined answers.