· Treatment of suspected communists revealed ·
Four court martialled after police inspector's inquiry
Ian Cobain Monday April 3, 2006 The Guardian
Archive pictures of German prisoners held by the British following the second
world war.
Photographs: Martin Argles
For almost 60 years, the evidence of Britain's clandestine torture programme
in post-war Germany has lain hidden in the government's files. Harrowing
photographs of young men who had survived being systematically starved, as
well as beaten, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme cold, were considered
too shocking to be seen. As one minister of the day wrote, as few people as
possible should be aware that British authorities had treated prisoners "in a
manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps". Many other photographs
known to have been taken have vanished from the archives, and even this year
some government officials were arguing that none should be published. The
pictures show suspected communists who were tortured in an attempt to gather
information about Soviet military intentions and intelligence methods at a
time when some British officials were convinced that a third world war was
only months away.
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Others interrogated at the same prison, at Bad Nenndorf, near Hanover,
included Nazis, prominent German industrialists of the Hitler era, and former
members of the SS. At least two men suspected of being communists were starved
to death, at least one was beaten to death, others suffered serious illness or
injuries, and many lost toes to frostbite.
The appalling treatment of the 372 men and 44 women who were interrogated at
Bad Nenndorf between 1945 and 1947 are detailed in a
report by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward. He had been
called in by senior army officers to investigate the mistreatment of inmates,
partly as a result of the evidence provided by these photographs.
Insp Hayward's report remained secret until last December, when the Guardian
secured its release under the Freedom of Information Act. The photographs seen
here were removed before the Foreign Office released the report, apparently
because the Ministry of Defence did not wish them to be published. That
decision was reversed last week, following an appeal by the Guardian.
One of the men photographed, Gerhard Menzel, 23, a student, was arrested by
British intelligence officers in Hamburg in June 1946. He had fallen under
suspicion because he was believed to have travelled to the British-controlled
zone of Germany from Omsk in Siberia, where he had been a prisoner of war. His
weight, measured several weeks after his arrest at 10st 3lb, had fallen to 7st
10lb by the time he was transferred from Bad Nenndorf to a British-run
internment camp eight months later.
In the meantime, he told Hayward, his hands had been
chained behind his back for up to 16 days at a time, periods during which he
was repeatedly punched in the face. He had also been held in a bare, freezing
cell for up to two weeks at a time and doused in cold water every 30 minutes
from 4.30am until midnight, a practice the detective discovered to have been
common.
A doctor at the internment camp reported that Mr Menzel was one of a group of
12 inmates transferred from Bad Nenndorf, all emaciated and dressed in rags.
Previous arrivals had also been half-starved. Some had facial scars,
apparently the result of beatings. A few had scars on their shins, said to be
the result of torture with shin screws which had been retrieved from a Gestapo
prison at Hamburg.
Mr Menzel "was only skin and bones," the doctor wrote. "He could neither walk
nor stand up without assistance, and could only speak with difficulty because
his tongue and lips were swollen and broken open.
"It was impossible to take his body temperature because it was not higher than
35 degrees Celsius and the thermometer only starts at 35."
The prisoner was also confused, anxious and suffering memory loss, his lungs
were badly infected and his blood pressure was dangerously low. Only after
being washed, fed and heated with lamps could his body temperature be raised
to 36.3C, but the doctor feared his chances of survival were slim.
Another man pictured, Heinz Biedermann, 20, a clerk, had been arrested in
October 1946 because he was in the British zone, while his father, who lived
at Stendal in the Russian zone, had been identified as "an ardent communist".
By the time he was transferred from Bad Nenndorf four months later his weight
had fallen from 11st 3lb to 7st 12lb. He said he had been held in solitary
confinement for much of the time, threatened with execution,
and forced to live and sleep in sub-zero temperatures
while barely clothed.
One British army guard told Inspector Hayward that Mr Biedermann had "wasted
like a candle" during his imprisonment. Another, a private in the Essex
Regiment, told the detective that he complained that he and his comrades were
behaving as badly as Germans. "I became very unpopular after this ... the
sergeant appeared to take a poor view of my remarks."
On Mr Biedermann's transfer to the internment camp, an officer at Bad Nenndorf
requested he be detained "for an adequate time" to prevent him giving the
Soviets "detailed information on this centre and methods of interrogation".
Foreign Office records show that the navy officer commanding the internment
camp, Captain Arthur Curtis, was so shocked by the condition of the men being
sent to him that he ordered these photographs be taken to support his
complaints about the treatment of these "living skeletons". Photographs of
several other prisoners, taken at the same time, appear to have vanished from
the Foreign Office files.
On the other side of the British zone, meanwhile, a Royal Artillery officer
was complaining about the state of Bad Nenndorf inmates who were being dumped
from a truck at the entrance to a military hospital. Some weighed little more
than six stones, and two died shortly after their arrival.
The records show that Bad Nenndorf was run by a War Office department called
the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC).
By late 1946, CSDIC appears to have lost interest in Nazis, and was targeting
communists. It appears the prisoners were questioned about Soviet methods and
intentions, rather than about the Communist party itself.
Some of Bad Nenndorf's inmates were indeed spying for the Soviets: one
prisoner, who was half-Norwegian and half-Russian, told Hayward he was an
officer in the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, and had been operating
continuously in Germany since 1938. Another, a German journalist who had been
freed by the Soviets from a Gestapo prison, was caught flying into Croydon
aerodrome with false British papers. Both men were starved and badly tortured.
Others clearly were not spies, however. One man who was starved to death was a
gay ex-soldier caught with forged papers while crossing into the British zone
in search of his lover, while the other was a young German who was being
interrogated because he had volunteered to spy for the British in the Russian
zone, and was wrongly suspected of lying because of an official error over his
medical records.
Four British officers were court martialled after Hayward's investigation.
Declassified documents show that the hearings were held largely behind closed
doors to prevent the Soviets from discovering that Russians were being
detained.
Another consideration was admitted to be the determination to conceal the
existence of several other CSDIC prisons. While it is now known that one
interrogation centre was in central London, little is known about those in
Germany, other than their locations.
Following the courts martial, the prison at Bad Nenndorf, which was in a
converted bath-house, was replaced with a purpose-built interrogation centre
near an RAF base at Gütersloh, and orders were issued for inmates to be
examined by a doctor before interrogation. It is unclear when this centre
closed.
The only officer at Bad Nenndorf to be convicted was the prison doctor. At the
age of 49, his sentence was to be dismissed from the army. The commanding
officer, Colonel Robin Stephens, was cleared of a charge of "disgraceful
conduct of a cruel kind" and told he was free to apply to rejoin his former
employers at MI5.
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