London Cage
The London Cage was an MI19 prisoner-of-war facility during and after the Second World War to mainly interrogate captured Germans, including SS personnel and members of the Nazi Party.
[3]: 63 Among the German war criminals confined at the London Cage was SS Obersturmbannführer Fritz Knöchlein, who was in charge of the murder of 97 British prisoners who had surrendered at Le Paradis, France, in May 1940.
[1] Alexander Scotland wrote a postwar memoir entitled London Cage, which was submitted to the War Office in 1950 for purposes of censorship.
Scotland was asked to abandon the book, and threatened with a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, and officers from Special Branch raided his home.
[1] In London Cage, Scotland claimed that confessions were obtained by seizing upon discrepancies in the accounts of prisoners, and stated:[3]: 154 We were not so foolish as to imagine that petty violence, nor even violence of a stronger character, was likely to produce the results hoped for in dealing with some of the toughest creatures of the Hitler regime.While denying "sadism", Scotland said things were done that were "mentally just as cruel".
"[5] Scotland refused to allow Red Cross inspections at the London Cage, on the grounds that the prisoners there were either civilians or "criminals within the armed services.
[8] In 1943, allegations of mistreatment at the London Cage resulted in a formal protest by MI5 director Maxwell Knight to the Secretary of State for War.
[...] One of the guards who had a somewhat humane feeling advised me not to make any more complaints, otherwise things would turn worse for me.Other prisoners, he alleged, were beaten until they begged to be killed, while some were told that they could be made to disappear.
[1] Scotland said in his memoirs that Knöchlein was not interrogated at all at the London Cage because there was sufficient evidence to convict him, and he wanted "no confusing documents with the aid of which he might try to wriggle from the net."
At one stage the local police called in to enquire why such a din was emanating from sedate Kensington Palace Gardens.At a trial in 1947 of eighteen Germans accused in the massacre of fifty Allied prisoners who escaped from Stalag Luft III, the Germans alleged starvation, sleep deprival, "third degree" interrogation methods, and torture by electric shock.
At more than one stage in those fifty days of courtroom wrangling, a stranger to such peculiar affairs might have suspected that the arch-criminal of them all was a British Army intelligence officer known as Colonel Alexander Scotland.Scotland denied the allegations at the trial.
