London Cage

The London District Prisoner-of-War Cage (LDC) in London’s Kensington Palace Gardens was the name given to three stately homes located in Kensington Palace Gardens, London, where German prisoners of war where tortured to extract information between 1940 and 1948. The Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre was run by MI 19 which was responsible for obtaining information from enemy prisoners of war.

History

The British journalist Ian Cobain wrote in 2005 that 3,573 Germans had to endure extreme torture in the British capital; interrogations continued there until 1948. The commander of the torture center was Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Scotland (1882–1965), who, although British, served in the Schutztruppe of German South-West Africa from 1903 to 1907 under the name “Schottland”, later as an agent for Jan Smuts, but allegedly also for the German side, was then interned as a spy in Windhoek in 1914, was liberated by British troops on 6 July 1915, returned to England, and then interrogated German prisoners in France as a British officer in the First World War, since he spoke fluent German. In 1918, he was active as an agent in Flanders (he tried to volunteer for the Imperial German Army), was then exposed, returned to his own troops and was discharged as a captain in 1919.

Located in a gated street coined Millionaires’ Row, belonging to the Crown Estate and bordering the royal Kensington Palace, it boasted one of the most exclusive and expensive residences in the capital and unlikeliest of locations to hold German prisoners-of-war. For the neighbours – the Russian Embassy tenanted next door and the wealthy magnates living in the other mansions – there was no inkling of what was going on behind the bravura Victorian façades. Here the prisoners, who could not be broken under normal conditions of interrogation at any of the other eight ‘cages’ in Britain, were subjected to ‘special intelligence treatment’, designed to break their will to resist. As a transit camp, the London Cage should have appeared on the wartime lists of the Red Cross. It did not – because officially it did not exist. Its Commanding officer Colonel Alexander Scotland, a longstanding intelligence officer (rumoured to have been MI5), set the cage rules and this is where the controversy emerged. Within six months of opening, the London Cage became embroiled in an internal heated controversy over the use of violence and unorthodox methods during interrogations. At the end of the war, the London Cage became the War Crimes Investigation Unit and the most important such centre outside Germany. Many high ranking Nazi war criminals and SS officers passed through its doors after being hunted down by Scotland’s own specialist teams roaming Europe to bring them out of hiding. Claims of brutality, use of torture and psychological abuse surfaced again at the London Cage – this time very publicly. Then, in the 1950s, panic coursed through the corridors of MI5 and the Foreign Office when it was discovered that Scotland was on the verge of publishing his memoirs. He was silenced and a censored version published in 1957. What ended up on the cutting room floor was at least half of the manuscript, including all examples of methods of interrogation, anecdotal stories about specific prisoners, examples of conversations with prisoners, and life generally inside the cage.

In 1939, now 57 yeras old, Scotland was reactivated in the English army due to WWII. It had five interrogation rooms and had a staff that included 10 officers and a dozen NCOs who served as interrogators and interpreters. It was Scotland who denied the Red Cross access to the prisoners of war in the London Cage because he arrogantly described them as civilians or “criminals in uniform” who did not deserve the protection of the Geneva Conventions. The Red Cross was not allowed in until September 1947, but by then the army command had given the London Cage the order to stop or at least reduce the torture interrogations.

Run by MI19, the section of the War Office, the London Cage existed first as an “interrogation centre” and then as the war crimes “investigation unit”. What went on behind these closed doors was in no way consistent with the Geneva convention or Britain’s post-war “no torture policy”. Prisoners of war were tortured there using various methods, including sleep deprivation, starvation, beatings, electric shock, induced hypothermia to name a few. The Cage had space for 60 prisoners at any time, and five interrogation rooms. It’s claimed local police were called in on occasion by neighboring residents to inquire about the mysterious cries of men coming from number 6, 7, and 8 Kensington Palace Gardens.

The military intelligence service MI5 had also criticized – according to the files that Ian Cobain was allowed to view – the treatment of German prisoners of war in the London Cage during the war (after the African and Tunisian campaigns, when many Wehrmacht officers were taken prisoner).

In autumn 1940 British intelligence, MI9, opened a secret interrogation centre on behalf of in the heart of the millionaire enclave of London’s Kensington Palace Gardens. Taking over Nos. 6-7 and 8 & 8a, its commanding officer Colonel Alexander Scotland ensured that the mansion houses were stripped off their former luxury and the ‘cage’ was established as a grim prison. It soon developed a formidable reputation in military circles for any prisoner of war transferred there for interrogation. Here, Colonel Scotland and his interrogators tried “to break the prisoner’s will to resist” through periods of solitary confinement, long relays of interrogation, often at night, and sleep deprivation. Today, the declassified files – especially Colonel Scotland’s unredacted memoirs – provide a vivid insight into ‘life inside the cage’. But, proving precisely what happened there and dispelling the decades of rumours about mistreatment and torture is not straightforward. [...] Whatever the moral dilemmas, psychological tricks and physical conditions at the London Cage, an astonishing fact has emerged – that Colonel Scotland and his team used truth drugs on some prisoners as early as 1940. Truth drugs are generally associated with the Cold War and developed independently by the US, Britain, Russia and North Korea in the 1950s. The experimental use of drugs and hypnosis for ‘mind control’ was believed to control a person’s mind or induce them to tell the truth; hence the designation ‘truth drugs’. The subject became the focus of the Hollywood film franchise The Bourne Identity and its sequels, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and George Orwell’s 1984. In popular culture these were seen as just fiction and pure fantasy, yet few people suspected how close to reality these accounts came. Declassified files reveal that Britain’s Naval intelligence interrogators were experimenting with truth drugs as early as December 1939. Initially, interrogators from Naval Intelligence tried out truth drugs on their own willing intelligence officers to ascertain the effects. Bernard Trench, a Naval Intelligence interrogator attached to MI9, was one of those involved in the experimental use of drugs like Evipan, and possibly mescaline. His war diary alludes to the experimental use of drugs on prisoners. Epivan, when combined with hypnosis, could put a patient in a condition in which he would be unable to resist interrogation. The drug was traditionally used to treat types of epilepsy and certain psychotic disorders. It belonged to a group of drugs that made a person more susceptible to hypnosis. Hypnosis ensured that the patient had no memory of the interrogation.

Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Paterson Scotland, the head of the clandestine facility, denied all allegations of torture at the London Cage until his death in 1965.

See also

• Nuremberg trials
• Claims of torture in British occupied Germany
• Holocaust testimonial evidence: Violent methods

External link

• The secrets of the London Cage
• The Guardian: The interrogation camp that turned prisoners into living skeletons (Archive)