When its 2 Commando Brigade detachment rejoined 3 Troop, No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando from Italy, the Troop were transferred to form 346, 347, 348, 349 and 350 FSS and the Commando Interrogation Team, which screened 250,000 prisoners in the camps at Rheinburg and Wickwrath. When the release of forced labourers, liberation of Allied prisoners and confinement of German prisoners meant that agricultural output came to a near halt, several Disbandment Camps administered by a trusted German unit and supervised by Field Security began releasing as many prisoners as possible. Sergeant ‘Anson’ worked with the Field Interrogation Agency (Technical) investigating Nazi scientific and medical experiments. Those attached to Public Safety Branches helped reform the police but found investigating Jews profiting from the black market an easy option to ignore. Others interviewed the directors of Krupps and several major companies for evidence of their involvement in using slave labour. Of the German resistance groups, the most well known, the Wehrwolves, was largely ineffectual. However, activists threw a grenade into the 317 (Airborne) FSS office in Wismar. Some commandos were involved in covert operations. A gang planning to assassinate British soldiers using weapons stored in a cache near Hildesheim were infiltrated by Sergeant Ronnie ‘Gilbert’ who ‘agreed’ to use an Army lorry to move the weapons. As he drove toward a planned checkpoint, the leader pointed a pistol at his head and ordered him to ignore the checkpoint, however, ‘Gilbert’ slipped the clutch causing the vehicle to de-accelerate and enabled the soldiers to catch up. The leader was imprisoned for six years. Under the military law then in force, he could have faced a firing squad.
By the time the Allies met at Potsdam in July 1945 to finalize the post-war peace, relations had worsened since Yalta. In March, Stalin had arrested non-Communist Polish leaders. The new, tough talking US President Truman arrived with the knowledge that US development of the Atom bomb gave America strategic advantage and consequently the Soviets were no longer needed to help defeat Japan. Nevertheless, the Conference agreed to four occupation zones within Germany and Austria. A Russian-speaking FS section provided security cover. Within two months of Potsdam and the British Joint Planning Group drafting Operation Unthinkable of ‘total war … to impose our will upon Russia’, on 25 August, 21st Army Group reformed as the second British Army of the Rhine with the three Corps supporting the British Military Government under command. It was also decided that communications between the four Allied Commanders in Chief should be retained. So, on 16 September, Lieutenant General Brian Robertson, the British Deputy Military Governor, and Colonel General M.S. Malinin, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Forces, agreed to exchange military liaison missions of eleven officers and twenty NCOs, permitted freedom of travel within their respective zones except in Permanent and Temporary Restricted Areas notified in advance. Also guaranteed were radio and telephone communications and diplomatic immunity. The Soviet Military Mission (SOXMIS) was initially based at Bad Salzuflen until it moved to Bunde when Headquarters British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) and RAF Germany moved to Rheindahlen. The British Military Mission (BRIXMIS) was based in Berlin.
In September, the spa complex near Bad Driburg was requsitioned and, once the haughty Baroness von Oeynhausen had been relocated from her rooms, the School of Military Intelligence was opened to cater for the training of transferees and those involved in intelligence activities on ten-week courses that included principles of intelligence, German administration, socio-political aspects of democracy and cultural trips. Competency in German was obligatory. A female instructor teaching the use of explosive to open safes discouraged flagging concentrations by detonating timer fuses under trestle tables. Two villas in Wilmersdorf, Berlin were requisitioned by 23 (Antwerp Port) and 309 (2nd Army) FSS and were followed by 50 FSS in November. Tasked to target Nazi intelligence services, in the event of a Nazi revival, and Soviet scientific and atomic research and technology, Colonel Stevens moved Advanced Camp 020 from Diest to the spa town of Bad Nenndorf where it became No. 74 Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (Western European Area).
Twice within twenty-five years, the British had gone to war with hastily-raised Intelligence Corps and yet, in spite of their success, the Adjutant-General’s 1943 decision that there was no need for a permanent Intelligence Corps was upheld. At the annual Intelligence Directorate dinner in November 1945, General Templer was pessimistic:
Short Service engagement should be accepted as a stop-gap – a temporary expedient to meet the needs of the moment … It is possible that at some future date the Intelligence Corps will continue only on a reserve or Territorial Army basis’.
On 3 January 1946, the War Office committed to the Intelligence Corps existing as a reserve of about 320 officers and 260 other ranks receiving periodic training at the School of Military Intelligence, by attachments and by filling intelligence appointments on exercises. Staff intelligence appointments would be filled by officers from any arm. That most FS sections were not commanded by Intelligence Corps officers meant the vital esprit de corps developed very slowly, although the Intelligence Corps Comrades Association, which had been formed in October 1941, provided linkages. Its members collected about £1,500 for a Corps Chapel. The word ‘Comrades’ was dropped in 1964. Templer’s remarks were reflected in the January to June 1946 Corps Newsletter:
It is possible that at some future date the Intelligence Corps will exist only on a reserve or TA basis. The terms of service for volunteers and TA will be published in due course. Meanwhile, applications are welcomed from would-be volunteers.
Meanwhile in Germany, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Forces in Europe began a census and rebooted education alongside martial law, curfews and non-fraternization, the latter largely disregarded until it was discontinued by 1946. Supplied with pre-war and wartime demographic and political records, the three Corps Headquarters formed Intelligence Teams of pairs of German-speaking Intelligence Corps from their FS sections to undertake one to two week tours in their sectors to assess public opinion and interview politicians, civil servants and industrialists at all levels. Shortage of transport led to Operation Snatch, in which private cars, including VW Beetles manufactured at the British-controlled Wolfsburg factory, were requisitioned. However, few served their purpose and most were returned to their owners. The teams were issued with Special Authorisation Cards that permitted holders to fraternize, and even shake hands, with Germans; they were still being issued in the 1970s. Others interviewed Germans who had spent the war in neutral countries, which included sailors from the German pocket battleship Graf Spee who had remained in Argentina after it had been scuttled in the River Plate in 1939, and deportees sympathetic to the Allied cause.
Although the Allies had issued the Declaration on the Punishment of War Crimes in November 1943, the development of the British War Crimes Commission was slow. The Judge Advocate General’s War Crimes Investigation Unit established at Bad Oeynhausen was supported by the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, which had been established in Paris in February 1945 with the three lists of the wanted, suspects detained for specific crimes and prisoners of war, but attempts to establish an Anglo-American registry was chaotic because agencies failed to exchange information. The lack of linguists, lawyers and suitable investigators hampered inquiries, as did War Office ambivalence. Nevertheless, Internment Centres were established, such as the ‘Dustbin’ for VIPs near Frankfurt/Main, Werl for German hierarchy and at Fallingbostel and Recklinghausen. The ‘Tomato’ Internment Centre in Minden was used to detain important suspects before transfer to Detailed Interrogation Centres in Great Britain.
The aim of the Counter-Intelligence Bureau set out to suppress and prevent the resurgence of military, Nazi or subversive activity. Organized into the Information Section dealing with analysis and assessment, a Case Work Section dealing with cases arising out of arrest or investigation, and the Postal, Frontier and Travel Control Section, it was expected to co-operate with the Corps in the de-Nazification process and exerc
ise control over the civilian population, using appropriate measures, such as interrogation, the exploitation of informants and travel control. The Russian-speaking Lieutenant Colonel Alan Nightingale heading the Investigation Section later claimed that ‘I had to scrape the barrel and still kick out those I could recruit.’ The Registry was discredited because some suspects had adopted false identities and the Russians were not members although, in May 1946, they relented after Nightingale handed over forty-six officers and guards from Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Eventually, the Allies concentrated on crimes against their nationals with the British executing, between 1946 and 1947, about 200 men convicted of crimes against the British, the Dominions and foreign nationals serving with the British.
The lack of interrogators was partly resolved by drafting German speakers from within the Armed Forces and SOE. Captain Harris Cornish was detached from the London Cage and joined RAF investigations into the murders of the fifty Allied air force officers who had escaped from Stalag Luft 3 in the Great Escape. Arriving in Moscow in 1946 to interview SS-Dr Wilhelm Scharpwinkel, the Breslau Gestapo chief suspected of murder, the Soviets allowed him to take just two statements; nevertheless, he collected previously unknown information that implicated the Kiel Gestapo. Border Police Sergeant Erich Zacharias, sent to London Cage, was described by Colonel Scotland as ‘the most uncivilised, brutal, and morally indecent character in the entire story’. Denounced by his wife and recognized from a mural in a Gestapo night club, he was executed in 1948. Scotland investigating the murders of ninety-eight Royal Norfolks near Calais in 1940 by the SS Totenkopfe Division produced two survivors. When the officer responsible, SS-Captain Fritz Knoechlein arrived at The Cage in October 1946, his complaints of violence, deprivation of sleep and rigorous exercise were formally investigated but failed to delay his execution. MI5 always had concerns about the Cage and when Knoechlein alleged that he had signed a confession under psychological duress, Scotland was accused of repeatedly breaching the Geneva Conventions. He refused a Red Cross inspection in March 1946 on the grounds that war crimes investigations followed judicial protocols rather than the Geneva Conventions. A visit eighteen months later found little evidence of ill-treatment but noted that ten prisoners had been transferred to other camps and some lodging complaints risked reprisals, but no action was taken because its closure was imminent. When in 1950, Scotland submitted his manuscript for this book London Cage, the War Office threatened him with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. It was eventually published seven years later.
Perhaps the one arrest that achieved notoriety was the capture of SS-Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz commandant, by 92, 270 and 318 FSS. Evading Soviet forces that had liberated Auschwitz on 27 January, Hoess reached Flensburg. He attended the 5 May meeting chaired by Himmler and melted into the masses of prisoners, masquerading as former Petty Officer ‘Franz Lang’ and then found employment on a farm near the town. Meanwhile, the War Crimes Unit had traced his wife and two sons to a house near Belsen where 92 FSS, commanded by Captain William Cross, arrested her and her eldest son on 6 March 1946. Mrs Hoess despised her husband; nevertheless, for five days she refused to answer the only question that she was asked ‘Where is your husband?’ Cross then offered her the option of writing down his aliases and location or bid farewell to her son, who, he said, was about to be put on board a train bound for the Soviet Union. She chose the former and, that night, the three sections surrounded the farmhouse and arrested Hoess but then treated him to the same humiliations to which his guards had subjected new arrivals at Auswitchz, to the extent that the accompanying RAMC medical officer was sufficiently concerned to advise Cross to ‘call his men off unless he wanted to take back a corpse’. Hoess wrote a lengthy deposition and was eventually executed by the Poles outside his Auschwitz office. Among those involved in his interrogation was Private ‘Jackson’, of 3 Troop, No. 10 (Inter Allied) Commando, whose mother had not survived Auschwitz. With Kramer of Belsen, he is estimated to have managed the extermination of about a million people. During the year, 92 FSS also arrested SS-Captain Hans Bothmann, who was in charge of extermination at Chelmo concentration camp and Birkenau and was also head of SD in Poznań, and SS-Captain Rudolf Georg Renner, who was wanted for war crimes in Denmark. CSM Ryan of 39 (15th (Scottish) Division) FSS in Bad Oldesloe, Schleswig-Holstein, arrested Colonel General Kurt von Zeitler, former Chief of Staff to the German High Command, and removed eight diaries.
Although the risk of infiltration by agents and saboteurs into Northern Ireland from Ireland had been mitigated in 1940 by Northern Ireland Command and the Irish Army conducting joint reconnaissances of possible air and sea landing sites, in 1946 an Intelligence Corps officer interviewed the Abwehr Irish desk officer, Kurt Haller. From him he learnt that a 1935 plan to use Irish saboteurs in southern England to support Operation Sea Lion had foundered when attempts to recruit volunteers from Irish prisoners of war failed. The Detailed Interrogation Centre report concluded:
‘The sorry crew of Irish renegades, though willing to betray Great Britain and each other, were judged to be too unreliable to be sent. On top of that the Abwehr were badly misled in that they took the fantastic day-dreams of the IRA at face value…greatly overrated the strength and ability of the organisation.’
By December, HQ Intelligence Corps (Field) was administering 1,500 men divided into eighty-three sections, twenty Interrogation units, an Army Refugee Interrogation Team, a Counter-Intelligence Bureau and Laboratory, sixteen Area Security Officers and a Dutch Security Liaison Mission. A Belgian Mission had been disbanded in October. The aim of the Counter-Intelligence Bureau was to suppress the resurgence of military, Nazi or subversive activity. Organized into the Information Section dealing with analysis and assessment, a Case Work Section dealing with cases arising out of arrests and investigations and the Postal, Frontier and Travel Control Section, it was expected to co-operate with the Corps in the de-Nazification process and exercise control over the civilian population, using appropriate measures, such as interrogation, the exploitation of informants and travel control. Later additions included three Counter-Sabotage Detachments, Port Security Sections and Border Security Sections. In Bremen, a FS detachment seconded to the US Counter-intelligence Corps vetted displaced persons applying to emigrate to the USA.
Censorship played a key role with 2nd Army Counter-Intelligence Instruction No 4 displayed in every post office, warning that mail would be censored. Two months after the surrender, representatives from Great Britain, Belgium, Denmark and Holland established the Censorship Bureau from GS Intelligence (C), Twenty-First Army Group and HQ British Civil Censorship (Germany) of District Censorship Stations of No. 1 (Belgian) in Bonn, No. 2 (Dutch) at Peine and No. 3 (Danish) and a Radio Traffic Station in Berlin. Each was organized into Policy and Liaison, Postal, Electrical, Information and Records, Military, and Administrative branches. The Belgians withdrew in 1947, the Dutch in April 1949 and the Danes in September 1950; nevertheless, the British retained twenty staff until responsibility for counter-intelligence matters in the British zone passed from the Foreign Office to the War Office in 1951.
Meanwhile, the mammoth task of battlefield clearance was underway throughout Europe. In the spring of 1946, Sergeant Bryan Griffith of 342 (Hamburg) Port Security Section was returning to his billet when there was a massive explosion from the docks. Returning to the docks with a highly agitated German docker, Griffith saw a rusty 5ft cylinder embedded in the wreckage of a smoking building. A Royal Engineer bomb disposal sergeant pronounced the device to be a field cooker but was unable to explain why it had become airborne until the sappers pulled it from the rubble and found it was part of a V-1. During his investigation, Griffith interviewed a former member of the Afrika Korps working at a dump of captured equipment, who told that him that he had been instructed to dismantle V-1s using a blow torch and one had reacted to the heat, had slithered across the grass, briefly took off and then buried itself in a building. The inciden
t later rated six lines in the Daily Express.
The confiscation of about ten per cent of the surviving German industrial infrastructure as reparation and the occupation of several Eastern Europe countries and parts of Finland by the Soviet Union, led to Churchill summarizing the threat in his Sinews of Peace speech of 5 March 1946 at Fulton, Missouri:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.
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