The Interrogator

by Andrew Williams

  ‘Can we walk a little way?’ Lehmann asked. ‘Just to the chapel.’

  Gretschel was hobbling slowly towards the cemetery gates with Mary at his side, their heads bent close in conversation.

  ‘All right, Herr Lehmann.’

  The chapel was a short walk in the opposite direction, half hidden by trees, simple, wooden, windowless, like a pagan longhouse. Beneath the open porch at the west end there was a bench and Lehmann dropped on to his knee to wipe it dry with the sleeve of his jacket. Lindsay sat down and reached for his silver cigarette case: ‘Do you smoke?’

  Lehmann pulled a face.

  ‘So, Herr Lehmann,’ and he bent to light his cigarette. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Herr Lange was like a grandfather to me. He helped my father when he was too ill to work, helped me through school and paid for me to come to university here. He was a friend to the family. Excuse me.’

  He stopped to blow his nose on a grubby handkerchief. Lindsay looked away until he was calm enough to continue. It was a friendship of more than forty years, that had begun at the end of the war when Lange had found Lehmann’s grandmother and her two children in a hostel for the homeless in Hamburg. Her husband had been killed in the British blitz of the city, her elder son lost on a U-boat, no money, no friends, no hope, two children to feed and care for, one of them Lehmann’s mother.

  ‘It was a small miracle. He spent weeks searching for my grandmother. He said he owed it to an old comrade, a friend from the U-boat service, my uncle.’

  ‘Your uncle?’

  ‘He served on one of the most successful U-boats of the war.’ Lehmann’s voice rang with a pride that would have been a cause of comment in his student hall.

  ‘The 112?’

  ‘Yes. Did you know . . .’

  ‘Yes. I did know him.’

  ‘Uncle August. He was only nineteen.’

  Yes, they had the same eyes. He could see the little engineer rocking on the chair on the other side of the table, his eyes large and frightened and close to tears. Nineteen. God. So many years lost to him, a terrible waste, a terrible and pointless crime. Black and white and as sharp in his mind as it was fifty years ago, the picture of Heine dangling inches from the washroom floor. It brought a hard lump to his throat.

  ‘I found out recently that he took his own life in the camp,’ said Lehmann. ‘Do you remember him? Herr Lange said you would.’

  ‘I didn’t know him well.’

  ‘No one seems to know why he killed himself. I asked his commander, Admiral Mohr – he spoke of combat fatigue. He said my uncle’s death hit all the survivors of the 112 very badly.’

  ‘Yes. It was sad and senseless.’

  And he thought of Gretschel tapping his finger against his temple. He was right, of course. Every hour, every day, guilt, fear, conflicting loyalties pulling first one way and then the other. Millions of small battles. Fought long after the parades and the bunting and the speeches. Scarred. Victor and vanquished the same. Lange, Mohr, Lindsay, he was sure they were the same. A secret history beyond the numbers and the dates and the shifting of borders. Someone had asked him to do an interview for a radio programme, just his memories of the war, but he declined. Some memories should be buried.

  Lindsay leant down to extinguish his cigarette in a puddle, then got stiffly to his feet. A sharp wind was gusting powdery snow from the pines into the chapel porch where it swirled in a fine mist, dropping wet crystals on their clothes and in their hair. It felt colder – perhaps that was the memories – and the sky was a filthy Berlin grey.

  ‘I think we’d better go back. My wife will be waiting for me.’

  They did not speak and the graveyard was silent but for the crunch of their shoes, figures in a monochrome landscape like something from a piece of forgotten archive film. Picking their way slowly between the stones, they found the main path and a few minutes later reached Lange’s grave. The cemetery workers were beating the hard ground between the pines flat with their spades, the rhythm like the ticking of a lazy clock. When it was level they loaded their tools into a handcart and left without a word, rattling down the gravel path to the gate. And Lindsay stood alone at the foot of the grave. He stood there until the raw earth was lost beneath the snow.

  HISTORICAL NOTE ON CODES

  I

  n the autumn of 1945 Commander Tighe of the Admiralty Signals Division submitted a secret report on German code-breaking efforts during the Second World War to the Director of Naval Intelligence. The report was considered ‘so disturbing and important’ that only three copies were made. In it, Tighe detailed the success of German cryptographers in repeatedly breaking both Royal and Merchant Navy codes and suggested that their efforts were responsible for many of the U-boat’s greatest successes in the Battle of the Atlantic. The Royal Navy’s codes were changed a number of times but the German B-Dienst was able to break into them again and again, often within a few weeks. The Admiralty was slow to recognise and interpret evidence that its codes were compromised and carry out the necessary investigation.

  After the war, the success of the cryptographers at Bletchley Park in breaking the German Enigma ciphers helped to shield the Royal Navy from critical scrutiny over the failure of its own codes. In his report, Commander Tighe concluded that British code security was so disastrously lax that it cost the country dearly in men and ships and ‘very nearly lost us the war’.

  NOTE ON SOURCES

  M

  any of the characters are based on real people although most of the events described are fictional.

  Admiral John Godfrey was the Director of Naval Intelligence until 1942 and Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books, was his assistant. Fleming was instrumental in recruiting people to the Division and those who worked with him often remarked on his love of cloak-and-dagger operations. The man charged with responsibility for tracking German U-boat operations from the Citadel was Rodger Winn and while none of the duty officers in Room 41 were women, a Margaret Stewart held this position across the corridor in Room 30 where the movements of the enemy’s surface fleet were plotted. Her confidential memoir of life in the Citadel is in the National Archive in London (ADM 223/286).

  For further details of the Citadel and the work of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) I quarried written sources but also the memories of those who visited and worked there. I am particularly grateful to the late Colin McFadyean who served as a naval interrogator and at the end of the war became head of the section. Transcripts of the secret recordings (SR reports) made of German prisoners at CSDIC, notes on the detailed interrogation of U-boat crews, and intelligence assessments written by the interrogators exist in the National Archive (Record groups ADM 223 and WO 208). They provide an invaluable insight into the work of Section 11 and the views of U-boat prisoners. Occasionally I have quoted from these documents, for instance, the observation made in 1941 by the then head of Section 11 that it was a mistake to use Jewish interrogators or men of ‘Jewish appearance’ (ADM 223/475). I have also drawn on authentic pieces of special intelligence, including some of the Enigma decrypts from Bletchley Park that suggested British codes might be compromised in the spring and summer of 1941 (ADM 223/2). Evidence that prisoners let slip valuable intelligence on the work of the B-Dienst can be found in CSDIC secret recordings made in March 1941 (WO 208/4141).

  Although there were three U-boat commanders with the name Mohr, none of them served on Admiral Dönitz’s Staff or fell into British hands. One of Admiral Dönitz’s most senior Staff officers was the distinguished U-boat commander Günther Hessler, who sank fourteen ships off the coast of West Africa in May and June of 1941. The official history he wrote for the Ministry of Defence after the war was an important source for the German Staff perspective on the Battle of the Atlantic.

  The most successful commander of the war, Otto Kretschmer of U-99, was captured in March 1941, brought ashore in Liverpool and taken to Trent Park for interrogation. The officers of
U-99 were then transferred to Grizedale POW camp in the Lake District. His first officer, Hans-Jochen von Knebel Doeberitz, had served for a time on the Staff as Dönitz’s adjutant. During Kretschmer’s time as the senior German prisoner at Grizedale, a secret Council of Honour was held to question and judge the First Officer of the ill-fated U-570. In August 1941 the inexperienced commander and crew of the boat had panicked and surrendered to a British aircraft at sea. The first officer was found guilty of cowardice by the Court of Honour for his part in the affair and ostracised by the other prisoners, but he was not beaten. In an effort to regain his good name, he attempted to escape and was shot while on the run in the Lake District. There were two investigations into the Court of Honour but no charges were brought against Kretschmer or any of the other prisoners at the camp. After the war, Otto Kretschmer served as an Admiral in the West German Navy. A more disturbing example of a kangaroo court took place at a POW camp in Scotland in December 1944 when a prisoner called Wolfgang Rosterg was wrongly accused of giving information to the British. He was brutally beaten and hanged by some of the SS prisoners in the camp. Five men were eventually tried and executed for the crime, although many more had played a part.

  Camp 020 was MI5’s secret centre at Ham Common, London, where spies were interrogated and broken by the formidable Colonel Stephens and his team of interrogators. There is no evidence to suggest that physical torture was used by the Security Service but a senior officer in one branch of Military Intelligence [MI 19] who spent time at the camp is known to have used excessive force. A number of secret reports were written by Naval Intelligence, MI5 and Military Intelligence personnel after the war describing their interrogation techniques in some detail and I have made use of these. The memories of the master Luftwaffe interrogator Hanns Joachim Scharff, quoted in The Interrogator by Raymond F. Tolliver (Schiffer 1997), were also useful, as were more contemporary British and American police sources. It was not unusual for POWs to be taken to bars and theatres in London in an effort to win their confidence and a special fund existed for this purpose.

  The Royal Navy lost a number of escorts like the Culloden on convoy duty in the course of the war but particularly shocking was the sinking of HMS Firedrake. The destroyer, Firedrake, was cut in half by a torpedo while on convoy duty in the Atlantic in December 1942 and all but twenty six of her crew of 194 men were lost. A secret Admiralty report was critical of decisions made by her captain (ADM 199/165). No official Board of Inquiry was held into the loss of the ship. For the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder on war veterans, I spoke to both Merchant and Royal Navy seamen and was able to draw on a number of recent medical studies. Of particular valve were J. P. Wilson, B. Droždek, and S. Turkovic: ‘Post-traumatic shame and guilt’, Trauma, Violence and Abuse, vol. 7, no. 2, April 2006, 122–141, and R. E. Opp and A. Y. Samson, ‘Taxonomy of guilt for combat veterans’, Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 20, 1989, 159–165.

  Of the many books, papers and people I have consulted in researching the story, I would especially like to thank Volmar König for his memories of life behind the wire as a prisoner. Admiral John Adams helped me with his recollections of life aboard an old V and W Class destroyer in the first years of the war and of the dark days of the Liverpool blitz. I am grateful to Sarah Baring for her insight into life in the Citadel and on the home front and to Dr Iain Hamilton of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg for sharing his knowledge of the Naval Intelligence Division. Donald Coombes spoke to me of the night HMS Firedrake was lost. I interviewed Colin McFadyean more than once about his work as an interrogator and the late Sir Charles Wheeler also shared his memories of the Naval Intelligence division with me.

  I would also like to acknowledge my debt to the following sources: The Admiralty’s A Seaman’s Pocket-Book (June 1943); Patrick Beesley, Very Special Intelligence – The Story of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre 1939–45 and Very Special Admiral: The Life of Admiral J. H. Godfrey; Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-boat Wars 1939–45 (2 vols); Kendal Burt and James Leasor, The One That Got Away; Patrick Campbell, Trent Park: A History; Simon Crump, They Call it ‘U-boat Hotel’; Roderick De Norman, For Führer and Fatherland: SS Murder and Mayhem in Wartime Britain; Karl Dönitz, Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days; Günther Hessler, German Naval History of the U-boat War in the Atlantic (3 vols); Chris Howard, The Battle of the Atlantic – The Corvettes and Their Crews; Major H. R. Jordan, unpublished memoir in the Imperial War Museum of Major H. R. Jordan of Military Counter Intelligence; David Kahn, Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-boat Codes 1939–43; General Raymond E. Lee, The Journal of General Raymond E. Lee 1940–41; Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming; Donald Macintyre, U-boat Killer; Donald MacLachlan, Room 39: Naval Intelligence in Action 1939–45; Jak P. Mallmann Showell, German Naval Code Breakers; Timothy P. Mulligan, Neither Sharks Nor Wolves: The Men of the Nazi U-boat Arm 1939–45; Axel Niestlé, German U-boat Losses During World War II; James Owen and Guy Walters, The Voice of War; Léonce Peillard, U-boats to the Rescue: The Laconia Incident; Graham Rhys-Jones, ‘The German System: A Staff Perspective’ in The Battle of the Atlantic: The 50th Anniversary International Naval Conference; Phil Richards and John Banigan, How to Abandon Ship (1942); Terence Robertson, The Golden Horseshoe; Jürgen Rohwer, Axis Submarine Success of World War II; Captain S. W. Roskill, The War at Sea (4 vols); Stephen Sansom, Westminster at War; Hanns Joachim Scharff and Raymond F. Tolliver, The Interrogator: The Story of Hanns Joachim Scharff – Master Interrogator of the Luftwaffe; Lt Col A. P. Scotland, The London Cage; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Enigma: The Battle for the Codes; Lt Col R. W. G. Stephens and Oliver Hoare, Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies; John Strachey, Post D; David Syrett, The Battle of the Atlantic and Signals Intelligence U-boat Situations and Trends 1941–45; Eric Topp, Odyssey of a U-boat Commander; Colin Warwick, Really Not Required; Herbert A. Werner, Iron Coffins; Derek M. Whale, The Liners of Liverpool; Richard Whittington-Egan, The Great Liverpool Blitz; Joan Wyndham, Love is Blue and Love Lessons.

  Finally, I would like to thank my agent Julian Alexander and my editor, Kate Parkin and all those who helped me with advice and encouragement. I hope they find enough of the spirit of the times in the story to forgive the liberties I have taken with the history.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  March 1941

  April 1941

  May 1941

  June 1941

  PART TWO

  July 1941

  August 1941

  September 1941

  PART THREE

  Historical Note on Codes

  Note on Sources