British torture camp where innocent prisoners were murdered
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1669544,00.html

Ian Cobain, in The Guardian 17 December 2005, reported on Britain's secret torture centres in Germany. One of the torture centres was at Bad Nenndorf, near Hanover. It was run by the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC), following the British occupation of north-west Germany in 1945.

At the torture camps, prisoners were emaciated and fearful like the victims of Belsen.

One Russian prisoner, Alexander Kalkowski, claimed he had been severely beaten and forced to spend eight hours a day in a cold bath.

Prisoners complained of thumbscrews and "shin screws".

In December 2005, Foreign Office files were opened after a request by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act. These papers, and others declassified earlier, tell the story of the 372 men and 44 women who passed through the Bad Nenndorf torture centre during the 22 months it operated before its closure in July 1947.

A Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward, investigated Bad Nenndorf.

He describes how prisoners were systematically beaten and exposed to extreme cold; some were starved to death and, allegedly, tortured with instruments that his fellow countrymen had recovered from a Gestapo prison in Hamburg.

Many of the prisoners were simply German leftists.

Others were Germans living in the Russian zone who had crossed the line, offered to spy on the Russians, and were tortured to establish whether they were genuine defectors.

One of the men who was starved to death, Walter Bergmann, had offered to spy for the British, and fell under suspicion because he spoke Russian.

Hayward reported: "There seems little doubt that Bergmann, against whom no charge of any crime has ever been made, but on the contrary, who appears to be a man who has given every assistance, and that of considerable value, has lost his life through malnutrition and lack of medical care".

Another man who starved to death, Franz Osterreicher, had been arrested with forged papers while attempting to enter the British zone in search of his gay lover. Hayward said that "in his struggle for existence or to get extra scraps of food he stood a very poor chance" at Bad Nenndorf.

Many of Bad Nenndorf's inmates were there for no reason at all.

One, a former diplomat, remained locked up because he had "learned too much about our interrogation methods".

Another arrived after a clerical error, and was incarcerated for eight months.

Hayward reported: "There are a number against whom no offence has been alleged, and the only authority for their detention would appear to be that they are citizens of a country still nominally at war with us."

Ingrid Groth, then a seven-year-old, said locals claimed that if you crept up to the barbed wire at night, you could hear the prisoners' screams.

MI5

According to The Guardian:

The commanding officer was Robin "Tin Eye" Stephens, 45, a monocled colonel of the Peshawar Division of the Indian Army who had been seconded to MI5 in 1939, and who had commanded Camp 020, a detention centre in Surrey where German spies had been interrogated during the war.

An authoritarian and a xenophobe with a legendary temper, Stephens boasted that interrogators who could "break" a man were born, and not made. Of the 20 interrogators ordered to break the inmates of Bad Nenndorf, 12 were British, a combination of officers from the three services and civilian linguists. The remaining eight included a Pole and a Dutchman, but were mostly German Jewish refugees who had enlisted on the outbreak of war, and who, Inspector Hayward suggested, "might not be expected to be wholly impartial".

...Some warders represented the more unruly elements of the British Army of the Rhine, sent to Bad Nenndorf after receiving suspended sentences for assault or desertion. Often, Hayward said, they were the sort of individuals "likely to resort to violence on helpless men".

The inmates were starved, woken during the night, and forced to walk up and down their cells from early morning until late at night. When moving about the prison they were expected to run, while soldiers kicked them. One warder, a soldier of the Welsh Regiment, told Hayward: "If a British soldier feels inclined to treat a prisoner decently he has every opportunity to do so; and he also has the opportunity to ill-treat a prisoner if he so desires".

The Foreign Office briefed Clement Attlee, the prime minister, that "the guards had apparently been instructed to carry out physical assaults on certain prisoners with the object of reducing them to a state of physical collapse and of making them more amenable to interrogation".

Former prisoners told Hayward that they had been whipped as well as beaten. This, the detective said, seemed unbelievable, until "our inquiries of warders and guards produced most unexpected corroboration". Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered "perfectly proper", on the grounds that such threats were never carried out.

Moreover, any prisoner thought to be uncooperative during interrogation was taken to a punishment cell where they would be stripped and repeatedly doused in water. This punishment could continue for weeks, even in sub-zero temperatures.

Naked prisoners were handcuffed back-to-back and forced to stand before open windows in midwinter. Frostbite became common.

One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar...an anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo.

"I never in all those two years had undergone such treatments," he said.

Kalkowski, the NKVD officer, claimed that toenails were ripped out and that he had been hung from his wrists during interrogation, with weights tied to his legs. British NCOs, he alleged, would beat him with rubber truncheons "while the interrogating officers went for lunch"...

Whatever was happening during the interrogations must have been widely known among many of the camp's officers and men. In common with every CSDIC prison, each cell was bugged, so that the prisoners' private utterances could be matched against their "confessions".

Inspector Hayward's investigation led to the courts martial of Stephens, Captain John Smith, Bad Nenndorf's medical officer, and an interrogator, Lieutenant Richard Langham. The hearings were largely held behind closed doors. A number of sergeants - men who had carried out the beatings - were told they would be pardoned if they gave evidence against their officers.

Langham, who had been born in Munich and fled to England with his parents in 1934, at the age of 13, denied that he had mistreated prisoners and was acquitted.

Charges of manslaughter against Smith were dropped but, after a court martial held entirely in secret, he was found guilty of the neglect of inmates and sentenced, at the age of 49, to be dismissed the service.

It is unclear whether any of Stephens's superiors knew, or condoned, what had happened at Bad Nenndorf, although his lawyers said they were prepared to spread the blame among senior army officers and Foreign Office officials. Before his court martial began there was nervous debate among ministers and government officials about how to avoid the repercussions which would follow, should the truth become known.

Ministers were anxious that nobody should learn that CSDIC was running a number of similar prisons in Germany.

There was also what the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Frank Pakenham, later to become Lord Longford, described as "the fact that we are alleged to have treated internees in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps".

The army, meanwhile, said it was determined the Soviets should not discover "how we apprehended and treated their agents", not least because some would-be defectors might have second thoughts.

Finally, there was the inevitable fall-out for Attlee's Labour government. As Hector McNeill, foreign minister, pointed out in a memo to Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary: "I doubt if I can put too strongly the parliamentary consequences of publicity. Whenever we have any allegations to make about the political police methods in Eastern European states it will be enough to call out in the House 'Bad Nenndorf', and no reply is left to us."

Stephens ... was acquitted of two charges, two others were withdrawn, and he was free to apply to rejoin MI5.

The closure of Bad Nenndorf was not the end of the story, however. The archives reveal that three months later a custom-built interrogation centre, with cells for 30 men and 10 women, was opened near to the British military base at Gütersloh. The inmates were to be suspected Soviet spies, and would be medically examined before interrogation.

When Frank Pakenham complained that most of the interrogators had been at Bad Nenndorf, and demanded that "drastic methods" should not be employed, Major-General Sir Brian Robertson, the military governor, put his foot down.

Why, he exclaimed, if the military authorities were required to justify the arrest of each inmate, and then handle them according to the standards "enforced by the prison commissioners in our own enlightened country", there was little point in having an interrogation centre at all.

Death subterfuge

One of the most bizarre episodes at Bad Nenndorf followed the death of a former SS officer called Abeling. He had been so severely beaten during his arrest in January 1947 that he was unconscious on arrival at the prison, and died shortly afterwards.

The camp's officers instructed a local gravedigger to prepare a grave for a British officer who had died of an infectious disease. Abeling's corpse was sewn into a blanket, lowered in, and covered with quicklime. A firing party was on hand to ensure that the dead man was buried with full British military honours, and a white wooden cross with a false name was erected over the grave.

The reasons for such subterfuge are made clear in declassified Foreign Office papers at the National Archives. Abeling, formerly a member of an "annihilation squad" in Warsaw, had been working as an agent for the Americans at the time of his death, spying on his old Nazi comrades under the codename Slim.

The report notes that the Americans "insisted that 'Slim's' death must be kept a very closely guarded secret, because of the fact that the US authorities had been employing him in the full knowledge that he was wanted by the Polish government as a major war criminal".

Today the wooden cross over Abeling's grave has been replaced with a gravestone. It still bears the name of the man that local people believe to be buried there: John X White, born 1.8.1911, died 17.1.1947.

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MI6 torture in Greece?
According to The Times, 13 December 2005:

Lawyer accuses MI6 of 'torture' methods

MI6 agents are accused of the kidnapping and “psychological torture” of 28 Pakistanis held in Greece.

A leading Greek lawyer has presented a dossier to parliament in Athens of the treatment of 28 detainees by MI6 officers. Frangiscos Ragoussis alleges that the detainees were hooded and held in secret.

The men, all of Pakistani origin, claim that they were threatened by two British agents who warned them that their families in Greece and the UK would suffer also if they dared complain about their treatment.

These allegations come at an awkward time for the Government, which is facing demands for an investigation into the CIA’s use of British airports to ferry al-Qaeda suspects to secret prisons in Europe and the Middle East.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, denied yesterday that British airports had been used by the United States for so-called “extraordinary rendition” flights taking terrorist suspects for interrogation in third countries.

If Greek MPs decide to investigate the claims of mistreatment British ministers may have to defend the behaviour of its agents abroad. Mr Blair insists that Britain’s security services do not use torture here or overseas.

Security chiefs have never said how many were detained at their request, or what happened to these suspects.

Most of the 28 detained in Greece are still too scared to say anything, but one, Hizar Hayet, 32, has claimed that he was questioned about a series of mobile telephone calls linked with some of the four London suicide bombers.

None of the men was charged.

London bombs: former UK cabinet minister Meacher says MI6 is trying to cover its tracks.

"7/7 Bombers" movements Physically Impossible

7 July 'bus bomber' phoned 'tube bombers' after the tube explosions.

Lest we forget - Aswat

Aswat worked for MI6 in Kosovo?

Scotland Yard 'Not Interested' In Talking To 7/7 Bomb Mastermind

The security services had links to the four July 7 London 'bombers' a year before July 7th.

David Shayler, ex-MI5 agent: 'the London bombings were most likely carried out by the British government.'


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