Playing a picture of Churchill on his birthday

British war crimes

Posted Monday, August 27, 2001

All this really happened — but in reverse. It happened in Germany, and we, the British occupying forces, carried it out. http:// Daily Mail London, Augfust 25, 2001 UNDER THE BRITISH JACKBOOT Rape, torture, execution and the horrors of interrogation camps. A new book paints a chilling picture of Germany under British rule in the aftermath of World War II Christopher Hudson TRY to imagine Britain occupied by a victorious Germany after World War II.

A young boy is executed for displaying a picture of Churchill on his birthday. Theft carries the death penalty, so does possession of any kind of firearm. Firing squads are expensive. Hanging wastes time. The Nazi Penal Branch asks permission to use the guillotine, which can carry out six single executions in 14 minutes. Meanwhile, internment camps have sprung up across the country.

Almost 40,000 British civilians and prisoners of war, men and women aged 16-70 have been swept up into these camps and are held without charge or expectation of a trial. They include not only ‘war criminals’, profiteers and anti-Nazi agitators, but anyone who ‘ridicules, damages or destroys’ German culture, along with any persons ‘considered dangerous to the Occupation or its objectives’, even if they have not committed any offence.

One English mother of four has been imprisoned for a year because she hid in a ditch to snatch a word with her husband who was out on a working party. Conditions in these camps are brutal. Inmates sleep in their clothes, packed five at a time like sardines on beds constructed from old pieces of wood. There is so little to eat that the majority of them are emaciated. Family visits are restricted to 30 minutes every three months.

Internees are frequently kept in dark cellars to prepare them for interrogation. According to a report compiled by a courageous German bishop, they are ‘terribly beaten, kicked, and so mishandled that traces can be seen for weeks afterwards. ‘The notorious Third Degree methods of using searchlights on victims and exposing them to high temperatures are also applied.’ All this really happened — but in reverse. It happened in Germany, and we, the British occupying forces, carried it out .

According to a new book by Patricia Meehan , historian and former BBC TV producer and documentarist who worked in Germany in 1945, the first few years of our Occupation were tarnished by deeds which would not have seemed out of place in Hitler’s Third Reich. Besides internment centres and holding camps for returned prisoners of war, there were also secret camps known by the initials DIC — Direct Interrogation Centres.

One day in February 1947, two of the inmates of No.74 DIC (Bad Nenndorf) were dumped at an Internee Hospital. One patient was skeletal, suffering from frostbite, unable to speak; the other was unconscious, with no discernible pulse — cold, skeletal and covered in ‘thick cakes of dirt; frostbite to arms and legs’. BOTH men died within hours. A third, who had been arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking, committed suicide while undergoing interrogation.

The resulting investigation uncovered horror stories of deprivation amounting to torture. Men were treated for injuries without anaesthetic. One prisoner, after eight days of solitary confinement, was put in an unheated punishment cell in midwinter. Buckets of cold water were thrown into the cell which the prisoner had to mop up with a rag. His jacket and boots were removed, and he had to stand with bleeding feet for about ten hours in extreme cold on a concrete floor.

Finally he had to crawl on hands and knees to interrogation. The Camp Commandant, Medical Officer and three interrogators were suspended and charged. But charges were dropped or reduced to negligence. All three courts-martial, including the Commandant’s, petered out, and the men were allowed to leave the service. True, Bad Nenndorf was an extreme case, which made the headlines.

And after fighting Germany in two world wars, it was hardly surprising if there were outbreaks of vindictiveness among British officers who had fought and suffered in them. CERTAINLY Hitler and Himmler would not have concerned themselves with the legality of such crimes.

Nevertheless, the very fact that this barbarism could have gone unnoticed or neglected by higher authorities for nearly two years is evidence of the chaos which engulfed defeated Germany, upon which no number of bureaucrats and administrators could at first impose order. After Germany surrendered in May 1945, it was divided into sectors, with Russians in the east, Americans in the south, French in the west and the British occupying the northwest, from Bonn to Hamburg.

Millions of Germans were on the roads — women, children and old people, pushing bicycles, prams and carts, or crowding into cattle wagons, to escape the Red Army which was killing and raping as it advanced, laying waste to millions of homes and driving soldiers and civilians alike