http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,16518,1669544,00.html
Great Britain's Secret Torture Chambers!
Ian Cobain
Saturday December 17, 2005
The Guardian
Despite
the six years of bitter fighting which lay behind him,
James Morgan-Jones, a major in the Royal Artillery,
could not have been more specific about the spectacle in
front of him. "It was," he reported, "one of the most
disgusting sights of my life."
Curled up on a bed in a hospital in
Rotenburg, near Bremen, was a cadaverous shadow of a
human being. "The man literally had no flesh on him, his
state of emaciation was incredible," wrote Morgan-Jones.
This man had weighed a little over six stones (38kg) on
admission five weeks earlier, and "was still a figure
which may well have been one of the Belsen inmates". At
the base of his spine "was a huge festering sore", and
he was clearly terrified of returning to the prison
where he had been brought so close to death. "If ever a
man showed fear - he did," Morgan-Jones declared.
Adolf Galla, 36, a dental technician,
was not alone. A few beds away lay Robert Buttlar, 27, a
journalist, who had been admitted after swallowing a
spoon handle in a suicide attempt at the same prison. He
too was emaciated and four of his toes had been lost to
frostbite.
The previous month, January 1947, two
other inmates, Walter Bergmann, 20, and Franz
Osterreicher, 38, had died of malnutrition within hours
of arriving at the hospital. Over the previous 13
months, Major Morgan-Jones learned, 45 inmates of this
prison, including several women, had been dumped at
Rotenburg. Each was severely starved, frostbitten, and
caked in dirt. Some had been beaten or whipped.
The same week that Major Morgan-Jones
was submitting his report, a British doctor called
Jordan was raising similar concerns at an internment
camp 130 miles away. Dr Jordan complained to his
superiors that eight men who had been transferred from
the same prison "were all suffering gross malnutrition
... one in my opinion dying".
They included Gerhard Menzel, 23, a 6ft
German former soldier who weighed seven stones, and was
described as a living skeleton.
Initially, most of the detainees were
Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded
up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. A
significant number, however, were industrialists,
tobacco importers, oil company bosses or forestry owners
who had flourished under Hitler.
By late 1946, the papers show, an
increasing number were suspected Soviet agents. Some
were NKVD officers - Russians, Czechs and Hungarians -
but many 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.
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, who swallowed the
spoon handle to escape. 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.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,16518,1669544,00.html
