Subject: Guardian Unlimited: Revealed: UK wartime torture camp
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Revealed: UK wartime torture
camp
Ian Cobain
Saturday November 12 2005
The
Guardian
The British government operated a secret torture
centre during the second world war to extract information and confessions from
German prisoners, according to official papers which have been unearthed by the
Guardian.
More than 3,000 prisoners passed through the centre, where many
were systematically beaten, deprived of sleep, forced to stand still for more
than 24 hours at a time and threatened with execution or unnecessary
surgery.
Some are also alleged to have been starved and
subjected to extremes of temperature in specially built showers, while others
later complained that they had been threatened with electric shock torture or
menaced by interrogators brandishing red-hot pokers.
The centre, which
was housed in a row of mansions in one of London's most affluent neighbourhoods,
was carefully concealed from the Red Cross, the papers show. It continued to
operate for three years after the war, during which time a number of German
civilians were also tortured.
A subsequent assessment by MI5, the
Security Service, concluded that the commanding officer had been guilty of
"clear breaches" of the Geneva convention and that some interrogation methods
"completely contradicted" international law.
On at least one occasion, an
MI5 officer noted in a newly declassified report, a German prisoner was
convicted of war crimes and hanged on the basis of a confession which he had
signed after he was, at the very least, "worked on psychologically". A number of
people who appeared as prosecution witnesses at war crimes trials are also
alleged to have been tortured.
The official papers, discovered in
the National Archives, depict the centre as a dark, brutal place which caused
great unease among senior British officers. They appear to have turned a blind
eye partly because of the usefulness of the information extracted, and partly
because the detainees were thought to deserve ill treatment.
Not
all the torture centre's secrets have yet emerged, however: the Ministry of
Defence is continuing to withhold some of the papers almost 60 years after it
was closed down.
Copyright Guardian Newspapers
Limited
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