London Cage

In 2005, the British government released several hitherto secret files from the immediate time after World War Two. In this context, several documents came to light revealing that a division of His Majesty’s War Office operated secret interrogation centers all over the world. One of them was located in London itself and was nicknamed the London Cage. The released documents show that this was a secret torture center where German prisoners were systematically tortured in order to extract confessions to be used either to blackmail other prisoners to similar confessions, or as evidence during upcoming trials in Germany against so-called war criminals.

After the German Wehrmacht had surrendered, German prisoners of war lost this status, and many were rebranded as disarmed enemy forces, which were wrongfully denied the protection of the Geneva Convention. In fact, when a war is over, PoWs are supposed to go home, not be stripped of all their rights, misused and tortured.

Many former staff members of former German wartime camps who fell into British hands suffered horrific tortures either in London or in any of the other British torture centers. One of the most infamous among them was the British torture center at Bad Nenndorf, some 25 km west of Hanover. (For more details, see the entries on torture, on Bad Nenndorf, and in general Cobain 2005a&b, 2013.)