Battleship Bismarck (54 page)

The former Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC), the interrogation camp for newly captured German prisoners of war, lay inside Trent Park at Cockfosters in northern London. (Photograph by the author from the 1960s.)

In the hall outside the cell there was a little lending library with German and English books. It was very mixed—I saw Max Brod’s
Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott
,
*
Pittigrillis’s
Jungfrau von 18 Karat
,
†
and more of the like. I read constantly whatever interested me; but soon I was brought out for interrogation, for which, after all, the Cockfosters camp was chiefly equipped.

By May 1941 the British had developed three methods for pumping prisoners of war. The first and the most frequently employed—and also favored at Cockfosters—was direct questioning. If the prisoner was cooperative, either from the start or because of a degree of pressure, this was the most effective method. Its success depended to a
large extent on the amount of information already available to the interrogator, his experience, and his skill in handling the prisoner. As a rule, he was already familiar with the latter’s unit, its leading personalities, and state of technical development. Such information was available mainly from the questioning of other prisoners or from secret sources.

At Cockfosters since the beginning of the war the British had through the interrogation of captured crewmen gained considerable knowledge of the German U-boat arm and had developed a routine in regard to interrogating its members. But no one there had a glimmering about German battleships, and the shock at the sudden prospect of examining one or two thousand
Bismarck
survivors was substantial. What, in God’s name, should one ask them? It was therefore, a “deliverance” when only a few more than one hundred men appeared.

I myself was interrogated by two periodically alternating interpreters. One was Lieutenant Commander Bertram Cope, a sturdy man in his late fifties who had drawn up my “warrant” upon my arrival at Cockfosters. He had learned his German in the Thomas Cook travel service and was a little rough around the edges, yet not unpleasant upon acquaintance.

The other was Dick Weatherby, about twenty-four years old but older-seeming, of average height, thin, with pitch-black, shiny hair. He came from a good Wiltshire family, which, as the hereditary keepers of the
Stud Book
—the register of English thoroughbred racing horses—had a name in society. His background included an academic schooling in German and an extended prewar visit to Germany. Without a profession at the outbreak of war, he had joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and completed a six-month sea-training course for junior officers. He did not go to sea, however, but was attached to the staff of the Naval Intelligence Department, which had a desperate need for German speakers knowledgeable in naval matters. Like the other interrogating officers, he had never been trained for this activity, but was assigned to it at random. It may well be that his rather threatening exterior, his character, and temperament helped him with his assignment—”head and neck like a cobra,” many said; yet friendly, super-persuasive, occasionally furious, but without actually feeling the anger he displayed. As an interrogator he was a natural talent, probably the best in Cockfosters.

I no longer recall in detail the questions put to me by Cope or
Weatherby in repeated sessions. From the beginning, there was something different in the case of the
Bismarck
from that of most of the U-boats whose crews had been lost or captured. The invisibility that characterized their operations often made their missions a puzzle; therefore, the British focused their relentless curiosity on the where and when; but the great battleship had been pinpointed by the British almost continuously—from her arrival in the Kattegat on the morning of 20 May until her sinking 400 nautical miles west of Brest on 27 May. The position and course of the
Bismarck
thus lay more or less open to view. The answer to the question of the ship’s mission, I kept to myself. At any rate, it was not hard for the British to figure it out.

So the questions concentrated on the
Bismarck’s
technical characteristics. Two of them were repeated with great regularity. The first: “How large was the
Bismarck
?.”—which I always answered with “35,000 tons.” The second: “Is it true that some of our torpedoes bounced off ineffectually on hitting the
Bismarck
?.”—to which I replied, “No idea.” The latter question arose from the worry that over the course of time an apparatus might have been developed in Germany that made British torpedoes harmless. In any event, we hadn’t had it in the
Bismarck.
Our interrogators’ interest in the technical aspects of the
Bismarck
was, no doubt, also inspired by the wish on the part of the Admiralty to gain knowledge about her sister ship the
Tirpitz.
Winston Churchill was quite concerned with her too, and my knowledge of the
Bismarck
would have been invaluable to any attack the Royal Navy would launch against the
Tirpitz.
However, I did not see myself in a position to oblige.

The second method of pumping prisoners consisted of bugging their cells with a hidden microphone. Thus it was possible, for example, to overhear conversations between members of the same German unit before they were directly interrogated for the first time. This method proved especially productive for the British. On the one hand, through the factual knowledge gained. And on the other, for the helpful starting point it provided for direct questioning. The disadvantage was that the conversations could not be steered from outside. Yet in certain ways the conversations could be prepared, sometimes already in the “London Cage.” There, the interrogators would address the interesting points that could not be clarified immediately in an energetic but not unduly pressing manner. They expected that these would stick in the prisoners’ minds and later be raised in conversations between cellmates.

In Cockfosters, as well, these methods brought the British by far the richest results, although at this time only two or three cells there were bugged. This low number was imposed by the relatively large number of army personnel needed to cover each cell twenty-four hours a day: listener, transcriber, and translator. Their work was bothersome and tiring. They were not expected to do it for longer than two consecutive hours.

According to Donald McLachlan’s
Room 39
, prisoners had already been warned of the risks of being overheard before entering their cells. This was in no way the case with me personally. I took it as a given, however, and my assumption was reinforced by my experience in the time to come. Days of isolation alternated with those in the company of other prisoners of war. For a while Wohlfarth was quartered with me. He had lost his
U-556
to the depth charges of a British corvette a month after the sinking of the
Bismarck.
What a surprise and joy it was to see our “Sir Parsifal” again, our “sponsor,” who in the last desperate hours of 26 May had been so completely helpless to aid his “protégé”
Bismarck.
“We two together—wow!—they’d really like to listen in on us,” I said to him upon his arrival. “We’ll keep completely mum!” We played skat—
the
German card game—continously.

After Wohlfarth came an officer from a German auxiliary vessel that had been lost in the Atlantic, then a fighter pilot. For me this remained a variegated and not unwelcome change. Each time, we were supposed to be stimulated to conversations that would be profitable to our listeners. Always I warned my new companions of this danger. And I don’t believe that we ever served as a source of secret information to our warders.

The third method of pumping prisoners consisted of the planting of so-called decoys. Originally recruited from emigrant circles and later from prisoners of war, they were carefully prepared for their role, in which they would win the confidence of prisoners to be tapped and lead them into conversations. Trained by the British army—there were forty-nine during the course of the war—they proved themselves thoroughly successful. However, they never posed as members of the same branch of service as the prisoners being pumped—that would have made the risk of discovery too great. I personally was never confronted with this method at Cockfosters.

All the information elicited from German prisoners was relayed to the subsection “German Prisoners of War” in the “Germany” section of the Naval Intelligence Department in London. The head of this
subsection was Colonel B. F. Trench of the Royal Marines, who in 1910—it may be of some interest—had been sentenced to four years’ fortress confinment
*
in Germany after he had been caught in too close an inspection of the guns in the fortress of Borkum. Trench for his part forwarded the information gathered from the prisoners of war, properly worked up, to the chief of the German section. From him, after it had been checked against other sources, the information went to the chief of the department, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, in the Room 39 destined for historical fame. A sharp-witted, energetic man, Godfrey placed great demands on his subordinates and could be obnoxiously impatient but spared himself least of all.

The crème of the British intelligence service was assembled in and around Room 39. Naval specialists, civil experts from the naval reserve, university professors, scientists, attorneys. Here the entering information was definitively analyzed, accepted or rejected, and a decision made about what to send the operations section “for further action” and what not to send.

Two examples illustrate the successes Cockfosters brought Room 39, and three the reverses when Room 39 discounted information from Cockfosters.

The successes. My interrogators’ questions concerning the suspected ineffectiveness of British torpedoes “bouncing off” the
Bismarck
, answered by my “No idea,” had its origins, unknown to me at the time, in the area of German torpedo failures. The first U-boat personnel captured by the British had complained bitterly among themselves about the numerous failures of
their
torpedoes to detonate. Mutually, they had consoled themselves in the expectation of new acoustic torpedoes that would follow the target vessel’s propeller noises, with which German U-boats would soon be armed.

Cockfosters forwarded this bugged self-exposure to Room 39. In consequence, the British developed a protective device against the future threat, the so-called “Foxer.” This consisted of nothing more than two steel rods towed behind the British ship at an appropriate distance. The metallic noise produced by their banging together would attract the acoustic torpedo away from the ship’s propeller to the rods, and it would detonate at a safe distance from the vessel. The
“Foxer” was ready before the Germans had their acoustic torpedoes at the front. Despite the technical deficiencies connected with it, for a while it contributed to saving many an Allied ship.

In routinely censoring captured German naval officers’ mail, the Naval Intelligence Department noticed at an early date that in their letters U-boat officers were using a simple code based on the symbols of the Morse Code. The dashes and dots of the Morse alphabet, as well as the separation marks between these letter symbols, were reproduced through three groups of letters into which the alphabet had been divided for this purpose. The secret information was concealed in the first letters of the words in the text of the letter. Of course, this type of code limited the writer’s freedom of expression, but it still left him enough to compose a sufficiently natural-seeming text which did not openly betray the encoding of a very different sort of message than the one that was outwardly evident. In this manner U-boat personnel were to report to their commander how, among other things, they had lost their boats and been made prisoner. Initially, Cockfosters let all this information go through uncensored—in the hopes of catching a bigger fish. And that was on the way.

In the summer of 1943 a German U-boat officer in the Bowmanville camp in Canada used the letter code to request the Commander, U-boats,
*
to send a boat to the country’s east coast. There it would pick up several officers who were to have participated in a mass breakout from the camp and carry them back to Germany to rejoin the undersea war.

This letter was no masterpiece of apparently innocent phraseology and had a number of artificially arranged substantives, striking enough; but the representative of the Naval Intelligence Department in Ottawa noticed nothing—despite years of indoctrination in the code by way of London! So the letter, completely unnoticed by Ottawa, reached its goal and was rewarded by a letter from the commander agreeing to the operation and transmitting the organizational details.

In contrast to the request, the commander’s reply was extremely adept in its choice of words, completely natural-seeming and absolutely innocent. No wonder that Ottawa did not notice anything or even subject it to a cursory scrutiny. Then by pure accident the British came to the rescue.