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Eavesdropping on Hitler’s Reich
to Admiralty-, Military, or Air Intelligence.
As more prisoners trickled in – captured Nazi submarine officers
and airmen who had bailed out over Britain – the interrogation
centre shifted to Cockfosters Camp in the outskirts of London.
Subsequently C.S.D.I.C. set up two specially equipped interrogation
units at Latimer and at Wilton Park, near Beaconsfield; C.S.D.I.C.
became the responsibility of department M.I.9 of the War Office in
March 1940.
At the same time M.I.5 – Britain’s counter-intelligence organisation
– converted the War Office’s Victorian mansion, Latchmere
House at Richmond in south London, into “Camp 020” for
processing captured Nazi agents; this camp opened for business in
July 1940 under the command of a monocled, notoriously badtempered
colonel, R.W.G. Stephens, a half-German ex Indian Army
officer (who would be court-martialled in 1948 as commandant of
No.74 C.S.D.I.C. at Bad Nenndorf near Hanover for maltreatment
of his prisoners.)
Eventually C.S.D.I.C. (U.K.), under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel
Thomas 3. Kendrick – who had headed the British
secret service unit in Vienna until his exposure and expulsion in
August 1938 – would operate in two camps. These were No.11 at
Latimer House, and No.20 at Wilton Park, both large Georgian
country mansions in the county of Buckinghamshire.
The commandant of Wilton Park, Major L. St Clare Grondona,
would describe this camp’s operations after the war – its warders
were hand-picked sergeants from the Brigade of Guards, housed in
hutments spaced among tall trees a hundred yards or more from
the main officers’ quarters known as the White House, which itself
had to be taken over later for the senior prisoners. The prisoners
were accommodated in a brick compound, four intersecting corridors
of cells. Once there had been a vegetable garden and orchard
here, usefully surrounded by a fourteen foot high brick wall to keep
out scrumpers; now the wall served to keep Britain’s more exotic
preserves in. Each cell was centrally heated, each had beds and mat-
Prof. Sir Frank Hinsley,
Prof. Sir Frank Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War (London,
1982), vol. i, p.90.