Judging by other correspondence in the file, it seems that the report was written in May 1945. The CSDIC circulated it to a number of officials at various agencies—who, it would appear, filed it away and forgot it. The lack of responses in the report file suggests that the report had little impact. British intelligence agencies made immediate use of some of the information acquired through the interrogation of German POWs. As they were interrogated, POWs were asked to disclose the names of military or Gestapo service personnel with whom they had come into contact. Some interrogation reports contain more than 100 names. The names collected became part of the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, which was used to provide lists to intelligence officers attached to the advancing Allied armies in Europe. The SHAEF Evaluation and Dissemination Section soon had a card index of the names of 60.000 Gestapo and SS officers supplied by British Military Intelligence. (56) The interrogation reports themselves were not released. In Britain, war crimes investigations were conducted by the War Crimes Group (Northwest Europe), which was established in 1944 and supervised by the Judge Advocate General’s Office within the British Army of the Rhine, and which limited its focus mainly to incidents that had occurred within the British Zone of Occupation. War crimes suspects caught in the British Zone but involved in crimes elsewhere were subject to extradition. Rudolf Höss, the long-time Kommandant of KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, was extradited to Poland for prosecution along with other Auschwitz staff members apprehended in the British Zone. In January 1946 British authorities handed over to the Soviets more than 100 policemen who allegedly had served in Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, despite the fact that Soviet war crimes investigators had failed to provide prima facie evidence in some cases. However, many Soviet extradition requests were denied due to a lack of sufficient evidence.
In the Soviet Union, the propaganda machine went into high gear as soon as the shock of the German attack had been absorbed. The Soviet authorities produced a number of publications in English highlighting information on atrocities obtained from German prisoners of war. (57) The weekly Soviet War News, published by the Soviet embassies in London and Washington, featured stories from the front accompanied by facsimiles of captured official German documents and POW diaries. Books of similar material appeared toward the end of 1943, with the conclusion in Kharkiv and Krasnodar of the first Soviet war crimes trials of German servicemen. It appears that Soviet intelligence also secretly recorded their captured German generals. At an internment camp in a former old country estate near Voikovo in the Ivanovo Region, to which Field Marshal Paulus and his staff officers were transferred in July 1943, all the rooms were bugged. (58) Little material from these Soviet reports has thus far been made available.
For their part, American authorities did not record the conversations of German POWs in their custody in Europe. Prisoner conversations were secretly recorded only at Fort Hunt in Fairfax County, Virginia. At this POW camp on American soil, the first German prisoners were the captured members of a U-boat crew. The number of prisoners here increased as the war progressed; after the war, many German scientists were debriefed there and their conversations, too, were recorded. (59) The transcripts were made available to the public only after many
decades.
After the war in Europe ended, Britain’s Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee met to discuss the legal basis on which information from secretly recorded conversations could be used as evidence in the prosecution of German war criminals. The committee decided that revealing this method of intelligence-gathering would compromise the future use of CSDICs. It resolved to classify the CSDIC records and reports as top secret and limit their use to briefing interrogation officers and cross-examiners. Further, the committee determined that it would invite the War Office to decide upon the correct channels for the transmission of the records and reports from the [Military Intelligence] Directorate to those who would eventually need to make use of them. (60) Extensive research has yielded no indication that the transcripts and reports of these conversations were passed on to any Allied war-crimes investigation units. (61) The intelligence agencies had to make a choice: was this information to be used as evidence or intelligence? Not until thirty years after authorities decided to treat them as intelligence would these records be placed in the public domain—too late to be used in the prosecution of any war crimes.
NOTES
55. Undated report by MI1 (Directorate) of June 11, 1945 meeting between interested intelligence agencies and Judge Advocate General “to discuss plans for co-operation between the service departments and the Treasury Solicitor in bringing major war criminals to trial.” TNAK, WO 311/7
56. The Soviet Government provided the source material for the publication in the UK of books such as Soviet Documents on Nazi Atrocities (London: Press Department of the Soviet Embassy in London and Hutchinson & Co. [undated, probably 1942]); and True to Type: A Selection from Letters and Diaries of German Soldiers and Civilians, Collected on the Soviet-German Front (London: Hutchinson & Co., [undated, probably 1943]). In 1942, the Soviet Government published (in English) We Shall Not Forgive! The Horrors of the German Invasion in Documents and Photographs (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1942). Soviet intelligence agencies also retained in their archives unpublished interrogation reports; copies are located in the archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. These documents include a number of reports of Soviet Army escapees from KL Auschwitz. See USHMM RG-06.025*45, RG-06.025*46 and RG-06.025*47
57. Sergei Valeryevich Tochenov, Where the Nazi Officers took as war prisoners in Stalingrad battle were detained,” at www.vor.ru/55/Stalingrad/History_17_eng.html, accessed January 7, 2008. Tochenov is a journalist who works for “Voice of Russia.” I have not been able to verify his information independently
58. Petula Dvorak, “A Covert Chapter Opens For Fort Hunt Veterans,” Washington Post, August 20, 2006.
59. See note 56
60. TNAK records in Class List (Record Group) series WO 204, WO 208, WO 219, WO 235, WO 309, WO 310, WO 311, and TS 26. Many interrogation reports carried out by British agencies remain classified even today; of these classified British reports, many have been declassified by US agencies and are available at NARA.
