Interrogators and Custodians

Abstract

Largely as a consequence of extensive experience acquired with German prisoners-of-war during the First World War, British POW policy was fundamentally humane during the Second.² It certainly used to be a popular notion that spying was treason and that the inevitable penalty for such treachery was death. Consequently, influenced no doubt by their own regime’s savage practices, most captured German operatives probably believed this during the Second World War and were extremely fearful under interrogation that they would ultimately face a British firing squad, which of course made the interrogator’s job easier. However, these Germans were generally unaware that official British policy had by then evolved to a point where a living spy was usually considered more valuable than a dead one. Thus, of the 440 men interrogated at Camp 020 between 1940 and 1945, only 14 were actually executed for espionage.³ Lest it be thought that British policymakers and executives were motivated primarily by empathy or compassion in not sending spies to trial, it needs to be recognized that in reality their main objection to placing German agents before the courts lay in the perceived risk of failure to secure a conviction and the death penalty. Certainly in cases where there was no material evidence, where agents had been successfully turned and doubled, or where prisoners had been captured outside the United Kingdom, no capital proceedings were ever launched against them, nor were their lives ever really threatened.⁴

It was agreed that … bumping off should be the exception rather than the rule. We all felt that it was far preferable to keep these people as reference books since we never knew when they might be useful or when some further piece of information might turn up which would render interrogation desirable. (Guy Liddell [MI5])¹