On April 5, 1946, McKenna escorted Erich Zacharias to the London Cage. The men took off from an airfield outside Minden and flew by Dakota to RAF Croydon. By jeep, they traveled into London proper, a wounded city. Zacharias stared out the window and took in the damage. What he saw fell far short of claims made by Nazi propaganda, declaring that German bombs had rendered the British capital a desolate wasteland. Surface air-raid shelters still lined cratered streets, and rubble-strewn holes marked where buildings once stood, but the city still thrived. Londoners appeared to be going about their business: heading to work, shopping, attempting to live as normal an existence as circumstances allowed.
The London Cage occupied three large white mansions in Kensington Palace Gardens, an exclusive enclave of grandiose architecture and old money. The eloquent exteriors of numbers 6, 7, and 8 belied the brutality that occurred within. Only a single barbed-wire fence separating the houses from the main street gave any indication of something amiss. Operated by MI9, the branch of the War Office charged with the interrogation of captured enemy personnel, the Cage had opened for business in July 1940. The interior of the houses had been modified to serve their unique purpose, with five interrogation rooms and cells to house up to sixty prisoners at any given time. A dozen noncommissioned officers served as interrogators and interpreters. Soldiers, selected “for their height, rather than their brains,” guarded the prisoners around the clock. Lieutenant Colonel A. P. Scotland oversaw the facility’s day-to-day operation. Now in his mid-sixties, the blunt Scotland was the ideal man for the job. British-born, he had traveled in 1904, at the age of twenty-two, to South Africa and taken a job managing a branch of South African Territories, Ltd., a “grocery and provisions trade.” His work brought him into contact with German officials who invited him to join the German Army in southwest Africa to oversee the distribution of its food supplies. He served in the German Army from 1903 to 1907 and acquired unique insight into its military philosophies and tactics. The knowledge proved useful when, during the First World War, he worked as an interrogator for British Intelligence. He toured Germany twice between the wars, fascinated as he was by its people, and again went to work for British Intelligence as an interrogator during the Second World War.
The London Cage, despite its elegant setting, was a brutal place. Visiting the Cage, an RAF airman was surprised upon entering the premises one evening to find a German naval officer in full regalia on his hands and knees, scrubbing the floor to the entrance hall. Over him stood a broad-shouldered guard, a cigarette clamped in one corner of his mouth, with a heavy boot placed squarely on the prisoner’s back. Scotland possessed no qualms about the methods employed under his watch. “Abandon all hope ye who enter here,” he thought each morning as he settled behind his desk. Prisoners who refused to share what vital information they had were eventually broken. From the threat of violence to psychological browbeating, Scotland’s men excelled at their specialized trade. At night they roamed the halls and knocked on cell doors every fifteen minutes to deprive inmates of their sleep. Those who did not initially crack were threatened during interrogations with torture, needless surgical procedures, and execution. Others were told they would simply vanish and never be heard from again. Beatings were not uncommon, while making a prisoner stand at attention for more than twenty-four hours straight proved an effective method of wearing down a man’s resolve.
Vicious though such treatment may have been, Scotland felt justified in the steps taken to extract information. He was, after all, dealing with members of the Gestapo and the SS. Hadn’t they perpetrated far greater evils on countless others? If anything, they deserved the harsh measures being meted out. Besides, his work served an important purpose. The statements he extracted from prisoners sent a number of Nazis to the gallows.
The Red Cross, which monitored prisoner-of-war facilities, initially knew nothing of the Cage. Only when the name and location of the Cage was inadvertently added to a list of camps submitted by British authorities did it come to the aid organization’s attention. In early 1946, they sent an inspector to Kensington Palace Gardens to ensure the treatment of those imprisoned behind its ornate white walls adhered to the Geneva Convention. Scotland would have none of it, and the inspector was promptly turned away at the door. Scotland explained his actions in a letter to his superiors at the War Office. Those imprisoned in the London Cage, he wrote, were either civilians or war criminals within the German military, neither of whom were protected under the Geneva Convention. Allowing the Red Cross to inspect the Cage, he argued, would severely limit his ability to do his job—especially when it came to questioning those suspected in the Stalag Luft III murders. Should the Red Cross persist in gaining access to the Cage, the interrogation of Sagan suspects, he wrote, “must proceed in Germany under conditions more closely related to police methods than to Geneva Convention principles.”
SS Captain Fritz Knoechlein, arrested for his part in the slaying of ninety-nine British soldiers near Paradis, Pas-de-Calais, France, in May 1940, made note of his experiences in the Cage prior to his 1949 execution. When he refused to surrender information sought by his interrogators, Knoechlein claimed he was stripped, starved, and deprived of sleep for nearly a week. The guards routinely beat him, he said, and forced him to exercise until he passed out. Among the physical exertions forced upon him were walking in a tight circle for four hours and running through the Cage’s landscaped back garden while carrying a heavy log. Complaining to Scotland about his treatment only made matters worse. He was tossed down a flight of stairs and beaten with a club. On one occasion, he wrote, he was forced to strip and stand near a hot gas stove. When he could no longer tolerate the heat, guards dragged him into a shower stall and blasted him with freezing water. Other prisoners, he claimed, were treated in a similar manner and begged their captors to kill them. Scotland dismissed Knoechlein’s story of brutality as “a lame allegation.” He later recounted the SS man’s last few nights in the Cage before being shipped to Hamburg to face trial. “[He] gave us an example of what might have been regarded in another man as pitiful behavior, but from him it seemed merely contemptible,” Scotland wrote. “He began shrieking in a half-crazed fashion, so that the guards at the London Cage were at a loss to know how to control him. At one stage, the local police called in to enquire why such a din was emanating from sedate Kensington Palace Gardens.”
When Scotland received Zacharias at the London Cage, the Gestapo man struck him as being “a wild young brute.” The prisoner’s “abnormally large, powerful hands [and] remarkably thick neck” impressed him. McKenna warned the colonel that his new inmate had a penchant for escaping. Scotland dismissed McKenna’s concerns with a wave of the hand. Escape, he said, was a near impossibility with the Scots Guards watching the premises. Satisfied, McKenna left London and returned to Germany.
Zacharias proved forthcoming during interrogation. He recalled once torturing a captured airman at Gestapo headquarters in Zlín. Outside the airman’s cell, a young secretary sat waiting in the stone corridor with a business matter that required Zacharias’s attention. Emerging from the cell and fearful the girl might have heard the airman’s screams, Zacharias asked her out to lunch. They got in his car and drove out of town into the surrounding countryside. He occupied the young Czech girl with friendly conversation. She seemed not to notice the winding route he took through the woods, taking them farther away from civilization. Only when he ceased the friendly banter and pulled the car off the road did she ask what was happening. He got out of the car and dragged the girl from the vehicle. He pulled her away from the roadside and raped her among the bushes. As the girl lay prostrate, he drew his Walther pistol and put a bullet in her head. He walked back to his car and retrieved a shovel from the trunk. Beyond the tree line, he dug a shallow hole and disposed of the body. He brushed the dirt from his uniform and did his best to hand-iron out the creases before returning to his car. He drove back to Zlín, enjoyed a lunch out, and returned to work.
“He showed neither remorse for the act,” noted Scotland, “nor compunction about describing it.” He made Zacharias strip and kneel for hours on a concrete floor—an interrogation tactic he knew the Gestapo had frequently employed. Having already confessed his involvement in the Kirby-Green and Kidder murders to McKenna in Germany, Zacharias again repeated his story for Scotland’s men. “Take him away,” said Scotland, turning to a guard, “and feed him on kindness and cups of tea.”
Zacharias was soon transferred to a holding facility at Kempton Park Racecourse in Middlesex. On the night of May 13, he took the tin plate on which he’d been served dinner and began scratching away at the wood surrounding the lock on his cell door. It was tedious work, but he eventually scraped away enough wood to release the door’s lock mechanism. He snuck his way into the prison yard and scrambled up the side of a twelve-foot-high outhouse, its roof layered with barbed wire. He crossed the roof, crushing the wire underfoot, and leapt into a tree. He shimmied along a branch and lowered himself onto a guard walk, fenced on both sides by ten-foot-high wire palisades. Spotlights swept the walkway, but four trees—their branches thick with leaves—provided ample cover. A sentry on duty a hundred yards away saw nothing. Near the end of the walkway, Zacharias found an iron bar, which he used to separate the wire in one of the palisades. He wormed his way through the hole, losing a shoe in the process, and scurried off into the night. In his pocket were rations he’d saved from his meals, which he hoped would last him at least a day or two. He moved quickly, half-expecting to hear at any moment the blare of an alarm—but all remained silent behind him. Not until eight hours later, when making their morning rounds at five, did guards discover Zacharias missing.
Officials sounded a national alarm. The BBC, at the urging of the War Office, broadcast news of the escape and warned listeners to be vigilant. Erich Zacharias, “a Nazi police officer,” was extremely dangerous. “His escape,” proclaimed the Sunday Times, “is one of the boldest and most desperate from any prisoner of war camp in Britain during and since the war.” Reports described the fugitive as wearing “a dark blue reefer jacket with zip fastener down the front and blue trousers, and one brown shoe.” A break developed late that morning when a guest at the nearby Weir Hotel reported seeing a man who answered the fugitive’s description, hiding in the shrubbery of a local park along the River Thames. An army of police officers and three hundred soldiers armed with tommy guns descended on the scene and fanned out through the park. Armored cars and radio vans from the Metropolitan Police Service blockaded nearby streets. RAF reconnaissance planes thundered over the park at tree level. Although area residents were urged to stay in their homes, curious onlookers began to congregate near the park and outside the prison camp. Noted one reporter: “Italian prisoners of war, who were also at the camp, were paraded outside the guardroom preparatory to repatriation, and smilingly enjoyed the temporary notoriety when scores of sightseers, who had heard of the escape, stopped to peer at them.”
Police found Zacharias later that day, hiding beneath a bush and nursing a sprained ankle. He was returned to Kempton Park and kept under continual watch until his eventual transfer to Hamburg to stand trial.
A newspaper clipping detailing the escape of Erich Zacharias from the prison camp at Kempton Park Racecourse. Zacharias was hanged for his participation in the murders of Squadron Leader Thomas Kirby-Green and Flying Officer Gordon Kidder.
BRITISH NATIONAL ARCHIVES: ADM 40/2492