A VERY SECRET PLACE
In July 1942, Kendrick moved his headquarters to Latimer House in the Chess Valley, a few miles from Chesham in Buckinghamshire. He now had three sites under his command, all so well hidden that they could preserve total secrecy about what was going on. Trent Park was now reserved exclusively for the long-term internment of German generals and senior officers. Latimer House and Wilton Park processed lower-ranking Axis prisoners of war for intelligence.1 Wilton Park initially held captured Italian generals and some lower-rank Germans. Later, it housed German generals for a few days of interrogation before they were transferred to Trent Park. To the outside world, Latimer House masqueraded as a supply depot – No.1 Distribution Centre; Wilton Park was known as No. 2 Distribution Centre. Even the local villagers knew nothing of their true functions.
‘Latimer was a very secret place,’ wrote one former interrogator, John Whitten. ‘The prisoners entered and left in closed vans, so they never knew where they were.’2
The Latimer estate was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, with two checkpoint entrances. Photography was strictly forbidden and no one could enter the site without a special permit. At the far end of the estate, a purpose-built complex known as ‘the Spider’ housed the interrogation rooms, cells, an M Room and administration block (see Chapter 9). The clocks and calendars were all changed in order to disorient the prisoners. Just below the Spider, a path called King’s Walk led to the red-brick mansion house, which served as the officers’ mess. Only the tall mock-Tudor chimneys of the mansion house could be seen from the Spider. The house also became a hub for coordinating and discussing intelligence operations in confidence.
At the west end of the house, a temporary building provided living quarters for the female officers and also accommodated the naval intelligence section. One of the upstairs rooms in the mansion house was Kendrick’s office, while the other rooms there were used by female staff for typing up classified reports. Kendrick walked back and forth to the Spider when necessary, but, as commander in chief, he did not conduct any of the interrogations. Recordings from the M Room and interrogation reports were brought across to his office. There he compiled summary reports for distribution to the relevant departments of the War Office, the Admiralty and the air force, with frequent liaison with MI5 and MI6.
Most of the women in the unit performed clerical and typing duties; however, there were some female officers who were responsible for assessing the material coming out of the M Room in terms of its intelligence value and importance. Furthermore, German-Jewish émigré women had the task of translating prisoners’ conversations and keeping prisoners’ records on site: most of them had been transferred to the unit from the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) on account of their fluency in German. Interrogation reports, M Room transcripts and intelligence summaries all had to be dispatched as swiftly as possible, otherwise they risked becoming old intelligence. Day and night, dispatch riders worked in and out of Latimer House (and indeed the other two sites at Wilton Park and Trent Park).
A substantial body of reference material was held in a library at Latimer House and could be accessed by interrogators and intelligence officers: technical intelligence files, industrial reference works, airfield intelligence reports, aerial intelligence, maps, technical dictionaries and a quarterly index covering all reports from home and abroad. All of this was supported by a card index that linked to intelligence reports, as well as an index of 80,000 names of enemy air personnel and a log book that recorded daily details of enemy aircraft compiled by ADI(K), the air intelligence section. The unit shifted vast amounts of paperwork and distributed tens of thousands of transcripts of recorded conversations, intelligence reports and memos. This level of output increased after D-Day and would continue until the end of the war.
The operational template of CSDIC, masterminded by Kendrick, was so successful that it became the model for additional CSDIC stations set up abroad to process POWs for intelligence. These included listening stations at Cairo and Rome, and in Greece and Austria.3 They, too, generated transcripts of interrogations and bugged conversations which warrant further analysis by historians.
No roughing up of prisoners
The technique of befriending the prisoners lay at the heart of Kendrick’s vision for subtly gaining whatever information the British needed. There was no contravention of the Geneva Convention during an interrogation.4 Derrick Simon, an interrogator with expertise on German anti-aircraft technology and rocket-propelled shells, recalled:
Discipline and the behaviour of interrogation officers should be of the highest standard but this can only be ensured if the Colonel in charge is fully aware of every activity that is going on within his centre. Colonel Kendrick was such a man.5
Lower-rank prisoners could find themselves on a quiet walk with a British officer in the grounds of Latimer, usually within earshot of a microphone hidden in a tree. The accompanying officer was issued with a .32 pistol, hidden in a trouser pocket and never seen by the prisoner, as a precaution in case the prisoner tried to escape. As Matthew Sullivan, a former interrogator, recalled, the general method was ‘a sophisticated mixture of cunning and bluff, of softening a man with kindness and wearing him down, and, if necessary, hinting at or threatening other possible methods’.
Denys Felkin (head of the air intelligence section) was known by the prisoners as ‘Oberst King’ (Colonel King). As Sullivan recalled:
His favourite time of day was at night. Over a glass of whisky in a room fitted out as a sitting room, he would slowly convince a POW that Germany had lost the war. This he proved by taking the prisoner for a night out in London to show the German that the city, far from being in ruins, as Goebbels claimed, was bustling with activity and night life.6
Female naval interrogator Claudia Furneaux was known to have accompanied U-boat officers on a pub-crawl in London as a reward for their cooperative behaviour.7
The methods used to gain intelligence from lower-rank prisoners involved several layers of deception and relied on both formal and phoney interrogations. Furneaux’s colleague Colin McFadyean commented:
We didn’t regard them [U-boat prisoners] as Nazi swine but as fellow naval officers. The interrogators knew more about the U-boats than the prisoners realised: microphones had been hidden in the light sockets of their cells and much valuable information was gained that way. The dirtiest it got was when German stool pigeons were placed in the cells to get prisoners talking. This gentlemanly style of interrogation paid off and much that was useful filtered through.8
Army interrogator Derrick Simon concluded: ‘Through humane sympathetic treatment, far more valuable reliable information was obtained than could have been brutally extracted.’9
The combination of interrogation and M Room worked like clockwork. The scale of the listening operation provided intelligence at every stage of the war – from survivors of six U-boats and two E-boats in the first six months of 1942, to prisoners captured during the commando raids into Norway.10 Their unguarded conversations inadvertently yielded information about the German order of battle, new shelters that were being built for E-boats at St Nazaire and other French ports, and the construction of new warships, including details of the new German battleship Tirpitz, which was ready for action in 1943.11 Details emerged of U-boat construction at Danzig, Kiel, Wilhelmshaven, Rostock, Lübeck and Flensburg,12 and of Germany’s ability to make up its U-boat losses relatively quickly. This was vital intelligence if the Allies were to win the Battle of the Atlantic. German pilots spoke of the impact that the devastating RAF raids were having on Hamburg, Essen and Cologne. From these prisoners, too, came information about the war on the Russian Front, and about the disposition of Russian and German troops. It was possible to track a shifting attitude of pessimism about the outcome of the war for Germany.
Even the smallest of details from prisoners’ conversations could be used in subtle ways against other POWs. A file was prepared from different sources, including the bugged conversations, of the names and nicknames of restaurant staff and waiters in German towns and cities, as well as the names of girls working in brothels. On one occasion, an interrogator asked a prisoner about the well-being of a certain Lulu, who worked in an establishment where he lived. When he returned to his cell, the prisoner admitted to his cellmate that he had been shaken by the fact that the interrogator even knew Lulu – it was not worth hiding anything from the British.13
The transcripts could offer useful snippets of information for wider propaganda purposes. Kendrick began a close collaboration with the political intelligence department (PID) of the Foreign Office and, from January 1943, held joint meetings at Latimer House once a month to aid the work of PID. Any stories of scandals were collected from the M Room and could be particularly useful when deployed against the enemy. As Norman Crockatt, head of MI9, commented: ‘although such material which dealt with Party scandals, local colour, erotic stories and low-class jokes had no Service value, such material is of great propaganda value’.14 Copies of relevant reports were sent to PID, providing information that could not be obtained any other way. The effectiveness of the PID propaganda was not known until the secret recordings confirmed that BBC programmes were being widely listened to by German forces.
Another indication of the success of the subtle methods used by Kendrick’s teams was the way that some prisoners were ‘turned’ to work for the British. They might be sent to Milton Bryan in Bedfordshire, not far from the codebreaking site of Bletchley Park. The modest complex at Milton Bryan was occupied by a section of the Political Warfare Executive, under the direction of Denis Sefton Delmer, a former journalist. It masqueraded as a German radio station, broadcasting news items that became popular with the German armed forces. It often used material that had come from the M Rooms and had an air of authenticity about it.15
‘A gentlemen’s club’
Kendrick’s unit may have generated vast amounts of paperwork from interrogations and recorded conversations, but one of his most important jobs at this time involved something that he was exceedingly good at – hosting lunches and dinners. In the panelled library and dining room on the ground floor of the house, he frequently wined and dined the intelligence chiefs and other important visitors. These included guests from the Air Ministry, Admiralty, Bomber Command, MI5, the Political Warfare Executive and other departments. He continued to foster the close working relationship with Bletchley Park and held regular meetings with its liaison officer, thought to have been Hanns Vischer.16 Over luncheon where the wine and port flowed, Kendrick would discuss the progress of the war and the latest intelligence from the prisoners. His visitors primed him on the information they needed from POWs, especially new German technology. It was an extension of a gentlemen’s club, where the nation’s secret operations could be discussed in total privacy.
One visitor was General James Marshall-Cornwall, who afterwards wrote Crockatt a letter of appreciation, in which he described Kendrick as ‘an old-stager on our side of the house’.17 Kendrick was completely at home in this setting – doing what he loved most, harking back to his days as a master of espionage in Vienna. This was as much a vital part of HUMINT as the intelligence reports being generated on an industrial scale in the M Room at the top end of the site.
Those figures with top-level security clearance were sometimes taken on a tour of the site, so that they could understand the practical daily workings of the operation and appreciate its importance to the war effort. In April 1943, Vice Admiral Rushbrooke (the new director of naval intelligence) was escorted around the operation, afterwards writing to Kendrick:
I was very much impressed with all I saw. You obviously have a most efficient organisation, and the inter-team work is of the highest order. I only hope my visit did not throw your busy machine out of order for half a day.18
Importantly, Rushbrooke promised to support Kendrick in any way necessary for the naval intelligence aspect on site.
Kendrick was mindful of the constant need to keep the different heads of departments and services in Britain on side, and he deployed his hospitality and charm to ensure smooth cooperation from figures who could be apt to be difficult or to allow inter-services rivalries to overtake the priority of the work itself.
Small glimpses of Latimer’s secrecy would only emerge decades later. As, for instance, when it came to light that the US ambassador, John Winant, moved out of central London to a farmhouse on the estate in order to avoid the Blitz.19 He enjoyed a special friendship with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who often spent weekends there with Winant. Now demolished, the farmhouse is shown as a modest building on older Ordnance Survey maps. As a former RAF officer, Cyril Marsh, recalled:
It was a plain or even ugly looking farmhouse, two storeys high. It would have been inside the perimeter fence, on the opposite side of the road four or five hundred yards from Latimer House and about one hundred yards before the M.T. [motor transport] depot.20
It is perhaps not surprising that the Latimer estate should have been chosen: the security surrounding it afforded the US ambassador complete privacy.
There are persistent rumours that Hess was held at Latimer House during the war. It is interesting that the official MI9 war diary noted that during construction work in 1941, ‘the premises at Latimer were to be made available by 19 May 1941’.21 This particular date is intriguing, as the estate was not operational as a CSDIC site until the following year. Hess was transferred to Mytchett Place, near Aldershot, on 20 May 1941, and it is possible that he was held overnight at Latimer House on 19 May, during his transfer from the Tower. Although Mytchett Place is less than two hours’ drive from the Tower of London, Hess could have been held at Latimer for some other purpose. The files on Hess’s stay in the Tower have not been declassified.
Since the late 1980s, Latimer House has operated as a luxury hotel and conference centre, under ownership of the hospitality company De Vere. Over the decades, some of the staff have heard stories that Hess was indeed held there. On various visits to the house – both for research purposes and to give talks – mention was made of Hess having been there. I was dismissive of the claims, until one day a member of staff asked, ‘Do you want to see his room?’
If the bedroom had ‘provenance’ in this oral tradition, then perhaps there was some truth in it. . . . I was shown ‘Hess’s room’ on the first floor. In the 1980s, the room was divided into two smaller conference rooms. But in the 1940s it looked across the Chess Valley, secluded and tranquil, and Hess would have had no idea of his location.
I turned to the member of staff and asked: ‘How do you know Hess was in here?’
He replied: ‘Because over the years, former interrogation officers have come back to visit us and told us. We had an American interrogator a few years ago who said this was Hess’s room.’ What gives some credence to this story is that ‘Hess’s room’ was right next to Kendrick’s office. Was this why John Whitten had described Latimer as ‘a very secret place’?
Just a week later, I delivered a talk at the house with former secret listener Fritz Lustig. A question was raised by the audience about Hess and Latimer House. This was reinforced by two other attendees, who were positive about the Hess/Latimer connection. Indeed, there had been sightings in the area during the war. Patrick Filsell was 10 years old when he saw Hess at Piper’s Wood, near Hyde Heath, just a few miles from Latimer. He was with his grandfather, Dr Humphrey England, at the time: Patrick had just had an operation for appendicitis and was spending a few days with him.22 Dr England had been brought out of retirement as medical officer for the Buckinghamshire area. ‘In this capacity as a doctor, he visited all kinds of odd places, including the wartime POW transit camp at Piper’s Wood,’ recalled Filsell. ‘I don’t remember the transit camp being particularly well guarded.’23
The camp was well hidden among the dense trees, so that the Luftwaffe would not have seen it from the air. A main public road ran through the camp and the woods, with buildings on either side of it. There is still evidence of the derelict base of the camp in the undergrowth today. Filsell vividly remembered the day he saw Hess:
My grandfather pulled in and parked the car. At that moment, he pointed to a man being escorted across the road and said to me, ‘That’s Hess.’ I knew who Hess was because of the newspaper reports after his capture. I stayed in the car while my grandfather quickly popped into the camp for something. He never discussed his work and I didn’t ask any questions.
On 23 March 2014, Filsell took me back to the exact location in the woods where he had seen Hess crossing the road in front of him. He stood looking out across the woodland as he commented: ‘Of course I don’t know if it was the real Hess or a double. Hush-hush things went on in the Buckinghamshire countryside during the wartime that may be impossible to verify now.’
The story leaves many fascinating, unanswered questions about why Hess could have been in the area. Was he being taken for a walk that day for exercise? Was it the real Hess?
The oral traditions linking Hess to Latimer House began to seem so strong that I looked again at the files. Re-examination of the Hess files revealed a gap around June 1942, when Hess was moved from Mytchett Place to various unknown locations.24 Could this be when he was accommodated at Latimer House? June 1942 correlates with the time when Filsell was recovering from his operation. Finally, on 26 June 1942, Hess was moved to Maindiff Court Hospital in Abergavenny, South Wales, for the duration of the war.25
Wartime personnel from Latimer often frequented the Green Dragon pub at Flaunden, about a mile away, where the landlady overheard talk about Hess being at the house, including from the driver who moved Hess around.
I also had a brief exchange with a Buckinghamshire resident, who had met a lady whose father’s job during the war had been to interview defectors at Latimer and listen in to prisoners of war. He had confirmed that Hess had definitely been at Latimer. Another person commented: ‘Hess was definitely at Latimer. My grandfather told me.’ A number of other independent oral traditions place Hess for a short time at Bois Mill at Chesham Bois, about a mile away. A photograph of the mill, taken by a secret listener, John Gay, in 1944, exists in the archives of English Heritage and shows bars on one of the side windows of the property.26
Questions have sometimes been raised about whether Churchill ever secretly met Hess. This is unlikely, because Hess believed Churchill to be a warmonger and not open to any peace mission. But possibly Churchill could have watched from one of the windows of Latimer House while Hess walked in the gardens. A local resident (who wishes to remain anonymous), wrote to me:
The rumour about Churchill [at Latimer] is just that, a rumour, almost certainly off record and deniable. But there are some facts that lend some credibility. Latimer is a short detour off the route between Downing Street and Chequers. Hess made repeated requests to see the King and did not understand the British constitution. Churchill was known to visit Latimer as a guest of American ambassador John Winant. Presumably his visits to Winant were informal or even a secret means of communicating with Roosevelt.
Although no written documentary evidence has come to light that firmly locates Hess at Latimer House, the existence of so many variant and strong oral traditions make it a possibility. As far as is known, Kendrick had no dealings with Hess after 1942.
During that year, Kendrick’s career took another extraordinary turn as he was tasked with taking care of Hitler’s top commanders captured on the battlefields of North Africa and gaining vital intelligence from them. Now the spymaster really came into his own: with the intelligence chiefs, he had to devise ways of getting the German commanders to spill the most closely guarded secrets of the Nazi regime. He and his intelligence officers created ‘a dramatic stage set’ that would provide the backdrop for an extraordinary daily life in the mansion house at Trent Park. In May 1942, infantry general Ludwig Crüwell became the first German general to be taken prisoner by the British, when his plane was shot down over British lines in North Africa.27 Then General Ritter von Thoma, commander of a Panzer tank division, was captured on 4 November 1942 at Tel-el-Mapsra, west of El Alamein.28 Crüwell and von Thoma were brought to England, where Kendrick was ready to receive some of the most valuable prisoners to be captured in the war. Trent Park was reserved for them.
Hitler’s senior commanders
General Crüwell was brought to Trent Park on 22 August 1942.29 Ten days earlier, Kendrick had hosted a meeting at Latimer House to discuss the handling of high-ranking German officers who would be captured in the North Africa campaign in the coming months.30 Between Crüwell’s capture in May 1942 and his arrival at Trent Park in August, Kendrick arranged for engineers from Dollis Hill Research Station to return to the mansion house to wire it further. This second wiring was done in much greater haste, with cables running under floorboards to microphones hidden not only in light fittings and the fireplaces, but also in plant pots, the billiards table, behind paintings and mirrors, and even in the trees in the garden. There were now three M Rooms in the basement, wired to the living rooms on the ground floor and to the bedrooms on the first.31 No opportunity would be wasted to gain intelligence from Hitler’s senior commanders.
In November 1942, Crüwell was joined at Trent Park by General von Thoma.32 By the end of the war, the special quarters at Trent Park housed 59 German generals, 40 senior officers and at least 2 field marshals. The men were given the freedom to roam the communal rooms on the ground floor and were allocated bedrooms on the first floor. This was a deliberate ploy on the part of British intelligence, to enable the generals to relax and to facilitate unguarded conversations.
After the Afrika Korps collapsed and surrendered on 12 May 1943, 11 more generals joined Crüwell and von Thoma at Trent Park, including the Afrika Korps commander, General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim. They were brought by military vehicles through the double barbed-wire enclosure at Trent Park and alighted in front of the house. Dressed in full German uniform, complete with medals, the commanders were saluted by General Sir Ernest Gepp, director of prisoners of war (administration). They were then taken to their new quarters, along with their batmen. In the coming months, they were the key characters in the disputes and personal rivalries in the house, and yielded first-rate intelligence.33 The prisoners spent their time painting and drawing, playing cards or chess, learning languages, reading books and newspapers and listening to radio broadcasts. Some of the newspaper reports were faked, in an attempt to encourage leaks of information from the generals.34 The batmen dined separately and were assigned duties that included making the generals’ beds and polishing their boots. On one occasion, Luftwaffe General Bassenge was overheard complaining to Panzer General von Broich that the batmen even had pictures of Hitler on their bedroom walls at Trent Park.35
Highly skilled as he was in HUMINT techniques, within the house Kendrick – ably assisted by Major Arthur Rawlinson (a scriptwriter in civilian life) – created a façade where nothing was as it seemed. By bringing the generals to a country house, he played to their egos and sense of self-importance. They felt they deserved to be treated as befitted their rank, and mistakenly assumed that their war was over. But British intelligence would reap the benefits of Kendrick’s deception plan. Little did the generals realize that the majority of the minders were actually members of the Intelligence Corps. It was Kendrick’s belief that by enabling the generals to feel relaxed in the house, surrounded by beautiful parkland and with a view over a large lake, he could achieve results far beyond anything that could be gained from interrogation. The Germans very quickly forgot the warnings they had received before they left Germany that, if they were captured, their conversations would be bugged by the British.
When a senior German commander was brought to Trent Park, he would first be welcomed by General Sir Ernest Gepp,36 British intelligence officer Major Charles Corner, Colonel Spencer of the United States Army Air Force – and a fake aristocrat, ‘Lord Aberfeldy’, who was introduced to them as their welfare officer. Lord Aberfeldy was, in fact, a senior intelligence officer named Ian Munro.37 Kendrick had discussed with intelligence chiefs that it would be a good idea for the generals to have such an officer to befriend them. When the rank was discussed – should it be a major or a colonel? – Kendrick had interjected: ‘No, no, the generals love an aristocrat.’ Was it perhaps Kendrick’s old-fashioned sense of humour that caused him to title the ‘lord’ after a whisky distillery?
Lord Aberfeldy would go into central London once a fortnight to pick up odd items for the high-ranking prisoners – cigarettes, boot polish and a plentiful supply of wine and whisky. He was
a delightfully outgoing and intelligent Scot . . . the prototype of the officer and gentleman and his contribution to the war was to act this out in full. He took his guests on walks, to restaurants, galleries and shops in London, disarming not a few with the snob appeal of his assumed title.38
The relative luxury that these senior German officers enjoyed did not always prevent them from trying to improve their conditions even further. The first priority for Colonel Egersdorff on his arrival was to seek out Lord Aberfeldy and ask whether they could have ‘parole for pheasant shooting and a plentiful supply of whisky’.39 Not unsurprisingly, this request was denied.
Life inside the ‘special quarters’
A vivid picture of life emerges from the intelligence reports for this period. One can well imagine Kendrick chuckling behind the scenes at the daily antics unfolding at Trent Park.
The generals would sometimes be taken into central London for lunch at Simpsons on the Strand or for a shopping trip at Harrods.40 Eric Mark, a secret listener, would accompany them:
They [the generals] thought we were being so nice to them because, they believed, we were trying to seek favours with them, so that when they won the war, we would be well treated, too. It did not occur to them that it was all part of the bugging deception plan.41
The generals looked forward eagerly to these lunches. But one day Churchill entered the restaurant. So furious was he at what he witnessed that he summoned Kendrick to a private meeting and forbade him to ‘pamper the generals’. Churchill’s orders were ignored, however. Kendrick and his officers were already gaining vital secrets from the recorded conversations at Trent Park and so the pampering had to continue. That way the generals remained relaxed and suspected nothing. In typical style, Kendrick merely relocated the lunches to the Ritz. Churchill never found out.
Dudley Bennett recalled that his father was always reluctant to speak about his time as an intelligence officer at Trent Park:
They were given sugar, a luxury in wartime, and taken to smart restaurants. My father also mentioned the thousands of faces that passed before him as an interrogator. He spent time sifting scraps of information about troop movements and the V-2 building sites. That was about as much as he would reveal of his secret past.42
On other occasions, the generals were taken to Kendrick’s own home of Woodton in Oxshott, Surrey, where his wife prepared cucumber sandwiches, cake and tea. Norah never asked questions or raised an eyebrow at the arrival of top-level guests in German uniform. In the living room, Kendrick played the piano and his grandchildren entertained them with First World War songs. The generals never questioned their fine treatment, believing that Kendrick had arranged all this so that, when Germany won the war, he would receive preferential treatment from the new German leadership. At no point did they recognize him as the spymaster who had been expelled from Austria, and nor did they suspect him of working for the British secret service. To them, he was a military man of honour who understood their situation, even though they were on opposite sides in the war. He laughed and joked with them and treated them fairly. In return, they accorded him an unprecedented level of trust.
The senior commanders fell into two distinct and opposing groups: pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi. From the M Rooms in the basement, the secret listeners recorded their intense political discussions and arguments. Crüwell led the vehemently pro-Nazi clique;43 von Thoma headed the anti-Nazis.44 Crüwell and von Arnim were horrified by the defeatist attitude of the anti-Nazis and suggested that the disloyal generals would be shot once they were repatriated to Germany at the end of the war. Divisions were so deep between the two factions that, when Kendrick arranged for photographs to be taken and sent home as Christmas cards for their families, the pro-Nazis refused to sit with the anti-Nazis. In consequence, the groups were photographed separately. These photographs survive to this day. One general wrote on the back of the card to his wife: ‘Wish you were here, but without the barbed wire!’
In an interesting development, some of the anti-Nazis expressed their readiness to unite with Lord Aberfeldy against Hitler. General Hans Cramer asked a British army officer whether Britain would make peace if the Nazi leadership were to go – although he admitted that he did not know who could lead such a revolt.45 The British officer replied that it was not only a matter of removing the Nazi leaders: the whole system would have to be replaced. Cramer responded that there were still many communists in Germany and there was a danger that they could seize power when the Nazi Party eventually had to go.
One Friday night, over dinner in the dining room, von Arnim berated the pro-Nazis for complaining about his alleged sympathy for the anti-Nazis. They jeered him from across the table, and he responded that he was trying to ‘save the defeatists [anti-Nazis] from court-martial when they finally returned to the glorious Fatherland’. Others seated at the table suspected him of suffering from psychosis. The microphones picked up every single word.46
The daily rhetoric and intense arguments provided important insight into cracks in the leadership of the military commanders. These scenes were tolerated by the British minders, because the melodramatic scenes inside the house gave the spymaster the intelligence that Britain needed to keep ahead. But the transcripts yielded an unexpectedly dark side, as the secret listeners overheard graphic details of war crimes and the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Russians, the elderly and Allied personnel.47 At Trent Park, General Dietrich von Choltitz admitted to von Thoma: ‘The worst job I ever carried out – which however I carried out with great consistency – was the liquidation of the Jews.’48
Mention of mass murder and the annihilation of European Jews cropped up in the conversations of prisoners of all ranks. As early as 1940, Kendrick referred in a report to massacres committed by the SS in Poland, overheard in conversations recorded in the M Room.49 He specifically instructed the secret listeners to keep the acetate disc recordings of atrocities; while these appear not to have survived, the typed transcripts do. They show that his unit amassed a substantial quantity of evidence covering most of what is known today about the Holocaust.50 Kendrick instructed interrogators to ask prisoners who had spent time at a particular concentration camp to draw the layout of it. Thus, detailed sketches of Dachau and Auschwitz survive in the CSDIC files, including a crude sketch of a camp crematorium. All of them – remarkable for their accuracy – were drawn in 1944, in some cases at least four to six months before the liberation of the camps.51
Today, the transcripts provide incontrovertible evidence that the German army was complicit in war crimes and had knowledge of the concentration camps and the Final Solution.
Anglo-American intelligence cooperation
The bombing by Japan of the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in the South Pacific on 7 December 1941 had brought the United States into the war. Within a fortnight of the attack, a contingent of US personnel arrived at Latimer House. This marked the beginning of a new joint Anglo-American intelligence cooperation, complementing the close relationship between the Americans and Bletchley Park. And Kendrick was at the heart of it. Under his direction, the US officers received training in British methods of intelligence work and interrogation before they were integrated into CSDIC operations.52 This was a contribution for which Kendrick would later receive a Legion of Merit award from the White House. All copies of transcripts from the M Room could now be shared with the Americans and copies could be sent to Washington.
Kendrick was the pivotal figure at the centre of this new relationship. To date, this has not been fully appreciated in studies of the historic Anglo-American intelligence cooperation. Ever charming and relaxed, he welcomed senior officers of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) to his headquarters at Latimer after the formation of the OSS in June 1942. In mid-August 1942, OSS officers Witney Shepardson and Mr Maddox travelled from the US to meet Kendrick. The following month, Mr H. Kimball of the FBI came to view the work on site and was impressed by the efficiency. Afterwards, J. Edgar Hoover (head of the FBI) sent a letter of thanks to Kendrick:
My dear Colonel, I am writing to express to you my deep appreciation for the assistance which you rendered to Mr H.M. Kimball of this Bureau during his recent visit to London. It was very good of you to be so helpful, and you may be sure that your kindness is sincerely appreciated by me.53
From 1942 until the end of the war, Kendrick hosted numerous visits from US military chiefs, including Brigadier General Kroner, chief of the US military intelligence section.54 It was due to Kendrick that Latimer House became one of the most important centres for Anglo-American intelligence cooperation in the war. He never talked about this collaboration outside his inner circle, not even to his own family. On 2 December 1942, as a key adviser and mentor to the OSS from the British side, he boarded a passenger liner for a special trans-Atlantic mission to Washington and New York on behalf of MI6. He was to liaise with the Americans over matters of intelligence and the training of their new officers. It is not clear whether he visited the White House while in Washington, but it is known that he met key advisers in the FBI. While in New York, he visited the British Security Co-ordination (BSC), a covert organization set up by MI6 to protect British interests in the United States, cover all clandestine operations in that area and liaise with US intelligence. Based in Room 3603 of the Rockefeller Center, the BSC was headed by William Stephenson, a wealthy Canadian businessman, who was on the payroll of SIS. Stephenson carried out operations in conjunction with Allen Welsh Dulles, the first director of the OSS. Also in New York, Kendrick met up with his former agent and friend Charles ‘Dick’ Ellis, who was working for SIS and Stephenson. As with so many aspects of Kendrick’s life, a degree of mystery continues to surround the trip and this part of his life.
Secret listeners
In January 1943, Kendrick returned from the United States to be honoured with an OBE in the New Year’s honours list. This came in recognition of his success in setting up and running the listening stations, but most especially uncovering the X-Gerät and Knickebein being used by the Luftwaffe. In a letter which survives among the Kendrick papers, Norman Crockatt, head of MI9, wrote to congratulate him on ‘the best merited OBE of the war’. The unit’s work, he wrote, was of vital importance. As well as ‘being a personal triumph for you as their leader’, the OBE was a tribute to the efforts of the staff, who ‘have worked hard and loyally’.55
A pressing concern now faced Kendrick. The volume of work necessitated an increase in M Room personnel; but, as former secret listener Peter Hart has written: ‘Not only was it necessary to have a complete mastery of the German language, but often prisoners coming from regions where dialects were spoken, were extremely difficult to understand, unless one knew the dialect well.’56 Until 1943, the secret listeners were primarily British-born men who had some fluency in German because they had a degree in German or had been raised in Germany. Now Kendrick needed native German speakers to monitor the 30 bugged rooms at Latimer House and Wilton Park, as well as to support ongoing operations at Trent Park.57 In a memo to intelligence chiefs, he wrote:
The difficulty of finding suitable M Room personnel cannot be over stressed. Very frequently it was found that Englishmen with a perfect academic knowledge of German were quite unsuited for M Room work . . . [An operator] must acquire an extensive knowledge of service slang, conditions and technical gadgets. This of course takes time, and experience has shown that at least three months are required to train an operator.58
Several thousand German-speaking refugees, over 90 per cent of them Jewish, were serving in the British army’s Pioneer Corps. They had fled Nazi Germany and Austria and proved ideal recruitment material. Kendrick began a drive to enlist 103 German-speaking refugees into CSDIC sites in the UK, interviewing candidates at the War Office in London. The selection process comprised a day of interviews, conducted by Kendrick himself, along with a female intelligence officer, 21-year-old Catherine Townshend. She later wrote:
I attended the interviews, sought security clearances through MI5 afterwards, and in the weeks that followed, sent successful candidates their instructions to report to Beaconsfield or Latimer. The long and careful questioning by Kendrick prepared me for the role of interviewer, a task that I had to assume in the year ahead.59
If successful, then a few weeks later an interviewee would receive a railway ticket to Chalfont & Latimer station on the Metropolitan line, where an army driver would pick them up. None knew the real nature of the work until they came before Kendrick on the following day. The morning after arriving at Latimer, secret listener Fritz Lustig was called into Kendrick’s office:
He explained to me the nature of my work – that I would be listening into the prisoners’ cells in a specially equipped room. He impressed upon me the importance of not telling anyone about it, not even my immediate family. He then passed me the Official Secrets Act to sign.
Kendrick then said something which Lustig never forgot: ‘Your work here is more important than firing a gun in action or joining a fighting unit.’60
Kendrick developed a strong and special relationship with the secret listeners and commanded respect from them. Former listener Paul Douglas remembered him as ‘a fair man, discreet and the right man for the job. He understood our situation – the situation of the refugees who worked for him.’61 It is interesting how so many aspects of Kendrick’s life would come full circle. He had been inextricably linked to the lives of Europe’s Jews in the 1920s and 1930s – those who worked for him as agents or contacts, and then some in Austria whom he had helped save from the Holocaust in 1938. George Pulay, grandson of the eminent skin specialist Dr Erwin Pulay and friend of Sigmund Freud, was one of those saved in Vienna who went on to become a secret listener.
All were required to sign the Official Secrets Act and were bound by an oath of silence. For the next three years, day in and day out they worked long shifts in the M Room, bugging prisoners’ conversations. They were organized into squads of up to 12 operators, each squad divided into two shifts. As Lustig recalled:
We sat at tables fitted with record-cutting equipment. Each operator usually had to monitor two or three cells, switching from one to the other to see whether something interesting was being discussed. As soon as we heard something that was valuable, we began recording onto acetate discs.62
The policy of recruiting listeners from the army (rather than the air force or Royal Navy) was not without its critics. Kendrick’s colleague Felkin submitted a report at the end of the war in which he argued that recruitment exclusively from the army meant that the listeners had only a superficial understanding of air intelligence.63 He suggested that it would have been of enormous value to the secret listeners to have spent time at an air base. However, this was impractical in wartime when the listeners were required for immediate duties in the M Room: there was no time to train them or provide extra experience outside their base. Felkin also overlooked the primary qualification that Kendrick was seeking – that the recruits be native German speakers. Such people were only to be found in the army’s Pioneer Corps at that time.64
With just a few exceptions, the secret listeners went to their graves without breathing a word about their wartime work. The unit’s existence had to be kept secret at all costs. If it were betrayed, its methods could no longer be used – and the outcome of the war (indeed Britain’s survival) was at stake.
Personal tragedy
The summer of 1943 brought personal tragedy, when Kendrick’s nephew George Pearson (Rex Pearson’s son), a fighter pilot in the RAF, was shot down over Belgium on 11 August. He is buried in the cemetery at Aarsele. Following his death, Kendrick returned home to Oxshott for a few days of compassionate leave. Rex Pearson and his wife, Olga, were living there, too, during the war. In Kendrick’s absence from Latimer House, Lieutenant Colonel Huband deputized. On the evening of 12 August, Huband continued with a pre-arranged cricket match between officers from MI9 and MI19. It was a fierce competition between these two intelligence services, but light relief for the staff after long hours of interrogation work. The event was attended by Crockatt, head of MI9, who sent Kendrick a letter to thank him for the hospitality shown in his absence: ‘After the match a magnificent supper was served at a late hour, followed by games of snooker and ping-pong well into the early hours of the morning.’65 The ‘old boys’ club’ of the secret service carried on as it always had, but it also gave a backbone of military and moral support to its personnel.
Kendrick spent long periods away from home. Norah kept busy with activities to support the war effort with the Women’s Voluntary Service. Grandson Ken recalled:
She was not afraid to roll up her sleeves and work hard. She could be seen in the garage, putting fruit into cans and sealing them with a cloud of wasps around her. She would pick up a wasp that was annoying her and pinch its head! She was always happy and affectionate and a good cook herself.66
Kendrick and Norah supported refugees in Britain by employing an ex-refugee Jewish cook and maid. Kendrick himself provided references of support for a number of German-Jewish refugees appearing before British tribunals as ‘enemy aliens’ at the outbreak of war.
The grandchildren went to stay at Oxshott during the school holidays and they have happy memories of Kendrick arriving from time to time in an army vehicle driven by his chauffeur, Buffrey. The family was exceptionally close. As Barbara Lloyd recalled: ‘Grandpa was such fun. He was always bringing a laugh and prank to us.’67
The family had no idea, of course, about his true role. For Kendrick could switch smoothly between his double life as loving grandfather and spymaster.