Trent Park is a country house located between Enfield and Barnet in north London, one can go to it via the underground station at Cockforsters and from there it is a walk of around 1km. During the second world war, Trent Park was used by the British government as a special camp for high-ranking prisoners of war . The rooms were bugged by the British secret service . It was assumed that in the relaxed atmosphere of this camp, where officers could enjoy the privelidges that they might have assumed came with their rank and waited on by British staff, they might talk more freely.
During the course of the war, eighty-four generals and a number of lower-ranking staff officers passed through Trent Park. Some valuable information which may have effected the course of the war was gleaned from their conversations but as far as this presentation is concerned, I am just going to concentrate on the war crimes that were discussed there and in particular how this dispels the myth - if it still exists - of the clean Wehrmacht and the cowardice of those officers who did nothing to stop National Socialist crimes. The archives were not opened until 1996 and the resulting conversations show that some of the officers should have been put on trial for crimes that they committed.
The Trent Park operation was the idea of Thomas Kendrick, who had headed the the British Secret Intelligence Service in Vienna in 1939.
He found a Scottish aristocrat, Lord Aberfeldy, who was to be the prisoners’ welfare officer. He was a cousin of the King George VI and his role was to befriend the German generals. He let them know that his cousin, the king, was insistent that the captured officers were treated in accordance with their status. To this end he took them out on day trips shopping to the places like Harrods and out for meals at high end places such as the Savoy Hotel and Simpsons in the Strand in London. Part of the aim of this was not only to gain their confidence but also lull the prisoners into talking about subjects with their fellow officers. Lord Aberfeldy however was not a cousin of the king, nor was he a lord for that matter, he was an MI19 agent named Ian Munro.
However the situation suited the prisoners too.
For the captured officers, life in Trent Park had its perks. The rations were simple but probably much better than their families were getting in Germany and they had the benefit of British whisky. There was a large library, a lounge and they could go for walks in the extensive grounds where the English King Henry IV had hunted some 550 years earlier. This all may have been conducise to loosening their toungues whilst talking to each other.
After WW2, most former generals refrained from self-critical reflection on their role in the “Third Reich”. They started the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht", the professional army had nothing to do with the regime, they said. They only learned about the atrocities committed by the SS and the Einsatzgruppen after the war. However the recordings from Trent Park show something completely different and they did indeed talk about the "commissar order", the massacre of the Jewish population, the cruel treatment of Russian prisoners of war, about the shooting of hostages and the plundering of the occupied territories.
At the beginning of the war, there were few German prisoners there and those that were held there were of comparatively low rank. However bugged conversations of prisoners held there allowed the British to learn of how Luftwaffe planes managed to find cities in the dark through use of radio signals which the planes literally flew through. Once that secret was out, then all the British had to do was to jam the signals. From 1942, generals and other high ranking individuals fell into British hands and it was these that revealed that some knew a lot about Nazi atrocities.
Major General Walter Bruns recounted in great detail how he had witnessed a mass shooting near Riga:
“The pits were 24 metres long and about three metres wide, the Jews had to lie down like sardines in a can, heads toward the middle. Six submachine gunners were above them and they shot them in the neck. When I arrived, the pit was already full, so the living had to lie down on the dead and then they got the shot; so that space in the pit was used to the maximum. They had to be correctly layered. Before that, however, their possessions were stolen. That Sunday, there were three pits. The queue of people was 11 - 12 km long, and it was gradually advancing - it was a queue of death."
Walter Bruns was captured at the end of the war, so this conversation took place once the details of the Holocaust were known, however we must ask why he continued to serve the National Socialist regime until the very end.
PBS documentary : • PBS - Secrets Of The D...
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10 сен 2024
