Qualla: Bad Nenndorf Interrogation Centre

Bad Nenndorf Interrogation Centre: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fatelessfear, CC BY 3.0. The chambers were built to hold warm peat. Bad Nenndorf had lived off its sulphur springs since 1787, and the Wincklerbad - named for Axel Winckler, a local doctor and a serious figure in the medicine of bathing - was where you went to sink a stiff shoulder into hot mud. In June 1945 the British emptied the bathing chambers, fitted them with doors and locks, and began putting people in them. No. 74 Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre ran for two years in a spa town twenty-six kilometres west of Hannover. In that time 372 men and 44 women passed through it. Two of them died of what was done there, and the only reason that is a documented fact rather than a rumour is that British Army doctors at a hospital near Bremen looked at the patients they were sent and refused to sign off on it.

Image: Fatelessfear | CC BY 3.0

Bad Nenndorf Interrogation Centre: What No. 74 Was For

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fatelessfear, CC BY 3.0. The centre succeeded an interrogation unit at Diest in Belgium, ran under War Office authority with a mix of military and intelligence officers, and was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Robin Stephens, who had spent the war running MI5's interrogation centre at Camp 020 outside Lo...

Image: Fatelessfear | CC BY 3.0

Bad Nenndorf Interrogation Centre: The Winter of 1946-47

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fatelessfear, CC BY 3.0. That winter was the coldest Europe had seen in living memory, and it arrived on a continent with no coal to spare. In January and February 1947 prisoners were transferred from No. 74 to the civilian hospital at Rotenburg, near Bremen, arriving with frostbite, malnutrition and inj...

Image: Fatelessfear | CC BY 3.0

Bad Nenndorf Interrogation Centre: Three Courts Martial, One Conviction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fatelessfear, CC BY 3.0. Four officers were charged; three came to trial between March and July 1948, and all pleaded not guilty. Lieutenant Richard Langham, a German by birth serving in the Royal Armoured Corps, faced two counts of disgraceful conduct of a cruel kind over two former SS men suspected of ...

Image: Fatelessfear | CC BY 3.0

Bad Nenndorf Interrogation Centre: The Photographs, and Who Wanted Them

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fatelessfear, CC BY 3.0. Three months after Bad Nenndorf shut, a purpose-built interrogation centre opened at Guetersloh, staffed largely by the same interrogators - which caused visible unease in London. The Foreign Office minister Frank Pakenham demanded that 'drastic methods' not be used. The Army's p...

Image: Fatelessfear | CC BY 3.0