The case of Wadim GREENEWICH

From Brian Cooper. 13/07/024. Data source: UK National Archives FO 950/1151

Mr Greenewich, a naturalised British citizen, was employed in the Passport Control Office of the British Legation in Sofia. He was held in Germany from 25 May 1942 to May 1945.

He spent time in Dachau Concentration Camp and Flossenberg Concentration Camp.

He described his work as “clerk, interpreter and later passport examiner” as well as providing part time translation assistance to the Military Attaché and Press Secretary to the Legation in Sofia.

Passport Document Control offices at British Legations were used as cover stories for operations by the British Secret Service in countries of interest.

[Source https://macedonia.kroraina.com/en/mmb/mmb_1.htm#4_18 accessed May 2024]

The signing, by the Bulgarian Government of the Tripartite Pact signalled the beginning of a full-scale campaign against British interests in Bulgaria. As early as February 1941 police harassments had reached ominous proportions. On February 24 a British consular official named Greenwich (sic) disappeared without a trace. On the 26th, about fifty persons described by Radio Berlin as in the employ of British intelligence were arrested in Sofia. Two days later a number of journalists, including the correspondents of the London Times and the Chicago Daily Mail, were arrested, as were about thirty opposition leaders.
The British Embassy was ordered closed on March 1, the same day that Sofia police claimed to have found a bomb of British origin near the city waterworks.

From the: NEWS CHRONICLE Friday 28 February 1941. Sofia, Thursday.

‘Sofia Briton May Have Been Kidnapped’

It is thought here that Mr. Wadim Greenewich, an officer in the British passport office here, has been kidnapped.
This theory of his disappearance would fit in with the assumption that the Gestapo also had a hand in the robbery at the British passport office last Saturday, when an out-of-date code book and several unimportant documents were stolen.
Mr. Greenewich left Sofia on Monday to escort Mrs. Smith-Ross, wife of Flight-Lieutenant Edward Charles Ross, British passport officer here, and two other women to Istanbul. He vanished from the train when it stopped near the Bulgarian border.
Sir George Rendel, British Minister here, strongly protested to the [Bulgarian] Foreign Office, but so far no results of Bulgarian police investigation have been communicated to the British authorities.
Mr. Greenewich is a British subject of Russian origin.

From: TNA FO 950/1151
In 1964 in pursuit of a Nazi compensation claim, Mr. Greenwich wrote : –

‘1. I was kidnapped by the Bulgarian authorities on 24.2.1941, at Svilengrad on the Turkish frontier when travelling to Istanbul on Passport Control duty. I was kept incommunicado at Sofia police headquarters and handed over to the Germans on 18.3.1941.
2. From that date I was kept incommunicado until liberation: –
a. in Berlin Gestapo headquarters at Prinz Albrecht Strasse in a common, but underground cell until [25] May, 1942.
b. transferred to Dachau concentration camp, where kept in strict solitary confinement, not being allowed to leave cell even for short walks in the prison yard, until [24] March, 1944.
c. transferred to Flossenburg concentration camp, where I was again kept in solitary confinement until mi-April, 1945.
d. taken with large group of other prisoners, including Lt. Col. R. Stevens and Capt. S. P. Best – see the latter’s book “The Venlo Incident” – to Dachau, Innsbruck and the South Tyrol, where at Pragser Wildsee I was liberated in the first week of May, 1945, and later brought to London.
3. I base my claim on the following considerations:-
a. I was secretly and illegally taken by the Germans from Bulgaria.
b. I was kept incommunicado from date of my kidnapping to date of liberation. No one outside the Gestapo – neither my family not the Foreign Office ever being able to learn whether I was alive or not. In this my treatment differed radically from the treatment accorded to Lt. Col. R. Stevens and Capt. S. P. Best.
c. the Germans did not inform the International Red Cross of my existence. I was not allowed to get in touch with the Red Cross or anyone else, and II received no Red Cross parcels.
d. for three years I was kept in strict solitary confinement, dressed in the prisoners’ uniform and given camp food without any possibility of physical exercise.
4. I survived, but the prolonged solitary confinement in the surrounding circumstances of camp terror aggravated by hunger, together the complete isolation and inability to get in touch with my family or the outside world, let an indelible and harmful impact on my mental state, due to which I was unable to undertake any useful work for almost three years after liberation.
[signed] W. Greenewich 7.8.64’

On 13 August 1965, the Foreign Office, who administered the compensation scheme on behalf of the British Government responded: –

‘The Foreign Secretary wishes me to write ton you about your application to be registered as a United Kingdom victim of Nazi persecution.
I should begin by explaining that what we are endeavouring to do is to pay compensation to persons who were subjected to the well-known inhuman and degrading treatment of a concentration camp proper.
Your case has been very carefully considered and I am sorry to inform you that only that portion of you imprisonment from 18 March, 1941 until the end of May 1942, when you were held at the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, can be registered for compensation.
The latter periods when you were held in the Sonderlager at Dachau and Flossenberg and up to your release, cannot be accepted for registration because the conditions under which you were held were such that you were never subjected to the type of persecution referred to in paragraph 2.
As you will appreciate from the foregoing, the facts of the actual persecution form the basis upon which an application is accepted for registration or not, and it would seem quite clear that you were held under conditions which could not be equated to those od a concentration camp proper.
I am sorry to have to send you a disappointing decision, but the compensation which we are dealing with is only intended to cover a very limited category of United Kingdom nationals who suffered the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp proper.’

On 25 August 1965, Mr. Greenewich in frustration at the lack of understanding by the Foreign Office wrote: –

‘I thank you for your letter of 13.8.65.
Para 4 of your letter seems to be based on premises so erroneous that I feel constrained to elucidate my claim further.
The conditions of my solitary confinement in Dachau and Flossenberg were many times harsher and more degrading than in Berlin. if you accept the Berlin period as falling under the conditions specified in para 2 of your letter I fail to understand on what grounds you exclude the latter periods, and what is your justification in asserting that in Dachau and Flossenberg I was never (sic) subjected to the type of persecution referred to in your para 2. it is exactly there that the more inhuman and degrading treatment began and persisted for three years.
May I again repeat that from my kidnapping on 24.2.41, to my liberation in the first week of May, 1945, I was kept incommunicado – was not able to get in touch either with the Red Cross or the Foreign Office – and that everything was done to convince my family that I was in fact dead. this virtual social death for a period of four years was in itself cruel and harmful not only to me, but also to my late wife, who was mentally affected by the grief it caused her, and to the rest of my family.
On arrival at Dachau I was made to wear the striped uniform of ordinary camp inmates, my hair was closely cropped, I was given no shoes, and was not allowed to leave my cell at all – neither for a bath nor for exercise – a regime quite different from that of other people held in what you call the “Sonderlager”. Within a few weeks of my arrival at Dachau my mental state began to deteriorate.
My jailers at Dachau repeatedly refused to alleviate these conditions, on the ground, as they said, that my passing along the corridor of the building could be observed by other inmates and my existence could them be revealed. This, of course, would have broken their conspiracy of my alleged death. Eventually, after two years of pleading I was transferred to Flossenberg, where at last I was allowed to walk daily for 40 minutes in the yard, still in my camp uniform.
I know of no similar case of such solitary confinement of a British civil prisoner, and those I met afterwards not held incommunicado i.e. they either were known to the Red Cross or were allowed to correspond with their families.
Some other British, French and American prisoners held in Flossenberg in conditions similar to mine were all hanged there a couple of weeks before I was removed from the camp. that I was spared was probably just luck. one of the execute was a relative if Sir Frank Soskice, to whom I reported on these executions and on the conditions of my detention in 1945. Please check.
The hanging of “Sonderbau”(sic) inmates in batches of half a dozen went on daily in the yard where I went for my daily walk, and from my cell I could count the thud of bodies dropping from the gallows. Such were the conditions in the “Sonderbau” (sic), and such was the degree of our degradation there we had to eat starvation ration with wafts of smoke from burning bodies drifting through the window. is starvation of a degree that one picks blades of grass besides the gallows too break the qualms of hunger not degrading within the meaning of your para 2?
How do you equate mental harm to physical harm? I was not beaten, nor did I lose any limb, but due to starvation I became so week I could hardly walk, and after three years of silence and total isolation my memory was impaired, my capacity for conceptual thought was reduced, I almost lost my gift of speech, and all that time was in constant pin in my chest from the fear induced by claustrophobia and mental anguish. As a result I was unfit for normal work until 1948, and even now I bear some trace of the mental harm inflicted by solitary confinement – recurrent unreasonable fears of impending misfortune and loss of will power from the slightest mishap or frustration.
I trust that the above description of the conditions and consequences of my detention in Dachau and Flossenberg is sufficient for you to reconsider your decision and to count the whole period of my detention in Germany as falling within the provision of para 2 of your letter. Should you, however, require further information I request a personal interview with those responsible for this investigation so that I could explain in full the conditions of my detention together with the implications and effects of the kind of solitary confinement to which I was submitted, and to avoid thus my pursuing this matter further.
yours faithfully
W. Greenewich’.

On 11 March 1966 after some due diligence by the Foreign Office which had previously been lacking, they wrote: –

‘The Foreign Secretary wishes, me, with reference to your visit to this Department, to write to you again about your claim to compensation as a victim of Nazi compensation.
As you will know your case has been re-evaluated in the light of all the information now available to me. I am glad to tell you that your claim has now been registered in respect of your detention in the Concentration Camps between 24 May, 1942 and 18 April, 1945 and not in respect of your earlier detention in Berlin.
it will take some little time before payment of an award to you can be arranged, when a further communication will be sent to you. until then no action on your part is necessary except to keep this Department informed of any changes in your address and apart of course from the question of your disablement claim.’

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