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There followed a hiatus until CSDIC was established in Austria. In this short period my duties were somewhat changed — I became the intermediary for my colleagues from CSDIC who wanted to spend a few days in nearby Venice!

CSDIC took over a pleasant villa on the shores of the Wörthersee, halfway between Velden and Mariawörth, in Austria. The villa had belonged to Professor Porsche, the engineer behind the Volkswagen. I only stayed there for a short while before being moved to Völkermarkt, Headquarters of 46 (Wessex) Division.

Work here was different. Hundreds of Germans were congregated in a big tented camp, laid out in meticulous, Germanic style, in lines and squares. German troops and displaced civilians continued to arrive daily. The camp had its own kitchen and mess, a well-equipped medical centre, and an office where all their own records were meticulously kept.

I would be notified of a transport leaving Austria for a certain area of Germany and the number of places available. The camp office would then give me a list of prisoners from that area and I would give them a quick interrogation before clearing them for the journey home. I would already have seen all their paybooks with the telltale string of field-post numbers, and weeded out any potential characters of further interest to us.

It was to this camp that a German truck drew up one day. A senior officer marched up and asked for diesel for the truck, as he was making his own way back home. This was, of course, against the rules, and we insisted that he unpacked the truck and took his place in the camp. The truck contained, apart from a large trunk with his personal belongings, a double bed, a young lady, whom he introduced as his secretary, and a fine young pointer dog. We sent the secretary off to a camp for women, and I promised to find a good home for the dog. In the end, I kept him myself, and brought him back to England.

In winter 1945, CSDIC moved from the comfortable Villa Porsche to the Graz area, where an empty sanatorium in the village of Lassnitzhöhe was placed at our disposal. This was also very comfortable, and altogether more spacious. It also gave us scope for interrogating suspicious individuals.

HQ 8th Army had been very keen to get CSDIC out of the Villa Porsche, as it required these premises, with its boathouse (the CSDIC Sergeants’ Mess) for use as an Officers’ Club. I was unable to attend the farewell party before CSDIC moved to Graz, as I was still quite busy at 46 Division, so I am not perhaps in a position to judge about that night’s events. It was reported that, at about 3 in the morning, a fire broke out in the boathouse and quickly destroyed it. It was assumed that the cause was a smouldering cigarette, but 8th Army always accused us of having started the fire deliberately!

At Lassnitzhöhe, we were fed dubious characters, most of whom had been picked up in camps for displaced persons. Many of these turned out to be soldiers attempting to get back home under their own steam, probably having become tired of waiting for an official transport. Some had been resorting to crime to fund their passages. Some of them were former members of the SS, scared of being picked up and detained indefinitely. It was fairly easy to identify the latter, even in the absence of their paybooks. SS personnel were known to have had their blood group tattooed under their left arms, presumably so that they would be assured of the correct blood group, should a transfusion be required. In order to disguise the tattoo, some of them had resorted to the rather painful expedient of burning the mark off with a cigarette, but the resultant scar was in itself very suspicious.

The arrival of such characters soon became a mere trickle and finally petered out in 1946, when CSDIC was wound up, and we were demobilised. I believe that the former sanatorium is now a country hotel.

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