Courtesy of Mr Nibbler

And to add on – The Garrison Officers’ Mess in Crüwellstraße was the Gestapo HQ and my room was allegedly seriously haunted. I was 19 years old and found myself in the best room in the mess – eventually an older German mess serveant told me why. A Gestapo officer had hanged himself out of the bay window and a Brit officer (Int, I assume) had seen his brains off with a revolver in about the same place in ’46 or ’47. Before I was told this I saw things and had taken to sleeping with a bible under my pillow. And I am not now, and never have been, a religious or god-bothering person.

The cellar had the snooker table next to the wine cellar: a white tiled room with a sloping floor leading to a central drain and a wall mounted tap (like for a hosepipe). And a cell door with a way to look in, but not out. That was a scary place after dark.

Mr Nibbler

Garrison Officers Mess, Crüwellstraße, Bielefeld

As far as I am aware, this building was not Gestapo headquarters but the family home of General Crüwell, one of Rommel’s Panzer Divisional Generals in Africa and of the Crüwell tobacco firm which still exists in Bielefeld.

When hostilities finished in Germany, it was taken over by a Field Security Intelligence Section of the RAF who were engaged in de-nazification and security, and who were succeeded by an Intelligence unit of the Control Commission for Germany. I believe that it was because of these connections that the locals referred to the building as the Gestapo headquarters.

On demobilisation from the Intelligence Corps in the Polizeipraesidium in Düsseldorf, I returned as a civilian Intelligence Officer and was located at Crüwellstraße between 1947 & 1949 at the height of the Cold War. The building served as offices & mess. It had a fine Minstrels’ Gallery around a central staircase and our offices were ranged around this with bedrooms on the next floor. It was then a very comfortable and well furnished building with a magnificent Steinway grandpiano in the dining room.

B Adams