MI19
department of British military intelligence (historical)
MI19 was a section of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, part of the War Office. During the Second World War it was responsible for obtaining information from enemy prisoners of war.
It was originally created in December 1940 as MI9a, a sub-section of MI9. A year later, in December 1941, it became an independent organisation, though still closely associated with its parent.
MI19 had Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centres (CSDIC) at Beaconsfield, Wilton Park, and Latimer, as well as a number overseas. Beginning in 1940, MI19 recorded conversations between German officers held comfortably at Trent Park in North London; many important secrets were learned from that effort. MI19 operated an interrogation centre in Kensington Palace Gardens, London, commanded by Lt. Col. Alexander Scotland OBE, known as the "London Cage". It was a subject of persistent reports of torture by the prisoners confined there, which included war crimes suspects from the SS and Gestapo held in the facility after the war.
“MI19” enters the record as department of British military intelligence (historical). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what MI19, department and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“MI19” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, MI19, department and British provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2986715. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1940 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “MI19” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.