I'm not sure if this is the correct forum or not, but here goes anyway. A short time ago I was watching some documentary on the Tuskegee Airmen and part of it was about a black pilot that was shot down and captured by the Germans. Under questioning, he found out that the Germans had much of his personal information. They new about his high school and college grades--transcripts even, his graduation from flight school and other things. Now I realize that this sort of thing happened regularly in air units flying out of Britain. The Germans seemed to know a lot of small stuff about units, where they drank, what clubs in London they frequented, commanding officer names, etc. I always put this down to information fed to the Germans by the XX committee in order to give their turned agents credibility. However. the Tuskegee Airmen never landed in Britain, were squirrled away in a remote location in Italy, with, for all practical purposes, no publicity at all- either in the USA or Europe- and their existence a secret. So, how in the heck did the Germans get this info? Any answers out there? It should be an interesting story!
I watched that just the other night and had the same question, thinking the German espionage system was pretty much blown in the USA. "German Espionage and Sabotage Against the United States" is referenced at http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq114-1.htm - O.N.I. Review [Office of Naval Intelligence] 1, no.3 (Jan. 1946): 33-38. [declassified, formerly "confidential"]. The Game of The Foxes by Ladislas Farago has good book reviews. It is based on captured files of Nazi Intelligence.
One of the fundamental techniques in any interrogation is making the person being questioned think that you already have all the information. A Tuskegee Airman could only have graduated from that flying school, and if you know his home of record it wouldn't be difficult to deduce that he went to the black high school in that town (presuming he was from the segregated south). Further, you might even deduce that as guy who went on to college, he was probably near the top of his class because that was a rarity among blacks at that time. You could get a lot of general information from standard reference works of the time, and with only a little imagination put it together to seem like you knew "everything." The paperwork was likely just phony documents and so on, to bolster the appearance that you already had all of the information. And of course, they likely had already interrogated other members of your unit so every little bit and piece could be casually strung together to make it seem like you had a wealth of info. Any experienced cop does the same thing today when interrogating a criminal suspect, and these Germans were better trained than the average cop.
You had to be top of your class, Had to graduate from that one aviation school, etc. Many of the requirements to be one of these pilots meant you had to follow a certain path, and since your stating that they knew this info. It could have been relatively easy for them. Just asking indirect questions and using reverse psychology on the guy could get them the info that they want.
That sounds plausible but there was more than one black college and many black high schools. If he was from north of the Mason-Dixon line then the possibilities of schools go up a whole bunch. The transcripts HAD to have the right name of the school he went to plus other details the interrogators couldn't have been aware of. Yes, they used these to try and show that they already had the info and all that, but they had to get these documents from some place. Making them up in a hurry strains my credulity. The only thing that the interrogators could have known about the guy was that he came out of the Tuskegee program producing black pilots.
The POW (a German) on the truck next to him says "Where you from...?" along with other questions. OK, he's from Jerkwater, Texas and they only have one black high school - info they could get from American sources such as captured newspapers or encyclopedias, etc. Perhaps he's wearing a college ring that is taken from him. They've already captured other members of his unit and know names and general info on a lot of people. The trick is stringing such arcane things together to convince the prisoner that they already have all the info. Once you have convinced the prisoner that he's not actually revealing anything they don't already know, he's far more liable to spill lots of other information - that is used on the next prisoner from that unit. Cops do this all the time. They tell the suspect that he was identified at the scene, a camera caught his license plate, his partner has already fingered him as the shooter, whatever. None of that is true, but the criminal then is led to believe that they already have all the info so he should cooperate for more lenient treatment. The same technique was used on POW's, on both sides. They'll be kept in some miserable interrogation facility indefinitely, or they can talk and be sent immediately to a comfortable POW camp. Since they are convinced they are just repeating info the Germans already have, why not?
Doubtful that the airmen would give or know much information...most information would have been garnered from listening in to their conversations. There were spies in all departments, including posting and entitlement sections...Im sure there were many spies that just "absorbed" themselves back into society after the war and "went back to sleep"...never to be known. In my opinion.
Beavertails: I suppose it could have worked that way for some, but the astute POW might ask, "If they've got the answer to this, why are they asking me? Hmmm..." Remember, that during training they would have had classes on how to recognize what their interrogators were doing. Hopefully, they didn't sleep through those classes. I also seem to recall they had newspaper clippings from his home town (Black) newspaper and other stuff that I have a hard time believing that they would go to all they work for one fighter pilot. I, like CAC, thing there was some unknown and probably never to be known, intelligence op in the USA.
One reason for (initially) asking questions they know the answer to is to try to ascertain the veracity of the perosn being interrogated. Are they telling the truth?
Intelligence isn't a big "gotcha" moment where some junior officer reveals a huge secret. It's a slow gathering of almost inconsequential data that's collated with other data to build a picture of enemy capabilities. Somewhere on this forum is a thread about a German Luftwaffe interrogator and his easygoing and friendly chats with downed pilots.
I fully understand the "jigsaw puzzle" concept of intelligence. My point being that they had info that had to have come from the USA. If so, how did they get it? By the way, I think the person you are referring to is Hans Scharf.
