The WWII interrogator who used kindness over violence

Funny as I remember when I went through Advanced Combat Survival School while in the USAF, the 'nice' interrogator always got me whereas the 'mean' interrogator got nothing out of me.





Much of the debate about the interrogation of suspected terrorists has been about whether the methods used, such as waterboarding, could be described as torture. Historian Julian Putkowski examines how a German Luftwaffe interrogator used persuasion rather than punishment to get prisoners of war to talk.

During the latter part of World War II lots of allied fliers got shot down over Germany. Many of the survivors - or terrorfliegers as they were termed by the Nazis - got rounded up and were dispatched to Luftwaffe's interrogation unit at Dulag Luft POW Camp, near Oberursel.

After being marched into the camp, they were placed in solitary confinement and in spite of the provisions of the Geneva Convention, they anticipated rough handling, possibly having their fingernails torn off by Nazi torturers.

[SIZE=1.077em]Aircrew who anticipated a Gestapo-style battering were in for a surprise when they encountered Obergefreiter Hanns Scharff, who had acquired fluent English when working as a businessman in pre-war South Africa.[/SIZE]

Although his inscrutability secured him the nick-name Stone Face, he was otherwise a genial fellow. He was a self-taught interrogator who used persuasion rather than punishment as a strategy for getting Allied prisoners of war to disclose more than the customary name, rank and number, permitted by the Geneva Convention.

Scharff always began by doing his homework thoroughly. Before commencing an interrogation session, he checked all available data, generally acquainting himself with whatever was known about the pilot's service and personal circumstances.

Read More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/0/19923902

 

I remember watching something years ago about this topic. One of the things I remember, is how they tried to figure out why Allied planes would shoot soild lines of white tracers, none of the normal "mean" techniques got that type of info, but there was an interragator (not sure if it was this guy) who would sit down and have a casual lunch with the guy he was interregating and he ended up figuring out that a bunch of white tracers meant they were almost out of ammo.