Prisoner interrogation during World War II

A few idle moments' browsing at the BBC Web site led me to a very interesting article about a World War II German interrogator.  Here's an excerpt.

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.

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.

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.

There's more at the link.

Intrigued, I looked for more information about prisoner-of-war interrogation, and found a series of articles by a British interrogator in the BBC's 'People's War' archives.  John Oswald has contributed several articles to the archives, including:

• Wartime Memories 1939-1945
• An Interrogator's Life (Part 1)
• An Interrogator's Life (Part 2)
• An Interrogator's Life (Part 3)
• The Gauleiter

Here's an excerpt from the second article linked above.

In due course, we were posted to the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) at Ma’adi Camp, in a southern suburb of Cairo, and began life seriously as interrogators. By this time, Lieutenant Williams had been taken ill with a serious lung disorder, brought on by the extreme Egyptian climate, and he was repatriated to Britain after several weeks in hospital.

CSDIC was an interesting community. A small, non-intelligence administrative staff ran the camp, and about a dozen Intelligence Officers were assigned to interrogation work and editing reports, while a somewhat larger number of non-commissioned officers performed ancillary duties. Most of these were Jews, who were probably more highly qualified than many of the officers, but who could not be commissioned because they still had German or Austrian nationality.

One of these duties, which was kept very secret, was the so-called Map Room. This consisted of a number of recording devices. Magnetic tape was not yet readily available, and recording was a specialised job, using wax discs. The recording instruments were connected to microphones hidden in certain cells, into which incoming prisoners were placed in pairs. Their conversations were then studied, and those likely to have specialised knowledge were readily identified and interrogated accordingly.

Many amusing incidents occurred in this department. One of these was when two apparently ordinary soldiers who displayed amazing knowledge of the German Navy baffled the listening NCO’s for some hours. It was later found that they had been whiling away their time by playing “Battleships” on scraps of paper! This game was obviously as popular with the Germans as it was with us.

Prisoners were mainly brought in as a result of raids on the Mediterranean islands. The bulk of these were members of the German 999 “Punishment” Regiment. This was made up largely of misfits — soldiers shown to have anti-Nazi, rebellious, or even Christian tendencies. They were usually glad to be out of the War, and rarely resisted interrogation.

Amongst the naval vessels operating in the eastern Mediterranean was a Polish submarine, the Sokol. We understood that it was the only Polish naval vessel to escape the clutches of the Germans. The crew of this ship was instrumental in bringing us a steady flow of prisoners. A small party would go ashore on one of the islands at night, snatch one or two men on sentry duty, and bring them to Egypt in the sub. They were usually very complimentary about their treatment on board and settled down to POW life quite happily.

A highlight at Ma’adi was the capture on Crete of the German General Kreipe by a Commando unit. We junior officers were not allowed near him. Interrogation was performed by officers of the rank of major or above. I heard later that the German troops on Crete took cruel reprisals on the local population, whom they accused of having sheltered and advised the Commandos. I visited Crete on holiday in 1983, and was told that it was still unsafe for German tourists to venture into the interior of the island.

Again, there's more at the link, and in the other linked articles.

All the linked articles make interesting reading, particularly at a time when methods of interrogation such as waterboarding and other forms of torture are once again in the news.  It's noteworthy that none of the interrogators cited above used such methods.

Peter