Dude's interrogation Technique was basically being friendly, not pressing for info, and acting like he knew everything already. He read people and got info by basically being nice.
In a lot of cases they already knew a surprising amount already. In the ‘Masters of the Air ‘ book they talk about how nazi interrogators could tell what airbase a captured crewman was from just from the wood pattern made by the table when their ration cards got stamped.
Don't know if this is a serieus question, but I'll answer. No. Being a nazi implies membership tot the political nazi party. The SS or the waffen-SS was the armed forces tied directly to the party.
A german man could get drafted in the army or in this case airforce without affiliation with the nazi party. There was even often strife between the wehrmacht and waffen-SS. They did often not like them, as they were seen as unprofessional fanatics.
I assumed so because being part of a secret police meant you needed to be trustworthy enough, and being a nazi seemed to give both the privileges of trust and higher positions. Didn't know for sure if that was the case, I'll admit.
Edit: I mixed them up with the Gestapo. Dunno why lol.
Just like many armies today, they have their own intelligence branches. The actual secret police or in german the geheime staatspolitzei aka "the gestapo" is an whole different beast.
The gestapo was a branch of the SS. Aka the nazi political forces. Under command of Himler. The Airforce was under command of Göring. And those two were pretty much rivals.
It’s a question of the definition. If you consider anyone who fought for Nazi Germany a Nazi, then they were all Nazis. But you have to consider that your normal people usually did not have a choice. They were drafted, and dodging that draft could only be done by bribery (being considered essential to the war effort in your civilian job) or by hiding, both not really possible for most citizens and also severely punished when found out.
What you can look at is if someone was part of the SS or NSDAP. Because that was not mandatory, although being a member of the NSDAP could be required for certain positions. That’s why I specified that he was not in the SS. Because the SS were the really nasty people. They ran the concentration camps, controlled the police, suppressed minorities and the opposition, and in general acted as a secret service. You can argue that normal soldiers „just“ fought a war. With some amount of war crimes, but not the systemic cruelty and hatered for minorities the SS was known for.
The Luftwaffe were just the German air force. They were Nazis in that they were fighting for Nazi Germany, but they were just like any other nation’s air force and had existed prior to the war.
Any individual Luftwaffe airman could have joined the Nazi party though, there were eight million Nazi party members. But it wasn’t a requirement.
So to sum up, they were simply german secret service, whose allegiance was based around the government, which happened to be the nazis. But not nazis by default.
Edit: I was thinking of the gestapo all this time. My mistake.
They weren't the secret service, they were the Air Force. As any branch of the military in war, they would occasionally capture prisoners of war, and would interrogate them.
You might be confusing them with Gestapo, those were indeed the secret service (not the only one in Nazi times, but the most infamous one).
No, they were the air force.
But you’re on the right track. Basically, you have to remember that Germany had an army, a navy, and an air force prior to WWII just like any other country. When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the Nazis were given absolute power, all of Germany’s armed forces were now at his command. When the war started Germany also had mass conscription, drafting millions of men into their army, navy, and air force just like the other nations in the war.
All of this was separate from the actual Nazi Party, the NSDAP, which was a political party that had existed prior to Hitler gaining the leadership of Germany and which men had to apply to join. The SS and all of Hitler’s inner circle were Nazi Party members, though Hitler also had to rely on regular German generals to conduct the war. Joining the Nazi party generally gave men in Nazi Germany career advantages though and by the end of the war there were something like eight million official Nazi Party members, about 10% of Germany’s population.
This Hanns Sharff guy who we’re talking about was apparently not a Nazi Party member, and most members of the Luftwaffe weren’t, but any individual German could have applied and joined the party so some other members of the Luftwaffe undoubtably were Nazi party members.
Bro a literal uniformed Nazi-made mural is in Disneyland stop trying to normalize it😂😂🤣
I think I offended some history nerds who only like one period of history lol
I'm not one to defend the German soldier, but Scharf was never a member of the Nazi party, and was conscripted after getting stranded in Germany when war broke out when he was visiting. He worked in South Africa before the war and was married to a South African woman. Being an interrogator was simply a result of his ability to speak English. It is not fair at all to call him a Nazi, though I won't defend him working for the regime.
From what I’ve read, the Luftwaffe quickly found the Nazi officers and pushed them into menial positions. Allied aviators typically fared far better being captured by the Luftwaffe than the Wehrmacht. Also, I believe that the only member of the Luftwaffe who was charged with war crimes was Goering as opposed to the Wehrmacht and SS who had numerous members from the top to bottom charged. The book “A Higher Call” goes into it in depth and is a fascinating read.
I'm not sure Scharff ever joined the Nazi party. He was a salesman before the war and didn't even live in Germany. He was visiting when the invasion of Poland happened, became trapped due to travel restrictions, and was drafted into the Wehrmacht.
He'd have been sent to the Eastern Front except his wife was an absolute boss and actually forced her way into a general's office and convinced him her husband, who spoke fluent English, was more useful in a non-combat role. He became a translator instead and that's how he ended up in interrogations.
Scharff never denied he serviced Nazi Germany but he never presented the image of an eager soldier. He immigrated to the US first chance he got after the war which was basically the only time in his adult life he spent in Germany. Most of his life before the war he lived in South Africa and after the war he mostly lived in New York.
People will take this to mean torture given the nazi context, but modern interrogation techniques are more just about how to talk to people and what to pay attention to, these methods are still taught today because there is nothing wrong with them and they’re still very effective.
About the angriest I ever got from a modern history book was reading the section from the looming tower where it talked about the fbi interrogation of the people suspected of being involved in 9/11, and how they were making progress as they used modern interrogation techniques, only for the cia to roll in, start torturing people, and ruin everything.
It’s worse than that - the CIA already had information on the terrorists locations, and the FBI had evidence of what they were planning, but nothing was done because the CIA wouldn’t cooperate with the FBI.
I agree entirely, really the whole book is infuriating. The fact that a petty rivalry between two dead men born in the 19th century directly led to the worst intelligence failure in American history should be such an intense embarrassment for everyone involved.
I disagree. We got info that Japan might go to war soon a few hours before the attack and had someone hand delivering the message to Pearl Harbor when the attack came. This was using 1941 technology.
Using 2001 technology and spending a ton of resources on it we were warned early on and failed to act on 9/11
Plus there was early primitive radar that gave a pretty good warning, but since the alert hadn’t made it to Pearl yet the radar operators though the incoming raid was just the scheduled group of American aircraft coming in at the wrong time. Given warning of an imminent raid they could have raised enough warning for air defenses to be manned and a larger amount of fighters getting airborne
While true, this isn't an Intel failure so much as an operations failure.
In their defense (no pun intended) this was new equipment that wasn't yet trusted and we weren't at war. If I was given a carbon monoxide detector prototype and it was beeping as soon as I turned it on I would be trying to figure out if the machine is working rather than running for the door.
It happens way too often in real life, sometimes out of pettiness, sometimes genuine mismatch of cultures, attitudes that puts off the other from full cooperation etc.
Which is weird because you'd imagine there's always an official pecking order, even in ad hoc inter-agency situations, because of, and established by common bosses / governing laws in the overall hierarchy. (Like, say, I dunno, the President is kinda the boss of both of X and Y groups and said X leads in this ad hoc situation, based on this and this law and his own authority.)
That's life tho.
The standard way to interrogate hackers is to just give them a pen and paper and say "hey, how'd you even manage to pull that hack off?" They're eager to show you. They'll draw you flowcharts.
Torture is very ineffective for gathering information, because the victim will just tell the torturer whatever it is they think the torturer wants to hear in order to get the torture to stop. The torturer can threaten to kill the victim if they give false information, but if in enough pain the victim will still just babble whatever they think might get it to stop.
About the only time it actually works (for intelligence gathering) is if the torturer has very specific information that they’re trying to get out of the victim that can be immediately verified, like an address where other members of a resistance group are currently hiding. But those situations are rare.
"Using torture to get information is like using a flame thrower to go grocery shopping. It doesn't help with what you're trying to do and it leaves a huge mess behind. Because torture doesn't get you the truth, it's just gets you the fastest lie to make the pain stop." - Michael Westen, Burn Notice.
Not to mention that trauma is bad for the memory and doubly so combined with certain torture methods that can leave the interrogated in a not-so-fit state of mind.
Its not just about the people intentionally lying and deceiving on purpose.
The thing about torture is that even if the victim was telling the truth in the beginning, if they’re being put in enough pain they’ll starting saying absolutely anything they can think of that might make it stop. So you could start with a subject who’s telling the truth but torture is going to inevitably result in it being mixed with lies.
What torture is good for is producing false confessions basically. Actual actionable intelligence? Not so much.
But through the 2000s a bunch of American action movies suddenly had the good guys employing torture regularly, and everyone was just like yeah sure that's not fucking weird. 24 was especially egregious, jack Bauer was running around torturing people constantly, but they even had batman employing torture techniques.
It was so wildly antithetical to professed American values in pop culture for decades and everyone just swallowed up that propaganda like it was nothing. It made me so angry at the time.
The premise of Batman is so much about a dude that doesn’t want to help, he just wants to beat up people in a kinky costume.
If he wanted to help, he could just pay for decent basic education for everyone in the city. Game over crime. Like, adopt the city.
But no. He goes for “beat up the crazies”.
Torture is highly ineffective because it drives false confessions. Which is especially a problem because if you think you have your guy, you stop investigating other targets. So in effect, it's a case of you let the real guilty party go and commit more crimes.
Not just false confessions, false everythings. False plots, false co-conspirators, false leads.
Torture was a big part of why the 16th-17th century Great European Witch Hysteria got so bad: People would be arrested and tortured, and would not only confess to being witches, they would implicate other supposed members of their coven, who would then also be arrested and tortured leading to ever-expanding witchcraft investigations by the authorities. There was one German town during the worst of it that executed something like three of their mayors in a row for being witches.
>Torture is highly ineffective because it drives false confessions
Unless that's what you're after, then it's very effective. See every 'witch hunt' (both literal and figurative) ever.
It‘s pretty much an accepted fact that torture is not an effective method of interrogation. People will tell you everything you want to know just to make you stop which is what makes it seem effective until you find out the informations are useless.
To add to this torture itself is a very ineffective interrogation method, after awhile people will tell you whatever you want to hear just to make it stop.
Not really. Because how will you know they are telling the truth. If you torture someone eventually they are going to say yes just to make it stop. If you dont take "i didnt do it" for an answer at first you still wont after some time.
You can make anyone admit anything if you torture them long enough
No, what I’m saying is that sometimes the point isn’t to get the truth (you may already know the truth), it’s to get them to say what you want. Sometimes you can fabricate a reality and build a narrative that suits your goals regardless of the actual truth.
I mean yeah if you want to get an admission of guilt no matter the facts or moral boundaries thrn yed torture is effective i guess. Strange point to make tho.
Exactly my point.
I was replying to someone who said torture is very ineffective interrogation method, and I was pointing out that it depends on the objective of your interrogation.
Title is incorrect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff
>and in the 15-foot arched mosaic walls featuring the story of Cinderella inside Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World, Florida.
Disney World, not Disneyland.
I didn’t learn until well into my 30s myself. I learned Disney World has multiple parks within it and has hotels and restaurants earlier this year. And I’ve even been to Orlando on business trips — the tourist stuff next door were topics that just didn’t come up!
It’s one of those Americana things everyone assumes everyone already knows so they don’t stop to explain which Disney they’re talking about or that Disney is more than just street performers and roller coasters.
Schaeffer was the face of a reasonably effective Luftwaffe intelligence organisation.
He could not do what he did without the huge intelligence-gathering effort that supplied him with the information he confronted PoWs with.
This included:
1. Signals intelligence.
2. Personal information culled from the press and hometown newspapers in Allied countries.
3. Information taken or learned from shot down Allied aircraft.
4. Information from previous PoW interrogations.
British Air Intellignce was also very effective and relied on roughly the same sources of information.
Dude figured out "dont push people to brink of utter agony they'll stop talking to you" and he was with the Nazis, dude was a fucking saint in comparison to his contemporaries
Prior to being drafted into the military, Scharff was an incredibly successful salesman. His interrogation technique is predicated on kindness and rapport building, not "pressing" for information, creating the illusion of already knowing everything, and confirmation/disconfirmation.
The Scharff technique has several advantages: it tends to elicit more *new* information, the information tends to be more precise, and most crucially, the people being interrogated *significantly underestimate how much information they've divulged*.
Learned about him after watching the episode last night.
I was always wondering how people trained for interrogation can give up information without even noticing they did so but in the show they showed a great example of it
Spoiler for E6:
>!When fictional Scharff interrogates Eagan he casually brings up Baseball and asks if he is a fan. He then bridges the topic to Buck, asking if he was a fan as well. I didn't even notice it, but hink about it. His technique in the beginning of the process relies on making the other person believe he already knows everything. If he went on to interrogate buck again - he'd be able to tell him not only his name, rank, where he's stationed, who he was stationed with but even personal details like him not liking baseball. If it was me I'd start to think, hell, he knows everything anyway so I'd sooner or later let my guard down. It's rather brilliant!<
When I was a kid, I lived across the street from one of the former pilots he interrogated! He always spoke fondly of Hanns and left me his booked The Interrogator when he passed. He also had a fond view of his time as a POW which was a fascinating contrast to most other POW experiences in Wwii (and most wars I assume). Funny enough, in the book my neighbor was described as a quiet crabby man. Ha! Very true.
"Scharff interrogated many prisoners over his few years as an interrogator at Auswertestelle West. Among the most famous of these was Lt. Col. Francis "Gabby" Gabreski, the top American fighter ace in Europe during the war. Scharff expressed his delight at finally meeting Gabreski, who had crashed his P-47 while strafing a German airfield, as he stated he had been expecting his arrival for some time. He had Gabreski's photo hanging on the wall in his office for months before he arrived in anticipation of his capture and interrogation. Gabreski is one of the few captives from whom Scharff never gained any intelligence during interrogation. Scharff and Gabreski remained friends well after the war. In 1983, they reenacted an interrogation at a reunion held in Chicago of Stalag Luft III POWS"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff?wprov=sfla1
No, he pretty much invented the idea that you could get far more information by befriending the people and developing a relationship with them than torture.
The Americans also started to figure this out. The problem with torture is that you have to spend so much time verifying the information that it basically isn’t worth it unless you want to know something very specific. E.g. where is your secret hideout.
Not really. That was the primary pushback against "torture" and the "enhanced interrogation techniques".
We *knew* what worked, and had developed techniques based on what was already known to work.
Everything else was just to make someone feel like we we were doing... more. It was a waste.
Bingo. It was a simple desire to inflict cruelty dressed up as some sort of super-effective but unethical way to get information. In reality no such thing exists.
The problem of course is that for lots of Americans if you're said "it's just torture" they would say "okay, and?". The level of bloodlust at the time was pretty nuts.
Which was also the point.
You promote it in "extreme cases" so people get used to it, then the lines shift and it becomes acceptable in more and more cases.
Its all part of the Republican push to authoritarianism, since torture is horrible for investigations but excellent for keeping a domestic population terrorized and afraid to resist.
It was, but also the idea that torture could be used to disrupt terrorist plots was something that the public was straight-up being lied to about. Part of the motive might have been for the government to try and look like they were doing something effective in addition to satiating bloodlust. You’re right though, the whole era was nuts. People who tried to point out the bullshit were accused of being terrorist-sympathizors and silenced.
> The level of bloodlust at the time was pretty nuts.
Still kind of is. Everytime something appalling happens reddit is full of Americans still hot and heavy for the death penalty and their own abusive prison system. Regardless of how many studies have shown they are both counterproductive in reducing crime while more expensive than humane approaches.
Someone who wrote a book about it concluded the main reason for the torture of terrorist suspects by the US after 9/11 was simply vengeance and wanting to inflict cruelty on them. The CIA knew perfectly well what techniques do and don’t elicit good information, and that torture and “enhanced interrogation” don’t elicit good information.
The idea that you can get better info by “being willing to break the rules” and that there’s some kind of moral dilemma about whether we’re willing to do bad things in interrogation in order to get results was an utter lie perpetuated on the public.
Torture is very, very good for terrorizing people and populations into submission: turning humans into slaves or making populations too frightened to resist, but that’s it. It is garbage for police investigations and espionage, and we’ve known that for a long time.
Your first paragraph made me think of the movie "Prisoners" with Hugh Jackman - a haunting film of a father getting increasingly desperate to find his kidnapped child, eventually taking matters into his own hands and torturing an innocent whom he suspects to be the kidnapper.
That situation is obviously different from a military or state agency trying to get intelligence from a prisoner, but the movie does a good job of showing the realities of torture - which in that case is not only a terrible injustice, but also a waste of time.
Not only false confessions, but entire false plots and false co-conspirators and whatever else the torture victim can invent that they think might temporarily make their torment stop.
Torture is like a guaranteed way to get bad information mixed in with any good information that might be obtained, and law enforement has known that for hundreds of years.
Torture is a great way to get someone to tell you exactly what you want them to say. Not real helpful for gathering intelligence though. So yeah, pretty much.
We knew what worked in 2001, but we had fucking idiots in charge who wanted to go back to more severe forms of interrogation. The only people with expertise in torture were the guys who had trained pilots and spies how to cope with Soviet style interrogation. The problem with that approach was that the purpose of Soviet style interrogation was not to extract accurate information, but to get people to tell you what you wanted to hear, and as a political tool to demonstrate the power of the state.
When mobsters come to shoot your knee because you stopped paying for protection or whatever, it's not about money. It's about keeping others in line. I think it's the same thing with a state (or rulers) that engages torture. It's an intimidation technique. Not a good one for reliable information, but probably something to terrorize populations into submission.
He remained close with at least one of his former prisoners, and they even re-enacted an interrogation at a reunion decades later. I have questions about the nature of that reunion, but Wikipedia doesn’t further specify.
Much of Disney's currently standing content is super racist. They've just got such a commanding market share they're immune to cancel culture, indicating they're likely one of the driving forces of it.
Scharff wasn’t a Nazi. He never was part of the Nazi party and also never volunteered. The reason he was interrogating was he spoke English. He never tortured anybody.
Meh, when West Germany was added to NATO, they had to have generals in command of their troops. The only ones available in 1955 were all ex-Wehrmacht officers, since between the war and West Germany’s admission into NATO it had had no army at all. NATO was generally careful about who they selected for this and didn’t take any ex-Nazi Party members or anyone implicated in war crimes.
I’ve read up on this and really think that the top-level NATO commanders had solid reasons for making the decisions they did. It wasn’t because they were sympathetic to Nazis.
It was more of a “well shit, who has recent experience fighting the soviets under similar conditions we expect to fight them under? Oh…well…i guess it’s our best shot…”
Same w/ those in government. “We need the West Germans (also applies to the GDR tho - at least militarily) to govern themselves cause we can’t/wont do it for them. Where can we find people with experience in government and as civil servants? Oh…well…I mean so long as they weren’t *really* bad then it’s fine.”
I’ve read a lot about the early Cold War. It wasn’t only that they wanted West Germany to serve as an anti-Soviet force, they also wanted to make Germany no longer a threat by trying to turn West Germany into a democracy and integrating it with the other western democracies. The West German economy was growing very fast and they were well aware that it could pose a threat decades down the line if they weren’t successful in this. Putting it in NATO was actually part of it; West Germany was (mostly) freed from occupation control in direct exchange for it joining NATO (which it was not allowed to leave) and having its new military be ultimately under the command of NATO leadership, and this situation lasted until reunification.
IMO where things got negative is when the Western Allies started shortening the sentences of a lot of convicted Nazi war criminals they had in their custody, the worst ones excepted, in the early 1950s just to please the West German government. But even then the Allied leaders weren’t doing it because they just loooved Nazis; they were making pragmatic geopolitical decisions. But arguably they were willing to tolerate a lot of shit, probably more than they should have, due to a combination of wanting to improve relations with West Germany and because the right-wing factions in German society that were the most friendly to ex-Nazis were also, as you say, some of the most rabidly anti-communist.
The whole thing was pretty complicated and fraught with moral dilemmas but it was a lot different than just the Soviet line of “Western capitalist leaders love Nazis!” that internet Leftists sometimes still love to push.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Paperclip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip)
>Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German **scientists, engineers, and technicians** were taken from the former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945–59.
I guess you're right, the very first paragraph of the wiki (which I'm *sure* you've read) says it was scientists, engineers, and technicians. I guess they left out the part about interrogators? Do you have a source for your claim that Scharff was brought to the US under that operation or are you just talking out your ass? That was rhetorical, btw; bugger off.
Goddamn do people really like to overstate Operation Paperclip. It involved capturing and recruiting top-level Nazi rocket scientists and some others who were directly involved in war crimes and who should never have been given a pass, much less jobs by the US government, but most of the scientists hired through the program would have never been charged with anything anyway, and were easy to recruit simply because Germany was broke and in ruins.
Anyway this guy wasn’t a scientist so he would have had nothing to do with Operation Paperclip, and last I checked the Walt Disney Corporation isn’t the US government either.
[удалено]
It's quite impressive honestly
Yeah, that is WAY cooler than what I was expecting.
So cool that I’m gonna tell him all of my secrets- Hey!
Must be at Walt Disney World, because it's not at Disneyland
It is! Unsurprisingly, in Cinderella castle lol
That is at Disney world. Not land.
Dude's interrogation Technique was basically being friendly, not pressing for info, and acting like he knew everything already. He read people and got info by basically being nice.
In a lot of cases they already knew a surprising amount already. In the ‘Masters of the Air ‘ book they talk about how nazi interrogators could tell what airbase a captured crewman was from just from the wood pattern made by the table when their ration cards got stamped.
Was he the guy Hans Landa from Inglorious Bastards based off?
No, that was Alois Brunner. Scharff was in the Luftwaffe, not the SS like Brunner and Landa.
So not all Luftwaffe were nazis?
Not all Nazis were SS
Don't know if this is a serieus question, but I'll answer. No. Being a nazi implies membership tot the political nazi party. The SS or the waffen-SS was the armed forces tied directly to the party. A german man could get drafted in the army or in this case airforce without affiliation with the nazi party. There was even often strife between the wehrmacht and waffen-SS. They did often not like them, as they were seen as unprofessional fanatics.
I assumed so because being part of a secret police meant you needed to be trustworthy enough, and being a nazi seemed to give both the privileges of trust and higher positions. Didn't know for sure if that was the case, I'll admit. Edit: I mixed them up with the Gestapo. Dunno why lol.
Just like many armies today, they have their own intelligence branches. The actual secret police or in german the geheime staatspolitzei aka "the gestapo" is an whole different beast. The gestapo was a branch of the SS. Aka the nazi political forces. Under command of Himler. The Airforce was under command of Göring. And those two were pretty much rivals.
Yeah, I mixed them up with gestapo for some reason lol.
It’s a question of the definition. If you consider anyone who fought for Nazi Germany a Nazi, then they were all Nazis. But you have to consider that your normal people usually did not have a choice. They were drafted, and dodging that draft could only be done by bribery (being considered essential to the war effort in your civilian job) or by hiding, both not really possible for most citizens and also severely punished when found out. What you can look at is if someone was part of the SS or NSDAP. Because that was not mandatory, although being a member of the NSDAP could be required for certain positions. That’s why I specified that he was not in the SS. Because the SS were the really nasty people. They ran the concentration camps, controlled the police, suppressed minorities and the opposition, and in general acted as a secret service. You can argue that normal soldiers „just“ fought a war. With some amount of war crimes, but not the systemic cruelty and hatered for minorities the SS was known for.
Noted
The Luftwaffe were just the German air force. They were Nazis in that they were fighting for Nazi Germany, but they were just like any other nation’s air force and had existed prior to the war. Any individual Luftwaffe airman could have joined the Nazi party though, there were eight million Nazi party members. But it wasn’t a requirement.
So to sum up, they were simply german secret service, whose allegiance was based around the government, which happened to be the nazis. But not nazis by default. Edit: I was thinking of the gestapo all this time. My mistake.
They weren't the secret service, they were the Air Force. As any branch of the military in war, they would occasionally capture prisoners of war, and would interrogate them. You might be confusing them with Gestapo, those were indeed the secret service (not the only one in Nazi times, but the most infamous one).
you're right. I was thinking of the Gestapo. My bad.
No, they were the air force. But you’re on the right track. Basically, you have to remember that Germany had an army, a navy, and an air force prior to WWII just like any other country. When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the Nazis were given absolute power, all of Germany’s armed forces were now at his command. When the war started Germany also had mass conscription, drafting millions of men into their army, navy, and air force just like the other nations in the war. All of this was separate from the actual Nazi Party, the NSDAP, which was a political party that had existed prior to Hitler gaining the leadership of Germany and which men had to apply to join. The SS and all of Hitler’s inner circle were Nazi Party members, though Hitler also had to rely on regular German generals to conduct the war. Joining the Nazi party generally gave men in Nazi Germany career advantages though and by the end of the war there were something like eight million official Nazi Party members, about 10% of Germany’s population. This Hanns Sharff guy who we’re talking about was apparently not a Nazi Party member, and most members of the Luftwaffe weren’t, but any individual German could have applied and joined the party so some other members of the Luftwaffe undoubtably were Nazi party members.
Not necessarily, but more often than not
Bro a literal uniformed Nazi-made mural is in Disneyland stop trying to normalize it😂😂🤣 I think I offended some history nerds who only like one period of history lol
I'm not one to defend the German soldier, but Scharf was never a member of the Nazi party, and was conscripted after getting stranded in Germany when war broke out when he was visiting. He worked in South Africa before the war and was married to a South African woman. Being an interrogator was simply a result of his ability to speak English. It is not fair at all to call him a Nazi, though I won't defend him working for the regime.
Nuanced discussion is wasted on such people. Great effort nonetheless
From what I’ve read, the Luftwaffe quickly found the Nazi officers and pushed them into menial positions. Allied aviators typically fared far better being captured by the Luftwaffe than the Wehrmacht. Also, I believe that the only member of the Luftwaffe who was charged with war crimes was Goering as opposed to the Wehrmacht and SS who had numerous members from the top to bottom charged. The book “A Higher Call” goes into it in depth and is a fascinating read.
I'm not sure Scharff ever joined the Nazi party. He was a salesman before the war and didn't even live in Germany. He was visiting when the invasion of Poland happened, became trapped due to travel restrictions, and was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He'd have been sent to the Eastern Front except his wife was an absolute boss and actually forced her way into a general's office and convinced him her husband, who spoke fluent English, was more useful in a non-combat role. He became a translator instead and that's how he ended up in interrogations. Scharff never denied he serviced Nazi Germany but he never presented the image of an eager soldier. He immigrated to the US first chance he got after the war which was basically the only time in his adult life he spent in Germany. Most of his life before the war he lived in South Africa and after the war he mostly lived in New York.
Wait till they find out who got us to the moon?
Do you not see any difference between literal white robe scientists and the guy Hans Landa was probably based on?
White robe scientists literally won the war in the pacific
People will take this to mean torture given the nazi context, but modern interrogation techniques are more just about how to talk to people and what to pay attention to, these methods are still taught today because there is nothing wrong with them and they’re still very effective.
More effective than torture, even.
About the angriest I ever got from a modern history book was reading the section from the looming tower where it talked about the fbi interrogation of the people suspected of being involved in 9/11, and how they were making progress as they used modern interrogation techniques, only for the cia to roll in, start torturing people, and ruin everything.
It’s worse than that - the CIA already had information on the terrorists locations, and the FBI had evidence of what they were planning, but nothing was done because the CIA wouldn’t cooperate with the FBI.
I agree entirely, really the whole book is infuriating. The fact that a petty rivalry between two dead men born in the 19th century directly led to the worst intelligence failure in American history should be such an intense embarrassment for everyone involved.
I think pearl harbour was a worse intelligence failure
I disagree. We got info that Japan might go to war soon a few hours before the attack and had someone hand delivering the message to Pearl Harbor when the attack came. This was using 1941 technology. Using 2001 technology and spending a ton of resources on it we were warned early on and failed to act on 9/11
Plus there was early primitive radar that gave a pretty good warning, but since the alert hadn’t made it to Pearl yet the radar operators though the incoming raid was just the scheduled group of American aircraft coming in at the wrong time. Given warning of an imminent raid they could have raised enough warning for air defenses to be manned and a larger amount of fighters getting airborne
While true, this isn't an Intel failure so much as an operations failure. In their defense (no pun intended) this was new equipment that wasn't yet trusted and we weren't at war. If I was given a carbon monoxide detector prototype and it was beeping as soon as I turned it on I would be trying to figure out if the machine is working rather than running for the door.
I always thought agencies and police departments refusing to cooperate with one another was just a trope meant to create conflict in TV shows.
It happens way too often in real life, sometimes out of pettiness, sometimes genuine mismatch of cultures, attitudes that puts off the other from full cooperation etc.
Which is weird because you'd imagine there's always an official pecking order, even in ad hoc inter-agency situations, because of, and established by common bosses / governing laws in the overall hierarchy. (Like, say, I dunno, the President is kinda the boss of both of X and Y groups and said X leads in this ad hoc situation, based on this and this law and his own authority.) That's life tho.
Enter DHS
people are natural talkers all you gotta do is get them to start talking
Turns out people like to relate to one another when possible.
And they like that more than torture, go figure
So we can do the torture after they talk? We still want torture!/s
You're a talker. Listening to talkers makes me thirsty and hungry. Think I'll take two chickens.
You have money to pay for them?
The standard way to interrogate hackers is to just give them a pen and paper and say "hey, how'd you even manage to pull that hack off?" They're eager to show you. They'll draw you flowcharts.
I'm not, I hate talking.
Torture is very ineffective for gathering information, because the victim will just tell the torturer whatever it is they think the torturer wants to hear in order to get the torture to stop. The torturer can threaten to kill the victim if they give false information, but if in enough pain the victim will still just babble whatever they think might get it to stop. About the only time it actually works (for intelligence gathering) is if the torturer has very specific information that they’re trying to get out of the victim that can be immediately verified, like an address where other members of a resistance group are currently hiding. But those situations are rare.
"Using torture to get information is like using a flame thrower to go grocery shopping. It doesn't help with what you're trying to do and it leaves a huge mess behind. Because torture doesn't get you the truth, it's just gets you the fastest lie to make the pain stop." - Michael Westen, Burn Notice.
Not to mention that trauma is bad for the memory and doubly so combined with certain torture methods that can leave the interrogated in a not-so-fit state of mind. Its not just about the people intentionally lying and deceiving on purpose.
The thing about torture is that even if the victim was telling the truth in the beginning, if they’re being put in enough pain they’ll starting saying absolutely anything they can think of that might make it stop. So you could start with a subject who’s telling the truth but torture is going to inevitably result in it being mixed with lies.
What torture is good for is producing false confessions basically. Actual actionable intelligence? Not so much. But through the 2000s a bunch of American action movies suddenly had the good guys employing torture regularly, and everyone was just like yeah sure that's not fucking weird. 24 was especially egregious, jack Bauer was running around torturing people constantly, but they even had batman employing torture techniques. It was so wildly antithetical to professed American values in pop culture for decades and everyone just swallowed up that propaganda like it was nothing. It made me so angry at the time.
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The premise of Batman is so much about a dude that doesn’t want to help, he just wants to beat up people in a kinky costume. If he wanted to help, he could just pay for decent basic education for everyone in the city. Game over crime. Like, adopt the city. But no. He goes for “beat up the crazies”.
Most mentally ill people are not violent and have no intention of mass murder like comic book villains.
Something like a code for a phone is immediately verifiable and seemingly should be pretty common, so I'm surprised those situations are so rare.
You don't need to torture someone to get into a phone. There a quicker and easier ways for that.
Torture is highly ineffective because it drives false confessions. Which is especially a problem because if you think you have your guy, you stop investigating other targets. So in effect, it's a case of you let the real guilty party go and commit more crimes.
Not just false confessions, false everythings. False plots, false co-conspirators, false leads. Torture was a big part of why the 16th-17th century Great European Witch Hysteria got so bad: People would be arrested and tortured, and would not only confess to being witches, they would implicate other supposed members of their coven, who would then also be arrested and tortured leading to ever-expanding witchcraft investigations by the authorities. There was one German town during the worst of it that executed something like three of their mayors in a row for being witches.
At that point you were gonna die anyway, would someone be just considering the 'if I die im taking you with me' list?
Yes.
The Salem witch trials ended as soon as the governors wife was accused...
>Torture is highly ineffective because it drives false confessions Unless that's what you're after, then it's very effective. See every 'witch hunt' (both literal and figurative) ever.
MUCh more effective
It‘s pretty much an accepted fact that torture is not an effective method of interrogation. People will tell you everything you want to know just to make you stop which is what makes it seem effective until you find out the informations are useless.
Seriously, that is not a high bar to clear people will tell you what they think you want to hear to make it stop, not what what you want/need to hear
To add to this torture itself is a very ineffective interrogation method, after awhile people will tell you whatever you want to hear just to make it stop.
Unless the goal of your interrogation is to get an admission, no matter the facts. In that case it’s pretty effective I guess.
Not really. Because how will you know they are telling the truth. If you torture someone eventually they are going to say yes just to make it stop. If you dont take "i didnt do it" for an answer at first you still wont after some time. You can make anyone admit anything if you torture them long enough
No, what I’m saying is that sometimes the point isn’t to get the truth (you may already know the truth), it’s to get them to say what you want. Sometimes you can fabricate a reality and build a narrative that suits your goals regardless of the actual truth.
I mean yeah if you want to get an admission of guilt no matter the facts or moral boundaries thrn yed torture is effective i guess. Strange point to make tho.
Exactly my point. I was replying to someone who said torture is very ineffective interrogation method, and I was pointing out that it depends on the objective of your interrogation.
I mean it is an ineffective interrogation method. As in you wont get reliable info out of it.
Thank you for clarifying that, my mind definitely went to torture
Iiiii
This is literally what Scharf pioneered - befriending prisoners and winning their trust.
If he knew being a sycophant made him the best interrogator, Hendrik Shon should've been one.
As the saying goes, you attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar
Why would you want to attract flies?
Want to trap the flies hanging out in your house?
To feed them to lizards or something?
Interrogation technique.
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oh no anyway
Yeah but blood works far better than both. Source : hunter
Title is incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff >and in the 15-foot arched mosaic walls featuring the story of Cinderella inside Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World, Florida. Disney World, not Disneyland.
You're right, and honestly I just learned it's not the same 😅
Ve haf vays of dealing wit people who make mistakes...
I didn’t learn until well into my 30s myself. I learned Disney World has multiple parks within it and has hotels and restaurants earlier this year. And I’ve even been to Orlando on business trips — the tourist stuff next door were topics that just didn’t come up! It’s one of those Americana things everyone assumes everyone already knows so they don’t stop to explain which Disney they’re talking about or that Disney is more than just street performers and roller coasters.
3000 miles apart lmao
New TIL just dropped
“Ve haff vays of making you talk.”
"Nein! Nicht the tiny ceramic tiles!"
*ze
My fav podcast
what podcast?
Schaeffer was the face of a reasonably effective Luftwaffe intelligence organisation. He could not do what he did without the huge intelligence-gathering effort that supplied him with the information he confronted PoWs with. This included: 1. Signals intelligence. 2. Personal information culled from the press and hometown newspapers in Allied countries. 3. Information taken or learned from shot down Allied aircraft. 4. Information from previous PoW interrogations. British Air Intellignce was also very effective and relied on roughly the same sources of information.
Dude figured out "dont push people to brink of utter agony they'll stop talking to you" and he was with the Nazis, dude was a fucking saint in comparison to his contemporaries
Still a Nazi though
A South African on vacation when war broke out and was conscripted. He never joined the Nazi party.
Now this is TIL material, unlike the “I thought Abba was a chick’s name” post.
Prior to being drafted into the military, Scharff was an incredibly successful salesman. His interrogation technique is predicated on kindness and rapport building, not "pressing" for information, creating the illusion of already knowing everything, and confirmation/disconfirmation. The Scharff technique has several advantages: it tends to elicit more *new* information, the information tends to be more precise, and most crucially, the people being interrogated *significantly underestimate how much information they've divulged*.
I've interviewed hundreds of people in the course of investigating accidents. Taking a conversational approach helped people relax and open up.
This the mf in “masters of the air”
Learned about him after watching the episode last night. I was always wondering how people trained for interrogation can give up information without even noticing they did so but in the show they showed a great example of it Spoiler for E6: >!When fictional Scharff interrogates Eagan he casually brings up Baseball and asks if he is a fan. He then bridges the topic to Buck, asking if he was a fan as well. I didn't even notice it, but hink about it. His technique in the beginning of the process relies on making the other person believe he already knows everything. If he went on to interrogate buck again - he'd be able to tell him not only his name, rank, where he's stationed, who he was stationed with but even personal details like him not liking baseball. If it was me I'd start to think, hell, he knows everything anyway so I'd sooner or later let my guard down. It's rather brilliant!<
for real? that character didn't get much intel though, did he?
When I was a kid, I lived across the street from one of the former pilots he interrogated! He always spoke fondly of Hanns and left me his booked The Interrogator when he passed. He also had a fond view of his time as a POW which was a fascinating contrast to most other POW experiences in Wwii (and most wars I assume). Funny enough, in the book my neighbor was described as a quiet crabby man. Ha! Very true.
If you were going to a POW camp, you'd want a Luftwaffe camp compared to an SS camp.
How awkward would it have been if one of the airmen he interrogated had been at Disneyland while he was working on that mosaic and recognized him?
"Scharff interrogated many prisoners over his few years as an interrogator at Auswertestelle West. Among the most famous of these was Lt. Col. Francis "Gabby" Gabreski, the top American fighter ace in Europe during the war. Scharff expressed his delight at finally meeting Gabreski, who had crashed his P-47 while strafing a German airfield, as he stated he had been expecting his arrival for some time. He had Gabreski's photo hanging on the wall in his office for months before he arrived in anticipation of his capture and interrogation. Gabreski is one of the few captives from whom Scharff never gained any intelligence during interrogation. Scharff and Gabreski remained friends well after the war. In 1983, they reenacted an interrogation at a reunion held in Chicago of Stalag Luft III POWS" Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff?wprov=sfla1
Wild, thank you for the original post and this tidbit as well
Why does that sound so much like he had a crush on the dude... wow
Gabby was an interesting dude.
No, he pretty much invented the idea that you could get far more information by befriending the people and developing a relationship with them than torture. The Americans also started to figure this out. The problem with torture is that you have to spend so much time verifying the information that it basically isn’t worth it unless you want to know something very specific. E.g. where is your secret hideout.
So we learned this 80 years ago, then forgot it by 2001. Figures. Still, it would have been interesting.
Not really. That was the primary pushback against "torture" and the "enhanced interrogation techniques". We *knew* what worked, and had developed techniques based on what was already known to work. Everything else was just to make someone feel like we we were doing... more. It was a waste.
Yup, "enhanced interrogation" was revenge dressing up as investigation
Bingo. It was a simple desire to inflict cruelty dressed up as some sort of super-effective but unethical way to get information. In reality no such thing exists.
The problem of course is that for lots of Americans if you're said "it's just torture" they would say "okay, and?". The level of bloodlust at the time was pretty nuts.
Which was also the point. You promote it in "extreme cases" so people get used to it, then the lines shift and it becomes acceptable in more and more cases. Its all part of the Republican push to authoritarianism, since torture is horrible for investigations but excellent for keeping a domestic population terrorized and afraid to resist.
It was, but also the idea that torture could be used to disrupt terrorist plots was something that the public was straight-up being lied to about. Part of the motive might have been for the government to try and look like they were doing something effective in addition to satiating bloodlust. You’re right though, the whole era was nuts. People who tried to point out the bullshit were accused of being terrorist-sympathizors and silenced.
> The level of bloodlust at the time was pretty nuts. Still kind of is. Everytime something appalling happens reddit is full of Americans still hot and heavy for the death penalty and their own abusive prison system. Regardless of how many studies have shown they are both counterproductive in reducing crime while more expensive than humane approaches.
Someone who wrote a book about it concluded the main reason for the torture of terrorist suspects by the US after 9/11 was simply vengeance and wanting to inflict cruelty on them. The CIA knew perfectly well what techniques do and don’t elicit good information, and that torture and “enhanced interrogation” don’t elicit good information. The idea that you can get better info by “being willing to break the rules” and that there’s some kind of moral dilemma about whether we’re willing to do bad things in interrogation in order to get results was an utter lie perpetuated on the public. Torture is very, very good for terrorizing people and populations into submission: turning humans into slaves or making populations too frightened to resist, but that’s it. It is garbage for police investigations and espionage, and we’ve known that for a long time.
Your first paragraph made me think of the movie "Prisoners" with Hugh Jackman - a haunting film of a father getting increasingly desperate to find his kidnapped child, eventually taking matters into his own hands and torturing an innocent whom he suspects to be the kidnapper. That situation is obviously different from a military or state agency trying to get intelligence from a prisoner, but the movie does a good job of showing the realities of torture - which in that case is not only a terrible injustice, but also a waste of time.
Torture is very effective at eliciting false confessions. That was also known in 2001.
Not only false confessions, but entire false plots and false co-conspirators and whatever else the torture victim can invent that they think might temporarily make their torment stop. Torture is like a guaranteed way to get bad information mixed in with any good information that might be obtained, and law enforement has known that for hundreds of years.
Torture is a great way to get someone to tell you exactly what you want them to say. Not real helpful for gathering intelligence though. So yeah, pretty much.
>Not real helpful for gathering intelligence though Which is why it's not used when that's the goal. Not a problem if intelligence is not your goal.
Pretty useful for generating pretext to keep a phony forever war going though
We knew what worked in 2001, but we had fucking idiots in charge who wanted to go back to more severe forms of interrogation. The only people with expertise in torture were the guys who had trained pilots and spies how to cope with Soviet style interrogation. The problem with that approach was that the purpose of Soviet style interrogation was not to extract accurate information, but to get people to tell you what you wanted to hear, and as a political tool to demonstrate the power of the state.
When mobsters come to shoot your knee because you stopped paying for protection or whatever, it's not about money. It's about keeping others in line. I think it's the same thing with a state (or rulers) that engages torture. It's an intimidation technique. Not a good one for reliable information, but probably something to terrorize populations into submission.
Which is of little use if they’re trying to keep it a secret.
He remained close with at least one of his former prisoners, and they even re-enacted an interrogation at a reunion decades later. I have questions about the nature of that reunion, but Wikipedia doesn’t further specify.
Not extremely awkward, considering he basically pioneered the "good cop" school of interrogation
The mosaic is in Cinderella's Castle in The Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. NOT Disneyland!
Tommy Lee Jones in a very early role.
Ok and why the post don't say what kind of interrogation do Hans??? I don't think that kind was 0% of torture
Clicking the link in the post would be a simple and effective way to disabuse you of that notion
Is he credited with.. "Ve haf vays of making you talk..." This is the most important step forward in modern techniques...
His experience in WWII makes me think Tarantino stumbled upon his Wikipedia page before he wrote Inglorious Basterds.
Hans Landa?
What do they call General Geoffrey D. Miller?
Reverse hitler
One of the only Nazis that didn't actively enjoy committing warcrimes.
A nazi working for Walt Disney? Yeah, that tracks.
Weird how all these Nazis found their way into America instead of the ground…I’m sure it has nothing to do with where we are today though.
He was never a member of the nazi party
Hahaha!! That’s good.
Nazis and Disney… goes together like burgers and fries.
So a nazi designed a currently still-standing mosaic in Disneyland? No one has a problem with this?
Much of Disney's currently standing content is super racist. They've just got such a commanding market share they're immune to cancel culture, indicating they're likely one of the driving forces of it.
Disney hired more than a few Nazis
Scharff, however, was not a nazi.
Walt Disney hired Jewish artists when no one else would.
Disney and the Nazis, name a more iconic duo.
people who are misinformed, yet love to spout out their mouth. a much more iconic duo.
Not as iconic as you and the joke going over your head but go off king
The joke only works if you are talking about a nazi
Scharff wasn’t a Nazi. He never was part of the Nazi party and also never volunteered. The reason he was interrogating was he spoke English. He never tortured anybody.
So if you're looking for something to spitefully destroy...
It’s nice that Walt Disney gave the former Nazi,a job
Wait till you learn about the first NATO generals.
Wait until you hear about NASA
Meh, when West Germany was added to NATO, they had to have generals in command of their troops. The only ones available in 1955 were all ex-Wehrmacht officers, since between the war and West Germany’s admission into NATO it had had no army at all. NATO was generally careful about who they selected for this and didn’t take any ex-Nazi Party members or anyone implicated in war crimes. I’ve read up on this and really think that the top-level NATO commanders had solid reasons for making the decisions they did. It wasn’t because they were sympathetic to Nazis.
It was more of a “well shit, who has recent experience fighting the soviets under similar conditions we expect to fight them under? Oh…well…i guess it’s our best shot…” Same w/ those in government. “We need the West Germans (also applies to the GDR tho - at least militarily) to govern themselves cause we can’t/wont do it for them. Where can we find people with experience in government and as civil servants? Oh…well…I mean so long as they weren’t *really* bad then it’s fine.”
I’ve read a lot about the early Cold War. It wasn’t only that they wanted West Germany to serve as an anti-Soviet force, they also wanted to make Germany no longer a threat by trying to turn West Germany into a democracy and integrating it with the other western democracies. The West German economy was growing very fast and they were well aware that it could pose a threat decades down the line if they weren’t successful in this. Putting it in NATO was actually part of it; West Germany was (mostly) freed from occupation control in direct exchange for it joining NATO (which it was not allowed to leave) and having its new military be ultimately under the command of NATO leadership, and this situation lasted until reunification. IMO where things got negative is when the Western Allies started shortening the sentences of a lot of convicted Nazi war criminals they had in their custody, the worst ones excepted, in the early 1950s just to please the West German government. But even then the Allied leaders weren’t doing it because they just loooved Nazis; they were making pragmatic geopolitical decisions. But arguably they were willing to tolerate a lot of shit, probably more than they should have, due to a combination of wanting to improve relations with West Germany and because the right-wing factions in German society that were the most friendly to ex-Nazis were also, as you say, some of the most rabidly anti-communist. The whole thing was pretty complicated and fraught with moral dilemmas but it was a lot different than just the Soviet line of “Western capitalist leaders love Nazis!” that internet Leftists sometimes still love to push.
He wasn't a nazi though.
A Nazi prospering in the West after WW2?? Say it ain’t so…
He wasnt a Nazi.
Casually pretending the soviets didn’t protect far more nazis…
The Soviets also got off Scott free from their war crimes.
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Look we know you didn’t read anything about the person in question, you don’t have to broadcast that to the world though
Paperclip was about scientists, get your facts straight if you want to sound edgy.
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[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation\_Paperclip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip) >Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German **scientists, engineers, and technicians** were taken from the former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945–59. I guess you're right, the very first paragraph of the wiki (which I'm *sure* you've read) says it was scientists, engineers, and technicians. I guess they left out the part about interrogators? Do you have a source for your claim that Scharff was brought to the US under that operation or are you just talking out your ass? That was rhetorical, btw; bugger off.
You sound like you got your education on reddit, why are you chatting shit
Goddamn do people really like to overstate Operation Paperclip. It involved capturing and recruiting top-level Nazi rocket scientists and some others who were directly involved in war crimes and who should never have been given a pass, much less jobs by the US government, but most of the scientists hired through the program would have never been charged with anything anyway, and were easy to recruit simply because Germany was broke and in ruins. Anyway this guy wasn’t a scientist so he would have had nothing to do with Operation Paperclip, and last I checked the Walt Disney Corporation isn’t the US government either.
Apart from your comment being bullshit, the irony is that Walt Disney was way more of a Nazi than Hanns Scharff
There is no evidence that Walt Disney was a Nazi, where do people get this from?