Did torture work for Gestapo?

[phylo_roadking]

The faulty part may have been the lack of trial. For all they knew prisoners could name a list of people who were pro-NSDAP government, getting those pro-NSDAP people executed.

Hence what I said earlier about torture being part of the "quality check" You don't trust freely-given information unlees it's corroborable - so you torture anyway

They failed to break senior leaders of the French, Danish, Polish and German resistance

There comes a point where torturing to death is counter-productive. People at that level were killed after a show trial - as "useful" as any murder - OR kept alive for any theoretical future use; instead they went off to a camp as "Nacht Und Nebel"...but UNTIL their final demise there was no guesing what use they might be put to.

It's surprising how unsuccessful the Gestapo's brutal efforts were.

Saying this on the basis of a small panel of high-ranking prisoners might be overstating the case more than a little - given the hundreds if not thousands that must have been in Gestapo custody on any given day in the WHOLE of the Greater Reich And of every rank and level.

Even Hitler's notorious secret police got most of their information from public tips, informers and interagency cooperation

Again - this IS true...but only when the entirety of the Gestapo's operations are looked at at once. Looking specifically at, say, "counter-terrorism" or anti-partisan/anti-Resistance activities, the percentages of torture versus volunteered/garnered information might vary

[historybuff99]

My answer is yes because torture served several purposes to the Third Reich: (1) intimidation, knowing if you were caught you would be subjected to terrible pain and also see members of your family arrested and tortured; (2) allowed Nazi show trials to reach the right conclusions--that is, getting prisoners to confess to the desired crime; (3) For captured agents like those of the SOE, torture or the threat of torture could either turn them (like send false radio messages back to England), or be forced to give up the names of network operatives, locations of hideouts, planned operations, etc.

As far as getting captives to talk, and perhaps talk truthfully, the record is mixed. It depends on the circumstances and the personalities of the torturers and the tortured. During the war, the British government did its best to insist that SOE agents did not betray anything, but curiously, I have never heard of an actual interrogation transcript being discovered or analyzed. The best evidence might be to examine the memoirs of those people who lived bu suffered under the Gestapo. The record is mixed. Jan Valtin, in Out of the Night, described how he was broken by whips and beatings. Yeo Thomas, in The White Rabbit, describes how he was ready to talk when the Gestapo strangely stopped torturing him. SOE writings indicate that some agents were beaten and then deported to the camps, while others were worked on horrendously. One agent had his eyes poked out with a fork, a women had needles driven into her breasts. One account indicates that a German "traitor" had his genitals torn off with pliers and was left to bleed to death. It is hard to conceive how people could stand that kind of duress. They were either extraordinary heroes or they were liars.

[historybuff99]

It is an interesting comment about the Gestapo not being able to break the resistance leaders. That is the current conclusion about Jean Moulin, for example, even corroborated by Barbie himself who says he could not get Moulin to talk even after crushing his hands in a door and pumping boiling water up his rectum.

In no way do I want to diminish the heroism of these people, but it might be in some cases better to leave the record clean by saying none or few were broken which indicates their moral and physical superiority over a vicious, ruthless foe. And if there is little or no evidence that they DID talk, so much the better to preserve their honor in memory.

But in other instances, for example the Korean and Vietnam Wars, American prisoners were 100 percent broken by torture and other forms of duress, as far as I can research. And in Latin America in the 1970s, torture was extremely effective in obtaining information about dissident groups and rounding them up.

[Nautilus]

1 Torture worked for the Gestapo.

Actually, no. Even Hitler's notorious secret police got most of their information from public tips, informers and interagency cooperation. That was still more than enough to let the Gestapo decimate anti-Nazi resistance in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Russia and the concentration camps.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01303.html

Torture usually is a very poor way of extorting information, with added risk the target may die or become incapacitated before extracting anything useful.

People knew that for centuries, even millennia. Information is best extracted when the poor guy doesn't know what people expect from him and makes no conscious effort to hide, lie or deceive. Next best is threat of torture or brainwashing.

However, people also understand torture is messy, noisy, dirty, slimy, gruesome. It hits you even to see or hear the filmed recording, leave alone being there, hearing live, smelling, being sprayed with bodily fluids.

So they need "a justification" to silence the public and their own conscience. We did it to extract intelligence, to help our comrades, to shorten the war, or, in peacetime, to extract enough information to sentence a dangerous bastard.

The reality nobody talks about is that information had already been extracted, in some friendly conversation with an interrogator, over a cigarette. By the point people are physically hit, there is no longer need for them to talk. It's brutal, murderous revenge for having defied the authority.

(As it had been pointed out for the Middle Ages and Classical Antiquity: the most gruesome public forms of execution were almost never for common criminals, those were dispatched quickly by hanging, axe or sword. They were specifically for people who defied the authority: religion, class, gender, political group.)

[steve248]

Torture and Gestapo methods always seem synonymous. The results must have varied and dependent on the person on the receiving end. The SOE agents when captured, mentioned in a post above, were not all tortured. Some of the SOE survivors suffered more physical deterioration and malnourishment in the concentration camps than when interrogated by the Gestapo. The methods of Gestapo interrogation varied from country to country.
In 1942 once the Abwehr managed to decipher a Russian radio message to their agent in Holland giving details of agents and their addresses in Berlin it set in motion the end of the Rote Kapelle organization. The Abwehr had no remit to take action in Germany so they were obliged to bring this information to RSHA IV (Gestapo). Within two weeks these Russian agents (Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack) had been arrested and their Gestapo interrogators extracted numerous names etc who were in turn arrested and interrogated by the same means. The German counter-intelligence services (Gestapo, Kripo, SD, Abwehr) had no idea of the extent of Rote Kapelle until an error was made by the Russians. Like denunciations, the Gestapo waited until someone was brought to their attention.
After the war the British interrogated Walter Habecker, himself a Gestapo interrogator with a fearsome reputation. He invented (it is said) the "Tibeten Wheel" form of torture. Pencils were placed between the fingers and the hand crushed. It is apparently exceedingly painful, especially when repeated. Needless to say the British interrogations of Habecker are not very fulsome on this point.
The SOE agent (radio operator) Noor Inayat Khan was captured in Paris in October 1943 and taken to Avenue Foch for interrogation. Literature says this was not physical but she did attempt twice to escape from the building. Inayat Khan was subsequently deported to Pforzheim prison where she was manacled hand and foot for the next 11 months on orders from RSHA IV.
Psychological pressure, intimidation, are often more effective but the age old question for interrogators - am I being told the truth? And what is the truth I am expecting?