Hey, welcome to House of History. Imagine that you’re in the middle of the second world war and
a Prisoner of War is brought to you. You know he has knowledge of an imminent bombing raid,
and your superiors task you with the interrogation and making sure that the
prisoner spills the beans. How do you ensure the prisoner gives up the most amount of information?
Do you torture them and rile up the pressure to an inhumane level in order to force someone to
tell you everything he knows, even if he doesn’t? I mean you’re in the middle of a war after all.
So, according to the United States Army manual, you remain business-like. Ask direct questions,
and supplement those with open-ended questions and fact-checking. But according to two academic
articles I happened to come across there’s a technique that works even better. It’s called
the Scharff-technique. This technique basically means you, as the interrogator, empathise and
put yourself in the place of your prisoner, who is your source of information. You remain friendly,
don’t force any questions or confessions and create the illusion that you already
know more-or-less everything the prisoner knows. This so-called Scharff-technique thanks its name
to Nazi Germany’s master interrogator Hanns Joachim Scharff. During the war, he worked as
an interrogator for the Luftwaffe’s Intelligence and Evaluation Center. Because Scharff was fluent
in English, he interrogated he questioned allied pilots that had crashed and were captured alive.
He interrogated well over 500 captured pilots throughout the war. Even though
Scharff was on ‘the wrong side of history’, even today the intelligence
community considers him an iconic role model for interrogators. So what made him so special?
Well, a captured United States Air Force Fighter Pilot later reminisced about his interrogation,
and his account tells us a lot about Scharff’s methods.
In October 1944 Hubert Zemke was shot down over Germany and parachuted out of his aircraft.
After several days of being on the run, he was captured and sent to Scharff for interrogation.
Scharff made friendly conversation with him and wasn’t too interested in military intelligence.
During a stroll through the woods, Scharff mistakenly mentioned that a chemical shortage
was responsible for tracer bullets from American planes leaving white rather than red smoke.
Zemke corrected him - there was no chemical shortage, the change in colour was to signal
an aircraft was running out of ammunition. Scharff didn’t bat an eye, and the conversation continued.
Zemke survived the war and only when he returned to the US he relayed his capture
and interrogation to US army personnel, he realised what happened. When asked what
Scharff got out of him he said “What did he get out of me? There is no doubt in my mind
that he did extract something, but I haven’t the slightest idea what.” And he wasn’t the only one.
One former prisoner said that Scharff ‘could get a confession of infidelity from a nun.’
Scharff’s unparalleled success came from the core belief that interrogating prisoners of
war benefited from a friendly approach instead of torture. Basically, prisoners were unwilling to
give up any information that the interrogator didn’t know. Still, they would think it
useless to deny or withhold information that the interrogator pretended to know. It’s why Scharff
always pretended to know more than he actually did during interrogations. He would provide
a careful statement about a situation to which the prisoner would most likely reply yes or no,
slowly coaxing the interrogator into the right direction and providing more information,
even though the prisoner would just think he confirmed what the interrogator already knew.
Now one of the most ironic things about Scharff being the most successful
interrogator in Nazi Germany is that he was not just never meant to be an interrogator,
but he was never meant to join the German Luftwaffe at all. During the decade preceding
the Second World War, Scharff worked for the Adler automobile manufacturer in Johannesburg,
South Africa. There he met his British wife, with whom he had two children. Due to his work in South
Africa, Scharff quickly became fluent in English and was promoted to director overseas. Fate had
it that Scharff and his family were vacationing in Germany as the Second World War broke out. Because
of hostilities he was unable to leave Germany and was eventually drafted into the Wehrmacht.
His unit was destined to be sent to the Eastern Front to invade the Soviet Union. But because of
his fluency in English and the general awareness that the Eastern Front was a literal meat grinder,
Scharff’s wife managed to talk herself into a general’s office and convince him to use her
husband’s qualities as an interpreter. During the initial stages of the war, Scharff became
an assistant-interrogator and saw the appalling treatment of Prisoners of War during interrogation
sessions. He vowed to do things differently if he was ever in a position of influence. Thanks to a
string of coincidences and an aeroplane crash with two of his superiors, over time Scharff actually
became in charge of the Luftwaffe’s interrogation department, tasked with extracting information
from captured Allied pilots. Throughout the war, he was tasked with not just interrogating fighter
pilots, but also assisting other Luftwaffe interrogators with their interrogation,
if the captured pilot did not want to give up any information. Furthermore, other departments of the
Nazi military apparatus such as the Wehrmacht made ample use of him interrogating captured officers
and spies. One of his most famous prisoners was Lt. Colonel Francis “Gabby” Gabreski,
the US top fighter ace during the second world war. He was notorious in Nazi Germany and when
he crashed his aircraft in German territory, he was subsequently arrested and brought to Scharff.
Although Scharff said, Gabreski was one of the few men he didn’t manage to extract new
information out of, the two men remained friends until Scharff’s death nearly 50 years later.
Most articles and historiography about Scharff puts the emphasis on his charismatic personality
and cultivated people-skills. Only recently, there has been an interest in explaining the
actual effectiveness of Scharff’s tactics and the methodology behind it. In a 2016 study published
in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence researchers set up an
experiment with several participants in order to test the effectiveness of the Scharff technique
against the so-called ‘direct approach’, the business-like way of interrogating.
Now, one of the findings was that the Scharff technique managed to elicit more information
than the direct approach and that this information was more valuable and specific.
But, what’s an even more interesting find is that people interrogated by the
Scharff-technique tended to underestimate how much information they revealed. In contrast,
the people questioned using the direct approach overestimated how much information they revealed.
And these findings correspond with the saying of Zemke, who said he had no idea how much
information he divulged because he simply never had the feeling he was being interrogated. And,
well, that basically sums up the effectiveness of Scharff’s technique: pilots he interrogated simply
didn’t realise they were giving up information the Nazis did not yet know, and Scharff didn’t
have to torture a single soul for it. And as for Scharff after the war?
Well, although his wife left him, he did manage to remarry an American woman. He emigrated there
and contributed significantly to the United States post-war interrogation techniques.
In 1948 he gave lectures to US air force personnel and Scharff’s first-hand experience
accounts became part of the core curriculum. But Scharff didn’t stick to lecturing about
interrogation: he became a mosaic artist and a pretty successful one at that. In another funny
course of history, one of his works hangs on the wall in the Magic Kingdom Castle at Disney World.
It is the Cinderella Castle Mosaic Mural and after this entire story about Scharff interrogating
over 500 captured Allied pilots perhaps this is the most bewildering fact of the whole story.
Nazi Germany’s Master Interrogator became a mosaic artist, with his art still exposed
in Disney Land. But his work also hangs in the California State Capitol building, Los Angeles
Hall and many other public buildings in the United States. He passed away in 1992, at the age of 85.
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