Germany's Luftwaffe Master Interrogator that Inspired U.S. Interrogation Techniques

Hanns Scharff is often referred to as Nazi Germany’s ‘Master Interrogator’. And for good reason: he was one of the most successful interrogators during the Second World War. Yet his technique was different than you’d perhaps suspect: he never laid a hand on a prisoner.

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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:44 Hanns Scharff

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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.’

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Sources:

The Scharff-technique: Eliciting intelligence from human sources:
Pär Anders Granhag, Simon Oleszkiewicz, Marthe Lefsaker Sakrisvold, Steven M. Kleinman. (2020) The Scharff technique: training military intelligence officers to elicit information from small cells of sources. Psychology, Crime & Law 26:5, pages 438-460:

Photos, paintings and imagery: Public Domain, Wikicommons

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