Intensified interrogation

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The term intensified interrogation was a term used in the police administration during the Nazi era to describe certain forms of physical and / or psychological torture that were routinely used in the context of police interrogations. Similar to many other vocabulary used in SS and police administration (e.g. the term special treatment for the targeted killing of prisoners), the phrase "exacerbated interrogation" was a euphemistic code word (and a cipher) that was used in the official correspondence of the National Socialist police . The words commonly used to describe the practices actually taking place (mistreatment, torture, etc.) were thus bypassed and concealed from outsiders.

time of the nationalsocialism

Although the use of physical and psychological violence (e.g. sham shootings) in the context of interrogations by the Secret State Police and other police organs as well as by other sovereign or quasi-sovereign organs of the National Socialist state or the NSDAP (e.g. . of the SS , which at that time still had the rank of a party organization and not a state organization) had been used unofficially, it was not until the mid-1930s that the leadership of the German police switched to making efforts to use the violence used during interrogations -Giving methods an official basis, d. That is, to formalize, systematize and codify them: In 1935 Heinrich Himmler , who at that time as inspector of the Secret State Police already had the de facto management of the entire political police in Germany, entered into negotiations with Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner that pursued the goal to achieve legal recognition of such practices. In 1935, for example, Himmler wrote in a letter in which he demanded the introduction of "more stringent interrogations" that the state had the duty to "provide its enforcement organs with means that enable state authority to be enforced against the criminal ." Therefore, it is already necessary in the police investigation to be able to "touch lawbreakers in a proper manner". Gürtner, on the other hand, stated that statements and confessions extorted through abuse in high treason trials are increasingly being considered worthless and without evidential value. On October 11, 1935, however, two Gestapo officers who, despite the intervention of influential advocates such as Walter Best , Viktor Brack and Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff , were in custody for abuse and the extortion of confessions, were released from custody on Hitler's instructions and the pending proceedings were discontinued.

Since corresponding negotiations of the police leadership (which also formed the leadership of the SS) dragged on, Reinhard Heydrich , Himmler's right-hand man, who, as head of the Secret State Police Office in Berlin, was in fact responsible for the day-to-day management of the political and criminal police , in a decree of May 28, 1936 internally issued the instruction that "intensified interrogations" should not be mentioned in the interrogation protocols and files.

After the Ministry of Justice and the police leadership had finally come to an agreement, Heydrich issued a decree on July 1, 1937, which officially legalized the practices of physical or psychological violence during interrogation as "intensified interrogation". These practices were later renewed "in the course of simplification" in a secret decree of the chief of the Sipo and the SD (Heydrich), signed on behalf of the chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller , of June 12, 1942, and adapted to the war situation . whereby the circle of those to be tortured was almost completely unbounded. In Müller's decree it said among other things:

Under these conditions, the intensified interrogation may only be used against communists, Marxists, biblical researchers, saboteurs, terrorists, members of the resistance movements, parachute agents, anti-social, Polish or Soviet Russian refusal to work or loafers.

In all other cases my prior approval is always required [....]

Depending on the situation, the aggravation can consist of: the simplest food (water and bread), hard bed, dark cell, sleep deprivation, fatigue exercises, but also the administration of lashes with a stick (if more than 20 lashes with the stick, a doctor must be consulted).

A senior police officer who was familiar with the organization of intensified interrogations in German-occupied Poland described the bureaucratic formalization of the process since 1942 - d. This means that since 1942 a pro forma request had to be made in Berlin at the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) to intensify an interrogation through the use of torture and then the instruction to do this was given automatically and always - which, despite this formalization, was practically the same as before as a "ridiculous farce".

Aftermath

Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the US-American Bush administration launched the designation enhanced interrogation as part of the military-intelligence action it initiated against Islamist terrorism , in order to identify certain "robust" interrogation methods. These were used to persuade people in American custody who were suspected of being connected to terrorist organizations or plans to divulge information. Critics of the methods called war on terror and especially the enhanced interrogation pointed out that the term enhanced interrogation can literally be translated with the Nazi term "intensified interrogation" and vice versa. In addition, the fact that the procedures used by the Bush administration under the euphemistic name of enhanced interrogation were in fact just as much torture as those used by the Nazi regime at the time under the belittling name of "intensified interrogation" was denounced . Thus, not only would there be a linguistic parallel between the terms "intensified interrogation" and enhanced interrogation , but the actual processes that were concealed behind these two similar terms were also very similar in substance.

During the Nuremberg Trials , the term "intensified interrogation", when it appeared in German-language official documents submitted by the prosecution, was still translated as "third degree interrogation" in the English-language trial protocols. This formulation was a term for brutal interrogation practices popularized in the English-speaking world by the book The Third Degree by police reporter Emanuel H. Lavine, published in 1930 - in which he described brutal interrogation methods of American police officers under this heading.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lothar Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Reich. 2001, p. 706.
  2. ^ Lothar Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Reich. 2001, p. 706.
  3. ^ Lothar Gruchmann: Justice in the Third Reich. 2001, pp. 708-709.
  4. ↑ Hans-Eckhard Niermann: Criminal Justice in the Third Reich. 1995, p. 331 in note 355.
  5. ^ Document PS-1531, printed in: Internationaler Military Tribunal: The Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Documents and other evidence . Nuremberg 1948. (Photomechanical reprint: Munich 1989, ISBN 3-7735-2522-2 , Volume XXVII, p. 327).
  6. ^ IfZ: Witness literature Müller, p. 131 .
  7. ↑ See e.g. B. the article intensified questioning. In: The Atlantic. May 29, 2007.
  8. ↑ Robert Zgaolla: In the name of truth: Torture in Germany from the Middle Ages to today. 2006, p. 11.