Gestapo (14 page)

It is a thousand pities that this statement cannot be conclusively proved by documentary evidence. The truth of it can only be deduced; and the materials upon which the deduction is based, the circumstantial evidence, is of the cumulative kind, which would require a large volume for its proper presentation. The material is there. It exists, scattered through the mass of documents presented at innumerable trials, from the trials of the major war criminals at Nuremberg downwards. In case after case, in affidavit after affidavit, from witness after witness, we get the same story.

In every Gestapo prison in every city of occupied Europe—which extended from Brest on the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean—we find the same tortures being repeated. If it was only a matter of beating up and kicking—beating to the point when the kidneys are all but torn away from their protective fat; kicking until the face is a shapeless gap-toothed jelly—it could still be put down to individual sadism. When all is said, this technique was developed in the earliest days of Nazidom by the young hopefuls of the Party, and evidently expressed some deep-seated need in certain sections of the German young. If the Gestapo had confined itself to crudities of that kind it could still be put down to individual acts of violence: one would simply record that Nazi Germany contained a remarkable number of sadists in positions of responsibility. But it was not as simple as that.

While it might reasonably be argued that beating and kicking a helpless prisoner to death is the sort of thing that might well occur simultaneously to thousands of German Government officials scattered throughout the length and breadth of Europe, it is too much to ask us to believe that these same officials would simultaneously hit on some of the more elaborate methods of torture which we find practised with monotonous regularity in towns as far apart as Lyons and Stavanger, Amsterdam and Odessa. Thus we find the testicle-crushing technique in almost universal use, and involving the employment of a little machine which even a nation of inventors could hardly be expected to
duplicate very often. Again, there was a fairly elaborate exploitation of the principles of electricity, which involved passing an electric current through electrodes fastened to the penis and the rectum. If this was thought of simultaneously in a dozen Gestapo offices throughout the length and breadth of Europe, then the Germans are more ingenious and inventive than we have hitherto believed. But, of course, they were not.

The torturing, as such, took place invariably at the interrogations of prisoners and suspects in the Gestapo offices. After interrogation the victims were, equally invariably, either sent to a concentration camp or killed. The ostensible idea of the interrogations was to make the victim talk—not, as with the Soviet interrogations, to make him confess to his own crimes, but to make him say what he knew about others. More often than not—in fact, nearly always—the interrogations were conducted with extreme clumsiness and lack of finesse. It is not to be expected that the Heinrich Baabs would be very good at cross-examination; but it is remarkable that the “gentlemen” Gestapo officials were not much better. Even when they had a fairly clear idea of what they wanted to know, as when they had captured a known Resistance leader, they seem to have brought a minimum of subtlety to the interrogation, relying on the effect of one or two questions repeated to infinity against an accompaniment of battery and torture. On the rare occasions when battery was not used for reasons of high policy they still shouted and threatened to produce an atmosphere of terror, and seemed at a loss for the next move if the victim did not succumb.

Captain Best, one of the chief figures in the Venlo incident, who from the moment of his kidnapping with Major Stevens from Dutch territory by a dubious individual who turned out to be none other than Schellenberg himself, was treated very much as a privileged prisoner, was one of the few who were interviewed by Gestapo Mueller in person and lived to tell the tale. Mueller, too, shouted, like any Baab (Captain Best, who knew the Germans as well as he knew himself, gives the German word for this shouting technique:
anschnauzen
or snorting) and Captain Best's description of Mueller in action is the only one extant:

“Mueller was a dapper, exceptionally good-looking
little man, dressed in imitation of Adolf Hitler, in a gray uniform jacket, black riding breeches and top boots. He started his ‘snort' immediately he entered and, as he walked towards me, increased the pitch and the volume of his voice with great virtuosity. He managed to get right up close to me before his vocal chords tore into shreds. ‘You are in the hands of the Gestapo. Don't imagine that we shall show you the slightest consideration. The Fuehrer has already shown the world that he is invincible and soon he will come and liberate the people of England from the Jews and Plutocrats such as you. It is war and Germany is fighting for her existence. You are in the greatest danger and if you want to live another day must be very careful.' Then he sat down on a chair in front of me and drew it up as close as possible, apparently with the intention of performing some mesmerizing trick. He had rather funny eyes which he could flicker from side to side with the greatest rapidity and I suppose that this was supposed to strike terror into the heart of the beholder.”

Best also met Heydrich, who shouted too:

“Almost as soon as I entered a young and very resplendent officer whom I recognized as Heydrich (his enlarged photograph hung in every room) jumped up and started shouting at me in a most threatening manner:

“ ‘So far you have been treated as an officer and a gentleman, but don't think that this will go on if you don't behave better than you have done. You have two hours left in which to confess everything. If you don't, I shall hand you over to the Gestapo, who are used to dealing with such gangsters and criminals—you won't enjoy their methods a bit.'

“I turned to Mueller, who was standing at my side and asked, ‘Who is this excitable young officer?' At this Heydrich really went off the deep end and literally foamed at the mouth; at all events, he sprayed me liberally with his saliva. Mueller quickly pushed me out of the room and into my own. Later on he came in again and told me I must not take the matter too seriously: ‘Soup is never eaten as hot as it is cooked.' “

It is only fair to Mueller to record these impressions of Best, as well as his conclusion: “In my experience I always found Mueller a very decent little man.” But this verdict of a British officer who exhibited a remarkable talent for getting on with the Germans is the last good we shall hear. As a rule the interrogation of the Gestapo was a prelude to the concentration camp and slow, laborious death, or to immediate killing.

The battery usually began with arrest and continued intermittently until the more formal tortures were started. The general object of knocking prisoners about even before interrogation started seems to have been to break their nerve by shock tactics and so daze and humiliate them that they would never have a chance to recover: they were knocked off balance, in a word, and only the bravest or most insensitive ever found their feet again: it is hard to be calm and collected and lucid when your face is streaming with blood, your eyes are closed up, your lips swollen and your front teeth adrift; and when with every word you try to say you are knocked down again and kicked as you try to get up it is very hard indeed to retain a balanced view. So this was the almost universal preliminary treatment, though whether a drill laid down in Gestapo regulations or a custom spontaneously generated among the like-minded it is impossible to say. The torture began with the interrogation proper.

The basic torture was flogging, and this was the only form of torture ever admitted to by the Germans. Numerous members of the Gestapo, among them the all-too-familiar Heinrich Baab, told of the existence of an R.S.H.A. order authorizing in exceptional cases a treatment called “Rigorous Examination,” which was to consist of not more than twenty-five blows with a stick. Corporal punishment of up to twenty-five blows “on the loins and buttocks” was also authorized in the official “Concentration Camp Statutes,” and records were to be kept. The Yugoslavs, however, found a blank form used by the Gestapo and the S.D. in Slovenia which was intended to be filled in to cover “especially rigorous interrogations.” This contained a space to be filled in by the authorizing official: “The especially rigorous interrogation should consist of … Minutes of the interrogation should be kept.
A doctor may (or may not) be asked to be present.”

We do not know exactly what the central office of the R.S.H.A. had in mind in the way of “especially rigorous” torture. But it clearly had something. And we do know what in fact happened.

One of the most comprehensive first-hand descriptions of the Gestapo's methods of torture was given by the Frenchman, M. Labussière, a schoolmaster, and a captain of the reserve. His testimony was presented by the French Prosecuting Counsel at Nuremberg, and it concluded with a general statement of the methods used:

“(1) The lash.

“(2) The bath: the victim was plunged head-first into a tub full of cold water until he was asphyxiated. Then they applied artificial respiration. If he would not talk they repeated the process several times consecutively. With his clothes soaking, he spent the night in a cold cell.

“(3) Electric current: The terminals were placed on the hands, then on the feet, in the ears, and then one in the anus and another on the end of the penis.

“(4) Crushing the testicles in a press specially made for the purpose. Twisting the testicles was frequent.

“(5) Hanging: the patient's hands were handcuffed together behind his back. A hook was slipped through his hand cuffs and the victim was lifted by a pulley. At first they jerked him up and down. Later, they left him suspended for varying, fairly long periods. The arms were often dislocated. In the camp I saw Lieutenant Lefevre, who, having been suspended like this for more than four hours, had lost the use of both arms.

“(6) Burning with a soldering-lamp or with matches.

“On July 2nd my comrade Lalbue, a teacher from Cher, came to the camp. He had been subjected to most of these tortures at Bourges. One arm had been put out of joint and he was unable to move the fingers of his right hand as a result of the hanging. He had been subjected to flogging and electricity. Sharp-pointed matches had been driven under the nails of his hands and feet. His wrists and ankles had been wrapped with rolls of wadding and the matches had been set on fire. While they were burning, a German had plunged a pointed
knife into the soles of his feet several times and another lashed him with a whip. Phosphorous burns had eaten away several fingers as far as the second joint. Abscesses which had developed had burst, and this saved him from blood poisoning.”

It is unnecessary to pile horror upon horror. The instances of this kind of torture are innumerable. They may be found in quantity in the documents submitted by the French and Soviet prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials, and in the reports of hundreds of lesser trials. There were variations in detail from place to place. In Russia, for example, the Gestapo were especially fond of immersing their victims in barrels of icy water until they drowned or were frozen to death. Different Gestapo chiefs would have their own variants of the technique of hanging up by the wrists. What might be called the Kiev-Pechorsky variation was to twist the suspended victim round and round until the rope was tightly knotted, and then let go, so that the rope unwound in a dizzy rush. Most inquisitors preferred the rubber truncheon to the whip, and used it to break bones. Some preferred the more sophisticated machines to the boot and the bludgeon. There were iron bands which were placed round the head and contracted; and there was a special apparatus for mangling the wrists and ankles, consisting of rings set with alternate balls and spikes which could be tightened by a screw. There is no known case of the use of the rack; but in every other way the torture chambers of the Gestapo were better equipped than the dungeons of the Medieval tyrants and inquisitors. A favorite activity was to torture a woman within hearing of a male prisoner under interrogation and to pretend that the woman was his wife.

It is desirable to repeat that these were not the innocent excesses of the psychopaths who ran the concentration camps, each of whom was a law unto himself. They were the prescribed routine of innumerable Gestapo prisons in all the occupied countries of Europe. The Chief of German Security in Denmark, S.S. Colonel Bovensiepen, admitted that the order to use torture “in certain cases” certainly originated from the higher authorities in Berlin. And the general instruction was that torture could be used to compel persons to give information that might serve to disclose
subversive organizations directed against the German Reich, but not for the purpose of making the delinquent admit to his own deeds. Even Bovensiepen, however, insisted that the means prescribed were limited to a certain number of strokes with the rod. He did not explain the extraordinary unanimity of the more elaborate methods of torture employed throughout the whole of occupied Europe.

As far as it is possible to establish, however, the general instruction that torture was only to be used to make the victim speak about his colleagues seems to have been fairly rigidly adhered to—though not in Germany itself. The chief victims of torture were members of Resistance groups and partisans, and they were questioned about their companions and tortured if they refused to speak. There are few known instances of a man or a woman being tortured to make him confess to his own misdeeds. On the other hand, most of the examples known to us involved questioning at random.

Anybody picked up by the Gestapo would immediately be assumed to have some knowledge of subversive activity, even if nothing positive was known against him. And he would be questioned, stupidly and aimlessly, often about subjects of which he was totally ignorant. In other words, he was tortured on the off chance that he might know something. And, once started, and firmly based on their instructions from Berlin, the local inquisitors, the Gestapo Commissars and Secretaries, as they were called officially, would find it very hard to stop. If a man had nothing to say under mild torture, the pressure would be increased, and frequently he was dying, or dead, before his interrogators could bring themselves to conclude that he had nothing to tell them at all. The torture might go on for days—and end only with the victim being shot as good for nothing.