Hanns Scharff was among the top German Luftwaffe intelligence operatives during World War II. His specialty was befriending captured American fighter pilots and then using information he already had and what appeared to be innocent conversation to extract detailed tactical data.
In Raymond Toliver’s book about Scharff, The Interrogator, Scharff revealed many of the secrets he used, starting with sharing some of the minute information he already had about the pilot’s unit. It started with painstakingly complete dossiers compiled at the Luftwaffe interrogation headquarters in Oberursel, Germany. For example, it never failed to shock a newly captured pilot to hear some of his squadron’s radio conversations from a previous mission repeated word-for-word by the interrogator.
Scharff told Toliver, “To most captured airmen it seemed incredible that the enemy interrogation officer could have a file at his command in which nearly every single word spoken in the air from plane-to-plane or from base-to-plane or vice-versa was carefully noted. This was logged in a book telling the exact minute and second of the conversation, what was said, and the frequency used. ‘Listening in’ or monitoring operations were being used by both sides so I did not really understand why POWs were always surprised that every word they had uttered over the radio was down in our books. We thought it quite valuable information because we could always tell what unit was in action. Soon we knew individual voices, plus various tactics because we found out not all leaders flew the same way.”
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We [US, Britain] did the same/similar to German and [the few] Japanese captured soldiers, sailors, airmen. This technique proved hugely valuable… while abuse/torture/killing was rarely effective, for either side.