In World War II, if an Allied pilot who was fighting against the enemy fell into the hands of fascists, many people must have thought that what awaited the pilot would be unimaginable torture. In many film and television dramas, the Japanese gendarmes or German Gestapo who interrogated the captives either first seduced with a hypocritical expression, and then showed their vicious nature to abuse. However, highly intelligent people often despise torture and interrogation, such as Wu Jingzhong, the station manager lurking in the TV series, bluntly said: These things are played by low-level talents, and I am not used to playing! A former Nazi German inquisitor, in a different way, leached intelligence from more than 500 Allied pilots, and even developed a considerable number of them into his own invisible assistants.
Scharf used his psychological knowledge to successfully extract useful information from hundreds of prisoners of war
This unique Nazi inquisitor was named Hans. Scharf, born in 1907, joined the Luftwaffe fighter unit in his early years and was stationed at a base north of Frankfurt in mainland Germany. At the end of 1941, with the sharp increase in the frequency of British and American bombing against Germany, the offensive and defensive warfare of the Air Force over the German mainland intensified, and more Allied pilots began to fall into the hands of the Germans. In the eyes of the Germans, these pilots often held the secrets of new fighters or unique Allied tactics, and were bound to be subjected to strict interrogation to make confessions, and Sharf himself had seen the Gestapo treat Allied prisoners of war with torture and beatings on many occasions. Scharf believed that the Gestapo's approach to the truly determined and highly vigilant had no real effect, and that the cowardly simply mixed in a pitiful amount of true information on the basis of false intelligence for self-preservation, and that the Gestapo's misdeeds would make the Allies hate Germany even more from top to bottom. Sharf, who had studied psychology since his student days and was highly eloquent, soon volunteered to become a professional inquisitor.
Sharf and many of the captives became lifelong friends
Sharf, who was well versed in psychology, believed that any prisoner of war would initially come into contact with the interrogators with a strong sense of vigilance and fear, and they would often focus on the inquisitor's uniform. If the interrogators were dressed in ordinary Wehrmacht uniforms, they were relatively less nervous; if they were dressed in SS or Gestapo uniforms, the prisoners would be highly disturbed, and any interrogation room would have multiplied the prisoners' uneasiness. Sharf believes that the people and environment around him in adversity will completely affect his thinking, and if he can relax the interrogated person to the greatest extent, he may find the weak point of his psychological defense. So Sharf took advantage of his fluency in English and wore casual or suits to take each captive to restaurants, cafes, parks, and even concert halls, but his actions were no ordinary simple inducements, because the interrogators in that inducement were still communicating with the captives as superior. Scharf, on the other hand, made himself look like a captive foreign friend, knowing that the other side would not be easily lured by ordinary profits to break down the psychological defenses, so he sometimes introduced the topic in the other direction, that is, to praise the other party's fighting spirit and weapons, and even invited the other side to board the German fighter jet after the two sides were familiar with each other. As a result, it is easy for young captives who lack psychological knowledge to inadvertently say something that contains military information.
Sharf often judged each other's personalities by seemingly small talk
On the other hand, Sharf and the captives often first reveal their family situation and membership relationships, talk about their own life experiences, and then gradually dig into each other's family intelligence, such as the physical condition of the other party's parents, the school and personal hobbies that the other party himself has attended, and whether the other party is single or likes what kind of opposite sex. In the process, Sharf would quietly memorize every detail and ask German intelligence agencies to further determine, from the radio, telegrams, or certain newspapers, the authenticity of their own family situation that the other party and himself had talked about, and classify it into files. Moreover, Sharf also specifically proposed to the German military top brass that he needed to order many famous newspapers published by the Allies, and Germany at that time for many years stressed that it was strictly forbidden to listen to allied broadcasts, and it was even more strictly forbidden to disseminate its newspapers, so it was not difficult to see that Sharf was completing the interrogation work in disguise in a way that could cause himself trouble. To what extent did Sharf's eloquence and insight go, and once he was ordered to figure out the use of ammunition on Allied fighters, he organized a group outing of captives in his personal capacity, and people who did not know the truth would even think that Sharf was a tour company leader. After some play, he said to himself with a joking tone, it seems that the U.S. military does not have the material to make red tracer bombs, but the red lights in New York's business district are so bright that it is really difficult to accept. One of the captives naturally replied that our resources were far more abundant than you might think, and using white tracer bullets was just a reminder to my teammates that I didn't have ammo anymore. In this regard, Schalf gave the Luftwaffe an inadvertent access to important operational procedures for U.S. warplanes, and this is just one of Scharf's many successful interrogation cases.
Sharf believed that the hundreds of tortures of the Japanese gendarmes were a completely barbaric and stupid way of interrogation
Sharf, on the other hand, was not a hypocritical pragmatist who would not allow the Gestapo to take the captives away after receiving information that they were not of any use, but would use his power to keep his interrogated captives in a safer place as much as possible. Moreover, Sharf thought that these prisoners of war who had regarded themselves as friends would be of great help to themselves in bringing out useful information from the mouths of new captives in the future, and as more captives trusted Scharf, Sharf began to inadvertently hold parties between new and old captives, who did not know that they were chatting with the new captives in a seemingly ordinary greeting and chat, and would also be asked by Sharf by knocking on the side, and then Sharf would also claim that the other party was his friend in front of the new captives, and finally the new captives would be indirectly used by Sharf. Undoubtedly, Sharf's eloquence has been very helpful in his task, and it is also reminiscent of the lecturers of some modern pyramid scheme companies. But Sharf, in addition to completing his mission, did conscientiously protect a large number of captives, and it is said that this person accidentally learned from the Gestapo that the Japanese gendarmerie had more than 500 kinds of torture in 34 categories, and then privately directly called this important ally of Germany a brutal barbarian, and decided that this vicious interrogation method was stupid, inhuman and inefficient, and anyone who tried to imitate it could only mean that they were the same kind as barbarians. It was precisely because of Schalf's humane and high-IQ approach to interrogation that he was not considered a war criminal after the war, but successfully obtained the opportunity to work in the United States under the protection of former prisoners of war.
Sharf, who is well versed in psychology, has also created such exquisite murals
Scharf, who moved to the United States, soon became an important psychology lecturer at the CIA, and contributed greatly to the improvement of psychological warfare ability and interrogation level in the United States. After his retirement, Schalf not only opened a psychological training institution and information company, but also became a mosaic mural artist, and one of his works became exhibits in a Cinderella castle in Disneyland. In Scharf's later entrepreneurial career in the United States, he also received great assistance from his former prisoner of war friends, and Sharf's life explained what wisdom and conscience are. In the war of each master, the interrogator often faces the dilemma of loyalty and righteousness, but this person skillfully uses psychological knowledge and successfully achieves a perfect balance, which also shows that people with different talents shine everywhere.