Hanns Joachim Scharff was, by all accounts, a profoundly
humane interrogator. The prisoners he interrogated described his demeanor as
friendly and empathic. He didn’t use torture, threats, or intimidation.
Instead, he engaged captured airmen in seemingly free-flowing conversation and
created the impression that he already knew everything of importance. As a
result, the prisoners he interrogated overestimated what he knew and failed to
realize how much crucial new information they were in fact disclosing to
Scharff. Compared to the typical accusatory interrogation, which is characterized
by trickery and powerful social influence that are liable to induce innocent
people to falsely confess to crimes they didn’t commit, Scharff’s techniques
were quite benign [1]. There is much to say about his remarkable
interrogation techniques, but Scharff’s skill as an interrogator is actually
not my main concern here. When I co-wrote a book chapter on the ethics of interrogation
with Maria Hartwig and Michael Skerker, we described Scharff as “active in
World War II” – which may reasonably strike people as an inappropriately sanitary
phrase, given that he was fighting for Nazi Germany. We more or less ignored
the context in which Scharff was conducting his interrogations, even though we
argued that the tactics he used were, by and large, likely morally defensible.
As far as I know, the social, political, and legal context
in which questioning occurs has been largely unexplored in the moral analysis
of interrogation. Perhaps this is because researchers who study interrogation
and philosophers who have examined the ethics of interrogation have mostly
focused on specific tactics, rather than the broader environment in which an
interrogation might happen. This seems like a massive oversight. Interrogation
under potentially adverse moral conditions is an interesting moral problem, and
here, I wish to offer a brief (and admittedly, incomplete) analysis of the
moral environment in which interrogations take place. (Readers interested in
the ethics of specific interrogation tactics are referred to the aforementioned
book chapter. Also, it’s worth
noting that I’m a psychologist, not a philosopher – so this whole analysis
might be fairly amateurish.)
There is much to admire about Hanns Scharff, perhaps in the
same way that people often admire the famed German general Erwin Rommel – both
as a talented professional and as a human being with an apparent moral core.
This admiration is usually accompanied by a polite dismissal of the fact that they
fought for Nazi Germany. After all, it wasn’t their choice to start or carry on
fighting the war. But is it reasonable to compartmentalize their actions into
what they did “on the ground” and broader effects of their service – namely
supporting the Third Reich’s war effort?
Michael Walzer uses Rommel as an example of precisely this problem in
his authoritative treatment of traditional just war theory. Can we shake
Rommel’s hand? he asks metaphorically. Was his skilled service morally defensible,
even laudable, despite it being a part of flagrantly unjust war? Or is the
morality of his actions poisoned by the injustice of the larger purposes to which
his service contributed?
