Behind the front lines of the Second World War raged a different kind of battle. In secret camps across Britain, thousands of enemy spies, soldiers, and war criminals were interrogated in the effort to defeat Nazi Germany and the ideology that drove it. Drawing on extensive British archival sources, Artemis Photiadou uncovers the methods, motives, and moral tensions behind this vast machinery of questioning. Within it, officers, scientists, and linguists sought to extract military intelligence, as well as to grasp why individuals fought Hitler's war and, eventually, to assess their complicity in the regime's crimes. The resulting interactions expose the complexity of those who were questioned, the assumptions of their interrogators, and the ethical contradictions of a liberal state at war. This is a vivid account of how Britain attempted to comprehend the enemy it was fighting. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

‘Interrogating Nazism reveals the hidden relationship between security control and intelligence gathering by the British state, which saw detainees simultaneously as suspected spies, assets, and allies. This brilliant book sheds important new light on the deeper workings of wartime society and its assumptions about loyalty, legitimacy and violence.’

Richard J. Aldrich - author of GCHQ

‘A fascinating history of wartime interrogation and the value that the intelligence services derived from it. Absorbingly written and engaging in style, the book highlights the central role of individuals in building a system for obtaining and uses vast amounts of information.’

Michael Goodman - author of the Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee

‘Interrogating Nazism is a deeply researched study of the background to the famous postwar trials of Nazi war criminals. In eye-opening and sometimes shocking detail, Artemis Photiadou reveals the drudgery of interrogation, but also the drive, sometimes to the point of illegality, of those who conducted these programmes.’

Dan Stone - author of The Holocaust: An Unfinished History

'This is a wonderful book: it manages to be simultaneously an expert history of how British interrogation developed during the war against Germany, a fascinating exploration of the archival records of those interrogations, which will shape how subsequent historians use them, and a meditation on the act and purpose of interrogating the enemy. Writing with verve, precision and a constant eye for the human experience of those interrogating and being interrogated, Artemis Photiadou gives us new insights into how contemporaries sought to understand the war.'

Daniel Todman - author of Britain's War, 1942–1947: A New World