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Summary

British policy restricted investigations to incidents involving Allied civilians or prisoners of war, excluding the persecution of Jews and other targeted groups. This was a narrow and ultimately inadequate framework, but the investigations into war crimes themselves were far from parochial. They addressed episodes of violence that reflected the broader patterns of cruelty that defined the war. This chapter uses WCIU’s interrogation reports to examine the distinctive challenges the interrogations of so-called ‘minor’ war criminals posed. By following interrogators’ work on the ground, the chapter highlights the complexity of this effort that other records tend to omit. Unlike high-profile defendants such as Göring or Ribbentrop, these perpetrators were difficult even to identify, and their crimes were rarely documented. Investigators therefore relied on a combination of past intelligence – much of it collected through interrogation during the war – as well as on witness testimony. These investigations were as a result shaped by fraught encounters among suspects, witnesses and interrogators.

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6 - Interrogating the ‘Arch-Bastards’

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6 - Interrogating the ‘Arch-Bastards’

Summary