Torture 101: WWII Interrogators' Message to Bush

In 1944, Sergeant Rudy Michaels got a lesson about torture. The lesson was simple and straightforward: The U.S. doesn't torture. It's against the rules and it doesn't work, period. Michaels' instructors weren't just regurgitating a sentence or two from an Army manual. They were training an elite group of soldiers on how to get useful information from Nazis. Michaels had a personal stake in squeezing information from captured Germans. A Jew, he grew up in Leipzig, Germany and escaped to America in 1938. His family made it to England later that year. But there were friends and relatives left behind.

After completing his interrogation training at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, Michaels went back to Europe, landing on Normandy beach with the U.S. 5th Armored Division. Soon he was on German soil, interrogating Nazi POWs.

Now 92, Rudy Michaels can't believe what he's hearing in his adopted country more than 60 years after the war. Michaels listened to George Tenet on 60 Minutes in April as he tried to justify "enhanced interrogation." And he heard only one of 10 Republican presidential candidates call it by its real name -- torture -- in their debate on May 15th. Michaels has heard enough.

Each time, I reacted to the hypocrisy and also to the idea that torture is justified because these are such tough guys. In my opinion, the tougher they are, the less likely you are to get anything of value out of them by using force... The first time I saw one of the Gitmo guys in an orange suit in shackles, I thought what the hell are these people doing? They're not going to get anything useful out them.

To Michaels and the other "Ritchie Boys," as they came to be known, it was made "absolutely crystal clear that we weren't supposed to touch prisoners." It proved to be good advice. One of Michaels' closest friends, fellow Ritchie Boy Morris Parloff, was awarded a Bronze Star for the report he produced on interrogations conducted in Aachen, the first large German city to fall to the Americans. Parloff, now 88, later became a prominent psychologist and advisor to the U.S. Army on group psychology. He says the Aachen report holds up today.

The practicality of how we got information was very sound... The establishment of rapport was the main point... if they thought you were interested in their experiences, they were more likely to talk. If they thought you were just trying to get information, they wouldn't give you anything. The first thing we learned about interrogation was that you have to make it clear that you already have a lot of information.

The Ritchie Boys scared their interrogation subjects with psychology, not physicality. Virtually all of the Ritchie Boys were Jewish, and that turned out to provide a psychological advantage, says Parloff.

It was always an intellectual game... They are scared shitless -- now they're facing a Jew. I depended on them recognizing me that way -- I never told them directly -- but by very subtle means.

Rudy Michaels says the Ritchie Boys often employed another psychological ploy.

We used to say in German [to one of the other U.S. soldiers], 'Son, do we still need a few people to send to Russeland - Russia?' They would answer, 'Yes, we still do.' By that time, the prisoner's face was ashen. We discovered that early on.

Of course, the Americans didn't actually send the German prisoners to Russia. "Extraordinary rendition" had to await the arrival of George Bush and Dick Cheney, as did American disregard of the Geneva Conventions. The Ritchie Boys were taught, says Michaels, that the "Geneva Conventions were honored and part of the deal... The Germans certainly were not abiding by the Geneva Conventions. We didn't say 'they're not doing it so we don't have to.'"

After the war, Rudy Michaels spent decades as a lawyer, judge and law professor. But when he hears about the U.S. engaging in torture, the question of its legality doesn't always preoccupy him: "I keep coming back to whether or not it's legal or not - but it's simply wrong."

The Ritchie Boys were the subject of a 2004 documentary by German filmmaker Christian Bauer.