The Generals by Per Wahlöö Read Free Book Online Page B

statement, or as it is popularly called, if he lies, that is only due to the fact that his own brain at the moment of occurrence made a defective registration. To correct this is not impossible in itself, as the registration of impressions occurs both in a conscious and an unconscious dimension. These can in themselves be different—but must they be or even are they that? No, by no means. Corrections can, then, be carried out in this field too, but they demand so much work and such complicated analyses, that they can still be recommended only in exceptional cases. In my view, Velder did not fall into that category.
    I will now proceed to answer your question about the use of what you call torture; the inexact terminology you used in itself, ‘to extract confessions’ for instance, shows to what extent old-fashionedrepresentations of a subject remain in circles that are occupied with war and other forms of professional extermination. Even empirical research …
    Colonel Orbal
: Excuse me, but could you put things a little more simply?
    Gerthoffer
: Even empirical research, as I was saying, has long ago confirmed that the method of using different forms of torture to extract information and statements is both primitive and archaic. Nowadays, such methods might possibly—please observe that I say possibly—be motivated, against prisoners of war on the battlefield, for instance, or if the person being interviewed is dying. Even in such special and urgent situations, however, the method must be regarded as unreliable. On the other hand it can of course still be used to advantage by anyone who wishes to extract a confession at any price, and,
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, if that person is indifferent to whether the confession is true or false. But that has however nothing to do with modern interrogation techniques; perhaps it appertains only to politics. In addition, the process is so simple that anyone can achieve the result intended with practically any means of assistance whatsoever. As a means of persuasion in connection with interrogation, torture has no longer any practical significance. And in my view, conventional torture, by which I mean the kind that aims to torment the victim, that is, cause the object in question unendurable physical pain, has on the whole outlived its usefulness. Naturally, this is partly due to the fact that the individual’s capacity to become inured to a sense of pain shows faster acceleration than the inventiveness of science when it comes to creating new physical sensations. So today’s interrogators do not use torture, just as little as doctrinaire torture methods are brought into use during preparations;
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, if these are carried out by skilled men. Is that quite clear?
    Colonel Pigafetta
: Yes.
    Gerthoffer
: Excellent. I will now proceed to answer the first part of the question, which deals with Velder in particular. Incidentally, this is one of the most instructive and thoroughly prepared cases I have hitherto had the benefit of dealing with. Velder was handed over to our department three years and two months ago. He then came from a military hospital where he had been treated for a bullet wound in his neck. By the time of his convalescence, he had alreadybeen interrogated by personnel from some office within the security services, and in connection with that also subjected to primitive forms of conventional torture. Amongst other things, they had smashed his right knee with a sledgehammer. The treatment had not, of course, had the slightest effect on Velder, anyhow not in the direction intended. He was in every way obstinate and unreliable, both deliberately and unconsciously. His experience during recent years had simplified his thinking and after the events that took place in the military hospital, he was adjusted to becoming the object of more complicated forms of primitive physical maltreatment. This way of thinking caused him no great worry. He was well equipped to face varying kinds of