P.O. Box 1142, WWII Interrogators Speak

There was a very nice little article in the Washington Post this past weekend about a group of veterans sharing their war-time stories with the American public. There have been many such articles, especially since Ken Burns turned such reminiscences into a 14-hour documentary.

But this group of men was a little different. These 80-90 year-olds were the US Army's professional interrogators in WWII. They worked at a facility known only by its mailing address, P.O. Box 1142, and tucked into Virginia's Fort Hunt, along the Potomac River near Washington, DC. Here, the interrogators questioned Nazi scientists, U-boat men, officers, and leaders. Holding cells were bugged, and, in violation of the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross was not told of their location until they were transferred to a normal POW camp.

However, these veterans never committed the sort of physical and mental abuse now being meted out at Gitmo and CIA "black sites". Instead they often found that games of chess or even steak dinners did more to loosen the lips of their German captives. Many of these veterans made clear while they were being honored by the Army and the National Park Service for their war-time service, they did not approve of the move that America has made towards the new 'harsh interrogation' techniques that in the 1940's were more often found in the hands of the Gestapo than in the US Army.