Thread by @fakehistoryhunt

I won't go into detail but if the women in 'The Handmaid's tale' had studied how resistance/partisan/guerilla groups worked in the past, they would have avoided quite a few mistakes.

#blessedbethefight

OK then, risk of minor spoilers;

In a resistance group when one of yours is captured or missing, expect them to talk, move everything and everyone, don't sit and wait.
If captured, at least hold out 24 hours to give comrades time to do so.
Everybody talks, almost everybody.

I've spend quite a lot of time chatting with lovely old ladies who used to be members of the Dutch armed resistance during WW2, blowing up railroads, executing traitors, etc.
One hint of something not quite right and they'd vanish, which is why they survived.

If members of your group know the location of the next safehouse, you only go there when everybody in the group is accounted for.
If one is missing, there's a risk of the safehouse being compromised.
You find a new place to hide.

Gerrit Kastein, doctor, medic-veteran of the Spanish Civil War, communist, member of the Dutch resistance group CS-6.
When arrested he knew he would be tortured, to avoid betraying his comrades he jumped to his death from a window on the Binnenhof in The Hague.
He was 32.

He knew remaining silent was very difficult and for most people impossible.
Handcuffed, facing his guards, he knew there was only one way to protect the members of his group and jumped.
He left behind a wife and two children.

Although there were cases of people who did not speak when tortured, generally most people did, sooner or later.
Today people who risk this sort of thing are prepared in the same way resistance members & SOE agents were trained; you will talk, but stall for as long as you can.

I once had a chat with some chaps who were in the secret hush hush sort of business and they told me torture does not work, I informed them that it sometimes does, purely based on actual historical cases.
Of course it depends on the goal of the interrogation.

Although torture works, it is unreliable and too demanding, both on victim, interrogator and sometimes time.
Psychological torture or temptation works a lot better as German interrogator Hanns-Joachim Gottlob Scharff showed.

Unlike most Nazi torturers Scharff tried another technique.
When interrogating allied prisoners, he'd comfort them, make them feel relaxed.
Here's come coffee, a cigarette, don't worry about me, where were you born?
Oh that's a lovely town...

He never used violence and was able to gather a lot of information by offering a "carrot" in stead of threatening with a "stick".
He was so successful the US invited him after the war to give lectures and incorporated his methods into their interrogation school curriculum.

However, what is often forgotten is that although he didn't use force, he didn't use the stick, it was always there.
His prisoners knew that if they didn't give Scharff any information, they'd be handed over to the guys that were more than willing to use pain.

So although he is often shown as an example of how you can interrogate people and obtain information without violence, remember that violence was still one of the things he could threaten with.
And fear is more effective than pain.

Either way, torture should always be avoided.
Although it sometimes works, there simply are more effective ways of obtaining the intel.
It is also bad for morale, image, everybody involved, etc.
It also gives the enemy an excuse to do it as well.
Don't do it, it's evil.

And that, dear readers, is how being a history addict can save your life if you ever find yourself in a resistance group, but also gets you really distracted while watching tv when you start thinking about 9328 stories but the one you're watching ;)

One final tweet, people asked me about examples of cases where torture "worked".
Operation Anthropoid is such a case, the torture of 17-year-old son Vlastimil "Ata" Moravec.
But I advice against looking into the details of this case.
It's sickening, literally.