The bathtub, whether you will it or not, was still more humane.
—Masuy at his trial, 19471
After defeating France in 1940, the German government divided the country into two zones. Germany occupied the northern zone. A dependent government, Vichy, ran the southern zone.
In the northern zone, mainly in Paris, several French gangs conducted intelligence operations on behalf of the Germans. French historians refer to these gangs by their leaders: Lafont and Bonny, Masuy, or Berger. They are known collectively as the “French Gestapo.” Then there were groups that operated outside of Paris. Vichy had a brutal security force, the Milice, and police squads, the most notorious of which was run by Inspector Marty in Toulouse.
In later generations, Frenchmen dismiss these torturers as “a miserable handful of traitors not worth mentioning.”2 Traitors they undoubtedly were, but historians certainly think they are worth mentioning for their inventive tortures. Jacques Delarue, the main French historian of the Gestapo, compares the French Gestapo to the medieval craft-torturers, noting how proudly they produced “variations and discoveries.”3 Alec Mellor, the postwar scholar of torture, singled out the Belgian torturer, Masuy. With Masuy, “Modern torture has found its first theoretician and this inhuman century had the doctrinaire that it merited.” Mellor suggested that the twentieth century be dubbed “the Century of Masuy.”4
In this chapter, I describe innovation in torture technique among the French gangs, for “in the domain of torture, the French agents were more refined and more cruel. They showed themselves more Nazi than the Nazis themselves.”5 First, I describe the two most inventive agents, Masuy and Marty. Masuy in Paris claimed a new approach to water torture. Marty in Toulouse brought electric torture to France. They used techniques that will dominate torture around the world after the war.
Then I describe how other French and German agents used these methods. In modern memory, the German Gestapo looms large as the progenitor of electric torture, if not all modern torture.6 Remembering Masuy and Marty is one small step in remembering to whom that honor, if that is what one may call it, belongs.
In 1947, Colonel Rémy, a famous Resistance fighter, published his wartime memoires. Une affaire de trahison opens with a photograph of a pair of brooding dark eyes staring out at the reader. Torture victims never forgot the eyes of Masuy.7
Christian Masuy was a pseudonym for George Delfanne, a Belgian national.8 Masuy began his political career on the Allied side, smuggling refugees out of Germany into Belgium. Captured by the Abwehr, German military intelligence, he entered its service as a spy. Around 1942, the Abwehr assigned Masuy to one of its “purchasing bureaus” in Paris, enterprises through which the Germans collected strategic war materials from the black market. To these bureaus Germans relegated “satellite” services, including tracking the Resistance.9
Masuy’s bureau was among “the most important and most dangerous.”10 At his headquarters, Masuy set about devising as many possible tortures as he could. He mentions electronic equipment, finger presses, and special pliers to remove nails. He was proudest of his distinctive approach to water torture, the bathtub. “The baignoire, whether you will it or not, was still more humane [than these other tortures].” Masuy’s henchmen would hold the head under water and then Masuy would question them. “It was not rare that I obtained confessions after one or two immersions.”11
The Gestapo was impressed enough to authorize using the bathtub in Norway and Czechoslovakia in 1945. After the war, Masuy and his chief assistants were executed, but the bathtub lived on in France and its colonies. In French Algeria and in Spain, it remained “the bathtub” (la baignoire, la bañera). In French Vietnam, it was dubbed “the submarine.” By the 1960s, Latin Americans called the torture by both names.
Still, one is left somewhat puzzled by all this. What is so novel about nearly drowning a person? One wonders why the bathtub was so notorious among the Resistance and why Masuy thought his approach was so distinctive. To grasp its status, one needs to situate Masuy’s technique among Western methods of water torture.
When Westerners think of water torture, they remember “Chinese water torture.” In that artful Eastern technique, small drops of water fall on the forehead, slowly driving the victim mad. Less frequently remembered is that a sixteenth-century Italian lawyer, Hippolytus de Marsiliis, had independently proposed the torture of the drop and that French kings adopted it as a punishment for witches, sorcerers, and blasphemers.12
It was a torture without a future in European interrogation. Classical torturers wanted confessions of guilt. They were not oriental despots for whom torture meant the pleasure of watching one’s enemy go mad. There was no percentage in a slow torture when there was cutting, burning, stretching, whipping, and piercing. The torture of the drop died out by the eighteenth century.
Today, we remember “Chinese water torture” because it captures a great fear about modern torture. It is a torture that reaches beyond the body and touches the mind. We would do better to think of Masuy instead. Masuy self-consciously harnessed water to touch the mind. This insight set him apart from many who preceded him in the field.
In the seventeenth century, European interrogators used water to cause pain in two ways, what I will call choking and pumping.13 Choking involved covering the face with cloth, ladling water on it until the victim could not breath, and then removing it for questioning. Pumping involved forcibly filling the stomach and intestines with water. In pumping, victims’ organs stretch and convulse, causing the most intense pain that visceral tissue can experience.14 In the nineteenth century, torturers added a third variation: they showered prisoners from a great height with a solid stream of water, literally beating prisoners with water.15 Nazi torturers, as documented in the previous chapter, adapted fire hoses and pressurized showers to produce the same effect.
The history of these techniques will be described later in this book. What is sufficient for the moment is that amid all this liquid horror, one other use of cold water was largely forgotten. Cold water can also induce psychological and physical shock. It is a familiar technique: throwing a pail of cold water on a body can shock an unconscious person to consciousness. Torturers knew the technique, but they had not thought to exploit it until Masuy.
Today many assume that shock treatment necessarily involves electricity. In the nineteenth century, shock treatment meant hydrotherapy. Asylum doctors prescribed it for “patients who seemed to need strong stimulation.”16 Noted French psychologists observed that these methods, because of “their exceptional and sometimes dangerous character, present the inconvenience that one cannot reproduce them many times for the same patient.”17 Ironically, doctors described electricity as a shock treatment because it resembled the effects of cold baths and douches.18
Masuy drew from this medical tradition. His victims choked, their stomachs swelled, but Masuy’s main goal was to induce emotional shock. “The bathtub? I am not its inventor, but I knew how to bring this system to perfection by putting a very high degree of psychology in it. I use it because I know that all creatures are first of all and originally scared, and that fear exercises a paralyzing action and that it provokes pain and anguish.”19 Masuy complained that the Gestapo had abused his technique. In the hands of “those lard-heads,” the bathtub became “a cruelty.”
His bathtub technique was “experimental psychology.”20 He supervised to make certain that the bathtub “wasn’t applied contrary to the proper spirit.”21 “The head held in the water, the patient suffocated. Then I warmed him up, and I comforted him with grog.”22 Masuy’s “patient would be conscientiously dried in a bathrobe, warmed up, rubbed with eau de cologne, and consoled with Cognac.” Masuy would then praise the victim for his courage, but remind him that it was useless, urge him to come clean, and if not, repeat the torture.23 Masuy insisted, unlike many torturers of this period, that a doctor be present.24 Efficiency was important, but he also had “the concern for not making people suffer,” torturing men and women in the same professional way.25
So perhaps the twentieth century does deserve to be called “the Century of Masuy.” Masuy understood that modern torture was fundamentally about emotional shock, not dramatic painful techniques like the Inquisitional water tortures. All this he dismissed as “mise-en-scène,” showmanship.26 Masuy strove to touch the minds of his victims. No wonder his victims could not forget his eyes. What Masuy did not anticipate was that electroshock, not water shock, would dominate the world.
Pierre Marty was a successful police inspector in colonial Tunisia. As police commissioner of Bizerte in 1940, Marty had infiltrated and crushed Communist cells. After his return to France, the Vichy government appointed him as police chief of Montpellier on the Mediterranean (October 1943) and then as the top policeman in Toulouse (April 1944).27
Toulouse lay on the Spanish border. People running for their lives passed through the city, hiding in the countryside and hoping to find their way out of France. Police in the Resistance safeguarded routes over the Pyrenees and ignored false documents for Jews and Resistance fighters.28 In effect, Toulouse was a “fief of the Resistance.”29
In 1943, to counter the Resistance, Marty created an extralegal brigade of thugs, “the too famous ‘special Marty brigade,’ which he endowed with the famous electric machine and the black chamber, so many torture methods of his own invention.”30 The brigade was a parallel system alongside the regional police that he also managed. It beat victims with belts with brass buckles. It suspended, burned, and suffocated victims. It tore off nails, cut heels with knives, crushed genitals, and pierced flesh with pins.
“Besides these crude methods to make people talk under pain, the inspectors of the Marty Brigade had also thought of [imaginer] the electric machine,” reported one near-contemporary account.31 Marty’s victims called it a thermocauterizer (thermo cautère).32 Marty called it the “confectionary box” and “Radio London.”33 It consisted of “a magneto activated by a motor.” One end was “attached to the wet hands of the patient, while the other pole, by means of a mobile wire, was placed on the most sensitive parts of the body and provoked deep burns.”34
This is the earliest report of electric torture in France, though by no means in the French colonies. Magneto torture, as I will describe in chapter 7, was common in French Indochina long before it came to France. How Marty or his brigade came by it is unclear. Next to nothing is known about Marty’s interrogation methods in colonial Tunisia or his earlier career.
What is certain is that, in southern France, Marty operated with two faces. The public face was that of the police superintendent, who insisted that the police should respect the law. At his trial, Marty asked the judges to consider the statistics. “My dossier will prove that I am the intendant who has tortured the least.”35
Marty had another face. When a Toulouse police commissioner went to Marty to complain about the electrotorture of a prisoner, Marty said, “I forbid you, regular police, to use certain methods, but one way or another he is going to squeal.”36 Marty used the police for banal operations, and the brigade for extralegal ones, wanting “to leave the honor of the regular police intact.”37 Marty and five of his brigade were executed in 1948.
Marty’s magneto is the clearest example of what becomes a common French technique. Between 1943 and 1944, the technique appears in other cities, though it is often hard to determine the date or the instrument. The instances are listed below in order of clarity.
Vichy created the paramilitary Milice in January 1943.38 The Milice had an investigative wing, Bureau 51, which used electric torture. In the city of Vichy, Henri Millou’s team interrogated at the Chateau de Brosse and Commissaire Poinsot’s team at the Petit Casino. Interrogations consisted of the bathtub, “whips, belts, the dynamo [a magneto] and the fridge [freezing prisoners in large commercial refrigerators]; their skin is torn off, their toes are crushed.”39
Bureau 51 had investigative teams outside of the city of Vichy as well. In Paris, two Bureau 51 interrogators, a former bartender assisted by a former pimp, beat victims with mallets and broomsticks, flogged with leather belts, beat soles of feet (the falaka), broke teeth, squeezed skulls with metal bands, and pierced with pins and nails.40 They also used an “aviation magneto,” an electric device used to start plane engines.41
In Lyon, the team of Paul Touvier used whipping, forced standing on sharp objects, and a car dynamo to interrogate prisoners.42 In Ariege in 1944, Milice interrogators submitted stubborn detainees to “a dynamo stuck on a [wooden] board.”43 The technique was “perfected at Foix,” a town along the Pyrenees.44 A report in 1944 describes a young girl beaten, choked, forced to hold buckets of water for hours, and electrified in Rennes.45
Henri Chamberlin, alias Henri Lafont, was the most notorious of the French Gestapo.46 In 1942, he took on Pierre Bonny, a former police inspector, as his chief lieutenant. Lafont’s gang came directly out of Fresnes Prison: One-Armed Jean, the Mammoth, Handsome Abel, Big Armed Jo, the Bloodthirsty (le Sanguinaire), and Glowing Nose (Nez-de-Braise). There were also foreigners: a Dane, a Basque, an Armenian, a Jewish Bessarabian, and several Algerians.47
Torture at Lafont’s headquarters began with beating and whips studded with nails. Interrogators filed teeth, cut the gums with razors, and struck teeth with mallets. Torturers then attached the victim’s feet to a ring on the wall and banged his head repeatedly against the bricks. For the “difficult prisoners,” Lafont employed the “electric bench” (banc électrique), which roasted feet, and the magneto: “Simple System. Plugging in of two wires, one on the finger, the other on the genitals. The crank was put into motion up until the confession.”48
Lafont’s headquarters attracted torturers. Violette Morris, a lesbian in the entourage of “Jo the Terror” and a former champion female discus-thrower, worked for Lafont in return for his permission to torture women with whips and lighters. Lafont disliked “perverts,” preferring professional torturers.49 At some point, Lafont hired a con man, Adolphe Cornet, “Fredo the Terror of Prison [Gnouff].” Fredo brought “the ‘magneto to wipe off smiles’ the functioning of which was confined to two assistants: Normand, ex-sergeant major of the L.V.F [Legion des Voluntaires Français] and Pierre Sibert, a fat professional killer.”50
Masuy possessed electrotorture equipment51 although his victims remember bathtubs and beatings, not electrotorture.52 Other Paris gangs did not use electrotorture. In the gang of Frederic Martin (alias Rudi de Mérode), torture began with blows, kicks, and then the bathtub.53 Friedrich Berger’s gang reversed the order: the bathtub first, followed by threats, whips, and cudgels. For the bathtub torture, Berger hired Rachid Zulgadar, an Iranian taxi driver nicknamed “King Kong,” who had no difficulty holding heads under water.54
In Angers, Jacques Vasseur subjected prisoners to an electric helmet (casque électrique) that burned down to their scalps.55 In Marseilles, the local Gestapo chief, Ernst Dünker (alias Delage), employed an Italian criminal, Giordano Bruno Gallino, nicknamed Geuele-en-or (“The Golden Maw”) who specialized in electric torture.56
Other agents were less interested in electric torture, though this did not mean they were less inventive. Clara Knecht, a police spy, developed “an atrocious perfection of the bathtub torture . . . the bathtub of soapy water, in use at Rennes and other western cities.”57 In Montpellier, torturers brushed victims with a dog tooth brush and then shoved them in a vat of brine.58 At the Alcazar in Lyon, torturers used an iron mask with screws that twisted the skull in different ways.59
In Bordeaux, a prisoner Pierre Touyaga was put to “tortures so refined and cruelly original by [Marcel] Fouquey that Fouquey, proud of his technical creativity, invents the neologism touyaguer, which the Deuxième Service had to use instead of torturer.”60 Lamote (also known as Pierre Paoli) at Bourges developed techniques so grotesque the Germans intervened sometimes to defend the victims. After using magnetos, and even experimenting once with Chinese water torture, he developed his signature razor technique, removing strips of skin from the heels.61
It is clear, then, that French auxiliaries used electric torture commonly throughout France. The German Gestapo outside France rarely used electric torture. As one might expect, the German Gestapo inside France was more familiar both with the bathtub and with electric torture. German agents used bathtub torture in Paris, Nice, Bordeaux, Lyon, and Lille.62 When it came to electrotorture, the Germans left that to the French.
Regional surveys of the Gestapo in France report no Germans using electrotorture in the regions of Angers, Bordeaux, Lille, Limoges, Lyon, Orleans, Rennes, Savoy, and Vichy.63 Klaus Barbie in Lyon used the usual methods: truncheons, whips, stretching tables, suspension, studded handcuffs, and pincers to tear nails.64 German agents used electrotorture in one known case. In Toulouse sometime after October 1943, four agents hung a victim by the feet, burned his fingers, and subjected him to a magneto.65
At Nuremberg, the French prosecutor submitted fifty-seven affidavits of torture victims from northern France. Fifty victims allege being flogged and beaten. Six allege water torture. Only Albert Billot describes how a French auxiliary, Verbrugge, tossed a live wire into the bathtub in which he sat.66 In the direct testimony to the Nuremberg judges, former French prisoners described two other cases of electric torture. Labussière describes how Laloue received electric torture at Bourges, and Claeys, who was imprisoned in Poitiers, had friends who had seen electric torture.67 In these cases, unfortunately, one cannot determine the agent, date, place, or device.
In France, torture commonly meant whips, beating, and suspension. Beyond that, it varied. Groups adopted different techniques and devices: the bathtub, the electric helmet, the electric bench, the magneto, soldering irons, pliers, presses, and unique razor methods.
The Gestapo inside France encouraged, but did not regulate, torture. There was no German manual showing the French how to perform electrotorture or water torture. The competing French gangs became infernos of invention. Torture techniques spread from the bottom up, not from the top down.
Then torture became policy. On June 10, 1942, Karl Oberg, the supreme head of the SS and the police in France, authorized sweating and regulated beating, repeating Gestapo chief Müller’s directive two days earlier.68 This recommended approach, however, did not correspond to what was happening on the ground. In France, more so than elsewhere, sweating was the last thing the Gestapo did, and it is not hard to see why.
In war, interrogators want accurate, up-to-date information. Sweating takes time, and Resistance fighters knew it. They developed a strategy now known among guerrillas everywhere. They made a “contract” with arrested members: Keep your mouth shut for as long as you can. Buy time with false or outdated information. Give us 48 hours to change the names, codes, and places. Then talk as much as you want. This strategy assumed that torture would always work. It was a rule of prudence, not an empirical observation, and it seriously undermined the quality of information that torturers could gather if someone broke.69
The strategy may seem obvious now, but it was not at the time.70 As it spread, the Gestapo changed how it interrogated. “Interrogations were usually most severe during the first forty-eight hours after capture as the Gestapo understood that information obtained later would probably be out of date.”71 Interrogators ignored slow techniques like forced standing and pummeled the victim for as much information as they could get. “These tortures were all the more horrible because the Germans in many cases had no clear idea of what information they wanted and just tortured haphazard.”72 Such actions in turn pushed the Resistance to more extreme acts, including, in at least one case, torture of its own.73
In this context, sweating and clean tortures rapidly disappeared from the Reich.74 Alec Mellor concluded that torture in France was dictated by a cold logic of war, just as Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century philosopher of war, predicted.75 In war, Clausewitz argued, “There arises a sort of reciprocal action, which logically must lead to an extreme.”76
To all this, there appears only one interesting exception. In Vichy, appearances mattered. Six months after Oberg legalized torture, the Vichy secretary general of the police was discouraging police torture. Once again, he complained, he was getting reports that threw “discredit upon the entire police force, sully the dignity of its functions, and reduce its authority.”77 Caught in the middle between the Resistance and the Germans, Vichy generated two systems of law enforcement: police for ordinary functions and the Milice for fighting the Resistance.78 Marty, in this respect, was typical.
Did the concern for appearances encourage clean torture? Apparently it did for the Milice’s Bureau 51. Writing shortly after the war, Elias Reval remembers that Leo Polin was subjected to the “supreme torture: sleep deprivation.” It was “a cunning torture because it leaves no marks and one can’t accuse anyone of responsibility.”79 This Vichy bureau also favored “electric torture, probably because it does not leave obvious traces and, that is to say, proof.”80
In favor of Reval’s conclusion, there is also the geographic distribution of electric torture in France. Outside Paris and Rennes, electric torture occurred mostly in the south (Toulouse, Marseilles, Foix, Lyon, Vichy) and along the Loire River valley (Bourges, Angers).
Aside from Bureau 51, Vichy electric users were not subtle. Reports describe roasted feet, burned fingers, and baked scalps. All the supplementary tortures—whipping, crushing, and beating—show that the torturers left deep scars. Where subtlety was needed, they abandoned the broken body, as if it was an accidental death.81 Why Bureau 51 was so concerned with clean torture remains a mystery.
The Gestapo did not torture “scientifically,”82 if what one means by this is empirically confirmed rules that inevitably broke individuals. This survey confirms the American report after the liberation of Paris, which observed that interrogators were unsystematic and inefficient.83 “All credible descriptions of torture involve crude techniques, easily learned at levels below official training.”84
Gestapo interrogators were modern in that they applied pain without attention to what custom or law required. They expressed, like modern torturers everywhere, the growing autonomy of their profession from the law. Gestapo technique was also anachronistic, most closely resembling the torture of seventeenth-century European states. Whipping cut into sensitive skin tissue. Torches and heated wires aggravated sensory receptors. Pressure and suspension attacked the musculoskeletal system. Suspension deprived the muscles of blood and dislocated the shoulders and hands from the joints. Classical torturers would recognize all these common techniques.85
Usually, when observers talk about “scientific torture,” they are gesturing at tortures that touch the mind or warp one’s sense of self. At the very least, they describe methods that seize victims from within through drugs, sound, sweating, water torture, or electricity, the latter often presented as analogous to scientific shock treatment. German interrogators did not commonly use sweating, water torture, or electric torture in interrogation, much less electroconvulsive therapy, drugs, or sound. Many aspects of the Gestapo were modern, but torture was not one of them.86
The myth of the scientific Gestapo torture played on a predisposition to see Germans as efficient in everything. This reputation alone did more damage to the Resistance than torture. Many a fearful person became an informant rather than undergo “scientific” interrogation.87
The French Gestapo has a better claim to a place in the history of modern torture. To be sure, they did not everywhere seek to use torture cleanly, scientifically, or systematically. They did favor methods that gripped the subject from within. Masuy, in particular, understood why emotional shock mattered.
To prove that German policy authorized organized torture, French prosecutors at Nuremberg set out to show that German torture was uniform and thus centrally planned. This was an excellent strategy in principle, but not in practice. Indeed, one can learn from the prosecution’s mistakes.
The prosecution did not make clear what kind of uniformity it sought to establish. Was the prosecutor looking for identical practices, different practices that shared identical properties, or family resemblances? Too often, the prosecution waffled.88 It is not surprising that it failed to persuade the judges, and in the end the judges returned only one guilty verdict on the charge of torture, against Kaltenbrunner for the penal regime in the concentration camps.89
The prosecution never defined precisely specific tortures among which it hoped to find uniformity. Whips, water, electricity, and razors all cause suffering, but they are not identical techniques. Too often, the prosecution’s case was simply that victims suffered profoundly from torture. No doubt, but this did not mean interrogators used the same techniques to cause suffering and gather information. Uniformity of suffering does not imply uniformity of practice. Rather, it confuses the effects of torture with the means, yielding vague generalities.
Then there were simply empirical mistakes. For example, in listing torture in the Netherlands, Prosecutor Charles Dubost asserts that sometimes prisoners “were exposed to electrical current.” He cites Document F-224 (RF 324), a document that contains no reference to electric torture.90 Who knows what the Odessa machine is?
Subsequent writers have compounded the misleading impression that the Gestapo practiced French techniques throughout Europe. For example, Edward Crankshaw asserts that the more elaborate methods of torture were “practised with monotonous regularity in towns as far apart as Lyons [Lyon, France] and Stavanger [Norway], Amsterdam and Odessa. Thus, we find the testicle-crushing technique in almost universal use . . . again, there was a fairly elaborate exploitation of the principles of electricity.”91
On the contrary, testicle-crushing devices were not found in Norway, Odessa, or Amsterdam. Electric torture was uncommon outside France. The Gestapo did use elaborate machines, but these varied across Europe. “There was no known case of the use of the rack,” Crankshaw claims.92 Clearly he had not read Schlabrendorf’s memoirs.
The Nuremberg prosecutors chose a high standard to meet, namely, that torture methods were identical across Europe. This claim holds only for the concentration camps, as the tribunal judges correctly concluded. Elsewhere, there were only loose regional styles, most notably in Norway and France.
In the last three chapters, I have shown that the great authoritarian states of the early twentieth century used stealth torture for show trials, UN inspections, and foreign newspapers. In these few instances, it served to “keep up appearances.”93
The Russians and Chinese used clean tortures as the Spanish Inquisition would. They wanted to produce false confessions, and they did not mind using slow tortures to achieve this purpose. They did not share the concern of many modern torturers: to produce accurate intelligence with speed. The Germans did, but for that purpose, they preferred whips, truncheons, razors, and thumbscrews, not electricity and water torture. In their own ways then, Communists and Nazis were old fashioned.
In his history of the European Resistance, M.R.D. Foot asks rhetorically, “Was it one of them [the Gestapo] who invented the electric shock to the genitals, that has become a commonplace of over-sophisticated conduct since?”94 That is unlikely. Nevertheless, the question Foot asks really does require an answer: who did invent electric torture? Or the other common clean tortures that use water, sound, drugs, light, and ice? I have described their use by the French Gestapo in this chapter, and their nonuse by Germans, to help dispense with the common assumption that German Nazis must have originated and spread all modern tortures. But that is a separate matter from pinpointing the ultimate origins of these methods. To what extent did the French Gestapo use methods invented prior to the war, and where did they come from?
That is what I turn to in the next two parts of this book, and I begin with electricity. For many, electricity is the emblematic modern torture. It involves mastering technology and science. It can be used to assault the mind while leaving few marks on the skin. To tell the story of electrotorture, then, is to tell the story of stealth torture as well as modern torture.
Unlike many tortures, electric torture requires easily identifiable instruments. Using survivor narratives in the Nuremberg fashion, one can compare these devices and map their movements. By examining the techniques that accompany them, one can also judge whether torturers intend to use these devices stealthily. When electrotorture is used with water or white noise, then torturers probably mean to be covert. When it is used with whips and razors, the torturers are not concerned with leaving marks.
In part III, I will show that electricity is not an easy power to harness for torture, much less use cleanly. Many instruments failed, and these failures illuminate the political factors that helped other instruments succeed. The French auxiliaries of the Gestapo will have their place in this story, but we will find that the nexus in which clean electrotorture appeared was democratic, not authoritarian (not, in other words, “the Gestapo”). We have already seen this origin in the case of sweating (chapter 3, “Lights, Heat, and Sweat”). In part IV, we will find that this pattern holds also for sound, drugs, light, ice, water, and positional torture.