(1) Il faut que la torture soit propre. [Torture must be clean.]
—Lecture notes, French reserve officer, 19591
The gégène is an army signals magneto, used for communication purposes and also for torture. In the late 1950s, this word became notorious in France and Algeria. The term gégéneur, one who operates this device, became synonymous with torturer. However, electric torture by magneto began long before Algeria. As one French historian remarks, “The ‘gégéneurs’ of Algeria invented nothing. In the 1930s, beneath the tropics, in the shelter of the French flag, all the degrading methods existed just fine.”2
In this chapter, I document the history of magneto torture in the early twentieth century. I focus primarily on the French policing system between 1920 and 1965, when stealthy magneto torture was routine. From the start, French torturers took care to keep torture clean, which is to say, leave few marks. I also consider and seek to explain the behavior of the Japanese Kempeitai, the Hungarian police, and the British colonial police in Kenya during this period. They also favored magneto torture, but their use was not stealthy.
French police institutionalized electric torture in Vietnam during the 1930s. After documenting this history, I follow the trail of magneto torture out of Vietnam, first to France in World War II, then back to Vietnam in 1949, and then to Algeria in the 1950s, and finally back to Paris in the 1960s.
This trajectory of magneto torture is thought-provoking. A colonial technique found its way into domestic policing, traveling to France from Vietnam, not once, but twice. Nor will this be the last time a foreign army carries magneto torture out of Vietnam, as I will show in the next chapter. Let us consider first the magneto in the early twentieth century.
A magneto is a simple generator that produces a high-voltage spark. In the early twentieth century, magnetos were indispensable for starting machines. Viewers of old movies may recall seeing operators spin a handle on a phone before they spoke, or crank a handle on the hood of a car or spin a propeller on a plane to start the engine. In the course of the twentieth century, torturers adapted magnetos from all these devices for interrogation.
When one moves a coil of wire in a magnetic field, one produces an electric current in the wire. When a gap separates the wire ends, the voltage builds up until it is high enough to jump across the gap as a spark. In magnetos, cranking the handle rotated a coil of wire inside a ring of permanent magnets, and that in turn generated a spark from the wire. Other devices achieved the same result without permanent magnets, instead inducing a magnetic field in an outer coil of wire by the rotation of the inner coil, what Werner Siemens dubbed in 1867 “a self-exciting dynamo.”3 Yet other devices—transformers—took low voltage from an external source and changed it into a high-voltage spark. By 1886, Silvanus Thompson declared the differences were irrelevant. “The arbitrary distinction between so-called magneto-electric machines and dynamo-electric machines fails when examined carefully.”4 I shall call all these devices magnetos.
Automobile engines used magneto ignitions, until manufacturers replaced them with a coil ignition in the 1950s. Once the vehicle started, a chain from the main shaft cranked the magneto and generated high-tension current. A four-cylinder magneto ignition typically gave two sparks per revolution of the engine; it took four to eight volts and increased it by thousands of volts.5 Cars also possessed several electrical systems, each with different energy requirements, and drivers preferred to start their cars without blowing out their radios and lights. “Commutated magnetos” had commutators that allowed the magneto’s energy to supply the different systems at each one’s particular requirements
Portable field telephone magnetos were common from the 1880s onward.6 Each cranking generated a powerful, but short shock at very low amperage to ring the phone at the other end. The operator increased the voltage by cranking faster. Field magnetos also came equipped with wires ending in alligator clips, spring-loaded clips with serrated jaws. Torturers used these for quick, temporary attachments to various body parts.
By the early 1880s, most major armies had portable telephone sets and wire drums that were carried on horseback. By World War I, field telephones were ubiquitous. The German army, for example, had 6,350 men in communications units in August 1914. By 1918, there were 190,000 men handling communications.7 Yet “during World War I, interrogation by dynamo did not exist.”8 Indeed, for some fifty years (1880–1930), soldiers and policemen did not think to use magneto torture. Between 1930 and 1945, the French, Japanese, and Hungarian police did use magnetos, but the kind of magneto did not seem to matter. Torturers used magnetos for cars, planes, refrigerators, and, in two Japanese cases, field telephones. By the 1950s, though, French torturers had settled on the field telephone as the primary form of magneto torture, a choice that would have a lasting effect on torture for the next three decades.
In February 1930, colonial troops loyal to the Nationalist Party mutinied at military posts in northern Tonkin. This was called the Yen Bay Mutiny. The French reaction was swift and merciless. Foreign legionnaires arrived by the summer. Political disorder spread, as did a crime wave exacerbated by the world economic depression, and police repression increased dramatically.9
In 1931, a French journalist, Andrée Viollis, described the common tortures practiced in Vietnam. She concluded with a list of electric tortures, gathered from political prisoners:
First, attach an end of wire to the arm or leg and introduce the other end into the genitals; pass current through them. Second, join together a whip of steel wires interlaced with an electric current; each blow of this instrument causes the patient such intense pain that he is reduced to asking for mercy and to confessing. Third, attach one [outlet] to the hands of the prisoner by a metallic wire that one plugs then into the circuit. Each time that one turns the commutator, the jolt is so violent that it is impossible to endure it for more than two or three times. These tortures were particularly honored and practiced daily during the year 1931 at the Police Commissariat at Binh-Donj (ville de Cholon).10
This is the earliest account of systematic state torture using electricity. The date is striking. It is four or five years before the Argentine police adopt the picana eléctrica, the Spanish SIM invents the electric chair, and the Brazilians use live wires. It is over a decade before Marty turns to magneto torture in Toulouse on behalf of Vichy. A decade before Dorthea Binz swung her electric whip at Ravensbrück, French torturers had fashioned one in Vietnam.
French colonial torture was not new. In Vietnam in the 1920s, as in France, police sweated and beat common criminals during interrogation. Increasingly the passage à tabac also fell on political prisoners. In a trial in 1927, for example, a gendarme testified that he walked in on two colonial Sûreté agents torturing a prisoner. This episodic torture became normal by 1930.11
Prisoners described the various tortures in articles in La Lutte, a left-wing Vietnamese journal in the 1930s. The most feared torture was the crapaudine. The prisoner is laid flat on his stomach. Torturers pull the arms and feet together behind the back until they touch. The body bends out like a bow. Then torturers press a foot against the ribs, “producing an unconscious muscular reaction (unconscious because 99 times out of 100, the victim loses consciousness), the reaction yields blood from the nose, mouth, the ears, and the anus.”12
The crapaudine was a French military field punishment that had been abolished a decade or so earlier.13 It means “the toad,” though à la crapaudine means to cut open and broil. The Vietnamese called the torture appropriately the lan mé ga, “turning your guts inside out.”14 They had no doubts why the Sûreté favored it: It was “particularly loved by torturers because it leaves no apparent traces.”15
Reports from La Lutte suggest that police stations differed in the cleanliness of their tortures. “In Saigon, tortures are performed with lots of know-how, and they have at least one goal: getting confessions without leaving marks.”16 Saigon torturers used clean tortures like the crapaudine, “diverse electric tortures,” sleep deprivation, meals of salted rice to induce dehydration, starvation, and the falaka, the beating of the soles of the feet. Doctors were either unwilling or unable to diagnose the marks of torture as such.17
Such care was sometimes disregarded. For example, the Sûreté Générale subjected Tran Phu, the Communist Party secretary, to the crapaudine, then tried to bribe him, and then dehydrated him. Finally they burned his hands, tore his hair, slit the soles of his feet, put cotton soaked in alcohol in the slots, and burned it. Tran Phu died two days later.18
In the provinces, police were less clean. They whipped, pricked with pins, and pierced eardrums with thin baguettes. Even here though, there was some concern with cleanliness in torture. According to La Lutte, by the mid-1930s, “the beating of the soles of the feet” had been “imported to provinces from Saigon.”19 Local police also sometimes beat cleanly, or poured pimento-spiced saumure [brine] into orifices.
Viollis’s list of standard tortures does not capture all the techniques prisoners report in La Lutte, but it mentions many of them.20 This list also mentions four of the six standard tortures Labussière will itemize at Nuremberg: whipping, burning, suspension, and electric torture. Viollis omits the bathtub and testicle-crushing machines.
To be precise, Viollis distinguishes between “archaic” tortures and “modern” tortures, “all of which have been invented and practiced, notably by the Sûreté de Cholon.”21 Classical tortures include starvation, dehydration, the falaka, pins under fingernails, “the wood press,” “a funnel of petrol,” suspension by the hands, and tongs that squeezed the temples until eyes popped out.22 Tortures for young women included rape, suspensions by the toes, falaka, flogging, and “a nest of ants introduced into their intimate parts.”23
Under modern tortures, Viollis lists the crapaudine (two styles); electrotorture; introducing “a spiral metal wire into the urinary tract” and pulling out brusquely; and a razor technique. This last involved the following steps: “With a razor blade, cut the skin of the feet in long furrows, fill up the wounds with cotton and set fire to the cotton.”24 What historians of the French Gestapo regarded as the peculiar technique of Lamote/Paoli was, according to Viollis, a standard practice in colonial Vietnam.
Viollis describes French police using not one, but three types of electrotorture. Two of them have no future in Vietnam: live wires and electric whipping. In 1936, La Lutte mentions only how “prisoners screamed before the ‘magneto.’ ”25 It seems interrogators settled on the one device that left the least marks and produced the lowest fatalities. The Saigon magneto does not appear to be a gégène, the army signals magneto. Viollis’s description suggests a commutated magneto from an automobile.
So, in 1931, the French police in Vietnam were practicing stealthy magneto torture. In 1949, after an absence of fifteen years, the journalist Jacques Chégaray returned to Indochina. He visited a young officer in Tonkin in his post in the outback, at Phul-Cong.
“You are a journalist from France? Delighted. Come see my home. Here, this is the lookout post; over there, the PC [command post] of the company.”
We enter; everything is in impeccable order. I congratulate him.
“Here,” he continues, “is my office. Table, typewriter, washbasin; and in the corner, the machine to make one talk.”
As I seem not to understand, he adds, “Yeah, sure, the dynamo [magneto]! It is a good handy way to interrogate the prisoners. The contact, the positive pole, and the negative pole; turn the handle and the prisoner spits [it out].
He resumes in the same tone: “Over there, the telephone; here, the rack for the maps of the general staff; over there, etc.”26
One year after the execution of sinister Inspector Marty in Toulouse, this officer seems unaware that he is using exactly the same device Marty did. Should one say that the young officer in 1949 learned his technique in Paris from the French Gestapo? More likely, what one is looking at is something quite indigenous, so much a part of the office furniture in Indochina it was entirely acceptable.
Magneto torture first appeared in France in 1943, most probably introduced by the Marty Brigade in Toulouse, as I argued in part II. Magneto torture then spread rapidly through the French Gestapo and Milice. Most European electro-torturers in 1943 were French policemen (Marty, Poinsot, and Vasseur), former French soldiers (Normand and Touvier), or French criminals (Cornet and Gallino). Among them, the technique was well known. The question, then, is how magneto torture came to France. Perhaps it was Marty’s independent innovation. However, in light of the French colonial police’s extensive use of magneto torture in Indochina, it seems more plausible to think that it traveled through backroom apprenticeships in the French military and colonial police to France. Marty’s Brigade was one conduit, but probably not the only one.
It is a tempting hypothesis, but the difficulty lies in connecting the dots between Vietnam in 1936 and France in 1943. Marty worked in North Africa before 1943, but little is known about his earlier history in the French colonial police. Moreover, some avenues of transmission can be eliminated. Outside of Indochina, between 1900 and 1943, prisoners do not report electrotorture in the Third Republic—not in France, or among the Legion’s penal battalions in North Africa or in the bagnards, the grim prisons of French Guyana and New Caledonia.27 One can also eliminate centralized training and transmission by the Sûreté. No one reports torture classes in Indochina. Torturers drew on what was at hand or what they had heard about. In a political crisis, they did not have the time to be inventive.
In favor of the hypothesis, however, there is some evidence that other torture techniques circulated by means of backroom apprenticeships, and that these techniques traveled between French police and the military as well as circulating geographically within the French colonial system. For example, the Foreign Legion prohibited the crapaudine in 1909 and, when the first attempt to stamp it out failed, again in 1920.28 Yet police in Vietnam were still practicing it a decade later. Either legionnaires continued the practice surreptitiously (after all, it was a clean torture) or some old soldiers showed younger police how to do it. And there was the distinctive police razor technique: cutting slits on the soles and burning cotton soaked in alcohol in the slits or between the toes. This standard Vietnamese practice appears a decade later in Paoli’s torture chambers in Bourges, as well as other French prisons.29
Additionally, what is striking is that the French torturers in Europe uniformly preferred magnetos for torture, even though they were indifferent as to the kind of magneto (unlike later French torturers, who strongly favored the field telephone). The Vichy Milice used a refrigerator magneto—probably from a commercial freezer. The Lyon Milice used a magneto from a Berliet car. The Paris Milice performed clean electrotorture with an aviation magneto. It was a magneto attached to a large steering wheel that the operator “drove.” The device released less than one milliampere, but between ten thousand and fifteen thousand volts, roughly competitive with the picana eléctrica.30 The Foix Milice used an odd dynamo that had three connections: to a lamp, to the victim’s body, and to a white metal casing that was used as an electric prod.31 All this suggests something of a craft tradition, in which people passed on a basic knowledge of how to torture using magnetos, but the device was determined largely by availability and chance.
So it is plausible to argue that magneto torture passed through the French colonial system from Indochina to France. Still, there is an alterative hypothesis that is worth exploring. The French Sûreté in Indochina was not the only Asian electrotorturer in the thirties. The Japanese military police, the Kempeitai, also used electrotorture, including, occasionally, magnetos. It is possible to speculate that they passed on magneto torture to the European torturers. To explore this hypothesis, one needs to reconstruct the pattern of Japanese torture in the 1930s and during World War II.
Let me start first with police torture in Japan and then turn to Korea. Reports suggest that while the Kempeitai did not use electrotorture in Japan, it did not hesitate to do so in Korea.
In 1928, a European observer identified the following tortures.32 Police boxed suspects in a small space and poured water on their face until they confessed. They twisted arms, beat heads, pricked with sharp splinters, and poked with red-hot irons. They placed a flat timber over the ankles of a kneeling suspect and then pressed down until the joints came apart (ankle spreading).33 In 1933, the novelist Kobayashi Takiji died in police custody. His body bore signs of beating, kicking, and hot tongs to the forehead. His fingers were broken. His thighs had a dozen holes “as if made by a nail or drill.”34
Police also suspended prisoners by the fingers with the toes barely touching the floor; when the prisoner rested his heels, he pulled his fingers out of their socket. More severely, police roped the prisoner’s hands behind his back and pulled him up to the ceiling, a procedure that slowly disjoins the shoulders. Nishijima Shigetada, a Marxist activist, was suspended in this manner, beaten, and poked with a hot iron.35
Between 1941 and 1942, police arrested leftists and foreigners, subjecting them to torture.36 Interrogation included continuous slapping (sometimes until the face was cut), suspension, beating, hair pulling, finger breaking, and forcing suspects to kneel for hours (with stamping on ankles). Interrogators pressed pencils between fingers and burned suspects with cigarettes. During the war, prisoners held on the Japanese mainland reported “water treatment” (Tokyo), burning (Kawasaki), suspension (Tokyo, Yokkaichi), kneeling on sharp instruments (Fukuoka, Omuta), having nails pulled (Yamani), and the knee spread (Tokyo).37 Similar to the ankle spread, the knee spread required prisoners to kneel with a pole over the calves and beneath the thighs; the pole would sometimes be three inches in diameter. Guards then brought pressure on the thighs, sometimes by jumping on them, causing the knee joints to separate.38 Lastly, it is worth noting that it was not prisoners alone who were subjected to some techniques. In 1946, Prime Minister Tojo observed, for example, that hard slapping, though forbidden, was also customary practice in the Japanese navy and army for training recalcitrant cadets.39
In 1910, Japan annexed Korea. During the period of “Military Rule” (1910–19), torture consisted primarily of flogging.40 In March 1919, many Koreans protested for independence. In the period of “Cultural Rule” that followed, the Japanese repealed the Flogging Ordinance, but expanded police forces. Along with this came lengthy detention and torture.41
The first named cases of electrotorture appear in the 1930s.42 Pak Se-yong, a twenty-four-year-year-old activist from Kijang, claimed that police subjected him to electrotorture in 1930.43 Chong In-hwa, another activist, also described electrotorture in this period.44 He claimed it happened while assisting the independence leader Kim Ku. The Japanese had exiled Kim Ku to China in 1919. In 1931 he began organizing the Korean Patriotic Corps. It seems likely that this was roughly when police tortured Chong In-hwa.
In 1942, Japanese arrested Westerners in Korea and Manchuria. Interrogators slapped them continuously and flogged them with rubber hoses and belts. They pumped the prisoners: they tied their knees to their chests, and then forced water down the throat with teakettle funnels. In Harbin, British and American prisoners described “electric treatment” that they characterized as “near-electrocution.”45
Prosecutors for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), the sister to the Nuremberg tribunal, mapped Kempeitai torture after Korea. Interrogators in disparate regions shared a core style: beating, whipping, burning, forced kneeling (often on sharp objects), the knee spread, suspension, pumping stomachs with water (usually with a teapot), and magneto torture. Torture was not clean; it left permanent scars and injuries.
In mapping this pattern, the IMTFE prosecutors faced the same obstacles as the Nuremberg tribunal in finding documentary evidence of torture. During the war, the Japanese government generally ignored customary rules governing treatment of prisoners. This included denying visits to POW camps by neutral states designated by an enemy (in this case the Swiss government), restricting such visits when they were allowed, refusing to forward to the neutral states lists of prisoners taken and civilians interned, and censoring news relating to prisoners and internees, including letters from prisoners.46 When the Japanese surrendered, the chief of the prisoner of war camps ordered all incriminating documentary evidence to be destroyed, and all those who “mistreated prisoners of war” were “permitted to take care of it by immediately transferring or by fleeing without trace.”47 The order was sent to camps in Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, North China, Hong Kong, Borneo, Thailand, Malaya, and Java.48
Consequently, the IMTFE prosecutors had to reconstruct the pattern of torture, grouping prisoner affidavits by region. They documented the core techniques not only among the Kempeitai throughout Asia, but also among other army and navy units, camp guards, and local police organized by the Kempeitai. “Such uniformity,” concluded the IMTFE, “cannot have arisen by chance.”49 The IMTFE returned guilty verdicts on counts of torture. The summary that follows describes what the IMTFE found by region, starting with the occupation of China in 1937, followed by the regions occupied during World War II. I have supplemented these findings with prisoners’ accounts where they are available.
China. In 1937, Japanese forces occupied Shanghai. The main tortures were beating (punches, slaps, kicks), flogging (with a hose, riding crop, bamboo bat, or stock), pumping stomachs with water, forced standing and kneeling, and electrotorture.50 Torturers soaked prisoners, tied them to a painter’s ladder, tied wires to the genitals, and then applied electricity with “a hand manipulated shocking coil.”51
“Officers did not give explicit directions for questioning, but merely ordered so and so out for interrogation.” Sergeants and interpreters adopted tortures as they saw fit: “Each handled the prisoner according to his own ideas.”52 Supplementary tortures included burning with cigarettes, toenail removal, “rack torture,” and “others too numerous to mention.”53
Prisoners also reported “water treatment,” burning, and electrotorture in Beijing, knee spreads and suspension in Nanking, and burning in Hanko and Nomonhan.54
Singapore and Malaysia. The main tortures were beating, flogging with knotted ropes and bamboo canes, burning with cigarettes and irons, forced sitting for hours on the floor, forced kneeling on sharp objects, needles under the nails, pumping with water (dubbed the “Tokio-wine treatment”), choking (with a wet cloth or in a tub or oil drum), suspension, and electrotorture.55 There were two kinds of electrotorture. First, “An induction coil was used, one electrode being attached to the hand or foot and the other wire applied to various parts of the body.” The second kind, “apparently more severe, was called the electric table or electric cap. There is evidence that this was used by [sic: but] not on any of our witnesses.”56
“Every guard was a law unto himself.”57 Supplementary tortures included “ju-jitsu, twisting of limbs, bending back of fingers, twisting of sharp-edged wood between fingers, punching, repeated blows on the same spot, and so on.” Later, interrogators would tear the scab with a frayed bamboo end, leaving permanent scars.58 Prisoners also reported burning and suspension elsewhere in Malaysia, including Ipoh, Victoria Point, and Kuala Lumpur.59
Burma-Siam (Thailand) Railroad. Prisoners on this jungle project reported beating, flogging, genital burning, and pumping with water. Guards suspended prisoners, or stuck hot steel pins beneath the nails. Positional tortures included forced standing, holding heavy objects, and forced kneeling on sharp sticks while holding heavy rocks.60 At Tavoy and Chumporn, prisoners were subjected to the knee spread and at Chumporn to electrotorture.61
Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Cellular Prison at Port Blair was a well-known British penal colony in the Indian Ocean. When the Japanese occupied the Andamans, they used the prison facilities there and at Kakana on the Nicobar Islands. Prisoners report the “water treatment,” burning, knee spreads, and kneeling on sharp instruments.62
Vietnam (French Indochina). Prisoners were beaten, kicked, and flogged (with rods, truncheons, whips, belts, and rulers with metal edges). They were suspended by the thumbs, burned with cigarettes and lighted tapers, and forced to kneel for hours on broken bricks or sharp-edged wooden bars.63 Then there was magneto torture. “The gendarme who worked the magneto and twisted my testicles was called the ‘American.’ I can recognize him.”64 Prisoners reported electrotorture, in particular, at detention centers in Hanoi and Mytho.65 Interrogators also pumped stomachs with a teapot. They occasionally used the classical European technique, covering the face with cloth and then slowly soaking the cloth with water.66 In one case, during pumping, torturers applied an electrified plate to the feet.67
The Philippines. Prisoners reported slapping, suspension, forced kneeling on sharp objects, forced knee spreads, having nails pulled, being pricked with sharp objects, forced standing and sitting, burning, squeezing skulls with rubber bands, and beating (with a huge variety of objects). Water torture included pumping stomachs with a hose (sometimes with soapy water) and choking (with a wet cloth or dunking in a tub or toilet bowl). Finger bandaging involved binding cartridges or pencils to fingers and then squeezing the hand gently or forcefully. “Sun treatment” involved tying prisoners to the ground with their faces toward the sun, propping the upper eyelid open with thin sticks, and forcing prisoners to stare at the sun for hours.68
Prisoners also report five types of electrotorture. One involved tying an EE5 telephone to the feet. This device was an old “lineman telephone,” consisting of two binding posts to which one connected wires and a crank to generate a ring. When it rang, it delivered a shock. The shock lasted four to five minutes.69 Three other electrotortures used the main power grid to electrify metal chairs, brass tabletops, and metal rings on the fingers. A fifth was exclusively for women; the torturer thrust an electrode “shaped like a curling iron up her vagina.”70
Taiwan (Formosa). Torture included beating, water treatment, forced sitting, and forced standing with heavy buckets of water.71 In 1945, a Korean described her torture as a comfort woman in Taiwan. A Kempeitai officer “pulled the phone cords and coiled them around my wrist and ankles. Then he said ‘konoyaro’[“you swine”] and turned the phone handle. My eyes and my body were shivering.”72
Borneo. Here a Kempeitai torturer confessed to using pumping and electrotorture.73 Torturers also used the ancient technique of beating lightly but repeatedly in the same spot until the flesh was highly sensitive. IMTFE affidavits list beating, flogging, suspension, burning (often with cigarettes), ankle spreading, knee spreading, forced sitting, pumping with water, and sometimes the Dutch style in choking.74 Torturers varied pumping by feeding starved prisoners large amounts of uncooked rice, and then pumping them full of water (“rice torture”).75 Rice expands slowly when soaked. Guards also used a sweatbox (“Esau”).76
Java. IMTFE affidavits report permanent scars from beatings, flogging (with a bamboo stick, dog whip, or ruler), scorching with cigarettes, pumping with water, and electrotorture.77 “To prevent monotony, he [the interrogator] gave me electrization . . . if I am not gravely mistaken, it was altogether 39 times.”78 Prisoners report electrotorture in particular at camps in Batavia, Buitenzorg, and Semarang.79
Sumatra. Prisoners were beaten with cudgels, flogged, slapped, suspended, forced to stand at attention for hours, subjected to the water treatment and knee spreads, and burned with hot pokers.80
Micronesia, Timor, the Moluccas, the Solomons, and the Celebes. Torture on these islands consisted of severe beatings, floggings, pumping with water, hard slapping, burning with cigarettes, and suspension. Positional tortures included holding the “press up” position indefinitely, kneeling on sharp objects for hours, and standing, often while holding heavy objects.81 On the Celebes, exhaustion exercises were common, in particular, crawling on one’s stomach (“the lizard”).82
The Kempeitai resembled a guild, with a high degree of group solidarity and coherence.83 Unlike the Gestapo, regional Kempeitai did not become semiautonomous. They rarely used foreign auxiliaries for coercive interrogation.
Interrogators apprenticed in the field, learning core techniques. Uno Shintaro, a Kempeitai interrogator in China, states, “There really wasn’t any concrete training for intelligence-gathering.” Nevertheless, he took his responsibility seriously, selecting “capable soldiers and noncoms who understood Chinese and trained them” as he saw fit.84 Prisoner affidavits also confirm that officers expected interrogators to produce results, but left the details to them.
If detailed torture manuals from a Kempeitai torture university exist, they are not widely available.85 Notes for the Interrogation of Prisoners of War (1943), marked “Top Secret,” authorizes torture, but does not regulate the practice. It leaves it to interrogators to produce results, offering no standardized procedures. It states simply, “The following are methods normally to be adopted: (a) Torture. This includes kicking, beating and anything connected with physical suffering.”86
Looking back, one may safely conclude that magneto torture became common in Asia around the Great Depression. The French Sûreté and the Japanese Kempeitai institutionalized it between 1930 and 1931. By 1945, the Japanese knew how to use a portable phone, what the French called the gégène, for torture.
We may never know whether the French in Indochina learned from the Japanese in Korea or the reverse. Or perhaps these were independent innovations. What is certain is that the two police used magneto torture differently. The Kempeitai did not care whether it left marks, whereas prisoners report that this mattered greatly to the French Sûreté. It is not clear why police in a French colony cared, while the police in a Japanese colony did not. But one might speculate that the conditions here resemble those mentioned elsewhere in the book as triggering stealth. Once again, we have police and troops of a democratic country using torture under conditions where there was, if not a free press, at least a vociferous alternative one that documented the treatment of prisoners. And authors like Viollis publicized torture well beyond the confines of Indochina, bringing the news back to France of the violence of the Yen Bay Mutiny.
The next country to adopt magneto torture was Hungary, possibly as early as 1941.87 In 1943, Egon Balas, a Romanian prisoner, described the device as “a generator that one of the agents held in his lap while he turned its handle. . . . The faster the handle was turned, the stronger the current that coursed through my body.” Torturers tied one wire to his ankle and applied the other to his head, neck, genitals, or inside his mouth. They used electrotorture to frighten and intimidate prisoners, not because it was clean.88 Generally, Hungarian torture left scars.89
Next, the French Gestapo adopted the magneto, starting with Inspector Marty in Toulouse in 1943. The most plausible hypothesis is that magneto torture passed through the French colonial system from Indochina to France. This makes the most sense of the chronology, incidence, and frequency of the technique.
But let me now consider the alternative hypothesis I raised earlier in this chapter. Perhaps the Kempeitai passed it on to the Gestapo who then gave it to the French Gestapo. This hypothesis traces torture using established military connections between Axis powers. Tempting as this hypothesis might be, it is unconvincing in several respects.
This hypothesis does not explain why most early magneto torturers were French policemen, criminals, and legionnaires and why the first record of German officers using a magneto to conduct torture is in Toulouse in 1943. German military connections to the Japanese date to the early 1930s, but the Gestapo does not adopt these techniques from the Kempeitai at the same date. There certainly was ample opportunity. In March 1945, the U.S. War Department identified twelve different types of dynamos for field radio-telephones in the German military.90
Moreover, the Gestapo was unfamiliar with other common Kempeitai techniques. For example, Kempeitai agents favored pumping stomachs with water in every region of Asia; it was more common that electrotorture. The Main Security Office in Berlin treated Masuy’s bathtub in 1943 as a discovery.
Following the military brass is not a reliable substitute for mapping the chronology and incidence of torture techniques. If it were, the parsimonious hypothesis would point to a Hungarian origin. Hungary was a more proximate Axis ally and it adopted magneto torture shortly before the Gestapo. Even this third hypothesis cannot explain the French character of magneto torture.
In the end, the pattern of the distribution of torture techniques suggests that the most plausible hypothesis is that magneto torture passed through the French colonial system from Indochina to France during World War II, and then spread to the German Gestapo and possibly to the Hungarians.
With the defeat of the Axis powers, magneto torture almost disappears worldwide. The main exception is in British and French colonies. The French used magneto torture in Vietnam as early as 1949, and there is at least one allegation of electrotorture in France as early as 1947 or 1948.91 The British used electrotorture in Kenya in the early 1950s, including at least one use of magneto torture.
But the subsequent trajectory of British and French electrotorture varies significantly. British police in other colonies did not take up electrotorture, or, if they did, they quickly abandoned it. Although torture occurred in various British colonies, the British style did not include electrotorture (as I document in part IV). After their defeat in Vietnam, the French military carried over the routine use of magneto torture to Algeria, and the characteristic French usages here set the style for torturers worldwide for the next thirty years. Let me consider first the British usage, and then the French.
Until recently, it was not generally known that “electric shock was widely used” during the British counterinsurgency campaign in Kenya.92 Difficult prisoners were sent to the Mau Mau Investigation Center, an intelligence unit run by the British Special Branch, which had “a way of slowly electrocuting a Kuke—they’d rough up one for days.” One settler describes participating in this torture on one occasion, but “things got a little out of hand. By the time I cut his balls off he had no ears and his eyeball, the right one, I think was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.”93
As this description suggests, electrotorture in Kenya occurred in the context of scarring tortures. Standard procedures included flogging, beating with sticks, cutting with knives, castration, shoving broken bottles, sand, and hot eggs into rectums and vaginas, wrapping suspects in coils of barbed wire, suspending prisoners by the feet until blood ran from their noses and ears. There are also occasional reports of other techniques that leave few marks, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, choking in water, the use of irritants such as pepper or soap, and punitive exercises, but these also occur amid other scarring tortures. British agents did not care whether they left marks or not. Indeed, torture was a public spectacle in many cases.94
The British counterinsurgency campaign in Kenya contrasts sharply in this respect with the French campaign in Algeria, where directives emphasized torturers should leave no marks. Moreover, unlike the French, British torturers did not appear to have a preferred device for electrotorture such as the army signals magneto or gégène. In the known cases, British torturers appear to use what was at hand, including the battery of a Land Rover and the generator of a police station.95 One prisoner remembers a “small conductor” used at the Ruthigiti Post, and she offers a description that closely resembles magneto torture.96
There are few reports of British electrotorture before or after Kenya. There is only one report of British electrotorture before this date, at Cellular Prison in the Andaman Islands in 1912.97 German prisoners at the London Cage (1940–48), a clandestine military prison with a brutal interrogation regimen, reported that they were “threatened with electrical devices,” but none reported that interrogators used such devices on prisoners.98 In the 1950s, the journalist Charles Foley heard rumors of electrotorture in Cyprus but was never able to confirm it.99 Another journalist, John Barry, reports that a British Special Branch interrogator in Cyprus told him he had a “bad experience” with electrotorture once and abandoned it, “Nuff said.”100 Prisoners do not report electrotorture in Aden, and the only cases from Northern Ireland involve five men tortured between 1971 and 1972.101 All this suggests that British torturers, for whatever reason, did not favor electrotorture.
This could not be said of the French colonial police and military; they not only favored magneto torture, but elected to use it in a particular form: the army signals magneto or gégène. It is difficult to know when after the war the French adopted torture by field telephone. An officer who served in Indochina before going to Algeria explained that colonial practices circulated not only among the Vichy French, but also the Free French.
What happened afterward in Algeria were methods of torture that were imported in our units in 1939–1945 by a fringe of officers from the colonial army. I knew one of them. He was, to my knowledge, the first one to use the gégène. In any case, it’s a problem inherent in the colonial system. The English were worse than us! There was such hatred of the human beings in front of us that all methods were good for reaching our goals!102
Indeed, what is certain is that torture quickly reappeared in French territories after the war: Algeria (1945), Indochina (1946), Madagascar (1947), and France (1947–48). By 1957, the gégène was the queen of torments.
Algeria. For most of the twentieth century, the French colonial police routinely beat Algerian suspects.103 One colonial described seeing his father, a policeman in North Africa, beating and “torturing men in the grilling-hot courtyard of some Algerian police station.”104 General de Gaulle tried to reduce the inequities in 1944, but failed.105 After the nationalist insurrection in Sétif in May 1945, police violence and torture was routine.106 In August 1947, Algerian deputies compared police tactics to the Gestapo.107 In 1950, a French prefect submitted “eighty complaints of acts of torture.”108
France. Police textbooks after the war recommended sweating and beating.109 Alec Mellor, the postwar torture scholar, recorded six cases between 1947 and 1948 where the police “used methods worthy of the Gestapo to compel confessions.”110 The most notorious was that of M. Cavailhié, who collaborated with the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence. At his trial, Cavailhié declared Paris police had beaten him. The judge was unmoved, replying that he should not have been surprised. As a member of the Abwehr, “he was used to it.”111 Then Cavailhié shocked everyone, alleging that police in Nice had subjected him to the baignoire, torture of the bathtub, and electrotorture.112
Madagascar. In 1947, the French army crushed a rebellion in Madagascar. In 1948, the Sûreté interrogated the three Madgascaran deputies, releasing their confessions as instigators of the rebellion. At their trial, the deputies withdrew their confessions, charging the Sûreté had tortured them, as well as the alleged witnesses, to make false confessions. They claimed agents beat them and then subjected them to the ordeal of the bathtub.113 In the absence of telling marks, “It became hard for the public to decide where the truth lay.”114
Indochina. In 1946, nationalist protests led to the first Indochinese War (1946–54). By 1949, Jacques Chégaray reported magneto torture in Vietnam. France withdrew its troops from Vietnam in 1954, soon redeploying many of these regiments to Algeria.115 There was “not enough time for the ‘bad habits’ to be forgotten,” observed a French historian.116 Then came the Algerian Revolution and the gégène.
The Algerian Revolution, and the place of torture in it, has been exceedingly well documented.117 Here, I simply map changes in torture techniques during the revolution, and the main change was this. In 1954, torturers favored water torture over electrotorture. By 1957, torturers used the gégène almost exclusively for certain interrogations. In this section, I describe torture in 1954, and then I turn to the factors that led to the rise of the gégène.
In 1954, the French government sent Roger Wuillaume, the inspector general for administration, to investigate numerous allegations of police torture in Algeria. He spoke with prisoners and policemen.118 All, either publicly or privately, confirmed that torture was routine. Wuillaume listed the standard tortures:
1. Imprisonment, for periods in excess of twenty-four hours, in some cases up to 15 or 20 days.
2. Beatings with fists, sticks or whips.
3. The baignoire [bathtub]. The person is held under water until he is practically suffocated or has even lost his consciousness.
4. The tuyau [water-pipe] method. A tube similar to a piece of gas piping is connected to a tap, or failing that a jerrican or other container. The victim’s wrists and ankles are tied with his arms and legs bent and he is so held that his elbows are slightly below his knees; a thick stick is then passed between the elbows and knees. Once he is thus trussed up, he is rolled backward on to an old tyre or inner tube where he is firmly wedged. His eyes are bandaged, his nose is stopped up, the tube thrust into his mouth, and water passed through it until he is practically suffocated or loses consciousness.
5. Electrical method. Two electrical leads are connected to the mains [wall socket] and their bare ends applied like red-hot needles to the most sensitive parts of the body such as armpits, neck, nostrils, anus, penis or feet. Alternatively the two wires are wound one round each ear or one round each ankle or one round a finger and the other round the penis. If mains electricity is not available, the field electrical supply is used or the batteries of the signals W/T [wireless telegraphy] sets.119
Wuillaume observed that, judging by its frequency, police favored the tuyau or pumping with water over all other tortures.120 Pumping, as I explained in chapter 5, produces the most intense pain visceral tissue can experience; this was why Inquisitional torturers valued it. In addition, pumping would not kill the victim, whereas live wires from the main power grid risked cardiac arrest.121 Torturers recommended, as the safest electrical procedure, many pricks “as if using a red-hot needle.”122 Police favored using the mains over magnetos. Unlike Vietnam, the gégène was a secondary electrotorture device in 1954.
Wuillaume’s list highlights clean tortures. Torturers explained to him how they prevented inadvertent death and left few marks. If there were bruises, the detention period was long enough for most to disappear.123 Magistrates saw only prisoners who were “in good shape.”124 Wuillaume observed that the gendarmes cared less about leaving marks. Publicity mattered in the cities, whereas scars on peasants did not matter.125
In the absence of scars, Wuillaume was persuaded that pumping was similar to being deprived of a cigarette. Wuillaume recommended that the government legalize this standard Inquisitional torture. “I am inclined to think that these procedures can be accepted and that, if used in the controlled manner described to me, they are no more brutal than deprivation of food, drink and tobacco, which are however accepted.”126
Wuillaume offered three arguments.127 The usual roughing up (passage à tabac) had no effect on Algerians, who lived extraordinarily hard lives. Besides, these techniques were far more civilized than sweating. In the spirit of Masuy, Wuillaume argued that properly used, these techniques “produce a shock which is more psychological than physical and therefore do not constitute excessive cruelty.”128 Lastly, police told him they would inevitably turn to them, whether they were legal or not. Prohibiting them would simply drive them underground. Better, then, to legalize and regulate these techniques than to deny them hypocritically.
In February 1957, General Massu and his paramilitary troops (“Paras”) assumed the policing of Algiers. Massu argued any means were acceptable in gathering information against terrorists. “Speed is critical,” he insisted, and he authorized torture.129 Massu had his staff bring a gégène to his office, where he tried it on himself.130 “ ‘Was there really torture?’ I can only reply in the affirmative, although it was never either institutionalised or codified. . . . I am not frightened of the word.”131
At Camp Jeanne d’Arc, instructions itemized what mattered:
(1) Torture must be clean. (2) It must not happen in the presence of young soldiers. (3) It must not happen in the presence of sadists. (4) It must be carried out in the presence of an officer or someone responsible. (5) It must be humane, that is to say, it must stop the moment the man has talked—and, above all, it must leave no trace.
With these conditions satisfied you have a right to water and electricity.132
The police favored pumping with water, though “from September, 1956, on certain questionings were carried on exclusively by electricity.”133 After 1957, military torturers favored the gégène (slang for génératrice).134
In June 1960, a magistrate produced a gégène in court in Paris. It was “a curiously shaped object, a narrow, cylindrical machine which, from a distance, looked rather like a small duplicator minus its revolving drum. It had a small winding-handle or crank, and wires attached to terminals on one side.”135 The term gégène encompassed both magnetos from field telephones (EE8) and the larger “Wolf,” which inflicted a different quality of pain.136 “Instead of the sharp and rapid spasms that seemed to tear my body in two, a greater pain now stretched all my muscles and racked them for a longer time.”137
Water and magnetos were nonlethal and clean. The gégène had a distinct advantage over water and other magnetos: it was intimately bound up in military practice. One might wonder what police were doing with a refrigerator magneto or why Paras spent so much time in the bathroom with the prisoner. Who would question why soldiers were carrying portable communications devices? Could there even be a modern army without the gégène?
Linkage is a simple principle: organize a situation such that one cannot do X (which is desirable) without also causing Y (which is not desired). Human and machines are woven together such that, to remove one element, one must undo the entire network. This raises the stakes. As a substitute is too costly and time-consuming, the status quo remains undisturbed.
The politicians were helpless. Paras used the gégène no matter how much politicians condemned it. By 1957, the gégène displaced pumping with water as the most frequent torture. In his famous torture memoir, Henri Alleg described five electrotorture sessions, far more than any other torture. He was choked with water only once.138 In the sensational Gangrene, four prisoners described electrotorture, two did exhaustion exercises, and only one was choked with water.139
The gégène was portable, painful, flexible, multifunctional, free (indeed, government supplied), widely available, familiar to operate and maintain, and easily excusable. It generated far less amperage than the mains, reducing the risk of death. It left few marks. Torture advocates argued to a credulous public that electrotorture was “nothing serious.”140 When Massu saw Alleg in front of the Palais de Justice in 1970, he compared Alleg’s “reassuring dynamism” with the scarred bodies of FLN victims. “Do the torments that he suffered count for much alongside the cutting off of the nose or of the lips, when it was not the penis, which had become the ritual present of the fellaghas to their recalcitrant ‘brothers’? Everyone knows that these bodily appendages don’t grow again.’ ”141
Nevertheless, magnetos required hands-on training. “The whole art consisted in handling it well.”142 In the absence of marks, soldiers sometimes misjudged how vulnerable the victim was, inadvertently killing her.143 “I heard S——say to the person who was working the magneto: “do it by little shocks: first you slow down then you start again.”144 Torturers had to sponge “with water in order . . . ‘to leave no traces and increase the pain.’ ”145 Other tricks of the trade included wrapping the body in a wet sheet, wrapping extremities in gloves or socks, and placing cardboard underneath the alligator clips.146 Electrotorture also hardened muscles and locked jaws, sometimes so severely victims bit through the electrified wire in their mouth.147 Torturers had to learn to loosen these.
“Torture by electricity,” wrote a French soldier, “first looked upon as useful, then as indispensable, has finally come to be considered matter-of-course, just as normal and proper as any other.”148 Henri Pouillot, who conducted a dozen torture sessions daily at Villa Sussini, calculated he subjected six hundred to a thousand individuals to magneto and water torture during his ten months of service (June 1961–March 1962).149
By 1960, the Paras had dramatically diversified the practice of electrotorture. Hafid Keramane, for example, offers a comprehensive list of tortures from this period. He identifies three broad classes of electrotorture.150
1. Magneto torture. Torturers strapped the victim down, soaked him, attached wires to his extremities, and cranked the magneto. Variants involved making the bound victim stand in a bucket of water or tying the victim to a metal ladder. The latter was applied mainly to young girls at the Villa Susini.
2. The electrified prod, typical of General Massu’s headquarters, PC El Biar. The bound victim sat in a pool of water. Wearing rubber gloves and wooden clogs, torturers applied a long, electrified metal stick. “This operation sometimes leaves traces for more than 20 days.”
3. The electric bath, bain électrique. Torturers placed the victim in a deep tub of water and then electrified it.
A fourth technique, especially favored by Sûreté in Paris, was the electric spit, passer à la broche. Torturers tied a victim’s hand to his feet, slipped a pole in the bend of the knees, and rested the pole between two tables. Then they electrified the pole with one cable and pricked the body with the other end.151 Leulliette mentions that his torture group also used “an electric wire attached to a floor plug. Its role is to ‘pleasure’ the most important suspects.”152
Keramane also enumerated the many kinds of water torture in this period:
1. Pumping. (a) Pouring water into the victim’s mouth with cups or funnels. (b) Pumping by means of a hose (tuyau) inserted into the mouth from the tap. Torturers then folded the victim’s legs against the bloated stomach, forcing water out of every orifice.
2. Choking with the bathtub, baignoire. (a) Plunging the head into the bathtub. (b) Putting young girls in a sack and plunging the sack into water. (c) Mounting the victim on the spit, head downward; the torturer swings the head into water and then withdraws it.
3. Choking on the sauccison, “the sausage.” Torturers used a pulley to hoist victims by the feet, much like meat at the butchers. Then they dropped the victim from a great height into the sea or pool.
The manual Guide provisoire de l’officier de renseignement (1961) also defines three types of water torture: choking, pumping, and beating suspects with high-pressure jets.153
Keramane identified other tortures using fire, steel, and rope, but these left marks, perhaps not incriminating ones, but marks nonetheless.154 Then Paras had to imprison those tortured long enough “for the marks to clear up.”155 Or they had to kill them surreptitiously: “They used to ask for volunteers to finish off the guys who had been tortured (there are no marks left that way and so no danger of a witch hunt later.”156 The accepted figure for “disappearances” during the Battle of Algiers alone is three thousand individuals.157 Paras also knew how to use clubs to beat a suspect senseless without leaving marks.158 But all this involved work. Electricity was easier and had, “despite all its horror, the advantage that its traces disappear if one takes the necessary care.”159
Prisoners resisted stealth torture by tracking their wounds. Of course, torture victims have always authenticated their claims by describing their wounds, usually long broad scars made by whips, large burns, or notches cut out of the flesh. Algerian prisoners had to document smaller, transitory marks: scabs, numbness, and burns of uncertain origin.160 Often specialists disagreed what these marks indicated.161 Prisoners had to struggle to ensure their suffering would not go unacknowledged. Recording wounds, showing them to others, keeping the blood on the surface, being unclean, these became acts of resistance.
“Take your handkerchief and clean up the blood—I don’t want to see it. . . .
Salaud, go and wash again. You did it on purpose. Your chest is still covered with blood.“
And, in fact, I had done it on purpose, not being in any hurry to go back and be tortured.162
The French government practiced torture, but France was not Nazi Germany. Its democratic character extended even to French torturers. They were always mindful of adverse publicity, favoring clean tortures. In a period cartoon, a French Para choked a suspect in a soapy bathtub. Next to him was a box of “Peace” detergent, advertised as “Great for Washing!”163 Algerian torture was clean. Like shampoo, it disappeared down the drain. When asked to define torture forty years later, the French right-wing politician Jean Marie Le Pen (who was an officer during Battle of Algiers) stated torture was “a series of violent acts that cause physical injury to individuals, actions that destroy the personality and leave traces. Police and military interrogations do not fit this definition of torture.”164 Torture was Soviet brainwashing or what the Nazis did, but not what French paratroopers did, for they aimed neither to change personalities nor leave traces. Whatever Massu’s faults, and he had many, at least he was never afraid of the word torture or of recognizing what it was the Paras did.
The image of Nazi torture played a multifaceted role in debates about the war. For opponents of the war, torture was a “Nazi virus.”165 The government bridled at the “scandalous comparison” to the Gestapo.166 But even Massu’s Paras embraced the Gestapo’s disciplinary reputation, sometimes to invoke fear (“This is the Gestapo here!”) and sometimes with regret (“them at least, they knew how to do it”).167 Older interrogators noted the irony. “I was tortured by the Nazis; now I do it myself.”168 Some took the lesson of the experience of the camps in a different direction. Paul Teitgin, the police prefect of an Algerian prefecture and a former prisoner at Dachau, resigned in protest in 1957.169 Gaston Gosselin, a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Justice and another Dachau internee, leaked the devastating Red Cross report on torture in Algeria in 1960.170 But they were the rare exception.
“Gestapo!” was not simply an accusation. It was also a historical thesis: the reductio ad Hitlerum, it all began with Hitler. “Many of the methods used in Algeria during the 1950s and early 1960s were similar if not identical to those alleged against the Gestapo.”171
On the contrary, the two principal Algerian techniques, pumping stomachs with water and magneto torture, were uncommon Gestapo practices. They were, however, characteristic of other national policing traditions: American, French, and Japanese.
The history of torture rarely offers the simplicity of a reductio. Which police first devised portable electric instruments with low amperage for interrogation? That honor goes either to the American police (1920s), the Japanese in Korea (1931), or the French in Indochina (1931). Which state institutionalized electro-torture first? Either the Japanese or the French in their Asian colonies. Which state first adopted clean electrotorture to avoid public scrutiny? The first stealthy electrotorturers were either the American police in the South (for the modified chair), the French Sûreté in Saigon (for the magneto), or the Argentine police in Buenos Aires in 1935 (for the picana eléctrica). These police valued the façade of democratic rule of law.
Those who remembered torture before the war knew there was more to modern torture than Nazis. In 1948, the unsympathetic judge of Cavailhié’s trial knew his history better than most. “Mr. Cavailhié has spoken of grave matters: he has spoken of torture by electric current. The first time I heard of others speak of this, it was in Spain.”172 The judge remembered the Spanish chair, but even he no longer remembered the magneto from Indochina.
Those who came later could not resist the accusation, “Nazi!” Jean-Paul Sartre introduced Alleg’s Algerian torture memoirs by invoking the Gestapo in the first sentence. “In 1943, in the Rue Lauriston (the Gestapo headquarters in Paris) Frenchmen were screaming in agony and pain: all France could hear them.”173 The German Gestapo was headquartered at 72 Ave. Foch, but no doubt a convenient error. Rue Lauriston was the headquarters of Henri Lafont, the most notorious of the French auxiliaries.
Vidal-Naquet, the finest scholar of the Algerian war, understood that reducing torture to Hitler was “hardly the way to approach the problem.”174 He had read Jacques Chégaray’s and Andrée Viollis’s accounts of Vietnam. He knew that when evil came to visit, it did not always do so dressed in jackboots. Too often, it had a degree from Paris and invited you out for beer.