ABSTRACT
The legal framework for the investigative interviewing of suspects in Germany is designed to enable the police to obtain relevant information on the crime under investigation while, at the same time, allowing suspects to defend themselves from any accusations made against them. This confronts police officers with the difficult task of establishing an interview setting that will ensure that suspects can exercise their procedural rights while simultaneously enabling the police to collect evidence against them (Mohr et al., 2006). The legal requirements for this mainly describe what police officers have to avoid rather than specifically explaining how they should conduct these interviews. Nevertheless, police officers are expected to follow an information-gathering interview approach while motivating suspects to give statements and make confessions without, however, eliciting false confessions. Little is known about how this is done in practice, because research in this area in Germany is limited.
