ABSTRACT
Leonard Ingrams, a Foreign Office official who had worked during the war for the Ministry of Economic Warfare was told before his trip to ASHCAN in mid-June, that whatever the German prisoners said on almost any subject would be 'of great historical interest and may be instructive for the future'. This view highlighted a profound ambiguity behind much of the interrogation programme directed at the major German war criminals in the eight months between defeat and the opening of the International Military Tribunal on 20 November 1945. On the one hand, those defined as major war criminals were seen as the key to a fuller understanding of how the Hitler dictatorship functioned and to what end; other, the interrogations were part of a criminal investigation. The experience differed fundamentally from other post-war interrogation regimes, which were seldom public, were run by personnel used to interrogation in forms brutal, and were targeted at what were defined as specific security threats.
