Stosowanie narkoanalizy przez polski kontrwywiad w latach 30. XX wieku
The use of narcoanalysis by Polish counterinelligence in the 1930s

Summary/Abstract: The initial idea to use narcoanalysis for investigation purposes originated soon after surgeons began using narcosis (sedation) to induce sleep before surgery. Perhaps the first suggestion to interrogate a patient under narcosis in a criminal case occurred in the case of murder of Benjamin Nathan in New York in 1879. In the 1920s, Dr Robert E. House, a physician from Texas, suggested to use scopolamine in criminal investigations. In the 1930s, the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory at Northwestern University in Chicago experimented with scopolamine, and considered the results „fairly satisfactory”. At that time, Calvin Goddard was the first to call scopolamine the „truth serum”. There is no proof in literature that any state services in the world routinely used narcoanalysis before the Second World War. Therefore, there are fair grounds to believe that its routine use by the Polish counterintelligence while interrogating people suspected of espionage in the 1930s was among the first such cases in the world. Beginning with 1935, the Second Department of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces used „injections weakening the will” of the interrogated: first morphine combined with pilocarpine, and later – scopolamine. The head of the Polish project to use narcoanalysis for „weakening the will” was Cpt. Ludwik Krzewiński M.D. The fact of using narcoanalysis was not disclosed to the courts, its results were not treated as an evidence, and were only used for operational purposes.

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