Sharples on Goldensohn, 'The Nuremberg Interviews'

H-German Sharples on Goldensohn, 'The Nuremberg Interviews'

Review published on Sunday, May 1, 2005

Leon Goldensohn. The Nuremberg Interviews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. xxxi + 490 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-375-41469-5.

Reviewed by Caroline Sharples (Department of History, University of Southampton) Published on H-German (May, 2005)

Between November 22, 1945, and August 31, 1946, the first major prosecution of Nazi personnel took place before an international tribunal in Nuremberg. Twenty-two defendants faced charges relating to war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity, twelve of whom were subsequently sentenced to death by hanging. Much has been written on the organization, course, results, and legacy of these proceedings over the years, while recently the accused themselves have increasingly become the subject of scholarly investigations. In 2001, Richard Overy published transcripts of the Allies' original interrogations of the Nazi prisoners, recorded in the presence of both a uniformed officer and court stenographer.[1] Now Robert Gellately's latest work goes a stage further, providing us with a unique behind-the-scenes look at these events, enabling us to peek into the cells, and minds, of the defendants through a series of never before published interviews with some of the most notorious names of the Third Reich.

Leon Goldensohn was a thirty-four-year-old American physician and psychiatrist when he came to Nuremberg in January 1946, some six weeks into the trial. Goldensohn was charged with monitoring the mental health of the defendants, and those former Nazis now appearing as witnesses for both the defense and prosecution. Over the next seven months, he made frequent visits to his subjects, compiling comprehensive notes on their conversations. Goldensohn used these sessions to question them about their personal lives, their original attraction to National Socialism and relationships with Hitler, and their responses to the Holocaust. The subjects were, for the most part, willing to speak to him, apparently enjoying the chance to set out their version of recent events and to elaborate on their own world-views. The interviews also became an opportunity for the prisoners to rehearse their own defense in preparation for their court appearance, not least because Goldensohn regularly assumed the role of cross-examiner to take issue with some of their statements.

The Nuremberg Interviews serves up a total of nineteen defendant and fourteen witness interviews. Each is prefaced with a photograph of the subject, together with a concise biography summarizing the individual's date of birth, role in the Nazi regime and postwar fate, thereby enabling any readers unfamiliar with the personnel of the Third Reich to keep track of exactly who was who. Gellately himself generally remains unobtrusive in his role as editor, outlining the bare facts of the trial and how the Allies came to establish the tribunal in his introduction, while placing any factual corrections to the interviews or additional details in the endnotes. There is also none of the thematic structuring that characterized Overy's work on the official interrogations. Instead the reader is left to pursue any particular point of interest, be it comments on Hitler's personality or the influence of Goebbels, through the extensive index. The defendants are left to speak, one by one, for themselves with just the occasional analytical comment from Goldensohn on their motivation and self-image.

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Sharples on Goldensohn, 'The Nuremberg Interviews'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/44190/sharples-goldensohn-nuremberg-interviews Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German

Goldensohn himself is also not without interest. Gellately acknowledges that Goldensohn had a strong interest in the "pathology" of the defendants and through the course of these interviews, we see him trying to delve deep into their psyches, attempting to establish what may have induced their attraction to National Socialism and their willingness to participate in, or at least turn a blind eye to, the mass murder of the Jews and other minorities. In this way, Goldensohn's interviews tell us almost as much about postwar Allied attitudes to the Nazis as the mentalities of the defendants themselves. Goldensohn is preoccupied with their private lives, encouraging them to speak about their childhood and family relationships in order to identify whether the crucial factor might lie in their early development. Similarly, he questions his subjects as to whether they had known any sadistic types among their colleagues, and quizzes several witnesses about their sexual proclivities. At the same time, though, the interviewees are keen for Goldensohn to acknowledge their normality. Former chief of the Reich Security Main Office Ernst Kaltenbrunner recognizes how the public are now demonizing him and regularly refers to himself sarcastically as the "archcriminal of them all," inviting Goldensohn to reassure him otherwise (p. 150).

Goldensohn's interest in his subjects' personal lives, though, only serves to underline what Hannah Arendt famously termed "the banality of evil." Most of those questioned were well-educated, religious, happily married men who doted on their children. Many stress their appreciation for the finer things in life in an effort to present themselves as cultured, sensitive individuals. The piano- playing former Economics Minister Walther Funk even goes so far to suggest "if I were to play the Pathétique or the Moonlight Sonata for the high judges, they would let me off" (p. 82). Goldensohn, meanwhile, sometimes seems disappointed at discovering the sheer "ordinariness" of his subjects, noting that witness Rudolf Mildner "could be a policeman anywhere" (p. 367).

How far can these testimonies really get us into the mindsets of the Nazi perpetrators? While the flyleaf to this book hails the interviews as "candid", it is essential to remember, as Gellately emphasizes in his introduction, that these men were on trial for their lives at this time and consequently sought to conceal the extent of their involvement in the Nazi regime. No one, it seemed, had known about the systematic extermination of the Jews, nor had anyone ever harbored anti- Semitic opinions. Indeed, one of the tropes of these testimonies is a continual affirmation of having had Jewish friends or having intervened to save Jewish lives. No one had read Alfred Rosenberg's book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century beyond the first chapter, while at the other end of the Nazi cultural spectrum, none of those interviewed had ever purchased a copy of the rabidly anti-Semitic journal, Der Stürmer. The latter's editor, Julius Streicher is dismissed by Göring as "abnormal" (p. 109). Meanwhile, Otto Ohlendorff, the former head of the Einsatzgruppen, is particularly brazen as he refutes any notion of his having participated in the mass shootings of European Jews, arguing the distinction between giving orders and firing the actual bullets: "I didn't shoot women. I merely supervised" (p. 392).

Each defendant thus seeks to distance himself from the crimes of the Third Reich and present himself instead as a mere victim of fate, drawn accidentally into a web of military aggression, racism, and mass murder. Goldensohn challenges such tactics, asking why, if they were so shocked by what was happening, they did not just resign. In response, he receives the excuse of having to follow orders, the notion that to resign in wartime was tantamount to treason and, from Funk, the claim that the economist was serving a higher obligation to Germany itself (p. 87). There are also attempts to relativize the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, with several references to the civilians killed

"[I]f a people is engaged in a fight for life or death and if the leaders think that they can win the war by importing slave labor--then it was correct. On the other hand, things did happen which were not absolutely necessary. I mean things done by the Allies ... Old historical towns like Rothenburg and many other towns where no armaments were made were bombed mercilessly ... There are many instances of barbarity and cruelty on the part of the Allies which I could tell you" (p. 262).

The blame for all the crimes is placed firmly on those leading Nazis who were then known to be either dead or missing: Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Bormann. Hitler himself is alternately portrayed throughout these interviews as being a strong dictator who betrayed the German people with his megalomania (Fritzsche, p. 71), or as someone open to manipulation by the more radical elements in his party (Göring, p. 114). The competitive nature of the Third Reich is accentuated in these interviews, with subjects describing how their spheres of power and influence were steadily eroded by rivals. Göring recalls his struggles against Goebbels and Himmler, while Funk notes his competition from Göring. Dissension between different factions remains during the trial, with Göring feigning illness so as to avoid having to hear Baldur von Schirach give a contrary version of Hitler's role in the orchestration of the Holocaust.

Gellately takes pains to note in his introduction that he has not attempted to correct the "lies" told by the subjects. It is a wise move, for it is precisely in these misleading interpretations of the recent past that we can see how these men struggled to extract themselves from the charges before them. At the same time, their very language flies in the face of their calculated objectives, regularly revealing a lingering anti-Semitism and adherence to Nazi ideology. Streicher delivers his continued conviction in anti-Jewish ideas in cold, matter-of-fact descriptions, while Göring avows that the killing of women and children (but not adult male Jews) was "unsportsmanlike" (p. 132). Similarly, the euphemisms employed by the former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, provide some of the most shocking moments in the whole collection, as he describes the deliberately misleading signs erected nearby the gas chambers: "that was in order to give the people the impression that they would merely receive a bath or be disinfected, in order not to have any technical difficulty in the extermination processes" (p. 302). Throughout the book, these men remain arrogant and defiant. That there is little sense of guilt, shame, or responsibility expressed over these pages adds to the chilling impression being created of the accused. Finally published almost sixty years after their conception, Goldensohn's interviews provide a detailed and disturbing insight into the minds of the Nuremberg defendants that complements existing historical works on some of the highest ranking Nazi figures. Gellately's collection is sure to prove a valuable source for anyone interested in perpetrator mentalities and the internal dynamics of the National Socialist state.

Note

[1]. Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (London: Penguin Press, 2001).

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