| The
Nuremberg Interviews reveals the chilling innermost thoughts
of the former Nazi officials under indictment at the famous
postwar trial. The architects of one of history’s greatest
atrocities speak out about their lives, their careers in the
Nazi Party, and their views on the Holocaust. Their reflections
are recorded in a set of interviews conducted by a U.S. Army
psychiatrist. Dr. Leon Goldensohn was entrusted with monitoring
the mental health of the two dozen German leaders charged
with carrying out genocide, as well as that of many of the
defense and prosecution witnesses. These recorded conversations
have gone largely unexamined for more than fifty years.
Now, Robert Gellately
— one of the premier historians of Nazi Germany —
has transcribed, edited, and annotated the interviews, and
makes them available to the public for the first time in this
volume.
Here are interviews
with the highest-ranking Nazi officials in the Nuremberg jails,
including Hans Frank, Hermann Goering, Ernst Kaltenbrunner,
and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Here, too, are interviews with
the lesser-known officials who were, nonetheless, essential
to the workings of the Third Reich. Goldensohn was a particularly
astute interviewer, his training as a psychiatrist leading
him to probe the motives, the rationales, and the skewing
of morality that allowed these men to enact an unfathomable
evil. Candid and often shockingly truthful, these interviews
are deeply disturbing in their illumination of an ideology
gone mad.
Each interview
is annotated with biographical information that places the
man and his actions in their historical context. These interviews
are a profoundly important addition to our understanding of
the Nazi mind and mission.
Dr. Leon Goldensohn was an American physician
and psychiatrist who joined the U.S. Army in 1943 and was
posted to France and Germany. He died in 1961.
Robert
Gellately is the Earl Ray Beck Professor of History
at Florida State University and the author of The Gestapo
and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933_1945
and Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany.
He lives in Tallahassee, Florida. |
