Product Description

"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 defence and prosecution witnesses. These recorded conversations have gone largely unexamined for more than fifty years. Here are interviews with some of the highest-ranking Nazi officials in the Nuremberg jails, including Hans Frank, Hermann Goering, Ernest Kaltenbrunner, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Here, too, are interviews with 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 and footnotes that place the man and his actions in their historical context and are a profoundly important addition to our understanding of the Nazi mind and mission.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #154441 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From the Publisher
A Pimlico Original which provides remarkable and unique insights into the Nazi mentality and the nature of evil

About the Author
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 is currently writing a book about Hitler and Stalin for Cape/Pimlico. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Customer Reviews

Unique insight but with minor limitations
This book contains unique information collected through interviews with the Nuremberg trial defendants and some of the witnesses by the prison psychiatrist. A good general introduction to the history of the trials is given and then each individual is covered in a separate chapter.

Unfortunately, the list of defendants covered is not complete - no Seyss-Inquart or Raeder - and these omissions are not explained, nor is the single page devoted to Speer. One possible explanation for this might be due to missing notes, as the book was compiled by a historian years after the trials had finished (?). Each set of interviews also contained too much information about the subject's childhood and family which does not interest me.

The author makes clear that much of the material needs to be read with caution, given that those imparting the information were potentially facing the gallows, i.e. not objective. However, they are still their own words, assuming accurate transcription, and this consideration does not apply to the same degree with the witnesses.

I found the witness section the most interesting because of the high profile interviewees included and the more candid nature of the testimony. As alluded to above, this was partly due to the fact that they were facing no or lesser charges or, alternatively, were certain to hang whatever (e.g. Hoess). This didn't stop one or two of the SS lying through their teeth, however. The final chapter covering Hitler's interpreter and his opinions on foreign affairs makes excellent reading. Others include: Pohl, Schellenberg, Kesselring, Sepp Dietrich, von Manstein of a total of 14.

Writing this review has focused my attention on how much I liked this, despite some minor grumbles - highly recommended for those interested in the trials or the Nazi regime.

Chilling in its banality - a surprising primary source
The most frightening thing about these interviews is that they expose how utterly banal the major players in Nazi Germany during World War II actually were. This series of interviews, conducted with defendants and witnesses during the Nuremberg Trials and recorded faithfully by Leon Goldensohn, make for compelling reading. But the difficulty is - you don't know quite why you so want to continue. Perhaps you are looking for a hint of the larger-than-life monster in each character? Perhaps you are hoping for remorse, acceptance of responsibility, truth? But you don't find it in these words. What you find is a picture of fear, inhumanity in many cases, weakness, bombast and a birds-eye view tainted by some very different personalities.

A valuable first hand account for any students of Twentieth Century History.

Chilling
As a young person who cannot get to grips with what happened during the Holocaust, i felt that reading this book would help me to understand how normal men could commit such unspeakable evil.

I started the book expecting to come across the individual testimonies of monsters and devils but as i got through the book it became clear that this wasnt the case.

The most frightening thing is most of the the defendants are shockingly normal. Its easy to look at the old newsreels of them sitting in the dock at Nuremberg and judge all of them as evil, but this book reveals that some of them were more evil than others.

This book shows us that the political hierarchy of Nazi germany was not only made up of evil fanatics i.e Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Julius Streicher and Hermann Goering, but was also made up of weak insecure characters who found themselves in so deep that they went along with whatever Hitler wanted. In this category i would place Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Walther Funk and Hjalmar Schact. However they all deny any knowledge of atrocities and are quick to stress they were only following orders.

Most shocking is the complete lack of remorse from many of the defendants for the 11 million innocent people which died at their hands. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the Holocaust and Nazi Germany in general. Id also suggest reading Gustave Gilberts Nuremberg Diary as he was the other US psychiatrist working alongside Leon Goldensohn. He seems to make more of his own observations on the defendants characters where as Goldensohn only touches on this a little.

Im also reading Vivien Spitz book on the Nazi Doctors Trial and i can tell you now, if you think the major war criminals were evil they had absolutley NOTHING on the Nazi Doctors.