The Nuremberg Interviews

"This book is based on the notes of the psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn who was with the US Army at Nuremberg. I chose it because it typifies a literature that emerged immediately after the war at the international military tribunal in Germany. I wanted to highlight the role the “psy” professions – psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology – played at Nuremberg, which followed on from that earlier endeavour to profile Nazi leaders at the OSS. At Nuremberg there was a direct attempt to bring psychologists and clinicians face-to-face with the men who were standing trial. There was indeed something of a psychiatric lobby group campaigning for access to the prisoners, and suggesting that this was a unique opportunity to try to understand them. On one occasion they were termed “psychological treasure”. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Part of what my book is trying to show is how these clinicians believed that this endeavour to understand Nazism was a necessary ingredient in trying to eradicate or contain it – it wasn’t enough to defeat Nazism militarily but you had to go “inside it” to see what it was all about. Again, we need to recognise the methodologically problematic assumptions in such literature, but also to historicise it and to see what remains alive in it. It includes many cameo descriptions of these prisoners and their statements and conversations. One needs to read it alongside the works by other psychiatrists who interviewed the Nazi leaders – for instance, the US army psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who published his Nuremberg Diary . Goldensohn’s work shows the interaction of the psychiatrists and the prisoners – the latter start to feed them information, get absorbed in the process and participate in this construction of case material. So it’s not just the psychiatrist looking at the prisoners and how they behave in the courtroom, but entering into a conversation in which the prisoners contribute their own thoughts. What I’m trying to describe in my book is this interaction in making these “cases”. In similar ways, I examine how Rudolf Hess participates in the construction of his own psychiatric story. Some of the émigré Nazi or ex-Nazi figures that talked to Walter Langer about Hitler are also feeding in information and interpretations, which then in turn influences the way in which the Allies understand the Nazi mind. The question is: Who’s putting what into whom?"