The Nuremberg Interviews

THE NUREMBERG INTERVIEWS: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses. By Leon Goldensohn. Edited by Robert Gellately. Knopf. 474 pp. $35

As every publisher knows—and as we were reminded during Holocaust denier David Irving’s audacious but ill-fated libel suit against his fellow historian Deborah Lipstadt—there can probably be no such thing as a surfeit of information about the Third Reich. Like Richard Overy’s Interrogations (2001), which synthesized the transcripts of interviews of captured German leaders, Leon Goldensohn’s fastidious record of his encounters with fallen potentates and functionaries offers a backstage glimpse of the Nuremberg trials.

A psychiatrist who rose to the rank of major in the U.S. Army, Goldensohn (1911-61) spent seven months of 1946 interviewing Nazi officials held as both defendants and witnesses at the Nuremberg trials, for purposes of monitoring their mental health. Although he never fulfilled his plan to write a book about the assignment, his notes and transcripts were collated after his death and subsequently came to the attention of Florida State University professor Robert Gellately, author of Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (2001).

The result is, essentially, a work in progress, which inevitably lacks the narrative flow and occasional melodramatic flourish of psychologist G. M. Gilbert’s Nuremberg Diary (1947). But Goldensohn remains an intriguing witness to history nonetheless. There may be a chilling doggedness to some of his techniques: Asking Rudolf Hoess, the former commandant of Auschwitz, if his wife was “a good cook” elicits no useful information. And like many an interlocutor at Nuremberg, Goldensohn is invariably confronted with long-winded evasions and self-justifications, particularly when he attempts to probe the inner workings of the Final Solution.

But his patience and persistence yield valuable insights, especially from the lowlier figures in the Nazi hierarchy. Indeed, the third of the book devoted to the men called as witnesses is the most intriguing. The loftily self-absorbed SS general Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski attempts to depict himself as an “incorruptible,” good Nazi. The fanatical Einsatzgruppe leader Otto Ohlendorf is so successful at convincing himself that he was a mere pawn that he resembles, in Goldensohn’s words, “a burned-out ghoul.”

In a curious way, there is an even more repellent quality to the portrait of Walter Schellenberg, the urbane intelligence official who seems capable of infinite adjustments to the moral calculus. If the VIPs in the other cells often seem less than human, Schellenberg is all too recognizable as the ambitious, quick- witted young man who always knows which way the wind is blowing. Though the monsters were hanged, Schellenberg’s spiritual descendants will always be with us.

—Clive Davis