Jurjen
A super interesting read, and although it's a reread, when I first read it 9-10 years ago I didn't read every interview. I will say that you can tell that the book is constructed by someone other than Leon Goldensohn himself based on his notes. It's largely descriptive, and often lacks the psychological analysis you'd expect of a psychologist.
Most defendants and witnesses can be put into three categories:
1. The outrageously cynical, able but unwilling to do introspection, and intuitively evil ones: (think Himmler and Goebbels). The best examples are Ohlendorf (kommando einsatzgruppe D) and Streicher (head of the infamous anti-semitic newspaper Der Stürmer). The types you'd recognise to be evil people the first time you spoke with them.
2. The utterly pathetic shells of human beings, complete worms. Not just unwilling to do introspection, literally being psychologically unable to do so: not a really famous analogy, as these types were generally not as well known. Funk (minister of economics) and Frank (hitler’s lawyer, governor of Poland) are good examples of this.
3. The boring, dull but intelligent and generally competent yes-men. This is a category that falls in line with Arendt's writing on Eichmann. I have my issues with her characterisation of Eichmann and that study's approach (she was only at his trial for like 5 days)--eichmann absolutely *was* ideologically driven and an emotionally passionate anti-semite through and through. This category describes most of the army high command–careerist wehrmacht generals and field marshals–but also many ministers like Frick (minister of interior), Sauckel (minister of labour) as well as Hoess (kommandant of Auschwitz). This class was probably more instrumental to the atrocities than the more obviously evil ones.
There's outliers. Mannstein was laser focused on creating the clean wehrmacht myth as soon as he was captured, employing half the field marshals of the reich to do so. Göring is your archetypical melodramatic, charismatic, larger than life charlatan strong man. Speer was a conniving rat (and not interested at all in talking with the psychologists, which is curious considering how “guilty” he felt). Hess, I still can't tell how much of his amnesia he was faking (it started and stopped 3 or 4 times lol), and Ribbentrop was probably Hitler's biggest dickrider of all of them. Schacht was aggravating to read because of how indignant he was about being charged. I'm not convinced he should have been declared not guilty. Oswald Pohl might have been the most delusional man in human history (“labourers in Auschwitz enjoyed the same working standards as German workers”). Alternatively, he might have been lying. He was probably the biggest liar of the lot. Hearing him describe the idyllic working environment in concentration camps and factories was infuriating, especially as my own grandpa was kidnapped by the SS, and made a slave labourer in Lübeck for 2 years before he was able to escape in 1944.
Fritzsche is funny, because literally no one else at the trial knew who the fuck he was, and they were all wondering why they selected him for Nuremberg (he was chosen as a stand-in for Goebbels). All of these men were deeply evil, though if I was forced to pick one to be the least evil, it'd be Ewald von Kleist (panzer general taken out of retirement, later field marshal)
*Every* single defendant repeated the same refrain: 1) I didn't know of what was going on in the camps. No one knew what other departments were doing, as per Hitler's directives. 2) I share zero responsibility for the atrocities I directly ordered, because I myself was ordered by Hitler (and Germans simply must obey orders, didn't you know that?). 3) I am not an anti-semite, nor evil. The real evil ones were Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Bormann and Hitler (incidentally, the 5 big names not at the trials… what a coincidence). I was fooled like everyone else. Also, jews didn't *really* face persecution until 1942 (“the pogroms of 1938? What are those? Never heard of them. Also the Nuremberg laws were good and fair”). Cowards, all of them.
A very good, but often aggravating read. Fuck Nuremberg (2025) starring Rami Malek, you are a trash movie. Fucked up how you slandered Leon Goldensohn in it.
A super interesting read, and although it's a reread, when I first read it 9-10 years ago I didn't read every interview. I will say that you can tell that the book is constructed by someone other than Leon Goldensohn himself based on his notes. It's largely descriptive, and often lacks the psychological analysis you'd expect of a psychologist.
Most defendants and witnesses can be put into three categories:
1. The outrageously cynical, able but unwilling to do introspection, and intuitively evil ones: (think Himmler and Goebbels). The best examples are Ohlendorf (kommando einsatzgruppe D) and Streicher (head of the infamous anti-semitic newspaper Der Stürmer). The types you'd recognise to be evil people the first time you spoke with them.
2. The utterly pathetic shells of human beings, complete worms. Not just unwilling to do introspection, literally being psychologically unable to do so: not a really famous analogy, as these types were generally not as well known. Funk (minister of economics) and Frank (hitler’s lawyer, governor of Poland) are good examples of this.
3. The boring, dull but intelligent and generally competent yes-men. This is a category that falls in line with Arendt's writing on Eichmann. I have my issues with her characterisation of Eichmann and that study's approach (she was only at his trial for like 5 days)--eichmann absolutely *was* ideologically driven and an emotionally passionate anti-semite through and through. This category describes most of the army high command–careerist wehrmacht generals and field marshals–but also many ministers like Frick (minister of interior), Sauckel (minister of labour) as well as Hoess (kommandant of Auschwitz). This class was probably more instrumental to the atrocities than the more obviously evil ones.
There's outliers. Mannstein was laser focused on creating the clean wehrmacht myth as soon as he was captured, employing half the field marshals of the reich to do so. Göring is your archetypical melodramatic, charismatic, larger than life charlatan strong man. Speer was a conniving rat (and not interested at all in talking with the psychologists, which is curious considering how “guilty” he felt). Hess, I still can't tell how much of his amnesia he was faking (it started and stopped 3 or 4 times lol), and Ribbentrop was probably Hitler's biggest dickrider of all of them. Schacht was aggravating to read because of how indignant he was about being charged. I'm not convinced he should have been declared not guilty. Oswald Pohl might have been the most delusional man in human history (“labourers in Auschwitz enjoyed the same working standards as German workers”). Alternatively, he might have been lying. He was probably the biggest liar of the lot. Hearing him describe the idyllic working environment in concentration camps and factories was infuriating, especially as my own grandpa was kidnapped by the SS, and made a slave labourer in Lübeck for 2 years before he was able to escape in 1944.
Fritzsche is funny, because literally no one else at the trial knew who the fuck he was, and they were all wondering why they selected him for Nuremberg (he was chosen as a stand-in for Goebbels). All of these men were deeply evil, though if I was forced to pick one to be the least evil, it'd be Ewald von Kleist (panzer general taken out of retirement, later field marshal)
*Every* single defendant repeated the same refrain: 1) I didn't know of what was going on in the camps. No one knew what other departments were doing, as per Hitler's directives. 2) I share zero responsibility for the atrocities I directly ordered, because I myself was ordered by Hitler (and Germans simply must obey orders, didn't you know that?). 3) I am not an anti-semite, nor evil. The real evil ones were Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Bormann and Hitler (incidentally, the 5 big names not at the trials… what a coincidence). I was fooled like everyone else. Also, jews didn't *really* face persecution until 1942 (“the pogroms of 1938? What are those? Never heard of them. Also the Nuremberg laws were good and fair”). Cowards, all of them.
A very good, but often aggravating read. Fuck Nuremberg (2025) starring Rami Malek, you are a trash movie. Fucked up how you slandered Leon Goldensohn in it.