Goldensohn, Leon. The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist's Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses.

• Author: Green, Harold M.
• Position: Book review

Goldensohn, Leon. The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist's Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses. Edited by Robert Gellately. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. xxix + 490 pages. Cloth, $35.00. (Paper edition: Vintage, 2005, $16.95.)

In his opening statement of November 21, 1945, at Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, seven months after Germany's surrender, Robert H. Jackson, chief of counsel for the United States, delivered the following stark and sobering assessment of the International Military Tribunal proceedings against the some twenty accused Nazi war criminals in the dock: "What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. They are living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power" (Jackson, The Niirnberg Case, 1947, p. 31). Nearly sixty years after the Nuremberg Trials, echoes of Germany's past come back to haunt us once again in this selection from Dr. Leon Goldensohn's remarkable series of thirty-three interviews which he conducted in an attempt to understand a mentality that wrought incalculable destruction and human suffering.

Goldensohn was a U.S. Army physician who, in 1946, replaced Major Douglas Kelley as psychiatrist at the Nuremberg prison. He was responsible for evaluating and maintaining the mental health of some of the most notorious Nazi leaders and their subordinates, many of whom were subsequently hanged. During the course of this assignment, which lasted seven months, Goldensohn faithfully recorded his conversations with the prisoners, preserving them in several notebooks. He had intended to publish this material, but the project came to an abrupt halt when Goldensohn suffered a fatal heart attack in 1961.

Goldensohn's interviews followed along the lines of psychologist G. M. Gilbert's Nuremberg Diary (1947), but differed in several important respects from this classic study, with the result being that Goldensohn's accounts were more accurate and comprehensive. First, whereas Gilbert never took notes while speaking to the prisoners, but reconstructed from memory the content of his conversations with them, usually at the end of the day, Goldensohn always took detailed notes as he spoke with the prisoners, often through an interpreter. Second, while the Gilbert study was limited to the major Nazi war criminals, Goldensohn also...