The Nuremberg Interviews (3 page)

The prosecution, on the other hand, had to prove there was a clear plan, with shared aims among the accused from early on in the regime. They set out to show that there was an intention from the very beginning to commit specific crimes; that included long-term planning not only for a war of aggression, but for specific events like the murder of the Jews. The prosecution ended up overstating the intentionality, just as the defense unduly played it down, the latter in order to paint a picture of administrative chaos, endless power struggles, and a system without a real leader. For the defense it was logical to insist that no one believed in
Nazi ideology or had read Hitler’s book, much less Alfred Rosenberg’s books.

To this day there continues to be significant controversy among historians about the nature and extent of Hitler’s role and his relations to the Nazi leaders. The picture now supported by many historians is more complex and blends elements from both prosecution and defense claims.
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However, the prosecution image of Alfred Rosenberg as the main Nazi “theoretician” or “philosopher” is without any merit whatever.

The International Military Tribunal responsible for trying the major war criminals was the product of long political and judicial debates. After a preliminary session in Berlin on October 18, 1945, the trials moved to the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, where the sessions ran from November 14. The main proceedings, comprising prosecution and defense presentations, lasted just over nine months, from November 22, 1945, to August 31, 1946. The trials were a massive undertaking. There were four judges and four prosecutors (with alternates), each with a team of his own, all of them drawn from the victorious powers — the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, along with France. The court met in 403 open sessions, heard a total of 166 witnesses, and worked through literally thousands of written affidavits and hundreds of thousands of documents.
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The trials were cumbersome and slow, not least because they were carried on in four languages and required enormous translation work just to record the testimony, the cross-examinations, the written submissions, and many documents. A sense of the scale of the trials can be gathered from the fact that the transcripts and only a selection of the documents entered as evidence were published (also in four languages) in forty-two large volumes.
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Charges were initially brought against twenty-four men deemed on various grounds to be major war criminals. These included Robert Ley, the head of the Labor Front, who committed suicide on October 24, 1945, before the trials began, and the industrialist Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, chosen by the Allies as “representative” of big business, who proved to be unfit. Included, in absentia, among the twenty-two defendants was Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary. On September 30 and October 1, 1946, the court delivered its judgments. Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death by hanging (Bormann in absentia, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Hermann Goering,
Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Julius Streicher). Of the remaining ten defendants, three were found not guilty (Hans Fritzsche, Franz von Papen, Hjalmar Schacht), three were sentenced to life imprisonment (Rudolf Hess, Walther Funk, Erich Raeder), two got twenty years’ imprisonment (Baldur von Schirach, Albert Speer), one was sentenced to fifteen years (Constantin von Neurath), and one to ten years (Karl Doenitz).

Immediately after sentencing, counsels for two men condemned to hang (Jodl and Keitel) requested that their clients be granted the dignity of a military death by shooting. Counsel for Raeder also requested that he be shot, in place of his sentence of life imprisonment. All three requests were denied. On October 16, 1946, all those condemned to death (with the exceptions of Bormann and Goering) were hanged. Reich Marshal Goering had managed to defy the court by committing suicide in his cell just before the scheduled execution.

After the United States government finally decided, toward the end of 1944 and into 1945, that trials were necessary and preferable to summary executions, the Americans took the leading role. They insisted almost immediately, with British support, on moving the venue outside the Soviet sector of occupied Germany, and at the end of June 1945 decided on Nuremberg. The city had been nearly obliterated during the war, but it still had facilities where the trials could be held.
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The occupying powers were very much drawn to the choice of Nuremberg. The city’s name was identified with the racist laws of September 1935, and beyond that it had hosted the annual Nazi Party rallies, when hundreds of thousands of people would fill the city and infuse it with wild enthusiasm for Hitler. Thus, holding the trials of the fallen Nazi leaders at Nuremberg had both political and symbolic value.

By September 1945 American prosecutors Robert H. Jackson and Thomas J. Dodd could call on a staff of two hundred. There were legal officers and experts of various kinds, as well as translators and stenographers. Jackson was by far the most active of the prosecutors, followed by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe of Great Britain. The British, however, had at most only thirty-four staffers and usually fewer, while the Soviet and French teams were smaller still.
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The Americans, therefore, tended to
dominate the proceedings in nearly every way, and not only because the trials were held in the American sector of Germany.

In addition to a medical staff, the Americans generally had a psychologist and a psychiatrist on duty during most of the proceedings. The first prison psychiatrist at Nuremberg was Major Douglas M. Kelley, who had previously served at a holding camp for important Nazi prisoners at Mondorf-les-Bains, in Luxembourg. Most of the Nuremberg defendants had been kept there before the trials, and it was not without a touch of victor irony that the camp became known among the Allies simply as “Ashcan.” It was run along spartan lines by the strict Colonel Burton C. Andrus, a man known to be a firm disciplinarian. Other Nazi bigwigs, notably Speer and Schacht, were kept in less stringent conditions at Kransberg Castle near Frankfurt am Main, a camp nicknamed “Dustbin.” All the leading Nazis were questioned either at Ashcan or Dustbin, and some of the information garnered from them has been preserved. Interesting selections of this material, much of it never used in the trials, have recently been published.
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Colonel Andrus and Major Kelley were sent from Ashcan to Nuremberg. Kelley stayed only for the first month of the trials, when he left and was replaced by Goldensohn.

Throughout the period of the incarceration, at Mondorf and later at Nuremberg, American guards communicated hardly at all with their prisoners, but maintained a permanent suicide watch. Initially, one guard was assigned to four cells, but after Robert Ley’s suicide in October 1945, Colonel Andrus had a guard posted at every cell. They had to check on the prisoners more or less continuously through tiny portholes in each cell door. Before prisoners returned to their very sparse cells they had to remove belts, suspenders, shoelaces, and so on — in short, anything that might be used to commit suicide. Guards were ordered to keep the head and hands of prisoners in view at all times, including when they tried to sleep (on their backs only) during the night. Prisoners were generally isolated from the outside world and not allowed newspapers. Their mail, even with family members, was censored, and they were allowed to move outside their cells only for meals, talks with their lawyers, and a daily exercise period. During those times the defendants colluded whenever possible, in order to plan their strategies against the prosecution. Guards generally did not communicate with the prisoners, even though Colonel Andrus, unbeknownst to them, had recruited some German-speaking GIs for guard duty. They were to report to him anything
they found suspicious or that might be useful in the trials. The prisoners were virtually cut off from human contact, except for their defense attorneys, so that it is not surprising they were willing to talk to the psychiatrists and psychologists who worked in the medical detachment of the 685th Internal Security Detachment (ISD) of the U.S. chief counsel in Nuremberg. The doctors had more or less free access at all times.

When Leon Goldensohn was posted to Nuremburg, he was thirty-four years old. Born on October 19, 1911, in New York City, he received a B.A. from Ohio State in 1932 and an M.D. from George Washington University School of Medicine in 1936. He trained in neurology at Montefiore Hospital in New York City and in psychiatry at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry. At the end of the war, Major Goldensohn was assigned to the 121st General Hospital in Nuremberg, and on January 3, 1946, to the 685th Internal Security Detachment. He served as prison psychiatrist until July 26, 1946 — which was close to the end of the defense hearings.

In the immediate wake of the defeat of Germany in the spring of 1945, and into the summer, when the International Military Tribunal was announced, there was enormous interest in “what made those Nazis tick.”
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Kelley referred to the “psychological treasure” he and psychologist Gustave Gilbert had at their fingertips, and initially the plan was to publish a Kelley-Gilbert book.
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Captain Gilbert was an American intelligence officer. He was fluent in German and managed to get an assignment as translator for Major Kelley. He was also a trained psychologist and soon convinced Colonel Andrus to appoint him “official” prison psychologist. Gilbert was apparently of one mind with Kelley, and saw the war criminals “as available to him as laboratory mice.”
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In addition to reporters, psychiatrists and psychologists from around the world tried to gain access to the prisoners. Goldensohn, like Kelley and Gilbert, likely became the envy of his professional peers and the many reporters, all eager to interview the defendants.
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The plan for the Kelley-Gilbert book never came to fruition. But Kelley published his own book in 1947. It remains useful in a limited way, though it is now quite dated.
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His former coworker Gilbert also published a book, which appeared several months after Kelley’s. It took the format of a diary, and with it readers can follow the course of the trial from the author’s experiences and perspective.
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Goldensohn too had intended to write a book. He never wrote it, but
his notes survived. Some of these transcripts were typed up not long after the interviews were held. Any plans for a book came to a halt when the doctor died prematurely at age fifty from a coronary heart attack, on October 24, 1961. But a few small notebooks were typed up later under the supervision of Dr. Goldensohn’s brother, Dr. Eli Goldensohn, who collated and organized all the original materials. What we have in this volume is an edited and abridged selection of some of Goldensohn’s interviews with nineteen defendants and fourteen witnesses.

We are indebted to Goldensohn for his conscientious note taking. Whereas psychologist Gilbert would jot down his impressions at the end of the day, and in that sense relied more on his memory to reconstruct conversations and impressions, psychiatrist Goldensohn insisted on taking detailed notes. Although he spoke little German himself, some of his interviewees knew English and he was able to converse freely with them. However, in his formal interviews he wanted to have the defendants and witnesses express themselves fully in their own language, and so he strongly preferred to employ the services of Howard H. Triest, a translator. He duly recorded both his questions and the defendants’ answers, writing these down as he went.

Gilbert’s fluency in German would have facilitated conversation with the prisoners, most of whom were talkative and eager for human contact. And yet some prisoners felt that Gilbert hated them, certainly that he entertained dark thoughts about them. One said he taunted them — for example, with pictures of hanged Nazi war criminals in
Stars and Stripes
, assuring them they were going to get the same treatment. The prisoners generally seemed to have had a kindlier attitude toward Goldensohn, whom they considered more detached and professional. On some occasions he and Gilbert made their rounds together, with Gilbert acting as translator.

Goldensohn shared the belief of the times in the “pathology” of the leading Nazis and, though gentle in his approach, was especially interested in trying to account for their “depravities.” There was never any pretense of doctor-patient confidentiality, and none was apparently expected by the prisoners. Not all of them were happy with this situation, but the majority seemed resigned to the fact that they were “material” for various book projects. Today, with our concerns about privacy, it might seem troubling that a medical doctor would openly and repeatedly ask one prisoner what he thought of another. On occasion an interviewee
might ask Goldensohn to keep something in confidence, but he was not inclined to give any such assurance. Like the other doctors on the American team, Goldensohn saw the Nazi prisoners as subjects to be studied, and rather secondarily, if at all, as patients. He explicitly referred in his interview notes to the “subjects” of his investigations. The prisoners, on the other hand, used their conversations with the doctors as an opportunity to air statements or approaches they would soon use in their defense before the tribunal. Goldensohn was certainly aware of that and even encouraged it. In conversation with the Americans, the defendants rarely let their guard down, especially when it came to confessing to crimes as charged, because they worried that what they said could be used against them in court. Prisoners who resented these professionals accused them of being more interested in collecting material for the books they were all writing than in providing care.
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Goldensohn saw the defendants almost every day, but what sets his record apart from the others is his persistent effort to hold formal and often extended interviews. He recorded everything he could of psychiatric and human interest. We can read what the accused and the witnesses had to say about the role of a given defendant in certain specific events, all the way down to details about his family and medical history. Goldensohn asked them what they thought of certain leaders, like Hitler, and even how they regarded one another and their crimes, as well as how they performed before the tribunal on any given day. He followed up with many questions, sometimes to the point of infuriating his subjects, but he kept on digging and digging. He claimed he did not want to cross-examine the defendants, but in fact during these one-on-one encounters, he sometimes did. He often went over a defendant’s testimony in court, noting, for example, parts of it that he did not find credible or difficult to understand. In some of these exchanges, Goldensohn was harder to satisfy than the prosecutor in the court.