The Nuremberg Interviews (4 page)

Goldensohn generally did not record casual conversations, only his formal interviews through the medium of a translator. The note taking and translation meant that the defendants rarely got carried away. Instead, they had plenty of time to think rationally about how to answer Goldensohn’s questions, and perhaps that was precisely what the doctor wanted.

A crucial point to keep in mind is that each of the accused was on trial for his life. Like anyone indicted on serious crimes, these men were
determined to exculpate themselves. (In at least one important philosophical tradition, every person, no matter how heinous his crimes, reserves a natural right to fight for his life.) For most of the defendants, who were essentially deprived of most legal rights (certainly as these are commonly understood under the United States Constitution), the note taking of Goldensohn must have set off alarm bells. The accused were not protected against self-incrimination, nor were their lawyers present, and it was not unreasonable for them to assume that they might end up in court being faced by their very own words as noted by Dr. Goldensohn. That never happened, but at the very least we have to keep in mind that the defendants would have been uncertain about the status of these interviews, which were not protected by doctor-patient confidentiality. Goldensohn may have regarded himself as a doctor and a scientist first, but from the point of view of any of the accused, he was one of the victors, while they were the vanquished, and so they had to treat him as if he were a member of the prosecution’s team. He assured them they had nothing to worry about and that they could talk freely, but he could not give them any real basis for believing him.

The defendants generally tried to get away with everything they could, and as one of them suggested, they sometimes succeeded. That claim was made by Hitler’s architect Speer, often regarded as the shrewdest observer among the defendants. He was not pleased at the end of the trial when he saw that Fritzsche, Papen, and Schacht got off, while he was given twenty years. He noted in his diary that their “lies, smokescreens, and dissembling statements had paid off after all.” Speer resented not being exonerated by the court, but it was certainly not because he had failed to lie or to cover up the truth.
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Speer and no doubt other defendants resented people like Goldensohn and Gilbert. So far as we can tell, Speer gave Goldensohn no more than a brief and tersely worded statement (included in this volume). He accused Gilbert of being “always eager to add to his psychological knowledge.” In answer to Gilbert’s question about his sentence, Speer lied when he said the twenty years he got “was fair enough. They couldn’t have given me a lighter sentence, considering the facts, and I can’t complain.”
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By his own later admission, Speer was not telling the truth, for in fact he felt unjustly treated by the court.

We can multiply such examples of the cover-ups many times, but they do not mean that everything said by the defendants and witnesses is a
pack of lies. In fact what is remarkable is how often the interviews are candid accounts and sometimes even shockingly truthful. At various points at least some defendants and witnesses admit the commission of heinous crimes, even if they also try to offload the guilt to someone else. Their excuses, reasoning, and attempts to avoid the legal consequences of their actions are of interest in their own right. Sometimes we can see that Goldensohn was misled, did not fully grasp the importance of some piece of information, or missed telling clues. In spite of everything, the defendants revealed a great deal about themselves and what attracted them to Hitler and Nazism.

I was contacted by the publisher and asked to edit the interviews. I have done so as carefully as possible. I corrected obvious mistakes, such as dates, and errors in the spelling of names, places, and ranks, all of which were sometimes quite garbled.
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Goldensohn never reached the stage of checking for and correcting errors in the facts, dates, and names mentioned in an interview, and I have tried to verify everything possible. He sometimes made simple mistakes when taking notes about an interviewee’s social, educational, and military experiences. I have put right obvious slips in so far as I could identify them, but some inaccuracies undoubtedly remain. These I trust are not the kinds of mistakes that will detract from the substance of the testimony provided in the interview.

Whenever it has been possible to do so, I have tried to keep the text as close as possible to the original. However, I have also had to make many stylistic changes in order to clarify the prose. I cut the interviews in places where there were obvious repetitions and overlaps, such as when one session went over the same ground as an earlier one. In order to keep the manuscript to a manageable size I also had to exclude entire interviews with some defendants and many witnesses, but my intention was to include whatever was of more importance for the historical record. Sometimes I had to make extensive changes, in order to be true to the substance of what was being communicated by the defendants. Some problems arose from translation difficulties, others from Goldensohn’s misinterpretation of what he was being told, for example about the operation of the German political system. Like every editor, I have had to rely on my professional judgment, based on my own and others’ research, when trying to resolve issues of interpretation that were not clear-cut.

I have not tried to correct every error or obvious untruth that Goldensohn
unwittingly recorded. Sometimes the interviewees played down their own role or their knowledge, or simply tried to rationalize the crimes. Some also tried to minimize their own crimes by maintaining that they were fighting a defensive or preventive war. Some reminded Goldensohn of what the Allies, especially the Russians, did to the Germans during the latter part of war. It is not possible to deal with every single such episode, but we have to be aware of the problem of deliberate falsifications and unconscious untruths.

In the notes to the interviews I provide some guidance and references for readers. I also supply basic information on notable figures and events mentioned in the text when I feel it is necessary. As well, I address the most obvious and important falsehoods, denials, and fabrications, or the repetition of unfounded myths and rumors. I provide more accurate information on some important issues, for example, on the Nazi takeover of power and the number of Jews who were murdered.

Some of the interviewees and Goldensohn himself mention that 5 million Jews were murdered in the Third Reich. Where did they get that number? In fact, that was the figure usually put forward by the prosecution at Nuremberg. For example, American prosecutor Jackson mentioned in his opening statement to the tribunal that out “of 9,600,000 Jews who lived in Nazi dominated Europe, sixty percent are authoritatively estimated to have perished. 5,700,000 Jews are missing from the countries in which they formerly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be accounted for by the normal death rate.”
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Later in the trial itself the prosecution tended to round off the number at 5 million.

At various points during the trial, as well as in Justice Jackson’s final remarks and in the tribunal’s judgment, the larger figure of 6 million victims was also used. One notable witness on this topic was Wilhelm Hoettl, whose testimony appears to have been followed in the judgment. However, he had at best secondhand knowledge. He said in court (and added in a separate affidavit) that he had asked Adolf Eichmann at the end of August 1944 about the number of Jews who had been killed.
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Eichmann replied that he had recently reported to Himmler that around 4 million Jews had been killed in the camps and another 2 million had died in various ways, especially by shooting. According to Hoettl’s recollection of what Eichmann said, Himmler had guessed that even more Jews had been killed by that time. Today most historians would suggest that the numbers apparently given by Eichmann and repeated by
Hoettl in court were likely too high, certainly for the period ending in August 1944.

Several historians, most importantly Raul Hilberg in his definitive account of the destruction of the European Jews, put the figure at just over 5.3 million.
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Hilberg shows the number of those murdered at Auschwitz at around 1 million, which is staggering, but well below the figure estimated at the trial by Commandant Rudolf Hoess. That larger figure — between 2.5 million and 3 million — though unreliable, continues to be cited, even in scholarly studies of Auschwitz, up to the present day.
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We need to get the figures as accurately as possible and thereby close the doors to the deniers and the revisionists.

We can also read the interviews from the point of view of what they tell us about the general understandings of Nazism and the Third Reich that existed at that moment on the American side. Goldensohn, for example, fully accepted one of the key American charges, namely that the Nazis had engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to commit various crimes, including crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, as these were defined in the charter of the trial. He accepted the view that a vast conspiracy began more or less at the beginning of the Third Reich and continued into the war years. Few historians today would agree with such an “intentionalist” approach to the Third Reich, and most subscribe to the view that many policies, including the policy to murder all the Jews in Europe, were improvised and decided only well into the Second World War. We have had a great deal more time to carry out research into the decision-making process, but beyond that most of us now have different understandings of the Third Reich than did Goldensohn and his contemporaries.

Newer research has made it possible for us to see some of the important documentation presented at Nuremberg in a fuller light and from new perspectives. Sometimes we can see far more in certain documents today than could the Nuremberg prosecution or the judges, who were at times overwhelmed. One of many clever tactics of the defense was to bury the tribunal in a sea of documents, affidavits, and eyewitness testimony.
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Only much later have we been able to figure out what was meant by some of those who testified at the trial — and others repeated the point in the interviews with Goldensohn — that the Nazis had plans to wipe out 30 million people. There would have been in fact not one, but serial genocides.
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Key documents about these plans were submitted at the trial, but the whole matter was not fully comprehended.

Although Goldensohn generally kept a neutral demeanor during the interviews, he definitely made his own judgments clear, including his profound skepticism regarding many of the explanations offered by the defendants. Some of his offhand reactions could be quite sharp, as we learn from another source.
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For example, he interviewed Otto Ohlendorf, who was not among the major war criminals, but who appeared as a witness at this trial. (He was later tried and executed.) Ohlendorf had been head of Action Group D — that is, Einsatzgruppe D — which by his own testimony was responsible for the murder of at least ninety thousand people, most of them Jews.
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This was one of four such Nazi death squads in the East, but in fact there were many more.
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He liked to regard himself as one of the “intellectual” leaders of the Security Service (SD), and also thought of himself as an “idealist” and not even an anti-Semite. Therefore, he was particularly bothered one day when Goldensohn accused him of being some kind of sadist, pervert, or lunatic. What other explanation was there, the doctor asked, to explain how Ohlendorf — a man who prided himself on such “integrity and incorruptibility”— could have ordered the murder of so many completely innocent men, women, and children?
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As readers will see from the interviews, Goldensohn was not usually quite so blunt, but he does seem to have arrived at Nuremberg convinced that some, perhaps many, Nazis were sadists, even those who did not engage directly in cruel actions. Goldensohn, who wanted answers to his queries about the nature of Nazism, could also be somewhat intrusive in his interviewing technique. He was certainly not shy about trying to pin down defendants when he found their statements unsatisfactory or contradictory, though generally he pulled back when he found himself engaging in too much cross-examination.

With the exception of Rudolf Hess, and in the later stages of the trials, possibly Hans Frank, the defendants at Nuremberg were anything but mentally ill. Alas, most of them were all too “normal,” and excluding Hess, they were mentally competent throughout their careers. Most of them turned out to be “good family men,” and many had been highly educated or had received some kind of professional training. An intelligence test administered by Dr. Gilbert showed that all defendants but one (Streicher) “were above average intelligence” — average being an IQ that measured between 90 and 110. Of the twenty-one tested, seven had IQs as high as the 130s and two more reached the 140s.
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These once all-powerful “Reich leaders” resented the idea of being examined by
their captors in this way, but as soon as the intelligence test started each of them strove “to do the best he could on it and see his abilities confirmed.”
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There were an additional twelve follow-up trials at Nuremberg between December 1946 and April 1949. Whereas, in the first great trials, the judges and prosecution were drawn from the three Allied powers and France, in the follow-up trials, the United States acted alone against specific individuals and groups who were accused of actually carrying out the crimes.
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These latter trials were particularly important for bringing to light the broader social participation in human rights abuses and involvement in war crimes and mass murder. Still more trials took place over the years in Germany as each of the occupying powers — the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France — prosecuted the Nazis on various counts.
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The Germans themselves have also prosecuted various crimes committed in the Third Reich, and even though the “politics” of war crimes trials was and remains extremely complex, they have intermittently continued to do so right up to the present.
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