The Nuremberg Interviews

In 1946, with the Nuremberg trials underway, Leon Goldensohn, a U.S. army psychiatrist, was given the task of interviewing the two dozen German leaders who were under indictment, as well as many of the defence and prosecution witnesses. The conversations were then left largely unexamined for more than fifty years. Now, Robert Gellately – one of the premier historians of Nazi Germany – has transcribed, edited, and annotated thirty-three of the interviews, and makes them available to the public for the first time in this volume.

Here are interviews with some of the highest-ranking Nazi officials in the Nuremberg jails, including Hans Frank, Hermann Goering, Ernest Kaltenbrunner, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Here too are interviews with lesser-known officials who were, nonetheless, essential to the workings of the Third Reich. Goldensohn was a particularly astute interviewer, his training as a psychiatrist leading him to probe the motives, the rationales, and the skewing of morality that allowed these men to enact an unfathomable evil. Often shockingly candid, these interviews are deeply disturbing in their illumination of an ideology gone mad.

Each interview is annotated with biographical information and footnotes that place the man and his actions in their historical context and are a profoundly important addition to our understanding of the Nazi mind and mission.