“Controlled Experiments in Social Pathology”
At the Nuremberg Trials
The Nazi leaders were evil men; they have become paradigms of evil. But after the war, in prison and on trial at Nuremberg, they became something else: pathetic, and all-to-human. They minimized responsibility for what they had done, and lied about how bad those deeds had been.
1. When the war ended, many high-ranking Nazis went into hiding, as humble farmers in quiet villages. Hans Frank did not. There was no need. “Convinced he had a strong hand to play,” he waited for the Allied liberators, and gave them his collection of looted artworks (including a da Vinci), and his personal diary. At 42 volumes (really, an insane length), he thought it full of exculpatory evidence:
It was all there [Frank told himself], the words that would save him, his improvement of the lives of the Poles [he’d been the governor of occupied Poland], his fights with Himmler, his brave law speeches in Germany...Certainly, the Americans would see through the pro forma anti-Semitic rabble-rousing. It was simply the lip service any Nazi official was expected to spout in order to keep his job.
The American troops beat him, kicked him, and spat on him; then they threw him in prison.
Awaiting trial at Nuremberg, Frank began to have wet dreams. He was forty-five years old. Some of the dreams were about his daughter. The cause, he told himself, was his new-found religious belief.
2. Among the Nazis on trial, Hans Fritzsche was the light square in that old Sesame Street game, “One of These Things is not Like the Others.” The Nuremberg Tribunal was not created to judge each and every Nazi prisoner. No, the rest of them would be saved for the secondary trials to follow—the first Nuremberg trial was for the marquis names. But Fritzsche was a “third-string operative in Goebbel’s propaganda apparatus”; a tiny cog in a big machine. So why was he there? The answer was politics. The leading Nazi defendants had all been captured by the Americans. Not to be diminished even in this, the Russians insisted that some of their prisoners also be indicted. Fritzsche, and a few other minor characters, were the best they had. The Tribunal found Fritzsche not guilty.
3. When Hermann Goering was captured he weighed 264 pounds (Goering was five foot six). He was an opiate addict, self-administering twenty paracodeine pills a day. In prison, the victors took him off the drugs. If this was done with malicious intent, it backfired: he lost weight, and his health and mental sharpness improved.
At the beginning of the trial, while the indictments were read and the rest of the defendants sat sweating, Goering “with a bored expression” counted how many times his name was mentioned. At forty-two mentions, he was the “winner.” Asked later, in his cell, about the charge against him of waging aggressive war, he said
I rearmed Germany until we bristled! When they told me I was playing with war by building the Luftwaffe [air force], I told them I certainly wasn’t running a girls’ finishing school.
About all the treaties Germany violated, he confided,
Just between us, I consider your treaties so much toilet paper.
I said these men were “pathetic, all-to-human”; Goering was the one exception. But his jailhouse ambition, to inspire a unified defense with his arrogant pride, was frustrated. The others defected from this Hitler-surrogate as they never could from the man himself.
4. In 1941 Rudolf Hess flew—as in, piloted a plane—on an unauthorized solo mission to Britain, hoping to negotiate peace, single-handedly, between the UK and Germany. If you know the first thing about Winston Churchill, you know this plan was doomed; so doomed, it now sounds like a joke. The prehistory of Hess’s arrival at Nuremberg is a great story, but I can’t get too far into it. He parachuted into Scotland, and said he needed to speak with the Duke of Hamilton. You know, the Duke of Hamilton. At the time, the Duke was Lord Steward of the Household, which doesn’t sound like that important a job. But then to us Americans, “Lord Privy Seal”—the position Henry VIII elevates Thomas Cromwell to, in episode 2 of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, in what looks like a big moment—that sounds like a fake job too. Anyway, of course the British didn’t usher Hess immediately in to an audience with any members of the Privy Council, or even the House of Commons. No, they put him in prison, where he sat out the rest of the war. In prison he exhibited the behavior of a crazy man, and professed to remember nothing. This continued after he was transferred to Nuremberg for trial with the big guys (Hess had been deputy Führer before his English adventures).
The American psychiatrists who examined Hess at Nuremberg applied their state-of-the-art psychiatric techniques, and concluded he was authentically insane: “The Polish invasion had come as a shock...His father substitute [Hitler, of course] proved not to be a god, but cruel...” Asked by the prosecutors for his opinion, the lead psychiatrist, Douglas Kelly, said
If one considers the road as sanity and the sidewalk as insanity, then Hess spends the greater part of his time on the curb,
—an answer ridiculous in its grandiloquence. Burton Andrus, the Army colonel who ran the prison, disagreed with the credentialed psychics. He thought Hess was faking it. And it was he, the one with no academic expertise, who got it right. Hess was told that if the Tribunal ruled him mentally unfit to stand trial, he would be moved to another prison, and no longer see the other Nuremberg defendants. Minutes later, he told the court that his memory was fine. Actually, his words were: “henceforth, my memory will again respond to the outside world,” a strangely beautiful statement. Hess had feigned amnesia for “tactical” reasons.
How did the psychiatrists respond to this development? “Nobody’s perfect”? “We did the best with the evidence we had”? Not at all. Instead, and ironically, they engaged in the same self-serving misrepresentation so familiar from the men they spent their days interviewing:
Kelly ventured that Hess’s amnesia was still real. It was this sudden cure that was the hoax.
I believe that in the psychology journals this is called “motivated reasoning.” Kelly’s colleague Gustav Gilbert had a different diagnosis. Hess was not an amnesiac...now. But he had been one, before his announcement. Gilbert held that Hess’s amnesia was “controllable at his discretion.”
5. Technically, Gilbert was a psychologist, not a psychiatrist (do you remember the difference?). But his official job was as Kelly’s subordinate, not his equal. Kelly spoke no German; Gilbert did, and lobbied to be Kelly’s interpreter. Gilbert took this low-status position because he
sensed an unprecedented opportunity. Nuremberg offered access, as he was later to write, ‘to history’s most perfectly controlled experiment in social pathology.’ What made civilized human beings join the Nazi movement and do what they did? If he could get into those cells, he might find the answers.
This is just amazing stuff. “Controlled experiment”? Gilbert would discover the causes of Nazism—by listening to the defensive lies told by Nazis on trial for their lives? What? Gilbert was delusional.
Gilbert was also a spy. He told the American prosecutors what the defendants said in their sessions with him. But surely no one on either side expected otherwise?
6. Was the chaplain the Americans supplied to the Nazis also deluded? Reverend Gerecke’s goal was to save their souls:
He was keeping track, and so far [as of December 16, 1945], he believed, he had brought half the defendants in his charge back to Christ.
Now 50% is a pretty good conversion rate in the best of cases, and these were perpetrators of the greatest evil of the 20th century. How, you will ask, could Gerecke be so sure of the sincerity of his converts’ faith? Never trust a Nazi, am I right? Behold the proofs he accepted:
What [Gerecke] hoped to hear from the defendants was a clear “Yes, I accept Christ.” Those exact words were not always forthcoming, and in certain cases [he] had been satisfied with nothing more than a promising smile.
Those are my italics. We would all do well to practice our promising smiles. Later in the trial, Gerecke decided it was time to go home. He’d been away from America for two years. The Nazis wrote a letter to his wife, begging her to change his mind:
Your husband has been taking religious care of the undersigned for more than half a year. We have heard that you wish to see him back home...we beg you to put off this desire...We cannot lose your husband. No one else can break through the walls that have built up around us, both spiritual and material.
The poor guys. One can only imagine how strong, how impenetrable, the spiritual walls that “had been built” around them must have been (notice the passive voice). Gerecke stayed; the Nazis got their wish.
7. Once indicted, these men ceased being prisoners of war, and became criminal defendants. Now they had the right to remain silent. Of course, Miranda warnings weren’t a thing yet. How well did they understand their rights? Still, the psychiatrists were surprised at how eager the prisoners were to keep talking.
8. There were four judges and four alternates on the Tribunal: one of each from America, Britain, France, and the USSR. For obvious reasons the British and American teams were closer to each other than to the others: they shared a language and (broadly speaking) a legal system. But the shared language was also a source of friction, at least for Norman Birkett, the British alternate. Joseph Persico reports in Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (my source throughout) that Birkett complained, in his diary, that
The Germans may have been guilty of murdering millions, but the Americans were guilty of murdering the English tongue. He winced at the U.S. prosecutors’ constant use of “privatize, finalize, visualize, argumentation and orientation.”
Here is a “but” worth contemplating. At this first and precedent-setting International War Crimes Tribunal, Birkett clearly had his eye on the ball. Or maybe, knowing he was just the spare, and would not get to vote on any verdicts, he allowed his mind to wander from the argumentation.
9. Hans Frank did a lot of hang-wringing at Nuremberg. How had it come to this? Frank was a lawyer by profession. And he’d stood up to Hilter, at least at first. When Hitler ordered a mass execution, Frank demurred:
I am a man of the law. You don’t shoot 110 men without a trial.
Frank had seemed to win the point. But later one of Hitler’s deputies called on the phone: “The Führer had relented. Of the 110 men, only 19 were to be shot.” Persico writes,
The price of standing by his principles would be exorbitant, Frank recognized—his position, the servants, the limousines, his several homes, the twin narcotics of power and wealth. In the end, he turned over the prisoners...When the shots rang out that day, Hans Frank found himself defined. He was more Nazi than jurist. Hitler had known his man.
Slippery slopes are real. Take care how you price seemingly-minor compromises of your principles. Even small bites of the apple will send you to hell.
10. Julius Streicher had run the rabidly anti-Semitic tabloid Der Stürmer. While most of the defendants at Nuremberg downplayed or disavowed Nazi anti-Semitism, Streicher leaned in. Unlike Hess, he really was crazy, though not unfit to stand trial. He was obsessed with circumcision. He constantly brought it up in conversation. And there’s this, an excerpt from his “newspaper”:
The male sperm in cohabitation [that is, during sex] is partially or completely absorbed by the female, and thus enters her blood stream.
Stupid and gross, but so what? Because, Streicher continues,
One single cohabitation of a Jew with an Aryan woman is sufficient to poison her blood forever.
He also wrote that the Jews were “a nation of bloodsuckers and extortionists.” At Nuremberg, he denied that printing this was preaching race hatred. “It is just a statement of fact.”
Streicher was sentenced to death. A horrible man, but what was his crime? He exercised no political or military power. The verdict against him was “incitement to murder and extermination,” which in context was judged a crime against humanity. Would what he published count as incitement here, under the 1969 precedent set in Brandenberg v Ohio? Probably not, right? A good test case for the First Amendment and free speech absolutism.
11. The prosecution rested, and the defense lawyers had their turn. It was an opportunity for black comedy. The German lawyers did not understand the legal system they were operating under, which had been Frankensteined specially for the trial: a mash-up of Continental and Anglo-American traditions. Maybe no one understood it: during its designing, when the English-speakers were explaining how they did things, a Russian representative had asked, “what is meant by ‘cross-examination’?” Especially opaque to the defense was the next phase, where they were to call and examine witnesses in order to cast reasonable doubt on the charges against their clients. So the Nazis’ lawyers, some of them Nazis themselves, would put people on the stand, only to elicit more damning evidence against the men they were defending. At one point a defense witness for Ribbentrop—a woman who had worked for him—was asked by Ribbentrop’s lawyer what her boss’s attitude was toward Hitler. Her answer: “To enjoy Hitler’s confidence was his chief aim in life.” Persico writes, “No prosecutor asked to cross-examine [her] ...What she had said could scarcely be improved upon.” Kaltenbrunner’s defense lawyer had watched the prosecutors, and had tried to learn from their example the needed new techniques; but “he had learned only the prosecutorial side” of the adversarial system. He put his client on the stand and then entered into evidence yet more incriminating material.
12. Rudolf Hoess was the subject of the recent film The Zone of Interest. The film shows him and his family enjoying a middle-class life, next door to Auschwitz and the crematoria, where he worked as the commandant. Hoess was captured during the trials, too late to be indicted, but not too late to be interrogated. What he said to Gilbert (the psychologist) could be the film’s epigraph: “I suppose you want to know if my thoughts and habits are entirely normal.” Gilbert asked Hoess to answer the question himself. “I am entirely normal. Even while doing this extermination work, I led a perfectly normal family life.” His perfectly normal activities included writing a poem about his day job:
In the spring of ’42 many blossoming people walked under the blossoming fruit trees of the old farmstead, To their death, without premonition.
See also: Goering at Nuremberg 1, and Interviews With Vampires. Continued below the fold, for premium subscribers: more black comedy at Nuremberg; helping Nazis sleep; Colonel Andrus, unsung hero.