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The Nuremberg Interviews

An American Psychiatrist's Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses

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About this listen

 The Nuremberg Interviews reveals the chilling innermost thoughts of the former Nazi officials under indictment at the famous postwar trial. The architects of one of history’s greatest atrocities speak out about their lives, their careers in the Nazi Party, and their views on the Holocaust. Their reflections are recorded in a set of interviews conducted by a U.S. Army psychiatrist. Dr. Leon Goldensohn was entrusted with monitoring the mental health of the two dozen German leaders charged with carrying out genocide, as well as that of many of the defense and prosecution witnesses. These recorded conversations have gone largely unexamined for more than fifty years.

Now, Robert Gellately–one of the premier historians of Nazi Germany–has transcribed, edited, and annotated the interviews, and makes them available to the public for the first time in this volume.

Here are interviews with the highest-ranking Nazi officials in the Nuremberg jails, including Hans Frank, Hermann Goering, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. Here, too, are interviews with the 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. Candid and often shockingly truthful, these interviews are deeply disturbing in their illumination of an ideology gone mad.

Each interview is annotated with biographical information that places the man and his actions in their historical context. These interviews are a profoundly important addition to our understanding of the Nazi mind and mission. 20th Century Law Military Military & War Modern Politics & Government War & Crisis World War II War

Critic reviews

“A gripping work of history, a series of oral narratives that drag the reader, almost by force, into the nightmarish mental landscape of the Third Reich.” —The New York Times

“A rare document. . . . Striking proof of the banality of evil.” —Kirkus

“Goldensohn serves as a down-to-earth Dante in these anterooms to hell, getting one damned soul after another to reveal himself in his own words." —Newsweek
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Splendid interviews about the time of war an people. Listener can have a better understanding of the direction of the world now.

honesty by the interviewer.

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Hard to imagine a better treatment and narration xxxx ccccc rrrrr nnnnn rrrrr ggggg nnnnnn

Excellent

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although they all denied, some of them seemed credible and those were eventually found "not guilty". It was really interesting because you could actually here the differences between credible deniers and the obviously false ones. What I also found interesting was that most off them claimed the Russians were guilty of the same crimes against humanity, which at the time of the interviews was not recognized but turned out to be true. The second greatest crime that took place after the ww2 is the allies failing to take these allegations seriously or simply turn a blind eye and leave the whole eastern part of Europe in the hands of a man with a little moustache who was just as bad as the one they came there to conquer. For those of you interested I highly recommend the Gulag archipelago as a must read. A crime that took place in the same time in history, if you have read this you will actually here some of the claims the Nazis were making about the Russians are not only true but they seemes to have a deeper knowledge which was totally ignored which caused many more innocent lives to be taken in the years following the war.

Interesting

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This is a very human face on the the many monsters at nuremberg. Well worth reading and having in the library of any historian of the period.

A very good edition

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A must listen to help understand people who implemented orders they did not create. Hard to grasp the argument.

Interesting

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