Masterful testimony

Leon Goldensohn, a psychiatrist at Nuremberg, had the opportunity (I dare not speak of luck) to interview some of the accused of the first Nuremberg trial, Nazi officials and their witnesses, military performers or SS. And overall, reorganized by a specialist historian, is a major intellectual material.
The set is presented in a didactic way, with a small biographical introduction and content of interviews between January and July 1946. The company is unique psychological radiography forty officers, as such, already would reserve lessons interesting, but that of those leaders then, officials from criminal and monstrous enterprise, is required in the reader's mind as an essential resources in the history of that time.
Goldensohn not having shaped the interviews, they take a raw form that gives them their value. The judgments it relates to his interlocutors, Pervasive during interviews in January and February, conducted on an aggressive tone, is gradually off to give way to the floor. Word sometimes brutal, sometimes chilling, sometimes pleunicharde, sometimes arrogant. Word devoid of humility and often calculated, thoughtful, manipulative.
Each officer responds first and foremost to the monstrous evidence of his guilt. Denial is usually, though claimed to varying degrees. Some (Hans Frank, Baldur von Schirach) reach almost to recognize collective guilt is to immediately extract, is in clear customs. As for the others ... Goering plays bully sensualist, but refuses to accept the genocide and reacts like a child when Goldensohn puts it under his nose. Funk whines about his artistic vocation disappointed, Fritzsche qualifies, without shame, man "who suffered the most in this war." All, without exception, load the dead and missing, Himmler, Bormann, Goebbels, Heydrich ...
Most are pitiful in their denials, some clearly dishonest and incompetent all to recognize their overwhelming responsibility in the drama of the century.

These men would be so pathetic shadow of inexpiable guilt, that of Auschwitz and the war, floated above them.

The player does not also prevent nausea while reading the most chilling interviews with those Frick, Minister of the Interior, with Daluege, the police chief, with Hoess, the Auschwitz boss or with Ohlendorf, chief of a Einsatzgruppen in the east.

A masterful piece for those interested in history, psychology and more simply to man. The only regret the elliptical nature of footnotes page, a little too light for contextualization, and the absence of synthetic psychiatric assessments for each accused. This does not take much to the quality of the whole.