Nazis on trial (Nuremberg Diary - G.M. Gilbert)

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Nuremberg Diary - G.M. Gilbert
Date:	17/05/01 (822 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: fascinating subject matter

Disadvantages: not enough detail in some parts, quite expensive

After the Second World War ended, the surviving Nazi leaders were brought to trial by the Allies. This was an unprecedented development, as the leaders of a nation had never before been held accountable for their actions. It set legal precedents that are still valid today (as witness the current attempts to bring Milosovic to trial). Almost all the major Nazis were present, although some of the most important had committed suicide previously (Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels), and one (Martin Bormann) had vanished (they tried him anyway, in absentia).

About twenty of the top Nazi's were in the dock, being forced to account for their actions over the previous decade. There were four counts under which they were indicted - conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was at the trial that the full enormity of the Nazis' crimes was brought to the attention of a world audience. It ended up lasting for about 18 months. Although critics have found fault with some of the legal issues raised, and the fairness of some of the sentencing, the defendants were all given a chance to defend themselves (three of them were aquitted).

For me, the most interesting aspect of the Nuremberg trial has always been the personalities of the defendants. The different ways in which people who had once wielded enormous power reacted to being imprisoned and put on trial is absolutely fascinating, especially in the changes that gradually began to overcome some of them as the prosecution evidence became more and more damning.

This book is probably the best available account of the personalities of these men. It was written by GM Gilbert, an army psychologist who happened to speak German, who was posted to the prison to monitor the mental states of the accused. It is his journal of his contact with them, and it has a diary structure - he'll tell you on any given date who he spoke to and what was said. The book al
so keeps track of the events of the trial, so as to give a context for the behaviour of the defendants.

Gilbert would visit them in their cells in the evenings and at weekends to discuss their feelings about the trial, and would also observe them in their interactions with each other in the dock and their lunchroom. Sometimes they'd talk quite willingly, other times they'd clam up, unwilling to give anything away. Gilbert was also pretty good at spotting when people were trying to tell him what he wanted to hear rather than what they actually thought. The book starts with Gilbert's first contact with the prisoners before the trial and ends with the reactions of each guilty defendant to their sentences (death in most cases, otherwise lengthy prison sentences).

A pretty compelling picture emerges of their behaviour. There were, roughly speaking, three types of reactions to the trial amongst the defendants - the unrepentant, the repentant and the confused. The unrepentant (Hermann Goering is probably the best example) were the ones who refused to admit that they'd done any wrong, and who challenged the validity of the trial, claiming that it was "victors' justice", or saying, famously, that they were only obeying orders. The repentant were the few who actually realised the enormity of their crimes and attempted to atone (in as much as that was possible) by renouncing Hitler and all his ideas (a bit late for that, you might think, but it certainly impressed the judges - Albert Speer, the armaments minister was the most prominent repentant). The confused were the ones who were in denial about everything, desperately scrabbling around for any ray of hope, but generally incapable of defending themselves beyond claiming that they were not important enough to have influenced state policy, that they hadn't known about the holocaust, and that it had all been Himmler's fault anyway. Foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop
is the classic example of this type of defendant.

The book does have some faults. Perhaps the main one is that Gilbert wasn't in the least bit impartial towards or about his subjects. He allowed his own moral judgments to shape his relationships towards the defendants. So he continually reminded them (especially Goering) of the full scope of their crimes and the general repugnance with which the world viewed them. This is understandable - like most people, Gilbert would have been horrified by the details that emerged about the Nazi era - but on occasion his interference definitely exceeded what I would have thought was acceptable behaviour. For instance, having discussed extensively with Speer about Speer's defense (which, as mentioned, was going to criticise Hitler in a big way), Gilbert actively began to attempt to turn another of the defendants, von Schirach (former Hitler Youth leader), around to Speer's way of thinking. The prison psychologist was basically trying to get the defendants in possibly the most important trial of the last century to change their defenses in directions he approved of (and it worked, at least in Schirach's case). I can't help but feel that that isn't quite the kind of thing that he was supposed to do.

The other problem is that Gilbert focused most of his attention on only a handful of the defendants. Goering, as the most important Nazi on trial, got the most time, and others high on the list include Speer, Ribbentrop, Hjalmar Schacht (former finance minister - one of the ones who was aquitted) and Hans Frank (governor of Poland). Rudolf Hess also got a lot of attention, but that's quite understandable as he was suffering from serious mental problems when the trial was taking place, and should probably have been in an asylum, not a prison. Unfortunately this means that we don't learn as much about some of the others. Kaltenbrunner, Frick, Saukel, Seyss-Inquart, Funk - perhaps not the b
est known names today, but I'd still like to have been told more about them. And since most of the books on the trial use this one as source material for their own portraits of the defendants, inevitably the less important Nazis always come across as slightly more hazy and vague than they should. (Although this wasn't Gilbert's fault entirely - some of the defendants were distrustful of him and weren't willing to open up to him in the way that others were.)

Also, when describing the trial, Gilbert tends to skip over things that perhaps he shouldn't. For instance, it seems to be fairly widely accepted that the Prosecutor Jackson's cross examination of Goering was ambarrassingly weak. Gilbert doesn't mention this, so Goering's elation after the first day of his battle with Jackson seems strangely inappropriate.

However, in spite of these weaknesses this remains one of the most interesting books on the trial. It's pretty compelling to read about the (mostly) weak and deluded men who were responsible for some of the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. The way they wavered between self-importance and fear and guilt, their malicious delight whenever the Russian judges disagreed with the American judges, their rivalries and alliances which continued to the very end - these are all fascinating. Reading this book I found myself being both disgusted at their attitudes and astounded that such a bunch of misfits could have ever achieved anything.

Perhaps the only real reason not to get this would be that it's a bit too expensive, especially considering that (unusually) it doesn't have any photographs.

Summary: