Inside the Nazi Mind at the Nuremberg Trials

[n2doc]

by Thomas Harding


Why do men commit evil? Were the kommandants who ran the Nazi death camps psychopaths? Did they have subnormal intelligence? Were they just ordinary men who made appalling decisions?

I have been thinking about these questions ever since I found out that my great-uncle, Hanns Alexander, a German Jew, was a Nazi Hunter. At the end of the Second World War he tracked down and caught one of the worst mass murderers of all time, Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz.
These were also the questions that a team of American psychologists and psychiatrists were directed to answer during the Nuremberg Trials that opened on November 20, 1945, six months after the war’s end.

Charges of crimes against humanity were read out against 24 of the highest-ranking Nazis then in captivity, including Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the Reich Security Main Office and the highest-ranking SS officer after Himmler’s death.

With so many senior Nazis held in one place at the same time, the Americans instructed a panel of psychologists to conduct exten­sive interviews and tests with the defendants. Such horrific crimes were committed surely by damaged men, men different in some fundamental way from the rest of humanity.

more

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/07/inside-the-nazi-mind-at-the-nuremberg-trials.html

[broiles]

1. Are the men who kill remotely with drones different?

Are they haunted by what they have done? Are they just following orders?

[Leontius]

2. Yes

[Fantastic Anarchist]

7. They are delegating their responsibilities upwards ...

... as the article suggests.

[Snake Plissken]

3. A panel of psychologists should conduct exten­sive interviews and tests on ....

the twisted fucks who came up with the idea of using depleted uranium munitions, that is something straight out of Josef Mengele's playbook.

[Hydra]

5. Operation Paperclip n/t

[Hydra]

4. Gilbert and the others failed because they needed a solution that said the Nazis were "DIfferent"

Arendt's conclusion seems to pan out naturally in every situation though- evil is not considered to be so when objective thought is given up. Evil when "justified" is virtue.

Even recently, a redo of the Milgram experiment proved that in the US, we've actually backslid to a more authoritarian viewpoint, and more people who were given permission to do evil did it than in the original experiment.

We're watching it again with cult of personality running wild. The logical end of it is not pretty.

[Fantastic Anarchist]

6. Wow ... fascinating.

Thanks for posting.