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Title: Nuremberg Diary by Gustave M. Gilbert ISBN: 0-306-80661-4 Publisher: DaCapo Press Pub. Date: September, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.21 (14 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Monsters of the Dritte Reich, or just a mirror?
Comment: Ever have the urge to get into the mind of a monster just to see how he thinks? Sound like another serial killer book? Well, in a sense, Nuremberg Diary is that, but it is so much more as well.
About a month ago, I watched the TNT production about the Nuremberg trial and took note of the names of some of the characters portrayed in it. The character of Captain Gilbert interested me. He was a prison psychologist who visited with many of the prisoners in their cells... spending an inordinate amount of time with Goering. I speculated that very probably that individual might have written a book after the trial.
I did a search on his name and guess what... he did indeed write a book about his experiences. It was published originally by Farrar, Straus & Company in 1947... barely a year after the Nuremberg trial was over. I quickly emailed a query off to Tracy at The Attic... could she get me a copy? The reply came back a day or so later... yes, she could, it would cost a certain amount... and if I wanted one with the dust-cover still intact... a certain amount plus about eight bucks... if I remember right. I placed the order and a few weeks later (coming from Canada), it arrived and Tracy emailed me to come pick it up. I showed up the next day to behold a beautifully preserved first-edition copy with the name "Clayton J. Golding" inscribed with an old-fashioned fountain pen. Thanks Tracy... good scrounge!
What's the book about? Well, some of you web-surfers are a bit young, I suppose.
After WWII was over, the victorious Allies decided to have a trial... charging 23 of the aforementioned monsters with four separate offenses. Two of the defendants, Robert Ley and Hermann Goering, killed themselves before sentence could be carried out, Ley, barely before the trial was even started. The others were either convicted and had their sentence carried out, or were released with a "not guilty" verdict... leaving them to the tender mercies of the German government.
During most of their time in captivity, an American officer, the aforementioned Captain G. M. Gilbert, Phd., for a time the Prison Psychologist, had access to the prisoners in their cells as well as at other times. He administered psychological tests... including intelligence tests, (they were all of fairly high intelligence... which I found a bit surprising) interviewed them at length, and even visited with some of their families... most noteworthy, the wife and daughter of Hermann Goering. Most importantly, he kept a journal... making careful notes as soon as he left the presence of the individual in question.
The book is lengthy, comprising some 471 pages, including the index. I found it to be fascinating at the outset, though the oft repeated anti-Semitic Nazi party line became a bit tedious toward the end.
Surprisingly, the defendants were willing to talk to Captain Gilbert quite openly... displaying lewdness, bigotry, hatred, stupidity, piousness, resignation, and every extreme of emotion that any group of men might display under similar pressures. One can really get a flavor for what these men of Hitler's inner sanctum were like.
After finishing this book, I was left with some questions, and a rather disturbing conclusion, that should not have surprised me but did. I wondered why they decided to try all these men simultaneously. Normally criminals are tried separately, not as a group. The defendants were judged guilty/not guilty of different crimes, indeed they were widely different in beliefs and temperament as well as tasking within the Dritte Reich. So why did they do it that way? The sentencing tends to support my questioning this as they were not sentenced as a group.
Initially, Goering was able to exert his yet considerable influence upon his co-defendants. As things began to heat up, and people saw, among other things, the incredible wealth of stolen artwork in Goering's larder, the absolutely horrifying conditions of the concentration camps, the lies, the signatures on orders, etc., his hold on them was broken. It was broken further when he was prevented from communicating with them. It was surprising how powerful he was perceived to be by the others who would hang with him... almost literally. Gilbert shows this in great detail by the words and activities of the other prisoners he chronicled.
I was surprised by what I saw of the monsters of the Dritte Reich. What surprised me most was that they were not monsters at all. They were just ordinary men. As a group, more intelligent on the average than most, but still fairly run-of-the-mill in terms of character and judgment. Yes, they were racists, certainly they were guilty of many crimes... but for all that, they were not significantly different from many other men of their time... not so very different than men of our own era. They sought to put the blame on others, to justify their actions by comparing themselves to other men in history, to deny knowledge... much like our own politicians do when they get some body part from the nether regions caught in a trap. (I was very much reminded of the words of William Jefferson Clinton during the Monica scandal.)
This is the truly scary part... the fact that they were not monsters. For if they were not monsters, then what makes them different from any one of us? Could not any of us, even including those of us blessed with high intellect, be seduced by a charismatic leader?
This is one that more people should be reading today, lest history repeat itself. The message is timeless... and should never, ever, be forgotten.
Dale A. Raby
Editor/Publisher
The Green Bay Web
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting look into the Nuremerg trials
Comment: Written by an American psychologist attached to the prison holding the accused war criminals. Gilbert gives highlights of the interactions between himself and the accused, and observations of the interactions among the accused, as well as highlights of the trial. I felt Gilbert let himself down by falling under the spell, as so many others did, of Speer.He doesn't delve deeply enough into the reasons for Speer's about face on nazism. Rather he takes it as face value, while at the same time portraying others for their weakness, vanity, and evil natures. I expected a more clinical look at these monsters rather than the brief outline of the personality tests undertaken. Also Gilbert had access to other war criminal not required for the main trial, but failed to draw comparisons with those 'lower down the order' in a hierarchy of 'i was only following orders'. However, the book is an insight into the trial on, dare I say it, a human level, for that, it is a valuable work.
Rating: 4
Summary: Intriguing Look At The Meaning of The Nuremberg Trials
Comment: As a person who has read a number of books relating to tghis subject, nothing so defines the striking differences between the nature of the Third Reich from the constitutional democracies that largely comprised the Allies as the way in which the defendants of the trials at Nuremberg were handled. With painstaking precision and at extraordinary cost in terms of international arm-twisting and back-door deals, the proponents of a judicial proceeding designed to illustrate the manifest individual guilt of the various Nazi officials forged a result that still stands today as a model of a non-retributive effort in the face of extraordinary pressure. While one can hardly describe the Nuremberg trials as unflawed or perfect, they did prove to the world that the Allies were willing to subscribe to the existing canon of law to judge the actions of the Nazis.
Doing so was anything but easy, Indeed, achieving a fair result that would literally convince the watching world of the guilt of the participants in the war was anything but easy, and moving toward that deliberate goal is a theme providing an interesting theme punctuating the pace of the book. Churchill wanted revenge by way of summary trials and quick retribution, while the Russians just wanted to string up the whole group in a mass hanging. Yet American Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was able to resolve the differences well enough to proceed, although at times the reader wonders if the trials will be anything like the fair-minded judicial event he has in mind. Indeed, the back-stabbing, personal ambitions, and petty jealousies of the various factions, trial officials, and individual defendants becomes a kind of political circus that sometimes resembles nothing so much as vaudevillian showboating.
Still, the efforts at conducting a fair and open forum for the world to watch as the prosecution and defense teams clashed before the international tribunal prevailed, and the trials concluded with mixed results in terms of the results. Most of the defendants were found guilty, and many were hanged. Yet few observers doubted that the defendants had had their day in court along with and adequate opportunity to defend their actions to a watching world. Given how little justice and liberty they collectively allowed for their tens of millions of victims, it is remarkable just how civilized and dignified a proceeding the Nuremberg trials were, with all their theatrics and subterranean undercurrents.
One marvels at the fact that after fifty years the world still stands in awe at the deliberate, careful, and methodical way in which the Allies achieved the result of a rational and fair trial of the defendants in history's most horrific modern nightmare, the terror of the Third Reich. This is an interesting and absorbing book, and a fascinating and entertaining book to read. It was also particularly interesting to me because it explores the lives of each of the defendants in looking at their individual guilt. I recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about these singular trials and their impact on history
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Title: The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945-46: A Documentary History (The Bedford Series in History and Culture) by Michael R. Marrus ISBN: 0312136919 Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's Pub. Date: January, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
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Title: Nuremberg : Infamy on Trial by Joseph E. Persico ISBN: 014016622X Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: August, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 by Richard Overy ISBN: 0142001589 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: Tyranny on Trial: The Trial of the Major German War Criminals at the End of the World War II at Nuremberg Germany 1945-1946 by Whitney R. Harris, Robert Storey, Robert H. Jackson ISBN: 0870744372 Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ Pr Pub. Date: 15 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: INSIDE THE THIRD REICH by Albert Speer ISBN: 0684829495 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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