Leon Goldensohn
Leon Goldensohn was an American psychiatrist who monitored the mental health of the twenty-one Nazi defendants awaiting trial at Nuremberg in 1946.
Born on October 19, 1911, in New York City, Goldensohn was the son of Jews who had emigrated from Lithuania. He joined the United States Army in 1943 and was posted to France and Germany, where he served as a psychiatrist for the 63rd Division. He replaced another psychiatrist in January 1946, about six weeks into the trials, and spent more than six months visiting the prisoners nearly every day. He interviewed most of the defendants, including Hermann Göring, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938 until 1945. Goldensohn conducted most his interviews in English with the aid of a translator to have the defendants and witnesses express themselves fully in their own language. Some of his subjects, notably foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, were partially or fully fluent in English, and conducted their interviews in that language.
Goldensohn served as prison psychiatrist until July 26, 1946. He had resolved to write a book about the experience but later contracted tuberculosis and died from a coronary heart attack in 1961. The detailed notes he took were later researched and collated by his brother Eli, a retired neurologist. Robert Gellately, a World War II scholar, edited and annotated the interviews in the book "The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist's Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses."
“That it is fairly improbable to get much emotional response out of this man, I am convinced. There is a long-conditioned hardness, an outer shell which has been worn and used so long, probably nothing exists beneath it. Having dealt with force, violence, and easy dispositions of the lives of others, it is questionable as to how much value he puts on life in general, including his own in particular. This was not discussed with him, though it would be interesting to get some information on that point. Getting a sincere or emotionally meaningful answer from him is like trying to bail water from a long-dry well.”
“Ribbentrop brushed aside the Jewish extermination events. He said that in the long view, historically, the Jews' extermination would always be a blot on German history, but that it was in a way attributable to the fact that Hitler had lost his sense of proportion and, because he was losing the war, went "wild" on the subject of the Jews. But the big historical issue was not that Jews had been exterminated but that Germany had really been oppressed and never given a chance.”