“Controlled Experiments in Social Pathology”

The Nazi leaders were evil men; they have become paradigms of evil. But after the war, in prison and on trial at Nuremberg, they became something else: pathetic, and all-to-human. They minimized responsibility for what they had done, and lied about how bad those deeds had been.

1. When the war ended, many high-ranking Nazis went into hiding, as humble farmers in quiet villages. Hans Frank did not. There was no need. “Convinced he had a strong hand to play,” he waited for the Allied liberators, and gave them his collection of looted artworks (including a da Vinci), and his personal diary. At 42 volumes (really, an insane length), he thought it full of exculpatory evidence:

It was all there [Frank told himself], the words that would save him, his improvement of the lives of the Poles [he’d been the governor of occupied Poland], his fights with Himmler, his brave law speeches in Germany...Certainly, the Americans would see through the pro forma anti-Semitic rabble-rousing. It was simply the lip service any Nazi official was expected to spout in order to keep his job.

The American troops beat him, kicked him, and spat on him; then they threw him in prison.

Awaiting trial at Nuremberg, Frank began to have wet dreams. He was forty-five years old. Some of the dreams were about his daughter. The cause, he told himself, was his new-found religious belief.

2. Among the Nazis on trial, Hans Fritzsche was the light square in that old Sesame Street game, “One of These Things is not Like the Others.” The Nuremberg Tribunal was not created to judge each and every Nazi prisoner. No, the rest of them would be saved for the secondary trials to follow—the first Nuremberg trial was for the marquis names. But Fritzsche was a “third-string operative in Goebbel’s propaganda apparatus”; a tiny cog in a big machine. So why was he there? The answer was politics. The leading Nazi defendants had all been captured by the Americans. Not to be diminished even in this, the Russians insisted that some of their prisoners also be indicted. Fritzsche, and a few other minor characters, were the best they had. The Tribunal found Fritzsche not guilty.

3. When Hermann Goering was captured he weighed 264 pounds (Goering was five foot six). He was an opiate addict, self-administering twenty paracodeine pills a day. In prison, the victors took him ...