[The American Spectator] I recently watched Nuremberg, the stunning new film about the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trial. Chief among the tranche of top Nazi leaders indicted for crimes against humanity was Hermann Goering, Hitler’s number two man. The film centers on the interplay between Goering and the American military psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, who had been assigned to monitor the prisoners and help avoid the embarrassment of suicides.
In a real jail-cell interview with another mental health professional, Gustave Gilbert (not portrayed in the film), Goering made clear his mind about what leaders are able to do:
This was meant as an empirical observation. To be sure, the Nazi police state and the entire apparatus of totalitarian coercion had a great deal to with what Germans did. Even before the Nazis gained power, they used brute force against their political opponents. Less than two months after coming to power, they opened the first of the concentration camps, Dachau, in which brutality was institutionalized and augmented. Things only got worse as time went on.
But, as Daniel Goldhagen pointed out in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners, we have extensive records of extreme cruelty and mass killings undertaken willingly, under no threat, by ordinary Germans. To use the full irony of the terrible truth, they were going "above and beyond the call of duty," as if what they were doing was an act of supreme gallantry facing a ferocious enemy, instead of the improvising the torture and murder of starved, nearly naked, unarmed civilians. |