Were NAZI Defendants at NUREMBERG psychotic or normal?

[WJHopwood]

During and for a time after the end of the Nuremberg war
crimes trials the O.S.S. (which later evolved into the CIA)
was interested in the psychology of the Nazi defendants.
In an effort to find out why, individually and as a group,
they did what they did in their creation of the Holocaust
and in other acts of mass murder of populations in their
conquered territories.
All sorts of tests and extensive interviews were given
to the defendants from Rorschach inkblots to removal of
the brain of one defendant ,Robert Ley, head of the Nazi
Labor Front, for observation after he had committed suicide ,
In a new book,"Anatomy of Malice. " recently reviewed
in the New York Times. psychiatrist Joel E, Dimsdale has
re-examined the records of many of the O.S.S. Nuremberg
tests and reported his findings in the light of modern
psychological understandings.
At the time of the O.S.S. tests the principal examiners
were two American doctors who reached different conclusions
--one believed that the Nazi actions were "a unique category
of psychopathology, while the other concluded that the
defendants were essentially "ordinary men whose counterparts
could be found anywhere." The author of "Anatomy of Malice,"
Dr. Dimsdale, tends to side with the view of the latter and others
like Hannah Arandt whose book "The Banality of Evil" about the
trial of Adolf Eichman was the subject of discussion in this forum
some time ago, the theme being that normal people can consider
evil acts to be normal under the circumstances of the existing
social culture and the times.

WJH

[IndSyd]

,On Sunday, May 29, 2016 at 9:43:37 AM UTC-4,
WJ Hopwood wrote: "ordinary men whose counterparts
could be found anywhere."
The author of "Anatomy of Malice," Dr. Dimsdale,
tends to side with the view of the latter".

I agree, the rise of a Nazi Party with Hitler
at the lead then gave the opportunity for many such
as Himmler as well as Hoess, Eichmann and others to
indulge in evil because the state had
sanctioned such evil as necessary and in fact
patriotically essential.

Himmler grabbed the opportunity to create his brain-
child the SS using a bizarre interpretation of
teutonic legends & mythology. He understood the evil
in the state policy developed and in his speeches
justified the murder of concentration camp inmates
as a necessary though "tough" duty. Down the line
Hoess and Eichmann and others, who weren't leaders
but mid level administrators, were the "ordinary men
made Himmler's & Hitler's policies a
reality.

The concentrated state propaganda atmosphere of
attacks against Jews, Commissars and Slavs created
the atmosphere with its implicit permission to the
Heer Officers and soldiers to conduct some of the
mass killings that accompanied the invasion of
the Soviet Union. Look how soon the massacre of
Babi Yar took place, 2 days in Sept 1941.
This killing of over 30,000 of Kiev's jewish
population occured pretty much within the greater
Kiev metro area. While this murder was directly
done by the Waffen SS, SD and Sipo and local
nazi collaborators the collaboration of the
region's military was needed too. The fact that
a concentration camp, Syrets, was then located at
the site where more regional Jews, perhaps 75,000
Gypsies, and Soviet POWs were killed. definitely
suggests that high level Heer officers of Army
Group South, and military governor, Major-General
Kurt Eberhardmust, must have known.

So in summary Army Officers and soldiers were
enabled by the Nazi general propaganda of the
essential "lebensraum" needed for future Greater
Germany at the expense of the locals. Unfortunately
this propaganda was accepted at varying levels by
so much of highly educated German population
(not all of course a courageous few of conscience
did not accept). The enabling environment was
perhaps made more permissive by the commissar order
to further permit murder on such a large scale and
have the Heer implicitly and explicitly engaged.

[Rich Rostrom]

Himmler ...understood the evil
in the state policy developed and in his speeches
justified the murder of concentration camp inmates
as a necessary though "tough" duty.

Himmler did not consider the extermination
of Jews and other "race-enemies" to be evil.
Harsh and psychologically difficult, but
ultimately a "virtuous" act.

Neither he nor any of the Nazi leadders were
psychotic or psychopathic; they were not acting
on delusions, but on erroneous knowledge and
defective moral principles, which they carefully
argued themselves into.

[WJHopwood]

Post by IndSyd
WJ Hopwood wrote: "ordinary men whose
counterparts could be found anywhere."
.... I agree, the rise of a Nazi Party with Hitler
at the lead then gave the opportunity for
many such as Himmler as well as Hoess,
Eichmann and others to indulge in evil
because the state had sanctioned such
evil as necessary and in fact patriotically
essential ....others, who weren't leaders
but mid level administrators, were the
"ordinary men made Himmler's &
Hitler's policies a reality.

And then there were the really "ordinary"
Germans, who just went along for the ride.
Primarily interested in their own daily lives
they couldn't care less about government
policy if it didn't affect them directly..
One such German is a woman, now 105
years of age, who was one of four wartime
secretaries working for propaganda minister
Joseph Goebbels.
Long silent and ignored by history, the
woman, Brunhild Pomsel, is the subject of a
new German documentary titled "A German
Life" which was recently released at the
Munich film festival.
In a recent review of the film in the New
York Times, Ms. Pomsel is described as still
having a lucid memory from which she
offers an "unflinching glimpse" into the mind
of a "normal German" during the Nazi era as
"someone who worked within the system for
personal advancement and now is wrestling
with (his or her) own complicity."
Joining the Nazi party in 1942 in order to
qualify for a good paying job in the propaganda
ministry" she now asks, "Is it bad when people
....try to do something that is beneficial for them,
even when they know...they end up hurting
someone else?"
In her interview Ms.Pomsel said she had no
knowledge about Nazi war crimes and learned of
the gas chambers only after the war was over. In
describing her own responsibility she says that if
you "end up blaming the whole German population
,,,for enabling the (Nazi) government to take control
that was all of us. Including me."
One of the film's directors summed up the intent
of the film with this comment: "The dangers are still
alive. It could happen again...the main aim of the film
is to have the audience question, 'how would I have
reacted?. What would I have done in her position" to
advance my career?
An interesting question.

WJH

[Alan Meyer]

On 05/29/2016 09:43 AM, WJHopwood wrote:
...

Post by WJHopwood
At the time of the O.S.S. tests the principal examiners
were two American doctors who reached different conclusions
--one believed that the Nazi actions were "a unique category
of psychopathology, while the other concluded that the
defendants were essentially "ordinary men whose counterparts
could be found anywhere."

...

There is an excellent book about this subject, though not about men in
the Nazi leadership, by Christopher R. Browning. I think Browning would
argue for the second explanation, that the defendants were essentially
"ordinary men whose counterparts could be found anywhere."

The book is: _Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland_, first published in 1992 by Harper Collins in the
U.S. and Penguin in the U.K.

Browning, an American historian, writes about a reserve police "ORPO"
battalion made up of mainly of "ordinary" men from Hamburg. Many were
in their thirties. Many were married. Most of them volunteered for the
police reserves, according to Browning, to avoid being drafted into the
Wehrmacht where they could expect to actually have to fight. They were
mainly working class men and a great many actually had union and
socialist or communist party backgrounds before Hitler came to power.

The battalion was ordered into the implementation of the Final Solution
in 1942 and Browning follows the transformation of these men into
killers of Jewish civilians. If I remember his conclusions correctly,
he said that a fairly small number took to killing eagerly. The
majority were unhappy to varying degrees with what they were ordered to
do (the first "action" involved ordering people to lie down on their
stomachs in the forest in a row, having a man above and behind each Jew
put the muzzle of his carbine at the base of the skull of the Jew in
front of him, and all pulling the triggers on command.) The men were
told by their commander that anyone who could not do this was excused,
but only a very small number of men actually opted out. The others,
however upset they were, believed that they would be seen to be weak and
cowardly if they refused the orders.

As time went by, more and more of these ordinary men became inured to
murder and carried it out without much compunction. However, it was a
considerable relief to many of them, and a boost to the morale of the
battalion, when their duties were modified from shooting obviously
innocent people to putting them on trains and sending them to death
camps where someone else would be directly responsible for carrying out
the killings.

The most brutal of the killers tended to become alcoholics, drug
addicts, and wild men whom even their former comrades found to be
dangerous and threatening.

Here are the conclusions I draw from all this:

1. Ordinary men can and will commit brutal crimes if placed in an
environment where brutal crimes are expected of them by those around them.

2. Some men were brutal before the Holocaust. Nazism didn't transform
these men, it attracted them. Some of these men may have had some
genetic defect but I suspect that most of them did not. No genetic
defect is required to explain what they did.

3. Most men are not brutal by nature but will be brutalized by
sufficient exposure to brutal violence.

4. There is a difference between being on the sharp end of the stick
(pulling a trigger or bashing a baby's brains out) and working in an
office like Eichmann or Himmler and murdering people by pushing paper
around without ever seeing blood. It was not that hard to turn the ORPO
battalion into killers, but it was probably even easier to turn the Nazi
officials into killers, as it were, by remote control.

Were the leaders psychopaths? Yes, I think they were. Were they
insane? No, I think they were not. I don't think they lost their
ability to reason. What they lost was their ability to sympathize with,
or even care about, other people.

In some cases this happened before they ever joined the Nazi Party. In
other cases it happened over time, in response to the situation that
they found themselves in. And in not a few cases they were actually
able to revert to being ordinary men again after the war when they
returned to civilized society.

Alan

[Alan Meyer]

On 05/31/2016 08:54 PM, Alan Meyer wrote:
...

Post by Alan Meyer
Were the leaders psychopaths? Yes, I think they were. Were they
insane? No, I think they were not. I don't think they lost their
ability to reason. What they lost was their ability to sympathize with,
or even care about, other people.

...

I'm going to qualify that.

If by "psychopath" we mean an amoral, anti-social person who cares
nothing for others and is willing to harm others for his own amusement,
then some of the Nazis were complete psychopaths and some were somewhere
on the border of psychopathy.

It might be argued, for example, that a guy who doesn't enjoy torturing
or killing people himself but orders others to do it is somewhere on
that border. It might be argued that someone who continues to care
about his wife and children but is happy to kill other men's wives and
children isn't a _complete_ psychopath. But I think these are
technical, psychiatric distinctions. They're not meaningless, but they
don't alter the fact that something pathological was happening in the
minds of these leading Nazis that cannot be called healthy.

I'd like to also qualify what I said about them not being insane.
Himmler and Hitler were arguably insane. Especially in the late stages
of the war, both of them frequently denied reality and gave in to
delusions. But I don't think they were insane earlier in their careers.

Alan

[Phil McGregor]

Sorry for the long lines, but ...

Post by Alan Meyer
...

Post by Alan Meyer
Were the leaders psychopaths? Yes, I think they were. Were they
insane? No, I think they were not. I don't think they lost their
ability to reason. What they lost was their ability to sympathize with,
or even care about, other people.

...
I'm going to qualify that.
If by "psychopath" we mean an amoral, anti-social person who cares
nothing for others and is willing to harm others for his own amusement,
then some of the Nazis were complete psychopaths and some were somewhere
on the border of psychopathy.
It might be argued, for example, that a guy who doesn't enjoy torturing
or killing people himself but orders others to do it is somewhere on
that border. It might be argued that someone who continues to care
about his wife and children but is happy to kill other men's wives and
children isn't a _complete_ psychopath. But I think these are
technical, psychiatric distinctions. They're not meaningless, but they
don't alter the fact that something pathological was happening in the
minds of these leading Nazis that cannot be called healthy.
I'd like to also qualify what I said about them not being insane.
Himmler and Hitler were arguably insane. Especially in the late stages
of the war, both of them frequently denied reality and gave in to
delusions. But I don't think they were insane earlier in their careers.

Do you mean psychopaths, who are generally unable to function in society (or function extremely poorly) and are usually marginalised
individuals who live on the margins of society?

Or do you mean sociopaths, who are generally able to function in society and who seem to present the sorts of 'symptoms' and character
traits that you deem to be 'psychopathic'

The two are significantly different.

Assuming, as seems accepted, that around 1% of a given population are classic psychopaths (and that these constitute 25% of [male] inmates
in prisons) and that around 4% of a that same population are classic sociopaths (and cosntitute between 15 and 25% of male prison inmates).
Then take figures that show that up to 3% of people in managerial positions are also sociopaths (presumably overwhelmingly male) ... and
allowing for sloppy definitions of those producing those figures (there are significant differences, at least according to some authorities
... and, heck, the percentages given seem to vary wildly according to different sources and, for all I know, the phases of the moon ;-) then
you could assume these figures (US) are probably representative of 1940's Germany ...

I am assuming you mean sociopaths, as psychopaths have difficulty functioning in the sorts of coherent and organised ways you seem to be
referring to.

So, say 3-4% of the total German population and around 3-4% of the 'managerial' population ... which, of course, for our purposes, includes
the political and military leadership.

Then allow for the fact that institutions tend to take on the characteristics of those in key leadership positions ... think of the famous
(now banned) Milgram experiments that had test subjects delivering lethal level electric shocks because they were told to by their 'bosses'.
65% did so, even though they 'questioned' their orders at some point.

Sixty Five Percent.

Those figures held consistently wherever the experiments were performed (first in the US, then in Israel and various other places).

In societies that were not notably run by sociopaths, which were (at least nominally) democratic and which did not enforce conformity (at
least not too harshly) and which did not have secret police forces (depending on your definition) and did not indoctrinate (in most places)
the populace to specific groups to be subhuman.

So, given that 3-4% of German Leadership cadres were sociopaths and would have had a disproportionate influence on 'corporate' thinking and
institutions, and that 65% or so of subordinates will follow orders, even ones that are pretty obviously lethal, with little or no practical
protest and that, presumably, in the Nazi state the remaining 35% had better not protest too much if they knew what was good for them ...

How many were *actual* sociopaths?

Or, perhaps, maybe 65% of any given populace (and that means ANY populace) is latently sociopathic?

(And, of course, the evidence is that the Soviet leadership cadre was dominated by sociopaths as well ... think punishment battalions and
NKVD machinegun units stationed behind assaulting forces to mow them down if they tried to retreat ... likewise, of course, the Japanese
showed even more distressingly sociopathic tendencies because their society had been encouraging it for much longer than Germany had)

And, of course, there were sociopaths in the Allied forces as well, but even those in positions of authority seem to have been kept on a
short leash because, by and large, Allied political systems were not dominated by political forces that were in turn hotbeds of sociopathy
in the same way as the Nazi Party, the Communist Party and the Japanese Military seem to have been.

Personally, I think Golding had it right in 'Lord of the Flies' ... he was trying to explain how a civilised society (Germany prior to the
1930's) could turn into, well, Nazi Germany ... and he was really pointing out to his readership that it could happen ANYWHERE and that it
didn't take much. Even one bad apple will rot a whole barrel.

So, on the whole, I'd go for the assumption that around 65% of any given populace are either sociopaths or will, under quite nominal
circumstances, do the bidding of sociopaths without much real resistance.

YMMV.

Phil

Author, Space Opera (FGU); RBB #1 (FASA); Road to Armageddon;
Farm, Forge and Steam; Orbis Mundi; Displaced (PGD)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Email: ***@tpg.com.au

[Alan Meyer]

Phil,

You've gone way beyond my level of expertise here. I'm not qualified to
talk about differences between psychopaths and sociopaths, or about what
percentages of people in democratic societies vs. other societies may be
one or the other.

I have, at best, a very poor understanding of what motivates a person to
murder harmless children, or what sort of persons are easier to get to
do things like that and what sort are harder. However some things that
I have read recently make me think that a key factor for Nazis was the
Nazi ideology that said the people they were murdering weren't really
humans - just some kind of subhuman that looked human.

This may be pure wishful thinking, but I'd like to believe that some of
the worst criminals like Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner,
"Gestapo Mueller", etc. were abnormal people well before beginning of
the Holocaust.

Although I'm not qualified to draw any conclusions about this, it seems
to me worth looking at the phenomenon of ISIS as having some relevance
to Nazism. From what I've read (e.g., _ISIS: the State of Terror_, by
Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger) most of the ISIS Internet propaganda is
not about Islam, it's about extreme violence. It attracts men, many of
whom know almost nothing about religion, who are excited by the idea of
hurting people.

I have no doubt that the majority of people attracted to Nazism were not
of that type. However it may well be that certain sections of the Nazi
state, such as the Gestapo and SS, had a much higher proportion of such
people than other institutions in society.

Alan

[Mario]

Post by Alan Meyer
1. Ordinary men can and will commit brutal crimes if placed
in an environment where brutal crimes are expected of them by
those around them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

[IndSyd]

Sorry RR I agree with you.
When I said
Himmler ...understood the evil
in the state policy developed
and in his speeches...

I meant that he only recognized
that the world would consider it evil
and so it needed to be kept secret as did
the other leaders - Goebbels, Heydrich, Hitler,
etc.

[Don Phillipson]

Post by WJHopwood
During and for a time after the end of the Nuremberg war
crimes trials the O.S.S. (which later evolved into the CIA)
was interested in the psychology of the Nazi defendants.
In an effort to find out why, individually and as a group,
they did what they did in their creation of the Holocaust
and in other acts of mass murder of populations in their
conquered territories.

Minor point: the Holocaust was little understood in 1945-46,
date of the Nuremburg trials of top Nazis, and did not figure
as such in the prosecution case (replete with evidence of
cruelty and mass murder regardless of race.)

Major point: Americans in the WW2 period were uniquely
concerned with psychologistic explanations of why the
enemy behaved as he did (early in the war, why Japan
and Germany were so successful) and how to forecast
on this basis his future actions and responses. The
best-remembered case was Ruth Benedict's book,
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (published postwar)
"in order to understand and predict the behavior of
the Japanese in World War II by reference to a series
of contradictions in traditional culture" cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chrysanthemum_and_the_Sword
Planners in London and Moscow never made such
methods a priority.

[WJHopwood]

Don Philipsson wrote;

Post by Don Phillipson

..... the O.S.S. (which .later evolved into the
CIA) was interested in the psychology of the
Nazi defendants. In an effort to find out why,
...... they did what they did in their creation of
the Holocaust and in other acts of mass
murder of populations in their conquered
territories.

Minor point: the Holocaust was little
understood in 1945-46, date of the Nuremburg
trials of top Nazis, and did not figure as such in
the prosecution case (replete with evidence of
cruelty and mass murder regardless of race.)

If it was little understood despite the prosecution's
case being replete with evidence such as the
atrocities mentioned above, perhaps the reason
was that such atrocities had not yet been grouped
and labelled by most as "The Holocaust." I believe
that the wide scope and evil activities of such
evidence was given ample publicity as the
concentration camps became liberated by
advancing Allied troops late in the war. It must
have been known about to a significant extent,
although not by the later "Holocaust" term,
by the prosecutors at Nuremberg, and to the
general public worldwide, months before
the Nuremberg trials began.
As an aside, in anticipation of eventual
victory, an Allied war crimes commission had been
working in London from as early as late 1943 to
identify Nazi individuals subject to prosecution for
war crimes when the war ended. When the war
did end, the commission had identified and made
dossiers on over 30,000 potential Nazi war criminals.
As a practical matter, war crimes prosecutions
had to be confined to a more manageable number of
defendants.
Accordingly, it was decided to concentrate
on the individuals who had held top wartime positions
in the Third Reich. Accordingly, 24 top Third Reich
officials were selected as defendants for what then
became the well known and widely covered Nuremberg
trials,
It had also been agreed by the Allies that specific
charges used to prosecute the 24 individual defendants
would be drawn from three main categories of
offenses which are outlined below:
1. Crimes against peace ( i.e initiation of a war of
aggression, violation of treaty agreements, etc.)

2. Crimes against the historical codes and covenants
of war (i.e, murder, assassinations, forced labor of
civilians in occupied territories, ill treatment of
POWs,etc...)

3. Crimes against humanity---(extermination of Jews,
Gypsies, Polish elites and religious persecutions,
enslavements)

As can be seen, number 3 above synopsizes the major
Nazi activities which later became encompassed in the
term "The Holocaust."

Post by Don Phillipson
Major point: Americans in the WW2 period .were
uniquely concerned with psychologistic
explanations of why the enemy behaved as he did
(early in the war, why Japan and Germany were so
successful) and how to forecast ....his future actions
and responses.

An interesting point. But if IRRC being "uniquely
concerned" with a psychological explanation of what
governed the enemies' early successes and, failures,
as well as forecasting his future actions on the basis
of his cultural background, was not a top priority for
either our military or the general public at the time.
Our enemies had already been at war for several
years before our own active participation therein,
and their intent and capabilities were fairly well
known by our military by then without theoretical
assistance.from the anthropologists.

Post by Don Phillipson
Planners in London and Moscow never made
such methods a priority.

I'm not surprised..

WJH