Basing himself on the records of psychological and psychiatric examinations of defendants at the post-World War II Nuremberg trials, Joel Dimsdale discusses the mental health of leading Nazis in his new book Anatomy of Malice. David Mikics writes in his review:
Dimsdale, a well-known psychiatrist, begins with a grossly unscientific sample: he appears to have chosen the four among the 22 Nazi defendants whose mental lives seem most abnormal. . . .
Robert Ley, Julius Streicher, Hermann Göring, and Rudolf Hess form a picturesque rogues’ gallery, but they are unrepresentative of high-level Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, most of whom lied and dodged their way through the trial in perfectly ordinary fashion. . . .
Dimsdale promises us a detective story, but he finally comes up empty-handed. He admits that psychiatry can offer diagnoses but not answers when faced with human evil. . . . Psychiatrists can argue persuasively in court that a defendant is too mentally deficient to grasp the idea of good and evil, and therefore not responsible for his crimes. . . . But with someone like the mentally agile Göring, psychiatry is of little help.
Dimsdale cherry-picks his examples to cater to our idea that human evil must have something to do with psychopathology. But the verdict goes in the other direction: the overwhelming majority of the Nuremberg defendants did not possess the traits of the mentally diseased.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/209235/germany-and-collective-guilt