'Nuremberg': Can You Diagnose Evil?

Eighty years ago, on November 20, 1945, one of the most unusual and important court trials in history began. The trial was deliberately convened in the bombed out German city of Nuremberg, notorious for huge Nazi party rallies. The new film, "Nuremberg," recounts the trial of Nazi leaders and remains highly relevant for engaging with public health and the politics of today in Germany, the U.S., and many other nations.

A few days after the end of World War II, in May 1945, the allied powers commenced discussions about what to do with captured Nazi leaders. Among those leaders were newspaper publisher Julius Streicher, close friend of Hitler and a leading anti-Semitic propagandist for the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish problem"; Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior and co-author of the Nuremberg Race Laws; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Gestapo; Fritz Sauckel, head of labor deployment; and the grand prize, Hitler's number two, Hermann Goring, Reichsmarschall and Commander of the Luftwaffe.

A strong argument was made by Winston Churchill and British military officials for summarily executing all of them. But, as the just released film "Nuremberg" accurately explains, many American and Soviet politicians and legal authorities insisted on a public trial that would demonstrate to the world the rule of law and document the horrific crimes of the Nazi leadership and their followers.

The film does a commendable job laying out the history of what was a complicated and risky prosecution. The crimes were so extensive, murderous, and heinous that an entirely new set of legal charges, including "crimes against humanity" and "crimes against peace," had to be established.

The key vehicle for the movie's narrative is the relationship between Lt. Colonel Douglas Kelley -- a U.S. Army psychiatrist sent to the Nuremberg prison to ascertain the defendants' competency to stand trial -- and the wily, arrogant, manipulative, narcissistic, and seductive Goring.

This relationship was first examined by Jack El-Hai in his 2014 book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. The movie follows the book's account closely, with Russell Crowe as Goring and Rami Malek as Kelley bringing the story to life on the big screen. They engage in a complex dance of friendship, frankness, duplicity, and betrayal that ends with Kelley's dismissal from the army for leaking information about Goring to the press, and Goring's death by suicide in his cell shortly before he was to have been executed.

As the horrors of World War II continue to fade from our collective memory, the movie is very much worth a close watch. In fact, if General Dwight D. Eisenhower had not insisted on filming in the concentration camps as they were liberated, the prosecution at Nuremberg might have failed and Holocaust deniers may be even more vociferous than they already are.

The movie is also important for the deeper questions it raises -- and doesn't raise -- about the legacy of the racist Nazi regime in the context of the reappearance of white supremacist ideology today.

One of the key reasons Kelley wanted to examine Goring and other defendants was that he hoped to find a common psychiatric condition that would explain the monstrous evil these men had committed. He was unable to achieve this goal.

Instead, the psychiatrist found among the top Nazi leaders: proud men still enormously angry over Germany's loss and humiliation after World War I; some opportunistic, bright, ambitious men eager to seize the chance to quickly advance their careers by aligning with Hitler and the Nazi Party; some men who were just bigots; and others who, in the words of another astute observer of Nazi evil, Hannah Arendt, were simply "ordinary," "banal," and "terrifyingly normal."

It is common in today's culture wars to dismiss the relevance of the Nazi horrors to current events. There is even a name for this supposed fallacy: Godwin's law. This holds that as a heated online discussion grows longer, the probability of invoking Nazis or Hitler approaches one (certainty).

But Godwin's law should not blind us to the reality that some analogies between current events and the history of Nazism are apt. Kelley's failure to find a distinctive psychopathology among the mass murderers he examined is a lesson for what has gone on in the world since. Ordinary, mentally sound people can and do perpetrate unspeakable evil. As do angry people holding deep grudges at perceived slights and mistreatment; people filled with hate fueled by bogus "scientific" theories about race, genetics, and foreigners; careerists and the overly ambitious. And when no one speaks up, the bigots and wily, egomaniacal careerists can lead political parties and sophisticated nations terribly astray.

American, German, and world politics are full of the kinds of dangerous leaders the film portrays. Those who try to expose and criticize them are not misusing what I and others have termed "the Nazi analogy." The staggering evil of Nazism was not perpetrated by obviously mentally ill men. Rather, some human beings did and continue to do monstrously evil things.

What the movie does not do is examine the reasons why these Nazi leaders and their followers believed so fervently in their cause. What ethical views led Nazis to sleep well at night while nearby smokestacks continuously spewed human remains, and innocent, peaceful civilians and prisoners of war were starved, enslaved, and tortured in more than 40,000 omnipresent death camps?

The answer is racism, grounded in widely influential and deeply flawed medical and scientific theories. Racism grounded in an enormous fear that Jews, the disabled, homosexuals, the Romani, Slavs, and Black people posed lethal risks to the purity of the genetic stock of the German people. That and revenge against those, especially Jews, who were falsely charged with bringing Germany to economic ruin in the pre-World War II years. This produced a nation of people willing to defend themselves against a perceived massive public health threat and to conquer and punish any nations or groups responsible for their prior financial misery.

When racism, eugenics, immigrant bashing, and white nationalism rear their ugly heads today, the rise of Nazism shows they ought not be ignored; all with a voice must engage and denounce them. When calls to return to a once glorious past, free from "undesirable people," are voiced, they are symptomatic of the morality that underpinned Nazism.

Far too many today counsel silence or compliance when echoes of Nazi ideology enter government, science, or public health. That poor advice is exactly how a score of men wound up on trial at Nuremberg for leading a powerful, sophisticated nation to commit the vilest crimes in human history.

Nuremberg, the movie and the actual trial, make clear that evil ignored is evil enabled.

Arthur Caplan, PhD, is the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Yes, but you can extrapolate, or infer how it worked back then, over there, by seeing how the playbook works.

If you had a job in 1930s Germany, a government job, you were doing well. Don’t rock the boat. There’s a revolution, and the National Socialists take over, after beating the International Socialists.

If you try to buck the system with either, you’re fooked. Lose your job. Pension. Maybe get thrown in a camp or gulag. I’m not excusing what people in totalitarian collectivist societies do, but this is part of human nature, this is how it happens.

The medical community indeed has been “captured” so to speak. Academia as well. Nobody says $@it, because they will get fired. In the case of Academia, we were always told the beauty of Tenure, was they couldn’t be fired for unpopular opinions, and this would lead to a robust Free Speech and Inquiry and the rest of it, academic freedom.

Sure hasn’t turned out that way. At all. They rolled over on all the BS quicker than anyone, Tenure or not. Very sad.

Supposedly Herr Schicklegruber had a lengthy Berlin (or wherever) local police file before he became famous. He liked the young college boys, supposedly.

My uncle was a World War Two vet, left wing as anybody (except for the atomic bomb, go figure). Before I was on to his “debating” style, he would just spout long lists of nonsense, and then change the subject if you actually refuted any of his points. Move on to the next subset of nonsense. The key to dealing with nutbars is staying on topic. Don’t let them flit around with drive by rhetoric. Classic lefty BS.

Anyhow, we were arguing about something, and I pointed out Adolf was a hard core vegetarian anti-tobacco homosexual socialist. He would fit in perfectly at Berkley. My uncle looked like he’d swallowed a lemon. He knew damn well what the deal was.

There were 500-550 total Allied judiciary executions of Axis war criminals. A precise number isn’t known but there also were some hundreds more summary field executions during the conduct of the war (this excludes the tens of thousands murdered by the Soviets, which had far more to do with Russian racism than alleged war crimes). Even with extremely liberal accounting, figure two thousand Nazis, tops, executed by the Allies for war crimes.

On the other hand, there were 44,000 (forty-four THOUSAND) extermination camps, concentration camps and labor camps. There were hundreds of thousands of Nazis directly involved with the Final Solution, or indirectly connected to it, or complicit in it. Every last one of them deserved to dangle but the vast majority of them got a pass because once Germany surrendered, the Allies’ primary focus turned to rebuilding a stable and democratic Germany that they wouldn’t find themselves at war with again 10 years down the road.

This also meant they couldn’t engage in a years-long series of war tribunals to make sure all the “worker bees” in the concentration camps got their just rewards because that would risk looking to the run-of-the-mill Germans like they were extracting revenge. So they weighed the cost against the reward and opted only to prosecute the higher-ups and some of the more egregious offenders, in the hope that that would earn them some good will and aid in implementing the Marshall Plan.

But hundreds of thousands of murdering Nazis got off without so much as a slap on the wrist.

Excellent movie ... saw it for the second time yesterday. There is a lot to absorb in this movie and seeing it twice within five days helped to clarify it. A few years ago, my wife and I were on a Danube cruise and Nuremberg was one of the cities we visited. The courtroom was one of the more interesting sites we visited ... the area where the prisoners were imprisoned and later executed (close by the courtroom) was demolished shortly after the trials were completed.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.