Hitler's Nazi regime collapsed at the end of the war in Europe in
1945. He, his police chief Himmler and his propaganda chief
Goebbels all killed themselves. Almost all the other Nazi leaders
fell into Allied hands; a score of them were put on trial before an
international court at Nuremberg, and were cross-questioned first.
As Richard Overy remarks, the interrogation of the leading members
of a governing class within a few weeks of their loss of power
should provide unprecedented insights into their regime. Indeed
this was just what happened. All the papers have now been publicly
released, and Overy's industry can show us some of the results.
Needless to say, though these were on-the-spot testimonies by men
in a position to know what they were talking about, they include
many mistakes; no one is infallible. Overy, as a leading historian
of the mid-20th century, is well placed to correct them, and to
choose which examples best show what Nazism was and how it worked.
The star prisoner was Goering, weaned off morphine by his captors
and so able to dominate most of his interrogators. Three hard-faced
Soviet secret policemen arrived to grill him, and left two hours
later roaring with laughter. Goering admitted his side had lost the
war, but like most of his fellow prisoners was not able to see that
he had done anything wrong. As a counterpoint to this, Overy prints
a joint interrogation of Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz, and
Moll, whose task it was to dispose of the bodies there in an
orderly fashion: by hundreds of thousands. This is a ghastly but
necessary tale, well told. (Kirkus UK)
'A chilling glimpse into the minds of Hitler's chief lieutenants'
J. G. Ballard, New Statesman, Books of the Year
How can we ever understand why those in the Third Reich acted the way they did? What could have led them to commit such atrocities in the name of the Führer?
In 1945, as the Nazi regime collapsed, its remaining leaders were imprisoned and interrogated for months before the Nuremberg Trials. In this searing work Richard Overy reveals the original transcripts of these little-known interviews with key Nazis: the brutal and unrepentant Goering, the selective amnesiac Hess, the deliberately evasive Ribbentrop, the courteous Speer and the suicidal Ley. For the first time, they were forced to examine their actions and speak about the unspeakable. The result is an unprecedented and shocking insight into Hitler's henchmen.
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