The cell held a cot, a table built to collapse if anyone leaned on it, and a peephole through which a guard watched day and night the prisoner’s head and hands. Inside that cell sat the man who had commanded the Luftwaffe. Next door was the minister who had negotiated with Stalin. Farther along, the governor of occupied Poland.

Between January and July 1946, an American psychiatrist entered those cells almost every day with a notebook and an interpreter. He asked them about their parents, their wives, the dead. And what they answered, with the gallows waiting at the end of the trial, was written down in pencil. Leon Goldensohn was thirty-four years old when he first crossed the prisoners’ wing of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.

He was a New Yorker, born on October 19th, 1911. He had graduated from Ohio State University in 1932, earned his medical degree at George Washington University in 1936, and trained as a neurologist at Montefiore Hospital in New York before specializing in psychiatry. In 1943, he enlisted. He fought in France and in Germany.

When the war ended, Major Goldensohn was stationed at the 121st General Hospital in the very city that was going to put the Third Reich on trial. On January 3rd, 1946, he received a new posting: the 685th Internal Security Detachment. His job was to look after the mental and physical health of the defendants before the International Military Tribunal. He arrived about six weeks late.

The trial had begun on November 20th, 1945, and the prison’s first psychiatrist, Major Douglas M. Kelley, was already leaving. Nuremberg had been chosen on purpose. The city was almost razed by the bombings, but it still had a usable courthouse and above all, a name.

The Nazi Party’s annual congresses were held there. The racial laws had been proclaimed there in September 1935. Trying the leaders on the stage of their parades had a political value that no one in Washington, London, Moscow, or Paris overlooked. The prison was run by Colonel Burton C.

Andrus, a strict disciplinarian who had already held a good part of the defendants at Mondorf-les-Bains in Luxembourg, a detention center the Allies ironically called Ashcan. At first, there was one guard for every four cells. Everything changed on the night of October 24th, 1945, when Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, hanged himself in his cell before the trial began. From then on, there was a sentry at every door.

The rules were meticulous. On returning from the courtroom, the defendants handed over belts, suspenders, and shoelaces. They slept on their backs with their hands outside the blanket in view of the guard. They received no newspapers.

Their mail went through censorship. They left their cells only to eat, to talk with their lawyers, and for a little exercise in the yard. Andrus had placed German-speaking soldiers among the guards without the prisoners knowing, so that they would report to him what was being said. In that isolation, a doctor with free access to the cells was an event.

Goldensohn spoke little German. Some of the defendants handled English, but in formal interviews, he preferred that they express themselves in their own language, and he worked with an interpreter, Howard H. Triest. While Triest translated, the psychiatrist wrote, questions and answers by hand in small notebooks that he then typed up within a few days.

His colleague, the psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who was fluent in German, did something different. He conversed freely and reconstructed the dialogues from memory at the end of the day. Goldensohn took notes in the moment. There was never any medical confidentiality.

The prisoners knew it. When one of them asked him to keep a secret, he made no commitment. In his notes, he called them subjects. And they, for their part, knew they were talking to one of the victors, that they had no right to remain silent in the courtroom, and that every sentence could, in theory, be turned against them before the tribunal.

That never happened. But they could not be sure. Even so, they talked. Out of loneliness, out of vanity, because they were rehearsing their defense with him, or because they needed someone to listen.

Several noticed the difference between the two American specialists. Some thought Gilbert was hostile. One of them claimed he showed them photos of hanged war criminals so that they would know what awaited them. Goldensohn they saw as more distant, more professional.

He, who spoke little and wrote a lot, asked about each man’s childhood, his illnesses, what he thought of his fellow defendants. Sometimes he insisted until he exasperated them. Gilbert had already given them an intelligence test. The results dismantled any comfortable explanation.

Of the twenty-one defendants examined, seven scored in the 130 range, and two exceeded 140. The one who got the lowest score was Julius Streicher. The leaders protested at having to submit to the tests of their captors, and as soon as the test began, each one strained to show how clever he was. Not everyone cooperated.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and Minister of Armaments, granted him only a brief, curt statement. He had foreseen the war. Everyone who accepted a position of responsibility in that government was guilty, and in that sense, he was, too. It was almost the only thing he said to him.

The trial had 403 public sessions and 166 witnesses, conducted in four languages. The cells had a single witness with a notebook. The first thing Goldensohn noted about Hermann Göring in the spring of 1946 was his dirty uniform. The former Reich Marshal, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, and Prime Minister of Prussia, lived surrounded by disorder in his cell.

He could switch on a smile and switch it off like someone opening and closing a tap. If the conversation touched on his family, his wives, or his childhood, he shut down and came out with stock phrases. He asked him about his sex life. “Oh, excellent.

” About his two marriages. “The two women were grand, each with her own kind of beauty. ” And that was that. What Göring wanted was to talk about art.

He preferred the Gothic, he said, because he had grown up among castles, one near Salzburg and another, the family’s own, near Nuremberg itself. He adored Dürer and Holbein. Picasso made him nauseous. Hitler, he explained with a certain air of superiority, despised the Gothic and couldn’t stand Bach or Handel, whom he loved.

He told him that at the Berlin State Opera, he had had three great conductors: Wilhelm Furtwängler, Richard Strauss, and Leo Blech, who was Jewish. He kept him for three years. Afterward, according to his version, Goebbels’s pressure was such that he sent him to Stockholm. Goldensohn noticed that Göring enjoyed these diversions.

He spoke like a patron of the arts, like a sage, and in none of them did the war, the camps, or the plunder appear. On May 21st, 1946, he asked to stay in his cell because of sciatica in his right leg. The pains, he said, had begun the day before in the courtroom. Well, that’s what he said.

The timing drew attention. The defense of Admiral Erich Raeder had just closed, and that of Baldur von Schirach, the former leader of the Hitler Youth, who according to talk among the defendants was going to denounce Hitler, was about to begin. Goldensohn examined him. The ankle reflexes were equal in both legs, the straight leg raise was normal, and there were no sensory abnormalities.

That same afternoon, he saw him walking easily around the yard. In the courtroom, on the other hand, Göring grimaced in pain at every step. From his bed, he spoke of Schirach with contempt. “He wants the world to believe that he became a friend of the Jews, and that Hitler deceived him.

Schirach did his part in the persecution of the Jews. ” And he spoke of Hitler. He explained to the psychiatrist that there had been two. One up until the end of the French campaign, charming, frank, with a sense of humor that still allowed him to say what he thought.

And another from the invasion of the Soviet Union on, distrustful, irritable, with his left hand trembling. “Hitler’s nerves were kaput,” he said. He told him that on April 22nd, 1945, he received the message to take over the leadership of the Reich, that Hitler changed his mind, that he accused him of wanting to succeed him, and that the SS arrested him in Berchtesgaden with an order signed by Martin Bormann. Resentment?

No. They were the final hours, and he was under pressure. The difference between the two of them, he insisted, fit in one word. “The German people called him ‘my Führer.

’ They called me ‘Hermann. ’”

When Goldensohn brought up Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, who had just testified before the tribunal, Göring changed his tone. “I knew nothing. I can hardly believe it.

The numbers are so large. I don’t see it. ” He admitted, without beating around the bush, that he had created the first concentration camps in 1933 to lock up communists, but extermination, never. He blamed Goebbels, whom he called “that club-footed fanatic,” and Himmler.

He also explained to him his theory about Goebbels’s influence. Hitler would drop by Göring’s house from time to time for coffee and leave around 9:00 because he went to bed early. With Goebbels and his family, on the other hand, he stayed until 4:00 in the morning. “God knows what bad influence he exerted on him during those long visits.

”

Then he said something that the psychiatrist copied down carefully. Göring made clear that he did not consider himself a moralist, though he had his chivalrous code. If he had believed that killing the Jews helped win the war, he explained, it wouldn’t have bothered him too much. What seemed wrong to him was that it served no purpose and gave Germany a bad name.

“I revere women, and I find it unsporting to kill children. ” He acknowledged that as the second man of the state, he had heard rumors of mass killings. He could have investigated them, he said, and it wouldn’t have been difficult. But he was busy.

And knowing would only have made him feel bad. The works of art accumulated in his residence were the charge that, by his own admission, hurt him most. He explained it in his own way. In a war, everyone plunders a little.

He paid, even if less than the pieces were worth, and it was all going to end up in German museums. “If I hadn’t taken, most of them would be in the hands of those damned Russians. ” He smiled as if he had scored a point. He also boasted of his maneuvers.

He told him that he had sent to Republican Spain a ship with ammunition ordered by the Madrid government. Under the cargo, a single layer of projectiles. The rest, bricks and stones. And that through his Swedish friends, he got King Gustav to write to Hitler to warn him that Sweden would resist an invasion.

Of the rest of the defendants, he spoke with a mixture of disdain and nostalgia. Of Rudolf Hess, he recalled that once, around 1936, on learning that Hess suffered from neuralgia, he sent a shipment of basins of all sizes to his home. One for soaking the arm, another the forearm, another the leg. Göring called him on the phone to ask whether he thought he was going to set up an aquarium.

He also confirmed the story of the pendulum that Hess kept in his office to decide, depending on which way it swung, whether a letter deserved an answer. “I saw it and he used it. ”

About the trial, he was direct. “Frankly, my intention is to turn this trial into a mockery.

”

On another visit, on May 28th, he found him smoking his long Bavarian hunting pipe, dejected. He confessed that in the courtroom, when things got boring or unpleasant, he closed his eyes behind his dark glasses and lived in the past. He went back to the parties at Carinhall. To his popularity.

They talked about his younger brother Albert, born in 1895. He was never a member of the party. For twelve years they had not spoken to each other. Göring described him as his antithesis, quiet, melancholic, pessimistic, with no interest in politics or the military.

He took a while to find the words. “But he’s not a bad guy, Albert. ”

What Göring did not tell Goldensohn or anyone was how he planned to die. That answer would come on the night of October 15th, 1946.

The first visit to Joachim von Ribbentrop was on a Sunday, January 27th, 1946. The foreign minister of the Reich from 1938 to 1945 was sitting at his table working on papers for his defense. He smoked an old pipe. He spoke excellent English with a slight British accent.

And he repeated the same sentence over and over. “It’s astonishing. I don’t understand how it could have happened. ”

Goldensohn detected two fixed themes in his monologue.

The first: could Hitler have known about the atrocities? “Impossible. ” Ribbentrop said. “Hitler was such an ascetic man that he didn’t eat meat and called his associates dead meat eaters.

” The second theme he never put into words, but it was in everything he said: how it could have happened to him of all people. In February he found him writing in pencil with his back to the door, in large sprawling letters. He wore no tie. Instead of shoelaces, bits of string.

The cell was full of boxes, matches, papers, and clothes thrown on the bed. He was writing his impressions of Hitler. The psychiatrist suspected he was helping to fabricate a myth: that of the magnetic, isolated Führer whom no one ever truly knew. A very useful myth for someone who needed to prove he knew nothing.

Ribbentrop described his first meeting with Hitler in 1932. “A dark face and very blue eyes that held you with a gaze. He would talk for twenty-five minutes. I would say two words.

And he would change the subject and talk for twenty-five minutes more. ”

Goldensohn read him a sentence from the diary of Hans Frank, who had just appeared in the courtroom. If Frank had told Hitler that he had killed 150,000 more Poles, Hitler would have said, “Good. ” Ribbentrop put his hand to his left temple.

“That fellow, why did he write those things? ” The psychiatrist noted his impression: what seemed to bother him was the clumsiness of putting it in writing. His life before politics came out in pieces. At seventeen, he went to Canada, where he lived from 1910 to 1914.

He worked as a foreman for a company building the railroad and took part in the construction of the cantilever bridge over the Saint Lawrence River near Quebec. There a tubercular kidney was removed. When the war broke out, he spent a few months in New York and boarded a Dutch steamer to return to Germany. At Falmouth, England, a British officer came aboard to arrest the Germans.

A machinist hid him in the coal bunker and he reached Holland without being discovered. So he served in the cavalry until the end of the war. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was ten or eleven. “I see her dead in her bed as clearly as when it happened forty-one years ago.

” His father died on New Year’s Day 1941 at his home in Berlin at over eighty-two years of age. “He was my best friend. ” He had married in July 1920 in Wiesbaden to Annelies Henkel, daughter of the champagne manufacturer. The Allied press, he complained, now called him “the former champagne salesman who became minister to the former corporal.

”

In June and July, the symptoms began. Headaches on the left side, a drooping eyelid that during an hour-long conversation opened fully. Goldensohn considered it of non-organic origin. Ribbentrop could not concentrate.

He would read a paragraph of his notes and not know what he had read. He asked whether he had a tumor. He asked whether his memory was going like poor Hess’s, and insistently whether tumors didn’t come from venereal diseases such as syphilis. The psychiatrist told him several times that they did not.

On July 15th, 1946, he made him a confession that sounds strange coming from a foreign minister. “Dachau to six weeks before the end,” he assured him, “we would win by a nose. I left there and said that from that moment on, I no longer understood anything. ” And he added, “Sometimes, in his presence when he spoke of all the good he would do for the people, the holidays, the highways, the new buildings, tears came to my eyes.

Is it because I am a hysterical and weak man? ”

He told him that, after the assassination attempt of July 20th, 1944, Hitler accused him in front of several generals of having sent emissaries to Sweden to negotiate peace. “It hurt me to the soul. I said nothing.

I clicked my heels and left the room. ”

About Hitler’s anti-Semitism, he offered an explanation of his own. Every year, he said, Hitler had become more obsessive, convinced that Jewish capitalism and Jewish Bolshevism were conspiring together. Ribbentrop claimed that on returning from Moscow in 1939, after signing the pact with Stalin and Molotov, he told Hitler that he had not seen Jews in Soviet leadership positions, except Lazar Kaganovich, who had struck him as a very pleasant older gentleman.

Hitler, according to him, ignored the comment. It was pure fantasy. When Goldensohn repeated to him what Streicher had said the day before, that if every last Jew in the world had been exterminated, there would be no trials, Ribbentrop nodded cautiously. He believed Hitler thought more or less the same.

About the Jews, Ribbentrop maintained that he only learned of the extermination in 1944, when the Soviets took the Majdanek camp and publicized what they had found. He went to ask Hitler. Hitler told him it was enemy propaganda. When captured by the British, he was carrying poison and handed it over.

“Now I feel that I must face the music,” he said, using the English expression. The other defendants had no respect for him. Admiral Karl Dönitz described him to Goldensohn as “a man of wood. ” Göring said he always seemed about to fall apart.

Ribbentrop knew it. What worried him most that summer was something else. His daughter Bettina, twenty-two years old, was expecting her first grandchild in six weeks. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel lay down on the cot and lit his pipe.

It was May 17th, 1946, an hour after the session ended. Sitting upright all day, he said, left him exhausted. He appreciated the visit, and he wanted at last to tell who he was. “I always wanted to be a country gentleman, a forester, and look what a mess I got into just because I was weak and let myself be persuaded.

”

He had been born on September 22nd, 1882, in the Duchy of Brunswick, into a family that had been farming the land for more than 150 years. He became a soldier because the family estate wasn’t enough to be independent. After the First World War, inflation swallowed his wife’s money, she also the daughter of farmers, and with five children he had to bury his plans. In 1934, he inherited his father’s estate.

He withdrew his request for discharge and stayed in the army. On February 4th, 1938, he was named Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, the OKW, a post that had not existed until that day. Six weeks later, the operations against Austria began. At the end of April, the Czech question.

“And so one fell from one event to another, like a man staggering along without fully realizing it and without being able to think. ” As he said this, his hands trembled. The figures in his account did not always agree. In April, he had told Goldensohn that he had thought of resigning three times.

In May, it was five times that he had asked to be relieved. “And each time they refused me in the harshest words. ” When things began to go badly, he told himself a phrase that he repeated in the cell: “Where I am, I am. They can only kill one in one place.

”

He called Hitler a genius and in the same conversation a demon. “A demonic man with an immense will who when he had something in his head had to achieve it. ” He claimed he never heard of the murders of Jews. “Hitler was a great psychologist in that.

He knew he couldn’t ask such things of a gentleman and an officer or even mention the idea. ”

What he did not explain was why orders and directives bearing his signature, which he himself admitted were contrary to international law, in particular those issued before the attack on the Soviet Union, which he justified from the ideological point of view, carried it. In April, he had given him his own diagnosis of the defeat. Three reasons: the struggle against the church, the persecution of the Jews, and the power of Himmler and the Gestapo.

Since when had he seen it that way? Only since the end of 1944. He also explained the attack on the Soviet Union with quartermaster’s figures. The war required 350,000 tons of oil a month.

Romania supplied 150,000, and the Luftwaffe alone consumed 100,000. Hitler feared that the Russians would cut off the Romanian supply. “The attack on Russia was a recklessness. ”

He remembered the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, when he asked how they were going to do it with barely three battalions, and Blomberg replied that they could count on France not reacting.

He remembered Hitler’s office with three portraits: Frederick the Great, Bismarck, and Moltke. And he remembered the gold party badge that Hitler gave him in April 1939, dated March 16th and 17th, as a reward for the entry into Czechoslovakia. Then he spoke of his sons. The youngest died in July 1941 before Smolensk, six weeks after the war in the East began.

He was twenty-one years old and a lieutenant. He was killed by machine-gun fire from an airplane. In 1942, he buried his favorite daughter, thirty years old, dead of pneumonia after catching a cold during a bombing raid on Berlin. His second son, a general staff major of the 563rd Grenadier Division, was missing in Russia.

He had heard nothing of him since mid-1945. “I have lost everything. In Berlin, my house and my things were burned. I only have two suitcases left.

”

His eldest son, a prisoner of the Americans, was married to a daughter of Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the man who in 1938 had recommended him for the post that now brought him to the dock. A few cells away was his immediate subordinate, General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the OKW. Goldensohn visited him on March 17th, and the first thing he heard was a reproach. “You come to see the others, but rarely me.

” The psychiatrist answered jokingly that he didn’t seem to need his services. Jodl took it seriously. “Yes, I am very normal. Everything is in order.

I will not become a psychiatric case. ”

Born in Würzburg in 1890, the son of an artillery officer, he insisted on his Bavarian temperament and on an uncle who was a professor of philosophy, from whom he said he had inherited the serenity to accept the trial. His first wife, Countess Irma von Bullion, had died in April 1944 after an operation. In March 1945, he married Luise von Benda, much younger, who now helped his lawyers.

He showed him with pride that he was the only one of the twenty-one defendants defended by two law professors. On the table he had behind the photos of his two wives, a view of Berchtesgaden, and he pointed out where his house was and where the Führer’s was. His argument was simple. He had spent the whole war at headquarters, next to Hitler, from 1939 to 1945.

The atrocities took place elsewhere. He said he felt an inner innocence. After the sentence, the lawyers of Keitel and Jodl requested for them the death of a soldier: the firing squad. The tribunal denied it.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner was nearly two meters tall, had a face crossed with scars, and had suffered two subarachnoid hemorrhages since being imprisoned, the latest in December 1945. The Austrian lawyer, since 1943 head of the Reich Main Security Office, the RSHA, the successor to Reinhard Heydrich at the head of Himmler’s police apparatus, received the psychiatrist on a Sunday in March with a soft, well-modulated voice. “I believe that by now you can see, having treated my cerebral hemorrhages, that I am not the coarse, unpleasant fellow the public surely thinks I am because of all the atrocities committed under Himmler’s command, of which I am totally innocent. ”

Goldensohn noted that the meekness, the calm, and the good manners seemed to him signs of a capacity for harsh and ruthless action.

Kaltenbrunner, meanwhile, was giving him a lecture. He explained to him the structure of the German police with a civil servant’s precision. “Criminal police and political police, united in 1936 as the Security Police. The Order Police with its rural gendarmes, its traffic officers, and its firemen.

” He took paper and pencil and drew an organizational chart of the RSHA, because the chart hanging in the courtroom, he said, was ridiculous. He gave him percentages of the police vote for the Nazi Party year by year: 5% in 1928, 80% in 1933. He assured him that the purge of 1933 had been very mild. In Bavaria, about forty policemen dismissed.

What interested him most was Heydrich: “a terribly ambitious man with an unmeasured lust for power, extraordinarily clever and cunning. ” He told how he had played Himmler against Martin Bormann, how the party’s intelligence service, the SD, became an instrument for spying on the weaknesses of the Nazi regional leaders: who drank too much, who bought himself four cars. Sadistic? Yes.

And Himmler? He defined him as “a petty man. He had been a school teacher and had that mentality. He enjoyed punishing, like the teacher who hits with the rod more than necessary.

” He attributed the extermination to Himmler’s slave obedience to the Führer. Nor did he spare details about another of the prisoners in the building, Kurt Daluege, the chief of the Order Police. He described him as a rival of Heydrich, who coveted the same Ministry of Police, vain, with delusions of grandeur. He said he had three million men when in reality he had 300,000.

According to Kaltenbrunner, Daluege’s fall from favor began when Heydrich, with Bormann’s help, was named Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in 1941 and obtained a rank that not even Himmler himself had. On April 8th, the statement was shorter. “They see me as another Himmler. I am not.

The newspapers paint me as a criminal. I never killed anyone. ” By then, one of his defense witnesses was already in the prison. His name was Rudolf Höss.

In June, Goldensohn found him in his usual state, inhibited and frigid. Kaltenbrunner asked him whether he had gotten fed up with war criminals, “especially with me, the so-called arch criminal of them all. ” Jodl’s defense had just ended, and Kaltenbrunner was exultant. According to him, it had been proven that the attack against the Soviet Union was a preventive war.

He drew a map with the borders of Russia, Hungary, and Romania, and marked with crosses where he said the Soviet divisions were concentrated: 150 divisions. Well, he corrected, more like nearly 300. And 120 airfields in occupied Poland. The psychiatrist reminded him that in June 1941, France was defeated and there was no Western Front, so Germany was at the height of its power.

Kaltenbrunner responded with Churchill, with the French fleet, and with the Dardanelles. When Goldensohn asked him for the concrete evidence that General Winter would have presented, he answered that there were five. “I don’t remember the exact evidence, but I know there were five. ”

He added a fact about his career that no one had asked of him.

He said he had obtained photocopies of treaties and notes between Turkey and England, and had taken them to Hitler. For that reason, he said, he was chosen to replace Admiral Wilhelm Canaris at the head of espionage. “It was known and proven that my ability was greater than Canaris’s. ” The proof of Canaris’s duplicity, he finished, was that he took part in the attempt of July 20th, 1944.

And then he spoke of Gilbert. He complained that the psychologist who upheld American principles violated the ban on showing them newspapers, just to show them copies of Stars and Stripes with photos of men hanged for war crimes at Landsberg. “Things he knows will make us boil. ” The man who directed the network of the Gestapo and the SD during the last two years of the war spent his afternoons gathering evidence that his guardians treated him badly.

It was 6:30 in the evening on February 12th, 1946. Hans Frank had just had dinner. He pushed aside the clothes lying on the cot and the chair, invited Goldensohn, whom he ceremoniously called “Mr. Interpreter,” to sit, and let out a high-pitched laugh.

“Since you are also a psychiatrist, you will probably find my case interesting. ”

Hitler’s former personal lawyer and Governor General of occupied Poland had a sty in his right eye and had worn cotton in both ears since an infection years earlier. He had two scars on his neck, one on each side at the level of the thyroid cartilage. He had made them himself when captured by the Americans at Tegernsee in Bavaria at the beginning of May 1945.

Days later he tried again by cutting his left arm. He still felt a tingling in three fingers. “I tried to kill myself because I sacrificed everything for Hitler, and that man for whom we sacrificed everything left us alone. If he had committed suicide four years earlier, everything would have gone well.

” Goldensohn offered him a cigarette. Frank accepted it with a smile. “American cigarettes are like the American soul, sweet and light. ”

His mood jumped from one extreme to another within minutes.

One day in March he greeted him with a joke. “Have you heard? On Thursday the defense of the art collector begins. ” He was referring to Göring.

He laughed uproariously with a high-pitched, almost hysterical laugh and suddenly turned serious, his right temporal vein standing out. “If he had devoted more time to collecting airplanes and less to collecting art, we wouldn’t be where we are. ”

He liked Brahms, Bach, and Max Reger, not Wagner. “The Führer had no musical taste and liked Wagner for the grandiloquent Teutonic glories.

” He showed him a little book he had dictated in ten hours, Columbus’s Cabin Boy, published at Christmas 1944. “It would have been better if I had devoted myself to writing books like this instead of getting into politics. ”

When Goldensohn asked him whether many Jews had been killed in Poland, Frank replied that they had not. “In Auschwitz, yes.

That was in Upper Silesia. ” He said he could prove that he had never sent a single Jew to a concentration camp. In the same conversation, he spoke of the murder of five million Jews and of the planned extermination of millions of Slavs as an epoch that must be closed definitively. And he claimed to feel great guilt.

“I have the feeling that I ran behind Hitler like a fool for no reason. ”

He told of his youth. On November 8th, 1923, he arrived with his group from the Freikorps von Epp at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall when Hitler’s coup had already begun. He remembered Göring at the door telling them, “We can use you.

” The next day, after the shooting, he helped remove from the street the body of Judge Theodor von der Pfordten. In 1929, Hitler asked him to be his full-time lawyer. He came to defend him in more than 140 lawsuits. In March, he spoke to him about 1942, the year of his famous speech against the concentration camps and the SS, delivered according to him in Vienna, Heidelberg, Munich, and Berlin.

It cost him all his party posts. Hitler, on the other hand, left him in Poland. “They kept me there because it was the most terrible place in Europe. The SS behaved like madmen.

My headquarters was in Krakow in the old palace of the kings. You could say I was king for five years, but without power. ” He asked to resign, he claimed, twelve times. He also remembered the philosopher Oswald Spengler, of whom he claimed to be a friend.

Spengler wrote to him in 1936, shortly before dying, that the Reich would probably cease to exist within ten years. He told him that when Hitler shouted out against the Jews, he showed that he lacked the stature of a statesman. “You can imagine the influence Hitler had, if not even a man like me let himself be convinced by Spengler’s wisdom. ”

Of his father, a lawyer of Rhenish origin, he told something less solemn.

In 1925, he was disbarred for advising both husband and wife in the same divorce, moved by her tears. He was readmitted three years later. He also spoke of his marriage, which he described as a mistake. He married the typist to whom he dictated his doctoral thesis and broke off his engagement to his first love.

In 1942, he began divorce proceedings. Hitler forbade them. Frank saw that girlfriend from his youth again at the end of the ’30s and lived practically with her until the end. He showed him her photograph.

She, he said, was a fanatical enemy of Nazism. “If I had married her, I would not have become a Nazi. ”

July 20th, 1946, was a Saturday, and there was no session. The sun came in through the open window of the cell.

Frank, in blue denim overalls, filled his pipe with American tobacco and set out for Goldensohn an idea he had been thinking about for days. In the dock there were twenty-one defendants and one absent. All the lawyers blamed Hitler, but no one defended him. Frank, his former lawyer, wanted to devote his final plea to doing so.

With a precise purpose: to destroy forever the possibility of a legend. “Over every ruin grass eventually grows, then some shrubs, and before one realizes it, what was a horrendous ruin becomes a romantic landscape and a legend. ” He imagined the procedure. Someone would speak on Hitler’s behalf.

The prosecutor would only have to put his political testament on the table and ask, “What do you have to say to this, Mr. Hitler? ” There would be no possible answer. And for all the arguments he could gather, the tribunal would need only one word.

Auschwitz. That would be enough. He told him that during the trial, he had compiled forty-four degrading epithets dedicated to Hitler. None came from the prosecution.

All had been spoken by the defendants themselves and their lawyers. When he finished, Frank sighed. “What a horrible system we had. How blind we were.

”

Julius Streicher’s pulse was racing. On January 24th, 1946, he had suffered a tachycardia in the middle of a session, and Goldensohn forbade him to go to the tribunal until the result of a portable electrocardiogram. It came out normal. The founder of the anti-Semitic weekly Der Stürmer was sixty-one years old, short, nearly bald, and smiled all the time with a grimace that the psychiatrist described as something between a gesture of pain and a lascivious look.

There was no need to ask him anything. He talked only about his subject. He told Gilbert, who was interpreting, “I knew all along that you are a Jew by your voice. ” He said it in a friendly tone.

He explained that he had been studying the Jews for twenty years as a scientific and psychological observer, that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were not exact, but that everything they said was true. While speaking, he looked at his fingernails, first of the right hand, and then of the left. When asked why, he said it was a little nervousness. In April, he returned to an obsession Goldensohn already knew: circumcision.

He leaned forward with a confidential air. “Have you ever thought about circumcision? ” The psychiatrist answered that he had performed many on Jewish and non-Jewish boys, and that he considered it a surgical procedure. Streicher looked at him with disbelief and moistened his lips with his tongue.

The chief American prosecutor, Judge Robert H. Jackson, he called Jacobson. He had been watching him walk, he said, and studying his face. He washed with cold water at any hour of the night with a cloth and a galvanized metal basin that he kept next to the toilet.

In the yard, he went around at a half run, overtaking the other defendants three or four times. He asked for small things non-stop: longer walks, more chocolate, jam, fresh carrots, onions, less noise from the guards. He said that a guard had hung a figure in his cell through the window of the door. He asked Goldensohn for the address of his wife, interned in an American camp in Ludwigsburg.

About his newspaper, he claimed that it had sold as many as a million and a half copies. The maximum documented print run of Der Stürmer was about 600,000, reached in 1935. In February 1940, after the investigation of a commission promoted by Göring, Streicher was removed from his posts and lived the rest of the war on his estate near Fürth, although he continued to direct the paper. From that, he drew his alibi.

“From 1940, I lived like a country gentleman. Hitler must have decided to exterminate the Jews in 1941 because I knew nothing. ”

He said the extermination had been the wrong policy because it turned the Jews into martyrs. And he disputed the figure.

According to him, they did not exceed four and a half million. He told him with pride that he had marched next to Hitler in the 1923 putsch and that the Führer never forgot it. The 1940 trial, the one before, for Göring’s commission, had been held in that very prison where he now awaited sentence. He dismissed it as a farce.

They accused him of having kept shares confiscated from Jews, and he maintained that he returned them to the state as soon as he learned he had no right to them. In June, he gave his opinion of his fellow defendants. Ribbentrop, he said, was misjudged. “What Göring said in the courtroom was very true.

Sauckel was an honest man with the bad luck of having to bring in foreign workers. ” And slave labor? “If a people is fighting for life or death and its leaders believe they can win the war by importing slave labor, then it was right. ” Immediately, he moved on to the Allied bombings of Rothenburg and Dresden.

“If everyone had a conscience as clean as mine, no one would need sleeping pills. My conscience is as clean as a baby’s. ”

Alfred Rosenberg received his visitors with a different face. Goldensohn described him on February 3rd, 1946, as “a face disguised in sobriety and philosophical calm.

” The former editor of the Völkischer Beobachter, Minister for the occupied eastern territories since 1941, and author of The Myth of the 20th Century, considered himself a historian and philosopher at once. His university degree was in architecture, but he never practiced it. Gilbert had lent him a week earlier a copy of the Protocols. Did he still think they were authentic?

Rosenberg smiled. “Their authenticity is a dark secret that may never be cleared up. ” They asked him a deliberately absurd question, whether a blood transfusion from a Jew would change the character of a German soldier. Rosenberg answered that he did not know.

“It would be a brutal experiment, like those carried out in the concentration camps. ” And he smiled as if he had won the argument. On June 8th, Goldensohn asked him what his main objection to Bolshevism was. Rosenberg seemed surprised that it needed explaining.

He listed three reasons. It destroyed by force a culture with no respect for the nation’s history. It governed for the benefit of a single class. And it fought private property.

Afterward he argued that the Nazis had come to power legally, and recalled that the previous year a million Germans had been expelled from territories handed over to Poland. The psychiatrist asked him whether that wasn’t understandable after what the Germans had done in that country. Rosenberg changed the subject. That same day he complained that Goldensohn was taking notes.

Then he said he was glad of it. But that he should take them accurately, because his theories were complex. It amused him that the other defendants declared in the courtroom that they had never read his books. He attributed it to their inability to follow a philosophical argument.

Göring, for his part, had confessed to the psychiatrist that he had only read the first chapter of The Myth of the Twentieth Century. It made him sleepy. During his testimony, Rosenberg interrupted several times to point out errors in the Russian translation. Goldensohn asked him for a concrete example.

“I don’t remember. The only important thing is that I exposed those Russians. ”

Fritz Sauckel had on his table a photograph of his ten children standing in a row, each one a little taller than the one before. Two girls and eight boys.

The eldest had died, shot down as a fighter pilot. The third was, as his wife had been told, in an American prisoner of war camp in northern France. He was short and stocky, with a bulldog’s head, a thick neck, very short hair, and a small trimmed mustache. On February 9th, 1946, at the start of the interview, his hands trembled a little.

They stopped trembling as soon as he began to talk, and then he spoke as if at a rally. He was born in Hassfurt, near Schweinfurt, on October 27th, 1894, the son of a mailman. At fifteen, he shipped out of Hamburg as a cabin boy on a Norwegian three-masted schooner. He sailed to Montreal, Dublin, Haiti, and Le Havre.

In January 1912, he was shipwrecked off the coast of Scotland. He traveled to Philadelphia, to the Cape of Good Hope, to Japan, and to Portland, Oregon, where an American doctor treated him after a blow to the head during a storm. In 1914, the French captured his ship and he spent five years interned as a prisoner. He returned in 1919 with his savings turned to paper by inflation and went to work at a ball bearing factory in Schweinfurt.

He joined the party in the mid-’20s. In 1927, he was regional leader of Thuringia, and in 1932 he was elected president of the government of that state, with 500,000 unemployed by his figures and factories closed everywhere. He repeated so many times that he never thought of a political career that Goldensohn noted it as a trait. And in the same conversation, he admitted that he had been attending party meetings since 1923.

In 1942, Hitler named him plenipotentiary general for the mobilization of labor. Sauckel called it “the hardest task of my life. ” He had to obtain millions of workers for the war industry. He gave Goldensohn a figure: five million foreign workers, of whom two million he claimed were volunteers.

And the other three, they had come by law. All of them, he added, had insurance like German workers and good food. The psychiatrist asked him about the families separated in the occupied countries and about the people captured in cinemas and public places and sent to Germany without warning. “What would you do if your country’s welfare depended on manpower?

When a ship is in the middle of a storm, it needs a single captain. ”

Buchenwald was in Thuringia, the region he had governed since 1933. Sauckel said that was Himmler’s territory. There was a moment when he was on the verge of tears.

It was when he recalled that he wanted to return to the sea and Hitler would not allow it. “He told me the sea was England’s business, not Germany’s. ”

Wilhelm Frick spoke differently: short, precise sentences with measured pauses, like someone giving an informal lecture. He was sixty-nine years old and had a straight back.

He had been born in Kaiserslautern on March 12th, 1877. He had been a doctor of law from Heidelberg, head of the political section of the Munich police from 1919, imprisoned for four and a half months for the 1923 putsch, a Nazi deputy from 1924, and from 1933 Reich Minister of the Interior for ten years. He told Goldensohn that his job had been to transform the parliamentary way into the authoritarian way. The prosecution had gathered 234 documents from the official gazette bearing his signature.

He said he had lost Hitler’s trust in 1934 with the purge of the SA. And that from then on, Himmler became more and more indispensable. The last time he was able to speak truly with the Führer was in 1937. During the war, he lived nevertheless a step away from him.

The Interior Ministry’s residences were in the Foreign Ministry building next to the Chancellery at 74 Wilhelmstrasse. Göring pointed to Frick as the author of the Nuremberg laws. The Reichstag fire? “It can be argued both ways.

” Hitler? “He was undoubtedly a genius, but he lacked self-control. He recognized no limits. Otherwise, the thousand-year Reich would have lasted more than twelve.

”

In August 1943, moreover, Frick had been named protector of Bohemia and Moravia. He said that after Heydrich’s assassination in 1942, Hitler ordered 50,000 Czechs killed in reprisal, and that Karl Hermann Frank, the German strongman in Prague, proposed lesser measures. Goldensohn asked him whether that same Frank wasn’t accused over Lidice. “Yes.

But Hitler wanted more. ”

The coldest part of the conversation came with the family. His son Hans, a district magistrate in Upper Bavaria, had committed suicide on May 3rd, 1945, along with his wife and children, for fear of being handed over to the Soviets. Frick found out in November.

His son Walter, a lieutenant, fell on the Russian front in 1941 with an abdominal shrapnel wound. Frick obtained permission from the Führer, flew to the bank of the Dnieper to see him, and returned to Berlin the next day. That same afternoon, he learned he had died. What was his reaction?

“It was sad. It’s war. Many others died, too. It’s war.

” Goldensohn told him it was a cynical philosophy. Frick corrected him. “No, I am only a realist. ”

On April 8th, 1946, in Wing C, isolated, a forty-six-year-old man had both feet in a basin of cold water.

He rubbed his hands over his lap. He said he had been suffering from frostbite for two weeks. The British arrested him on March 11th in Schleswig-Holstein, naked, and transferred him wrapped in a couple of blankets, without shoes or socks. He had been living in hiding under a false name as a discharged sailor working on a farm.

It was Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz from May 1940 until the end of 1943. The first important question was the number. “It cannot be determined exactly. I estimate about 2.

5 million Jews. ” Women and children, too? “Yes. ” Goldensohn asked him what he thought about it.

Höss went blank. The psychiatrist repeated the question. “I had my personal orders from Himmler. ” Höss repeated that figure before the tribunal.

Later research lowered it. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that around 1. 1 million people were murdered at Auschwitz, of whom nearly a million were Jews. Goldensohn reconstructed his life in the same session.

Born in Baden-Baden on November 25th, 1900, the son of very devout Catholics who wanted him to become a priest. He ran away from home several times to sneak onto military trains. At sixteen, in 1916, he managed to enlist and fought against the British in Iraq and Palestine. After the war, the Rossbach Freikorps, the Baltic, the Ruhr, Upper Silesia.

In 1923, he took part in the murder of a former comrade, Walter Kadow, whom they accused of having betrayed Leo Schlageter to the French. “Yes, I was one of the four men who beat him to death. ” He was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. He got out in 1928 thanks to an amnesty.

Goldensohn asked him what difference there was for him between a political murder and any other. “If you kill to rob, it’s plain murder. If you kill for political reasons, it’s political murder. ” In 1934, he joined the SS to run some horse stables.

Himmler met him on an inspection in Stettin and offered him a post in a concentration camp. He accepted. The next day, Höss stood to attention when he saw the doctor enter and did not sit until told to. Then he recounted Auschwitz as one drafts a report.

He arrived in May 1940 with thirty prisoners from Sachsenhausen at some empty barracks of the Polish artillery, sixty kilometers from Krakow. In the spring of 1941, Himmler ordered him to expand the camp to the maximum and to build three kilometers away a camp for 100,000 prisoners of war in a place called Birkenau. Seven villages were evacuated. That summer he was summoned to Berlin.

According to Höss, Himmler told him, “The Führer has ordered the final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, must carry out these plans. ” He told him that beforehand he visited Treblinka to learn from its mistakes. There were some barracks and a dead-end track in an old sand quarry beside the Bug River.

The chambers of wood and cement were the size of the cell in which they were talking. About two and a half by three and a half meters, but with a lower ceiling. Into each one, he said, they put about 200 people standing pressed together. The exhaust gases from the engines of tanks and old trucks did the rest.

The use of gas, according to him, began almost by chance. His camp commander, Karl Fritsch, proposed trying Zyklon B, a pesticide used to disinfect the barracks of fleas and lice. Höss tried it on prisoners condemned to death in the cell block. “I didn’t want any more shootings.

” He described two old farmhouses converted into gas chambers with the interior walls knocked down and the exterior walls cemented so there would be no leaks. In each one, he said, between 1,800 and 2,000 people fit. He described the ramp, the two SS doctors who watched people pass clothed and decided by their appearance, their age, and their strength. Between 20 and 30% were kept for work.

He described the signs that said, “To the disinfection and baths. ” The orderly piles of clothing. The prisoners who accompanied the victims inside to calm them and came out at the last instant. The Zyklon B, which took between three and fifteen minutes, depending on the weather, the wind, and the temperature.

In 1942, the large crematoria went into operation. Höss described them as modern buildings: changing rooms and gas chambers underground, ovens above, elevators to bring up the bodies. False showers, pipes, electric ventilation. And even so, he explained, they were always behind.

“Gassing was much easier than incinerating. ” For a transport of 2,000 people, the ovens needed about twenty-four hours, and there were days when two or three trains arrived. When he asked him about the hair, Höss specified that it was cut only from women, only after death, and that it was sent to factories to weave industrial felts. The gold teeth were extracted by prisoners, mostly dentists.

There were 3,500 guards and about 500 men of administrative staff. His house had ten rooms and a garden right in front of the camp gate. His wife and his five children lived there. Two women prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses over fifty years old, served them.

His wife, he said, found out in 1942 through a remark from the regional leader Fritz Bracht. She asked him. He explained it to her as Himmler had explained it to him. “She was satisfied, and we never spoke of it again.

”

Did he have nightmares? Never. Thoughts that haunted him? “No, I don’t have such fantasies.

” Did he read Der Stürmer? Sometimes, and he disapproved of it. It was superficial, pornographic, too propagandistic. Goldensohn noted the observation.

The man who credited himself with 2. 5 million deaths disapproved of Der Stürmer. “Oh, yes,” Höss replied. “All sensible people disapproved of Der Stürmer.

” What punishment did he think he deserved? “To be hanged. ”

Otto Ohlendorf was thirty-nine years old and looked older. Goldensohn described him on March 1st, 1946, as “a faded, stooped man without affect, who spoke with precision and defensively, as if expecting an insult at any moment.

” An economist, one of the SD’s intellectuals, he had commanded Einsatzgruppe D in 1941 and 1942, a unit of about 500 men that operated from Odessa and Nikolaev to Rostov and Crimea. Goldensohn began with his biography. Born in Hoheneggelsen, near Hanover, in February 1907, the son of a liberal farmer, a party member since 1925 at eighteen. He studied law and economics in Leipzig and Göttingen, and spent 1931 in Italy studying fascism, from which he returned, he said, as a fanatical anti-fascist.

The psychiatrist asked him how one could be anti-fascist inside a party like the Nazi one. Ohlendorf gave him a lesson in political theory. In fascism, the state comes first. In National Socialism, the people.

Did Hitler love the people? “Oh, yes. ” The people in general or only his concept of the folk? “He loved the German people.

” And the others? “I don’t know. ”

He explained the method: firing squads of fifteen men, one bullet per victim. The victims knew about ten minutes beforehand.

The maximum in a single day was four or five thousand. 90,000 were reported. He calculated that in reality, it was sixty or seventy thousand. Children?

“Thank God, very few children were shot. ” How many? “I don’t know. Barely a thousand.

” At the beginning of the same interview, he had said there was no age limit. Did he talk about it with his wife? “It didn’t seem to me an appropriate conversation for a woman. ” Goldensohn pointed out the contradiction.

Ohlendorf replied that he had not shot women. “I only supervised. ”

On another visit, the psychiatrist asked him bluntly what could explain that a man who boasted of integrity had ordered those deaths, other than sadism, perversion, or madness. Ohlendorf took offense.

Oswald Pohl arrived at the prison in early June, unshaven, with torn clothes and scratches on his face. The British had arrested him on May 27th, 1946. He was head of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, the WVHA, on which the concentration camps had depended since 1942. He told Goldensohn about the jewels, watches, coins, and ingots that arrived from the camps at his office before going to the Reichsbank.

Gold teeth? “I supposed some of the ingots were melted gold teeth. ” And he became indignant. “Do you think I went down to unload the trucks and open the sacks?

I was a very busy executive. ”

He had a story to explain how he had come to be there. He had spent almost twenty-two years in the Navy as a paymaster officer. At the end of 1932, bothered by the cheers of his comrades who said that only those who were no good for the Navy joined the party, he wrote to Hitler about the rumors circulating regarding a lieutenant expelled from the Navy over a matter involving a woman and who was already prominent in the SS: Reinhard Heydrich.

In May 1933, Himmler approached him in Kiel to tell him that he had investigated those rumors and they were false. Afterward, he wrote him one letter after another until in February 1934, Pohl agreed to organize the SS administration. For Pohl, the chain of extermination passed by him without touching him: from Himmler to Kaltenbrunner, from Kaltenbrunner to Heinrich Müller, from Müller to Richard Glücks, who was his subordinate, and from Glücks to the commandants. Glücks reported to him, but he insisted that in that matter he received orders from others.

He told of once investigating the case of a prisoner tied up and beaten to death at Stutthof near Danzig and bringing the culprit to trial. He spoke of bonuses in tobacco coupons and bread for prisoners who worked well. Goldensohn described to him a labor camp he himself had seen near Landsberg days after the liberation: about 400 Russian workers sleeping on planks without blankets, with lice and fleas, starvation rations, and the rule of carrying out each morning the dead of the night for the roll call. Pohl was not upset.

“You see what I mean? What hard and unpleasant work I had. ” To demonstrate his humanity, Pohl said he had five Jehovah’s Witness prisoners at home who looked after his children. Goldensohn answered that Höss had the same.

“It’s appalling,” Pohl exclaimed. “I could never have done what Höss did. ” Auschwitz was one of the camps under his authority. Kurt Daluege, the former chief of the Order Police, kept his cell in bare order.

Every time Goldensohn emptied his pipe into his cardboard ashtray and a few specks fell on the table, Daluege blew them away without thinking. He wrote his memoirs in block letters, so uniform they looked typed. In 1942, after Heydrich’s death, he had exercised the effective government of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and together with Karl Hermann Frank, he ordered Lidice and Ležáky razed. He said he felt guilty of nothing.

Goldensohn wrote that getting a sincere answer out of him was like trying to draw water from a well that had long been dry. Goldensohn left Nuremberg on July 26th, 1946, near the end of the defenses. He was not in the courtroom when the tribunal read its sentence on September 30th and October 1st. Twelve death sentences: Bormann in absentia, Frank, Frick, Göring, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Streicher.

Three acquittals for Hans Fritzsche, Franz von Papen, and Hjalmar Schacht. Life imprisonment for Hess, Funk, and Raeder. Twenty years for Schirach and for Albert Speer. Fifteen for Neurath.

Ten for Dönitz. The execution was set for the early hours of October 16th. On the night of the 15th, about two hours before the scheduled time, Hermann Göring bit into a potassium cyanide capsule in his cell. No one could explain then how he had kept it under a surveillance that forced him to sleep with his hands in view.

And if he’d been able to hide it for months in front of a guard at every door. The gallows were set up in the prison gymnasium, a room about ten meters wide by twenty-four long, with plastered walls. There were three wooden scaffolds painted black. Two were used alternating.

Thirteen steps led to a platform about two and a half meters high. The executioner was US Army Master Sergeant John C. Woods. At 1:11 in the morning, Joachim von Ribbentrop came in.

His last words, according to the witnesses, were “God protect Germany. God have mercy on my soul. ” The man who wondered in his cell whether he was weak and hysterical was the first to climb. He was followed by Wilhelm Keitel.

“I ask almighty God to have mercy on the German people. More than two million German soldiers died for the fatherland before me. Now I follow my sons. Everything for Germany.

” His sons: the twenty-one-year-old lieutenant killed before Smolensk, the major missing in Russia. Then Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who repeated that he loved Germany and had no knowledge of the crimes. Then Alfred Rosenberg. When asked whether he had anything to say, he answered with a single word, “No.

” The philosopher who asked that his notes be taken accurately left none. Hans Frank was the only one who entered the room smiling. He thanked them for the treatment received during his captivity and asked God to receive him with mercy. Months earlier in his cell, he had told Goldensohn that he considered suicide the greatest sin and that he was glad he had not succeeded.

Wilhelm Frick: “Long live eternal Germany. ” Julius Streicher entered shouting “Heil Hitler. ” On the platform, he screamed “Purim Fest 1946,” referring to the Jewish festival that commemorates the fall of Haman on the gallows. When asked for his last words, he said, “The Bolsheviks will hang you someday.

” And before the trapdoor opened, he pronounced his wife’s name: “Adele, my dear wife. ”

Fritz Sauckel shouted his innocence. Alfred Jodl, visibly nervous, said six words: “My greetings to you, my Germany. ” The last was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who expressed the hope that this execution would be the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War.

He dropped at 2:45. Afterward, Göring’s body was shown to the witnesses. The corpses were cremated at the Eastern Cemetery in Munich, the Ostfriedhof. The ashes were thrown into the Isar River.

The witnesses of the cells had their own appointments. Kurt Daluege was hanged on October 24th, 1946, in Pankrác Prison in Prague. Rudolf Höss was tried by the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland, which sentenced him to death on April 2nd, 1947. He was hanged on April 16th at Auschwitz, near the house with a garden where he had lived with his family.

A doctor certified his death at 10:21 in the morning. Otto Ohlendorf, convicted in April 1948 in the Einsatzgruppen Trial, and Oswald Pohl, convicted in the trial against the WVHA, died on the gallows in the yard of Landsberg Prison in the early hours of June 7th, 1951. Landsberg: the same prison whose executions Kaltenbrunner had complained about when Gilbert showed him the photos. Leon Goldensohn returned to New York with his notebooks and the intention of writing a book.

He never wrote it. He died of a heart attack on October 24th, 1961, at the age of fifty. His typed notes were kept for decades by his family in boxes: the questions of a doctor and the answers of men who knew they were going to die.

Höss, seated with his feet in a basin of cold water, had told him he had no nightmares.