Interrogations

Description

While the trial of Hitler’s fallen elite at Nuremberg has been thoroughly documented, the interval between the Nazis’ capture in May and June 1945 and the start of the actual trial in late November has until now remained shrouded in shadow. With Interrogations, acclaimed historian Richard Overy opens a new window into the Third Reich, providing an intimate glimpse of the savage dictatorship in its death throes. More than thirty transcripts of the interrogations are reproduced here for the first time, allowing us to hear the voices of the newly captured “Hitler gang”-including Göring, Speer, and Hess-as they squirmed under the Allies’ glare. Interrogations is the stark and disturbing history of defeat; it lays bare as never before the human weaknesses that made the Third Reich possible.InterrogationsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface
Abbreviations
PART I: INTERROGATIONS: AN INTRODUCION

Outlaw Country
The Criminals
The Charges
Asking the Questions
The Absentees: Hitler, Himmler, Bormann
Selective Amnesia? The Case of Hess
The Helpful Speer
The Unrepentant Goering
The Limits of Responsibility: Strategies of Denial
Confessing to Genocide
“I hope they hang all“: Final Retribution

PART II: INTERROGATIONS: THE TRANSCRIPTS

Notes on the Transcripts
Perspectives on the Fuehrer
Document 1: ‘the driving force’ [Albert Speer]
Document 2: Hitler’s Women [Karl Brandt]
Document 3: The New Feudalism [Hans Lammers]
Document 4: Hitler the Warlord [Alfred Jodl]

“The world’s worst criminal”: Goering in the Third Reich
Document 5: A Souvenir from Monte Cassino [Hermann Goering]
Document 6: The Commander-in-Chief [Hermann Goering]
Document 7: Conquest by Telephone [Hermann Goering]
Document 7b: Vote “No” if you dare [Albert Goering]

Waging War
Document 8: Ribbentrop, Hitler and War [Joachim von Ribbentrop]
Document 9: Hitler’s “chess game of power politics” [Albert Speer]
Document 10: OKW at War [Wilhelm Keitel]

Genocide
Document 11: The Fuehrer Order [Dieter Wisliceny]
Document 12: A Morbid Accounting [Dieter Wisliceny]
Document 13: “incredible things at Auschwitz” [Ernst von Gottstein and Eugen Horak]
Document 14: A Doctor at Dachau [Franz Blaha]
Document 15: Auschwitz-Birkenau [Rudolf Hoess]
Document 16: Demarcation Dispute [Otto Moll and Rudolf Hoess]

The Hess Case
Document 17: “I have lost my memory” [Rudolf Hess and Hermann Goering]
Document 18: The Young Ladies [Rudolf Hess, Ingeborg Sperr and Hildegarde Fath]
Document 19: “the science of psychiatry is sound” [Rudolf Hess]

The von Papen Case: Resistance and Compliance
Document 22: Speer the Expert [Albert Speer]
Document 23: Sixty Acts of Treason [Albert Speer]
Document 24: Speer the Assassin [Dietrich Stahl]
Document 25: Special Pleading [Albert Speer]
Document 26: “not a concern of mine” [Albert Speer]

Robert Ley: Profile of a Suicide
Document 27: The Testament of Robert Ley [Robert Ley]
Document 28: Ley’s Dialogue with the Dead [Robert Ley]
Document 29: Confessions of an Anti-semite [Robert Ley]

Obeying Orders: Complicity and Denial
Document 30: “not a dangerous person” [Wilhelm Frick]
Document 31: “talking in a dream” [Joachim von Ribbentrop]
Document 32: “very undesirable activities” [Heinz Guderian]

Germany’s Future
Document 33: Rebuilding the Reich [Robert Ley]
Document 34: Schacht’s New Germany [Hjalmar Schacht]

Notes
Bibliography and Sources
Transcript Sources
Index

“Profoundly unsettling….a chilling glimpse of Hitler’s chief lieutenants.” —J. G. Ballard, in The New Statesman

“Gripping, horrifying, absorbing and dismaying by turns.” —Richard J. Evans, in The Times Literary Supplement

“Riveting…an essential contribution to our understanding of the Nazi Era.” —Booklist

Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and one of Britain’s most distinguished historians and an internationally renowned scholar of World War II. He is the recipient of the Hessell-Tiltman Prize, the Wolfson History Prize, the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize and is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society. His many works include Blood and Ruins,  The Bombing War, Dictators and The Morbid Age.

US

Additional information