I n 1974, a visitor knocked on Joel Dimsdale’s office door.
Dimsdale, a young psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, had just published a paper in The American Journal of Psychiatry on the coping behavior of Nazi-concentration-camp survivors. The visitor, Joseph Malta, wanted to talk about it.
“I was the Nuremberg executioner,” Malta said, by way of introduction.
Malta, a military policeman in the U.S. Army during the Nuremberg trials, had volunteered to help hang Nazis convicted of war crimes. He participated in 60 executions. “They were scum, Dimsdale, and you should be studying them, not the survivors,” Malta told him.
The psychiatrist promised he would.
Dimsdale’s new book, Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals (Yale University Press), is a decades-delayed fulfillment of that promise. It’s also the latest contribution to the long shelf of books that attempt to plumb the minds of those responsible for the Holocaust. Were they calculating psychopaths? Or was their evil, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s term, more banal? The answer, according to Dimsdale, now a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, is complicated.
You focus on four Nazi leaders who were remarkably dissimilar. Julius Streicher was sadistic. Robert Ley was full of rage. Hermann Göring was charismatic. Rudolf Hess seemed out of touch with reality. Each was troubled in his own way. Is there any common thread, some primary flaw that made them embrace such a warped ideology?
Malice is not monochromatic. In fact, there are enormous shades of difference in the motivation and psychopathology of malice, and I don’t think we have come to terms with that in contemporary society. We encounter some episode of mass violence and we assume we know that the person is “a” or “b.” The reality is that when you look at this very closely, people are enormously different.
You rely on the research of Douglas Kelley, an Army psychiatrist, and Gustave Gilbert, a psychologist, who examined Nazi leaders when they were in prison after the war’s end. Kelley and Gilbert had a very uneasy partnership. What was at the root of this failure to get along?
These two men were unfortunately condemned to work together. They had very little volition in the matter. Kelley was a forensic psychiatrist with a mastery of the Rorschach inkblot test. But he spoke no German. Gilbert was a social psychologist who knew very little about the Rorschach test, but he was totally fluent in German.
Kelley and Gilbert each wrote books about their encounters with Nazi leaders. Kelley concluded that Nazism was a “sociocultural disease” and saw Nazis as not that different from the rest of us. Gilbert deemed Nazi leaders psychopaths. How did they arrive at such opposite conclusions?
I do believe that when one approaches malice, there are a number of possibilities in thinking about it. The peculiar thing is that Kelley, who was a psychiatrist, the sort of person you would expect to come up with a categorical approach to diagnosis, surprised everyone by instead perceiving malice on a continuum. In contrast, Gilbert, whose training was in social psychology, thought these people were psychopaths.
I wouldn’t say opposite, but very, very different.
Stanley Milgram, the researcher who conducted the famous obedience-to-authority shock experiments, concluded that “often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” There’s now a great deal of evidence from social psychology that backs him up, like Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment, at Stanford. Hasn’t science pretty much shown that Kelley was at least closer to right than Gilbert?
I think they were both spot on. It’s, sadly, very easy to put people in a circumstance where they behave despicably. If anything, the miracle is that some people behave honorably in such circumstances. I think the dark message from social psychology is that the default position of man may not be as bright as we would like it to be.
On the other hand, the view from psychopathology cannot be ignored. It’s kind of like theories of light, waves versus particles. They’re both true. I think both Gilbert and Kelley had much to tell us about the motivations and behaviors of the Nazi cabinet ministers.
The word “Nazi” gets thrown around now. There’s an internet meme called “Godwin’s law,” which essentially states that any conversation, given enough time, will come around to Hitler. It comes up often in the current presidential-election cycle. What do you think about how we apply that word now?
I prefer to use the word “Nazi” for Nazis. I think there are aspects of the belief structure and the political action of the Nazi Party which can be addressed. If we see xenophobia, we should label it as such. But I’m exceedingly cautious about using the appellation “Nazi” in contemporary times. I much prefer talking about xenophobia or incitement of violence, and I leave it to others whether they want to connect that to Nazi beliefs.
Tom Bartlett is a senior writer at The Chronicle. This interview has been edited and condensed.
