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Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War CriminalsAnatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals by Joel E. Dimsdale

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was disappointing. It's a Yale UP book by a "distinguished professor emeritus" from UC San Diego, and its subject matter should have been fascinating. But it was surfacey and skimmed where I wanted it to dig. On the face of it, the psychological analyses done of Goering, Hess (the crazy one, not Hoess the commandant), Streicher, and Ley before the Nuremberg trials should be fascinating to read about and should provide a wealth of material to talk about things like mental illness, psychopathy, and the nature of evil. And yet it wasn't and it didn't.

For one thing, Dimsdale had material he could have used about others of their cohort and really, did Yale tell you your book could only be 200 pages long? For another, he sets up a pretty simple binary between his two researchers: Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist, who thought the Nazis were basically ordinary men who had done evil things, and Gustave Gilbert, the psychologist, who thought--who was in fact seemingly desperate to prove--that they were inhuman monsters. (Since Kelley and Gilbert came to loathe each other with a green and crimson passion, the simplicity of the binary may be genuine.) And he goes down the list with Kelley on one side and Gilbert on the other, and he never really gets much deeper than that into the question of evil and psychology. The subtitle of the book is perhaps overly appropriate: "The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals." Dimsdale seems to be more concerned that we understand how enigmatic they are than in solving or undoing or cracking (whatever one does with enigmas) even the tiniest piece of the material he has.

So from this book, I learned a little bit about the history of psychiatry and the evolution of the diagnoses that cluster around the word "psychopathy." I learned about the existence of these Rorschach blots and the feud between Kelley and Gilbert over them. But I didn't learn anything about these four Nazi leaders and I didn't learn anything about the nature of evil.

There is definitely room here for somebody to write a better book.



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