![]() It turns out that two prominent American researchers conducted a battery of psychological tests on Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials.ĭimsdale's studies led to a 1980 book entitled Survivors, Victims and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust, as well as subsequent research. Although he couldn't very well summon up dead men, Dimsdale took an interest, and did the next best thing: he dug into the historical record. He urged the psychiatrist to expand his study to include the perpetrators, as well as the victims. Still, in the 70s, Malta told Dimsdale that he wondered how these men could commit such terrible acts. "It was a pleasure doing it," Malta told the Associated Press in 1996, three years before his death. Instead, the stranger pulled papers out of his case to prove that he was Joseph Malta, one of two executioners who had put to death Nazi criminals at Nuremberg's Landsberg Prison, in 1946. "With that he sat down on my couch and started opening up the gun case and I said a little prayer to myself and wondered who I had infuriated so much," Dimsdale recalls.īut the visit wasn't murderous. "And he says: 'I'm the executioner and I've come for you.'" "I open the door and there's a man I didn't know carrying a gun case," Dimsdale says. He was working in his office in Massachusetts General Hospital, when he heard a pounding on his door, as he recalls. Dimsdale, a psychiatrist, had recently published a paper about his research on Holocaust survivors. A visit from an executioner changed Joel Dimsdale's life.
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