"The study of memory had become my specialty, my passion. In the next few years I wrote dozens of papers about how memory works and how it fails, but unlike most researchers studying memory, my work kept reaching out into the real world. To what extent, I wondered, could a person's memory be shaped by suggestion? When people witness a serious automobile accident, how accurate is their recollection of the facts? If a witness is questioned by a police officer, will the manner of questioning alter the representation of the memory? Can memories be supplemented with additional, false information?" The "passion" Loftus describes in the lines above led her to a teaching career at the University of Washington and, perhaps more importantly, into hundreds of courtrooms as an expert witness on the fallibility of eyewitness accounts. As she has explained in numerous trials, and as she convincingly argues in this absorbing book, eyewitness accounts can be and often are so distorted that they no longer resemble the truth.

Goldensohn was the prison psychiatrist at Nuremberg from January to June 1946. He conducted interviews with the 21 prisoners there at the time, as well as with defense and prosecution witnesses. His accounts of these talks were preserved in notebooks and have never been published before. The book is divided into two sections: "Defendants" (19 interviews) and "Witnesses" (14 interviews). The texts reveal much about the mentality and motives of the Nazi leaders. The interviewees discuss Hitler and various aspects of Nazism. While their remarks are sometimes self-serving (e.g. denials of being antisemitic), they often disclose prejudice and other aspects of the psychology of Nazism. The antisemitism of the defendants is disclosed in the interviews with Göring and Streicher. Persecution of Jews is discussed in interviews with witnesses: Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz; Rudolf Mildner, the Nazi leader in Denmark; and Otto Ohlendorf, the commander of Einsatzgruppe D. Pp. vii-xxix contain the introduction by Robert Gellately.