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A half century after the destruction of the German Nazi state the discovery of relevant documentation has not yet ceased. To the contrary! More and more sources are being found, evaluated and utilized for the creation of compendiumlike
records. A number of those have become best-sellers and have appeared in multiple language editions. Another source of information are autobiographies by both victims and victimizes, such as those by Elie Wiesel and Albert Speer. I still find it painful to read any of them, and yet I cannot refrain from doing so. My own exposure to the capital evil of Nazism has left me with imprints that can never be erased.
When I was asked to review Geoffrey Cocks' book I was uneasy about accepting the invitation. Its connection to our profession, however, made my refusal impossible. The Göring Institute was a psychotherapeutic enterprise within the Nazi state, produced by the union between two of the most antagonistic opponents imaginable, the “Jewish science” of psychoanalysis and the most virulent antisemitic murderous criminal camorra that ever existed. Their offspring indeed was a bastard. To learn more about it became an irresistible challenge.
Geoffrey Cocks is a historian and as such his style is measured and sober, whereas I cannot resist turning emphatic and emotional, as I discuss his work. The current book is the 2nd edition of an earlier one that came out a decade ago and with which I am not familiar. By his own statement the author felt the need to enlarge upon his earlier research, because so much more material had been unearthed. His compilations and their use are enormously impressive. Each of the 16 chapters is followed by several pages of notes and the collected bibliography at the end attests to the solidity of his scholarship. He set himself a goal that went beyond the stated title by incorporating two additional chapters, an introductory one on the nature of German civilization that focuses on those features that facilitated t