"On the Manufacture of Consent to War and Nationalism"
1946: inside a concrete prison cell in Nuremberg, Hermann Göring stripped away the grand illusions of warfare. Speaking quietly to an American army psychologist, the former Reichsmarschall offered no apologies and no remorse for the catastrophic destruction of Europe. Stripped of his jewel-encrusted medals, tailored uniforms, and paracodeine addiction, the second-most powerful man in the Third Reich was awaiting his sentence before the International Military Tribunal. Observers expected fanatical dogma or legal evasions. Instead, in an intimate exchange with intelligence officer Gustave Gilbert, Göring delivered a cold, clinical analysis of political power. With brutal nonchalance, the architect of Nazi rearmament explained that ordinary citizens never desire war, yet any government on earth—dictatorship or democracy alike—can effortlessly herd its population onto the battlefield.
The man on the iron cot was a shadow of his former public persona, yet mentally formidable. When captured in Austria in May 1945, Göring was bloated and carrying thousands of narcotic pills. Confined behind the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, prison warden Colonel Burton C. Andrus enforced a strict regimen. Deprived of drugs and placed on standard rations, Göring shed eighty pounds, regaining an oratorical sharpness that frequently outmaneuvered chief American prosecutor Robert H. Jackson. Captain Gustave Gilbert, a German-speaking psychologist holding a doctorate from Columbia University, enjoyed daily access to the defendants' cells to document their psychological profiles. Testing placed Göring’s intelligence quotient at 138, among the highest in the prison. During their quiet evening visits, Gilbert probed the inner mechanics of the regime, finding a prisoner who spoke with unsettling candor.
The decisive exchange occurred on April 18, 1946, during a recess in the proceedings. Gilbert stopped by cell number five to discuss the trial's evidence regarding the outbreak of the war, remarking that ordinary people were unlikely to feel grateful toward leaders who brought them ruins. Göring shrugged in contempt. "Why, of course, the people don't want war," Göring replied. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?" It was a universal truth across all borders: common people never wanted conflict, whether in Russia, Britain, America, or Germany. But that reluctance was politically irrelevant. In the end, Göring explained, leaders determined national policy, and it was "always a simple matter to drag the people along."
Gilbert pushed back, seeking to defend the moral legitimacy of representative government. In a democracy, the psychologist argued, citizens possessed a constitutional voice through their elected representatives, and in the United States, only Congress held the authority to declare war. Göring brushed the objection aside as naive civics. "Oh, that is all well and good," he answered, "but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy." The mechanism required neither genius nor complicated persuasion: "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." He paused to emphasize the universal durability of the technique: "It works the same way in any country."
Göring was not sharing an abstract theory; he was describing the operational blueprint he had lived. In August 1939, to justify invading Poland to a populace that dreaded another war, the regime staged the Gleiwitz incident, faking a border attack by SS men disguised in Polish uniforms. For years, state headlines warned that the Fatherland was encircled by mortal enemies, while Gestapo basements swallowed anyone who questioned the militarist consensus. Yet Göring’s revelation was far more disturbing than a confession of Nazi guilt. By asserting that the exact same manipulation worked within free societies, he argued that representative institutions offered no immunity against manufactured hysteria. To the Nazi leader, political morality was merely an ornament, and public consent was just an engineering problem solved by weaponizing fear.
On October 1, 1946, the tribunal found Hermann Göring guilty on all counts, sentencing him to the gallows. But on the night of October 15, barely two hours before the executioner was scheduled to enter his cell, Göring outmaneuvered his captors by swallowing a smuggled glass vial of potassium cyanide. In 1947, Gilbert published his records in Nuremberg Diary, preserving the prisoner's private reflections for posterity. While the Third Reich collapsed into ruins, Göring’s cynical formula outlived the regime that perfected it. Delivered in the quiet of a concrete cell, his words remained an enduring diagnosis of political vulnerability: a chilling reminder that peace does not collapse through the malice of the many, but through the ease with which leaders convince the fearful that survival demands war.