I'll Take Nazi War Criminals for $200, Alex!

Tom McMahon finds (in his bottom desk drawer?) a chart of IQs of defendants at the Nuremberg trials. What strikes me as interesting are two things. One, that we did it at all: folks really believed in that stuff in those days. And two, the scores aren't really all that dazzling. Okay, nobody is exactly a box of nails but the range from a ho-hum 106 (Julius Streicher) up to a not-quite-so-ho-hum 143. And that last is Hjalmar Schacht, more precisely Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, the evil genius behind the Nazi's pre-war fiscal policy; he fell out of favor and actually ended the war in a concentration camp, having plotted to overthrow the regime (it is a moot point how far he was motivated by hostility to Hitler and how far by his own zeal to return to power). The vainglorious Herman Goering gets only a 138; the oily and manipulative Albert Speer, only 128.

Questions: how much does this matter, and how? Would these guys have been more effective if smarter? Or stupider? And, just for deviltry, how would these scores stack up against the leadership of the U. S. House of Representatives.

Freud and the Nazis: Maintaining the Proprieties

The wife of Sigmund Freud, receiving unwelcome visitors in their Vienna apartment, maintains the bourgeois proprieties:

When the Nazis arrived at the door, Martha, having asked them to deposit their rifles in the umbrella stand, asked if they might care to sit down. This too, they refused. As they began to search the house, Martha went off, fetched the household money, and placed it on the dining room table. “Won’t the gentlemen help themselves?” she suggested, and this time, the gentlemen complied.

—Mark Edmundson The Death of Sigmund Freud ,
As read on the BBC Book of the Week