Leon Goldensohn was an American psychiatrist who monitored the mental health of the twenty-one Nazi defendants awaiting trial at Nuremberg in 1946.
Born on October 19, 1911, in New York City, Goldensohn was the son of Jews who had emigrated from Lithuania. He joined the United States Army in 1943 and was posted to France and Germany, where he served as a psychiatrist for the 63rd Division. He replaced another psychiatrist in January 1946, about six weeks into the trials, and spent more than six months visiting the prisoners nearly every day. He interviewed most of the defendants, including Hermann Göring, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Fo
