At the most famous trial of the twentieth century, the chief prosecutor tried to force a defendant to take a truth drug. The defendant refused. And that small, failed episode at Nuremberg tells you almost everything about the limits of the whole truth-drug dream — because even here, at the trial of the Nazi leadership, with the world watching and a cooperative amytal interview already on the record, the drug had nothing to offer.1
The defendant was Rudolf Hess, Hitler's former deputy, and his strange journey through the truth-drug fantasy is worth following, because he sits at the intersection of nearly every thread in this chapter: a bizarre self-inflicted mission, florid paranoid delusions, an amnesia no one could quite classify, and two separate attempts to chemically pry the truth out of him — both of which came up empty.
Hess's story is genuinely strange before any drug enters it. In May 1941, while still Deputy Führer, he stole a Messerschmitt and flew, alone, to Scotland — on a self-appointed mission to persuade the British to drop out of the war. It was so bizarre an act that he was placed in a psychiatric hospital for the war's duration.2
And there his behavior curdled into florid paranoia. He attempted suicide. He complained of constant pain and itching. He accused the staff of feeding him nerve poison and "the glandular secretions of camels." At meals he'd suddenly switch plates with his guards, certain his food was poisoned. He was convinced the British were driving loud trucks past the hospital specifically to ruin his sleep.3
This is the backdrop for the truth-drug question, and it matters, because Hess wasn't a stable man guarding a clean secret. He was a floridly disturbed one whose most prominent symptom was his amnesia — and whose amnesia was itself deeply suspicious.
Hess claimed, during interrogation, that he couldn't remember anything. But his memory deficit was peculiar in a way that fooled no one: it "twinkled on and off inconsistently" and was sometimes too extensive to be believable. He claimed not to know what skiing was, or who Shakespeare was.4
That's the tell. Prisoners frequently claim memory problems to cut interrogations short, and Hess's amnesia had the signature of the malingered or the psychologically motivated rather than the organic: it was selective in convenient ways, inconsistent across time, and occasionally so total (Shakespeare? skiing?) as to be absurd. Dimsdale poses the real question without fully answering it: was Hess simply malingering — faking — or was he dissociating, his mind genuinely walling off memory under the pressure of his situation and his disturbance? The honest answer is that no one could cleanly tell, which is itself the point. Amnesia, real or feigned or dissociative, presents the same way from outside, and no interrogation technique reliably distinguished them.
Here's where the truth drug meets the most famous trial in history, and comes up empty twice.
First attempt: on May 17, 1945, Hess consented to an amytal interview to help his memory. He agreed to it. And nothing useful was elicited.5 This is the crucial baseline — a cooperative amytal session, the drug given to a willing subject who said he wanted his memory back, and it produced nothing. The barbiturate that could thaw a catatonic and restore a fugue patient's lost self did nothing for Hess, whether because his amnesia was feigned (in which case the drug can't retrieve a memory he's pretending to lack) or dissociative (in which case, apparently, it couldn't reach it either).
Second attempt: Hess was tried at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, and there he continued to claim amnesia. In exasperation, chief prosecutor Robert Jackson tried to compel him to undergo another amytal interview. Hess refused.6
Sit with the whole shape of that. The most important trial of the century, prosecuting the architects of the Holocaust, reached for a truth drug to break a defendant's amnesia — and the effort collapsed on two fronts. The one interview that happened, with a willing Hess, yielded nothing. The second, which the prosecutor wanted to force, never happened because Hess declined. And Dimsdale drives home the futility: given that the earlier cooperative amytal interview had already yielded nothing, it's questionable what new information a compelled second one would have produced anyway.
So Nuremberg is the truth-drug fantasy's high-water mark and its refutation in a single episode. The most powerful legal proceeding imaginable, with every incentive to make the drug work, got nothing from it — because there was nothing to get. A drug can't retrieve a memory that's being feigned, can't force disclosure from an unwilling subject, and, as the cooperative interview showed, couldn't even help a subject who genuinely wanted his memory back.
You are the chief prosecutor at the century's most important trial, and your defendant hides behind amnesia. You reach for the truth drug. Watch it fail on every path.
You note that his amnesia is suspicious — twinkling, inconsistent, absurdly total (he claims not to know Shakespeare). You can't tell if he's faking, dissociating, or genuinely impaired, and neither can your doctors, because from the outside these look identical.
You have a baseline you should heed but won't: he already took an amytal interview voluntarily, months ago, wanting his memory back — and it produced nothing. That should tell you the drug has no purchase here. But you're exasperated, so you try to compel a second interview.
And now you're stuck at the wall that ends every truth-drug dream. If he's malingering, the drug can't retrieve a memory he's pretending to lack. If he's dissociating, the earlier session showed the drug couldn't reach it. And you can't force him anyway — he refuses. What tells you the fantasy is empty is that you have maximum power, maximum stakes, and a prior cooperative session to build on, and you still have no move. The drug that could thaw a catatonic offers you, the prosecutor of the Reich, absolutely nothing.
The evidence is historical record: Hess's documented flight, his psychiatric symptoms, the May 1945 voluntary amytal interview and its null result, and Jackson's attempt to compel a second interview at Nuremberg. These are well-attested facts of the trial and Hess's captivity.
The tension the case preserves is the unclosable question of Hess's amnesia: malingering, dissociation, or organic? Dimsdale deliberately doesn't resolve it, and the non-resolution is the finding. If the century's best-resourced legal proceeding, with medical experts and a truth drug, couldn't determine whether a single defendant's amnesia was faked or genuine, then the whole premise that we can chemically distinguish real from feigned mental states is thrown into doubt. The deeper unresolved question: amnesia (real, dissociative, or feigned) presents identically from outside and resists every technique meant to pierce it — so what does it mean that so much of coercive interrogation depends on being able to tell whether a person's professed inability to remember or answer is genuine? Hess suggests: you often simply can't, and no drug fixes that.
Hess is the case that puts The Drug That Made Soldiers Relive the War on trial — literally. That page shows amytal working miracles: thawing catatonics, restoring fugue patients' lost selves. Hess shows the same drug doing nothing for an amnesia that wouldn't yield. The pair defines the boundary: amytal can loosen and retrieve when the mind is willing and the block is the kind the drug can reach, but it's powerless against feigned amnesia and against an unwilling subject — and it can't even tell you which one you're facing.
He converges with the whole chapter's thesis, confirmed from the top of the legal system: Truth Drugs Don't Work: The Experiments establishes it in the lab, Plötner confirms it in the death camp, and Hess confirms it in the courtroom. Laboratory, camp, and tribunal all agree.
To psychology — Dissociation and Cognitive Freeze. Hess's amnesia sits exactly on the unresolvable line between dissociation (a genuine trauma-driven walling-off of memory) and malingering (deliberate faking), and the case reveals why that line is so consequential and so invisible. Dissociative amnesia is real — the mind genuinely severs access to memory under overwhelming stress — but it presents identically to a convenient fake, and neither the amytal interview nor expert observation could tell them apart in Hess. The insight the pairing produces: coercive interrogation constantly runs aground on this indistinguishability. The interrogator's entire enterprise assumes he can tell whether a subject won't answer or genuinely can't — but dissociation makes "can't" and "won't" collapse into the same presentation, and no drug resolves it. The truth-drug dream implicitly promised to cut through this fog and reveal what the mind really holds; Hess proves the fog is often impenetrable, and that a professed blank may be genuine, faked, or protectively real all at once, with no test to sort them.
To behavioral-mechanics — Surreptitious Drugging as Control Vector. Hess is a natural experiment in non-surreptitious drugging — an amytal interview he consented to, and a second he refused — and it exposes what the OSS committee's "administer surreptitiously" clause was really hiding. When the drug is given openly to a willing subject (the May 1945 interview), it produces nothing; and an unwilling subject simply declines (the refused second interview). The connection reveals why the whole coercive-drug program fled to surreptitious administration: the drug offers the interrogator no leverage when the subject is either cooperative-but-blocked or uncooperative-and-refusing. Covert dosing was the only remaining path not because it worked better, but because it was the only scenario the failures hadn't yet ruled out — and Hess, tested openly at both consent and refusal, closed off the honest alternatives, leaving the fantasy nowhere to go but into secret.
Sharpest implication: At the century's most important trial, with maximum stakes and a prior cooperative session to build on, the truth drug offered the prosecutor of the Reich nothing — because a drug can't retrieve a feigned memory, can't force an unwilling subject, and couldn't even help a willing one whose block it couldn't reach. Hess also exposes the interrogator's deepest blind spot: amnesia real, dissociative, and faked all present identically, and no chemical resolves which you face. The fantasy that we can chemically read what a mind truly holds died, among other places, at Nuremberg.
Generative questions: