Trego's Mountain Ear

It only happened once – and it happened after the government was kaput and the officials were locked up at Nuremberg, awaiting trials for war crimes.   At the Nuremberg trials several Nazi leaders achieved genius-level scores on an IQ test. Highest result was 143! | The Vintage News

World War II had ended – a bunch of Nazi officials were locked up, and fundamentally, some American psychologists in uniform wanted to know how these guys could have led their nation not just through the second World War, but into the holocaust that killed at least 6 million jews.  Some conjectured that the Nazi leadership was below normal in intelligence.  Others thought there must have been some collective insanity.  Perhaps the question was answered best by Hannah Arendt in 1963 with the phrase “banality of evil.”  At any rate, the allies had a couple dozen senior Nazi officials in custody.  The results of their IQ tests are below – you can click the link above for the whole story – it is worth reading.

“ Part of establishing whether or not the Nazis were capable of standing trial was the administration of an IQ test. The Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Test was adapted from English and given in German, and at the time, it was one of the most widely used IQ tests available. Scores of 65 or less were classified as “defective,” between 80 and 119 as normal, and 128 and above was “very superior.” Only about 2.2 percent of the population scored in that range. The average of all the Nazis tested was 128. This means that they were a lot above from the average human IQ. Here are the results for all 21 Nazis tested:

1 Hjalmar Schacht 143
2 Arthur Seyss-Inquart 141
3 Hermann Goering 138
4 Karl Doenitz 138
5 Franz von Papen 134
6 Eric Raeder 134
7 Dr. Hans Frank 130
8 Hans Fritsche 130
9 Baldur von Schirach 130
10 Joachim von Ribbentrop 129
11 Wilhelm Keitel 129
12 Albert Speer 128
13 Alfred Jodl 127
14 Alfred Rosenberg 127
15 Constantin von Neurath 125
16 Walther Funk 124
17 Wilhelm Frick 124
18 Rudolf Hess 120
19 Fritz Sauckel 118
20 Ernst Kaltenbrunner 113
21 Julius Streicher 106”

The man at the top of the list is Dr. Hjalmar Schacht – who was acquitted at Nuremburg.  Schacht was never a party member, had been put into a concentration camp for his role in the Hitler assassination, and was one of the few German Freemasons to survive the Holocaust.

The second man on the list, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, was a school principal’s son who damned well deserved the noose he received.  Third was Hermann Goering.  Hermann was placed in command of Ritchoffen’s Flying Circus when the Red Baron was shot down, and was addicted to Morphine.

Obviously, the list goes on – but this is the only time I have found where government officials’ IQ was tested – and I’m not sure that it wasn’t a good idea.  From an informed voter’s point of view, I’d like to be able to read a list that included education, work history, and IQ.  I have this unpopular idea that IQ is just another measurement – like height and weight.  Without that measurement, politicians can (like Biden) claim to be really smart, and we have no data to prove, or disprove the statement.

Seyss-Inquart definitely proved that a high IQ (141 – he’d have been the smartest kid in a room with 319 people in it) didn’t keep him from being a vile, loathful individual who did vile, loathsome things.