The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  At the end of World War I Andrus was assigned to the Presidio of Monterey, California, where he served as a prison and intelligence officer. During the 1920s he commanded a cavalry troop in the Philippines. His colleagues saw him as formal, heavily starched, imperious, and intolerant of deviations from the rules. The US Army believed those qualities were perfect for the warden of the highest-ranking Nazis at the conclusion of World War II.

  Göring arrived at Ashcan disgruntled by the disrespect he had encountered from the gum-chewing American guards who drove him from the airfield. Still wearing his Luftwaffe uniform and sweating profusely, Göring reported to Andrus’s office. Andrus disliked him from the moment they met. “With the blubber of high living wobbling under his jacket he presented a massive figure,” Andrus observed, adding that he regarded Göring as a “simpering slob.” Göring smoldered under the commandant’s judgmental gaze.

  Along with his footman, Kropp, Göring had brought along a dozen monogrammed suitcases and a large red hatbox. The prison staff spent an entire afternoon searching their contents for contraband and rummaging through such items as jewel-encrusted military medals; diamond and ruby rings; swastika-emblazoned jewelry; cuff links adorned with semi-precious stones; Göring’s Iron Cross from World War I; silk underwear; four military uniforms; bedroom slippers; a hot-water bottle; four pairs of glasses; two cigar cutters; and a multitude of watches, stick pins, and cigarette cases. Göring had also provisioned himself with cash amounting to 81,268 Reichsmarks (equivalent in purchasing power to about $1 million today). He bragged that one of the rings was inset with the largest emerald he had ever seen in his long experience as a gem collector. The stone was an inch long and a half-inch wide. Many of these possessions had been stolen from occupied nations, the glittering spoils of war.

  Concealed in a can of coffee and in the seams of Göring’s clothing, a set of brass vials housed small glass capsules of a clear liquid with a white precipitate: deadly potassium cyanide. Many top Nazis—including Interior Minister and Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler and possibly Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels—had already committed suicide using similar capsules or would soon do so. Göring confided to his aide Kropp that he had managed to hide at least one cyanide capsule in his cell.

  The commandant sent Göring to his cell, formerly a luxuriously furnished room that probably had papered walls and a window with a view, now empty except for a flimsy table, chair, and bed with no pillow. Göring, Andrus related, splintered the chair the first time he sat on it. “Had he sat on his table it would have immediately collapsed,” Andrus noted, “for it was built to do so to avoid being used by a prisoner to stand on to hang himself.” Concerns about suicide attempts also prompted Andrus to issue the prisoners four-inch-long shoelaces, too short for self-strangulation or shoe tightening.

  An initial medical check confirmed that Göring was very overweight. His pulse was eighty-four with an irregular heartbeat, his respiration was rapid and shallow, his hands shook, and he appeared “in very poor physical condition,” the examining doctor noted. Göring said he had a history of heart attacks.

  Initially rude to guards and angry about being detained as a criminal suspect—he often imbued his rising to attention, saluting, and clicking heels in the presence of prison staff with sarcastic overtones—Göring kept protesting to Eisenhower. At Mondorf, he complained, he was receiving treatment “which shook me, as the top-ranking German officer and marshal, deeply.” He complained that his room had no light or doorknob; nearly all of his personal belongings had been taken away from him; the confiscation of his medals and marshal’s baton was humiliating; lower-ranking Allied officers denigrated him; and perhaps most upsetting, he had lost the services of his personal attendant, Kropp, whom Allied authorities assigned to manual labor elsewhere as a prisoner of war (POW). ( Just before Kropp’s departure from Mondorf, which nearly brought Göring to tears, the footman performed one last task for his master: stealing a pillow, which the Americans almost immediately took back.) Göring asked Eisenhower to fly him out of Mondorf to visit his family and to restore Kropp or bring in another German serviceman as his valet. The Allied commander did not respond. Andrus was furious, however, and scolded the prisoners:

  Whereas I do not desire to stand in the way of your writing letters concerning alleged theft of property or other violations of human rights, writing letters about the inconveniences or lack of convenience or about your opinions as to any indignity or deference due you is fruitless and apt to only disgust those in authority. . . . The commandant, his superiors, the Allied governments, and the public of the nations of the world are not unmindful of the atrocities committed by the German government, its soldiers, and its civil officials. Appeals for added comfort by the perpetrators and parties to these conditions will tend only to accentuate any contempt in which they are already held.

  Despite that rebuke, Göring became a wearisome critic of the prison, finding fault with everything, especially the food. Andrus insisted that the fare compared favorably with the meals of the prison guards. The jail’s schedule called for Göring and the other prisoners to awaken early and assemble at 7:30 a.m. in the dining hall, a dark chamber with arched entries, for a breakfast of soup, cereal, and coffee. Their lunch typically consisted of pea soup, beef hash, and spinach, and they ended the day with powdered eggs, potatoes, and tea for dinner. Each prisoner used a single spoon and rolled his own cigarettes. Andrus dictated where the prisoners would sit for meals, sometimes making neighbors out of captives who intensely disliked each other. The commandant told a story of Göring receiving dinner and lamenting to a German POW server, “This food isn’t as good as [what] I fed to my dogs.” The POW answered, “Well, if that’s the case, you fed your dogs better than you fed any of us who served under you in the Luftwaffe.”

  This anecdote, possibly apocryphal, captures the animosity Andrus felt for Göring. Like many of this Nazi’s adversaries, past and present, Andrus may have mistaken Göring for a stock movie character, the sort of crude manipulator whom British Nuremberg investigator Airey Neave described as “the fat man in endless screenplays who leads the gang of killers from his expensive dinner table.” As Neave discovered, however, Göring “was far more shrewd and dangerous than any celluloid character.”

  Hermann Göring, age fifty-two at the time of his capture, was the son of a judge and colonial official in the German colony of South-West Africa (now Namibia). A former flying ace who was once shot down and was credited with destroying twenty-two enemy planes for Germany during World War I, Göring achieved legendary status by flying the unit of planes he commanded into Germany at the end of the war and refusing to surrender to the Allies. He accepted the Pour le Mérite, then his nation’s highest military award, for his exploits.

  By the early 1920s Göring was a student at the University of Munich, where he first heard Adolf Hitler on a speakers’ soapbox. “You’ve got to have bayonets to back up your threats,” he remembered from Hitler’s message. “Well, that was what I wanted to hear. He wanted to build up a party that would make Germany strong and smash the Treaty of Versailles. ‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘that’s the party for me! Down with the Treaty of Versailles, goddammit! That’s my meat!’” Uncertain of his career direction and bitter over the dismantling of Germany’s armed forces, Göring devoured Hitler’s mix of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Communism. He supported the National Socialist movement—then small and open to new members, who could quickly rise to leadership positions—to express his hatred of the Weimar Republic that had arisen in Germany, help destroy it, and assume a position of power in a successor government. The Nazi Party was young, but “that meant I could soon be a big man in it,” Göring later said. His plan, stoked by opportunism and his desire for personal power, ultimately was realized. “Hermann will either be a great man or a great criminal!” his mother had predicted.

  While forming his nascent Nazi movement, Hitler recognized the usefulness of Göring’s alleg
iance and war-hero background. He tapped Göring to lead the paramilitary Brown Shirts of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the first of a staggering number of positions and accolades Göring would accumulate as a National Socialist leader. “For Hitler, Göring was a warrior of superior middleclass origins who could gain the respect of business people and former Army officers and was, above all, a man of unswerving fidelity,” the historian Eugene Davidson has observed. Under pressure from Weimar officials, Göring then left Germany and lived in Italy and Sweden for several years, watching the growth of the Nazi Party from afar.

  In 1927 Hitler welcomed Göring back to a stronger Nazi organization on the verge of electing members to the Reichstag. After the Nazis’ rise to governing power in 1932, Göring, now a top party organizer, planned or played prominent roles in some of the regime’s most notorious acts: the Roehm Putsch of 1934, which eliminated the rival SA leadership as a threat to Hitler; the establishment of the Gestapo (secret police); the creation of the first concentration camps for enemies of Nazism; and the persecution of political opponents on whom Hitler blamed the Reichstag fire of 1933. During the remainder of the 1930s, Göring was a key player in the framing of numerous Nazis and military men whose behavior appeared threatening to Hitler and Göring; the Nuremberg Laws, restricting the civil rights of German Jews; decisions that legalized the extermination of Jews; and, in intimate partnership with Hitler, the planning of Germany’s preparations for war, among many other deeds. This deep involvement in so many of Nazi Germany’s worst crimes later inspired US Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson to declare, “The podgy finger of Göring was in every pie.” Göring exploded with laughter when court translators labored to repeat Jackson’s phrase in German.

  By World War II Göring’s titles—surpassed in number among Nazis only by Hitler’s own lengthy honorifics—included President of the Reichstag, Hitler’s deputy, Prime Minister of Prussia, Reich Minister of Aviation and Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, Minister of Economics, member of the Secret Cabinet Council, director of the massive Hermann Göring Works manufacturing combine, field marshal, chairman of the Reich Council for National Defense, and Reich Forestry and Hunting Master. The most precious of Göring’s honorifics was the title Reichsmarschall—a rank similar to a six-star general—held only once before, some two hundred years earlier, by Prince Eugene of Savoy.

  Second in authority only to Hitler, Göring officially became the Führer’s successor-designate in 1935. He put enormous amounts of energy into his duties, making him exceedingly valuable to the Nazi government. At the same time, his vast wealth increased through theft and graft. Unlike many others in the Nazi regime, Göring projected a jocularity that won the affection of soldiers and pilots during the early years of the war. He loved pageantry, costumes, and medals, and once, in an era of formal wear for diplomatic conferences, met US President Herbert Hoover wearing a red silk shirt adorned with a neckerchief fastened with an emerald pin. In Carinhall—his grand countryside playhouse in Prussia, named after his first wife—he gathered tame lions, appeared before guests with spear and helmet as a sixteenth-century warrior, operated a lavishly designed toy railroad, watched cowboy and Indian movies, and displayed works of art stolen from museums and collectors throughout Europe.

  As the war turned against Germany and the Luftwaffe collapsed, Göring’s hijinks lost their appeal. His influence over Hitler diminished, and his value as an advisor weakened as others, primarily Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann, took his place. He grew reclusive; kept far from the lines of battle; and spent more time hunting, appropriating art, and dallying with his toys. At Germany’s surrender, just one of his titles, Reichsmarschall, remained. Only Gestapo chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner’s reluctance to carry out Hitler’s execution order without written confirmation saved Göring’s life.

  The guards searching Göring’s luggage discovered gigantic quantities of small tablets made from unknown ingredients. Soon after Göring’s arrival, a guard showed Andrus an expensive leather traveling case and said, “I felt you should see this, sir.” Andrus opened the case, stared at what he called “the biggest collection of pills I had ever seen in my life”—on detailed inspection about twenty thousand tablets—and immediately summoned Göring to his office. Göring explained that it was his custom to take forty of the pills a day to treat his heart condition. But these tablets were not part of any normal treatment for heart disease. At the war’s end, Göring had hoarded a much bigger stash of pills than the one that dismayed Andrus; he had flushed many tablets down the toilet, believing it would be dishonorable to have so many pills in his possession when he was captured.

  Andrus would not take Göring’s word for the ingredients or efficacy of the pills, so he shipped a sample to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in Washington. Hoover passed it on to Nathan B. Eddy, PhD, a pioneer in the study of drug addiction at the Bureau of Narcotics Research of the US Public Health Department. Eddy’s analysis confirmed that the tablets contained not heart medicine but paracodeine, an effective painkiller and “a relatively rare narcotic, not used in the United States,” Hoover noted. The FBI deemed paracodeine’s addictive potential similar to that of morphine and warned Mondorf prison officials not to abruptly withdraw Göring from it. Hoover asked to be kept apprised of the Nazi’s recovery. (Göring was surely unaware of the FBI’s analysis, but he grasped Hoover’s interest in him when two FBI agents later came to Mondorf seeking a souvenir for the agency’s museum in Washington. “Imagine my being featured in the famous FBI museum with the gun of John Dillinger and the mask of Baby-Face Nelson,” Göring exclaimed. “It’s a fantastic idea!” He suddenly stopped, however, when he understood the implications of this request. “Aha, I’m already indicted. A notorious criminal. American children in the future will shudder when they see a souvenir of the vicious Reichsmarschall in the FBI collection.” Eventually the agents persuaded Göring to contribute one of his military epaulets.)

  Göring’s hoard of pills amounted to nearly the world’s entire supply of the synthetic drug, which he had requisitioned from German manufacturers. Developed by German pharmaceutical firms four decades earlier, paracodeine is a depressant with an active ingredient chemically related to the one in opium. “Paracodeine fills a gap between the codeine and morphine groups [of drugs],” noted a German pharmaceutical journal of the early twentieth century. “When paracodeine is given, like codeine, in small doses, it often acts with more intensity than codeine. Compared with codeine, the remedy has a greater sedative power.”

  Göring was addicted, and to satisfy his need he had pharmacists formulate low-dosage tablets especially for his use. Each tablet contained ten milligrams of the drug, with five tablets delivering the narcotic effect of sixty-five milligrams of morphine, more than enough to anesthetize an average person. At the war’s conclusion, Göring often punctuated work and meetings with breaks so he could pop these pills.

  Andrus would not tolerate his prison housing an addict. On May 26, Göring’s sixth day at Mondorf, Andrus ordered the prison’s medical staff —a German doctor named Ludwig Pflücker and the American physician William “Clint” Miller—to wean the prisoner off paracodeine. They began by reducing Göring’s daily allotment of pills to thirty-eight, then to eighteen on May 29. An anxious Göring began counting the pills he received and “showed he was disgusted and otherwise showed no effects,” Andrus wrote in prison records. Two days later, however, Göring came down with bronchitis, and the Mondorf staff temporarily stopped the withdrawal process. “In my opinion, further reduction in the size of the dosage, or complete withdrawal of the medicine would produce an extremely serious mental and physical reaction in this individual,” Miller reported to Andrus. Several weeks would pass before anyone had the resolve to continue Göring’s recovery.

  With Göring’s withdrawal still unfinished, a new staff member arrived at Mondorf in early August. He had been ordered to Mondorf from the US Army’s 130th General Hospital of the European The
ater of Operations, where he worked as a consulting psychiatrist and was in charge of psychiatric services provided to thousands of US soldiers.

  Boyish in appearance, solidly built, and ruggedly handsome, with brown, wavy hair, the new arrival was Captain Douglas McGlashan Kelley, a California-born physician. He was near the end of three years in the medical service of the US Army. His responsibility at Mondorf, as Andrus soon explained to him, was to maintain the mental fitness of Göring and the other Nazi inmates until their disposition was determined.

  After settling in, Kelley spent time with all the high-ranking Nazis at Mondorf, but he met with Göring first to make a medical examination. Göring must have noticed that this new psychiatrist did not have the distant and scholarly demeanor that he was perhaps expecting. Kelley spoke loudly and directly, and he often moved his bushy eyebrows up and down for emphasis. He began his initial examinations gently, first probing the Nazi’s medical history. Kelley did not know what to expect from his infamous patient. He had heard Göring called everything “from a Machiavellian villain to a fat, harmless eunuch, the general tendency having been to identify him as a mere satellite of Hitler, who spent his days seeking medals, glory, and riches,” Kelley later wrote.

  One Mondorf staff member who already knew the prison’s most infamous inmate was John Dolibois, an honest-faced and amiable Luxembourg native and US citizen and Army officer working in intelligence. As a boy he had visited the Grand Hotel during its glory years, before his family emigrated to Akron, Ohio. Working at the prison since May 1945, he tried to protect his relatives in Germany by telling the detainees that his name was John Gillen. Dolibois cultivated a reputation as something of a “soft touch” among the prisoners, and he assumed the duties of a welfare officer—helping with their problems and needs and often lending a sympathetic ear to their complaints—in pursuit of valuable information to pass to the military interrogators who regularly interviewed the captives. Many of the Nazis spoke quite freely, believing they would never face trial for their crimes. “We didn’t have to use artificial devices to get our prisoners to talk,” Dolibois remembered. “We sometimes had trouble getting them to shut up. Almost all of the men in Ashcan were eager to talk. They felt neglected if they hadn’t been interrogated by someone for several days.” Dolibois’s fluency in German as well as his degree in psychology from Miami University made him an ideal translator for Kelley, who had only a weak knowledge of the language.