by Jack El-Hai
Thus confined, silenced, and restricted, the highest-ranking prisoners hungered for company. The captives “were quite glad to talk to anybody, even a psychiatrist,” Kelly discovered. And when they talked, the prisoners often spoke freely, torrentially, and without prompting—far more openly than they ever confided in the Allies’ official interrogators—making these psychiatric interviews some of the easiest Kelley had ever conducted. “Every man was an authority on his neighbor,” the psychiatrist said. “If you wanted to know about A, you talked to B about him, and you may be sure that B brought out the worst features in A. Göring talked about Ribbentrop, . . . Streicher about Frick, and so on. The only time they talked about themselves was when they wished to glorify their own position and emphasize their cleverness or innocence.”
Loneliness and isolation increased the flow of their talk, but Kelley’s skills as an examiner also made the Nazis drop their barriers. He based his interviews on an unspoken yet tangible respect between patient and doctor. The prisoners realized that Kelley wanted to understand their thinking and motivations without casting them as monsters or characters from a nightmare. His background in general semantics made him sensitive to their words, able to find significance in the cadences of their talk and the movements of their bodies, and he gleaned much without them being aware of it. He was the one person in Nuremberg who persuaded this collection of scared men with oversized egos that he wasn’t merely interested in finding out what their misdeeds were—he wanted to understand them.
Every day Kelley spent hours with the top Nazis. He listened to them, scrutinized them, and recorded their thoughts, giving all of them the first mental examinations of their lives. For Kelley, the German language sometimes got in the way, but many of the prisoners spoke decent English. (Göring, for example, understood English well, something many Americans learned when they saw his facial expressions during translated conversations.) In any case, at all times he met the prisoners with an interpreter, whose ability Kelley checked by rotating from one interpreter to another to compare their translations. Aware that the captives might say anything to make a favorable impression, Kelley also read their letters, found transcripts of their speeches, plowed through often execrable books they had published, and watched Nazi newsreels. He interviewed their acquaintances and any colleagues he could track down.
Colonel Andrus believed that danger lurked everywhere for the Nazi prisoners in Nuremberg jail. POWs and criminals were a risk for taking potshots at his prize captives, for example, as they walked the few hundred meters between the prison and the Palace of Justice. His fears were realized one day when an escort was taking Göring from the prison to the adjoining building. The armed guard, following Göring by the mandated six steps, suddenly heard something whiz through the air, followed by a sickening thump. Embedded in the wooden planking behind Göring was an eight-inch SS combat knife. The sentry looked up, but was unable to determine who had thrown it or whether he or Göring was the intended target. “And if Göring himself had died who could prove that an American did not do it?” worried Andrus, who kept the dagger as a souvenir. The commandant wasted no time in erecting a covered and walled walkway between these sections of the justice complex to prevent assassination and escape.
After the prisoners had settled in, US military security experts devised what they hoped were escape-proof procedures to control movement between the prison and the adjoining Palace of Justice. Starting in the court area, they set up obstacles, barriers, bells, sentries armed with firepower and billy clubs, peepholes, searches, square-grilled windows, all-business bureaucrats, warning signs, locked doors, permit requirements, and metal-clad surfaces confronting anyone trying to pass between the two sections of the complex.
Thinner and broken of his addiction to paracodeine, Hermann Göring was among the best adjusted to life as a prisoner. “The sudden change of environment from a situation wherein his slightest wish was immediately granted to incarceration in a tiny cell containing only a bed, a table, a chair, and a toilet, must have been profoundly shocking,” Kelley observed, “and yet Göring probably complained less and accepted prison routine with more grace than almost any other of the group.” Even so, he confessed to Kelley that he sometimes felt depressed. “Psychologically, I feel because of the environment right now very subdued,” Göring stated in a note he sent to the psychiatrist. “Physically, besides repeated heart palpitations, not too bad.”
Visitors to cell no. 5 often found him reading a book while sucking on a large, handcrafted pipe. One such caller observed that Göring looked theatrically well, with a brown tint to his skin “like that of a veteran star inured to make-up and costume.” It seemed as if incarceration had made him healthier, although he retained an air of corruption, like a once-distinguished man fallen into debauchery.
With his gray uniform hanging in folds from his shrunken frame—a look that New Yorker correspondent Rebecca West said lent him “an air of pregnancy”—he still conjured up energy and enthusiasm. “Each day when I came to his cell on my rounds,” Kelley wrote, “he would jump up from his chair, greet me with a broad smile and outstretched hand, escort me to his cot and pat its middle with his great paw. ‘Good morning, Doctor. I am so glad you have come to see me. Please sit down, Doctor. Sit here.’” This was a practiced manipulator at work, and Kelley’s skills and insights as a psychiatrist did not prevent his feeling attracted to Göring’s charm. These encounters between the dank, plastered walls of Göring’s cell, in fact, pitted one highly confident egotist against another.
Göring’s social ease and assumed leadership extended to his former colleagues. When he and his fellow captives managed to converse in the exercise yard, Göring tried to lift the spirits of the others. He fancied himself the most esteemed living Nazi, and he predicted honors that would accrue to the Nuremberg prisoners in the future, such as the marble tombs that he was certain loving Germans would eventually build as the resting places of members of the Nazi regime. Göring, Kelley was learning, determinedly lived in the present. A realist, he adapted magnificently to change. He focused on responsibilities and pursuits that led to his goals, and he awoke each morning convinced that the day offered “the rosy dawn of an always better future,” Kelley observed.
With that optimism, Göring discovered humor in imprisonment and became the cell block’s champion jokester. Kelley rarely found his jokes funny, but Göring, eyes sparkling in his role as prison comic, enjoyed them if nobody else did. Kelley was fascinated “not by the tale, but by the teller,” as when Göring delivered this routine:
If you have one German, you have a fine man; if you have two Germans, you have a Bund; three Germans together result in a war. On the other hand, if you have one Englishman, you have an idiot; two Englishmen immediately form a club; and when three Englishmen get together you have an Empire. One Italian is always a tenor; two Italians make a duet; when you get three Italians, then you have a retreat. One Japanese is a mystery; two Japanese are a mystery. But three Japanese? They are a mystery, too!”
Heaving with laughter, Göring could barely get out the punch lines. He also enjoyed quoting from a notebook he kept of German “underground” jokes that poked fun at his foibles and those of Hitler and other Nazi leaders.
He tended to his personal life, however, with absolute seriousness. On the table in his cell he kept framed photos of his wife, Emmy, and their young daughter, Edda. His devotion to them impressed Kelley. Andrus acknowledged Göring as the most prolific letter-writer among the captives, and the only inconvenience of prison life that the Reichsmarschall complained about was the difficulty he found in communicating with his wife.
During the 1920s Göring had married a glamorous blond singer, Carin von Kantzow. She helped him survive his bouts of narcotic addiction, and together they traveled extensively. Emmy Sonnemann, a well-known actress, had first encountered the powerful couple in 1931 when she was driving in an open-top automobile to give a private performance for dignitaries in the c
ity of Kochberg. The Görings’ entourage passed the car at great speed, spraying Emmy and her party with mud and rocks. She formally met Göring after the show. Later in 1931 Carin went to Sweden, where she died of tuberculosis, but Göring stayed in Germany to advance the Nazi cause with Hitler. “When her final illness came he was under the sway of newer enthusiasms,” Kelley observed drily.
In 1934 Göring moved Carin’s body from Sweden to his magnificent estate in the Schorfheide forest, now christened Carinhall. He kept up the hunting grounds, ballrooms, and ostentatious pageantry of Carinhall as a shrine to his late wife. “Thus did Göring try to appease his conscience with a display of pomp and ceremony,” Kelley noted. “He must always have had some deep guilt feelings about his treatment of this first wife. After all, she had left her husband to marry him, and he had then become too embroiled in politics even to be at her side in death. The story of his inattention to his wife had spread through all Germany.”
Göring married Emmy in 1935. He continued referring to his favorite retreat as Carinhall, but he christened another hunting lodge Emmyhall. When Emmy gave birth to daughter Edda three years into their marriage, Göring ordered five hundred planes of the Luftwaffe to race across the skies of Berlin in celebration (though he said he would have doubled the number if Emmy had given birth to a boy). Although fellow Nuremberg inmate and publisher Julius Streicher had insinuated in print that Göring was gay and the pregnancy had resulted from artificial insemination, “I am quite convinced that the daughter his wife bore in 1938 is Göring’s own,” Kelley wrote. Seeing Göring’s dedication to writing to Emmy, Kelley was convinced their marriage was a happy love match, not a political arrangement.
As the supportive wife of a top Nazi official, Emmy Göring shared in the regime’s responsibilities for its unsurpassed wrongdoings. And she suffered her own trials after her husband’s capture, when she lived at Valdenstein Castle. An American soldier once brought her the false news that a US military court had already acquitted Göring of all crimes and that his return to her was imminent, and Emmy rewarded him with an emerald ring. Not long after, another soldier malevolently or mistakenly informed her that Göring had been shot. Throughout it all, Emmy maintained the bearing of a Reichsmarschall’s wife. Edda resembled her father and made a good impression as a well-mannered and cheerful child.
Kelley was experienced enough in psychiatry to treat Göring and his other Nuremberg charges as he would patients in civilian life, without showing his opinions about their horrendous acts. Without being judgmental, he encouraged Göring and his Nazi colleagues to respond freely to questions about their government and their role in it. Göring, starved for attention, was glad to have an intelligent person to talk with.
In several of their conversations, Göring discussed his emotional attachment to animals. Like many hunters, he loved his prey and had redrafted Nazi Germany’s hunting and forestry regulations to give animals enlightened treatment. In addition, he advanced a remarkably compassionate and progressive antivivisection law. Violators landed in concentration camps. As a physician, Kelley did not approve of the effects of German antivivisection legislation on the protection of public health and the development of life-saving vaccines. “Germany has more diphtheria per square inch than any country in the world,” he observed, “thanks to Hermann Göring’s forbidding the production of anti-toxin for diphtheria.”
Kelley struggled to reconcile Göring’s empathy with other species with his cruelty to vast numbers of fellow humans. This man put his weight behind legislation to protect stray dogs and cats, but led gory purges of his enemies, declared his right to execute opponents without due process, and as Luftwaffe chief authorized the aerial bombardment of civilians in the heart of Rotterdam during the Nazis’ 1940 invasion of the Netherlands, an assault that killed a thousand noncombatants and left eighty-five thousand people homeless. “For . . . his friends, for his family, nothing was too good. Beyond this circle his interest in any other living thing amounted to almost total disregard,” the psychiatrist observed.
Slowly Kelley assembled a picture of his highest-ranking patient. Göring’s efforts to be a model prisoner and present himself in the most flattering light were working. Their time together showed Kelley the charm, persuasiveness, and “excellent intelligence bordering on the highest level” of Göring. The Nazi was funny, charismatic, well mannered, and cultured. These admirable qualities did not blind the psychiatrist to Göring’s inherent wickedness, however. Kelley was intrigued by Göring’s “ability to carry out policy no matter how brutal.”
The Reichsmarschall clearly enjoyed their frequent talks on topics ranging from military tactics to the coming Cold War. Göring interested Kelley, and the prisoner took note of that attention. He favored the quick-minded Kelley over the other staff members of the prison; the psychiatrist was perhaps the only person Göring thought he could trust within the confines of the jail. On one occasion Kelley asked Göring whether he subscribed to the Nazi Party’s position on the racial inferiority of non-Aryans. “Nobody believes that rot,” Göring stated. “When I pointed out that it had brought about the deaths of nearly 6 million human beings,” Kelley recalled, “he added, ‘Well, it was good political propaganda.’” From that exchange Kelley concluded that the prisoner showed a “complete lack of moral value.”
Göring wanted to reward Kelley for his attention. During one meeting in his cell, he offered to bequeath Kelley the spectacular emerald ring he had in his possession when captured, which the Reichsmarschall valued at about $500,000. Kelley pointed out that he could not accept such a valuable gift—and besides, Göring’s wartime booty was no longer his to give away. Göring looked pained, “not the action of a man suddenly realizing he’s a pauper, but rather the reaction of a small boy who was prevented from doing something he plans,” Kelley later said. The prisoner quickly rallied. “Well, here is something just as good,” Göring replied and inscribed to Kelley an eight-by-ten-inch photograph of himself dressed in full military regalia.
Despite Kelley’s interest in and affinity with Göring, he made time for all of the prisoners in his charge, and he found things in each that fascinated him. They in turn reacted variously to Kelley’s constant presence. Most treated him with respect, regarded him highly as a physician, and viewed him as a professional doing his job, not as an enemy tapping them for incriminating information. Held nearly incommunicado, they saw the doctor as one of their few contacts with the outside world and welcomed his visits as breaks in their usual solitude and dull existence. Only a few, like Schacht, who dismissively referred to Kelley’s profession as “a dreary calling indeed,” disliked his frequent visits to their cells.
Hobbled by joint pain, the humorless Alfred Rosenberg, a writer and indoctrinator of Nazi Party culture and philosophy, had lurched into Allied custody after a tipsy fall while drinking, which landed him in a hospital. Few Nazis read more of his tedious writing than absolutely necessary, although some were awed by the physical heft of such works as The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which one American psychiatrist had called an “immensely paranoid version of history, religion, and the importance of Germany in both spheres.” A native Estonian schooled in Germany, Rosenberg had joined the German Worker’s Party, a precursor of the Nazi Party, even before Hitler. Although his academic background was in engineering and architecture, his writing focused on the racial primacy of Nordic people such as the Germans, the ascendancy of the National Socialist movement over Christianity as the driving inspirational force of Europe, and the plots of Marxist and capitalist Jews to seize economic and political control of the region. These ideas had taken root in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. A mediocre political organizer, Rosenberg was most valuable to the Nazis as a scholarly personification of the aims and social theories of the party. When asked about his Jewish-sounding surname, he always said it was a Gentile name that came from his claimed Icelandic ancestry.
He held a variety of posts in the Nazi government, including bearing the
unwieldy title Deputy of the Führer for the Supervision of the Entire Ideological Training and Safeguarding of the National Socialist Philosophy for the Party and State, but never rose to the job he wanted most, foreign minister. His actual influence as a Nazi government official peaked in 1941, when Hitler made him Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories after Germany’s invasion of the USSR. On his watch, millions of civilians were deported and murdered. He failed as an administrator—subordinates tended to ignore his directives—and he stole art and furnishings for Göring and German institutions.
Sitting in a Nuremberg prison cell was a spectacular comedown for Rosenberg, who eight years earlier had received from Hitler the first German National Art and Science Award—a Nazi version of the Nobel Prize—in the same city. Compared with Göring’s mountain of possessions, Rosenberg had arrived at prison with an impoverished assortment of items: a hat, an overcoat, a handkerchief, keys, a rubber stamp, and a nightshirt. As the only government-sanctioned philosopher Kelley had ever met, Rosenberg was a fascinating subject. He struck Kelley as “a tall, slender, flaccid, womanish creature whose appearance belied his fanaticism and cruelty.” The psychiatrist marveled at Rosenberg’s one-track mind, which could turn a conversation on any topic into a discourse on racial purity. “I was more than casually interested as a psychiatrist to find in Rosenberg an individual who had developed a system of thought differing greatly from known fact, who absolutely refused to amend his theories, and who, moreover, firmly believed in the magic of the words in which he had expressed them.” Yet despite the supposed wizardry of his language, Rosenberg often could not complete his sentences or track his own thoughts.
