The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  5

  INKBLOTS

  Somehow, in a turn of events that would have flummoxed military administrators of the other Allied occupying forces, Kelley had become essential to the operations of Nuremberg prison. British military representative Airey Neave called the psychiatric and psychological scrutiny of the captives “essential to the American way of life at Nuremberg.” The language of psychiatric evaluation was foreign to the other armies, but Kelley turned its novelty even in the American context into an advantage, emerging as an authority figure many of the Nazis felt comfortable confiding in or at least engaging in unofficial conversation. To him they said things that remained untold during sessions with the prosecution-minded official interrogators. Through his presence, responses, and open ear, he sensitively orchestrated humane moments in the prison as he pursued his goal to illuminate Nazi behavior.

  Because of Kelley’s limited knowledge of German, good translators were crucial to his work. After an absence of several weeks, welfare officer John Dolibois was back, much to Kelley’s relief. Dolibois suspected that Kelley overestimated the knowledge of psychology he had gained from his college courses, but in any case the men worked well together.

  Some weeks later, at the end of September 1945, another valuable translator arrived, US Army Sergeant Howard Triest. A German native born in Munich and a veteran of the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach, Triest had blond hair and blue eyes. He concealed his Jewishness from the Nuremberg inmates and believed they spoke more freely to him as a result. Even sitting in the same room with them demanded steely nerves and great self-control, because much of Triest’s family had perished in Auschwitz. “I had too much personal history to be charmed by any of them,” he says, “and I knew that whatever they’d say to charm would be a damned lie.” He remembers getting along well with Kelley. “He didn’t seem to me a fellow who would be shaken up by a lot of things. . . . [He] never really came open with his private life or with his history. I had no idea where he came from, what he did [before the war], or what his family was like.”

  Kelley later claimed he had devoted at least eighty hours to each of the twenty-two defendants—probably an exaggeration, because it would have left him with no time to do anything else at Mondorf and Nuremberg—but out of scientific obligation and by preference he spent the most time with Göring. Amid the scant furnishings of Göring’s cell—with letters, packets of K-ration sugar, and a deck of American Legion playing cards on his table and sometimes bundles of laundry on the bed—they built a rapport and courted each other with a mutual fascination, which is not exactly the same as feeling sympathy or respect for one another. Each understood what the other said and how he felt, realized he could more or less be himself when they were together, and enjoyed the other’s company. Göring wanted attention to improve his mood, the open ear of an intelligent conversational partner who could help establish his historical legacy, and an occasional favor. Kelley was drawn in by this spectacularly intriguing and rewarding psychological subject who was a captive source of information: a prisoner facing damning evidence of his criminal behavior, whose emotional responses could be appraised.

  As Kelley could see, in embracing Nazism, Göring had sought to satisfy his personal designs and craving for power. His loyalty to the party was not about Hitler, not about Germany, and least of all about the preservation of a supposed Aryan race. His aim was to advance Hermann Göring, and he had joined the Nazis to lead a rising party. His self-interest was notable even compared with other narcissists. Göring possessed the most undiluted self-centeredness Kelley had ever experienced.

  The psychiatrist understood the tragedy of Göring’s fate, at least as the Reichsmarschall saw it. As Hitler’s official successor until the confusion and treacheries of the final days of the war, Göring had nearly attained his dream of ascending to the supreme leadership of Germany, to become the second Führer, when Hitler committed suicide. By then, however, the cause was lost. “He reached his goal too late,” Kelley acknowledged. “At Nuremberg he was a Führer without a country, a marshal without an army, a prisoner accused of waging aggressive war against peaceful peoples and of the deliberate murder of millions.”

  On the other hand, Göring wanted Kelley to know that he was not Hitler’s stooge. He claimed that increasingly as the war went on, he had seen Hitler’s miscalculations and faulty judgments, and he was one of the few Nazi leaders who had called them to the Führer’s attention. Alone among the prisoners at Nuremberg, Göring said, he had argued with Hitler. Mischievously, Kelley replied that Americans generally regarded all top Nazis, Göring included, as Hitler’s yes-men. “That may well be,” Göring said, “but please show me a ‘no-man’ in Germany who is not six feet underground today.”

  The prisoner usually was warm and friendly in conversation. “In fact, when Göring chose to do so, he always tried to persuade us with his charm and relaxed conversation,” recalled Dolibois. “Even when he challenged what to expect in court, he did so with a smile and often friendly sarcasm. Of course . . . Göring did not flash his good side unless he expected the visitor to be receptive.”

  If Kelley had been familiar with the work of Hervey Cleckley, an American psychiatrist who had introduced the concept of the psychopath in The Mask of Sanity four years before, he might have applied that label to Göring. But there is no evidence that Kelley had yet read Cleckley’s book. The Mask of Sanity characterized psychopaths as people who carry on normally in public, making a pretense of conforming to social norms while they conceal savage impulses and a dearth of empathy, which appears only in private. Kelley never used the term psychopath to characterize Göring or any of the other Nazi prisoners, but his notes of their conversations described classic psychopathic behavior.

  During one talk, for example, while chronicling his early years in the Nazi Party Göring mentioned his collaboration in the 1920s with Ernst Roehm in establishing the SA, the organization’s army of brownshirted storm troopers. Kelley saw that this difficult work, vital to the survival of the Nazi Party, had bonded Göring and Roehm in friendship. Then, without making much of it, Göring related how he and Roehm later started competing for Hitler’s attention. The competition ended tidily when Göring ordered Roehm murdered during the bloody party purge of 1934, the Night of the Long Knives. Story over: Göring made it plain to Kelley that he was ready to move on to a new topic.

  “But how could you bring yourself to order your old friend killed?” Kelley blurted out. Göring sat silent and fixed his eyes on the American. The look expressed bewilderment, impatience, and pity. It was as if Göring were thinking, “Dr. Kelley, I must have underestimated you. Are you an idiot?” Years later, Kelley had not forgotten what Göring did next: “Then he shrugged his great shoulders, turned up his palms and said slowly, in simple, one-syllable words: ‘But he was in my way. . . . ’”

  The shrug signified his release from the responsibility of considering his comrade’s welfare and interests. What else could a man like Göring do? He had other concerns. Kelley sometimes let pass this sociopathic thinking, which seemed to belong to someone neither sane nor insane, but in a twilight region of social and cultural derangement. Psychopaths as we now know them, with their lack of interest in others and focus on advancing their own narcissistic goals, were not on Kelley’s radar.

  At other times, however, Kelley argued with Göring. When the Reichsmarschall once declared that obeying orders, even illegal ones, was justifiable to preserve social order and military discipline, Kelley countered, “To hell with military discipline. With civilization hanging in the balance, we’ve got to put an end to militarism once and for all, and expend every effort to avoid another war, for the next one will spell the doom of mankind.” The former chief of the Luftwaffe took that in stride. “Yes, that’s what I thought after the last war,” he said. “But as long as every nation has its selfish interests, you have to be practical. Anyway, I’m convinced that there is a higher power which pushes men around in spite of all their e
fforts to control their destiny.” The exchange inspired Kelley to take note of Göring’s cynicism and “mystic fatalism.”

  In similar fashion, Göring eventually shook off his personal discomfort in prison, informing Kelley that he felt relatively well in confinement because of the quiet environment. He also quoted biblical scripture, a passage from Psalms 78:26 (“He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven, and by his power he brought in the south wind”), in which God miraculously provides food for the wandering Israelites. He wanted the psychiatrist to know that he was a survivor who would always get by.

  There was a purpose to Göring’s acceptance of his present condition. He had work to do. Although he strenuously denied the Allies had any right to try him and his colleagues as war criminals, he accepted the inevitability of the victors exacting punishment on the vanquished and saw it as an opportunity. With the world watching, he could mount a defense of Nazi policies and a resurrection of his own reputation. Those ends reduced all his personal complaints and inconveniences as a prisoner to insignificance. “He spends all his time trying to discredit all the other party men, even Hitler, so that the history books will remember only him,” Kelley told an interviewer a few months later.

  Like the rest, he shies away from any involvement with the atrocities—he is completely innocent, according to him, even though it has been proven that atrocities did take place in the early days of the concentration camps from 1933 to 1935, when Göring was in command of them. Of course, the wholesale slaughter and murder did not develop until later, under Himmler.

  Göring only complained to Kelley and the other Nuremberg jail staff when he found fault with the treatment of his family. He told Kelley that when he had surrendered to the Americans, the only consideration he had asked for was good care for Emmy and Edda. Göring devoted much of his epistolary energies to his wife and daughter, and he asked Kelley and translator Dolibois to track them down and deliver his letters to them. (Prisoner Fritz Sauckel, who spent three years with the Nazi government as a high-ranking administrator of slave labor, also asked Kelley for assistance contacting his family. He had lost touch with his wife and ten children, and one soldier son had not been heard from since two months before the war’s end.)

  The Reichsmarschall unleashed his frustrations and expressed his confidence in Kelley in a letter to Emmy in the first weeks of October 1945:

  For three months I have been writing to you without receiving an answer. . . . Today I can send you a letter direct: Major Kelley, the doctor who is treating me and who has my fullest confidence, is bringing it to you. You can also talk to him freely. The greatest torment of my soul was and is the fact that, up until now, I have not known where all of you were and how you were getting along. You can send me an answer through Major Kelley, and you will understand how I long for it. . . . I don’t need to tell you what I am going through here. The hard fate of our fatherland and the tormenting worry about you and your future are the most difficult burdens for my soul. My dearest wife, I am so sincerely thankful to you, for all the happiness that you always gave to me, for your love and for everything. How is little Edda taking it all? . . . Give Eddalein a kiss from her Pappi and greet everyone for me. You are embraced and kissed in sincerest love and longing by your Hermann.

  Although Emmy Göring avoided contact with most Americans, she readily agreed to see Kelley. When she accepted the letter from Kelley, she feared reading what she thought would be her husband’s final fare-well. She passed the correspondence unread to her niece, who confirmed that it contained better news. Then she read it. When she finished, she spoke with Kelley, whom she judged “an honest and very humane man.” She asked, “How is my husband?” Kelley replied, “He’s behaving like a rock in a stormy sea.”

  On the spot Emmy wrote out a response that Kelley carried back to her husband:

  Finally, finally a letter from you. I can’t tell you how happy I am. My love and my thoughts are with you every second. We are fine, we have food to eat and we have wood. . . . My only thought, my prayer every night is that you may be with us once more. Stay in good health. Thank God, Edda is still too young to share our worries. . . . Hermann, I love you above all, keep faith and God will lead us together again. Everybody sends his love and we all embrace you. I send you all the kisses which I have given you in the past and which I want to give you in the years to come. I love you, always yours, Emmy

  To which her daughter added a line: “My dearest daddy, come back to me soon. I am longing for you so much. Many thousand kisses, your Edda.”

  Göring received Emmy’s letter with joy, but he also expressed stoicism and regret:

  You can well imagine how inexpressibly happy I was over your dear letter. It was the first ray of light in this dark period. . . . You will already know from the newspapers that my trial as so-called war criminal will begin on 20 November. We must be prepared for the worst. Nevertheless I hope by the Almighty that we can still meet again. I pray everyday that I may keep the strength to uphold our dignity—for it would be better to come to the end with dignity than to live on without honor. I think only of you and only the worry over your welfare tortures me now. I have always known and felt how much I love you, but now the true depth of our love has been revealed to me for the first time I thank you eternally for the great happiness that your love gave me. You must know how great my longing and homesickness is for you and Edda. Sometimes I actually think I will die of it. Why did it have to turn out this way? If we had even suspected this development, we would certainly have gone another way. Now we leave everything to God’s will. . . .

  Never let Edda away from you.

  On the back of this letter Göring added a postscript: “Major Dr. Kelley, who is bringing this letter to you, is really an extraordinary gentleman. First Lieutenant [Dolibois], who accompanies him, is very warm and human and I have known both gentlemen for several months. You can trust them completely.”

  Göring later wrote again to Emmy: “To see [Edda’s] beloved handwriting, to know that your dear hands have rested on this very paper—all that and the contents itself has moved me most deeply, and yet made me most happy. . . . Sometimes I think that my heart will break with love and longing for you. That would be a beautiful death.”

  “It is my opinion that Frau Göring reciprocated to the fullest her husband’s feeling and remained throughout completely loyal to him,” Kelley later wrote. Nobody knows, however, whether Emmy Göring would have approved of a startling plan her husband was formulating for Edda. He asked Kelley to take care of young Edda in the United States if both mother and father died. Kelley told his wife about this entreaty when he returned home months later; it is unknown how Dukie responded to the prospect of adopting and rearing a Nazi’s daughter. This astonishing request—a sign of Göring’s respect for Kelley—moved the psychiatrist, who knew how much Edda meant to her father. Though he never recorded how he replied to Göring’s appeal, Kelley surely rejected it on professional grounds.

  On October 8 two army jeeps full of security officers escorted a fast-moving ambulance into the Nuremberg prison grounds. A scrawny man with cater-pillar brows over tense eyes, wearing a gray Luftwaffe suit, old overcoat, and rumpled hat, emerged from the back of the medical vehicle and blinked at his surroundings. His garb lacked any military insignia, but the spectacular boots he wore—made from soft black leather, rising high on his legs, each with a pair of serpentine zippers—gave him a distinctive military deportment. For the first time in four years, Rudolf Hess was back on German soil.

  On May 10, 1941, in accordance with a suggestion from his astrologer, Hess—then age forty-six, healthy, powerful as Germany’s Deputy Führer and the third-highest-ranking Nazi after Hitler and Göring, somewhat lucid, and wearing those aviator’s boots—had climbed alone into a Messerschmitt fighter plane in Bavaria and flown it over the North Sea to the green fields of Scotland, where he bailed out. Kelley later asked Hess why he had abandoned the aircraft in midair: “I had never flown t
hat type of plane before and wasn’t sure I could land it,” Hess said. “Then, too, I was uncertain of the location of the English fields. I did a good job, though, and struck the ground thirteen feet from where I planned.”

  The British Home Guard detained and interrogated him. He was on a mission of peace, he explained as he hobbled on an ankle injured during his parachute jump, and he wanted to speak with Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the thirteenth Duke of Hamilton, a conservative politician who had previously met Hess at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Hess probably believed that the duke was sympathetic to the German cause. Douglas-Hamilton was summoned and listened in astonishment to the Nazi’s wish to meet with King George VI, get Winston Churchill sacked, and negotiate a truce with Britain allowing the two nations to collaborate in the military defeat of the Soviet Union. Britain would retain control over its own empire, Germany would be free to dominate the rest of Europe, and the two powers could coexist, with the Bolshevik menace removed. Hitler had not approved of Hess’s mission, and he angrily condemned it in public when he learned of it, even calling Hess insane.