by Jack El-Hai
Hess’s surprise arrival disrupted Churchill’s viewing of a Marx Brothers movie. The prime minister decided that a meeting between Hess and the king was out of the question. “I was taken to a prison somewhere in England where all they did was ask me military questions,” Hess later told Kelley. “I denied any knowledge of military events and demanded my rights as an emissary. The English would then ask me, ‘Do you have anything to show that you are an emissary?’ I would reply, ‘Of course not. I am the Führer’s deputy.’ They would then ask, ‘Did the Führer send you?’ I would reply, ‘He knows nothing about my mission.’ So the English would say, ‘Then you are a captured aviator, a prisoner of war. Tell us about the disposition of your troops.’”
During his four years as a British POW, held captive for a time in the Tower of London, Hess saw few people other than military interrogators, low-level government officials, and psychiatrists. The interrogators already knew his background. Hess was born in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of German merchant parents. He was a fellow soldier with Hitler in the 16th Bavarian Regiment during World War I (although the two did not become acquainted until after the war) and trained as a pilot. He had been influenced by antidemocracy agitators while he studied at the University of Munich and became an early member of Hitler’s Nazi movement and a co-convict with the future Führer in Landsberg Prison after the failed Munich putsch, where he transcribed Hitler’s Mein Kampf. As the Nazis gained political power, he devoted all of his energy and attention to the glorification and rise of his leader. Nazi insiders knew him as Hitler’s most unwavering supporter.
Hitler made Hess his private secretary and gave him administrative control over much of the party’s political apparatus, and he named him Deputy Führer in 1933. A story circulated that Hitler chose Göring as his successor rather than Hess during this period partly because he disapproved of Hess’s drab taste in home furnishings. During the mid-1930s Hess’s influence grew as he collaborated in many of his government’s most repressive actions, including the murder of Nazi Party undesirables during the Night of the Long Knives, the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and other anti-Jewish legislation, the formation of pro-German bunds in other countries, and the persecution of minority groups that led to the Holocaust. Inventing the slogan “Guns before butter” to spur rearmament, Hess often spoke at party rallies, introduced Hitler to massive crowds, and urged the public to support Germany’s path toward war. Colorless and devoid of braggadocio, he lacked charisma. Hess so passively deferred to Hitler’s judgment that it was rumored that Hitler had even selected Hess’s wife for him.
In an examination of Hess soon after his capture, Dr. N. P. Dicks speculated that Hitler had been Hess’s father figure until the outbreak of war showed Hess the cruelty and ruthlessness of his Führer. Thereafter Hess transferred his filial feelings to King George VI and hatched his peace plan. Hess’s primary psychiatrist in England, J. R. Rees, agreed with this assessment and supervised Hess’s care. For sixteen months starting in October 1943, Hess claimed he had no memory of past events, even of his childhood. British doctors subjected him to narco-hypnosis using the anesthesia drug evipan—a procedure intended to make him remember through outside suggestion—but the attempts failed, and Hess refused to submit to similar treatments in the future. Then, starting in February 1945, he said his previous amnesia had been faked. (Kelley later observed that “such fallacious claims are typical” of personalities like Hess’s.) Then Hess flipped again and reported that his amnesia had returned in July 1945. He announced to his captors that Jews were hypnotically controlling people around the world, including his own psychiatrists.
Angry and frustrated over the failure of his peace mission, Hess imagined that his British keepers were plotting to kill him. Always a hypochondriac and a longtime believer in the value of natural food, he grew suspicious of all the meals served to him and sometimes switched plates with his jailers to avoid being poisoned. His physicians even sampled his medications while he watched. Nevertheless Hess remained convinced that his life was in danger. He saved food samples, wrapped tightly in paper packets, that he insisted were tainted. His paranoia expanded into delusions of persecution by Russians, Jews, and other enemies.
Twice while in British hands Hess tried to kill himself. In the first attempt in 1941, he called a psychiatrist to his cell, shoved the doctor aside, and bolted through the open door for the stairs. He plunged over the bannister and made a clumsy landing on the surface below, breaking his left thigh in three places. Then in 1945 he jabbed a bread knife into his chest and told his guard, “Look! I have stuck myself in the heart.” The dull weapon caused a wound that required only two stitches. Hess said that Jews had left the knife nearby to tempt him. His thinking seemed so disordered that Churchill considered repatriating him to Germany rather than turning him over as an accused war criminal to the International Tribunal in Nuremberg. The Russians, however, insisted on bringing him to trial. A British doctor judged him paranoid and delusional immediately before his departure for Nuremberg.
Colonel Andrus escorted Hess into Nuremberg prison, and within minutes they encountered Göring in a hallway (the meeting was not planned). “Hess immediately recognized Göring, stopped, and threw up his arm in the Nazi salute,” Andrus remembered. “Göring looked surprised but did not return the salute, which had been banned in the prison. I told Hess: ‘Do not salute like that again! It will not be tolerated. In this prison it is a vulgar gesture.’ He stared back at me with his deep-set, black eyes. ‘The Nazi salute,’ he said evenly, ‘is not vulgar.’”
As Andrus explained to the former Deputy Führer the other regulations of the prison, Hess did not respond, stood without expression, and “fixed me with a cold, glassy-eyed stare.” At last Hess began speaking with intensity of the efforts of the British to poison his food. Along with everything else in his possession—his personal articles included a pocket watch, key, Luftwaffe watch, and silver wax seal—Hess surrendered the packets of allegedly tainted sugar, chocolate, and crackers, sealed up with red wax, that he had been saving from his British confinement. Andrus immediately decided that the prisoner’s mental imbalance was fraudulent. “He was—as I expressed at the time in verbal and written reports—a total fake.”
Later meeting with Kelley, Hess complained of cramping stomachaches that had troubled him for years. Yet he refused medicines and said he preferred treatment with herbal and homeopathic remedies and vitamins. (In Germany, Hess had founded an alternative-medicine hospital that bore his name, “where the only requirement was that men practicing there could not be medical doctors,” Kelley reported.)
Hess made a strong impression on Kelley during one of their earliest encounters in his cell. He still wore the Luftwaffe uniform and leather flight boots he had donned for his mission to Scotland. Hess said he could remember nothing of his past, not even his birthday or place of birth, but he expressed concern about the disposition of his packets of purportedly poisoned food. (Kelley later took possession of some of these packets and brought them home with him to the United States.) “While his demeanor was strictly formal, polite, he still spooked me. . . . The faraway look on his face set him apart as someone not quite normal,” remembered Dolibois, who accompanied Kelley as translator, although Hess spoke English fluently and understood it perfectly. From what Dolibois had already heard of Hess—his hypochondria, paranoia, affinity for astrologers and quack healers, and supposed inability to remember his Nazi past—he dismissed the prisoner as “a flaky jerk. . . . I thought he was putting on one helluva good act.”
The former Deputy Führer’s behavior often puzzled others on the jail staff. On one occasion a guard who had collected several Nazi signatures on a US dollar bill approached Hess in his cell to ask for his contribution. “Hess smiled, agreed to sign, took the bill, and went to the back of the cell,” Kelley reported. “He then faced the soldier, smiled again, bowed, and proceeded to tear the bill into little fragments which he threw out the window. Hess smiled again
to the soldier and said: ‘Our German signatures are precious.’”
Kelley worried that Hess, though currently sane and free of psychosis, was “a profound neurotic of the hysterical type” who could suffer a breakdown as the trial drew close. “All through my life I’ve felt people might kill me,” Hess had told the psychiatrist. He might even again attempt suicide, “and it is extremely likely that he will produce some hysterical gestures before he is fully disposed of.”
The psychiatrist wrote that it was possible Hess had been faking amnesia so long, he had come to believe in it. He concluded that Hess’s amnesia resulted from a tangled combination of hysterical autosuggestion and conscious malingering. As for Hess’s overall mental health, Kelley noted that “if one considers the street as sanity and the sidewalk as insanity, then Hess spent the greater part of his time on the curb.”
Kelley thought the best course with Hess was to resume the British treatment of narco-hypnosis to restore the prisoner’s memory. Instead of evipan, however, Kelley hoped to use one of the pharmaceuticals with which he had successfully treated combat-exhausted soldiers, sodium amytal or sodium pentothal. “We could have found out in two days how much of his amnesia was real and how much was faked simply by giving him an intravenous injection,” Kelley later complained. From his work with battle-shocked soldiers, however, Kelley realized that these drugs carried a slight risk of a fatal reaction, “although in more than 1,000 such cases personally treated, I have never seen one.” The potential value of narco-hypnosis outweighed its hazards. If Hess’s amnesia was genuine, Kelley predicted a full recovery. If Hess was shamming, the absence of recovery would reveal that as well. Kelley asked Andrus to approve the treatment.
Colonel Andrus was wary of drugging Hess. “Hess believes or has pretended that the British attempted to poison him,” he wrote to the chief American prosecutor for the upcoming trial, US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. “Treatment with drugs might call forth the same suspicion or allegation against us by him. Undo alarm might be injurious to the patient,” not to mention to the prosecution. Jackson, who admitted that he would agree to the treatment for an amnesiac member of his own family if he had one, rejected using it in Hess’s case if there was even the smallest possibility it could harm him. Before learning of Jackson’s decision, Kelley asked Hess to weigh in on the use of narco-hypnosis to overcome his amnesia. Hess seemed open to the idea until Kelley remarked that it “always worked.” Hess then declined the treatment and refused to undergo any form of hypnosis. “For a long time he even objected to our taking blood for a Wassermann [syphilis] test, but on this count we were sustained by the higher authorities,” Kelley wrote.
Meanwhile, US Army interrogators tried to batter down Hess’s amnesiac shield. They brought in his old professor and mentor in geopolitics, Karl Haushofer, who said, “Don’t you remember me, Rudolf ? How we used to go for walks together and discuss books?” Hess showed no recognition. They presented him with eight of his former secretaries, at whom Hess stared blankly. They even confronted him again with Göring, whose old grudges against his former rival for Hitler’s favor spurred him to try to demolish Hess’s real or feigned forgetfulness. Their transcribed conversation revealed Göring’s vanity more than any of Hess’s lost memories:
GÖRING: Don’t you know me? You don’t recognize me?
HESS: Not personally, but I remember your name.
GÖRING: But we talked a lot together.
HESS: We were together; that must have been the case, must have been so. As the Deputy of the Führer. . . I must have met the other high personalities like you. I cannot remember anyone, to the best of my will.
GÖRING: Listen, Hess, I was the Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe, and you flew to England in one of my planes. Don’t you remember that I was Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe? First I was a Field Marshal and later a Reichsmarschall, don’t you remember that?
HESS: No.
GÖRING: Don’t you remember that I was made a Reichsmarschall at a meeting of the Reichstag while you were present? You don’t remember that?
HESS: No.
GÖRING: Do you remember that the Führer, at a meeting of the Reichstag, announced. . . that if something happened to him, that I would be his successor, and if something happened to me, you were to be my successor? Don’t you remember that?
HESS: No. . .
GÖRING: Do you remember that you moved to the Wilhelmstrasse, into a palace which really belonged to me, as the Prime Minister of Prussia, but I enabled you to live there?
HESS: I don’t know.
Göring, who Kelley believed “wanted to preserve the fiction that the Nazi Party was made up of strong men,” eventually gave up in disgust, declaring that Hess was “completely crazy.” He told Dolibois, “We knew all along that Hess wasn’t really normal. His flight to England made that very obvious.” Göring claimed to be most disturbed by Hess’s inability to remember the glory years of the Nazi regime, but Dolibois suspected that the Reichsmarschall feared going into the upcoming trial without a mentally competent, high-ranking comrade at his side.
Down the prison hallway, Streicher had established cordial relations with the incognito Jewish translator Howard Triest, whom he characterized as “the perfect Nordic.” Gathering information for the tribunal on crimes against religious groups in Germany, Triest sat calmly in Streicher’s cell, taking notes, as the prisoner fulminated against Jews. “I can smell a Jew a mile away,” he told Triest. He strongly suspected that Kelley was Jewish. “I can see it in their face, their eyes, their hair, from the way they walk, even the way they sit. And I know you are a pure Aryan.” While asserting that he did not dislike individual Jews and even praising a Jewish doctor who had previously treated him, Streicher maintained that his anti-Semitic publishing had improved the world by spreading word of the dangers of allowing races to mix. When he had some papers requiring translation into English and didn’t trust Kelley or any other possible Jew to handle them, he gave them to Triest. “Here,” Streicher said, “you do the translating. You’re a good German.”
Alfred Rosenberg remained reserved and distant, rarely straying from unreal theorizing on the rise of Nazism and German anti-Semitism in his discussions with the prison staff. When speaking of these topics, his sleepy face came alive. Rosenberg loved talking about his book Myth of the Twentieth Century, which Kelley had examined and judged “unbelievably obscure and hazy.” Although the philosopher acknowledged that European people had interbred so much that their racial distinctions had mostly disappeared, he held that Jews—Asiatic and Arabic in origin, he believed—had maintained racial purity because of their religious traditions. As a separate race, they could degrade what homogeneity remained among the Nordic people by marriage with them. Criminalizing intermarriage let Germans take the first step toward shedding their racial impurities. Americans of Nordic stock, Rosenberg argued, could protect their nation from racial contamination only by exiling different racial groups to distant geographical reservations. Germany could have adopted such measures if only outsiders hadn’t interfered, leaving the Nazis with extermination as the best option. He told Kelley that his plan to elevate Nordic people by subjecting other groups to slave labor and death could have produced dramatic effects within three or four generations.
On a visit to Rosenberg’s cell with interpreter Dolibois, Kelley began questioning the prisoner about one of his published works. Rosenberg, who knew that Dolibois was a Roman Catholic, firmly closed the book in the interpreter’s hands and refused to discuss it in Dolibois’s presence. “This young officer is working for his country,” Rosenberg told Kelley. “He is a good soldier and also a good Catholic, and I do not wish to change his way of life. If he were ever to read this book, he would renounce the Church immediately.” (Dolibois later characterized such talks with Rosenberg as “stupid discussions.”)
Meanwhile Ribbentrop was failing to support himself even as well as Rosenberg. Prison staffers reported him as self-pitying, w
ithdrawn, passive, frustrated, and depressed. He looked decrepit for a fifty-two-year-old man, slept poorly, was plagued by headaches, and continued to keep a messy cell that many visitors considered symbolic of a distraught mind. Other prisoners weren’t surprised. Schacht referred to Ribbentrop’s “extraordinary stupidity” and his lack of manners and cordiality. Kelley judged Ribbentrop a suicide risk, although he speculated on “a good possibility, however, that once he is sentenced and the burden of depression removed, his whole arrogance may return. If this occurs, he should face his sentence with considerable fortitude. It is possible, however, that he will break at the end.”
As an escape from his troubles, Baldur von Schirach, the former Reich Youth Leader and governor-general of Vienna, had begun writing poetry. One sample he penned for the psychiatrist’s approval, titled “Dem Tod” (“To Death”), signaled his apprehensions about the future:
Your dark eye I have so often seen,
That you have become like an old friend to me.
When the bullets scourged, you stood at the mark,
And looked at me. To the left and right fell
My neighbor. Yet you turned away.
I greeted each grave later, all alone.
When the bombs burst from the sky,
You drew to me the house’s silent guest.
Yet you have not done your work on me.
I know, my friend, that your eye is on me.
Visitors to Schirach’s cell thought he appeared gaunt and haunted, a look perhaps befitting a prison poet. He confided to Kelley something that he did not want to tell anybody else, even lawyers working on his defense. “He had intervened to save several Jews from concentration camp at the risk of his neck, because he had been forbidden to make a single exception,” Kelley wrote after an interview with the prisoner on October 27. “But in view of the great mass of murdered victims, he did not want to lower himself to seek clemency because of a few people he had spared, making a pitiful spectacle of defense like some of the others.”
