by Jack El-Hai
Life in Nuremberg prison went on for the captives. They traipsed to the exercise yard wearing a ragtag assortment of clothing that they had brought with them or scrounged from the staff. Göring sported yellow top boots that the guards coveted and offered packs of cigarettes for, Rosenberg walked the grounds in overalls, and Schirach had somehow acquired a military camouflage jacket. Although Streicher was shunned and Schacht avoided his fellow captives, the rest gathered together in small groups to share bits of news, wonder about their families, complain, and speculate on their futures. Göring always tried to keep their hopes high and encouraged them to remember their status as German leaders. All they had done wrong, he assured them, was to be defeated by the Allies. Göring’s job as booster was difficult, because, as Kelley believed, nearly all of the Nazi prisoners suffered from depression.
Colonel Andrus wondered what they dreamed about at night. It didn’t surprise him that many of the prisoners dreamed of him. “I was to them a symbol of what they were facing,” Andrus speculated. “There is always a tendency among people confined in prison to hate their custodians. The custodian is to them the embodiment of the retribution they have to face for the evil they have done.” The prison’s pastors, however, embodied something more benevolent to the prisoners, at least among those who attended services, which did not include Rosenberg, Streicher, and Hess. Both the Protestant chaplain, Henry Gerecke, and the Catholic priest, Sixtus O’Connor, were popular among the inmates, and they poked fun at each other about the dastardliness of their followers. “At least we Catholics are responsible for only six of these criminals,” Father O’Connor told the Reverend Gerecke. “You Lutherans have fifteen chalked up against you.” Gerecke declared his conviction that the top Nazis were not “a breed apart.” He found them similar to other people, though poisoned by prejudice and greed.
Göring, who often hastened to chapel services to get a good seat, was among the prisoners Gerecke saw most often. Seated near the altar and its simple ornaments, with an organ wheezing nearby, Göring sang hymns louder than anyone else. “He almost drowned out the organ,” Andrus remembered. He may have valued chapel only for its social opportunities, though, because he was a lapsed Lutheran, he informed Gerecke.
Hans Frank, the balding and dour former governor of Nazi-occupied Poland who had taken part in the Nazis’ “Beer Hall” Putsch of 1923, had become something of a model prisoner under the influence of Father O’Connor, who baptized the Nazi in his cell on October 25. A lawyer, once Hitler’s personal attorney, who devolved into a brutal administrator responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews and Poles, Frank had tried to erase Polish and Jewish culture in his region. He now made a point of thanking prison staff for their attention, appeared emotionally composed, and professed finding relief in his Catholic faith after what he described as betrayal by Hitler when the Führer took away many of his political titles at the start of the war. (Frank had left the Church years earlier when he joined the Nazi Party.) “He feels essentially guilty, but since rejoining the Church has developed a serenity of approach as a protection,” Kelley observed. “It was obvious that Frank, to himself, was a great tragic figure, a representative of God, who had sold his soul and was but purchasing it back at the cost of his life,” Kelley noted, and Frank’s sanctimonious attitude—what the doctor called his “beatific tranquility”—left a bad taste in the psychiatrist’s mouth.
Kelley formed a more positive impression of Admiral Karl Dönitz, a friendly though somewhat distant figure who often exhibited a sharp sense of humor and showed no trace of depression. With graying hair and mischievous eyes, Dönitz made good-natured jokes about the inconveniences of prison life, from the food to the spartan and seatless toilet in his cell. In a psychiatric report to Andrus, Kelley called Dönitz “one of the most integrated personalities of the whole setup” and a man blessed with “creative capacity, imagination, good inner life.” Intent on improving his English, he read poetry and impressed Kelley with his intelligence. “It is my opinion that Hitler used good judgment in selecting Dönitz as his successor. Dönitz is undoubtedly a leader of great stature and a most competent man,” the psychiatrist asserted.
Some of the prisoners readied themselves for the war crimes indictments they suspected were coming, while others wrote correspondence and read books. The prison librarian commented on the high level of the reading material the Nazis requested. Many wanted works by Goethe. Hess was one of the most ferocious readers in the months to come, plowing through two books a day. Schacht read through several volumes of Beethoven’s letters.
The psychiatrist also spent time in other wings of the Nuremberg jail building, which housed lower-ranking suspected war criminals and people the Allies were holding as possibly useful witnesses in forthcoming trials. There he frequently spoke with Karl Brandt, formerly Hitler’s personal physician and director of the Nazi euthanasia program for mentally and physically disabled citizens. Brandt worked under the direction of Leonardo Conti, who headed the medical programs of the Third Reich. In the final days of the war Hitler had ordered Brandt’s execution because the doctor had abandoned Berlin, against orders, with his family. In a notebook Kelley kept of his prison interviews, he jotted down about Brandt: “Authorize death of those people who according to human consideration are incurable. . . . ‘Existence without living.’” Kelley came home from Nuremberg with a set of X-ray images of Hitler’s skull, taken to help treat a sinus infection in 1944, and Brandt may have guided Kelley to them.
Kelley was assembling an archive of Nazi psychological profiles. Collecting ran in his blood, especially from his McGlashan ancestors. He surely knew how deeply the acquisitive and categorizing impulses influenced his family. His grandfather McGlashan had collected twenty thousand specimens of butterflies, gassing them and displaying their bodies in cases he had designed and patented. He could watch them at his leisure, stare at them as closely as he wanted. Their mysteries were frozen, no longer impenetrable. Each butterfly contained a world. Decades later, McGlashan’s grandson found the specimens of Nuremberg just as engrossing.
He soon received permission from Andrus to begin administering the Rorschach inkblot test to the Nazis. Kelley knew the test would have little value in court, and in fact the International Tribunal never heard the results. He turned to the inkblots because he knew the assessment well and grabbed at the chance it offered to scrutinize this historic collection of men. The Rorschach assessment worked in a way similar to the techniques of general semantics, by using storytelling to enter the minds of subjects and examine their emotions, attitudes, and personality.
Even in the unnatural setting of a prison, the Rorschach opened a door to fundamental areas of the personality that might otherwise resist scrutiny. Kelley called the Rorschach “the most useful single technique in a mental examination.” If the Rorschach results of the Nuremberg prisoners showed patterns or similarities, Kelley would be close to discovering essential features of the Nazi mind. Like stage magic, the test depended on the skill and interpretive artistry of the examiner.
Kelley gave the Rorschach tests to the prisoners in their cells, usually with each Nazi sitting on his bed. He preferred to work with an interpreter alongside, even if the prisoner was fluent in English. Kelley had trained both Dolibois and Triest in scoring Rorschach records to avoid errors in translation. Bored with the monotony of their prison lives, most (but not all) of the Nazi inmates cooperated with the testing, and “many of them commented favorably upon the testing program,” Kelley wrote. Occasionally Kelley had to return to an inmate to clarify a response, which was made possible by “one of the advantages of having your subject always on hand,” a special privilege of the psychiatrist who worked in a prison. He planned to repeat the Rorschach tests about a month later.
The prisoners of course interpreted the cards in various ways. Card VII, which shows an empty white area surrounded by a semicircle of connected gray and black blots, prompted a remarkable variety of responses. Karl Dönit
z said, “This is very nice. Faces of two little girls looking at one another. They have the expression of being curious to learn the secrets of life. They may be dancing together, too.” Robert Ley looked at the same card and described it as, “Cloud formations. Thunder clouds.” Joachim von Ribbentrop gazed at the picture for ten seconds and remained silent.
The Rorschach testing especially intrigued Göring, who carried on an animated dialogue during the examination, laughing, snapping his fingers, commenting on the difficulty of interpreting some of the cards, and thoroughly enjoying the process and attention. Göring “expressed regret that the Luftwaffe had not had available such excellent testing techniques,” Kelley wrote in a preliminary report on the examinations. The lack of testing tools was the Nazis’ own fault, Kelley observed. “Perhaps if the Nazis had not so whole-heartedly curtailed the function of the intelligentsia of Germany, these testing techniques which were for a large part developed in Germany would have been readily obtained.”
Kelley’s interpretation of Göring’s results focused on several distinctive features. Most of Göring’s responses included what Kelley called “kinesthetic determinants”: the frequent use of human or animal movement in his descriptions of the images. To Kelley’s surprise, this characteristic revealed Göring’s introverted personality, not the extreme extroversion the psychiatrist expected to find. Kelley also noted Göring’s fondness for the word “fantastic” in his Rorschach responses, which often described witches, prehistoric animals, ghosts, and whirling dervishes. The psychiatrist found a narcissistic preoccupation with himself in Göring’s descriptions of such figures as “a spook with a fat stomach” on Card IX. Just as significantly, Göring accepted the inkblot pictures as whole situations instead of as details of larger scenes. “There is little attempt at critical analysis, either of the details themselves or of their relation to the general concept of which they may be part,” Kelley observed. “The situation is dealt with in the grand manner and Göring passes on to the next. . . . [T]his is his natural way of behaving.”
All told, Göring’s Rorschach results gave Kelley “a picture of a person of considerable intellectual endowment, highly imaginative, given to an expansive, aggressive, phantasy life, with strong ambition and drive to quickly subjugate the world as he finds it to his own pattern of thinking, a pattern which deviates from the common world of experience.” Kelley opined that Göring’s fantasy-dominated ambition might be running amok, and that the Nazi was “a man [who] still must be reckoned with.” A non-psychiatrist might have inferred the same things from Göring’s past behavior, and one has to wonder how much Kelley’s knowledge of his favorite prisoner’s notorious acts influenced his Rorschach interpretation of the Reichsmarschall.
Testing Hess presented special obstacles because the prisoner, despite his outward cooperation, tried to control his responses, “not knowing how revealing even the most banal answer could be,” Kelley wrote. Hess sat on the cot in his cell between Kelley and Dolibois. Together they ran through what Kelley called “a very careful Rorschach, recording every remark.” Hess frequently reacted to the cards by laughing, shaking his head, and calling them senseless.
To Andrus and the Nuremberg prosecution team, Kelley justified giving the Rorschach examinations by characterizing them as ways to predict whether any of the prisoners might suffer a nervous breakdown during the forthcoming trial and to help determine that all of the examined Nazis were sane, including Ley, Hess, and Streicher, whose mental competence was in doubt. Hess displayed “an introverted, shy, withdrawn personality who, suspicious of everything about him, projected upon his environment concepts developing within himself.” Streicher exhibited a paranoid personality. But both Hess and Streicher “showed no evidence of overt psychosis and must be considered legally sane.”
All in all, the tests showed that “although many of [the prisoners] were not what we would call ideally normal, none of them were sufficiently [deviant] to require custodial care according to the laws of our country,” Kelley wrote. “In most cases they might be considered eccentric or fanatic.” This included Ley, whose Rorschach record Kelley found the most interesting by far. The psychiatrist advanced a diagnosis of brain damage in Ley’s frontal lobe, even though the inmate’s physical exams had turned up no evidence of neurological problems. In the Rorschach testing, however, Ley had misnamed colors, offered confused descriptions, and given responses that lacked context and sense. Kelley speculated that Ley had injured his frontal lobes during the plane crash in World War I that left him unconscious and stuttering.
Kelley had started to think beyond the trial and his eventual return to the United States, to a special disposition he had in mind for his Nazi Rorschach results. These went beyond the medical function Kelley had used to justify the test to the Nuremberg authorities. He wrote in a memo to Andrus that he wanted to submit the test results to Rorschach experts across the globe “to produce the clearest possible picture of these individuals, the [greatest] group of criminals the human race has ever known.” Kelley was convinced that the test results had historical value. They offered possible answers to the questions of why German citizens followed these men on a disastrous and destructive course and what motivated unusual but still normal people who knew exactly what they were doing as they ruthlessly ran a regime that persecuted and killed millions.
On October 8 Kelley administered to Göring the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a psychological examination designed to shed light on the subject’s worldview, self-image, and relationships with other people. Kelley subjected only a few of the prisoners to this evaluation. He showed Göring a set of twenty cards illustrating men and women in simple settings, or showed scenes with no people in them at all. Göring’s task was to spend five minutes on each card telling stories that narrated what was happening in the image, what led up to it, what the characters were thinking and feeling, and how the events concluded.
Göring spun this tale from the second TAT card Kelley showed him:
There is a man, a farmer, deeply devoted to his work and a lover of nature. His fate is revolving around two women, one pregnant woman leaning against a tree, undoubtedly a woman from the country, and the other one, a young girl mentally more alert and from the city. The man is impressed by the younger girl. A conflict arises in the man’s mind, but due to the expected child and his devotion to the soil, he will return to his wife, and the young girl will go back to the city and go her own way.
Kelley’s interpretation of this story is unknown. A layperson might speculate that Göring was subconsciously speaking of his own two wives and the claims each had made on his loyalty.
After looking at the ninth card, Göring said: “These are men who rest in the grass after hard work. A boy looks on and studies the faces of these men. He thinks that he would not want to lead a life like theirs. He looks at their faces and studies their types so that he never may be forced to lead that kind of hard and monotonous life.” Again, an amateur could find this story laden with fear and determination. It expresses a commitment to rejecting an unpleasant fate to which others have ignorantly surrendered. Perhaps it says something of Göring’s determination to lead Germany away from what he considered the demeaning course it had followed in the 1920s.
On October 6 the Nuremberg prison staff was hit with the news that an inmate being held in one of the other wings had taken his own life despite all of Andrus’s measures to prevent suicides. He was Leonardo Conti, MD, one of Hitler’s chief medical advisors and Karl Brandt’s superior. As state secretary of health and head of national hygiene, his unsavory responsibilities included launching the so-called euthanasia programs designed to kill the aged and disabled and sponsoring experiments on humans in concentration camps. Among the experiments were studies of the effects of poisons, bacteria, and freezing of captives, as well as other horrific tests. Kelley had once interviewed him in his cell, describing the Nazi physician as a “shy little man” who mildly protested that he was forced into euthana
sia work.
The Swiss-born Conti, an early Nazi Party member, had asphyxiated himself: he wrapped his neck with a shirt sleeve, tied the other end of the shirt to the bars of his cell window, and dropped from a chair. Kelley rushed to the scene that morning to pronounce Conti dead. The Nazi physician left behind a note detailing the remorse he felt for lying to Allied interrogators, although he declared, “I have never been a coward. I wanted so much to see my family again.” Andrus kept Conti’s suicide out of the newspapers, ordered all chairs removed from prisoners’ cells at night, and scheduled more frequent searches of their belongings.
During the same period Kelley saw a decline in Robert Ley’s mental stability. In their interviews Kelley watched Ley swing from excitement to depression, and Ley talked so much, stammering throughout, that “it was a real chore to sit and listen to him for an hour at a time,” Kelley said. The psychiatrist attributed some of this behavior to the brain damage he had diagnosed, but Ley’s fellow inmates, subjected to his rants and despair during exercise times, could not understand it. They “did not know that the inhibitory centers of his brain had ceased to function—that he quite literally had no judgment but only spontaneous emotional responses—as a vital, tough, excitable, intellectually gifted individual,” Kelley noted. “He was generally disliked.”
Ley spoke of his anguish over being viewed as a political gangster and facing trial as a criminal. His defense was that he had committed no crimes, declared no wars, planned wondrous social reforms while administering the German Labor Front, and acted only to advance his country. Putting him and his colleagues on trial would only spread Hitler’s ideology and cast the Allies as enemies of the new Germany to come.
During the third week of October the prosecutors of the International Tribunal completed the indictments against the top twenty-two Nazis. A group that included Kelley, Andrus, British representative Airey Neave, a translator, and a chaplain assembled to present the official documents to the prisoners, who were now formally defendants. The Germans had been charged with a variety of offenses against international law, some of them new to jurisprudence, including membership in such criminal organizations as the SS and the Gestapo, conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace through the waging of aggressive war, involvement in war crimes, and committing crimes against humanity. As the group made the rounds of the cells to deliver the indictments to the prisoners, Kelley took notes on their responses.
