The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  Göring was first. Through the window in his cell door they saw him sitting on his cot, his clothes hanging loosely, perhaps recently awakened from a nap and not expecting a visit, with a crooked frown on his face. He lurched to his feet when the door opened; his mouth gave a startled twitch. The boot heels of the visitors crunched on the stone floor as the group surged forward, but only Andrus, the translator, and Neave could fit inside the cell. The others peered around them or over their shoulders. Göring’s table still held the photos of Emmy and Edda, along with a stack of books. The prisoner did not initially meet the stares of the Allied representatives, but he soon faced Neave and focused his eyes—the beady and shiny eyes that had disconcerted so many of his political opponents—on him.

  “Hermann Wilhelm Göring?” Neave said. The Reichsmarschall must have sensed something important was happening. “Jawohl,” he answered. Neave explained that he was serving on Göring the indictment from the tribunal. Grimacing, Göring accepted the indictment and listened to Neave’s explanation of his right to legal counsel. He did not even glance at the documents, but seemed interested in Neave’s British service dress uniform. Kelley wrote down Göring’s next words: “So it has come.” Neave observed that “the words seemed very ordinary, not like the end of twelve years of absolute power. In that featureless cell, they did not sound dramatic. It was as if Göring ignored the presence of an audience and was thinking aloud.”

  Informed that he could choose his own lawyer or pick one from a list that the tribunal had drawn up, Göring said, “I do not know any lawyers. I have nothing to do with them.” It was hardly surprising—he had lived above the law for so long. When Neave recommended finding counsel, Göring expressed skepticism that any lawyer could help him. “It all seems pretty hopeless to me,” he said with quiet firmness. “I must read this indictment very carefully, but I do not see how it can have any basis in law.” With twenty-one prisoners to go, Andrus began to lose patience. Neave repeated his advice to engage an attorney. “Lawyers!” Göring said. “They will be of no use in this trial. What is required is a good interpreter. I want my own interpreter.” Andrus smirked; he remembered Göring’s requests for special treatment at Mondorf. The prisoner would have no personal interpreter. Neave bade the prisoner good-bye; Göring bowed. The group backed out of the cell and the door slammed shut.

  Hess received the group in his usual manner. He rose as the assembly filled his cell and “stared straight through me with his burning eyes,” Neave remembered. “His glance at my British uniform was unfriendly. . . . Then he lifted up one manacled hand in an odd gesture of derision. He bared his teeth in a mischievous grin.” Neave began his formal introduction, “Rudolf Hess?”

  The prisoner made no response, so Neave placed the indictment in Hess’s hand, now free of the manacles. He mentioned the prisoner’s right to legal representation. Hess’s reply alarmed the group: “Can I defend myself ?” Told he could, Hess said, “Then I wish to do so.” The prisoner then grimaced with pain as one of his stomach attacks struck him. Hess dropped to his cot and rocked his body until the pain faded. Then he again arose and asked if he would face justice in the company of his Nazi colleagues. When Neave said yes, Hess responded, “I do not like to be tried with Göring.” He returned to an Edgar Wallace novel he had been reading, at which point the meeting concluded.

  Next was Ribbentrop, and then the rest. Ribbentrop complained that he didn’t know any lawyers. News of the indictment shook Rosenberg. Keitel, wearing slippers, tried to click his heels. Jodl fretted over his choice of an attorney. Walther Funk, the former minister of economics who suffered from urinary pain, wept and did not rise from his bed when the group entered his cell. “Be a man, Funk!” Andrus shouted at him. Ley “became violently disturbed, orating and ranting, maintaining his innocence, and swearing that he would never face trial against such charges,” Kelley observed. Only Dönitz appeared to expect the indictment, and he calmly offered the name of the lawyer he wanted to defend him.

  By the end of October 1945 the start of the trial was only four weeks off. An alteration in the prison’s staffing was imminent. At the age of twenty-six, John Dolibois had decided that he’d already spent more than enough time in contact and conversation with Nazis. He wanted a change, and he told Colonel Andrus of his wish to leave the prison and return to his military station in Oberursel, Germany. Andrus consented to relieve him of his duties as welfare officer and assistant to Kelley, and Dolibois gladly served his remaining months in Europe as a motor pool officer. He would return to Nuremberg a few times to attend the trial, only as a spectator. Later, Dolibois regretted leaving Nuremberg. “I could kick myself for not staying longer, getting more involved, making history,” he declared.

  His replacement was on his way and would arrive during the final week of October. He, like Kelley, had a plan to advance himself professionally by exploiting his time at the prison, and he already had a scheme to transform the position into something completely new: a job as prison psychologist. He knew little about Kelley and his work at Nuremberg, and he hadn’t the slightest foreboding that his presence in the prison would put him in conflict with the senior-ranking psychiatrist.

  6

  INTERLOPER

  On October 20, the day the Allied prosecutors delivered to the tribunal its indictments against the prisoners, a stocky man with wire-framed glasses and a demeanor of persistent seriousness arrived at the Nuremberg jail along with a new shipment of Nazi prisoners intended for later interrogation and trial. He was Gustave Mark Gilbert, age thirty-four, a native of New York State whose parents, both Jewish immigrants from Austria, had made sure he grew up bilingual in German and English. He had earned a PhD in psychology from Columbia in 1939 and had served as a first lieutenant during the war, treating what he called “misfit soldiers.” After Germany’s surrender he worked as a military intelligence officer. “I had seen the collapse of the Nazi war machine and the evidence of Nazi barbarism in places like Dachau concentration camp before V-E Day,” he wrote. Gilbert’s professional interests in Nuremberg were similar to Kelley’s: “I had naturally been interested in finding out what made human beings join the Nazi movement and do the things they did.”

  So far his pursuit of that interest had yielded little of value. When asked why they had committed criminal acts as Nazis, the Germans of low military rank and civilian status whom he had previously interrogated spoke only of following orders and having no power to make a difference. Gilbert hoped that their military and political leaders held captive in Nuremberg could provide more illuminating information. When he arrived at the jail as Dolibois’s replacement as morale officer and interpreter, he reported to Colonel Andrus and immediately asked for more responsibility. He hoped to take advantage of this opportunity to become what he called a “participant observer,” to study and judge the prisoners as a human being, not as a detached spectator, a role he viewed as consistent with his responsibilities as a psychologist. “Psychology, above all, is applying human understanding in a scientific manner. . . . The only profession I have ever encountered which separates the role of a human being from his professional activity,” he declared, “was the role of the SS man.” Gilbert rarely mentioned that his academic study had been in social psychology, and he knew little of the field’s clinical applications. Still, why waste his training on duties limited to translation and other mundane affairs?

  He inquired of Andrus whether a psychologist might be useful in the Nuremberg prison. The commandant seemed not to have been aware of Gilbert’s academic training; in Dolobois’s words, “with all due respect, Andrus would not have known a psychologist from a bootmaker.” Nevertheless he soon approved Gilbert’s request. Gilbert went to work as prison psychologist—an appointment that was never made official—under Kelley’s nominal direction, although the two served in different administrative units, and Kelley’s authority was due to rank only. They shared an office.

  Gilbert met Dolibois in the officers’ mess in th
e prison, where Dolibois noticed that the newcomer “could hardly wait to get to work on the Nazis.” And Gilbert already knew what he wanted to do with his Nazi research. “Right from the beginning, he made no secret of the fact that he would write a book,” Dolibois recalled. “His actions toward that end became somewhat annoying—the constant search for quotable items and literal ‘news.’” Dolibois agreed to remain at the jail for a few days to help Gilbert adjust to his new work, which had no official description or classification, and to show him around. “I suppose I could have identified myself as ‘prison psychologist,’” Dolibois said, “by virtue of analyzing what I learned interpreting for Dr. Kelley and snooping around the prison to chat with the inmates.” But he didn’t regard his role (or Gilbert’s) as particularly important.

  As Dolibois had, Gilbert bore the difficult responsibility of keeping up the prisoners’ morale through visits and conversation. He joined the select club of Kelley, others on the medical staff, and the security staff in having unrestricted access to the top Nazis. To those duties Gilbert added working with Kelley and any visiting experts in examining the minds of the prisoners. And like Kelley, he had to grapple with the conflict between his duties as a psychologist, who might receive confidences from the prisoners, and as a member of the military, with the job of monitoring and reporting on the captives. Right away Gilbert understood that his military responsibilities were paramount. “There was just one limitation on this,” he explained years later when he appeared as a witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, “and that was that, as the Nazis ridiculed and cursed each other behind one another’s backs, they would sometimes ask me to please not say anything about it to the others until the trial was over. I kept that confidence.” Gilbert long denied, however, that he worked to strengthen the cases of the tribunal’s prosecution team. He served “neither at the behest of the defense counsel, nor the prosecution. I was on the prison staff and, of course, as objective as it is humanly possible to be in these circumstances,” he said.

  Gilbert went about his prison business with energy and efficiency. His fluency in German led several of the captives to welcome his conversation. He would not take notes in the defendants’ presence, but immediately afterward wrote at length in his personal diary about each of his meetings with the Nazis, including long direct quotations. The prisoners were ignorant of his transcriptions of their conversations. His ultimate aim, like Kelley’s, was to augment “the trial itself as a vehicle for examining the Nazi system and the men who made it.” Gilbert also admitted that he made notes of his conversations with the prisoners “because some of it was so incredible that I felt I had to have a record of these people because my colleagues would never believe me.” He hoped first to become familiar to the prisoners and collect their personal responses to the indictments they had received. After that, Gilbert wanted to give them a new battery of psychological tests that could shed light on their psyches.

  He did not immediately disclose to the prisoners that he was Jewish. He wanted to test the claim of Nazi ideologues that they could immediately recognize Jews. “Not a single one could,” he said, including Streicher, who now had failed twice—with Gilbert and Triest—and whose faith in the infallibility of his racial instincts also led him to erroneously identify some of the judges selected for the tribunal as Jews. When Gilbert eventually let the Germans know he was Jewish, most professed not to care and responded “that they never had anything against Jews personally, that this was all silly ideological nonsense, and that some of their best friends had been Jews.” Only Streicher and Rosenberg showed some nervousness after Gilbert’s revelation.

  The new arrival, one year older than Kelley, threatened the psychiatrist. Despite the use Kelley had found for Dolibois, who had rudimentary training in psychology, he did not want a PhD psychologist at his side. Kelley had already completed all of the psychological testing of the prisoners that he needed. He thought repeated testing would yield less accurate results than had the initial round and strongly believed his expertise in giving and interpreting the tests exceeded Gilbert’s. Kelley also suspected that Gilbert lacked his own professional authority and would have trouble developing rapport with the prisoners. Eventually, however, Kelley accepted Andrus’s appointment of the psychologist because he saw in Gilbert “a young man whose career might be helped by being there,” Dukie later remembered. “Doug often did this sort of thing.”

  Together Kelley and Gilbert visited Robert Ley in cell no. 11 on October 23. The prisoner was pacing and distraught. He lamented his inability to defend himself against crimes of which he had no knowledge and repeated his claim that he and Hitler had only worked in the best interests of their country. Then Ley stood against the wall and stretched out his arms like a man pinned to a cross. He begged to be shot on the spot rather than face a trial as a common criminal. Kelley wrote an update of Ley’s psychiatric condition for Andrus and prosecution team member William Donovan. He described the inmate as excitable, emotionally unstable, and depressed. There were no signs of psychosis, however. Despite the frontal lobe damage that Kelley suspected Ley had suffered, he declared Ley legally competent, sane, and responsible for his own actions. Kelley observed that Ley had busied himself preparing his upcoming court defense and, despite the psychiatrist’s earlier fears that Ley might attempt to take his own life, he now “presented no evidence of suicidal intention.”

  The next evening, at around 8:15 p.m., a guard raised an alarm in the cell corridor. Ley had secretly fashioned a noose from the hem of a towel and the zipper of his jacket, soaked the knots in water to make them tight, and tied the end of this makeshift rope around the pipe of his toilet. He then stuffed his mouth with his own underwear to prevent himself from crying out and lowered himself onto the toilet. Leaning forward, he asphyxiated himself. Since the toilet area was concealed from the guard’s view, and Ley was short enough to remain unseen when seated on the commode, it took several minutes for the sentry to notice that anything was amiss. Ley was found unconscious, slumped on the toilet. Dolibois, in his final hours as a prison staffer, was among the first to rush into the cell. “The lifeless body of the onetime leader of the Reichsarbeitdienst sat on the small toilet seat, his legs stretched out rigidly, face beet-red, eyes bulging,” he recalled. Dr. Pflücker quickly arrived, but his attempts to revive the prisoner with artificial respiration failed, and fifty-five-year-old Ley was pronounced dead at 8:35 p.m. The prisoners in nearby cells remained asleep or feigned slumber.

  “Such a death is both slow and painful,” Kelley wrote. “It demonstrated Ley’s violent will to die.” Some among the Americans found humor in the event. When Drexel Sprecher, a member of the prosecution team, arrived at work the next morning, he encountered a procession of translators marching through the offices in mock solemnity. “They were trying to hum a funeral march and doing a bad job of it,” he remembered. In private conversation, Andrus intimated how deeply Ley’s suicide had stung him. “What a way to die,” he told a member of the prosecution team, “strangled with his own loincloth on his dung heap.”

  The suicide continued to be a great embarrassment to Andrus and the Americans. Andrus immediately tightened security in the jail. Previously one guard had been assigned to observe every four adjacent cells of the top Nazis, ensuring monitoring of each prisoner at half-minute intervals. Now he set a guard outside each of the cells, around the clock. The guards stood at the peepholes continuously. A suicide like Ley’s “could not be allowed to happen again,” Andrus observed. In addition, after a package arrived for one of the trial witnesses containing a suicide kit including a vial of cyanide with needles and syringe, the prison stopped accepting all packages of clothing and food intended for the prisoners.

  The top Nazi captives received the news of Ley’s death individually in their cells on October 29. “It’s just as well,” Göring told Kelley. “I had my doubts about how he would behave at the trial. He would probably have made a spectacle of himself and would have trie
d to make a fantastic, bombastic speech. It is a good thing he got himself out of the way.”

  Kelley’s reaction to Ley’s death equally lacked empathy. He called the suicide a fortunate turn of events because Ley “could never have successfully been tried. . . . He was too far gone for that. So Robert Ley did the world a favor when he hung [sic] himself—did me personally a particular favor, because his was the one brain that I suspected would have organic damage.”

  And Kelley was after that brain, which, tongue-in-cheek, the psychiatrist said Ley had “kindly made. . . available for post mortem examination.” Hoping that a study of the organ would confirm his Rorschach-inspired diagnosis of organic damage and shed light on Ley’s deterioration, Kelley found an army colleague, pathologist Najeeb Klan, who agreed to remove the dead man’s brain in the Nuremberg morgue. Kelley then sent it on a strange journey. A GI bearing a square wooden case, labeled “spices,” soon appeared at Army Post Office 124. The soldier wanted it shipped registered airmail to the Office of the Surgeon General in Washington, DC. The postal workers thought that a very expensive way to send a box of spices. “Robert Ley’s brain,” the soldier tersely confided, as quoted in an article published by a US military newspaper, a clip of which Kelley sent to Webb Haymaker, a neuropathologist working at the Army Institute of Pathology.