The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

As the opening of the tribunal neared, the prosecution worried about the damage a disordered Hess could do if he gave testimony that focused attention on the symptoms of his mental problems and was unable to assist in his own defense. To confirm that Hess was fit to stand trial, the Allies convened a pair of experts to review Kelley’s psychiatric reports and examine the prisoner for themselves. The experts were Nolan D. C. Lewis, a noted psychoanalyst who directed the New York Psychiatric Institute and edited the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease and Psychoanalytic Review, and Donald Ewen Cameron, a Scottish-born psychiatrist then teaching at McGill University in Montreal and later notorious for performing mind-control and behavior modification research for the CIA.

  Lewis and Cameron spent many hours with Hess, bringing in Gilbert as a translator. They took evidence from Kelley, Andrus, and others who had passed time with Hess. In an eight-page report, they agreed with Kelley’s determination that Hess was sane and not psychotic. The prisoner’s amnesia, they found, was inconsistent. Even when he claimed no memory of meeting certain people or reading particular books, he could recall some events and ideas connected with those people and books, and he inexplicably had access to other memories from the same times and places. The psychiatrists’ examination suggested that “a part of the memory loss is simulated and it is probable that the hysterical or unconscious part is rather superficial.” Hess’s reflexive replies of “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember” to so many questions were likely “originally developed consciously as a protective measure during a period of stress. . . [and] it has become habitual and has therefore become unconscious in part.”

  In other words, Hess had pretended to forget past events to make his life easier during his early captivity in England and had continued not remembering them—at times unconsciously and habitually—during his weeks at Nuremberg. Although he initially faked his amnesia, at least some of it might no longer be feigned. And Hess felt no motivation at this moment to bring his memory back. Still unstable and anxious, “he obviously wanted to retain the amnesia,” the psychiatrists determined. In interviews with the press, Kelley compared Hess’s memory with an atrophied limb that had lost its muscle tone, a body of water dotted with islands of forgetfulness, and an ice-choked ocean in which opening “the right channels [makes] these ‘icebergs’ melt away.”

  The doctors continued whacking away at Hess. In all, three Soviet, one French, three English, and one additional American psychiatrist scrutinized the mysterious prisoner. The British team found him sane enough to understand the charges against him and the proceedings of the tribunal. His amnesia, however, was a handicap to working with his attorney and his assembly of a defense. A Russian and French panel concurred, finding Hess “not insane in the strict sense of the word.” Kelley continued to insist that Hess was truly amnesiac, but that much of his forgetfulness resulted from “a large voluntary block.” He predicted that the amnesia would disappear on its own, during or after the trial. Given the partly intentional aspect of Hess’s disability, the tribunal bore the responsibility of determining whether he should stand trial. Kelley believed the best course was to try Hess and then ask for psychiatric opinion on whether a death sentence, if in the offing, was justifiable for someone in Hess’s state of mind.

  Although Andrus permitted the repeated psychiatric exams of Hess, he did not want the other Nazi defendants to face the same medical scrutiny. In advance of one psychiatrist’s arrival to see Hess, Andrus advised that “he not be granted permission to conduct examinations of other prisoners. All other prisoners are in obviously good mental health and special examinations are not desirable as such examinations suggest an undue interest in the prisoner’s mental condition, a situation which should be avoided.” In his own determination, unapologetically lacking in medical basis, Andrus—who scornfully noted that Hess once forcefully replied, “No,” instead of “I don’t remember,” when asked if he had studied astrology—judged Hess an incorrigible fraud. “I was able to see through him and he knew it,” the commandant wrote. “I told him more than once that it wasn’t a very manly thing to do.” Hess would respond with silence or by shaking his head and repeating that he remembered nothing.

  Hess himself took an interest in medical diagnosis, although his approach was unorthodox. One day, out of the blue, he asked Kelley, “Do you know about the studies of the size of the pupil of the eye?” Kelley replied that he was familiar with the pupil’s expansion and contraction to admit more or less light into the eye.

  “He interrupted me a bit scornfully, since I obviously did not know what he was driving at,” Kelley recalled. Hess said, “I mean the science of diagnosis based on the size and shape of the pupil. Haven’t you heard of it?” Kelley had not. “It really hasn’t been accepted by doctors in Germany, either,” Hess continued, “but a scientist—he wasn’t a medical man—and I studied it a long time. By the change in the pupil, you can not only tell what is wrong with anyone, you can tell where his illness is.”

  When Kelley expressed skepticism, Hess’s manner immediately chilled. “I quite realize that an American medical man would not believe this,” he said, “but it is quite true. Even I can do it a little.” Hess then stared into Kelley’s eyes like a Nazi Svengali, “and for a moment I was afraid he would label me with some disease,” Kelley admitted. “Apparently all he discovered was disbelief, for he indicated that the interview was at an end.”

  Kelley faced a medical conundrum of a different sort in the face-scarred and square-jawed Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking SS officer in captivity. Kaltenbrunner, whose dangerous persona had crumbled into spells of depression and fits of weeping in prison, was deeply frightened by the prospect of the trial. The psychiatrist regarded him as potentially suicidal, a “crybaby who is convinced that ‘everyone picks on me’. . . . The hardness of character which marked him as an executioner had been replaced by this soft, sobbing personality who eagerly sought reassurance as to his future.” Kelley recognized Kaltenbrunner’s reaction to stress as one common to aggressive people, who show toughness when things go well but crack under personal setbacks.

  On November 17 Kaltenbrunner suddenly complained of a terrible headache and listlessness. Kelley kept him under observation until the next day, when the prisoner’s symptoms worsened to a stiff neck and pain when he moved his head. Suspecting spinal meningitis or some other contagious disease, which would have required a quarantine of all the prisoners and a delay of the trial, Kelley sent Kaltenbrunner to the hospital, where a spinal puncture revealed that a blood vessel had spontaneously ruptured in his brain. Blood was seeping into the fluid surrounding the brain and the spinal column. Although the condition is potentially fatal, Kelley believed Kaltenbrunner had skirted disaster and only needed several weeks of rest. His mind was unaffected, although his anxiety over the forthcoming trial might have caused the hemorrhage by pushing up his blood pressure. As a result, Kaltenbrunner missed the opening days of the trial. Andrus later remembered hearing that “Kaltenbrunner, the man who had terrified millions, had nearly died of fright.” Kaltenbrunner suffered a second hemorrhage a few days after he returned to prison but quickly recovered from it. Kelley again found him psychiatrically sound, but warned prison authorities that another attack “may well prove fatal. It is impossible, of course, to predict if or when such a hemorrhage might occur.”

  Sometime that autumn, Kelley and translator Howard Triest traveled together to Erlangen, a town less than ten miles from the prison. They stopped at a university library and stumbled upon a hoard of books that Allied authorities had seized in denazification sweeps. Many of the books had been written by the top Nazi prisoners, and Kelley and Triest pulled out samples for their own collections. After they returned to Nuremberg, their army truck loaded with Nazi volumes, both men sought the autographs of the imprisoned authors on the title pages of the volumes and later returned to America with the books. Kelley never explained why he collected the Nazi books, but they surely provided a conversatio
n opener when he met with the prisoners, and he likely gained insight into the authors’ minds through their response to the requests for autographs. Besides, Kelley remained a collector of exotic species—in his case, Nazis. Speaking sixty-five years later, Triest described his own collection as “a souvenir of my time at Nuremberg and [a] tangible reminder of a difficult personal period. It was something I could show my friends and family when I returned to America to say that I really had been there. I had been with the leaders who had killed my people. For me it was about remembrance—remembrance of Nuremberg. I never thought back then that the trial would attract the interest and have the status that it does today.”

  From those who trusted Kelley, the psychiatrist gleaned strategic information that he considered important enough to pass along to the tribunal’s prosecutors. He sent a series of memos to William Donovan revealing changes in the health of the defendants and their psychiatric states, but probably the most important tidbits for Donovan were the doctor’s disclosures about the prisoners’ defense strategies. In a memo on November 11, for example, Kelley wrote about Göring’s intention to call as a tribunal witness Lord Halifax (E. F. L. Wood), a conservative British politician who had met Göring eight years earlier when the Englishman favored appeasing Germany in its expansion into Austria and Czechoslovakia. Halifax was Britain’s foreign secretary when Nazi troops bloodlessly crossed the border into those countries, and he held the job of ambassador to the United States as the trial of the Nazi leaders approached.

  Göring told Kelley that he had sent a letter to Halifax in 1936, a prewar peace overture. “He states that Halifax received this letter, which could have prevented the war,” Kelley informed Donovan. In the same memo, Kelley detailed Schirach’s admission of guilt as a Nazi Party member, his acceptance of responsibility for developing the Nazi youth movement, and his acknowledgment that he signed persecuting decrees against the Jews of Austria. Jodl, Kelley reported, pointed out that the Russians committed atrocities of their own on the Eastern Front and planned to defend himself by asserting his duty to follow military orders. He strenuously denied enriching himself with looted civilian property. Frank, on the other hand, appeared to welcome his prosecution and “has become immersed in the belief that the accused are to be subject to a divine punishment,” Kelley wrote. “He has become extremely enthusiastic in feeling that the entire group has been weak in not shooting Hitler at least two years ago.” The Nazi leaders, Frank declared, worked “in league with the devil” and now faced punishment from God “in a form more devastating than any punishment man has yet devised.” From their conversations, Kelley knew that Frank criticized his fellow prisoners for trying to save their necks instead of accepting God’s judgment. “He seems to be at about the point where he might be willing to place the blame on other ‘weaker’ members of the accused group,” Kelley wrote to Donovan. “He has stated twice that if they plead not guilty he at least will plead guilty.”

  Kelley’s communication with Donovan inspired another missive to the prosecution’s special assistant, from someone only identified by the initials J. E. S.:

  When Major Kelley dictated his report to you today, he talked with me some about the defendants, and I thought the following bits would be of interest to you even though the major did not include them in his statement.

  It has become increasingly clear that the defendants are shaping up into a homogeneous group, all accepting Göring as their leader, with each of these good minds contributing to the general defense. This, says the major, will make the case much more difficult.

  The writer went on to tell Donovan that Kelley believed the Nazis did not fear the prosecution’s plans to convict them through the massive written documentation of their misdeeds. “A document, whereas it convicts one or two beyond a doubt, does equally well in exonerating the rest, in their opinion. . . . Dönitz made the remark: ‘The Americans are preparing my defense for me—typical Yankee humor!’” the memo reported.

  Kelley followed his first communication to Donovan on defense strategy with another a few days later. This time he wrote that Göring planned to cite a book he had published in 1933, Aufbau Einer Nation (Building a Nation), in his own defense. The book, Göring claimed, supported his defense that he formed the Gestapo only to fight communists and that the police organization held to that purpose while Göring controlled it. In the Reichsmarschall’s estimation, the book also demonstrated that Hitler’s rise was a revolution that “while slightly bloody was nowhere near as ruthless as similar Russian or French revolutions.” A scribbled notation on the memo reads, “Can we get this?” (To translator Triest, Göring claimed to have written Aufbau Einer Nation in a single weekend.)

  Acting more as a physician, on November 17 Kelley gave Donovan his medical opinion that the unforgiving and backless benches for the defendants in the Nuremberg courtroom “will prove a trying hardship if the trial is of much duration at all” for the older members of the Nazi leadership. He was especially concerned for Keitel, Dönitz, Funk, Göring, and former Nazi commissar in the Netherlands Seyss-Inquart, whose rheumatism would cause them suffering and who “after many days might well collapse.” Kelley recommended better seating with backs and seat cushions, with which most of the other seats in the courtroom were already furnished. Photos of the courtroom in use show that the defendants did receive a backrest, although cushions aren’t visible.

  In the end, Donovan had little time left to make significant use of Kelley’s information. He and Justice Jackson had begun clashing over the best approach to prosecuting the Nazis, with Donovan envisioning swaying the judges through skillful examination and cross-examination of courtroom witnesses, and Jackson wanting to rely on the piles of incriminating documentation that the Allies had discovered. Donovan was also skeptical about charging the defendants, especially the military officers, with membership in organizations that had committed crimes. After a series of prosecutorial quarrels, Donovan left the team and was on his way home by the end of November.

  Back in Chattanooga, Dukie awaited her husband’s return with her sister, Leora Brooke, and their parents. A newspaper photo showed her and Leora—whose husband served in the European theater as an army combat engineer—standing in their parents’ living room. Dukie held an ornate silver teapot, an accessory for the home she hoped she and Kelley would soon share. Wearing a tailored jacked and knee-length pleated skirt, she looked far more stylish than her older and taller sister. She had not seen Kelley for three years and communicated with him only through letters and occasional reports from his colleagues in the army who had returned to the States.

  Near the fifth anniversary of their wedding, Dukie was interviewed by a Chattanooga journalist about her husband’s activities at Nuremberg. She was encouraged to comment on what it was like to be married to a psychiatrist. “Sometimes they know what you’re thinking,” she said, “when you don’t want them to.” With his marriage on hold, Kelley was applying that skill to the Nazi defendants.

  7

  THE PALACE OF JUSTICE

  The trial approached. All of the top Nazi prisoners had engaged lawyers and were preparing their defenses. The German attorneys “were legally and politically respected,” Colonel Andrus acknowledged, but their trips into and out of the jail greatly increased the prisoners’ contacts with the outside world, as well as opportunities for smuggling. The suicides of Conti and Ley still weighed heavily on the commandant. He instituted a new round of security measures designed to keep the prison secure and all tools of self-destruction out of the hands of the inmates. Anytime a prisoner and his lawyer exchanged a document, a guard inspected it. Guards removed from the prisoners’ cells anything potentially dangerous—shoelaces, razor blades, and neckties—and even confiscated eyeglasses at night. The Nazis underwent searches when they returned to their cells and when they bathed, and guards turned their cells upside down while the prisoners were out.

  “And still we were finding contraband,” Andrus lamented. A raid of G
eneral Jodl’s cell yielded a nail concealed in a tobacco pouch, a six-inch-long piece of wire, nine tablets made of unknown ingredients, and lengths of rag. Keitel had hoarded a supply of aspirin, a chunk of sheet metal, a stash of belladonna tablets (useful in treating digestive disorders), a screw, and two nails, and he hid the shard of a metal heel-rim in his wallet. Questioned about the origin of the latter item, which had not come from his own shoe, Keitel with some pride would only say, “I have had it for a long time.”

  In Ribbentrop’s messy cell, guards discovered nine unrecognizable pills (four hidden inside socks) and a sharp, two-inch-long piece of metal. Even the good-humored Dönitz had a forbidden collection: shoelaces, string, a screw, and a bobby pin. “We had no idea what he was planning to do with them,” Andrus wrote. Schacht was surreptitiously holding onto ten paper clips. Sauckel hid a broken spoon. Elsewhere in the cell block guards found shards of broken glass, loose nails, and a fragment of a razor blade. Only the cells of Göring and Hess yielded no secrets.

  Protective security intensified elsewhere on the Palace of Justice grounds. A German employee of the courtroom library, the young niece of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, had warned of a possible attempt by “werewolf” Nazis to blow up the building—defendants, prosecutors, judges, evidence, and all—to prevent the trial. “There is so much that they do not want exposed and they are so bitter,” Christine Rommel said. Allied authorities knew of similar threats and rumors. In response, five tanks equipped with 75 mm guns assembled outside the building in a show of force. Soldiers took positions along the perimeter of the structure and in the hallways, on the roof, and at entrances. Sentries demanded official entry passes from everyone coming or going, including the judges.

  Room 600, the second-story courtroom for this first-of-its-kind international tribunal, had been transformed. It no longer lay in shambles. A set of new high-intensity ceiling lights shone brightly, allowing photographers to record the scene without using disruptive flashes. Old walls had vanished to create a bigger public space. The room was quite large, able to accommodate more than five hundred people, but all of the judicial action was concentrated in a small area at its south end.