The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  Göring, however, went a step further than his former associates. He stoically endured his long imprisonment that he might force down the Allied Tribunal and browbeat the prosecuting lawyers on their own terms. By these methods he established himself with the German people. His suicide, shrouded in mystery and emphasizing the impotency of the American guards, was a skillful, even brilliant, finishing touch, completing the edifice for Germans to admire in time to come.

  This was a striking, surprisingly laudatory interpretation of the Nazi’s final act, almost as if Kelley were describing a glorious twist to the curtain-closing of a play rather than the end of a life. A suicide, accomplished with skill, could wound enemies and build a grand legacy in one dramatic gesture. The image of Göring orchestrating his own farewell, on his own terms, burned in Kelley’s memory for years.

  The remaining condemned Nazis were led to the gallows in an operation that Andrus, insulted by Göring’s escape, supervised. Ribbentrop’s response to his approaching execution particularly impressed Kelley, who had previously speculated that guards would have to drag him to the gallows. Kelley wrote that the former foreign minister “showed some courage at the very end. Probably the news of Göring’s suicide and the realization that he was now the leader of the death procession, holding the center of this final stage, stiffened Ribbentrop and made him a more competent person in his last seconds than at any other time in his entire life.” Ribbentrop met the rope proclaiming his hope that Germany would remain united.

  Rosenberg had refused to participate in or even hear prayers, and he approached the hangman shaky and weak, perhaps, as Kelley predicted, still internally debating some fine point of Nazi philosophy. Streicher, Kelley said, would “hang happy,” and indeed he went down with Hitler’s name on his lips. Frank, the psychiatrist supposed, would die “convinced that one drop of his body will wipe out all the 5 million black marks registered against his soul.” As Kelley had predicted, none of the rest of the condemned men had to be dragged to the gallows. “Just as in a good deed well performed, so in a bad one well done, do men hold to the type of mentality with which they are endowed,” he wrote, in what might have been a general epitaph for the convicted Nazis at Nuremberg.

  The office of US Surgeon-General Thomas Parran Jr. asked for samples of the brains of the hanged Nazis. Andrus called this “a macabre request which was, of course, never granted.” Instead, in an act of retribution, all of the bodies were trundled to the ovens of the Dachau concentration camp, incinerated there, and the ashes dumped into a river. There would be no vigils held by unrepentant Nazis at marble mausoleums. There would be no heroic funerary architecture.

  Hess and his guilty compatriots who survived the tribunal’s justice with their lives went to Spandau Prison in Berlin to serve their terms. In a final act of extinction, Andrus made sure that every remaining piece of jewelry that had been in Göring’s possession was disassembled, melted down, and rendered unusable and beyond recognition. American authorities presented the hunks of precious metal and jewels to the treasury of the new Germany, then struggling back to its feet.

  Kelley’s grandfather Charles F. McGlashan, chronicler of the ill-fated Donner Party and collector of butterflies.

  The astounding McGlashan home and museum (perched atop the Rocking Stone) in Truckee, California.

  Douglas Kelley around 1938, when he was a graduate student at Columbia University.

  A note that Göring wrote to Kelley in prison in September 1945. It quotes the Book of Psalms: “He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven, and by his power he brought in the south wind.”

  Former Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess: “Henceforth my memory will again respond to the outside world.”

  Kelley decided that Nazi Party philosopher Alfred Rosenberg “had developed a system of thought differing greatly from known fact.”

  Kelley called Nazi publisher Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitism “an almost true monomania.”

  Hermann and Emmy Göring with their daughter Edda during the early years of World War II. (Courtesy of Corbis Images)

  After Robert Ley’s suicide, security tightened in the Nuremberg prison wing housing the top Nazi suspects.

  Julius Streicher perceived “the substance taken out of an operated knee” in Card VII of the Rorschach inkblot series.

  Card IX of the Rorschach inkblot test, in which Göring saw “a spook with a fat stomach.”

  The portrait of Göring that the Reichsmarschall inscribed, signed, and gave to Kelley.

  Kelley called Göring’s suicide an admirably defiant act against the Nuremberg prison authorities.

  The young psychiatrist, soon to be a criminologist.

  Nancy Bayley (right), a Terman Study researcher, visits Dukie and Douglas M. Kelley, with their children Alicia and Doug, in the living room of their home on Highgate Road. (Photograph by Gene Lester © 1952 SEPS licensed by Curtis Licensing, Indianapolis, IN. All rights reserved.)

  The principles of general semantics found their way into several of Kelley’s criminology courses.

  On the set of Kelley’s successful educational television series Criminal Man.

  8

  THE NAZI MIND

  As the International Military Tribunal ran its course, questions arose about the men who had committed the atrocities and advanced the criminal regime that took shape in the evidence and testimony presented in court. Why did the Nazis and their followers do it? Were they insane? Could anyone find in them a specific mental disorder responsible for their criminal conduct? In the US House of Representatives, Congresswoman Emily Taft Douglas of Illinois raised those questions in 1945 during a committee hearing on the punishment of war criminals. Douglas doubted that Americans, or anyone else for that matter, understood much about the motivations for the enormities of which the Nazi defendants were accused. “We don’t know about war crimes,” she said. “We don’t know at all. We know specifically of atrocities, but we do not understand the psychology of war crimes. . . . There has been a psychological sickness that has bred these crimes, which we must understand or we cannot cope with it in the future.”

  At the same time, many who worked in the tribunal or observed it realized that merely punishing the guilty would not make the proceedings a success. Something more had to emerge from the months of courtroom sessions: definitive signs that Nazi Germany and its ideologies had been crushed and that the world could learn from the horrors of the previous dozen years to prevent similar catastrophes from happening. “We have high hopes that this public portrayal of the guilt of these evildoers,” declared President Harry Truman, “will bring wholesale and permanent revulsion on the part of the masses of our former enemies against war, militarism, aggression, and nations of racial superiority.”

  Back in Dukie’s hometown of Chattanooga, Kelley had plenty to think about, much of it unconnected with the workings of Nazi minds. He “was anxious to forget the war years and get on with new plans and projects,” Dukie later wrote, perhaps too breezily. Kelley certainly needed a job, and wanted one that would further his ambition of achieving a top academic position. He had a long-neglected wife to consider, as well as the possibility of their starting a family.

  Still, Kelley’s thoughts about the Nazi leaders did not fade. In his spare hours he had written down his musings about Nazis, the basis of their evil, and the lessons of the recent war for Americans. Upon his return to the United States, “a number of people urged him to write about his studies of the Nazis,” Dukie wrote to an acquaintance. “He was reluctant to do so because after nearly four years at war with no respite, he was tired and wanted nothing more than for us to drive around the United States and see again the countryside we both love—which we did.” But as they traveled, the book manuscript he had begun envisioning since his initial weeks in the Nazis’ company slowly took shape. Kelley could not leave his Nuremberg experience behind. Indeed, it had followed him home.

  To stimulate his thinking, Kelley had papers—mountains of them. The
boxes he had shipped home from Nuremberg bulged with documents, many unique. He had also shipped to Tennessee a collection of books that their Nazi authors had signed; copies of letters he had conveyed between Hermann and Emmy Göring; a sampling of the Reichsmarschall’s paracodeine pills; X-rays of Hitler’s skull; and the wax-sealed specimens of crackers, cookies, and candies that Rudolf Hess had claimed were poisoned by his English keepers. A hoard of papers and artifacts, much of it medically intriguing or macabre, was close at hand. These materials taunted him. He wanted to make personal and professional sense of the past year of his life: experiences that countless other psychiatrists, psychologists, and academics would have done anything to have shared. Reluctantly Kelley began to sort out his own opinions on the Nazis. Now he could view them from a distance. What could he hypothesize from the evidence of cruelty and criminality?

  Looking over his Rorschach data and interpretations, Kelley could see that none of the top Nazi prisoners, except the brain-damaged Ley, showed signs of any mental illness or personality traits that would label him insane. Here he came up against wartime popular myth. All of the men, even the disordered and forgetful Hess, were responsible for their actions and capable of distinguishing right from wrong. Göring, the charmer with whom Kelley had so much in common, presented special challenges. Kelley was astonished that such a clearly intelligent and cultured man so blatantly lacked a moral compass and empathy for others. Perhaps, Göring’s example suggested, anybody with brains and weighty responsibilities—Kelley included—could lose his bearings and harm others. His intense interest in Göring was plain in the bulk of material on the Reichsmarschall he had brought back, which outweighed by far the material on any other defendant.

  If Kelley had hoped to discover a Nazi “germ,” a deviant personality common to the defendants, there was little evidence of one. Instead, he found in their personalities traits that he called neuroses, not uncommon psychiatric flaws that could certainly trouble the Nazis and increase their ruthlessness, but did not put them outside the boundaries of the normal. Kelley believed that countless men like Göring, unburdened by conscience and driven by narcissism, spent their days “behind big desks deciding big affairs as businessmen, politicians, and racketeers. . . . Shrewd, smooth, conscienceless speakers and writers like Goebbels, slick, big-time salesmen like Ribbentrop, and all the financial and legalistic hangers-on can be counted among the men whose faces we know by sight.”

  His long proximity to the prisoners had convinced him that they exhibited several qualities: unbridled ambition, weak ethics, and excessive patriotism that could justify nearly any action of questionable rightness. Moreover, the Nazis, even the most elite and powerful among them, were not monsters, evildoing machines, or automata without soul and feelings. Göring’s concern for his family, Schirach’s love of poetry, and Kaltenbrunner’s fear under stress had moved Kelley and persuaded him that his former prisoners had emotions and responses like other people. Anyone who dismissed them “because we look with disgust and hatred upon their activities and upon their actions, to sell the Third Reich short,” was making a big mistake. Their relative normalcy left a portentous hanging question. How could their inexplicable conduct be understood? Without comprehending the Nazis or identifying their psychoses, Kelley could only reluctantly conclude that enormous numbers of people had the potential to act as the war criminals had.

  Lacking psychiatric evidence, Kelley fell back onto sociology, history, and Korzybskian semantics to explain the Germans. “Insanity is no explanation for the Nazis,” he wrote. “They were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are; and they were also—to a greater degree than most humans are—the makers of their environment.” Like many who wondered about the rise of the Third Reich, Kelley saw connections between the growth of Nazi ideology and the presence of long-standing barbaric tendencies and prejudices in German culture. From the late nineteenth century through World War I, German leaders had preached the necessity of slaughtering enemies, setting Germans above people of neighboring countries, and recognizing their destiny to conquer others. The Nazis did not have to invent notions of the Führer principle, the folk hero who would rescue the nation, and the existence of an elite who could lead everyone else. They simply tapped into what was already present in the national atmosphere. “It is an established scientific fact that a person who is thinking with the emotional (thalamic) brain centers cannot think intellectually (cortically),” Kelley observed, hearkening to general semantics. “Hitler had an entire people thinking with its thalamus. In such state they fell easy prey to Goebbels, Streicher, Ley, and the other propagandists.” It did not require remarkable qualities to harness those ideas already embedded in the culture—merely leadership abilities.

  If insanity was not the common factor among the Nazis, what was? Kelley could find only two areas in which the Nuremberg defendants shared traits. The first was an enormous energy they devoted to their work; Göring and his colleagues were grade A workaholics. “They all worked for incredibly long hours, slept very little, and devoted their whole lives to the problem of Nazifying the world,” he observed. “They worked slavishly and fanatically. It’s too bad,” Kelley added almost ruefully, “we don’t have that much energy to spare in making democracy work.” In addition, Kelley discovered, the Nazis focused on the ends of their labors and did not much care about the means that made them happen. Those ends varied from Nazi to Nazi and ranged from furthering the spread of Nazism to achieving personal power and glory.

  As for Hitler, whose presence dominated the Nuremberg jail discussions yet who remained out of Kelley’s reach, the psychiatrist made valiant efforts to understand his motivations and nature. At Mondorf and Nuremberg, Kelley had interviewed Hitler’s associates, physicians, secretaries, and anyone else with intimate knowledge of the Nazi leader’s life. He determined that “Hitler had a profound conviction of his own ability, amounting to megalomania. He firmly believed that he was the only individual who could lead the Third Reich to success, and at times he seemed to feel that he had been chosen by Heaven for this task.” Anyone who crossed Hitler faced the leader’s fearsome rage. To Kelley, it was not inconsistent with such megalomania that Hitler in private was often kind and soft-spoken with his staff; polite to women, children, and the elderly; and a lover of good food and other simple pleasures of life.

  Kelley’s analysis of the testimony he had gathered from Hitler’s colleagues also convinced him that the German leader was less sexually driven than many other men, and like Göring may have channeled his sexual drive into work. “Hitler was just as normal in every way as any normal man,” Göring had told Kelley. It was a rather chilling thought.

  Douglas Kelley was far from the first psychiatrist or psychologist to attempt an analysis of Hitler’s mind. In 1942 Cambridge professor Joseph MacCurdy had dissected the Führer’s anti-Semitism, finding that it reflected Hitler’s increasingly delusional and frustrated mental state as his fighters began losing on the battlefield. The psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer and the psychologist Henry Murray also produced profiles of Hitler that guided the planning of the US Office of Strategic Services during the war.

  However, Kelley ultimately honed in on Hitler’s well-known gastro-intestinal disorders—a twenty-year history of gas and stomach pains—as a key to comprehending his behavior. Hitler’s doctors never found an organic cause, and Kelley diagnosed the problem as “no more than a nervous bellyache.” Kelley believed those symptoms pointed to “an anxiety neurosis and fixations centered on his stomach . . . nothing one could be committed to an institution for. He feared death. Many important decisions were made hurriedly and put into effect equally as hurriedly.” Kelley had learned, for example, that Hitler told Göring in 1941 that a planned attack on the Soviet Union had to take place immediately because his stomach was getting worse; the Führer feared he had stomach cancer and that he might soon die. As a result, the Nazi leader turned his attention from successful assaults on Great Britain to a campai
gn in the east that resulted in defeat. “The horrors of this decision are well known,” Kelley wrote, “and it is appalling to realize that an entire war was precipitated because of the severe hysterical stomach cramps and obsessive-compulsive fears of a psychoneurotic who happened to be in a position of command.” In the same attempt to rush ahead before cancer struck him down, Hitler had demanded long hours of work from his underlings. There is no evidence that Hitler actually had stomach cancer, and the Führer refused to allow X-rays of his stomach because he did not want to confirm his fears. One of Hitler’s doctors, Karl Brandt, had told Kelley that Hitler spent his final years continuously receiving shots of vitamins and glucose to stave off the imaginary illness.