The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  “When Jonathan was free from his drug sleep, Dr. Kelley talked to him,” Davis wrote, “made him see that what he had done was accidental and that his feelings of guilt were normal enough but unnecessary.” Sent back to his room to recuperate, Worth found that headaches still troubled him. Kelley turned his attention to Worth’s relationship with his father. He considered it unlikely that the dead soldier really looked like the elder Worth, and Kelley wanted to understand why the machine gunner had superimposed his father’s face on the slain man’s. In psychotherapy sessions, Kelley learned that Worth’s father was a drunk who treated his wife and son violently “and, on occasion, backhanded baby Jonathan halfway across the room,” Davis wrote. Worth grew up professing love for the man while harboring murderous feelings toward him.

  “Doctor Kelley reconstructs the story in this fashion,” Davis recounted. “When Jonathan hit the actual beach and ran toward the huddle of bodies, he had two shocks—first, that he had killed Americans, and second, to protect himself from that blow, he told himself that he had killed the one man he had always wanted to kill, his father. The treatment, with these facts in hand, was easy enough.” Kelley suggested to Worth that his father deserved his hatred, and that Worth had indeed hated him. Worth’s angry feelings toward his parent were completely normal and justified, Kelley said. “Once this lesson was accepted consciously, Jonathan’s muscle tensions relaxed, the powerful cords of the neck released their grip on the base of the skull and Jonathan Worth felt the merciful relief of life without a driving headache.” ( John Hersey recounted an astonishingly similar tale of recovery from wartime trauma using narco-hypnosis in “A Short Talk with Erlanger,” a LIFE magazine article published in October 1945.)

  Davis’s account of the diagnosis, treatment, and resolution of Worth’s problem proceeded dramatically and logically, and Kelley actually did emphasize the rational and scientific basis of his general semantics-based work. He took pride in his skills in leading patients to replace deluded perceptions with rational ones. General semantics continued to figure prominently in his treatments, as in his use of battlefield recordings and the beneficial power he foresaw in moving Worth to use and own the word “hate” in describing his feelings for his father. Combined with all of the other treatments Graylyn offered, the application of general semantics could bring patients back to health much faster than other variety of psychotherapy alone. If people thought more rationally, they “wouldn’t act so nutty,” Kelley was fond of saying.

  Throughout his sojourn at Bowman-Gray, Kelley continued lecturing, mainly in nearby mid-Atlantic states. He traveled through the Carolinas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, with occasional detours to the Mid-west and West Coast, talking on such topics as lessons from Nuremberg and horizons in psychiatry. Between 1947 and 1949 he gave forty-six lectures, including a neurological talk at a convention of magicians.

  Kelley often spoke of the emotional immaturity of the American public. “The average emotional age level of the American people is . . . appallingly low,” he told an audience in San Francisco. “I hate to say it—I’m almost afraid to admit it—that everything we know seems to indicate that the emotional age of the great number of Americans lies somewhere between 5 and 7 years. If we elevate that to the level of 15 years, then we are safe—as a people and as a nation.”

  He focused entire lectures on what he seemed to believe was the sickly mental health of the American public and recommended changes in child-rearing techniques to lower the incidence of Americans who “are not very bright or are emotionally immature. You can see them every day—the adult who has temper tantrums like a child, another who resorts to tears to get what she wants, a third who merely sits like a hunk of protoplasm, indifferent to all around him, and a fourth who just won’t play,” he told an audience. It was neither a sympathetic nor an optimistic portrait of his compatriots. Kelley also acknowledged that many of his psychiatric colleagues were “odd,” a circumstance he called “unfortunate but reasonable. . . . The unstable will frequently go into psychiatry. The field has attracted more of the odd than perhaps any of the various branches” of medicine, he noted in Wilkes-Barre. But in defense of his colleagues, he deplored the “myth that psychiatrists are always trying to interpret at a dinner party their associates’ behavior. We only interpret behavior during office hours.”

  Members of his audiences sometimes asked him how Göring acquired the cyanide capsule that he used to commit suicide. He replied that he did not know for certain but guessed that the Reichsmarschall’s attorney might have passed it to his client along with some legal papers. Kelley felt certain that Göring had no poisonous capsules with him during the months he was the Nuremberg jail psychiatrist, because his own thorough physical examinations of the prisoners had turned up no foreign objects.

  In other lectures, Kelley proposed blocking visitors to the United States who might try to spread a totalitarian ideology. If it were up to him, all politicians and statesmen would undergo psychological scrutiny before beginning their work. “The main thing to do,” Kelley said in a 1947 address to the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith in New York, “is to admit and recognize the danger. We shouldn’t be like patients who suspect they may be sick and put off going to see a doctor because they fear he’ll tell them that they are. The roots are here—you see them in anti-minority action of any kind, against Negroes in the South, against Jews in this area, against Orientals on the West Coast.” But what went unsaid was the highly authoritarian impulse that lay behind his demand for screening and scrutiny. Who would be the one to scrutinize if not the good doctor himself?

  Although Kelley dramatized his findings on the Nazi personality when addressing live audiences, he never expressed such certainty about identifying potential Nazis in his book. Greenberg at last published 22 Cells in Nuremberg in early 1947, and a second printing soon followed. Kelley had fashioned the book as a survey of his professional opinions of the Nazi defendants plus Hitler, not as a chronicle of the Rorschach scores and interpretations he had developed at Nuremberg. He wasn’t yet ready to explain the test results.

  Many of the book’s buyers wanted to read Kelley’s demolition of the commonly held myths that the Nazis were madmen, that Göring and Schirach were clownish homosexuals, and that Hess’s amnesia was completely feigned. The author’s assertions that the top Nazis who took control of Germany were highly intelligent and psychiatrically normal men drew attention at the time, but seem to have faded from the public’s imagination in the decades since then.

  Kelley hoped the book’s publication would combat rumors that he had somehow become attracted to the Nazis’ ideologies or personalities during his months at Nuremberg. He “was in no way sympathetic with the Nazis or their philosophy or actions—far from it!” Dukie wrote loyally. “However, being a true scientist, he knew how to control his aversion in order to elicit the information he needed for an unbiased study, which those who think him sympathetic probably couldn’t have done.”

  Meanwhile, Gustave Gilbert had not lightly accepted Kelley’s departure from Nuremberg with the psychologist’s papers, test results, and observations. After the trials ended and he left army service, Gilbert rushed to edit his notes and prepare his own volume for general readers about the personalities of the Nazis and events behind the scenes at the jail and the trial, which appeared as Nuremberg Diary a few weeks after the publication of 22 Cells. Like Kelley’s volume, Gilbert’s book steered clear of directly referencing the Rorschach tests he and the psychiatrist had administered, perhaps because of the author’s inexperience in interpreting such results.

  Nevertheless, Gilbert delved deeply into the Nazi personalities and produced a chronicle of his months with the prisoners in Nuremberg that influenced many later psychologists and historians. His interpretations of the German leaders often differed from Kelley’s. Gilbert wrote that he did not see several of the Nuremberg defendants as normal or commonplace in their characteristics, but as psychopaths, possess
ors of a dangerous and distinctive type of personality. Göring, Gilbert insisted, was impulsive, egocentric, and deficient in moral courage, prone to lash out against opponents when he wasn’t presenting his façade of geniality. He cared little for anyone outside his family. To Göring, war was merely a vehicle for asserting supremacy over others, not some lofty conflict over national interests. His yearning for power brought out his cynicism, sadism, and greed. Gilbert explained Göring’s loyalty to Hitler as merely a superficial formality, a way for the Reichsmarschall to satisfy his craving for vast personal power. Göring’s suicide, Gilbert maintained, was simply theatrical cowardice. Whereas Gilbert displayed Göring’s unsavory traits as signs of a psychopathic personality, Kelley had held them up as qualities common to many people successful in business and politics. And unlike Kelley, who was suspicious of the aims of all political authorities, Gilbert regarded Nazism as a uniquely pernicious form of political domination that needed special conditions to thrive.

  Gilbert’s book received an unusual endorsement from a Nazi source, Albert Speer, now serving his twenty-year sentence in Spandau Prison. “I must admit that [Gilbert] reproduces the atmosphere with amazing objectivity,” Speer said. “His judgments are on the whole correct and fair; I would hardly have put it very differently.” Speer had always voiced approval of Gilbert’s work at Nuremberg, confessing that the psychologist had left the Nazi feeling “something akin to gratitude.” (Gilbert followed up with a second book, The Psychology of Dictatorship, a more systematic appraisal of the Nazi regime and its leaders, in 1950.) Perhaps the most important distinction between Kelley’s and Gilbert’s books was that Gilbert’s offered an explanation that self-righteous and victorious Americans wanted to hear. It caught the mood.

  Greenberg licensed 22 Cells to a British publisher and hoped for decent sales throughout Europe. “However, we discovered brother Gilbert had been there before us,” one of Greenberg’s representatives wrote to Kelley. “You probably noticed in the Times that Gilbert’s book will be out the end of March. It’s some comfort and a real advantage to have beaten him to the gun.” When Leon Goldensohn, the psychiatrist who succeeded Kelley at Nuremberg, complained about the claim on the jacket of 22 Cells that Kelley was the only psychiatrist in the prison who had had intimate contact with the defendants, Greenberg removed it from the cover. “I don’t think we need worry about him,” the Greenberg staffer added. (Goldensohn kept his own detailed notes of his extensive encounters with the Nazis, but did not publish them. They came out in 2005 as the book The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses, edited by the World War II scholar Robert Gellately, forty-five years after Goldensohn’s death.)

  Ever willing to speak to the public, Kelley tirelessly promoted 22 Cells. He believed he had an urgent message to deliver. In March 1947 he spent four days touring with the book in New York City; appearing on four live radio programs, recording another show for later broadcast, and headlining a press conference. He emphasized that his book was not for psychiatrists, other physicians, or academic specialists—he intended it to influence the thinking and behavior of the American public. Kelley hoped readers would understand the qualities that allowed a group of men to cruelly dominate a country and let them believe they had the right to do so. He wanted people to see that anyone could become those men, that America could become Germany. The United States was at a crucial moment of change, and the understanding he had brought home from Nuremberg could shine a light on the right path to follow. The Nazis, he warned, were you and me—given the slightest twist of fate. In broadly optimistic postwar America, he sounded slightly paranoid.

  So strongly did Kelley believe in these principles that several years later, he required his young son to read 22 Cells in Nuremberg. “That was important to him,” Doug Kelley Jr. recalls. “He set me down and had me read the last part of the book, so I could understand that anybody in any place and in any culture could create a regime like this.”

  Lewis Terman, in his review of 22 Cells for a psychology journal, looked forward to the future publication of Kelley’s Nazi Rorschach transcripts and records, which the psychiatrist had promised were forthcoming. Kelley and Gilbert soon scuffled over the terms of a jointly published report and could not come to an agreement that met the demands of each that he receive primary authorship.

  Kelley’s faith in the value of the Rorschach test never weakened, and he continued using it as a tool for diagnosis for the rest of his career. He served a term as president of the Rorschach Institute during the late 1940s. He felt a professional responsibility to do more with the Nazi Rorschachs than presentation for laypeople in 22 Cells had required. So starting in 1947, he shared the Rorschach information on seven of the Nazis with a group of international experts whose opinions he respected, including Marguerite Loosli-Usteri, the first president of the International Rorschach Society; S. J. Beck, a Chicago psychiatrist who often wrote about the Rorschach technique; and Bruno Klopfer, Kelley’s old Rorschach collaborator. “I am not concerned with differences in scoring or interpretive methods or using these records for validation of the Rorschach method,” Kelley told them. “I am only interested in gaining from as many experts as possible the completest patterns of personality which can be elicited from the records.” He also said that he hoped to publish a paper that gathered and synthesized their findings.

  Many of these correspondents returned their comments—sometimes written at great length and with obvious care. But Kelley never published the paper he had planned. This failure to make use of the contributors’ work did not sit well with Loosli-Usteri, who complained to Kelley six years later and lamented that the window for such research had closed. “Nobody will anymore be interested in the psychology of those seven men,” she wrote.

  A separate effort to assess the Nazi psychiatric records had already begun among attendees of the First International Congress of the World Federation of Mental Health, held in London in 1947. The clinical psychologist and Rorschach expert Molly Harrower had invited ten fellow authorities to examine seventeen records gathered by Kelley and Gilbert for their assessment, along with eight unrelated control test results. (Gilbert was the source of these records.) Nothing came of the committee’s examination of the Rorschachs. Harrower was among those who did not provide the interpretation they had promised. In 1976 she explained this dropping of the ball by recalling that the tests “did not show what we expected to see, and what the pressure of public opinion demanded that we see—that these men were demented creatures, different from normal people as a scorpion is different from a puppy. What we saw was a wide range of personalities, from severely disturbed neurotics to the superbly well adjusted.” The members of the assessment team, she realized in retrospect, saw good and evil in black and white terms, with no room in their beliefs for more uncertain delineations of the personalities that could commit atrocious acts. So in the end Kelley remained the only investigator willing publicly to declare that people like the worst of the Nazis live among us.

  Slowly, Kelley’s focus on clinical psychiatric work began to weaken. Outwardly he appeared devoted to his teaching at Bowman-Gray and his direction of the treatment of patients at Graylyn. But his months at Nuremberg and inability to discover psychiatric triggers in the Nazis, or even a common personality type, left him yearning to better understand the minds of criminals. If, after months studying the prisoners responsible for the worst horrors of modern history, he found that evil was contained within people who in other ways seemed normal, then what could the tools of psychiatry usefully uncover? Kelley turned to criminology to illuminate these men.

  In embracing criminology, Kelley ran a risk. Searching for the seeds of badness in others would force him to confront his own sinister aspects. As it offered answers for aberrant behavior, criminology could stir up the dark, untrustworthy world, so stingy in its appreciation for a great man’s accomplishments, that Kelley’s mother June had revealed to him years a
go. When he turned to this new discipline, Kelley risked exposing his deepest fears.

  Starting in 1947, for the first time in his career Kelley accepted consulting work with a city police force, teaching psychiatric techniques to members of the Winston-Salem Police Department and helping the police investigate criminal cases. In the spring of 1947 he testified in court on behalf of an accused rapist, Ralph Vernon Litteral, and described his diagnosis of organic brain damage, probably indicated by Rorschach testing. Litteral was eventually convicted. In a development that captured headlines in North Carolina newspapers, Kelley publicly sparred with Governor R. Gregg Cherry over the politician’s denial of clemency for Litteral. After personally interviewing Litteral, Cherry rejected Kelley’s assertion that the convicted man was legally insane, and Kelley countered by suggesting that the governor should get a medical license if he wanted to practice psychiatry. “This business of being governor is not an exact science, and I think psychiatry is equally nebulous,” Cherry replied. To which Kelley responded: “If he is competent to determine whether this man knew right from wrong, then we’ve solved the shortage of psychiatrists.” Litteral was executed in November 1947.

  Kelley refined his use of narco-hypnotic drugs for application in criminal investigations, especially in cases of amnesia or hysterically repressed memory, by replacing sodium pentothal and sodium amytal with Somnoform, a commonly used dental anesthetic. He counted the drug’s subtle smell among its many advantages—it did not require hypodermic needles for administration, and in gaseous form it had a faint odor that often went unnoticed until it had intoxicated the patient. By that time the recipient was unlikely to worry about what it smelled like. Somnoform could take effect in ninety seconds and intoxicate the subject for ten minutes. “Take a whiff,” Kelley once invited a reporter. “Well, come on and smell it. It won’t hurt you. Sometimes it makes you feel like you had one drink too many.” Kelley was speaking from actual experience. He had experimented with all of the “truth serum” drugs on himself. “After a few whiffs,” he said of Somnoform, “your body begins to feel numb except for a little tingling sensation. Then you get sleepy and imagine you are floating away. A bit later about everything in the world seems wonderful and you relax. There is a constant feeling that something or someone is dissolving before your eyes.” He hoped to discover a narco-hypnotic drug that could be delivered even more easily than Somnoform, either in small bottles or some other container, perhaps for on-location use at crime scenes.