The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  Selective memory was not going to help all the family recover from Kelley’s devastating death. Its members “blew apart, all affected in different ways by the suicide,” Doug says. Allen, the youngest, remained Dukie’s baby, and she watched over him closely. Alicia bonded closely with her mother and took care of her.

  Doug, on the other hand, actively rejected what his father had taught him. “I was repelled by power and the idea of leading others,” he says. His parents had greatly accelerated his progress in school, and he was nine years old when he started seventh grade. After a short stay in a military boarding school in Tennessee, he came back to El Cerrito High School to graduate. Doug cruised through hippiedom, college, jobs, and marriages for years, always avoiding standing out, excelling, or being the kind of achiever that his father had wanted. He finally stuck with a mail sorting job in the US Postal Service—a man with a reputation among his coworkers for knowing everything that was happening in the building. It was his tele-empathy still ticking away, still on alert. For a time, one of his postal colleagues was Georgia Abbott, the wife of Burton Abbott and the discoverer of the belongings of Stephanie Bryan in the Abbott basement. Doug’s father had helped send her husband to the gas chamber.

  George “Doc” Kelley continued practicing dentistry in San Francisco into his ninety-first year, and he outlived his son by nearly fourteen years. He joined Kelley in the cemetery at Truckee in 1971.

  By then only three of the men who had occupied the twenty-two cells at Nuremberg remained alive. Half a world away, Rudolf Hess still lived behind bars in Spandau Prison in Berlin. In 1948 a Mayo Clinic psychiatrist working as a consultant for the US Army, Maurice N. Walsh, had evaluated Hess. Some years earlier Walsh had taken an interest in the minds of political tyrants when he encountered Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo as a patient at Mayo. Trujillo was supposedly there for a general checkup, but actually needed treatment for syphilis. Talking with Trujillo, Walsh judged him “schizophrenic and . . . without any access to normal guilt feelings and normal emotions of love and tenderness.” Walsh wondered how such a man could rule a country and attract loyal followers. He grew interested in the callousness with which he believed many despots regarded human life and human rights.

  At Spandau, a crowd of Allied representatives occupied the visiting room with Walsh, making a normal psychiatric interview difficult. Hess, looking thin and still suffering from frequent stomach cramps, “was affable and pleasant during the interview, which lasted two hours and was largely carried out through the American interpreter,” Walsh wrote. His amnesia appeared to have vanished, and Hess clearly recalled most events from his past. He only had difficulty remembering his episodes of forgetfulness in England, and he repeated his claim that his amnesia at Nuremberg had been faked. “Hess then asked permission to make a statement,” Walsh recorded. “With considerable dignity and with great emphasis he stated in a very formal manner that he regarded his present imprisonment as dishonorable and unjust. He said that he and his comrades were at times insufficiently fed in the prison and were made to do hard labor which was contrary to the sentence at the Nuremberg tribunal. . . . He said that he wished to request that he be set at liberty.” Walsh reported to the army soon after the interview that Hess did not suffer from hallucinations or delusions, that his mood was normal, and that he was not psychotic. He said that the depths of Hess’s emotions were greater than he had expected to find. He called Hess “an individual of superior intelligence with schizoid personality traits” who had experienced hysterical amnesia in the past because of emotional stress.

  Writing about the examination decades later, however, Walsh characterized Hess very differently. Hess, he recalled, “had a latent schizophrenia. There was no doubt about the basically psychotic nature of his psychiatric illness or that he had experienced recurrent psychotic episodes for several years past. This was indeed an astonishing situation,” and Walsh objected to Hess’s continued imprisonment. The psychiatrist disclosed that he had previously been “forbidden by the American Military authorities to release my diagnosis on Hess because, I was informed, this would irritate the Russians, and at the time of my visit during the Berlin Airlift, the Russians were very easily irritated.”

  The Soviets absolutely refused to allow any clemency for Hess, and his incarceration continued. Under normal circumstances in an American or British court, Hess might not have been put on trial at all, but the Russians insisted that his sentence was not alterable. In the 1970s—when the last of his fellow defendants remaining in prison, Baldur von Schirach and Albert Speer, had been released and Hess was Spandau’s sole inmate—committees of concerned citizens in Britain formed to demand a review of the former Deputy Führer’s case, and then Hess’s wife and son joined efforts to put an end to his treatment as a criminal. Alone among the former Allied powers, however, the Soviet Union resisted making changes to the terms of Hess’s punishment. The Russians never freed Hess from his sentence.

  John Dolibois, Kelley’s first translator at Nuremberg, caught a final glimpse of Hess in 1984. He and his wife were visiting the US Army’s Berlin brigade and took a helicopter tour of the city. Flying low, the aircraft hovered over Spandau Prison. “From an oblique angle I spotted a single, lone figure walking slowly along a path in the prison garden,” Dolibois recalled. Hess was sickly and shrinking within himself, refusing to speak with anyone or see his family. The stubbornly resistant man Dolibois remembered was gone. “Stooped, he shuffled along slowly.” Three years later, at the age of ninety-three, Hess succeeded in committing an improbable suicide by strangling himself with an electrical extension cord. Spandau Prison was soon demolished to prevent neo-Nazis from making it a shrine.

  As Hess deteriorated in prison, a controversy roiled over the best interpretation of the Rorschach tests that Kelley and Gustave Gilbert had given him, Göring, and the other Nuremberg defendants. Many psychologists pointed out problems with the records: the Nazi subjects—recently toppled from positions of power—were stressed from capture and time in prison, they probably were not representative of Nazis in general, and as prisoners they occupied subservient positions to their examiners. Even so, the tantalizing insights these records provide into the minds of leading Nazis have made them the most fiercely contested Rorschachs in history.

  The debaters have fallen into two categories. In one camp are those who agree with Kelley that the Rorschach tests of the Nazi defendants reveal no distinctive “Nazi mind.” Some in this camp also assert that many people regarded as mentally healthy are capable of behaving similarly to the Nazis under the right circumstances—the line of thinking that so overwhelmed Kelley when he reached the same dark conclusion. On the other side are investigators who point to data in the Rorschach tests that they believe indicate the Nazi leaders shared signs of mental disorder.

  Gustave Gilbert was the early standard-bearer of the latter group. In 1961 Gilbert, by this time a middle-aged member of the psychology faculty at Long Island University, stoked the debate as an expert at the trial of Holocaust architect and Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The court wanted to understand the mentality of the Nazi criminals. Testifying from the witness stand in Eichmann’s presence, the bespectacled Gilbert carefully and formally asserted that his study of the Rorschach scores of the Nuremberg prisoners showed that they had fit a common and narrow personality profile that included antisocial qualities and a lack of interest in the suffering of others, contrary to Kelley’s interpretation. (Gilbert tellingly titled two of his academic articles on Nazi psychology “The Mentality of S.S. Murderous Robots” and “Goering, Amiable Psychopath.”)

  Support for Kelley’s view of the psychological characteristics of the Nazis as commonplace came from Stanley Milgram’s famous 1963 experiment on the willingness of volunteers to follow orders to administer harmful and fatal levels of electricity to others. Personality, he demonstrated, was not important. The aftermath of World War II had inspired Milgram’s research, according to hi
s colleague Philip Zimbardo, who himself designed a renowned experiment on the brutal capabilities of subjects, the Stanford Prison Experiment. Milgram “worried about, you know, could the Holocaust happen in America?” Zimbardo says. “If Hitler said electro-cute somebody, would you do it?. . . And everybody said, no, Stanley, we’re not that kind of person. What he said [even] as a high-school kid was, how do you know unless you’re in that kind of situation?”

  A decade passed after Milgram’s initial work, and the Nazi Rorschach records only accumulated dust. Most of Kelley’s records, in fact, which Dukie kept in boxes at her home, had vanished from the sight of researchers. Molly Harrower, the same Rorschach researcher who had tried to gather a consensus of opinion on the Nuremberg tests during the late 1940s, made another, more successful effort some thirty years later. Now a professor at the University of Florida, with a direct gaze and regrets that she had suspended her earlier investigation, she gave a group of fifteen experts in Rorschach interpretation the records that Gilbert had collected on Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, and five other Nazis—unidentified to avoid bias—along with eight Rorschach records from hospital patients and members of the clergy to serve as controls. Even as late as the 1970s, there was no standardized method of interpreting Rorschach scores, and Harrower did not tell her experts how to evaluate the records. Although the experts could correctly pick out mental disturbances among some of the Rorschach test-takers, they could not find any similarities in their interpretations of the Nazis’ results. “The fact that they didn’t makes the notion that the war crimes were due to mental disorder untenable,” Harrower concluded. In fact, they judged all the Nazis except Ribbentrop as either normally adjusted or exceptionally well-adjusted. Using the Rorschach records, there was no way to differentiate the Nazis from ordinary people. In any event, Harrower believed, personality traits had little to do with the brutality of the Nazi regime and the atrocities it perpetrated. More decisive in the rise of German fascism was the susceptibility of normal people to myths, propagandistic manipulation, deception, and fear. And that susceptibility was a part of our species’ makeup. “It can happen here,” she declared, echoing Kelley.

  At about the same time, the research team of Michael Selzer and Florence Miale, a student of Bruno Klopfer who had worked with Rorschach testing for decades and had been one of the experts Harrower tapped just after the war, began their own investigations of the Nazi Rorschach records. Selzer, who taught in the department of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, wrote to Dukie in 1975 seeking access to Kelley’s results. Dukie put him off with excuses: Kelley’s papers were too voluminous for her to go through, his shorthand was impossible to read, and he kept much of the information in his head. Her actual reason for keeping the records away from Selzer, as she later disclosed to a friend, was that Kelley would not have approved of the sort of elaborate psychoanalysis of the top Nazi figures that she believed Selzer envisioned. Deep down, Dukie may have feared letting the records out of her control. She similarly declined a request for the records from the Rorschach Institute in Switzerland.

  Selzer and Miale gained access to Gilbert’s records and wrote their book anyway, and the conclusions of The Nuremberg Mind: The Psychology of the Nazi Leaders, published in 1975, placed them in Gilbert’s camp—so much so, in fact, that Gilbert wrote the book’s preface. Gilbert took this opportunity to take some digs at Kelley. The psychiatrist, Gilbert wrote, had “spoiled” any efforts to obtain clean Rorschach records from the Nazis by administering “some of the tests through an interpreter, before he knew that a German-speaking psychologist was coming. This rendered both the completeness and the accuracy of those tests somewhat doubtful, and also interfered with the imagery.” (Gilbert’s preface was one of his last published works before he died in 1977.)

  The authors then took over, first proclaiming that people like Arendt, Milgram, and Kelley “have not persuaded us that the major Nazi war criminals were normal, ordinary people fundamentally similar to you and us.” On the contrary, they believed, the Nuremberg defendants shared a common personality profile of mental disturbance. Based on their interpretations of the Rorschachs, they labeled many of the Nazis psychopaths with a limited capacity to feel guilt or attach themselves to other people or even to political or philosophical standards of behavior. The Nazis’ virulent self-interest was paramount in determining their behavior, set them apart from most people, and rendered them abnormal and psychologically unhealthy.

  Although this conclusion seems to oppose Kelley’s in every way—and Kelley would have furiously condemned Selzer and Miale had he lived to see their book—the divide is not as great as it may appear. The Israeli political scientist and historian José Brunner has pointed out that Selzer and Miale left open a door to the possibility that certain large and prominent groups of people—politicians, business leaders, artists, and others—might share the Nazis’ traits. Kelley would have agreed.

  Harrower declared the conclusions of Selzer and Miale fatally biased by their foreknowledge of the tested Nazis’ careers and crimes, and she faulted them for not reviewing the records blindly or comparing them with a control group. She believed that “their interpretations of the Rorschach results reflected their own expectations about Nazi mentality.” In other words, Selzer and Miale had assembled their book with a set agenda.

  In 1978 a researcher new to the debate, psychologist Barry Ritzler of Long Island University, applied a quantitative and statistically based criterion to the Nazi Rorschachs to avoid arbitrary interpretations and standardized the responses for comparison with a database of thousands of other test results that had been similarly appraised in previous years. Ritzler fell somewhere between Harrower and Selzer-Miale in his interpretations: he determined that the Nazi responses indicated a difference from the norm, but not enough to brand them psychiatrically disordered. The Nuremberg defendants, he said, resembled “successful psychopaths” who selfishly took advantage of chances to advance themselves and their status without caring about the effects on the people around them, but they did not show the severe symptoms of psychopaths who actively harm others.

  Ritzler’s Rorschach appraisal method had been devised by Samuel J. Beck, a Chicago psychologist to whom Kelley sent some of his Nazi Rorschach records in 1947. Years after Beck died, in 1992, researcher Reneau Kennedy discovered those records among Beck’s archived papers at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. As a result, despite Dukie’s best efforts to keep them under her control, several of Kelley’s Nazi records emerged into the spotlight for the first time.

  The appearance of Kelley’s records set the stage for the most extensive review of the Nazi Rorschach results, by a collaboration of Ritzler, Harrower, psychological assessment expert Robert P. Archer, and Drexel University psychologist Eric Zillmer, another longtime contributor to the controversy. In 1995 this team published The Quest for the Nazi Personality: A Psychological Investigation of Nazi War Criminals, which drew from Kelley’s results, as well as Gilbert’s. They concluded that it was impossible to use the Rorschach records to lump the Nazis into a distinctive psychiatric category. Göring, Hess, and their compatriots may have shared some personality traits—such as a tendency to vacillate in trying to solve problems, as do about 20 percent of the American public—but those traits did not make them abnormal or psychopathic and probably belonged to many political leaders and others. “In fact,” the research team wrote, “the differences among the members of this group by far outweighed any similarities.” They concluded that “many individuals. . . participated in atrocities without having diagnosable impairments that would account for their actions.” Psychotic sadism may have offered one path to the top of the Nazi elite, but men of many other personality types sat in the dock at Nuremberg. Tides of thought famously cycle in psychiatry and psychology, and Gilbert’s view of the Nazi records may again rise some day. But Ritzler, Harrower, Archer, and Zillmer decisively came down on Kelley’s side in the debate.
Until someone else refutes it, the latest study suggests that the Nazi personality that eluded Kelley, seduced Gilbert, and tempted so many other researchers is a myth.

  It took Doug Kelley twenty-eight years after his father’s death to feel that he could reconcile with Dukie. For so long he had blamed her for her role in his upbringing, for her inability to protect him from Kelley’s emotional storms. Then, in the mid-1980s, he realized that his demand for justice from Dukie would come only at great cost to her. She did not want to remember the painful episodes of her life with her husband. Doug decided to stop hoping that she would acknowledge his father’s faults and errors. In 1987 he visited her in Santa Barbara, California, where she lived in a house with beautiful views of the ocean. Ostensibly Doug arrived to help Dukie figure out how to use a new computer. Their relationship began to mend. “It was a way of saying, ‘I love you. We’re a family,’” Doug remembers. “From then on I was Doug to her, not Douglas, not just her son, but an equal she could be more upfront with.”

  By then her memories of Kelley had frozen into images of his brilliance and boundless curiosity. Doug thought of him as a father with his own way of loving, as a man who led him down a path he couldn’t stand, as one tormented by lifelong demons that escaped his control. When Dukie died in 2007, Doug inherited the ragged boxes of papers, medical records, and notes that his father had brought home from Europe sixty years earlier.

  Doug’s sister Alicia died in a car accident in 2006, and his brother Allen is seriously ill and disabled. So Doug remains the sole guardian of this hidden archive—yet another McGlashan collection with a stormy story to tell. Doug still has many of his father’s collectibles: a meteorite, old leaves encased in glass, wood carvings from Africa, and polished crystals. Upon request he will bring out one of the splinters from a Donner Party cabin. Floating in oil in a tiny glass vial, a suspended sliver of hardship from the past, it is not much more substantial than an eyelash, and you have to blink to make sure you’ve seen it.