The Nazi and the Psychiatrist Read online

  THE

  NAZI AND THE

  PSYCHIATRIST

  Copyright © 2013 by Jack El-Hai.

  Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved.

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  Book Design by Timm Bryson

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  El-Hai, Jack.

  The Nazi and the psychiatrist : Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a fatal meeting of minds at the end of WWII / Jack El-Hai.—First Edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61039-157-3 (e-book)

  1. Göring, Hermann, 1893–1946—Psychology. 2. Kelley, Douglas M. (Douglas McGlashan), 1912–1958. 3. Nazis—Psychology. 4. War criminals—Germany—Psychology. 5. Nuremberg Trial of Major German War Criminals, Nuremberg, Germany, 1945–1946. 6. Nuremberg War Crime Trials, Nuremberg, Germany, 1946–1949. 7. Nazis—Germany—Biography. 8. Psychiatrists—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  DD247.G67E4 2014

  341.6'90268—dc23

  2013010730

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  TO ESTELLE EL-HAI AND DR. ARNOLD E. ARONSON

  with my love and gratitude

  CONTENTS

  Principal Characters

  CHAPTER 1The House

  CHAPTER 2Mondorf-les-Bains

  CHAPTER 3The Psychiatrist

  CHAPTER 4Among the Ruins

  CHAPTER 5Inkblots

  CHAPTER 6Interloper

  CHAPTER 7The Palace of Justice

  CHAPTER 8The Nazi Mind

  CHAPTER 9Cyanide

  CHAPTER 10Post Mortem

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photo insert between pages 134–135

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  NUREMBERG JAIL STAFF

  Col. Burton Andrus, commandant

  Capt. John Dolibois, welfare officer

  Lt. Gustave Gilbert, psychologist

  Maj. Douglas McGlashan Kelley, psychiatrist

  Howard Triest, translator

  NUREMBERG DEFENDANTS

  Karl Dönitz, admiral and Hitler’s designated successor

  Hans Frank, governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland

  Wilhelm Frick, head of the radio division, German Propaganda Ministry

  Walther Funk, minister of economics

  Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall and Luftwaffe chief

  Rudolf Hess, deputy to the Führer

  Alfred Jodl, chief of operations for the German High Command

  Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of security police

  Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the German High Command

  Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front

  Konstantin von Neurath, minister of foreign affairs (until 1938)

  Franz von Papen, German vice chancellor

  Erich Raeder, commander in chief of the German navy

  Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister

  Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi party philosopher and Reichsminister for the Eastern Occupied Territories

  Fritz Sauckel, chief of slave labor recruitment

  Hjalmar Schacht, Reichsbank president and minister of economics (until 1937)

  Baldur von Schirach, Hitler Youth leader

  Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Austrian chancellor and Reich commissioner for the Netherlands

  Albert Speer, Reichsminister for armaments and munitions

  Julius Streicher, editor of Der Stürmer

  INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL OFFICIALS

  William “Wild Bill” Donovan, special assistant to the chief prosecutor

  Robert Jackson, US chief of counsel for the prosecution

  Judge Geoffrey Lawrence, president of the court

  FAMILY OF DOUGLAS MCGLASHAN KELLEY

  Charles McGlashan, grandfather

  June McGlashan Kelley, mother

  George “Doc” Kelley, father

  Alice Vivienne “Dukie” Hill Kelley, wife

  Doug, Alicia, and Allen Kelley, children

  1

  THE HOUSE

  The Kelleys lived in a sprawling, Mediterranean-style villa on Highgate Road in the hills of Kensington, north of Berkeley, California. Its red-tiled roof rose high above the distant, drifting waters of the bay, but closer, beyond the yard’s four terraces and stone walks and down a slope of redwood and fruit trees, stood the headstones of Sunset View Cemetery.

  A little merry-go-round and a children’s swimming pool sat in the center courtyard of the Kelleys’ U-shaped house. The front door opened onto a hallway with the kitchen to the left, where the doctor made the family’s meals using a large oven, a fast-food griddle, and a meat grinder. The kitchen connected to a pantry with a freezer. The oldest son once sat atop the humming appliance and contemplated killing his father with an ax.

  The entry hallway led to a bathroom on the right—the site of a gruesome scene that played out on the first day of 1958—and beyond that to the living room, which contained a fireplace, a long sofa, and the doctor’s own green leather chair. The room was carpeted, with the furniture pushed against the walls to open space for guests. Sometimes Dr. Kelley would play a game there with his oldest son. The boy had to leave the room, and in his absence the doctor would move a pencil on the coffee table. When the boy returned, he had to figure out what had changed.

  Beyond the living room was Dr. Kelley and Dukie’s bedroom, overlooking the rear of the half-acre lot. In a small closet that the children sneaked into through a hallway, they could overhear their parents’ fights.

  From the living room, black-stained stairs rose to the second level. Up there a bullet hole, hidden beneath a rug, scarred the wooden floor of a hallway drenched with sunlight from tall windows. Before terminating at Dr. Kelley’s office, the hallway ran past a closet concealing the magic tricks and props for his shows.

  The view from the office window presented a glorious panorama of the Golden Gate bay and the prison tower of Alcatraz Island. When Dr. Kelley turned his desk chair to face the view, he may have settled his gaze on Alcatraz and remembered his months working in another prison, in Nuremberg. His desk was orderly. In cabinets and a small laboratory he kept bone saws, a lab table, mortars, alcohol burners, graduated cylinders and beakers, collections of crystals, botanical samples mounted on glass slides, two human skulls, and a large assortment of chemicals, many of them toxic.

  The children slept in the basement bedrooms. They dreaded the unpredictability of Dr. Kelley’s goodnight visits. When they heard the creak of his weight on the stairs, they had a few seconds to brace themselves for whatever mood he was in.

  The last argument began in the kitchen. Often when Dr. Kelley and Dukie fought, she would pack her purse and leave for the day. This time Dr. Kelley burst out of the kitchen howling and stormed up the stairs to his office. He slammed the door, toppling a porcelain doorstop, its fragments raining down the steps. After a couple of minutes he emerged, concealing something in his hand.
He came down the stairs and stopped on the landing, which commanded the living room like a stage. He shouted a statement that terrified and bewildered his wife, father, and children. Then he put something in his mouth and swallowed.

  2

  MONDORF-LES-BAINS

  The airplane, a little Piper L-4, couldn’t budge. Its sole passenger, Hermann Göring—former World War I ace, chief of the once fearsome Luftwaffe, and highest-ranking official of the Third Reich left alive—weighed too much for a safe takeoff.

  This was an unaccustomed lull for Göring. For weeks he had been in a state of continual movement, uncertainty, and danger. He had evacuated his beloved hunting retreat and party estate, Carinhall. He had endured forced confinement at Adolf Hitler’s order after offering, heroically in his view, to take control of the Nazi government. Soon afterward Göring learned of Martin Bormann’s command to German forces to murder him, and he scrambled away from the custody of the Schutzstaffel (SS).

  Less than forty-eight hours before boarding the Piper, on the day before Germany’s surrender, May 7, 1945, Göring had sent a letter across the disintegrating line of battle to the US military command. He acknowledged Nazi Germany’s imminent collapse and offered to help the Allies form a new government of the Reich. US Army Brigadier General Robert I. Stack marveled at the sender’s audacity and was soon leading a convoy of soldiers in jeeps to capture him. They caught up with Göring’s own procession of vehicles near the Austrian town of Radstadt. Göring was riding in a Mercedes-Benz equipped with bulletproof glass.

  The chauffeur nudged Göring and said, “Here are the Americans, Herr Reichsmarschall.” Leaning toward his wife, Emmy, Göring said, “I have a good feeling about this.” Stack emerged from a US Army car, and the men exchanged salutes. Göring and his wife, once one of the most powerful couples in Europe, had reached the end of their war. Emmy was in tears. This meeting with enemy officers on a road congested with refugees “was certainly an extremely painful moment for us,” she later wrote.

  Stack telephoned the field office of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, with news of Göring’s capture. Göring, who considered himself the most charismatic and internationally admired of the German leaders, believed Eisenhower would soon order his release. American soldiers escorted Göring and his family to Castle Fischorn near Zell am See, where Göring joked with his captors as his family settled into rooms on the second floor and ate dinner with Stack. Göring told Emmy that he would leave the following day for his meeting with Eisenhower, but that he would soon return to her. “Don’t worry if I’m away for a day or two longer,” he said to her. After some reflection, he added, “To tell the truth, I feel that things will be all right. Don’t you think so?”

  Göring spent the night at the headquarters of the US Seventh Army at Kitzbühl, where he again asked for safe conduct and a meeting with Eisenhower. His captors told Göring it was unlikely such a meeting would ever happen. Yet Stack and his staff extended many courtesies to Göring: the Nazi leader drank champagne during receptions with American soldiers, posed for photographs and held a press conference, and was treated for one last time as the high-ranking representative of state that he believed himself to be.

  The following morning Göring, dressed in his gray Luftwaffe uniform, was taken to the edge of a nearby airstrip, to the tight cabin of the Piper, where it became evident that the aircraft could not transport his 270-pound bulk.

  Someone found a slightly larger plane, a Piper L-5, which had the horsepower to carry the Nazi prisoner. Göring boarded and settled into the backseat, but another impediment to safe travel arose. He could not stretch the passenger restraint around his belly. Göring held up the loose strap, shrugged, and said, “Das gut,” to the US Army Air Corps pilot at the controls, Captain Bo Foster. Then, in a gesture of nonchalance, he leaned his elbow out the window and onto the fuselage as Foster taxied the plane onto the runway and it lifted into the air.

  The Piper flew for fifty-five minutes to Augsburg, Germany, where American intelligence officers of the Seventh Army waited. Along the way Göring and Foster mixed German and English in a discussion of the sights below them. Göring pointed out airfields and industrial sites that he recognized. They talked about other things, too. Foster asked when Germany had begun developing jet engine aircraft, and Göring replied, “Too late,” and laughed. The Reichsmarschall was witty and genial. Foster wore a .45 pistol in his shoulder holster, but had his captive, an expert pilot, tried to take advantage of their close quarters to seize control of the aircraft, Foster would not have been able to free a hand from the instruments to defend himself. He and the world’s most famous prisoner of war were defenseless against one another.

  After they landed Foster asked Göring to autograph a blank flight report. Spending an hour so intimately with Göring had unsettled him. “I could see that he was like one of our officers if [one of them] had been picked up,” he recalled decades later. “I wouldn’t say it changed my view of the war, but it showed me that there are. . . . ” He let the sentence fade away unfinished. “Well,” he resumed, “I questioned all that we knew about these vicious people.”

  Emmy and Edda Göring, the Reichsmarschall’s wife and five-year-old daughter, were moved to Veldenstein Castle, a residence that the family owned in Franconia.

  At Augsburg, Göring’s privileges were taken away. His wardens took possession of his prized Reichsmarschall baton, a five-pound ivory shaft, embossed with gold eagles and platinum crosses and embedded with 640 diamonds, which Hitler had given him in 1940. However, he still consumed food and liquor in the officers’ mess (perhaps to make him more cooperative during interrogations), basked in the awed regard of the American soldiers, and enjoyed attention from the international press. For the last time, he spoke with his anti-Nazi younger brother Albert, who had assisted Czech resisters during the war and frequently aided persecuted Jews. To Albert, Göring hinted that he knew he would probably remain in custody for a long time. “You will soon be free,” he supposedly told Albert. “So take care of my wife and my child. Farewell.”

  Eisenhower continued to ignore Göring’s requests for a “man to man” meeting, and soon the prisoner learned that he should prepare for another move, on May 20. Permitted to bring along one aide, Göring chose his longtime servant, Robert Kropp.

  Göring’s destination was Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, where the Americans had established an interrogation center codenamed Ashcan. (With the same irreverence, the British had named one of their enemy detention centers Dustbin.) Göring may have cheered up when he learned of his destination, because Mondorf, an ancient spa town wedged between Luxembourg’s borders with France and Germany, was famous for its vineyards, parks, fields of flowers, and fine hotels. Before his arrival, however, US soldiers preparing for transports of Nazi captives had emptied the ornate but declining Palace Hotel of its furnishings, leaving the guest rooms bare except for folding beds with straw mattresses. Away went the chandeliers, as well as the window panes affording charming views of the town, to be replaced by metal bars and shatterproof sheets of Plexiglas. The soldiers also built a stockade around the hotel, with four watchtowers armed with machine guns, and they would soon install floodlights, fifteen-foot-high, electrified barbed-wire fencing, and additional machine gun posts.

  With such decorative touches, it was difficult for the new commandant of Ashcan, US Army Colonel Burton C. Andrus, to keep secret the purpose of the former hotel. But he tried, even as other notable Nazis moved in. Among the first to arrive were Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Nazi Germany’s final head of state (whom Hitler had designated as his successor in a last fit of pique against Göring); armed forces commander Wilhelm Keitel and his deputy, Alfred Jodl; Robert Ley, a mentally unstable Nazi director of labor who expressed no interest in his food and drink as a prisoner, but urgently requested female company; Hans Frank, the former Reich governor of Poland, already a veteran of two suicide attempts in captivity; the wr
iter of Nazi philosophy Alfred Rosenberg, recovering from a sprained ankle sustained after a drinking binge as the war ended; Hjalmar Schacht, the director of the German central bank, who had opposed Hitler during the war and ended up in a concentration camp; and Julius Streicher, publisher of the notorious anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer (The Stormtrooper), who had spent his final days of freedom in the Bavarian Alps posing as a landscape painter. Eventually Andrus took charge of fifty-two high-ranking German army officers and government officials at Mondorf. He recalled that he feared attacks on his German prisoners from the outside, “either by fanatical Nazis trying to rescue the inmates, or by the citizens of Luxembourg, who hated not only Nazis but all Germans, after the ruthless treatment they had been subjected to [during the war].” A group of 176 Luxembourgers, recuperating in Mondorf after surviving the horrors of the Dachau concentration camp, were among those who could not be blamed for wanting to lynch the Nazi leaders.

  Andrus took his job seriously. The epitome of soldierly crispness, with his glossily lacquered helmet, metal-framed glasses, clipped way of speaking, and rigid bearing, he insisted that his Nazi prisoners treat him deferentially, as their commanding officer. Although Time magazine described him as a “plump little figure, looking like an inflated pouter pigeon,” the colonel was a lean water-polo enthusiast, born in Washington State, who stood five feet ten and weighed 160 pounds. He had earned distinction as a cavalry officer during World War I and also served as warden of a military detention center at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Before his arrival at the fort, prison discipline had been a disaster. Escapes were frequent, and convicted murderers enforced their own rules through what Andrus called a “kangaroo court.” To initiate Andrus, the Georgia convicts had rioted and vandalized the cell block. He forced the leaders of the mayhem to clean up the mess, built solitary confinement cells, and wrote new rules of conduct. Then he ordered guards to shoot any prisoner attempting to escape. Discipline was excellent after that.