The Nazi and the Psychiatrist Page 3
A gregarious man, Göring was starved of social stimulation. He welcomed the physician’s attention and in one of their first encounters boasted to Kelley that he paid close attention to his own body. The Reichsmarschall, in fact, declared that he had the most admirable physique in all of Germany. He described “in minute detail every scar and blemish on his skin,” wrote Kelley, who began sketching a medical history:
12 lbs at birth. Not fat—slender as a child—started to gain in 1923.
1916—16 Nov. Shot down—bullet in rt flank—metal splinters and upholstery. Hosp. to Jan. 1917—16 cm scar. . . .
Was shot in upper thigh—in 1923 at Munich—9th Nov. ’23 to March ’24.
At that time given morph. self. by injections. After he left hospital took injection and by mouth for ½ to 3/years.
Kelley grew curious about the mountain of possessions that arrived at Ashcan with Göring. The prisoner’s collection of toiletries and accessories impressed the psychiatrist, who noted lotion and body powder among the supplies, but not makeup, as had been rumored. What really drew Kelley’s attention were the three rings among the Nazi’s treasures. They were “truly massive baubles,” Kelley wrote, one crowned by a huge ruby, another set with a blue diamond, and the third carrying an emerald. Until his captivity, Göring “always carried these rings so as to be able to select each day the color which best suited his mood,” he told Kelley. The psychiatrist also took special note of the massive emerald stored among Göring’s belongings.
Göring spoke proudly to Kelley about his well-being, strength, and prowess as a sportsman. “I have always been athletic,” Göring told Kelley as they sat side by side on the prisoner’s cot, “and until the last years of the war I spent much time skiing, hunting, and mountain climbing.” Göring seemed to believe that real danger could never threaten him. On one occasion in his youth, he had stood and watched an avalanche sweep around him in the Austrian Alps as his companions scurried to safety, and on another he had berated his friends for panicking when their rowboat drifted near the precipice of a waterfall. “If we go over, we die, and there’s nothing we can do about it, so why get excited?” Göring remembered shouting to his friends.
Kelley asked Göring about his personal habits, and Göring replied that he ate with gusto, drank alcohol in moderation, and sometimes smoked cigars. “He claims to have a normal sexual life and states that it has not changed since his gain in weight during the 1920s,” Kelley wrote.
The psychiatrist next turned to Göring’s drug addiction. As Göring explained to Kelley, twenty-five years earlier he had taken part in Hitler’s notorious Munich “Beer Hall” Putsch, a failed attempt by Nazi Party members to seize control of the government of the German state of Bavaria. Göring, already one of Hitler’s chief aides, helped plan the revolt; organized the Nazi storm troopers, who intimidated citizens and took over government buildings; and spurred on a mob that occupied a Munich beer hall in which a high-ranking Bavarian official, Gustav von Kahr, was giving a speech. After twenty-four hours of hostage taking and confusion, the Nazis and members of the Bavarian State Police fought in the streets of Munich and exchanged gunfire, leaving twenty people dead and many wounded. Hitler and his supporters were routed, and Göring took a bullet in the thigh. A resulting infection left him hospitalized for many months, during which the drug dependency took root. While doctors had cared for his leg, Göring had received repeated doses of morphine to dampen his pain. Gradually his wound healed, but his need for morphine persisted. When doctors discontinued the shots, Göring went to the black market to obtain morphine tablets. Exiled from Germany for his role in the putsch, he was looking for work as an aviation consultant when he and his first wife, Carin, moved to Sweden in 1924.
He took his addiction with him. He complained that the pain in his leg had grown unbearable, and the idleness of being unemployed left him feeling purposeless. He upped his daily intake of morphine. The drug made him at times delusional, untrustworthy, talkative, manic, grandiose, and insomniac. It lit his emotions like fireworks, igniting fits of rage and violence. He threw furniture around his apartment. Morphine overstimulated his hormonal secretions and his weight ballooned, to nearly three hundred pounds. The svelte, dashing aviation hero of World War I had enlarged grotesquely.
Göring made life miserable for Carin. Doctors told her he was a danger to himself and to others. She committed him to Aspudden Hospital, where, in accordance with the addiction treatment practices of the time, Swedish physicians abruptly reduced his access to morphine. Göring entered the hospital willingly, but he did not foresee the agonies that lay ahead. Physicians refused his requests for more morphine and told him to endure his withdrawal like a man. Enraged by pain, craving, and frustration, he assaulted a nurse, tried to break into the hospital’s stores of drugs, and threatened to kill himself. Göring had to submit to a straitjacket before his transfer to a much rougher institution: the Langbro Asylum for the Insane.
He remembered only a jumble of frightful images from the next three months at Langbro. Attendants tied him up in a padded room to prevent him from hurting himself and left him there for days. He was cut off from morphine and endured the full brunt of the harrowing symptoms of cold-turkey withdrawal. Released to his wife’s care, Göring relapsed into addiction and was soon back again at Langbro for another round of withdrawal. He repeated the treatment in Germany in 1927, and he told Kelley that he took a final dose of morphine during the winter of 1928–1929 to treat a sore throat. Göring’s drug use then ended for several years, even through Carin’s death in 1930 and the Nazis’ subsequent ascent to power in Germany.
Despite his occasional and controlled use of diet and sleeping pills, Göring seemed to have kicked the drug habit. A change occurred in 1937, however, when a toothache pushed him back to dependency. His dentist believed that nervousness and anxiety were causing the pain, and he gave Göring a bottle of paracodeine with instructions to take two tablets every two hours until the pain diminished. Five days later, when the pain and pills were gone, Göring, anxious to fight off his rising craving for morphine, demanded more. The dentist warned him about the potential for dependency and refused to comply, but Göring had no trouble finding a supply. He was soon taking ten tablets a day.
Göring should have listened to the dentist’s warnings about physical and psychological dependence. Although paracodeine did not give him a sense of euphoria, he relied on it to heighten his optimism, alertness, and charm. It also swung his mood between elation and depression and seemed to exaggerate his tendencies toward egocentricity, bombast, and flamboyance in dress and appearance. He stored the tablets in his house in antique Venetian glass bowls, giving him convenient access to the narcotic whenever he felt the craving.
The Reichsmarschall told Kelley that he had taken paracodeine at a relatively low dose until 1940, when wartime stresses multiplied and he began consuming up to 160 pills a day. He reduced that alarming rate of consumption later in the war, but it edged up again as Germany’s defeat loomed. “When he was captured, he states he was taking about 100 tablets per day,” Kelley wrote in his examination notes—about three times the recommended maximum daily dose. This amount, Kelley observed, was “not an unusually large dose. It was not enough to have affected his mental processes at any time.”
Kelley appealed to Göring’s pride in his physical strength and prowess to speed up the withdrawal. He realized how easy it was to suggest to the prisoner that he was a mightier man than others and could quit quickly. Göring responded to Kelley’s flattery with enthusiasm, concealing his leg pains and other withdrawal symptoms he felt unless specifically asked about them. Kelley gently reduced Göring’s intake of paracodeine, and by August 12 the prisoner was free from the drug.
The physician was learning how to manipulate Göring psychologically. But he did not see how the Nazi was influencing his own thinking. By with-holding information about his withdrawal discomfort, Göring had managed to convince Kelley that his paracodei
ne addiction was slight, hardly an addiction at all. Kelley decided that it was more of a “habit.” “It was the need to do something with his hands and mouth, to perform an act he was accustomed to, and liked, doing,” he wrote. “Just as smokers are careful to have a supply of cigarettes and tobacco on their desks each morning, so Göring would place on his desk a bottle containing a hundred of his little pills. Then, during conferences or discussions, he would reach out, open the bottle, shake out a few tablets into his hand and, popping them into his mouth, chew them leisurely while carrying on his conversation.” Kelley added: “I can testify that his addiction was not very severe.”
Others at Mondorf heard differently from Göring. He told Commandant Andrus during his withdrawal that his head hurt and he couldn’t sleep. He wanted his old dosage of paracodeine restored. The unsympathetic Andrus noted that “he had whined and complained like a spoiled child throughout the weaning.”
Göring’s long history of dependence on opium derivatives and his unsuccessful attempts to limit his paracodeine use during stressful times of the war made Kelley’s claims about Göring’s weak addiction ring hollow. A buildup of anxiety, not leg pain, had caused Göring to increase his intake to tens of thousands of paracodeine tablets during the 1930s and 1940s. Today the US Drug Enforcement Administration ranks paracodeine as a Schedule II substance, meaning that its use can lead to dependency and is restricted by law. William Lee, the junkie in William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch, mentions paracodeine as one of his favorite recreational drugs.
The Reichsmarschall played on Kelley’s professional pride, flattering him as he submitted to the physician’s direction. Kelley was pleased with the way he led Göring through the process, but it is unclear who was leading whom. In the early weeks of their relationship, Kelley had no real appreciation of Göring’s successful history of concealment, manipulation, and clever discernment of the motives of the people around him, skills that Göring had honed during his rise in Hitler’s Germany. He was no ordinary addict.
While overcoming his paracodeine habit, Göring also accepted Kelley’s help in losing weight. During a fat-shedding program that lasted five months, Göring dropped sixty pounds. Protecting Göring’s heart motivated Kelley to accomplish this reduction, but the doctor gave his patient a different rationale: losing weight made Göring look better. “He fancied looking like the hero of the Luftwaffe again,” Dolibois observed, “the highly decorated ace of the famous Richthoften squadron of World War I.” Göring agreed to the weight loss program and ate less. He also requested alterations to his prison garb and uniform. The waist of his pants needed to be taken in six inches. “This concession was granted,” Kelley acknowledged, “not because we were interested in Göring’s appearance but because, without refitting, he would have been unable to keep his trousers up.”
Now in much better health, Göring lost some of his animosity toward his captors, and his disposition improved. He remained anxious, however, sometimes accusing guards of plotting to murder him. He disliked solitude, and one night the violence of a passing thunderstorm, which Göring experienced in the solitude of his cell, set off what at first seemed a heart attack. A doctor called it just a palpitation. Gradually he climbed back into the skin of Hermann Göring, the confident and shrewd player of power politics who had dominated wide stretches of Europe before his capture. He became more comfortable, loquacious, and fascinating to the reassuringly intense psychiatrist who sat and patiently absorbed his every word.
3
THE PSYCHIATRIST
When Douglas Kelley stepped into the drama of Ashcan, he had no experience with war criminals and little expertise in treating the withdrawal of addicts from drug dependency. The assignment had come up unexpectedly on August 4, 1945, when he received new orders from the US Army’s executive command. “You are to contact Captain Miller . . . [at] Palace Hotel at Mondorf Lesbains, a small town approximately 10 miles south of Luxembourg City,” it read. “Captain Miller will give you specific instructions as to your mission.” Kelley did not know that these orders would catapult his life in a new direction.
During the previous two months a swarm of psychiatrists and other physicians had applied for permission to come to Mondorf to examine and try to find the reasons for the behavior of the top Nazi captives. One, the American psychoanalyst John Millet, hoped to “add to our information concerning the character and habitual desires of the German people.” Others who sought to interview the Nazis wanted far more than their time. “Some went as far as to propose dissecting the brains of the . . . perpetrators: this would involve executing the men by a shot to the chest so as not to damage brain tissue,” writes medical historian Daniel Pick. The US military turned them all down in favor of one of its own who had not even requested the honor.
It was a plum assignment, a rendezvous with the men widely regarded as the worst criminals of the century. Kelley’s period as the supervisor of several psychiatric hospitals had taught him that aberrant behavior often had mysterious and fascinating sources, and he set his own goals for his stint in this holding pen. He arrived eager to probe the prisoners for signs of a flaw common to Nazi leaders: the willingness to commit evil acts. Did they share a mental disorder or a psychiatric cause for their behavior? Was there a “Nazi personality” that accounted for their heinous misdeeds? Kelley intended to find out. “The devastation of Europe, the deaths of millions, the near-destruction of modern culture will have gone for naught if we do not draw the right conclusions about the forces which produced such chaos,” Kelley later wrote. “We must learn the why of the Nazi success so we can take steps to prevent the recurrence of such evil.”
Kelley had formed immediate impressions of Göring. From his meetings with the other Nazi prisoners, he recognized that Göring “was undoubtedly the most outstanding personality in the jail because he was intelligent,” as Kelley wrote in his medical notes. “He was well developed mentally—well rounded—a huge, powerful sort of body when he was covered up with his cape and you couldn’t see the fat jiggle as he walked, a good looking individual from a distance, a very powerful dynamic individual.” But having also lightly touched on politics, the war, and the rise of Nazism during their initial cell-bound conversations, Kelley was not blind to Göring’s dark side. The ex-Reichsmarschall displayed ruthlessness, narcissism, and a coldhearted disregard for anyone beyond his close circle of family and friends. That very combination of characteristics present in Göring—the admirable and the sinister—heightened Kelley’s interest in him. Only such an attractive, capable, and smart man, who had smashed and snuffed out the lives of so many people, could point Kelley toward the regions of the human soul that he urgently wanted to explore.
Outsized ambitions ran in Kelley’s family. The McGlashans, the family of Kelley’s mother, June, were one of California’s most precocious and eccentric clans. Kelley was proud of their extravagant saga. They were larger than life, an obsessive assortment of achievers, collectors, and builders of edifices, especially monuments to themselves. The patriarch was Charles Fayette McGlashan, who had arrived in California at age seven from Wisconsin and grew up to become an energetic criminal defense lawyer, newspaper publisher, lover of nature, inventor and holder of patents, and amateur historian.
In the early years of the twentieth century Charles McGlashan’s house crowned a hill overlooking Truckee, a rough Northern California town crouched in the Sierra Nevada above the blue jewel of Lake Tahoe. Surrounded by poppies, bachelor buttons, and lilac bushes and perched on a tall stone foundation that sparkled with mica, the house was a startling, two-story structure with white Grecian columns and tall, arched windows that flashed in the sun. Truckee residents long remembered the magical view of this bizarre dwelling, its windows illuminated by twinkling light-bulbs, that rose from the moonlit snow. Every room held treasures that told stories: Persian rugs, cases crammed with Edison music recordings, sculptures and mementoes, furniture chosen with great deliberation.
“Our
house sang out from the hill, conspicuous as a wedding cake,” remembered one of Kelley’s cousins. In the rotunda Charles McGlashan often planted himself in his favorite seat, a black, padded-leather chair that faced a view of a spectacular mountain peak. A footbridge connected the house to a similarly designed circular tower atop one of the region’s natural oddities: the Rocking Stone, a sixteen-ton, delicately balanced boulder famous for tipping back and forth at the slightest push. In decades past members of the Washoe Indian tribe had stored food at the base of the boulder, whose motion frightened scavenging animals.
The tower sheltered McGlashan’s extensive collection of twenty thousand butterflies, Indian curios, and artifacts from one of the nation’s most infamous tragedies. During the winter of 1845–1846, several families migrating west got stuck in a blizzard and had to spend months in the freezing mountains near Truckee. Many in this group, known as the Donner Party, died, and before the rest were rescued, the starving survivors resorted to eating the corpses of their family members. McGlashan spent years collecting remnants from the group’s campsites in the nearby mountains and built his house just three miles east of Donner Lake, the scene of the worst months of the tragedy. The museum tower on the Rocking Stone housed many gruesome artifacts, such as the little toe bone of one of the casualties, scavenged from one of the party’s fire pits. Nothing like this incongruous pair of buildings existed anywhere else in the Sierra Nevada.