The Nazi and the Psychiatrist Page 6
Three months after Göring had arrived at Mondorf, he and a select group of top Nazis learned that they had another move ahead. They did not know where or when. Perhaps in preparation for this transfer, on August 6 Kelley wrote up a detailed physical, neurological, and psychiatric evaluation of Göring. He judged his patient alert, perfectly adjusted to his prison surroundings, and cooperative. Göring’s environment barely affected his emotions; instead, “strong and labile,” his emotions “are generated primarily from within.” At the same time, Kelley observed, Göring showed no interest in the affairs of others. Because of his military training and self-discipline, Göring claimed the sufferings of others did not bother him. Kelley consequently declared him “an aggressive narcissistic individual,” fixated upon himself.
To help Göring sleep after his withdrawal from paracodeine, Kelley had prescribed the barbiturate phenobarbital. He concluded in the psychiatric report: “Internee is sane and responsible and demonstrates no evidence of any type of psychopathic deviation.” This appraisal of Göring’s fundamental sanity would not change in the months ahead.
In the early morning of August 12, a convoy of US Army ambulances and other vehicles appeared on the front drive of the Palace Hotel, and fifteen prisoners bearing satchels filed into them. The detainees, soon to be defendants, were deprived of belts, ties, and shoelaces. (The remaining Nazi detainees traveled separately.) Three armed guards rode in each vehicle, and Andrus jumped into a lead car. Without escorts, sirens, or any sign of the importance of its passengers, the convoy quietly passed through Mondorf and proceeded to Luxembourg City, where a pair of C-47 transport planes awaited its arrival at an airfield.
Göring, carrying his red hatbox and yanking up his roomy trousers with his free hand, was among the first out of the ambulances. Ignorant of the cargo they were about to carry, the pilots watched with astonishment as the Nazis boarded. The captives took seats on benches running lengthwise through the planes, which were furnished with little else except a toilet bucket and urinal.
Two guards, one carrying a .45-caliber pistol and the other a billy club fashioned from a mop handle, climbed in. An armed guard kept watch over the prisoners from the rear of each plane. As each aircraft took off and banked to the southeast, most of the prisoners kept quiet, including Julius Streicher, who was airsick. The exception was Göring. “Take a good look at it,” he told his companions as they flew over the Rhine River. “That’s the last you may ever see of it.” Göring later asked to inspect the controls up front. Colonel Andrus denied the request. The city of Nuremberg lay ahead.
Kelley followed the Nazis to the Nuremberg jail. His new orders were to evaluate the mental fitness of the top twenty-two men to face justice in the trial to come. His experiences with the Nazis at Mondorf, and with Göring in particular, continued to send his thoughts soaring beyond the concerns of his official duties. Was there a mental flaw common to these prisoners? Did they share a psychiatric disorder that caused them to participate in the monstrous deeds of the Third Reich? Working among these Germans made Kelley wonder whether he could answer the pressing questions that occupied his mind. Perhaps his scientific study of these men’s minds could identify a telling factor that would be useful in the prevention of the rise of a future Nazi-like regime.
The need was urgent. Without official sanction, Kelley was developing a plan to explore the psychological recesses of the brains of the captive Nazi leaders.
4
AMONG THE RUINS
For years the German city of Nuremberg hosted enormous Nazi Party congresses. Its name was used on a set of laws that denied basic human rights to German Jews, and the town stood for the principles of European fascism. But by mid-1945 it barely stood at all. Heavy shelling and forty air raids had pulverized the city. A single British air attack in January 1945 had flattened the center of Nuremberg and killed eighteen hundred people. Residents had worked around the clock for a month to find and bury the dead. More than half of Nuremberg’s homes lay in rubble—90 percent in the old part of town—and hundreds of thousands of Germans had fled the area. Many of those who remained lived in damp cellars.
Colonel Andrus and his procession of German prisoners motored through a city filled with eerie scenes of people huddled around outdoor cooking fires, families occupying apartments with walls sheared off and rooms exposed to view, and hungry Nurembergers emerging from underground hovels to wander among heaps of bricks that still entombed their neighbors. Staircases led to empty air. Lacking money, patrons of the black market used cigarettes as currency. The water was undrinkable. Residents of the city remained angry and dangerous. The place smelled of death, dust, and disinfectant.
Although few of the people in Nuremberg understood it—residents, occupiers, and prisoners alike—this battered city would soon host an event more momentous than the Nazi rallies that had filled newsreel frames around the world a decade before.
The US Army requisitioned the Grand Hotel, a social center of the city that had previously housed guests at Nazi Party rallies. It was one of the first large buildings in Nuremberg to undergo repair; a bomb had gutted one part of the hotel from roof to street. Previously the neighborhood had been a risky location for Allied soldiers, a place of frequent assaults and robberies by Nurembergers. In its new function, the hotel housed military and civilian men working on the future war crimes proceedings. (Women lived in another hotel a few blocks away, nicknamed “Girls’ Town.”) For a long time it was the only large structure in town with electric lights; at night it blazed amid the surrounding darkness. “To arrive at my room on the fourth floor, I had to walk a temporary gangplank strung over still another cavernous hole caused by a second Allied bomb,” one Allied occupier wrote. “The gangplank had a flimsy railing on one side and the whole contraption wobbled when one walked over it.” Here the tribunal staff lived and drank and danced in a crowded American-style restaurant called the Marble Room, which was closed to German civilians. (Similarly, Americans in Nuremberg were not allowed to patronize most German bars and restaurants.) The bar was well stocked. Dinner, served by waiters in tailcoats, cost the equivalent of 60 cents. From the hotel’s doorways and windows floated the music of the victors, a sound that one visitor remembered as “cheap and potent.” The Russian occupiers sometimes broke out of their isolation to party and drink prodigiously here.
The Palace of Justice was one of a few sizable buildings in Nuremberg that escaped destruction, although an air raid had damaged the roof, gutted its upper floors with fire, and collapsed the clock tower. In the last days of the war the building sheltered Nazi SS divisions making a final stand before Allied forces overcame them in May 1945, and months later defeat still colored its six hundred rooms and endless corridors. Fleeing Germans and occupying Allied soldiers had left the Palace of Justice’s main courtroom a mess, with shattered windows, upended chairs, and Coca-Cola cases stacked on tables beneath the still-intact chandelier and baroque clock. Here in wartime a special court under the eye of the notorious Nazi judge Oswald Rothaug had delivered verdicts against the Nazi regime’s political and racial opponents. The Americans were collecting construction materials from hundreds of miles around in a $5 million effort to repair the building and enlarge the courtroom for a judiciary purpose that few outsiders yet comprehended. German workers cleared broken glass and rubbish from the high-ceilinged rooms. One day during reconstruction, as a reminder of how unsafe any standing building in Nuremberg remained, the courtroom noisily collapsed into its own basement. Meanwhile, tanks, armed soldiers, and antiaircraft guns protected the building from an SS uprising or other rumored possible attacks by Nazi partisans or victims of the fallen regime.
Colonel Andrus’s procession of top Nazis was headed for an adjoining three-tiered prison complex built in the nineteenth century. Kelley thought the shape of the prison evoked a gigantic left hand. Three wings extended like fingers at the top, another wing formed the pinky at the west, and a final corridor, the future home of Göring and t
he other prominent Nazis, took the thumb’s place at the east. Part of the prison held German civilian criminals under a different commander, but the area that Andrus directed confined some 250 men and women in three wings, many of them witnesses and possible defendants for future war crimes trials. The building was badly damaged, requiring timbers to prop up walls and workers to rebuild the outer prison walls, which had holes in them big enough to steer a truck through. German prisoners of war, many still wearing SS uniforms, made the repairs. At night some of those same POWs retired to cells in the prison, where only one guard looked after every fifty captives. “There was nothing to stop them from overlooking into our prison yard,” Andrus observed, “hardly any obstacle to their choosing a moment and then shooting in themselves. . . . If some fanatical gang had taken it into their heads to lead a truck with high explosives and send it speeding through the wall to the jail itself, we should have all been blown skywards.” The facility was dangerously understaffed by Americans, and Andrus considered his security contingent unwilling castoffs and poor performers. He fumed over the security mess he and the top Nazis were entering, and he thought they had arrived at Nuremberg too early.
The colonel soon went to work fortifying the prison with more guards. He declared it Nuremberg’s “dark secret” that his security staff were “bottom of the barrel,” inexperienced in prison work, and obsessed by returning home. Some amused themselves by scrawling graffiti on the prisoners’ cell walls; others didn’t know how to use a gun. There weren’t enough men to check on the possibly suicidal prisoners in their cells more often than every half minute. Although he eventually beefed up his guard staff, Andrus never succeeded in acquiring top-quality men for the prison’s security work and suffered a turnover rate of 600 percent during the next eighteen months.
Kelley, who had now been on war duty in Europe so long that Dukie was calling herself a war widow, had a new official job. In addition to doctoring the top Nazi prisoners, as he had at Mondorf, he was now tasked with assessing the sanity of the prisoners—who ranged in age from Baldur von Schirach at thirty-eight to Konstantin von Neurath at seventy-two—and judging whether they were mentally fit for a future trial. While he accepted his official duties with all seriousness, he set them within the demands of his personal ambition. He came to understand his purpose in Nuremberg “to be not only to guard the health of men facing trial for war crimes but also to study them as a researcher in a laboratory,” he wrote. If Nazism was an illness that could infect people anywhere, even growing to epidemic proportions around the world, then the men he visited in their Nuremberg cells represented isolated concentrates of the disease that could yield a protective inoculation. Although the cause of prisoners’ behavior lay outside his official purview, Kelley had to dig more deeply to satisfy his personal ambitions. He set for himself a thrilling, officially unsanctioned, and time-limited quest. “I took it upon myself to examine the personality patterns of these men and, to a degree, the techniques they employed to win and hold power,” he wrote. His self-appointed mission was to understand the Nazi mind. “Of course we were not interested in whether they were guilty or not,” Kelley later spoke of this time. “Nor were we steering towards therapeutic care. We just wanted to find out as much as possible about them.”
He toured the prison soon after his arrival in Nuremberg. The top Nazi prisoners occupied solitary confinement cells on the ground floor of the east-running corridor, an area called the War Criminals Wing. “Cells lay on both sides of the corridor, and at either end circular stairways led to the two upper tiers of cells,” Kelley observed. The cells, nine by thirteen feet, were austere and stripped of anything a prisoner could use to commit suicide. Bolts fixed the beds to the walls. The mattresses were stuffed with straw. Damp plaster fell from the walls. Flimsy tables that could not support a man’s weight held the prisoner’s smallest personal items, and the rest had to sit in piles on the floor. One prisoner, the former economics minister Hjalmar Schacht, described the tables as “unsteady wooden erections of thin lathe with a thin sheet of cardboard nailed on top. Writing at this table was sheer torment for it wobbled continually.”
A single barred window admitted some light. Chairs, by regulation allowed no closer than four feet from a wall, were removed at nightfall. That left the inmates little to do but sleep and pace the rough, stone floors. The entrance doors had foot-square observation windows, never closed or blocked, that also admitted meals. A single lightbulb attached to the outside of the door glowed during the day. “A guy could go nuts sitting in a little cell with what some of these boys have got on their minds,” Andrus noted.
Colonel Andrus demanded silence in the cell block. Even the guards kept quiet except to give orders to prisoners or point out infractions of the rules. Like every prison, however, the Nuremberg jailhouse echoed with the sounds of forced confinement. Doors slammed and heels thudded on hard floors. Keys jangled. “The very air feels imprisoned,” Andrus observed with satisfaction. Wire netting enclosed the spiral stairways and covered drops through which a prisoner could attempt suicide. Guards lined the hallways, initially one for every four prisoners, checking the inmates through the door windows that gave a view of the entire cells except for the lavatory area in a corner by the cell door. But even when they occupied this small sanctuary of privacy, using a toilet that lacked a cover and seat, the inmates’ feet could be observed. The sentinels spied upon the prisoners day and night. Kelley observed that the top Nazis found this confinement humiliating and undignified, forcing them to taste “the bitter gall of their own boastful words.” Compared with Mondorf, this place was tough.
Other rules regulated the behavior of the prisoners. Andrus made no allowance for the former rank of his captives. They could keep in their cells only a minimum of personal articles: family photos, books from the prison library (which required the purging of Nazi texts), toiletries, cigarettes, and writing materials. Inmates’ heads and hands had to remain visible to guards while they slept, no matter how much the cold made them want to bury themselves in their blankets, and the sentries aimed blinding flashlights into the cells at night to enforce this rule. Prisoners were not allowed to turn away. Their letter-writing was limited and monitored, and they could receive few parcels. Supervised hot showers were limited to one per week. In a fortified inner courtyard the prisoners, two at a time, could walk and exercise for fifteen to thirty minutes each day among the undernourished trees. The exercising prisoners had to walk at least ten yards from one another or on different sides of a dividing wall. Armed sentries watched from encircling guard towers.
At unpredictable intervals, guards told the prisoners to strip and stand in a corner of their cells while staff searched for contraband: anything that could be used for suicide or escape, forbidden food, and unauthorized reading material. Kelley noticed that “these shakedowns were so thorough that prisoners needed some four hours to restore their cells to order.” If any prisoner attempted escape, Andrus reached back to his iron rule at Fort Oglethorpe to decree the guards’ response: “If time permits they will call ‘HALT’ before they fire. The Commandant will back them fully in their actions.”
Suddenly fallen from privilege and power, looking and feeling shabby in their mismatched wardrobes, many of the prisoners directed their resentment against Andrus. They found the commandant high-handed, prickly, comically formal, and disrespectful. He said to their faces that he could not care less about their status or their fate. Göring belittled him as “the fire brigade colonel”; Schacht complained that Andrus’s breath smelled of booze. Several felt personally humiliated by having to clean their own cells, and the enforced silence infuriated others. Joachim von Ribbentrop was notorious for performing his cleaning chores poorly, while Keitel shone with military thoroughness.
On occasion, though, Andrus showed a surprising kindness. When former propaganda minister Hans Fritzsche arrived at the prison late at night from Russian detention, the colonel apologized because the closed kitchen could not
cook up a hot meal for the prisoner at that late hour, and he sent a piece of cake to the hungry man’s cell. On another occasion Andrus rescinded his ban on shoelaces, at least for the older prisoners, acknowledging that their use provided an ease of walking that outweighed their possible danger as an aid to suicide. The commandant also had a corny though predictable sense of humor, sometimes repeating his favorite jokes endlessly.
Colonel Andrus, who viewed his prisoners as “a group of men who could probably be counted as among the worst the Lord has let live on this earth,” enforced a stifling daily routine. After rising early, the prisoners were given washing water by POW workers. Breakfast, often cereal, biscuits, and coffee, arrived in metal containers without handles. Attendants tracked every spoon; knives and forks were not allowed. Lunch usually consisted of bread, soup, meat, and vegetables. Most of the prisoners ate heartily. The 6:00 p.m. dinner marked the day’s final illuminated activities. There wasn’t much difference between the dull sleepwalking of their daytime existence and the slumber they began at their 9:30 p.m. bedtime.
Kelley was one of a small number of prison staff members with unrestricted access to the War Criminals Wing. Another was Ludwig Pflücker, the kindly German physician, himself a POW, who attended to the prisoners’ daily health needs in the Nuremberg jail as he had at Mondorf. Pflücker maintained a surgery room where he measured blood pressure and treated such disorders as former field marshal Wilhelm Keitel’s flat feet and former governor-general Hans Frank’s hand paralysis. Lutheran chaplain Henry F. Gerecke and Roman Catholic priest Sixtus O’Connor, fluent speakers of German, held weekly religious services in the prison’s makeshift chapel, which contained an altar and organ. Although Allied interrogators working for intelligence units and the tribunal’s prosecution could not speak with prisoners in their cells, they frequently pulled the top Nazis out of the prison for question-and-answer sessions. Welfare officer John Dolibois was now working elsewhere in military intelligence, so others filled in to help Kelley with translation.