The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (2 page)

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 writer 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.

At the end of World War I Andrus was assigned to the Presidio of Monterey, California, where he served as a prison and intelligence officer. During the 1920s he commanded a cavalry troop in the Philippines. His colleagues saw him as formal, heavily starched, imperious, and intolerant of deviations from the rules. The US Army believed those qualities were perfect for the warden of the highest-ranking Nazis at the conclusion of World War II.

Göring arrived at Ashcan disgruntled by the
disrespect he had encountered from the gum-chewing American guards who drove him from the airfield. Still wearing his Luftwaffe uniform and sweating profusely, Göring reported to Andrus’s office. Andrus disliked him from the moment they met. “With the blubber of high living wobbling under his jacket he presented a massive figure,” Andrus observed, adding that he regarded Göring as a “simpering slob.” Göring smoldered under the commandant’s judgmental gaze.

Along with his footman, Kropp, Göring had brought along a dozen monogrammed suitcases and a large red hatbox. The prison staff spent an entire afternoon searching their contents for contraband and rummaging through
such items as jewel-encrusted military medals; diamond and ruby rings; swastika-emblazoned jewelry; cuff links adorned with semi-precious stones; Göring’s Iron Cross from World War I; silk underwear; four military uniforms; bedroom slippers; a hot-water bottle; four pairs of glasses; two cigar cutters; and a multitude of watches, stick pins, and cigarette cases. Göring had also provisioned himself with cash amounting to 81,268 Reichsmarks (equivalent in purchasing power to about $1 million today).
He bragged that one of the rings was inset with the largest emerald he had ever seen in his long experience as a gem collector. The stone was an inch long and a half-inch wide. Many of these possessions had been stolen from occupied nations, the glittering spoils of war.

Concealed in a can of coffee and in the seams of Göring’s clothing, a set of brass vials housed small glass capsules of a clear liquid with a white
precipitate: deadly potassium cyanide. Many top Nazis—including Interior Minister and Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler and possibly Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels—had already committed suicide using similar capsules or would soon do so. Göring confided to his aide Kropp that he had managed to hide at least one cyanide capsule in his cell.

The commandant sent Göring to his cell, formerly a luxuriously furnished room that probably had papered walls and a window with a view,
now empty except for a flimsy table, chair, and bed with no pillow. Göring, Andrus related, splintered the chair the first time he sat on it.
“Had he sat on his table it would have immediately collapsed,” Andrus noted, “for it was built to do so to avoid being used by a prisoner to stand on to hang himself.”
Concerns about suicide attempts also prompted Andrus to issue the prisoners four-inch-long shoelaces, too short for self-strangulation or shoe tightening.

An initial medical check confirmed that Göring was very overweight. His pulse was eighty-four with an irregular heartbeat, his respiration was rapid and shallow, his hands shook, and he appeared
“in very poor physical condition,” the examining doctor noted. Göring said he had a history of heart attacks.

Initially rude to guards and angry about being detained as a criminal suspect—
he often imbued his rising to attention, saluting, and clicking heels in the presence of prison staff with sarcastic overtones—Göring kept protesting to Eisenhower. At Mondorf, he complained, he was receiving treatment “which shook me, as the top-ranking German officer and marshal, deeply.” He complained that his room had no light or doorknob; nearly all of his personal belongings had been taken away from him; the confiscation of his medals and marshal’s baton was humiliating; lower-ranking Allied officers denigrated him; and perhaps most upsetting, he had lost the services of his personal attendant, Kropp, whom Allied authorities assigned to manual labor elsewhere as a prisoner of war (POW). (
Just before Kropp’s departure from Mondorf, which nearly brought Göring to tears, the footman performed one last task for his master: stealing a pillow, which the
Americans almost immediately took back.)
Göring asked Eisenhower to fly him out of Mondorf to visit his family and to restore Kropp or bring in another German serviceman as his valet. The Allied commander did not respond. Andrus was furious, however, and scolded the prisoners:

Whereas I do not desire to stand in the way of your writing letters concerning alleged theft of property or other violations of human rights, writing letters about the inconveniences or lack of convenience or about your opinions as to any indignity or deference due you is fruitless and apt to only disgust those in authority. . . . The commandant, his superiors, the Allied governments, and the public of the nations of the world are not unmindful of the atrocities committed by the German government, its soldiers, and its civil officials. Appeals for added comfort by the perpetrators and parties to these conditions will tend only to accentuate any contempt in which they are already held.