The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (23 page)

Even in the tribunal’s early weeks—with nine months of argument and evidence still to come—the weight of damaging information arising in court dragged down the defendants. Keitel confessed to Kelley that the military atrocities he had heard about mortified him with shame, and he lamented the time he had spent away from the field, insulated in Hitler’s headquarters. After one visit, when Kelley and Gilbert prepared to leave Keitel’s cell, the former supreme commander of the Reich’s armed forces stood at attention and begged, “
Please let me talk to you once in a while, as long as I am not yet a sentenced criminal. Don’t despise me altogether. Come around once in a while. It gives me a little moral support to stand this ordeal, just to be able to talk to someone.” Gilbert found Keitel’s plea so humiliating “that I did not translate it to Kelley until we had left the hall.”

Sometime at the end of December, Kelley announced his intention to leave Nuremberg and return to the United States. The psychiatrist had heard enough confessions of frightened men in solitary cells and had taken
in enough courtroom drama. Kelley had not seen Dukie since 1942, and he wanted to go home. The couple’s letters during the waning months of 1945 kept anticipating Kelley’s return to the States. In addition, Kelley yearned to restart his civilian career and get to work on a book written with Gilbert about the psychology of the Nazi leaders. He had not yet formed his conclusions, but he sensed he had gathered enough information for that future volume. The Rorschach scores, IQ tests, and interview notes filled file folders. Kelley’s personal goals for his sojourn in Nuremberg had never been about the court inquiry. The psychological makeup of Göring and his Nazi colleagues concerned him more than their judicial fate. To the psychiatrist, the guilt of the German prisoners was never in doubt. Only their psychiatric workings and the causes of their abhorrent conduct as leaders—any thread that could possibly connect all twenty-two defendants—interested Kelley. He could predict the court’s verdicts against most of them, but he had to remove himself from Nuremberg to dissect their minds.

Kelley had fulfilled his responsibilities to the tribunal, and his official duties wound down. He judged the prisoners to be in “
good mental health” after a month of trial proceedings. “They are not the same lot of cocky, almost jaunty, individuals who entered the prisoner’s box,” he told a reporter. Before the trial, some had laughed about the odds of their swinging from the gallows, but now they were terrified that imminent execution awaited most of them.

During his last days in the prison Kelley made the rounds of the prisoners to hear their final thoughts and to offer his predictions for their future. Hess admitted to feeling distressed by his unending suspicions that his food was being poisoned. Sometimes, Hess said, he had tried to overcome his obsession by eating the suspect food, but he would get stomach cramps or attacks of giddiness as a result. “
He wanted to know if an individual with a strong mind could possibly entertain such ideas or did they indicate a process of insanity,” Kelley wrote. How the psychiatrist responded to Hess’s concerns is unknown, but by this time Kelley could do nothing to help. Hess was the only defendant who did not thank Kelley for his attention during the previous months.

One expression of gratitude came from an unexpected source. On December 26 Rosenberg wrote a long letter that began with uncharacteristic warmth. Addressed to “
the General Staff Doctor, Major Kelley,” it started, “I regret your departure from Nuremberg, as do the comrades confined with me. I thank you for your humane behavior and also for your attempt to understand our reasons.” Continuing with, “I hereby express my conviction that many conflicts would not have come to such a pass in the world if one had observed the laws of nature in politics,” Rosenberg returned to form and was off and running on a five-paragraph discourse against Judaism, “respect” for the natural dominance of some races over others, and the inevitability of a Jewish and Negro catastrophe in the United States unless Americans mobilized to protect the “white race.” Only in the letter’s final line did he return to the personal tone in which he had begun: “I wish you luck in your later life.” Then he signed off, “with best regards and repeated thanks, Alfred Rosenberg.”

In one of their last meetings, Kelley and Göring pushed aside talk of politics or the trial.
Göring described a conversation he had recently had with Hess, who commented on the sound of electric generators beneath their cells. Hess believed the noise was intended to keep the prisoners awake at night and ruin their nerves for the trial. Although Göring laughed off the incident, he wanted Kelley to know about it.

When Göring learned that Kelley was leaving the prison,
he broke down and wept.

To Kelley, the trial and its run-up had served as fascinating laboratories for the study of the group dynamics of aggression, criminal motivation, defense mechanisms of the guilty, depression, and the response of deviant personalities to the judicial process. Kelley was with the prisoners as they faced their impending judgment and for the disturbing surfacing of their emotions. He saw the victors release their anger, and perhaps cleanse their own guilt for wartime brutalities they, too, had committed, through the accumulation of nose-rubbing evidence against the Nazis and the
prosecution of the German leaders in court. The imprisoned individuals were set up to bear the responsibility for the war and its accessory horrors, perhaps so others could begin to feel less responsible. The deadly mess and blistering hatred of battle morphed into a logical and calculated game of strategy in the courtroom, complete with the prospect of a satisfying verdict in the end. Kelley found himself in the service of a nation that, in battling an ideology intent upon ruling the world and taking charge of the tribunal’s administration, now emerged to lord over much of the planet.

Leon Goldensohn, a thirty-four-year-old physician from Newark, arrived on January 8, 1946,
to replace Kelley as Nuremberg jail psychiatrist. The new man impressed the prisoners and jail staff with his congenial manner, unaggressive style, and willingness to listen to the defendants for long stretches without challenging them or saying much at all in response.

Douglas Kelley reunited with Dukie in Chattanooga in late January 1946, and he came home with boxes full of his records, memos, notes, and files from his time with the Nazis. When Gilbert became aware of the range of materials Kelley had taken—which included the handwritten autobiographies that the psychiatrist had asked the prisoners to compose and copies of Gilbert’s notes from his interviews with the Nazis—the psychologist was furious. His rage grew when he learned that Kelley had left no forwarding address. A couple of months later, Gilbert received a letter from Kelley saying that he now intended to write a book about Nuremberg without Gilbert’s participation. Gilbert could not fathom this change in their plans, but Kelley had likely concluded that as the officer superior in rank who had supervised the other man, he had moral ownership of all their research. With Gilbert still working with the prisoners in Nuremberg, Kelley could grab a head start in writing psychological profiles of the Nazis and an assessment of whatever personality traits they might share. He had leaped months ahead of his colleague.

He promised Dukie a second honeymoon after five years of marriage in which they had barely seen each other. By this time he had earned a
promotion from major to lieutenant colonel. When reporters interviewed him, Kelley quickly discovered that the press was most interested in hearing him recount the peccadillos of the Nuremberg Nazis. And Kelley delivered: he noted that he had “
practically lived with Hess” during the previous months and expressed his continuing resentment that Hess had refused to undergo narco-hypnosis. Moving on to Göring, he detailed the Reichsmarschall’s drug habit—repeating, as he would for many years, that Göring snacked on paracodeine tablets “like peanuts, throwing them in his mouth as he read or talked”—and reporting the Nazi’s cooperation in ending his dependence under the psychiatrist’s care. “These people without Hitler are not abnormal, not pervert[s], not geniuses,” Kelley said. “They were like any aggressive, smart, ambitious, ruthless businessman, and their business happened in the setting up of a world government.”

The trial ground on without Kelley. Though deprived of much of his influence over his codefendants, Göring stuck to his plan to vigorously defend the Third Reich as the trial progressed and to preserve its honor in the minds of his fellow Germans. He took the witness stand in his own defense in March 1946 and jousted famously with Jackson. At first Göring did not defend himself effectively against Jackson’s evidence that he knew about the concentration camps, prompting prisoner Schacht to tell Gilbert, “The fat one is sure taking a beating so far.” But the atmosphere in the courtroom soon changed. Göring’s manner shifted from defensive to assertive, and he succeeded in using the witness chair as a pulpit for long justifications of his role in the Nazi regime. “The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, their fortunes, their freedoms, their life, and for this I call on the Almighty and the German people as my witness,” he proclaimed. “
He might have been addressing the Nuremberg Rally, not the Nuremberg Tribunal,” wrote Airey Neave, an observer in court.

In one torrent of words that lasted twelve hours over two days, Göring portrayed Nazi Germany and his part in its government in the most radiant terms. His passion and expertise astounded many in the courtroom. Thanks in part to Kelley’s physical care and patient ear, the old Göring—the Göring who in years past had designed a lightning-fast air force, earned
the trust of a suspicious Führer, and maintained discipline within the Nazi Party—was back. Without Hitler watching over his shoulder, he was perhaps more assured than ever. Animated, smiling, and clearly enjoying himself, he exhibited his former magnetism. “
Somehow he makes me think of a captured lion,” wrote US prosecutor Thomas J. Dodd. Hesitant admiration for Göring’s political acumen began appearing in press accounts of the trial. “
His fellow prisoners followed him with rapt attention,” Neave wrote. “Some of them, notably Rudolf Hess, now his inseparable companion in the dock, were carried away. I half expected them to rise, salute and cry, ‘
Sieg Heil
’! I realized then why he had commanded such influence in the early years of the National Socialist regime.” Göring’s spellbinding testimony lifted the legitimacy of the Nazi regime to its highest point in the trial.

Robert Jackson now had the unenviable job of cross-examining this master manipulator who was suddenly in the ascendant. Göring was ready for him. He anticipated Jackson’s questions, offered to assist when he lost his place in his documents, and smugly corrected the prosecutor’s errors of fact. He answered Jackson’s questions with dismissive and off-topic lectures that Chief Justice Lawrence did not interrupt. According to some courtroom witnesses,
Göring’s obvious contempt and the court’s refusal to head off his harangues nearly reduced Jackson to tears. “
When the former Reichsmarschall strode from the witness stand to the prisoners’ box after his last session with Mr. Jackson, he was congratulated and smiled upon by his fellow-Nazis there, like a gladiator who had just won his fight,” Janet Flanner of the
New Yorker
reported.

It took weeks of work for the prosecution to repair the damage and to tarnish Göring’s character. A turning point occurred during the presentation of evidence that Göring allowed the execution of fifty captured British officers in 1944, a scandalous war crime. Göring denied any participation in the atrocity, but
he lost his temper on the witness stand. In contradiction to much of the assembled evidence, he claimed to have had no knowledge of the “final solution” against the Jews and astounded everyone by absolving Hitler of any knowledge as well. Nobody could believe that, and Göring’s credibility dropped sharply.

From then on the Nazi defendants were on the run. Yet Göring remained devilishly defiant, a reaction Gilbert called “
oral and incipient overt aggression.” In mid-June, for example, when tribunal judge Francis Biddle rose from the bench to use the restroom during a court session,
Göring spun around in the dock to whisper a snide comment to one of the other defendants. A guard grasped his shoulder to prevent Göring’s movement, and the Nazi leader ostentatiously brushed and flicked at his coat in a mock demonstration of cleaning the soiled fabric. The collapse of the defendants’ group solidarity seemed to sour Göring on everybody and everything. “It was interesting to compare notes with some of the other officers who were seeing him at this time,” Gilbert wrote, “to see how he was maligning the psychologist to the psychiatrist, the Catholic chaplain to the Protestant chaplain and vice versa, both chaplains to the psychologist and psychiatrist, and vice versa, while fawning on each in turn.”