The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (25 page)

The remaining condemned Nazis were led to the gallows in an operation that Andrus, insulted by Göring’s escape, supervised. Ribbentrop’s response to his approaching execution particularly impressed Kelley, who had previously speculated that guards would have to drag him to the gallows. Kelley wrote that the former foreign minister “
showed some courage at the very end. Probably the news of Göring’s suicide and the realization that he was now the leader of the death procession, holding the center of this final stage, stiffened Ribbentrop and made him a more competent person in his last seconds than at any other time in his entire life.” Ribbentrop met the rope proclaiming his hope that Germany would remain united.

Rosenberg had refused to participate in or even hear prayers, and he approached the hangman shaky and weak, perhaps, as Kelley predicted, still internally debating some fine point of Nazi philosophy. Streicher, Kelley said,
would “hang happy,” and indeed he went down with Hitler’s name on his lips. Frank, the psychiatrist supposed, would die “convinced that one drop of his body will wipe out all the 5 million black marks registered against his soul.” As Kelley had predicted, none of the rest of the condemned men had to be dragged to the gallows. “Just as in a good deed well performed, so in a bad one well done, do men hold to the type of mentality with which they are endowed,” he wrote, in what might have been a general epitaph for the convicted Nazis at Nuremberg.

The office of US Surgeon-General Thomas Parran Jr. asked for samples of the brains of the hanged Nazis. Andrus called this “
a macabre request which was, of course, never granted.” Instead, in an act of retribution, all of the bodies were trundled to the ovens of the Dachau concentration camp, incinerated there, and the ashes dumped into a river. There would be no vigils held by unrepentant Nazis at marble mausoleums. There would be no heroic funerary architecture.

Hess and his guilty compatriots who survived the tribunal’s justice with their lives went to Spandau Prison in Berlin to serve their terms. In a final act of extinction, Andrus made sure that every remaining piece of jewelry that had been in Göring’s possession was disassembled, melted down, and rendered unusable and beyond recognition. American authorities presented the hunks of precious metal and jewels to the treasury of the new Germany, then struggling back to its feet.

Kelley’s grandfather Charles F. McGlashan, chronicler of the ill-fated Donner Party and collector of butterflies.

The astounding McGlashan home and museum (perched atop the Rocking Stone) in Truckee, California.

Douglas Kelley around 1938, when he was a graduate student at Columbia University.

A note that Göring wrote to Kelley in prison in September 1945. It quotes the Book of Psalms: “He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven, and by his power he brought in the south wind.”

Former Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess: “Henceforth my memory will again respond to the outside world.”

Kelley decided that Nazi Party philosopher Alfred Rosenberg “had developed a system of thought differing greatly from known fact.”

Kelley called Nazi publisher Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitism “an almost true monomania.”

Hermann and Emmy Göring with their daughter Edda during the early years of World War II. (Courtesy of Corbis Images)

After Robert Ley’s suicide, security tightened in the Nuremberg prison wing housing the top Nazi suspects.