The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (13 page)

At other times, however, Kelley argued with Göring.
When the Reichsmarschall once declared that obeying orders, even illegal ones, was justifiable to preserve social order and military discipline, Kelley countered, “To hell with military discipline. With civilization hanging in the balance,
we’ve got to put an end to militarism once and for all, and expend every effort to avoid another war, for the next one will spell the doom of mankind.” The former chief of the Luftwaffe took that in stride. “Yes, that’s what I thought after the last war,” he said. “But as long as every nation has its selfish interests, you have to be practical. Anyway, I’m convinced that there is a higher power which pushes men around in spite of all their efforts to control their destiny.” The exchange inspired Kelley to take note of Göring’s cynicism and “mystic fatalism.”

In similar fashion, Göring eventually shook off his personal discomfort in prison,
informing Kelley that he felt relatively well in confinement because of the quiet environment. He also quoted biblical scripture, a passage from Psalms 78:26 (“He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven, and by his power he brought in the south wind”), in which
God miraculously provides food for the wandering Israelites. He wanted the psychiatrist to know that he was a survivor who would always get by.

There was a purpose to Göring’s acceptance of his present condition. He had work to do. Although he strenuously denied the Allies had any right to try him and his colleagues as war criminals, he accepted the inevitability of the victors exacting punishment on the vanquished and saw it as an opportunity. With the world watching, he could mount a defense of Nazi policies and a resurrection of his own reputation. Those ends reduced all his personal complaints and inconveniences as a prisoner to insignificance. “He spends all his time trying to discredit all the other party men, even Hitler, so that the history books will remember only him,” Kelley told an interviewer a few months later.

Like the rest, he shies away from any involvement with the atrocities—he is completely innocent, according to him, even though it has been proven that atrocities did take place in the early days of the concentration camps from 1933 to 1935, when Göring was in command of them. Of course, the wholesale slaughter and murder did not develop until later, under Himmler.

Göring only complained to Kelley and the other Nuremberg jail staff when he found fault with the treatment of his family. He told Kelley that when he had surrendered to the Americans, the only consideration he had asked for was good care for Emmy and Edda. Göring devoted much of his epistolary energies to his wife and daughter, and he asked Kelley and translator Dolibois to track them down and deliver his letters to them. (
Prisoner Fritz Sauckel, who spent three years with the Nazi government as a high-ranking administrator of slave labor, also asked Kelley for assistance contacting his family. He had lost touch with his wife and ten children, and one soldier son had not been heard from since two months before the war’s end.)

The Reichsmarschall unleashed his frustrations and expressed his confidence in Kelley in a letter to Emmy in the first weeks of October 1945:

For three months I have been writing to you without receiving an answer. . . . Today I can send you a letter direct: Major Kelley, the doctor who is treating me and who has my fullest confidence, is bringing it to you. You can also talk to him freely. The greatest torment of my soul was and is the fact that, up until now, I have not known where all of you were and how you were getting along. You can send me an answer through Major Kelley, and you will understand how I long for it. . . . I don’t need to tell you what I am going through here. The hard fate of our fatherland and the tormenting worry about you and your future are the most difficult burdens for my soul. My dearest wife, I am so sincerely thankful to you, for all the happiness that you always gave to me, for your love and for everything. How is little Edda taking it all? . . . Give Eddalein a kiss from her Pappi and greet everyone for me. You are embraced and kissed in sincerest love and longing by your Hermann.

Although Emmy Göring avoided contact with most Americans, she readily agreed to see Kelley. When she accepted the letter from Kelley, she feared reading what she thought would be her husband’s final fare-well. She passed the correspondence unread to her niece, who confirmed
that it contained better news. Then she read it. When she finished, she spoke with Kelley, whom she judged “
an honest and very humane man.” She asked, “How is my husband?” Kelley replied, “He’s behaving like a rock in a stormy sea.”

On the spot Emmy wrote out a response that Kelley carried back to her husband:

Finally, finally a letter from you. I can’t tell you how happy I am. My love and my thoughts are with you every second. We are fine, we have food to eat and we have wood. . . . My only thought, my prayer every night is that you may be with us once more. Stay in good health. Thank God, Edda is still too young to share our worries. . . . Hermann, I love you above all, keep faith and God will lead us together again. Everybody sends his love and we all embrace you. I send you all the kisses which I have given you in the past and which I want to give you in the years to come. I love you, always yours, Emmy

To which her daughter added a line: “My dearest daddy, come back to me soon. I am longing for you so much. Many thousand kisses, your Edda.”

Göring received Emmy’s letter with joy, but he also expressed stoicism and regret:

You can well imagine how inexpressibly happy I was over your dear letter. It was the first ray of light in this dark period. . . . You will already know from the newspapers that my trial as so-called war criminal will begin on 20 November. We must be prepared for the worst. Nevertheless I hope by the Almighty that we can still meet again. I pray everyday that I may keep the strength to uphold our dignity—for it would be better to come to the end with dignity than to live on without honor. I think only of you and only the worry over your welfare tortures me now. I have always known and felt how much I love you, but now the true depth of our love has been revealed to me for the first time I thank you eternally for the great happiness that your love gave me. You must know how great my longing and homesickness is for you and Edda. Sometimes I actually think I will die of it. Why did it have to turn out this way? If we had even suspected this development, we would certainly have gone another way. Now we leave everything to God’s will. . . .

Never let Edda away from you.

On the back of this letter Göring added a postscript: “Major Dr. Kelley, who is bringing this letter to you, is really an extraordinary gentleman. First Lieutenant [Dolibois], who accompanies him, is very warm and human and I have known both gentlemen for several months. You can trust them completely.”

Göring later wrote again to Emmy:
“To see [Edda’s] beloved handwriting, to know that your dear hands have rested on this very paper—all that and the contents itself has moved me most deeply, and yet made me most happy. . . . Sometimes I think that my heart will break with love and longing for you. That would be a beautiful death.”

“
It is my opinion that Frau Göring reciprocated to the fullest her husband’s feeling and remained throughout completely loyal to him,” Kelley later wrote. Nobody knows, however, whether Emmy Göring would have approved of a startling plan her husband was formulating for Edda. He asked Kelley to take care of young Edda in the United States if both mother and father died. Kelley told his wife about this entreaty when he returned home months later; it is unknown how Dukie responded to the prospect of adopting and rearing a Nazi’s daughter. This astonishing request—a sign of Göring’s respect for Kelley—moved the psychiatrist, who knew how much Edda meant to her father. Though he never recorded how he replied to Göring’s appeal, Kelley surely rejected it on professional grounds.

On October 8 two army jeeps full of security officers escorted a fast-moving ambulance into the Nuremberg prison grounds. A scrawny man with cater-pillar brows over tense eyes, wearing a gray Luftwaffe suit, old overcoat, and
rumpled hat, emerged from the back of the medical vehicle and blinked at his surroundings. His garb lacked any military insignia, but the spectacular boots he wore—made from soft black leather, rising high on his legs, each with a pair of serpentine zippers—
gave him a distinctive military deportment. For the first time in four years, Rudolf Hess was back on German soil.

On May 10, 1941,
in accordance with a suggestion from his astrologer, Hess—then age forty-six, healthy, powerful as Germany’s Deputy Führer and the third-highest-ranking Nazi after Hitler and Göring, somewhat lucid, and wearing those aviator’s boots—had climbed alone into a Messerschmitt fighter plane in Bavaria and flown it over the North Sea to the green fields of Scotland, where he bailed out. Kelley later asked Hess why he had abandoned the aircraft in midair:
“I had never flown that type of plane before and wasn’t sure I could land it,” Hess said. “Then, too, I was uncertain of the location of the English fields. I did a good job, though, and struck the ground thirteen feet from where I planned.”

The British Home Guard detained and interrogated him. He was on a mission of peace, he explained as he hobbled on an ankle injured during his parachute jump, and he wanted to speak with Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the thirteenth Duke of Hamilton, a conservative politician who had previously met Hess at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Hess probably believed that the duke was sympathetic to the German cause. Douglas-Hamilton was summoned and listened in astonishment to the Nazi’s wish to meet with King George VI, get Winston Churchill sacked, and negotiate a truce with Britain allowing the two nations to collaborate in the military defeat of the Soviet Union. Britain would retain control over its own empire, Germany would be free to dominate the rest of Europe, and the two powers could coexist, with the Bolshevik menace removed. Hitler had not approved of Hess’s mission, and he angrily condemned it in public when he learned of it,
even calling Hess insane.

Hess’s surprise arrival disrupted
Churchill’s viewing of a Marx Brothers movie. The prime minister decided that a meeting between Hess and the king was out of the question. “I was taken to a prison somewhere in England where all they did was ask me military questions,” Hess later told
Kelley. “
I denied any knowledge of military events and demanded my rights as an emissary. The English would then ask me, ‘Do you have anything to show that you are an emissary?’ I would reply, ‘Of course not. I am the Führer’s deputy.’ They would then ask, ‘Did the Führer send you?’ I would reply, ‘He knows nothing about my mission.’ So the English would say, ‘Then you are a captured aviator, a prisoner of war. Tell us about the disposition of your troops.’”

During his four years as a British POW, held captive for a time in the Tower of London, Hess saw few people other than military interrogators, low-level government officials, and psychiatrists. The interrogators already knew his background. Hess was born in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of German merchant parents. He was a fellow soldier with Hitler in the 16th Bavarian Regiment during World War I (although the two did not become acquainted until after the war) and trained as a pilot. He had been influenced by antidemocracy agitators while he studied at the University of Munich and became an early member of Hitler’s Nazi movement and a co-convict with the future Führer in Landsberg Prison after the failed Munich putsch, where he transcribed Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
. As the Nazis gained political power, he devoted all of his energy and attention to the glorification and rise of his leader. Nazi insiders knew him as Hitler’s most unwavering supporter.

Hitler made Hess his private secretary and gave him administrative control over much of the party’s political apparatus, and he named him Deputy Führer in 1933. A story circulated that Hitler chose Göring as his successor rather than Hess during this period partly because
he disapproved of Hess’s drab taste in home furnishings. During the mid-1930s Hess’s influence grew as he collaborated in many of his government’s most repressive actions, including the murder of Nazi Party undesirables during the Night of the Long Knives, the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and other anti-Jewish legislation, the formation of pro-German bunds in other countries, and the persecution of minority groups that led to the Holocaust. Inventing the slogan “Guns before butter” to spur rearmament, Hess often spoke at party rallies, introduced Hitler to massive crowds, and urged
the public to support Germany’s path toward war. Colorless and devoid of braggadocio, he lacked charisma. Hess so passively deferred to Hitler’s judgment that
it was rumored that Hitler had even selected Hess’s wife for him.

In an examination of Hess soon after his capture, Dr. N. P. Dicks speculated that Hitler had been Hess’s father figure until the outbreak of war showed Hess the cruelty and ruthlessness of his Führer. Thereafter Hess transferred his filial feelings to King George VI and hatched his peace plan. Hess’s primary psychiatrist in England, J. R. Rees, agreed with this assessment and supervised Hess’s care. For sixteen months starting in October 1943, Hess claimed he had no memory of past events, even of his childhood. British doctors subjected him to narco-hypnosis using the anesthesia drug evipan—a procedure intended to make him remember through outside suggestion—but the attempts failed, and
Hess refused to submit to similar treatments in the future. Then, starting in February 1945, he said his previous amnesia had been faked. (Kelley later observed that “
such fallacious claims are typical” of personalities like Hess’s.) Then
Hess flipped again and reported that his amnesia had returned in July 1945. He announced to his captors that
Jews were hypnotically controlling people around the world, including his own psychiatrists.