The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (16 page)

All told, Göring’s Rorschach results gave Kelley “
a picture of a person of considerable intellectual endowment, highly imaginative, given to an expansive, aggressive, phantasy life, with strong ambition and drive to quickly subjugate the world as he finds it to his own pattern of thinking, a pattern which deviates from the common world of experience.” Kelley opined that Göring’s fantasy-dominated ambition might be running amok, and that the Nazi was “a man [who] still must be reckoned with.” A non-psychiatrist might have inferred the same things from Göring’s past behavior, and one has to wonder how much Kelley’s knowledge of his favorite prisoner’s notorious acts influenced his Rorschach interpretation of the Reichsmarschall.

Testing Hess presented special obstacles because the prisoner, despite his outward cooperation, tried to control his responses, “
not knowing how revealing even the most banal answer could be,” Kelley wrote. Hess sat on
the cot in his cell between Kelley and Dolibois. Together they ran through what Kelley called “a very careful Rorschach, recording every remark.” Hess frequently reacted to the cards by laughing, shaking his head, and calling them senseless.

To Andrus and the Nuremberg prosecution team, Kelley justified giving the Rorschach examinations by characterizing them as ways to predict whether any of the prisoners might suffer a nervous breakdown during the forthcoming trial and to help determine that all of the examined Nazis were sane, including Ley, Hess, and Streicher, whose mental competence was in doubt. Hess displayed “an introverted, shy, withdrawn personality who, suspicious of everything about him, projected upon his environment concepts developing within himself.” Streicher exhibited a paranoid personality. But both Hess and Streicher “showed no evidence of overt psychosis and must be considered legally sane.”

All in all, the tests showed that
“although many of [the prisoners] were not what we would call ideally normal, none of them were sufficiently [deviant] to require custodial care according to the laws of our country,” Kelley wrote. “In most cases they might be considered eccentric or fanatic.” This included Ley, whose Rorschach record Kelley found the most interesting by far.
The psychiatrist advanced a diagnosis of brain damage in Ley’s frontal lobe, even though the inmate’s physical exams had turned up no evidence of neurological problems. In the Rorschach testing, however, Ley had misnamed colors, offered confused descriptions, and given responses that lacked context and sense. Kelley speculated that Ley had injured his frontal lobes during the plane crash in World War I that left him unconscious and stuttering.

Kelley had started to think beyond the trial and his eventual return to the United States, to a special disposition he had in mind for his Nazi Rorschach results. These went beyond the medical function Kelley had used to justify the test to the Nuremberg authorities. He wrote in a memo to Andrus that he wanted to submit the test results to Rorschach experts across the globe “
to produce the clearest possible picture of these individuals, the [greatest] group of criminals the human race has ever known.” Kelley was
convinced that the test results had historical value. They offered possible answers to the questions of why German citizens followed these men on a disastrous and destructive course and what motivated unusual but still normal people who knew exactly what they were doing as they ruthlessly ran a regime that persecuted and killed millions.

On October 8 Kelley administered to Göring the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a psychological examination designed to shed light on the subject’s worldview, self-image, and relationships with other people. Kelley subjected only a few of the prisoners to this evaluation. He showed Göring a set of twenty cards illustrating men and women in simple settings, or showed scenes with no people in them at all. Göring’s task was to spend five minutes on each card telling stories that narrated what was happening in the image, what led up to it, what the characters were thinking and feeling, and how the events concluded.

Göring spun this tale from the second TAT card Kelley showed him:

There is a man, a farmer, deeply devoted to his work and a lover of nature. His fate is revolving around two women, one pregnant woman leaning against a tree, undoubtedly a woman from the country, and the other one, a young girl mentally more alert and from the city. The man is impressed by the younger girl. A conflict arises in the man’s mind, but due to the expected child and his devotion to the soil, he will return to his wife, and the young girl will go back to the city and go her own way.

Kelley’s interpretation of this story is unknown. A layperson might speculate that Göring was subconsciously speaking of his own two wives and the claims each had made on his loyalty.

After looking at the ninth card, Göring said: “
These are men who rest in the grass after hard work. A boy looks on and studies the faces of these men. He thinks that he would not want to lead a life like theirs. He looks at their faces and studies their types so that he never may be forced to lead that kind of hard and monotonous life.” Again, an amateur could find this story
laden with fear and determination. It expresses a commitment to rejecting an unpleasant fate to which others have ignorantly surrendered. Perhaps it says something of Göring’s determination to lead Germany away from what he considered the demeaning course it had followed in the 1920s.

On October 6 the Nuremberg prison staff was hit with the news that an inmate being held in one of the other wings had taken his own life despite all of Andrus’s measures to prevent suicides. He was Leonardo Conti, MD, one of Hitler’s chief medical advisors and Karl Brandt’s superior. As state secretary of health and head of national hygiene, his unsavory responsibilities included launching the so-called euthanasia programs designed to kill the aged and disabled and sponsoring experiments on humans in concentration camps. Among the experiments were studies of the effects of poisons, bacteria, and freezing of captives, as well as other horrific tests. Kelley had once interviewed him in his cell, describing the Nazi physician as a “
shy little man” who mildly protested that he was forced into euthanasia work.

The Swiss-born Conti, an early Nazi Party member,
had asphyxiated himself: he wrapped his neck with a shirt sleeve, tied the other end of the shirt to the bars of his cell window, and dropped from a chair.
Kelley rushed to the scene that morning to pronounce Conti dead. The Nazi physician left behind a note detailing the remorse he felt for lying to Allied interrogators, although he declared, “
I have never been a coward. I wanted so much to see my family again.” Andrus kept Conti’s suicide out of the newspapers,
ordered all chairs removed from prisoners’ cells at night, and scheduled more frequent searches of their belongings.

During the same period Kelley saw a decline in Robert Ley’s mental stability. In their interviews Kelley watched Ley swing from excitement to depression, and Ley talked so much, stammering throughout, that “
it was a real chore to sit and listen to him for an hour at a time,” Kelley said. The psychiatrist attributed some of this behavior to the brain damage he had diagnosed, but Ley’s fellow inmates, subjected to his rants and despair during exercise times, could not understand it. They
“did not know that
the inhibitory centers of his brain had ceased to function—that he quite literally had no judgment but only spontaneous emotional responses—as a vital, tough, excitable, intellectually gifted individual,” Kelley noted. “He was generally disliked.”

Ley spoke of his anguish over being viewed as a political gangster and facing trial as a criminal. His defense was that he had committed no crimes, declared no wars, planned wondrous social reforms while administering the German Labor Front, and acted only to advance his country.
Putting him and his colleagues on trial would only spread Hitler’s ideology and cast the Allies as enemies of the new Germany to come.

During the third week of October the prosecutors of the International Tribunal completed the indictments against the top twenty-two Nazis. A group that included Kelley, Andrus, British representative Airey Neave, a translator, and a chaplain assembled to present the official documents to the prisoners, who were now formally defendants. The Germans had been charged with a variety of offenses against international law, some of them new to jurisprudence, including membership in such criminal organizations as the SS and the Gestapo, conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace through the waging of aggressive war, involvement in war crimes, and committing crimes against humanity. As the group made the rounds of the cells to deliver the indictments to the prisoners,
Kelley took notes on their responses.

Göring was first. Through the window in his cell door they saw him sitting on his cot, his clothes hanging loosely, perhaps recently awakened from a nap and not expecting a visit, with a crooked frown on his face. He lurched to his feet when the door opened; his mouth gave a startled twitch. The boot heels of the visitors crunched on the stone floor as the group surged forward, but only Andrus, the translator, and Neave could fit inside the cell. The others peered around them or over their shoulders. Göring’s table still held the photos of Emmy and Edda, along with a stack of books. The prisoner did not initially meet the stares of the Allied representatives,
but he soon faced Neave and focused his eyes—the beady and shiny eyes that had disconcerted so many of his political opponents—on him.

“Hermann Wilhelm Göring?” Neave said. The Reichsmarschall must have sensed something important was happening. “
Jawohl
,” he answered. Neave explained that he was serving on Göring the indictment from the tribunal. Grimacing, Göring accepted the indictment and listened to Neave’s explanation of his right to legal counsel. He did not even glance at the documents, but seemed interested in Neave’s British service dress uniform. Kelley wrote down Göring’s next words: “So it has come.” Neave observed that “the words seemed very ordinary, not like the end of twelve years of absolute power. In that featureless cell, they did not sound dramatic. It was as if Göring ignored the presence of an audience and was thinking aloud.”

Informed that he could choose his own lawyer or pick one from a list that the tribunal had drawn up, Göring said, “I do not know any lawyers. I have nothing to do with them.” It was hardly surprising—he had lived above the law for so long. When Neave recommended finding counsel, Göring expressed skepticism that any lawyer could help him. “It all seems pretty hopeless to me,” he said with quiet firmness. “I must read this indictment very carefully, but I do not see how it can have any basis in law.” With twenty-one prisoners to go, Andrus began to lose patience. Neave repeated his advice to engage an attorney. “Lawyers!” Göring said. “They will be of no use in this trial. What is required is a good interpreter. I want my own interpreter.” Andrus smirked; he remembered Göring’s requests for special treatment at Mondorf. The prisoner would have no personal interpreter. Neave bade the prisoner good-bye; Göring bowed. The group backed out of the cell and the door slammed shut.

Hess received the group in his usual manner. He rose as the assembly filled his cell and “stared straight through me with his burning eyes,” Neave remembered. “His glance at my British uniform was unfriendly. . . . Then he lifted up one manacled hand in an odd gesture of derision. He bared his teeth in a mischievous grin.” Neave began his formal introduction, “Rudolf Hess?”

The prisoner made no response, so Neave placed the indictment in Hess’s hand, now free of the manacles. He mentioned the prisoner’s right to legal representation. Hess’s reply alarmed the group: “Can I defend myself ?” Told he could, Hess said, “Then I wish to do so.” The prisoner then grimaced with pain as one of his stomach attacks struck him. Hess dropped to his cot and rocked his body until the pain faded. Then he again arose and asked if he would face justice in the company of his Nazi colleagues. When Neave said yes, Hess responded, “I do not like to be tried with Göring.” He returned to an Edgar Wallace novel he had been reading, at which point the meeting concluded.