The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (19 page)

It was a declaration worthy of a McGlashan, and it must have rung in Kelley’s ears. Göring appeared to suggest that his rise to the top of the Nazi heap, a promised promotion that he expected to be realized after Hitler’s suicide but that never occurred, still might have future value to him despite his certainty that the Allies would eventually sentence him to death. “
You know I shall hang. I am ready. But I am determined to go down in German history as a great man. If I cannot convince the court, I shall at least convince the German people that all I did was done for the Greater German Reich. In fifty or sixty years there will be statues of Hermann Göring all over Germany. Little statues, maybe, but one in every German home.”

The prospect of death did not trouble him, he explained. As a military commander who ordered countless men to their deaths in battle, he always accepted the possibility of facing the enemy on the field. Now that the Allies were upon him, Göring planned to “dish it out,” to do as much damage as he could on his way down. “
I do not recognize the trial’s legal jurisdiction, but since they have the power to enforce their will, I am prepared,” he boasted, “to tell the truth and face anything that may come.” His approach, he insisted, was practical, the consequence of his preparation and experience as a soldier and wager of war.

Was it really practical, though, for a man who considered himself a revered leader to make his neck available for the hangman’s noose? Göring
seemed to feel uncertain about the propriety of his current imprisonment. When he confessed to Kelley his fear that fate could thwart the best planning of men who tried to control their future, Kelley called the admission “the only time I ever saw Goering realize that he alone could not face and perhaps conquer the entire world.”

Certainly the Nazi decried his imprisonment and forthcoming trial as an injustice possible only as part of the Allies’ spoils of victory, but he was much happier plopped on his cot behind bars than contemplating the prospect of a still-living Hitler occupying a neighboring cell. “
It was not cowardly of Hitler to commit suicide,” Göring maintained. “After all, he was chief of the German state. It would be absolutely unthinkable to me to have Hitler sitting in a cell like this waiting trial as a war criminal before a foreign tribunal. Though he hated me at the end, he was for me, after all, a symbol of Germany. . . . I would still rather suffer any consequence than to have Hitler alive as a prisoner before a foreign court.” Göring already regarded suicide as a logical choice when honor and national dignity came under attack.

Kelley had concluded that Göring’s denials that he was a homosexual—a rumor that Streicher’s accusations had given new life in 1940—were plausible. “
He naturally denied any perversions, and psychiatric observation and independent conversations with other prisoners who had known Göring well seemed to bear him out,” Kelley observed. What, then, accounted for the sexual energy that Göring projected, and his absorption in his own appearance, wardrobe, and physique? “He probably sublimated his sex drive into hard work, which gave him his amazing ability to keep going eighteen hours a day,” Kelley wrote. “Undoubtedly ambition took precedence over ‘amour.’ However, his home life was a happy one, and the devotion between Göring and his second wife seemed satisfying to both.”

Yet Kelley learned that personal considerations sometimes trumped Göring’s loyalty to Hitler and Nazi policy. One day
Göring told Kelley and translator Triest about his efforts to assist the family of the Jewish nurse who had helped him recover from his wounds after the Munich putsch of 1923. Years after he had benefited from her healing attention, he pushed
ahead the paperwork that enabled her family to move to England and escape Nazi persecution. Göring made it clear that this was an individual decision, one that made no difference in his overall opinion of Jews or their role in German society.

To Kelley, Göring’s confidences confirmed that the Nazi leader craved attention and needed it to lift his spirits. He admired Göring’s willingness to take responsibility for his actions and the energy with which he defended himself, but Kelley never lost sight of the Reichsmarschall’s worst traits. “
Göring hasn’t changed a bit,” he told journalists months later. “He is still the same swaggering, vain, conceited braggart he always was. He has made up his mind he’s going to be killed anyway, so he’s very anxious to be considered the number one Nazi, a curious kind of compensation.”

Hess still vacillated between amnesia and lucidity. On October 30, 1945, he claimed not to remember the contents of the food packets he had so carefully conveyed to Nuremberg from England. “
He readily admitted that the writing on each package was in his handwriting and identified various documents, but seemed content to merely glance at them, identify his handwriting, and hand them back,” Kelley wrote. “His only explanation for the time-consuming wrapping and sealing job which he had performed was: ‘It certainly seems a good way to pass the time.’” A couple of weeks later, authorities tried to spark his memory by
showing him newsreels of him and his codefendants attending Nazi events and rallies. Handcuffed to two guards and placed in a part of the impromptu prison screening room where lights would reveal the emotions that played across his face, Hess was observed by chief prosecutor Jackson, special assistant Donovan, and interrogator Colonel John Amen, along with Kelley and another American psychiatrist brought in to consult. The movies began with a welling underscore of Wagnerian music. Hess leaned forward and rose as, on the screen, he bellowed a speech and ended it with thunderous
Sieg Heil
s, to the Führer’s visible satisfaction. Hess sat and calmed down during clips of Göring, Ley, and Streicher. The lights rose, and Hess let a minute go
by before speaking. “I recognize Hitler and Göring,” he said. “I recognize the others, but only because I heard their names mentioned and have seen their names on cell blocks in this jail.” He said he did not recall attending any of the filmed events. “I must have been there because obviously I was there. But I don’t remember.”

Kelley had not been watching the screen. He stared at Hess’s hands, where the prisoner unconsciously revealed his tension “
by a tightening of the hands, readily visible to anyone looking for this symptom,” the psychiatrist wrote. “He certainly recognized some of the scenes shown in that picture, although his denial was complete. He realized his inner tension and perhaps recognized its manifestation in the tightening of his fingers.”

As the opening of the tribunal neared, the prosecution worried about the damage a disordered Hess could do if he gave testimony that focused attention on the symptoms of his mental problems and was unable to assist in his own defense. To confirm that Hess was fit to stand trial, the Allies convened a pair of experts to review Kelley’s psychiatric reports and examine the prisoner for themselves. The experts were Nolan D. C. Lewis, a noted psychoanalyst who directed the New York Psychiatric Institute and edited the
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease and Psychoanalytic Review
, and Donald Ewen Cameron, a Scottish-born psychiatrist then teaching at McGill University in Montreal and later notorious for performing mind-control and behavior modification research for the CIA.

Lewis and Cameron spent many hours with Hess, bringing in Gilbert as a translator. They took evidence from Kelley, Andrus, and others who had passed time with Hess. In an eight-page report, they agreed with Kelley’s determination that Hess was sane and not psychotic. The prisoner’s amnesia, they found, was inconsistent. Even when he claimed no memory of meeting certain people or reading particular books, he could recall some events and ideas connected with those people and books, and he inexplicably had access to other memories from the same times and places. The psychiatrists’ examination suggested that “
a part of the memory loss is simulated and it is probable that the hysterical or unconscious part is rather superficial.” Hess’s reflexive replies of “I don’t know” and “I don’t
remember” to so many questions were likely “originally developed consciously as a protective measure during a period of stress. . . [and] it has become habitual and has therefore become unconscious in part.”

In other words, Hess had pretended to forget past events to make his life easier during his early captivity in England and had continued not remembering them—at times unconsciously and habitually—during his weeks at Nuremberg. Although he initially faked his amnesia, at least some of it might no longer be feigned. And Hess felt no motivation at this moment to bring his memory back. Still unstable and anxious, “
he obviously wanted to retain the amnesia,” the psychiatrists determined. In interviews with the press, Kelley compared Hess’s memory with an atrophied limb that had lost its muscle tone, a body of water dotted with islands of forgetfulness, and an ice-choked ocean in which opening “
the right channels [makes] these ‘icebergs’ melt away.”

The doctors continued whacking away at Hess. In all, three Soviet, one French, three English, and one additional American psychiatrist scrutinized the mysterious prisoner. The British team found him sane enough to understand the charges against him and the proceedings of the tribunal. His amnesia, however, was a handicap to working with his attorney and his assembly of a defense. A Russian and French panel concurred, finding Hess “not insane in the strict sense of the word.” Kelley continued to insist that Hess was truly amnesiac, but that much of his forgetfulness resulted from “
a large voluntary block.” He predicted that the amnesia would disappear on its own, during or after the trial. Given the partly intentional aspect of Hess’s disability, the tribunal bore the responsibility of determining whether he should stand trial.
Kelley believed the best course was to try Hess and then ask for psychiatric opinion on whether a death sentence, if in the offing, was justifiable for someone in Hess’s state of mind.

Although Andrus permitted the repeated psychiatric exams of Hess, he did not want the other Nazi defendants to face the same medical scrutiny. In advance of one psychiatrist’s arrival to see Hess, Andrus advised that “
he not be granted permission to conduct examinations of other prisoners. All other prisoners are in obviously good mental health and special
examinations are not desirable as such examinations suggest an undue interest in the prisoner’s mental condition, a situation which should be avoided.” In his own determination, unapologetically lacking in medical basis, Andrus—who
scornfully noted that Hess once forcefully replied, “No,” instead of “I don’t remember,” when asked if he had studied astrology—judged Hess an incorrigible fraud. “
I was able to see through him and he knew it,” the commandant wrote. “I told him more than once that it wasn’t a very manly thing to do.” Hess would respond with silence or by shaking his head and repeating that he remembered nothing.

Hess himself took an interest in medical diagnosis, although his approach was unorthodox. One day, out of the blue, he asked Kelley, “
Do you know about the studies of the size of the pupil of the eye?” Kelley replied that he was familiar with the pupil’s expansion and contraction to admit more or less light into the eye.

“He interrupted me a bit scornfully, since I obviously did not know what he was driving at,” Kelley recalled. Hess said, “I mean the science of diagnosis based on the size and shape of the pupil. Haven’t you heard of it?” Kelley had not. “It really hasn’t been accepted by doctors in Germany, either,” Hess continued, “but a scientist—he wasn’t a medical man—and I studied it a long time. By the change in the pupil, you can not only tell what is wrong with anyone, you can tell where his illness is.”

When Kelley expressed skepticism, Hess’s manner immediately chilled. “I quite realize that an American medical man would not believe this,” he said, “but it is quite true. Even I can do it a little.” Hess then stared into Kelley’s eyes like a Nazi Svengali, “and for a moment I was afraid he would label me with some disease,” Kelley admitted. “Apparently all he discovered was disbelief, for he indicated that the interview was at an end.”

Kelley faced a medical conundrum of a different sort in the face-scarred and square-jawed Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking SS officer in captivity. Kaltenbrunner, whose dangerous persona had crumbled into spells of depression and fits of weeping in prison, was deeply frightened by the prospect of the trial. The psychiatrist regarded him as potentially suicidal, a “crybaby who is convinced that ‘everyone picks on me’. . . . The
hardness of character which marked him as an executioner had been replaced by this soft, sobbing personality who eagerly sought reassurance as to his future.” Kelley recognized Kaltenbrunner’s reaction to stress as one common to aggressive people, who show toughness when things go well but crack under personal setbacks.

On November 17 Kaltenbrunner suddenly complained of a terrible headache and listlessness. Kelley kept him under observation until the next day, when the prisoner’s symptoms worsened to a stiff neck and pain when he moved his head. Suspecting spinal meningitis or some other contagious disease, which
would have required a quarantine of all the prisoners and a delay of the trial, Kelley sent Kaltenbrunner to the hospital, where
a spinal puncture revealed that a blood vessel had spontaneously ruptured in his brain. Blood was seeping into the fluid surrounding the brain and the spinal column. Although the condition is potentially fatal, Kelley believed Kaltenbrunner had skirted disaster and only needed several weeks of rest. His mind was unaffected, although his anxiety over the forthcoming trial might have caused the hemorrhage by pushing up his blood pressure. As a result, Kaltenbrunner missed the opening days of the trial. Andrus later remembered hearing that
“Kaltenbrunner, the man who had terrified millions, had nearly died of fright.” Kaltenbrunner suffered a second hemorrhage a few days after he returned to prison but quickly recovered from it. Kelley again found him psychiatrically sound, but warned prison authorities that another attack “
may well prove fatal. It is impossible, of course, to predict if or when such a hemorrhage might occur.”