The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (22 page)

Kelley counseled some defendants on how to resist Göring’s dominance. When Fritzsche questioned the physician about Göring’s intentions and the degree of cynicism in his admonitions to the defendants, Kelley replied that Göring wanted to be long remembered as a hero of the German state, a goal that prevented him from acknowledging the defendants’ collective moral guilt. “If he wants to play it that way, let him speak for himself,” Fritzsche observed, “but he doesn’t have to rope the rest of us into his heroics.” But Göring actually felt impelled to do exactly that.

Kelley and Gilbert monitored the prisoners’ conversations at lunch and in the courtroom. Sometimes Kelley felt compelled to correct the prisoners’ perspectives. On one occasion he debated a group of defendants about a comparison of the racial problems of Germany and the United States. Assured that America had no laws that were as racially repressive as those of the Third Reich, Rosenberg replied, “
Oh, but you will. You wait and see. If you don’t have a Jewish problem, you will at least have a Negro problem.” Streicher mentioned a Negro leader who wanted to spark an American revolt, and Kelley responded that he had never heard of him. Such crackpots, the psychiatrist said, “come and go, and decent people don’t pay attention to them.” Streicher’s reply: “Oh, but you’re bound to have a racial problem. It’s in the Talmud.” To which Rosenberg added, “It’s a biological necessity.” Having had the last word, the Nazis returned to the dock for the afternoon sessions of the tribunal.

On the afternoon of November 29 everyone in the courtroom was transfixed by one of the most dramatic moments of the trial. The prosecution showed filmed footage of concentration camps shot during their liberation by British and American troops less than a year earlier. As the room darkened and a projectionist began the whirred spinning of the reels of film, Kelley and Gilbert took positions at the ends of the defendants’ dock. Spotlights illuminated the prisoners, allowing the psychiatrist and
psychologist to scrutinize their faces for traces of emotion and other telling reactions. The scenes of stick-limbed camp inmates, haunted faces, yawning crematoria doors showing incinerated skeletons, stacked corpses, and bulldozers tumbling mounds of bodies into mass graves—images all too familiar to people today—hit the uninitiated in the courtroom with terrific force. Sobs and soft cries from the spectators’ gallery mixed with the hum of the projector. Coughing nervously, Göring leaned on the railing of the dock and covered his face with his right arm. Hess bewilderedly stared at the screen, but betrayed no feelings. Funk and Fritzsche were crying, and some who noticed their tears assumed they were grieving for themselves and their fate. Schacht, who had spent time in a Nazi concentration camp before his arrest by the Allies, turned away from the screen. Ribbentrop covered his eyes with his fingers but sometimes peeked through them. Moving restlessly in his seat, Rosenberg sneaked looks at his fellow Nazis. Dönitz kept averting his gaze and returning it to the screen, removing and restoring his sunglasses to his face. Alone among the Nazis,
Streicher seemed keenly engrossed.

At the conclusion of the film, the defendants “
remained seated, as if turned to stone,” one person present recorded. “They were slow to rise when the judges filed out in disgusted silence.” Stunned, Chief Justice Lawrence had neglected to officially adjourn the court. Slowly the prisoners regained their senses. Hess began to protest, “
I don’t believe it,” and Göring s hushed him. Guards finally led them all out of the courtroom, and Frank needed assistance dredging up the energy to move. When Kelley and Gilbert visited the prisoners in their cells that night, they saw weeping and heard protests that others were responsible—they knew nothing of such atrocities. Frank, however, put those declamations of innocence in perspective: “
Don’t let everyone tell you that they had no idea. Everyone sensed there was something horribly wrong. . . even if we did not know all the details. They didn’t want to know.” Streicher icily called the film “terrible,” then asked for the guards to quiet down so he could go to sleep.

The screening of the camp films blew a hole in Göring’s plan for the trial. “
It was such a good afternoon, too, until they showed that film,” he
said. “They were reading my telephone conversations on the Austrian affair, and everybody was laughing with me. And then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything.”

At such times, Göring only reluctantly conceded the power of the evidence arrayed against him and his colleagues. “
You’re having a hard time keeping your group in fighting trim, aren’t you?” Kelley remarked during the third weekend break of the trial. Göring admitted it was true. “Well, it seems to me the evidence is pretty damaging,” Kelley pressed on. “You must admit that for yourself.” Göring would not answer that directly. At last he responded: “Do you suppose I’d have believed it if somebody came to me and said they were making freezing experiments on human guinea-pigs—or that people were forced to dig their own graves and be mowed down by the thousands? I would just have said, ‘Get out of here with that fantastic nonsense!’. . . It just didn’t seem possible. I just shrugged it off as enemy propaganda.” The evidence presented in court, however, established that Göring knew about the atrocities and details of the “final solution” planned for the Jews. The Holocaust had occurred with his assent and assistance.

On the day after the screening of the concentration camp films, the ninth day of the trial, the court took up the matter of Hess’s amnesia as the former Deputy Führer sat alone in the dock. The judges wanted to know whether Hess had been mentally competent to enter his plea, and the prisoner’s lawyer, Gunther von Rohrscheidt, presented a request to remove Hess temporarily from the trial proceedings until he could more actively take part in his own defense. (The court had already followed such a course in delaying the trial of the infirm industrial magnate and armaments manufacturer Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, whom the tribunal’s prosecutors had indicted in 1945. Krupp died in 1950 without ever facing trial.) Rohrscheidt reluctantly conceded that Hess believed himself competent. The judges debated legal aspects of Hess’s competence and fitness to stand trial.
Chief prosecutor Jackson added that Hess should not be able to use amnesia as part of his defense or as a reason to delay his trial because he refused to undergo the narco-hypnosis treatment that Kelley had recommended to restore his memory. “
He is in the volunteer class
with his amnesia,” declared Jackson, who was clearly persuaded that Hess had intentionally blocked his recollections.

During the two hours of debate, Hess scribbled notes and whispered and waved his arms at various times to draw the attention of his lawyer. He had grown visibly restless and agitated. Finally Lawrence looked at Hess and said, “The tribunal would like to hear Hess on the subject.” Hess arose and strode to the center of the courtroom. Three guards leaped up to stop him, led him back to the dock, and handed him a microphone. Hess then asked to read aloud a statement he had just prepared on his mental state. He continued in a measured but
high-pitched voice that suggested barely repressed excitement:

Henceforth my memory will again respond to the outside world. The reasons why I simulated loss of memory were tactical. The fact is that only my ability to concentrate is somewhat reduced. However, my capacity to follow the trial to defend myself, to put questions to witnesses, or even to answer questions is not being affected thereby. I emphasize that I bear the full responsibility for everything that I have done or signed as signatory or co-signatory. My attitude in principle that the tribunal is not competent [to try and judge me] is not affected by the statement I have just made. So far in conversations with my official defense counsel, I have also simulated loss of memory. He has therefore represented me in good faith.

Astonished silence met Hess’s revelation, and then, weirdly,
Rohrscheidt laughed, and many others in the courtroom joined him. Justice Lawrence abruptly adjourned the court. Rohrscheidt exasperatedly told reporters he was completely surprised by his client’s statement, but he added that this courtroom spectacle strengthened his belief that Hess was not sane. Hess went back to his cell, where Andrus told him, “
I’m glad you’re not going to fake anymore.” Hess replied, seemingly in agreement, “
Ach
, I feel unburdened—I feel better.”

Then Hess bragged to Rohrscheidt that he had made Kelley and Gilbert look ridiculous because they believed in his amnesia. Hess continued his elated recounting of the day’s events. He could now recall events from his past that he had previously said were inaccessible. When Kelley asked why he had made this courtroom statement, Hess glowed with excitement “like an actor after a first night” and appeared not to realize that he had upset his own attorney more than any of the prosecutors.

“How did I do? Good, wasn’t I?” Hess exclaimed. “I really surprised everybody, don’t you think?” Kelley replied that not everyone was surprised. “Then I didn’t fool you by pretending amnesia?” Hess asked. “I was afraid you had caught on. You spent so much time with me.” Kelley then reminded Hess of the screening of the Nazi rally films in November, during which Hess had claimed to recognize nobody, not even himself, in the movies. “I thought then that you knew I was pretending,” Hess recalled. “All the time you looked only at my hands. It made me very nervous to know you had learned my secret.”

Kelley later wrote: “I had not, of course, learned his ‘secret’ in quite the way he thought. I knew only that he remembered more than he admitted.” The psychiatrist was unwilling to give up the belief that Hess still suffered from some genuine amnesia, which began, as Kelley had earlier suspected, during Hess’s interrogations while he was incarcerated in England, when it was easiest for him to feign lack of memory. Kelley continued to believe that over time “large sections of his life simply slipped below the threshold of memory. . . . In the end, he was a genuine victim of an induced, even rationalized, amnesia state.” Yet, in defiance of Kelley’s opinion, some of what Hess had claimed was lost he could actually recall.

Gilbert and Kelley informed some of the other prisoners about Hess’s admission. Ribbentrop’s confusion was immense. “
Hess, the Hess we have here? He said that?” Ribbentrop exclaimed. Schirach declared the fakery amusing but beneath the decency of a sane German. Though undeniably amazed at Hess’s pretense,
Göring felt resentful that he had been fooled along with everyone else. When Göring and Hess met in the courtroom dock the next day, they initially bantered about the ruse like schoolboys
who had fooled the headmaster. Hess now felt free to boast to the former Luftwaffe chief about the dangers of his clandestine flight to Britain. Göring quickly tired of the conversation
“as he looked around the courtroom and saw that Hess was now the center of attention,” Gilbert noted. “Hess was enjoying it immensely.”

To some observers, Hess’s statement may have made Kelley look foolish for having taken seriously mental disturbances that were faked. The psychiatrist, however, insisted to anyone who asked that Hess’s words had come as no surprise to him. The courtroom declaration, Kelley told reporters, was expected given the prisoner’s hysterical personality. Kelley repeated that he believed some of Hess’s forgetfulness to be genuine and some intentional, “
but it is obvious he has been using amnesia as a defense.” Later Hess admitted to Gilbert and others that his declaration in court was false and that some of his amnesia was real. Hess continued to deteriorate mentally as the trial went on, failing to take the stand in his own defense because “
he was too insane to testify,” Kelley later said.

Privately, Kelley blamed Gilbert for Hess’s unexpected statement. Right before that court session, Kelley wrote, Gilbert had told the prisoner that the tribunal might declare him insane and remove him from the trial. Hess wanted to remain a defendant “
since he felt that to be denied a trial would indicate mental inferiority and he felt that he must stand trial with his companions,” Kelley noted. “This sort of reaction again emphasizes his hysterical nature and his desire to thrust himself into the limelight, fatal as it might be, instead of attempting to escape by continued pretense.”

Despite the drama of Hess’s admission, the judges quickly determined that Hess was faking his forgetfulness, that he was fit to stand trial, and that they would order no further medical examinations. Kelley agreed with these decisions. When he completed his final assessments of the Nazis facing trial, including Hess in mid-December, he wrote of each defendant: “
This man is competent and demonstrates no evidence of psychopathology. He is able to face trial.”

Later, when the defendants grew too fractious and Göring too domineering, Andrus directed Gilbert to separate them into groups in different
lunch rooms. The psychologist established eating groups designed to weaken Göring’s dominance, based on the ability of various defendants to counter his arguments. Göring had to eat lunch in a chamber all by himself. “
He was furious to be eating alone and let it be known that he thought I was ‘a nobody’,” Gilbert recalled, “while he and the others were ‘historic personalities’.” A few other factors played into Gilbert’s seating assignments; historians Ann and John Tusa have noted that “
Hess and Ribbentrop were put together because Gilbert thought they would hardly find anything to say to each other and this would neutralize them.” The new seating arrangement had the immediate effect of empowering such defendants as Schacht and Speer to openly criticize Nazi policies and to blame Hitler, not the Allies, for Germany’s defeat. As the trial lumbered toward its 218th day, several of the Nazis broke out of Göring’s orbit and distanced themselves from him. Not even the Reichsmarschall could railroad his colleagues and hold the public’s imagination that long. “
Gott im Himmel!
” he would sputter on his bad days, along with hissed oaths and exclamations of “
Schweinehund und verraeter!
” (Pig-dog and traitor!), which he would fling at damaging witnesses.