The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (27 page)

Lacking psychiatric evidence, Kelley fell back onto sociology, history, and Korzybskian semantics to explain the Germans. “
Insanity is no explanation for the Nazis,” he wrote. “They were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are; and they were also—to a greater degree than most humans are—the makers of their environment.” Like many who wondered about the rise of the Third Reich, Kelley saw connections between the growth of Nazi ideology and the presence of long-standing barbaric tendencies and prejudices in German culture. From the late nineteenth century through World War I, German leaders had preached the necessity of slaughtering enemies, setting Germans above people of neighboring countries, and recognizing their destiny to conquer others. The Nazis did not have to invent notions of the Führer principle, the folk hero who would rescue the nation, and the existence of an elite who could lead everyone else. They simply tapped into what was already present in the national atmosphere. “
It is an established scientific fact that a person who is thinking with the emotional (thalamic) brain centers cannot think intellectually (cortically),” Kelley observed, hearkening to general semantics. “Hitler had an entire people thinking with its thalamus. In such state they fell easy prey to Goebbels, Streicher, Ley, and the other propagandists.” It did not require remarkable qualities to harness those ideas already embedded in the culture—merely leadership abilities.

If insanity was not the common factor among the Nazis, what was? Kelley could find only two areas in which the Nuremberg defendants shared traits. The first was an enormous energy they devoted to their work;
Göring and his colleagues were grade A workaholics. “
They all worked for incredibly long hours, slept very little, and devoted their whole lives to the problem of Nazifying the world,” he observed. “They worked slavishly and fanatically. It’s too bad,” Kelley added almost ruefully, “we don’t have that much energy to spare in making democracy work.” In addition, Kelley discovered, the Nazis focused on the ends of their labors and did not much care about the means that made them happen. Those ends varied from Nazi to Nazi and ranged from furthering the spread of Nazism to achieving personal power and glory.

As for Hitler, whose presence dominated the Nuremberg jail discussions yet who remained out of Kelley’s reach, the psychiatrist made valiant efforts to understand his motivations and nature. At Mondorf and Nuremberg, Kelley had interviewed Hitler’s associates, physicians, secretaries, and anyone else with intimate knowledge of the Nazi leader’s life. He determined that “
Hitler had a profound conviction of his own ability, amounting to megalomania. He firmly believed that he was the only individual who could lead the Third Reich to success, and at times he seemed to feel that he had been chosen by Heaven for this task.” Anyone who crossed Hitler faced the leader’s fearsome rage. To Kelley, it was not inconsistent with such megalomania that Hitler in private was often kind and soft-spoken with his staff; polite to women, children, and the elderly; and a lover of good food and other simple pleasures of life.

Kelley’s analysis of the testimony he had gathered from Hitler’s colleagues also convinced him that the German leader was less sexually driven than many other men, and like Göring may have channeled his sexual drive into work. “
Hitler was just as normal in every way as any normal man,” Göring had told Kelley. It was a rather chilling thought.

Douglas Kelley was far from the first psychiatrist or psychologist to attempt an analysis of Hitler’s mind. In 1942
Cambridge professor Joseph MacCurdy had dissected the Führer’s anti-Semitism, finding that it reflected Hitler’s increasingly delusional and frustrated mental state as his fighters began losing on the battlefield. The psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer and the psychologist Henry Murray also produced profiles
of Hitler that guided the planning of the US Office of Strategic Services during the war.

However, Kelley ultimately honed in on Hitler’s well-known gastro-intestinal disorders—a twenty-year history of gas and stomach pains—as a key to comprehending his behavior. Hitler’s doctors never found an organic cause, and Kelley diagnosed the problem as “
no more than a nervous bellyache.” Kelley believed those symptoms pointed to “an anxiety neurosis and fixations centered on his stomach . . . nothing one could be committed to an institution for. He feared death. Many important decisions were made hurriedly and put into effect equally as hurriedly.”
Kelley had learned, for example, that Hitler told Göring in 1941 that a planned attack on the Soviet Union had to take place immediately because his stomach was getting worse; the Führer feared he had stomach cancer and that he might soon die. As a result, the Nazi leader turned his attention from successful assaults on Great Britain to a campaign in the east that resulted in defeat. “The horrors of this decision are well known,” Kelley wrote, “and it is appalling to realize that an entire war was precipitated because of the severe hysterical stomach cramps and obsessive-compulsive fears of a psychoneurotic who happened to be in a position of command.” In the same attempt to rush ahead before cancer struck him down, Hitler had demanded long hours of work from his underlings. There is no evidence that Hitler actually had stomach cancer, and the Führer refused to allow X-rays of his stomach because he did not want to confirm his fears.
One of Hitler’s doctors, Karl Brandt, had told Kelley that Hitler spent his final years continuously receiving shots of vitamins and glucose to stave off the imaginary illness.

Hitler’s fear of death, evident in his employment of up to five physicians simultaneously, gave Kelley insight into the leader’s attitude toward suicide. At first Hitler would not allow anyone to discuss the subject in his presence. For years, even as the momentum of the war shifted against him, Hitler often said, “No one but a weakling or a fool ever would commit suicide.” But his opinion changed as the Nazi defeats piled up and his own health deteriorated. After 1944, now burdened with a tremor and weakness
of his left hand and leg that doctors had diagnosed as hysterical in origin, “he was heard to say that he could easily understand how someone who was no longer healthy could kill himself. . . . [H]e expressed a terrible fear that this affliction might spread to his right hand,” Kelley reported. “One day he said flatly that if this happened, he would put an end to himself.”

Another factor in the attraction of suicide for Hitler was the fate of fellow fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose body his enemies strung up in public after his execution. After seeing photos of this desecration, Göring told Kelley, “Hitler went into a frenzy. He seized the pictures and went up and down the hall shouting, ‘This will never happen to me!’ And he waved the pictures in his hand. Afterward, Hitler several times brought up the subject spontaneously.” Göring recalled, “He swore that he would never be taken alive and that no angry Germans would ever have the opportunity to befoul his corpse.” For that reason, Göring maintained, Hitler declined to lead his army in a final stand against the Russians, fearing that the enemy would take possession of his body. Ultimately, in the days before he committed suicide in his Berlin bunker with Eva Braun, Hitler wrote in his last testament, “My wife and I choose to die in order to escape shame and overthrow or capitulation.” Kelley found other peculiarities in Hitler’s psyche—including his reluctance to touch animals without wearing gloves, his interest in and fear of horses, his obsessive repetition of daily routines, and his finicky attention to personal hygiene—but nothing that branded the Nazi psychotic or mad.

Kelley knew that the Nazis had committed atrocities and crimes of war on an unprecedented scale. Even the German leaders were surprised to realize what they had done and where they had ended up. But men whose personalities fell within normal parameters had set in motion the Nazi outrages, making Kelley worry that they could happen again. “
With the exception of Dr. Ley, there wasn’t an insane Joe in the crowd,” he told a reporter for the
New Yorker
. The leaders “
were not special types,” he wrote. “Their personality patterns indicate that, while they are not socially desirable
individuals, their like could very easily be found in America” or elsewhere. Consequently, he feared that holocausts and crimes against humanity could be repeated by psychologically similar perpetrators. His concerns differed from those of Hannah Arendt, who famously commented upon “the banality of evil” in her writings on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. Arendt asserted that Nazis followed orders from above, viewed those orders as routine, and accepted their own actions as unremarkable. On the contrary, most of the Nazis that Kelley had studied continued to see their regime and their own part in it as special, favored by the course of human evolution. That kind of thinking allowed Göring to liquidate former colleagues and issue murderous decrees—to revel in his power—even as he enjoyed a loving family life.

The psychiatrist could have easily accepted conclusions from his Nuremberg studies that cast the Nazis as psychopaths or as people in Arendt’s mold. He could have rested easy believing that Germans were so culturally distinctive that such men could only have risen to power under unique circumstances. Instead, he reached a different conclusion, one that shocked and troubled him: the qualities that led the top Nazis to commit and tolerate acts of horror existed in many people, living in many places. True, the Nazis rose to power in Germany partly because of their nation’s cultural training. But they “are not unique people,” Kelley told American lecture audiences during the fall of 1946, following the execution of the condemned men:

They are people who exist in every country of the world. Their personality patterns are not obscure. But they are people who have peculiar drives, people who want to be in power, and you say that they don’t exist here, and I would say that I am quite certain that there are people even in America who would willingly climb over the corpses of half of the American public if they could gain control of the other half, and these are the people who today are just talking—who are utilizing the rights of democracy in anti-democratic fashion.

His observations of the Nazis in Nuremberg suggested to him that Germany’s problems could, in theory, become America’s. His countrymen commonly reassured themselves that in the United States the few could not control the many, civilization could not sink to such barbarity, and the nation’s democratic traditions would not tolerate totalitarianism. Kelley found such optimism naive. He grew convinced that “
there is little in America today which could prevent the establishment of a Nazi-like state.” Even worse, fascistic bigotry already riddled American culture. “I found the same anti-minority feeling shot through the American population,” he told one lecture audience.

American politicians, like white supremacists Senator Theodore Bilbo and Congressman John E. Rankin of Mississippi and Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia, Kelley maintained, exploited racial myths “in the same fashion as did Hitler and his cohorts. They use racism as a method of obtaining personal power, political aggrandizement, or individual wealth. We are allowing racism to be used here for those ends. I am convinced that the continued use of these myths in this country will lead us to join the Nazi criminals in the sewer of civilization.” Although he declared the threat to America was not immediate, Kelley pointed to the political machinations of and harnessing of police control by such figures as Huey Long as evidence that Nazi power techniques were well advanced among demagogues in regional pockets of the United States, just as Hitler had launched his fascist movement from his ideological headquarters in Munich.

Americans, Kelley concluded, needed to look closely at their own culture and politics if they were to avoid the extremism and brutality of the Nazis. In a way, Streicher and Rosenberg had been right to warn of impending upheaval in the United States. Instead of the racial chaos involving African Americans and Jews that the two condemned Nazis had predicted, however, the biggest danger to America came from ideological demagogues. Kelley believed that Americans should scrutinize “
our thoughts and our education, our policies and our political methods, if we are to avoid the sad fate of the Germans.”

Consequently Kelley argued that Americans needed to prevent people with these kinds of personalities from gaining political control in the United States. With anticommunist hysteria and resistance to civil rights on the rise, he pointed out, America had ultranationalists and racial bigots aplenty. The Germans had long taught themselves ideas of Nordic superiority, tales of heroes who would arise from the masses to lead triumphantly, and the acceptability of an elite ruling class bulldozing the rest of society.
“Americans are only [now] getting it ground in,” Kelley declared.
To combat this threat, Kelley advocated removing all restrictions on the voting rights of US citizens, convincing as many Americans as possible to vote in elections, and rebuilding the educational system to cultivate students who could, in Korzybskian fashion, think critically and resist using “strong emotional reactions” to make decisions. Finally, he urged his countrymen to refuse to vote for any candidate who made “political capital” of any group’s race and religious beliefs or referred indirectly or directly to the blood, heritage, or morals of opponents. “The United States [would] never reach its full stature” until it had undergone this transformation.