The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (37 page)

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Authors: Jack El-Hai

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Selzer and Miale gained access to Gilbert’s records and wrote their book anyway, and the conclusions of
The Nuremberg Mind: The Psychology of the Nazi Leaders
, published in 1975, placed them in Gilbert’s camp—so much so, in fact, that Gilbert wrote the book’s preface. Gilbert took this opportunity to take some digs at Kelley. The psychiatrist, Gilbert wrote, had “spoiled” any efforts to obtain clean Rorschach records from the Nazis by administering
“some of the tests through an interpreter, before he knew that a German-speaking psychologist was coming. This rendered both the completeness and the accuracy of those tests somewhat doubtful, and also interfered with the imagery.” (
Gilbert’s preface was one of his last published works before he died in 1977.)

The authors then took over, first proclaiming that people like Arendt, Milgram, and Kelley “
have not persuaded us that the major Nazi war criminals were normal, ordinary people fundamentally similar to you and us.” On the contrary, they believed, the Nuremberg defendants shared a common personality profile of mental disturbance. Based on their interpretations of the Rorschachs, they labeled many of the Nazis psychopaths with a limited capacity to feel guilt or attach themselves to other people or even to political or philosophical standards of behavior. The Nazis’ virulent self-interest was paramount in determining their behavior, set them apart from most people, and rendered them abnormal and psychologically unhealthy.

Although this conclusion seems to oppose Kelley’s in every way—and Kelley would have furiously condemned Selzer and Miale had he lived to see their book—the divide is not as great as it may appear. The Israeli political scientist and historian José Brunner has pointed out that Selzer and Miale left open a door to the possibility that
certain large and prominent groups of people—politicians, business leaders, artists, and others—might share the Nazis’ traits. Kelley would have agreed.

Harrower declared the conclusions of Selzer and Miale fatally biased by their foreknowledge of the tested Nazis’ careers and crimes, and she faulted them for not reviewing the records blindly or comparing them with a control group. She believed that “
their interpretations of the Rorschach results reflected their own expectations about Nazi mentality.” In other words, Selzer and Miale had assembled their book with a set agenda.

In 1978 a researcher new to the debate, psychologist Barry Ritzler of Long Island University,
applied a quantitative and statistically based criterion to the Nazi Rorschachs to avoid arbitrary interpretations and standardized the responses for comparison with a database of thousands of other test results that had been similarly appraised in previous years. Ritzler fell somewhere between Harrower and Selzer-Miale in his interpretations: he determined that the Nazi responses indicated a difference from the norm, but not enough to brand them psychiatrically disordered. The Nuremberg defendants, he said, resembled “
successful
psychopaths” who selfishly took advantage of chances to advance themselves and their status without caring about the effects on the people around them, but they did not show the severe symptoms of psychopaths who actively harm others.

Ritzler’s Rorschach appraisal method had been devised by Samuel J. Beck, a Chicago psychologist to whom Kelley sent some of his Nazi Rorschach records in 1947. Years after Beck died, in 1992,
researcher Reneau Kennedy discovered those records among Beck’s archived papers at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. As a result, despite Dukie’s best efforts to keep them under her control, several of Kelley’s Nazi records emerged into the spotlight for the first time.

The appearance of Kelley’s records set the stage for the most extensive review of the Nazi Rorschach results, by a collaboration of Ritzler,
Harrower, psychological assessment expert Robert P. Archer, and Drexel University psychologist Eric Zillmer, another longtime contributor to the controversy. In 1995 this team published
The Quest for the Nazi Personality: A Psychological Investigation of Nazi War Criminals
, which drew from Kelley’s results, as well as Gilbert’s. They concluded that it was impossible to use the Rorschach records to lump the Nazis into a distinctive psychiatric category. Göring, Hess, and their compatriots may have shared some personality traits—such as a tendency to vacillate in trying to solve problems,
as do about 20 percent of the American public—but those traits did not make them abnormal or psychopathic and probably belonged to many political leaders and others. “In fact,” the research team wrote, “
the differences among the members of this group by far outweighed any similarities.” They concluded that “many individuals. . . participated in atrocities without having diagnosable impairments that would account for their actions.” Psychotic sadism may have offered one path to the top of the Nazi elite, but men of many other personality types sat in the dock at Nuremberg. Tides of thought famously cycle in psychiatry and psychology, and Gilbert’s view of the Nazi records may again rise some day. But Ritzler, Harrower, Archer, and Zillmer decisively came down on Kelley’s side in the debate. Until someone else refutes it, the latest study suggests that the Nazi personality that eluded Kelley, seduced Gilbert, and tempted so many other researchers is a myth.

It took Doug Kelley twenty-eight years after his father’s death to feel that he could reconcile with Dukie. For so long he had blamed her for her role in his upbringing, for her inability to protect him from Kelley’s emotional storms. Then, in the mid-1980s, he realized that his demand for justice from Dukie would come only at great cost to her. She did not want to remember the painful episodes of her life with her husband. Doug decided to stop hoping that she would acknowledge his father’s faults and errors. In 1987 he visited her in Santa Barbara, California, where she lived in a house with beautiful views of the ocean. Ostensibly Doug arrived to help
Dukie figure out how to use a new computer. Their relationship began to mend. “It was a way of saying, ‘I love you. We’re a family,’” Doug remembers. “From then on I was Doug to her, not Douglas, not just her son, but an equal she could be more upfront with.”

By then her memories of Kelley had frozen into images of his brilliance and boundless curiosity. Doug thought of him as a father with his own way of loving, as a man who led him down a path he couldn’t stand, as one tormented by lifelong demons that escaped his control. When Dukie died in 2007, Doug inherited the ragged boxes of papers, medical records, and notes that his father had brought home from Europe sixty years earlier.

Doug’s sister Alicia died in a car accident in 2006, and his brother Allen is seriously ill and disabled. So Doug remains the sole guardian of this hidden archive—yet another McGlashan collection with a stormy story to tell. Doug still has many of his father’s collectibles: a meteorite, old leaves encased in glass, wood carvings from Africa, and polished crystals. Upon request he will bring out one of the splinters from a Donner Party cabin. Floating in oil in a tiny glass vial, a suspended sliver of hardship from the past, it is not much more substantial than an eyelash, and you have to blink to make sure you’ve seen it.

Now in his mid-sixties, wiry and strong, with a wrinkled face and thinning hair on his head, Doug has organized his father’s jumbled papers and filed them in folders labeled with the names of the Nuremberg defendants. The collection exhales the scents of tobacco smoke, dry paper, and fading photos. Included are three small boxes, the size of necklace cases. They contain peculiar jewels. One holds a set of glass slides showing views of Robert Ley’s brain. In another are six paper packets, still sealed with smears of red wax, maintaining a grip on the sugar, chocolate, and other foods that Rudolf Hess thought were poisoned. The final little box encloses a bed of cotton wool upon which lies a glass vial holding about a hundred white paracodeine tablets, a taste of Hermann Göring’s personal pharmacy.

The whole collection belongs in a museum or archive, but Doug has not surrendered it. He keeps it close at hand. He is curious, and he still wants to know more.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without the help of Doug Kelley—the oldest son of my subject, Douglas M. Kelley—I would not have attempted to write this book. I tracked down Doug in 2008 with hopes that he would have recollections of his father’s career, however faint they might be. I was overwhelmed to find that he possessed Dr. Kelley’s extensive collection of papers and photos chronicling his time at Nuremberg, as well as the years before and after. Doug invited me into his life and welcomed my questions. Insightful and funny, he generously plumbed his memories of being Douglas M. Kelley’s son, a journey at times painful and confounding. I am grateful to Doug and his partner, Christine Straub, for their enthusiasm and hospitality as I tried to make sense of Dr. Kelley’s story.

How fortunate I was to interview the men who may be the last living people who worked at Mondorf and Nuremberg with Douglas M. Kelley. My thanks to John Dolibois and Howard Triest for their time, ideas, and patience. I am also grateful for my interview time with Steven Miles of the University of Minnesota and with Michael Gelles.

Several institutions and archives aided my research. I thank Luisa Haddad and her helpful colleagues at the Department of Special Collections and Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz; Hilary Lane of the History of Medicine Library at the Mayo Clinic; the staff of the US National Archives in Silver Spring, Maryland; and the archivists of the William Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection at the Law Library of Cornell University.

Many others contributed to my writing in a variety of ways. I thank them all: Fred Appell, Dr. Arnold E. Aronson, Maisy and Bert Aronson, Ann Bauer, Laurie Brickley, Katherine Eban, Karla Ekdahl, Cornelia Elsaesser, Nancy Gardner, Elizabeth Giorgi, Anne Hodgson, Eugene Hoffman, Peter Hutchinson, Jon Klaverkamp, Bill Magdalene, Mary Meehan, Brad Schultz and Marx Swanholm, and Laura Weber.

I first wrote about Douglas M. Kelley and Hermann Göring in an article published in 2011 in
Scientific American Mind
magazine. My thanks to my editor there, Karen Schrock, for her skilled guidance and for keeping an open mind toward an unusual topic.

The team at Mythology Entertainment—Brad Fischer, Laeta Kalogridis, and Jamie Vanderbilt—have my appreciation for their interest in my work and for their support.

As always, I have benefited from the confidence, experience, and suggestions of my literary agent, Laura Langlie, whose common sense and calm always prevail. I also thank my performance rights agent, Bill Contardi, for his wonderful work. Kenneth Weinrib’s legal expertise has been essential.

Clive Priddle at PublicAffairs has supported this project from its earliest stages, and I feel lucky to write within the fold of this terrific publishing company.

Sometimes you need someone who will give you a place to write without asking questions. For that I have relied upon my local Caribou, Dunn Brothers, Quixotic, and Sebastian Joe’s coffee shops. By now they’ve learned I’m a tea drinker.

Finally, I thank my wife, Ann Aronson, for entertaining my crazy ideas, studying my manuscript, and giving me so much to look forward to outside of my writing den. She and my daughters, Natalie and Sasha, put up with a lot while my obsessions overtake me. They have all of my love.

NOTES

CHAPTER 2: MONDORF-LES-BAINS