The Nazi and the Psychiatrist
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Rosenberg never considered the possibility that he was guilty of any crimes. Kelley soon concluded that the prisoner’s dullness and mental confusion deprived him, more than most of his fellow captives, of an awareness of the limitations and fallacies of his own thinking. He was, in Kelley’s opinion, an intellectual bumbler, a purveyor of hazy and nonsensical philosophy.
Bearing fewer intellectual credentials was Julius Streicher, publisher of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer and a high-level Nazi party official, governor-general of Franconia, the German province that included Nuremberg, until he made foolish insinuations about Göring’s virility in 1940. He stood out among his fellow prisoners as a pariah. When Kelley met with Streicher in his cell, he couldn’t believe that the man could possibly have been effective as a hawker of hateful ideology. Streicher was “lounging on his cot, a bald, paunchy, loose-skinned man in cast-off GI work clothes,” a thoroughly unimposing figure.
Even more than Hitler—of whom Streicher was among the earliest followers—the husky, long-winded, and uncouth publisher believed that Jews were evil and subhuman, and anti-Semitism formed the foundation of all his political beliefs. Despite fractious personal relationships with other Nazis, Streicher, who had often carried a riding crop, never wavered as one of his Führer’s strongest and most vocal supporters. In articles, crude cartoons, and editorials, his newspaper cheered the burning of synagogues, the destruction of Jewish property, and physical attacks on Jews. In the guise of journalism, he spread specious stories about Jesus’s Aryan background, Jewish laws that permitted pedophilia and prohibited giving gift s to Christians, and the Jewish belief that Jesus’s mother was a prostitute. This anti-Judaism was no fringe conviction in Germany; in less crude form it fired the political, military, and economic aims of the Nazi regime, and nearly every Nazi official subscribed to it.
Yet Streicher’s fellow prisoners had refused to speak to or eat with him at Mondorf—Admiral Karl Dönitz even presented a petition to Andrus requesting Streicher’s banishment from the common table at mealtimes—partly because of his reputation as a sadist, rapist, and collector of pornography. (Newspapers described his pornography stash as “the largest library of its kind the world has ever known.”) Many who crossed paths with him in Nuremberg quickly judged him loathsome. “He was a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks,” wrote New Yorker correspondent Rebecca West, “and a sane Germany would have sent him to an asylum long before.” He refused to take responsibility for furthering the anti-Jewish hatred that led to mass murder and the Holocaust. Streicher was no stranger to the Nuremberg jail, having visited it in the past to administer whippings to convicts.
Streicher often dropped crude allusions to his sexual vigor, kept a clean cell, and practiced morning calisthenics in the nude before pouring a bucket of water over his head to conclude the exercise session. He fancied himself a martyr to his cause and could not talk on any subject for longer than a few minutes without descending into a soliloquy on “the Jewish problem,” the psychiatrist learned. “Twenty-four hours a day, his every thought, his every action bore some reference to his beliefs,” Kelley wrote. Even his vast and infamous collection of pornography, Streicher maintained, held keys to understanding Jewish thinking, because Jews were always the origin of obscene literature. “The enthusiasm with which he described these volumes led me to suspect more than interest in their alleged source,” Kelley noted.
The only prisoner who could tolerate closeness with Streicher was Robert Ley, the former director of the German Labor Front that had replaced the country’s trade unions and managed the Nazis’ workforce, including slave laborers. Ley had donned Tyrolean clothing after the war while trying to hide in a shed in the mountains near the Nazi stronghold of Berchtesgaden. After his capture, Ley attempted suicide three times.
Kelley found Ley almost identical to Streicher in appearance: squat, bald, and paunchy, garbed in an ill-fitting, discarded GI uniform. A veteran of the German Air Force during World War I, he had been seriously wounded when his plane was shot down in 1917. Kelley took detailed interview notes on this accident: “Fell 2900 meters, pilot killed. Ley thrown against cowling—unconscious 2–3 hours, struck forehead—no fracture. Was unable to speak for half a day—speech slowly improved. Still stutters slightly.” Ley’s stammer was most pronounced when he grew excited—which occurred often after 1924, when he became an enthusiastic follower of Hitler. He always claimed that a couple of jolts of American whiskey helped him overcome his speech impediment, and he frequently indulged.
Working as a chemist, Ley lost his job after political disputes with his employer and went into politics full time. He developed into one of the Nazi Party’s busiest spokesmen. “An inner voice drove me forward like hunted game,” he told Kelley. “Though my mind told me differently and my wife and family repeatedly told me to stop my activities and return to a civil and normal life, the voice inside me commanded, ‘You must, you must,’ and I obeyed that irresistible force, fate. Call it mystic, call it God.” Ley never gave up his fervent support of Hitler, even in defeat. “He gave the impression of being intellectually gifted, vital, tough,” a translator recalled. “But he really was just a bullshitter of the highest order.”
Kelley detected something psychologically amiss in Ley. Chatting with him was impossible, a descent into verbal chaos. “Often when I talked with him in his cell, he would begin an ordinary conversation and, as he became interested, he would stand, then pace the floor, throw out his arms, gesticulate more and more violently, and begin to shout,” Kelley wrote. In addition, Kelley had discovered that as Labor Front leader, Ley had proposed utterly irrational programs to benefit Germany’s workers, including the building of one hundred ships to take workers on pleasure cruises, the construction of grand residences to improve the nation’s housing shortage, and the provision of new cars for laborers. He so deeply idolized Hitler that he wrote a book overly dripping in praise, which even Hitler could not tolerate, ordering the destruction of the print run.
Clearly the prisoner lacked sound judgment and ran on unchecked emotions. What exactly was wrong with Ley? To learn more, Kelley arranged to interview the Labor Front leader’s former secretary. She described him as an idealist “who always saw the world through rose-colored glasses, who was always drunk and who, therefore, always saw people better than they really were. . . . [Ley] lived in a world removed from reality.” To Kelley, Ley’s lack of verbal control, his bad judgment, and his general lack of inhibitions pointed to a diagnosis of brain damage.
Several other prisoners piqued Kelley’s curiosity. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Rosenberg’s rival in the sphere of Nazi foreign relations and Hitler’s foreign minister from 1938 through the war’s end, occupied cell no. 7 in a shaky state. He told Allied interrogators that as a legitimate government official, his arrest had shocked him. With only an elementary school education and a background in the liquor business that had given him little political experience, Ribbentrop was sensitive to any suggestion of short-comings, including the whispers of fellow diplomats that he was just a “champagne salesman.” (Another nickname, “the movie actor,” stuck because of his theatrical expressions and gestures.) His notions of his inferiority led to a strong personal attachment to Hitler. Kelley believed that Ribbentrop had long seen Hitler as a father figure, and the Führer’s suicide left the foreign minister feeling abandoned. The disorder of his prison chamber seemed to mirror his mental disorganization, and he often peppered Kelley with such questions as, “Doctor, what shall I do? What shall I do?” Kelley noted, “He walks up and down his cell muttering to himself. He is like a little boy whose parents are taken away from him, and he is suddenly told to shift for himself. He doesn’t know what to do.”
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the top-ranking Gestapo leader in captivity, was a former lawyer. He was the tallest of the prisoners, and the many scars on his face lent him a sinister appearance. His unfortunate victims had often guessed that the terror chief’s web of
scar tissue came from dueling, but it actually resulted from his being propelled through an automobile window during a traffic accident. Kelley pegged him as a cowardly man despite his intimidating appearance, “a typical bully, tough and arrogant when in power, a cheap craven in defeat, unable to even stand the pressures of prison life.”
As Kelley deepened his knowledge of the prisoners, the International Military Tribunal in which the top Nazis would face judgment haltingly moved forward. Enormous quantities of official Nazi documents were making their way to Allied investigators and prosecutors. Representatives of the United States, Great Britain, France, and the USSR, after rejecting the possibility of quick executions without trial, negotiated how a war crimes tribunal could be conducted and who would first face judgment. Such an international court had never before come together. Although the Soviets made plain their wish that any trial would automatically end in death-penalty verdicts, and the British more quietly agreed, the arrival in Nuremberg of more than a hundred American legal staff members signified that the United States would lead the other countries in organizing the proceedings and setting the standards of justice. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American wartime intelligence agency, was officially handling the investigation of the suspects. Its former head, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, collaborated with chief prosecutor Robert Jackson to assemble evidence against the Nazis. Damning evidence was found of SS death vans that murdered Jews, the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and other horrors of the Holocaust, in addition to proof of war crimes and violations of international law.
Kelley began to see more clearly the social and political hierarchy of his charges. They reminded him of the directors of a business, all under the leadership of the late CEO, Adolf Hitler. One clique—which included Göring and Rosenberg—he called the “brain group,” the men who had shaped Nazi ideology and policy. There were also salesmen—Baldur von Schirach, Franz von Papen, Konstantin von Neurath, and Ribbentrop—who sold Hitler’s ideas to the world. Military and domestic enforcers, including Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, Erich Raeder, and Karl Dönitz, mobilized armies and weapons to enforce transactions. Finally, Third Reich, Inc., employed lawyers and bureaucrats who “tagged along.” Altogether the captive Nazi leaders constituted a “board of directors” of their defeated regime, a ruling group that had run a nation but frequently had little contact with one another.
Yet unlike any corporate board of directors, this one had unleashed six years of war upon the world, cynically disregarded treaties and international agreements, wiped out countless communities of innocent people, enslaved millions, concentrated additional millions in camps designed to murder them efficiently, and legalized racism and terror. What made these men criminals? Did they grasp at opportunities that could tempt many of us? Were they born with evil tendencies? Did they share psychiatric disorders—a type of “Nazi mind”—that could account for their behavior? Kelley understood that his access to this collection of many of the century’s most notorious criminals could lead him to answers and renown.
The prison authorities, not to mention the prosecutors for the future trial, were uninterested in the questions that excited Kelley’s curiosity. Nobody in Nuremberg wanted to know what made these human beings in high Nazi positions commit such nefarious acts.
In seeking to isolate the workings of the Nazi mind, Kelley was venturing into a controversial field of study, the intersection of psychiatry and criminology. Sociologists had long speculated on the causes of criminal behavior and studied the social forces that produce crime. But psychiatrists had less successfully looked within criminals, using their expertise on emotional states, subconscious motivations, and diseases of the mind. For decades, going back to the pioneering psychiatric work of the eminent nineteenth-century American physician Benjamin Rush, doctors had searched for flaws in some people that caused deviant behavior. These early investigators had thought of the elusive flaws as biological—something wrong or evolutionarily backward in the body. But what if the defect was not in the organism, but in the mind? The pioneering nineteenth-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso had speculated that criminals act in accordance with their nature: they are born bad. He began searching for the innate physical and mental characteristics of criminals. Much of Lombroso’s work has long been discredited as inaccurate, racist, and a form of social Darwinism, but in attempting to measure the psychological states of his criminal subjects, he pulled criminology into the realm of psychiatry. He pegged criminals as impulsive, immature, deprived of affection, and lacking in restraint, all qualities that later studies bore out. This inspired others to wonder whether, if the seeds of criminality were psychological, a clever investigator could make his name by identifying one or more measurable and diagnosable mental disorders that led to such behavior.
In court, where psychiatrists were increasingly testifying on the sanity of accused criminals, the mind experts simply addressed whether the accused person could distinguish right from wrong, not how he might fit some psychological profile of criminally insane perpetrators. Through the early years of the twentieth century, scientists of many types honed in on various mental defects supposedly shared by convicts. In Britain in 1913, Charles Buckman Goring (no relation to Hermann Göring) found that weak intelligence was the only shared quality among convicts he studied. Later studies tagged certain psychoses and neuroses as better identifiers of criminals than low intelligence. By the 1930s an enormous study of the psychiatry of crime in the prisons of New York State was beginning to indicate that personality disorders were the sparks of much criminal behavior. These disorders included antisocial behavior, narcissism, and paranoia.
Consequently people who worked with criminals increasingly viewed crime as a medical problem. Throughout the American justice system, police officers, social workers, lawyers, and judges were accepting the important role of psychological factors in criminal behavior. Hundreds of psychiatrists applied their skills in prisons.
In 1943, in the middle of World War II, the American psychiatrist Richard Brickner published Is Germany Incurable?, a book that Kelley owned. Brickner tried to view the crimes of the German government as he would examine the behaviors of a patient. He declared that although many individual Germans were mentally healthy, their nation’s actions “have been typical of what the psychiatrist finds in certain highly alarming types of individual behavior.” He discovered evidence of German mental disorder in news dispatches that the journalist William L. Shirer sent back to the United States during the early months of the war. In one, Shirer described an audience’s mass salute of Hitler at the Berlin Opera, “their faces now contorted with hysteria, their mouths wide open, shouting, shouting, their eyes burning with fanaticism, glued on the new god, the Messiah.” In addition, Shirer wrote about Germans outraged over the British bombing of civilians in Freiburg while they took joy in their military’s own destruction of buildings and cities in Belgium and the Netherlands, and Brickner noted Göring’s wartime announcement that Germany was prepared to drive all of Europe into starvation to get enough food for its own needs. These incidents illustrated a peculiar sense of justice, “one rule for me, another for the rest of the world,” Brickner wrote.
Specifically, Brickner determined that the German nation, including the Nazi regime, suffered from paranoia, “the only mental condition that frightens the psychiatrist himself—because, unless checked, it may end in murder. . . . Murder is the logical denouement of its special outlook on the world.” Paranoiac people suffer from megalomania, a need to dominate others, feelings of persecution, and a compulsion to falsify the past to fit their view of the world. Fascism, aggression, and anti-Semitism, then, were only symptoms of what ailed Nazi Germany. “Instead we are confronted with a group who employ whatever power they may have under whatever system of government in a strangely intense and terrifying manner.” Brickner believed that many Germans were either paranoid themselves or highly susceptible to paranoid influences from others.
Diagnosing a group-held disorder that may cause aggression among the citizens of a warring nation is not the same, however, as searching for psychological traits that a collection of notorious war criminals might share. Kelley had no idea whether men like Göring could be cured of criminal tendencies, and he never tried to treat his Nuremberg patients in that way. Instead, he began to study them as subjects, as a biologist might scrutinize animals confined in laboratory cages. And he could do more than observe them—he could measure their psyches using such examination tools as the Rorschach inkblot test, which had interested him for so many years.
Kelley faced an ethical dilemma: Whom did he serve, the prisoners or the tribunal that would prosecute and punish them? When he met with prisoners to discuss and diagnose their problems, was he an agent of the prison or an advocate for the prisoners’ health? He met these questions as a strong authoritarian (as his children would later discover) who respected authority. His job as a Nuremberg physician was to maintain—not to treat or improve—the health of his prisoners. He would perform his duties diligently and thoroughly. To the prisoners he would do no harm. There was massive pressure to bring the Nazis to justice, and Kelley would gladly do his part in that effort—as long as he could satisfy his own professional curiosity about the Nazi warlords. The Nuremberg prison, he knew, was a psychiatrist’s playground.