The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  The defendants’ dock was next to the main entrance of the courtroom, with two long rows of seating for the Nazi leaders. Directly in front of the defendants were chairs for their defense attorneys. The judges’ seats faced them all, filling a bench beneath four large windows with green curtains drawn to keep out sunlight. The flags of the four Allied powers stood behind them. Translators given the difficult job of instantly interpreting the proceedings into German, English, Russian, and French would occupy glass booths along the wall to the right of the judges. Wires connecting the translators with speakers’ microphones and headphone outlets spread across the floor and would trip up participants for the duration of the trial. Nearest the judges were the court reporters. (Defendant Schacht soon observed these tribunal staff, many of them chewing gum, and fell into the “optical confusion” of imagining they were chewing on words.) Areas for the prosecution teams, segregated by nationality, clustered around four tables in front of a press section. Nearby was the podium from which prosecuting and defense attorneys would address the court. Press members covering the trial had the finest seating of all, upholstered and widely spaced chairs, and there was a booth in the back of the courtroom reserved for newsreel cameras. All spectators had to sit in the more spacious north end of the courtroom or in the balcony above. One chair, dwarfed by the judges’ dais and the large seating areas for spectators and tribunal staff, stood by itself like an insignificant piece of furniture. It was for witnesses. But it was very important, as Göring would eventually remind everyone.

  More than thirteen hundred people contributed to the International Tribunal through the delegations of the four Allied powers and the teams of the defense attorneys, and over two hundred journalists were accredited to report on the trial for radio stations and publications around the world. Cafeteria workers at the Palace of Justice served about fifteen hundred lunches to trial participants each day.

  In their cells the prisoners typically wore a motley assortment of garments, but Andrus wanted these men when in court to represent the careful care and attention they had received as inmates of his jail. “We do not want them to be in a condition where they might inspire pity,” he said. He made sure their uniforms and suits were cleaned and pressed daily during the trial. He ordered tailors to produce new suits for several prisoners. More discriminating than most of his colleagues, Schacht complained that the prison-supplied suits were sewn from “very inferior material.”

  Andrus directed a somber rehearsal on the day preceding the start of the trial. He led the inmates the several hundred yards from the prison, through the covered passageway that he had ordered built as protection from outside attack, up the elevator, and into the courtroom. He ordered the sentries to remove the prisoners’ handcuffs and lined up the deposed Nazi officials like schoolboy performers in the order in which they would fill the double rows of the defendants’ dock. The order matched the listing of the defendants in the tribunal’s indictment: Göring first, followed by Hess, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, and the rest.

  On the morning that the tribunal opened, November 20, 1945, guards distributed suits, belts, ties, and the eyeglasses that the prisoners had surrendered the previous night. Amid tension that Andrus noticed caused “an unusual stir in the prison,” the inmates dressed themselves. Naturally no mirrors that could be broken and turned into daggers graced any of the cells, so Göring devised a clever procedure for the all-important examination of his own appearance. He used the backdrop of his lawyer’s dark suit behind the glass partition that separated the two men as a surface that reflected his image. Göring scrutinized himself in the glass, giving special attention to his hair.

  Judged by later security standards, the courtroom was remarkably free of weapons. Andrus feared the prospect of a prisoner grabbing a gun from a guard and doing something disastrous. The commandant made certain he was one of only two people in the room who would have a firearm while the tribunal was in session. Beneath his jacket, he kept a pistol and shoulder holster. Another prison officer wore a handgun. The many guards who escorted prisoners and watched over the courtroom proceedings carried white billy clubs, weapons threatening enough “to dissuade any prisoner if he got out of hand, or to prevent any spectator from making an attack,” Andrus hoped.

  Göring entered first. He wore his pearl-gray, brass-buttoned Luftwaffe uniform, stripped of all insignia and symbols of rank, and he appeared energized to retake the world stage. His months of confinement, which had cured him of his drug addiction and obesity while giving him time to reflect on his past and plan his defense, had left him mentally sharper than he had been in the final months of the war. But spectators also detected a softness within his undeniable strength that seemed disturbing. His garb draped his leaner physique more than clothed him. His face—pale, lined, yet strangely youthful—had the impassive and frightening look of a mannequin’s. At times he seemed to appraise the visitors in the gallery, looking for an early sign of the mark he would leave on history. New Yorker reporter Rebecca West, describing Göring’s blend of calculation, mean humor, and femininity, noted that he resembled madams of brothels with “the professional mask of geniality still hard on their faces though they stand relaxed in leisure, their fat cats rubbing against their spread skirts. . . . He was the only one of all these defendants who, if he had the chance, would have walked out of the Palace of Justice and taken over Germany again, and turned it into the stage for the enactment of the private fantasy which had brought him to the dock.” He took the most prominent seat, at the far left of the front row in the defendants’ box.

  Hess entered the courtroom with a desultory shamble, appearing almost indifferent to the court’s proceedings. His strange manner fascinated observers. With a face that reporter John Dos Passos thought “has fallen away till it is nothing but a pinched nose and hollow eyes and chinless mouth,” he looked up into the corners of the ceiling like a trapped animal and sometimes gave an odd, anxious laugh. To West, he appeared “plainly mad; so plainly that it seemed shameful that he should be tried. His skin was ashen, and he had that odd faculty, peculiar to lunatics, of falling into strained positions which no normal person could maintain for more than a few minutes. . . . He looked as if his mind had no surface, as if every part of it had been blasted away except the depth where the nightmares live.” In this first public appearance since he had piloted his Messerschmidt from Germany years earlier, he bore scarcely any trace of the Nazi rally speaker, pulsing with fanatical assurance, whom people remembered. Hess did, however, occasionally shed his sickly reserve to share brief comments with his seated neighbors, Göring and Ribbentrop, who was wearing sunglasses.

  Other defendants made lasting impressions upon entering the courtroom. Dos Passos wrote that Streicher looked like “a horrible cartoon of a Foxy Grandpa,” and Rebecca West judged the young Schirach as “like a woman in a way not common among men who looked like women. It was as if a neat and mousy governess sat there, not pretty, but with never a hair out of place.” Frick, who in his checkered jacket was the only defendant not wearing a military uniform or banker-gray suit, stood out like a circus performer. There was a slapstick air to some of the entrances, as Fritzsche had to shove past other defendants who mistakenly emerged in the courtroom ahead of him. Schacht looked like an angry walrus. While they waited for the proceedings to start, a few of the prisoners read newspapers. Taken together, the Nazis looked dull and deflated, as if sheer ordinariness had driven them to lead the world into war. Guards in white helmets stood behind them at attention. Only Kaltenbrunner, still convalescing from his cerebral hemorrhage, was missing. He would be absent for the first fifteen days of the trial, while his attorney represented his interests.

  Once the judges called the court into session at 10:00 a.m., the tribunal’s first business was to present the indictment against the defendants, a recitation that took prosecutors hours to complete. For most of this time, amid the heat of the packed room and the smell of fresh paint, t
he Nazis chatted with one another and watched with boredom—they had already read the indictment—although Göring beamed when the indictment accused him of the theft of a memorable bit of French property: eighty-seven million bottles of champagne. He also made faces, shook his head, and commented to others throughout the first day. Hess passed much of this time engrossed in a novel titled Der Loisl, the Story of a Girl and broke his concentration only to smile when prosecutors first spoke Hitler’s name. Later, during a court recess, he grimaced from one of his periodic attacks of abdominal cramps. He gripped his stomach, rocked in his seat, and brought his head down to the rail of the dock. Kelley approached him but gave him no medicine, advising Hess to keep rocking. He soon recovered and sat up straight, appearing “alternately politely interested and bored” with the proceedings.

  Few of his colleagues took an interest in Hess’s brief display of agony. Schacht, one of the few defendants paying close attention to the proceedings, laughed aloud when prosecutors mentioned the charge of conspiracy. Some of the Nazis entertained themselves by flipping from one translation to another on the headphones with which they were supplied. The defendants ate lunch together in the courtroom during a break while everyone else fled the closeness of the space. It was the first group meeting during their captivity. A magnanimous Göring distributed cigarettes to his codefendants. The men discussed the events of the morning as they ate, but they all snubbed Streicher, refusing to include him in the chatter. He tried to engage Gilbert in small talk, noting that of the twelve or thirteen previous times he had been put on trial for crimes, one had been in this very courtroom. Ribbentrop tried to explain the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to Hess, who said he knew nothing about them and complained of what he believed was the illegality of the tribunal. The former foreign minister later suffered an attack of vertigo and tinnitus in the courtroom, collapsed, was given a sedative, and returned to the defendants’ dock. Sometime during the day Hess leaned over to Göring and whispered, “You’ll see, this apparition will vanish, and you will be Führer of Germany within a month.” Göring remarked to Gilbert that now he was sure Hess was crazy. By the end of the day most of them were fatigued, and many were snoring in their cells by 7:00 p.m.

  The next day the defendants had to make their pleas in response to the charges in the indictments. Göring, the first to rise, began to read a lengthy statement justifying the Nazi government and defending the actions of the accused. Chief Justice Geoffrey Lawrence silenced him and demanded the Reichsmarschall enter a simple plea, which was “not guilty in the sense of the indictment,” a phrase that soon passed the lips of all the Nazi leaders in the dock.

  Chief prosecutor Robert Jackson delivered an opening address that was admired for its eloquence and declaration of the international legal significance of the trial. The Allies, he said, were not accusing the German people of high crimes, but hoped to establish international standards for conduct in war and peace that would bind rulers, generals, and armies in the future. “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow,” Jackson told the courtroom.

  The trial continued, focusing on the German leaders’ planning for war while making false overtures of peace, Nazi aggression against Russia, wartime propaganda, the atrocities in Poland, and the suppression of Jews and Christian opponents. The press reported minutiae of the defendants’ activities. “If Göring swore under his breath at a witness (and he often did), the oath would be ringing around the world within minutes,” Andrus noted. “If Hess changed the book he was reading in court, millions would know the next day the title of the replacement.”

  By the time the trial had begun, Göring craved the chance to give Nazi Germany one last display of brilliance before a world audience. Any glory gained would be mostly his, and he had nothing to lose. He made it his goal to rally his codefendants to defend themselves, be proud of their actions, and accept the punishment of the victors as a unified group—which he at first rosily predicted would be exile from Germany and later presented as a likely group execution that would grant them all an afterlife as national martyrs. He persisted in this vision of honorific monuments and the adulation of future Germans. All this could be theirs if they only cooperated at the trial. Months spent passively behind bars had made him thirsty to act aggressively and defiantly. Unlike many of the others, Göring did not try to blame Hitler or pin the responsibility for the actions of the Nazi regime on colleagues. He repeatedly admitted to his own decisions and portrayed himself as a moving force of the Reich. Several weeks into the trial, he summed up his attitude in a remark audible to spectators in the courtroom: “Damn it, I just wish we could all have the courage to confine our defense to three simple words: ‘Lick my ass.’”

  The Nazis continued to eat lunch together on trial days, and Göring took advantage of the gatherings to rein in opinions that he considered damaging to their common cause. “When the trial began he demonstrated his peculiar abilities of leadership immediately by assuming his place at the head of the dining table,” Kelley observed. “No one questioned this. His right to command was apparently taken for granted by all of the prisoners. . . . He said to me: ‘We are sort of like a team, all of us who have been accused, and it is up to us to stick together to accomplish the strongest defense. Naturally, I am the leader, so it is my problem to see that each of us contributes his share’.”

  Göring did not want to hear in court any admissions of wrongdoing or public denunciations of the Nazi regime. When Keitel tentatively suggested during lunch that Hitler should bear most of the blame for their country’s downfall, Göring cut him off. “You men knew the Führer,” Göring said. “He would have been the first one to stand up and say, ‘I have given the orders and I take full responsibility.’ But I would rather die ten deaths than have the German sovereign subjected to this humiliation.” Frank angrily took up Keitel’s cause. “Other sovereigns have stood before courts of law. He got us into this,” he declared, “and all that there is left is to tell the truth!” Then Frank and three others stood up and left the room. Some defendants, including Frank, expressed dismay over the charges in the indictment that Göring had stolen artworks and other valuables from conquered nations; in their minds, these were selfish, criminal acts that tarnished the Reichsmarschall’s credibility.

  Despite such setbacks, Göring retained influence over most of the defendants by tailoring his arguments to their concerns and insecurities. He told some that he would shoulder responsibility for their misdeeds. Others he plied with heart-to-hearts about the indignity of casting aspersions on their previous government. To a few, Göring declared absolute defiance against the Allies, saying the victors had no moral right to judge Germany’s internal decisions. In his cell between court sessions, he repeated to Kelley the same arguments about Nazi Germany’s war preparations during the 1930s, which were in violation of the Treaty of Versailles agreement that concluded World War I: “Of course we rearmed,” Göring, seated once more next to the psychiatrist on his cot, said. “We rearmed Germany until we bristled. I am only sorry we did not rearm more. Of course, I considered treaties as so much toilet paper. Of course, I wanted to make Germany great. If it could be done peacefully, well and good. If not, that’s just as good. My plans against Britain were bigger than they ascribe to me even now. When they told me I was playing with war by building up the Luftwaffe, I replied I certainly was not running a finishing school.”

  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 impell
ed 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.