The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  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.

  Even in the tribunal’s early weeks—with nine months of argument and evidence still to come—the weight of damaging information arising in court dragged down the defendants. Keitel confessed to Kelley that the military atrocities he had heard about mortified him with shame, and he lamented the time he had spent away from the field, insulated in Hitler’s headquarters. After one visit, when Kelley and Gilbert prepared to leave Keitel’s cell, the former supreme commander of the Reich’s armed forces stood at attention and begged, “Please let me talk to you once in a while, as long as I am not yet a sentenced criminal. Don’t despise me altogether. Come around once in a while. It gives me a little moral support to stand this ordeal, just to be able to talk to someone.” Gilbert found Keitel’s plea so humiliating “that I did not translate it to Kelley until we had left the hall.”

  Sometime at the end of December, Kelley announced his intention to leave Nuremberg and return to the United States. The psychiatrist had heard enough confessions of frightened men in solitary cells and had taken in enough courtroom drama. Kelley had not seen Dukie since 1942, and he wanted to go home. The couple’s letters during the waning months of 1945 kept anticipating Kelley’s return to the States. In addition, Kelley yearned to restart his civilian career and get to work on a book written with Gilbert about the psychology of the Nazi leaders. He had not yet formed his conclusions, but he sensed he had gathered enough information for that future volume. The Rorschach scores, IQ tests, and interview notes filled file folders. Kelley’s personal goals for his sojourn in Nuremberg had never been about the court inquiry. The psychological makeup of Göring and his Nazi colleagues concerned him more than their judicial fate. To the psychiatrist, the guilt of the German prisoners was never in doubt. Only their psychiatric workings and the causes of their abhorrent conduct as leaders—any thread that could possibly connect all twenty-two defendants—interested Kelley. He could predict the court’s verdicts against most of them, but he had to remove himself from Nuremberg to dissect their minds.

  Kelley had fulfilled his responsibilities to the tribunal, and his official duties wound down. He judged the prisoners to be in “good mental health” after a month of trial proceedings. “They are not the same lot of cocky, almost jaunty, individuals who entered the prisoner’s box,” he told a reporter. Before the trial, some had laughed about the odds of their swinging from the gallows, but now they were terrified that imminent execution awaited most of them.

  During his last days in the prison Kelley made the rounds of the prisoners to hear their final thoughts and to offer his predictions for their future. Hess admitted to feeling distressed by his unending suspicions that his food was being poisoned. Sometimes, Hess said, he had tried to overcome his obsession by eating the suspect food, but he would get stomach cramps or attacks of giddiness as a result. “He wanted to know if an individual with a strong mind could possibly entertain such ideas or did they indicate a process of insanity,” Kelley wrote. How the psychiatrist responded to Hess’s concerns is unknown, but by this time Kelley could do nothing to help. Hess was the only defendant who did not thank Kelley for his attention during the previous months.

  One expression of gratitude came from an unexpected source. On December 26 Rosenberg wrote a long letter that began with uncharacteristic warmth. Addressed to “the General Staff Doctor, Major Kelley,” it started, “I regret your departure from Nuremberg, as do the comrades confined with me. I thank you for your humane behavior and also for your attempt to understand our reasons.” Continuing with, “I hereby express my conviction that many conflicts would not have come to such a pass in the world if one had observed the laws of nature in politics,” Rosenberg returned to form and was off and running on a five-paragraph discourse against Judaism, “respect” for the natural dominance of some races over others, and the inevitability of a Jewish and Negro catastrophe in the United States unless Americans mobilized to protect the “white race.” Only in the letter’s final line did he return to the personal tone in which he had begun: “I wish you luck in your later life.” Then he signed off, “with best regards and repeated thanks, Alfred Rosenberg.”

  In one of their last meetings, Kelley and Göring pushed aside talk of politics or the trial. Göring described a conversation he had recently had with Hess, who commented on the sound of electric generators beneath their cells. Hess believed the noise was intended to keep the prisoners awake at night and ruin their nerves for the trial. Although Göring laughed off the incident, he wanted Kelley to know about it.

  When Göring learned that Kelley was leaving the prison, he broke down and wept.

  To Kelley, the trial and its run-up had served as fascinating laboratories for the study of the group dynamics of aggression, criminal motivation, defense mechanisms of the guilty, depression, and the response of deviant personalities to the judicial process. Kelley was with the prisoners as they faced their impending judgment and for the disturbing surfacing of their emotions. He saw the victors release their anger, and perhaps cleanse their own guilt for wartime brutalities they, too, had committed, through the accumulation of nose-rubbing evidence against the Nazis and the prosecution of the German leaders in court. The imprisoned individuals were set up to bear the responsibility for the war and its accessory horrors, perhaps so others could begin to feel less responsible. The deadly mess and blistering hatred of battle morphed into
a logical and calculated game of strategy in the courtroom, complete with the prospect of a satisfying verdict in the end. Kelley found himself in the service of a nation that, in battling an ideology intent upon ruling the world and taking charge of the tribunal’s administration, now emerged to lord over much of the planet.

  Leon Goldensohn, a thirty-four-year-old physician from Newark, arrived on January 8, 1946, to replace Kelley as Nuremberg jail psychiatrist. The new man impressed the prisoners and jail staff with his congenial manner, unaggressive style, and willingness to listen to the defendants for long stretches without challenging them or saying much at all in response.

  Douglas Kelley reunited with Dukie in Chattanooga in late January 1946, and he came home with boxes full of his records, memos, notes, and files from his time with the Nazis. When Gilbert became aware of the range of materials Kelley had taken—which included the handwritten autobiographies that the psychiatrist had asked the prisoners to compose and copies of Gilbert’s notes from his interviews with the Nazis—the psychologist was furious. His rage grew when he learned that Kelley had left no forwarding address. A couple of months later, Gilbert received a letter from Kelley saying that he now intended to write a book about Nuremberg without Gilbert’s participation. Gilbert could not fathom this change in their plans, but Kelley had likely concluded that as the officer superior in rank who had supervised the other man, he had moral ownership of all their research. With Gilbert still working with the prisoners in Nuremberg, Kelley could grab a head start in writing psychological profiles of the Nazis and an assessment of whatever personality traits they might share. He had leaped months ahead of his colleague.