Kelley gave the Rorschach to eight prisoners and Gilbert to sixteen, five of them previously tested by Kelley. Albert Speer, Rudolf Hess, racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, the “Butcher of Poland” Hans Frank, the head of Nazi-occupied Netherlands—each was shown ten inkblots and asked, “What might this be?” Göring had an even better time with the Rorschach than with the IQ test. He laughed, snapped his fingers in excitement, and expressed “regret,” according to Kelley, “that the Luftwaffe had not had available such excellent testing techniques.”
The prisoners’ results shared a few common elements—a certain lack of introspection, a propensity for chameleon-like flexibility in adapting to orders—but the differences far outweighed the similarities. Some of the defendants seemed paranoid, depressed, or clearly disturbed. Joachim von Ribbentrop was “emotionally barren” and a “markedly disturbed personality” overall; the Butcher of Poland’s results were those of a cynical, antisocial madman. Others were average, and some were “particularly well adjusted.” The cultured Schacht, high scorer on the IQ tests, almost seventy years old, “could call on an inner world of satisfying experiences to stand him in good stead in the stressful months prior to sentencing.” He rated as an “exceptionally well-integrated personality with excellent potential” and would later look back on his Rorschach testing rather fondly: “a game that, if I remember correctly, had been used by Justinus Kerner. Through the process [of spilling ink and folding the paper], many bizarre forms are created which are to be detected. In our case this task was made even more enjoyable since inks of different colors were used on the same card.”
An intelligent madman was one thing; a sane and exceptionally well-adjusted leading Nazi with excellent potential was something else. But those seemed to be the results. Gilbert refused to accept it. In his Nuremberg Diary, published in 1947, he described how Göring, after the guilty verdict,
lay on his cot completely worn out and deflated…like a child holding the torn remnants of a balloon that had burst in its hand. A few days after the verdict he asked me again what those psychological tests had shown about his personality—especially that ink-blot test—as if it had been bothering him all the time. This time I told him. “Frankly, they showed that while you have an active, aggressive mind, you lack the guts to really face responsibility. You betrayed yourself with a little gesture on the ink-blot test.” Göring glared apprehensively. “Do you remember the card with the red spot? Well, morbid neurotics often hesitate over that card and then say there’s blood on it. You hesitated, but you didn’t call it blood. You tried to flick it off with your finger, as though you thought you could wipe away the blood with a little gesture. You’ve been doing the same thing all through the trial—taking off your earphones in the courtroom, whenever the evidence of your guilt became too unbearable. And you did the same thing during the war too, drugging the atrocities out of your mind. You didn’t have the courage to face it. That is your guilt….You are a moral coward.”
Göring glared at me and was silent for a while. Then he said those psychological tests were meaningless….A few days later he told me that he had given [his lawyer] a statement that anything the psychologist or anybody else in the jail had to say at this time was meaningless and prejudiced….It had struck home.
It was a dramatic moment—a Shakespearean moment, the climax of Gilbert’s book. But what did the inkblot test add, beyond confirming what Gilbert already knew from Göring’s behavior and history? No double-blind study would ever prove that flicking the red was a sign of genocidal moral cowardice.
Kelley, a far more expert Rorschacher, saw the results differently. As early as 1946, even before the Nuremberg verdicts were handed down, Kelley published a paper stating that the defendants were “essentially sane,” though in some cases abnormal. He didn’t discuss the Rorschachs specifically, but he argued “not only that such personalities are not unique or insane, but also that they could be duplicated in any country of the world today.”
He expanded on the theme in his 1947 general interest book 22 Cells in Nuremberg, which opened by declaring:
Since my return from Europe where I was Psychiatrist to Nuremberg Jail, I have realized that many persons—even well-informed ones—do not grasp the concept [that psychology is determined by culture]. For too many of them have said to me:
“What kind of people were those Nazis really? Of course, all the top fellows weren’t normal. Obviously they were insane, but what sort of insanity did they have?”
Insanity is no explanation for the Nazis. 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.
Kelley insisted on going against what the postwar public strongly believed, and even more strongly wanted to believe. The Nazis were, he wrote, “not spectacular types, not personalities such as appear only once in a century,” but simply “strong, dominant, aggressive, egocentric personalities” who had been given “the opportunity to seize power.” Men like Göring “are not rare. They can be found anywhere in the country—behind big desks deciding big affairs as businessmen, politicians, and racketeers.”
So much for American leaders. As for followers: “Shocking as it may seem to some of us, we as a people greatly resemble the Germans of two decades ago” in the twenties, before Hitler’s rise to power. Both share a similar ideological background and rely on emotions rather than the intellect. “Cheap and dangerous” American politicians, Kelley wrote, were using race-baiting and white supremacy for political gain “just one year after the end of the war”—an allusion to Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi and Eugene Talmadge of Georgia; he also referred to “the power politics of Huey Long, who enforced his opinions by police control.” These were “the same racial prejudices that the Nazis preached,” the very “same words that rang through the corridors of Nuremberg Jail.” In short, there was “little in America today which could prevent the establishment of a Nazilike state.”
The Nuremberg Trials had failed to define the meaning of the war and the Holocaust, much less rebuild a shattered sense of the human community. The defendants had not been a homogeneous group of top Nazis, with the true leaders—Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels—already dead. Three of the twenty-four were even acquitted when the verdicts were handed down, including Schacht, the high performer on the psychological tests. Now Kelley was arguing that his most sophisticated technique had failed to detect a “Nazi personality.”
The lesson was unacceptable. Molly Harrower, the inventor of Group and Multiple-Choice Rorschach testing, was organizing an important international congress on mental health, to be held in 1948. It would be the perfect venue in which to publicize the Nuremberg Rorschachs. She sent Gilbert’s sixteen protocols to the world’s eleven foremost experts on the test, including Beck and Klopfer, Hertz and Rapaport, Munroe and Schachtel. All of them were eager to see the reports, but not one ended up contributing to the conference. Every single one suddenly found themselves with an unexpected scheduling conflict or some other excuse.
Surely the world’s leading Rorschachers could squeeze in a few hours to look at what promised to be the most significant tests in history? It is hard to believe that their unanimous refusal could be a coincidence. Perhaps they saw the implications clearly and did not want to go on the record saying so, because the public’s investment in the Nazis as uniformly evil was too strong. More likely, they themselves didn’t know what to make of what they were seeing and doubted Kelley’s and Gilbert’s competence or their own interpretations. Harrower, writing in 1976, explained the thinking of the time:
We operated on the assumption that a sensitive clinical tool, which the Rorschach unquestionably is, must also be able to demonstrate moral purpose, or lack of it. Implicit also at that time was the belief that this test would reveal a uniform personality structure of a particularly repellent kind. We espoused a concept of evil which dealt in black an
d white, sheep and goats….We tended to disbelieve the evidence of our scientific senses because our concept of evil was such that it was ingrained in the personality and therefore must be a tangible, scoreable element in psychological tests.
The 1948 conference panel fell apart, while Gilbert and Kelley pressed on, each eager to get into print first with the Rorschach results.
They had had a strained relationship at Nuremberg, which soon turned into another full-blown Rorschach feud. Major Kelley tended to call Lieutenant Gilbert his “assistant,” even though Gilbert was a member of the Counterintelligence Corps and not Kelley’s direct subordinate. Kelley called his Rorschachs the “originals,” while Gilbert called Kelley’s “premature,” “spoiled” (because given using an interpreter), and somehow “doctored.” The insults and retaliations, legal threats and counterthreats, escalated fast. “He continually startles me by his apparent neglect of basic ethics,” wrote Kelley. “I will not put up with anymore of Kelley’s nonsense beyond the specific concessions I have already made,” wrote Gilbert. Gilbert’s publishers “probably do not realize they are publishing stolen goods,” wrote Kelley.
Gilbert put out his psychological analysis The Psychology of Dictatorship in 1950. In the end, after requesting contributions from David Levy and Samuel Beck among others, he still didn’t publish the Rorschach data or any detailed interpretations—partly under legal pressure from Kelley, partly because he was the less proficient in Rorschach interpretation of the two, and partly because the Nuremberg Rorschachs did not give him the sweeping negative results he wanted. Kelley had likewise gone to Klopfer, Beck, and others. He didn’t care about their differences; he was “only interested in gaining from as many experts as possible the completest patterns of personality which can be elicited from the records.” But despite receiving long and labor-intensive reports, and despite continuing to believe in the value of the Rorschach, Kelley too declined to publish the Nuremberg Rorschach results and his interpretations. He eventually stopped answering the experts’ annoyed letters asking him what he was going to do with their work, and the material sat in boxes for decades.
In later years, Kelley continued to fight against demonizing criminals. He would play a part in the great midcentury artifact of sympathy for the outsider, when the director Nicholas Ray used him to vet the psychological and criminological accuracy of the Rebel Without a Cause screenplay. In 1957, he starred in twenty episodes of a popular and award-winning TV show called Criminal Man, designed to “bring about a better understanding by the public of the person who commits a crime” and to foster a shift from “simple vengeance” to rehabilitation. “No!” he shouted on camera in one episode, about whether criminals have physical features in common. “There is no such thing as a criminal type. It is simply folklore. It is like saying the world is flat. You can’t tell by looking. Criminals are not born.”
Kelley even refused to demonize Göring. They had developed an uncomfortably close bond at Nuremberg: “Each day when I came to his cell on my rounds,” Kelley wrote in 22 Cells, Göring “would jump up from his chair, greet me with a broad smile and outstretched hand, escort me to his cot and pat its middle with his great paw. ‘Good morning, Doctor. I am so glad you have come to see me. Please sit down, Doctor. Sit here.’ ” Göring was “positively jovial over my daily coming and wept unashamedly when I left Nuremberg for the States.” And a note of admiration, almost infatuation, crept into much of what Kelley wrote about the Nazi second-in-command, even as he was fully aware of the atrocities Göring had committed: “Göring was nobody’s fool, not even Hitler’s. He was a brilliant, brave, ruthless, grasping, shrewd executive.”
Kelley especially praised Göring’s suicide from swallowing cyanide on the eve of his execution: “At first glance his action may seem cowardly—an attempt to escape the punishment meted out to his compatriots. Careful consideration of his actions, however, reveals that here is the true Göring, contemptuous of man-made rules and regulations, taking his own life at his own convenience and in a manner of his own choosing.” Having denied the tribunal’s right to judge or sentence him, Göring had stoically endured the trial and now robbed the Allies of their victory, joining the other top Nazis who had already killed themselves. “His suicide, shrouded in mystery and emphasizing the impotency of the American guards, was a skillful, even brilliant, finishing touch, completing the edifice for the Germans to admire in time to come.” Kelley went so far as to say that “there seems little doubt that Hermann Göring has re-established himself in the hearts of his people….History may well show that Göring won out at the end”! Here is what Gilbert had to say: “Göring died as he had lived, a psychopath trying to make a mockery of all human values and to distract attention from his guilt by a dramatic gesture.” Gilbert’s later essays had titles like “Hermann Göring, Amiable Psychopath.”
Kelley remained a Salingeresque character to the end—like Salinger’s hero Seymour Glass, Kelley too had been a prodigy, part of a landmark Stanford longitudinal study of California schoolchildren identified as geniuses with IQs over 140, and like Glass, Kelley committed suicide. He chose the exceedingly rare means of swallowing cyanide, just like his antihero. It was rumored that the pill he crushed with his teeth in front of his wife and child on New Year’s Day 1958 was a souvenir from Nuremberg. Some even said that Kelley, a master prestidigitator on the side (vice-president of the Society of American Magicians), was the man responsible for smuggling the pill to Göring in the first place. He wasn’t, but there is no mistaking the significance of his final gesture: an identification with Göring’s “skillful, even brilliant, finishing touch.”
Gilbert’s fate was to end up at another trial of the century, one that would force a new reckoning with the Nuremberg Rorschachs.
—
In 1960, the Nazi who had been in charge of deporting Jews to death camps was captured in Argentina by Israeli agents. They brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial, and a court-appointed psychiatrist, Istvan Kulcsar, saw him for seven three-hour sessions and gave him a battery of seven psychological tests. These included an IQ test, a TAT, and what was by 1961 the world’s leading personality test: the Rorschach.
The tests told Kulcsar that Adolf Eichmann was a psychopathic personality with an “inhuman” worldview and a sadism so extreme that it went beyond the Marquis de Sade, deserving a new name, “Eichmannism.” Gustave Gilbert testified in the Eichmann trial, and his Nuremberg Rorschach material was admitted as evidence; he published “The Mentality of SS Murderous Robots” soon afterward, in the scholarly Holocaust journal Yad Vashem Studies, describing the Nazi personality type as a “reflection of the disease symptoms of a sick society [and] diseased elements of the German culture.” Kelley was no longer around to dispute Kulcsar’s and Gilbert’s interpretations, but others were.
The New Yorker magazine sent one of the most important political philosophers of the period, Hannah Arendt, to cover the trial. In the resulting book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” Eichmann’s was a new kind of wrongdoing, she argued: bureaucratic, unmoored from both character and personality. If anything, he was the antipersonality, not standing out from the crowd at all but unquestioningly accepting the group’s values. Arendt described him as an “average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical,” but such a person could be “perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.”
In today’s terms, Eichmann was not a robot but a joiner. The problem arose when what a person decided to join was Nazi Germany—or, looked at from the other side, when Hitler found unthinking joiners rather than individuals of integrity with a moral core. Eichmann was Arendt’s example of the inability “to think from the standpoint of somebody else”—even, in a sense, from an individual standpoint of his own. Such a banal failing could, in a Nazi context, “wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together.” But if Eichmann had no moral compass, then how could he fairly be judged?
The issue went far beyond Eichmann. When a Nazi tried to excuse his actions by saying he was only a cog in a machine, it was, Arendt provocatively argued, “as if a criminal pointed to the statistics on crime” and said “that he only did what was statistically expected, that it was mere accident that he did it and not somebody else, since after all somebody had to do it.” Psychology and sociology too—any theory “from the Zeitgeist down to the Oedipal complex” that “explained away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of determinism”—made it pointless to pass judgment.
Arendt called this “one of the central moral questions of all time,” and it was an impossible dilemma. One might be tempted to distance oneself from an Eichmann, denying any shared humanity, but the rule of law presupposed a common humanity between the accuser and the accused, the judge and the judged. Or one might insist on common humanity, assuming that every human conscience has the same bedrock values and that there is such a thing as crimes objectively “against humanity” or orders that should never be obeyed. But the Nazis, and Eichmann in particular, showed that these universal ideals were, in Arendt’s words, “truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.” People do what they have to do, and “about nothing does public opinion everywhere seem to be in happier agreement than that no one has the right to judge somebody else.” And yet Eichmann’s case cried out for judgment.
While Arendt was writing about the trial, a psychologist at Yale named Stanley Milgram was responding to Eichmann differently, by designing an experiment meant to discover how ordinary people could take part in genocide. “Could it be,” Milgram famously asked, “that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?” Originally, Milgram planned a preliminary run in the United States before taking the experiment to Germany, where he expected to find people more prone to obedience. That turned out not to be necessary.
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