The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (12 page)

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.

Brickner took pains to keep from tarring all Germans as mentally disordered evildoers, and he acknowledged that paranoiac behavior at times blossomed in many other countries, including in the American Ku Klux Klan movement. His point, though, was to show how paranoia had infiltrated Germany’s mainstream culture, which suggested ways for other countries to respond to it, as a psychiatrist might treat it in a patient. He proposed placing Germany after the war under “mental reconstruction”: supporting clear-minded Germans while demonstrating to the rest that healthy behavior had benefits and that their paranoiac values had damaged their country. Brickner maintained, however, that holding the Nazis responsible for their crimes before an international tribunal would be futile. A trial of German leaders would only strengthen German paranoiac delusions that their people were persecuted martyrs.

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.

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omehow, in a turn of events that would have flummoxed military administrators of the other Allied occupying forces, Kelley had become essential to the operations of Nuremberg prison. British military representative Airey Neave called the psychiatric and psychological scrutiny of the captives “essential to the American way of life at Nuremberg.” The language of psychiatric evaluation was foreign to the other armies, but Kelley turned its novelty even in the American context into an advantage, emerging as an authority figure many of the Nazis felt comfortable confiding in or at least engaging in unofficial conversation. To him they said things that remained untold during sessions with the prosecution-minded official interrogators. Through his presence, responses, and open ear, he sensitively orchestrated humane moments in the prison as he pursued his goal to illuminate Nazi behavior.

Because of Kelley’s limited knowledge of German, good translators were crucial to his work. After an absence of several weeks, welfare officer John Dolibois was back, much to Kelley’s relief. Dolibois suspected that Kelley overestimated the knowledge of psychology he had gained from his college courses, but in any case the men worked well together.

Some weeks later, at the end of September 1945, another valuable translator arrived, US Army Sergeant Howard Triest. A German native born in Munich and a veteran of the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach, Triest had blond hair and blue eyes. He concealed his Jewishness from the
Nuremberg inmates and believed they spoke more freely to him as a result. Even sitting in the same room with them demanded steely nerves and great self-control, because much of Triest’s family had perished in Auschwitz. “
I had too much personal history to be charmed by any of them,” he says, “and I knew that whatever they’d say to charm would be a damned lie.” He remembers getting along well with Kelley. “He didn’t seem to me a fellow who would be shaken up by a lot of things. . . . [He] never really came open with his private life or with his history. I had no idea where he came from, what he did [before the war], or what his family was like.”

Kelley later claimed he had devoted at least eighty hours to each of the twenty-two defendants—probably an exaggeration, because it would have left him with no time to do anything else at Mondorf and Nuremberg—but out of scientific obligation and by preference he spent the most time with Göring. Amid the scant furnishings of Göring’s cell—with letters, packets of K-ration sugar, and a deck of American Legion playing cards on his table and sometimes bundles of laundry on the bed—they built a rapport and courted each other with a mutual fascination, which is not exactly the same as feeling sympathy or respect for one another. Each understood what the other said and how he felt, realized he could more or less be himself when they were together, and enjoyed the other’s company. Göring wanted attention to improve his mood, the open ear of an intelligent conversational partner who could help establish his historical legacy, and an occasional favor. Kelley was drawn in by this spectacularly intriguing and rewarding psychological subject who was a captive source of information: a prisoner facing damning evidence of his criminal behavior, whose emotional responses could be appraised.

As Kelley could see, in embracing Nazism, Göring had sought to satisfy his personal designs and craving for power. His loyalty to the party was not about Hitler, not about Germany, and least of all about the preservation of a supposed Aryan race. His aim was to advance Hermann Göring, and
he had joined the Nazis to lead a rising party. His self-interest was notable even compared with other narcissists.
Göring possessed the most undiluted self-centeredness Kelley had ever experienced.

The psychiatrist understood the tragedy of Göring’s fate, at least as the Reichsmarschall saw it. As Hitler’s official successor until the confusion and treacheries of the final days of the war, Göring had nearly attained his dream of ascending to the supreme leadership of Germany, to become the second Führer, when Hitler committed suicide. By then, however, the cause was lost. “
He reached his goal too late,” Kelley acknowledged. “At Nuremberg he was a Führer without a country, a marshal without an army, a prisoner accused of waging aggressive war against peaceful peoples and of the deliberate murder of millions.”

On the other hand, Göring wanted Kelley to know that he was not Hitler’s stooge. He claimed that increasingly as the war went on, he had seen Hitler’s miscalculations and faulty judgments, and he was one of the few Nazi leaders who had called them to the Führer’s attention. Alone among the prisoners at Nuremberg, Göring said, he had argued with Hitler. Mischievously, Kelley replied that Americans generally regarded all top Nazis, Göring included, as Hitler’s yes-men. “
That may well be,” Göring said, “but please show me a ‘no-man’ in Germany who is not six feet underground today.”

The prisoner usually was warm and friendly in conversation. “
In fact, when Göring chose to do so, he always tried to persuade us with his charm and relaxed conversation,” recalled Dolibois. “Even when he challenged what to expect in court, he did so with a smile and often friendly sarcasm. Of course . . . Göring did not flash his good side unless he expected the visitor to be receptive.”

If Kelley had been familiar with the work of Hervey Cleckley, an American psychiatrist who had introduced the concept of the psychopath in
The Mask of Sanity
four years before, he might have applied that label to Göring. But there is no evidence that Kelley had yet read Cleckley’s book.
The Mask of Sanity
characterized psychopaths as people who carry on normally in public, making a pretense of conforming to social norms while
they conceal savage impulses and a dearth of empathy, which appears only in private. Kelley never used the term
psychopath
to characterize Göring or any of the other Nazi prisoners, but his notes of their conversations described classic psychopathic behavior.

During one talk, for example, while chronicling his early years in the Nazi Party Göring mentioned his collaboration in the 1920s with Ernst Roehm in establishing the SA, the organization’s army of brownshirted storm troopers. Kelley saw that this difficult work, vital to the survival of the Nazi Party, had bonded Göring and Roehm in friendship. Then, without making much of it, Göring related how he and Roehm later started competing for Hitler’s attention. The competition ended tidily when Göring ordered Roehm murdered during the bloody party purge of 1934, the Night of the Long Knives. Story over: Göring made it plain to Kelley that he was ready to move on to a new topic.

“But how could you bring yourself to order your old friend killed?” Kelley blurted out. Göring sat silent and fixed his eyes on the American. The look expressed bewilderment, impatience, and pity. It was as if Göring were thinking, “Dr. Kelley, I must have underestimated you. Are you an idiot?” Years later, Kelley had not forgotten what Göring did next: “Then he shrugged his great shoulders, turned up his palms and said slowly, in simple, one-syllable words: ‘But he was in my way. . . . ’”

The shrug signified his release from the responsibility of considering his comrade’s welfare and interests. What else could a man like Göring do? He had other concerns. Kelley sometimes let pass this sociopathic thinking, which seemed to belong to someone neither sane nor insane, but in a twilight region of social and cultural derangement. Psychopaths as we now know them, with their lack of interest in others and focus on advancing their own narcissistic goals, were not on Kelley’s radar.