The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (15 page)

As an escape from his troubles, Baldur von Schirach, the former Reich Youth Leader and governor-general of Vienna, had begun writing poetry.
One sample he penned for the psychiatrist’s approval, titled “
Dem Tod
” (“To Death”), signaled his apprehensions about the future:

Your dark eye I have so often seen,

That you have become like an old friend to me.

When the bullets scourged, you stood at the mark,

And looked at me. To the left and right fell

My neighbor. Yet you turned away.

I greeted each grave later, all alone.

When the bombs burst from the sky,

You drew to me the house’s silent guest.

Yet you have not done your work on me.

I know, my friend, that your eye is on me.

Visitors to Schirach’s cell thought he appeared gaunt and haunted, a look perhaps befitting a prison poet. He confided to Kelley something that he did not want to tell anybody else, even lawyers working on his defense. “
He had intervened to save several Jews from concentration camp at the risk of his neck, because he had been forbidden to make a single exception,” Kelley wrote after an interview with the prisoner on October 27. “But in view of the great mass of murdered victims, he did not want to lower himself to seek clemency because of a few people he had spared, making a pitiful spectacle of defense like some of the others.”

Life in Nuremberg prison went on for the captives. They traipsed to the exercise yard wearing a ragtag assortment of clothing that they had brought with them or scrounged from the staff. Göring sported yellow top boots that the guards coveted and offered packs of cigarettes for, Rosenberg walked the grounds in overalls, and Schirach had somehow acquired a military camouflage jacket. Although Streicher was shunned and Schacht avoided his fellow captives, the rest gathered together in small groups to share bits of news, wonder about their families, complain, and speculate
on their futures. Göring always tried to keep their hopes high and encouraged them to remember their status as German leaders. All they had done wrong, he assured them, was to be defeated by the Allies. Göring’s job as booster was difficult, because, as Kelley believed,
nearly all of the Nazi prisoners suffered from depression.

Colonel Andrus wondered what they dreamed about at night. It didn’t surprise him that many of the prisoners dreamed of him. “
I was to them a symbol of what they were facing,” Andrus speculated. “There is always a tendency among people confined in prison to hate their custodians. The custodian is to them the embodiment of the retribution they have to face for the evil they have done.” The prison’s pastors, however, embodied something more benevolent to the prisoners, at least among those who attended services,
which did not include Rosenberg, Streicher, and Hess. Both the Protestant chaplain, Henry Gerecke, and the Catholic priest, Sixtus O’Connor, were popular among the inmates, and they poked fun at each other about the dastardliness of their followers. “
At least we Catholics are responsible for only six of these criminals,” Father O’Connor told the Reverend Gerecke. “You Lutherans have fifteen chalked up against you.” Gerecke declared his conviction that the top Nazis were not “a breed apart.” He found them similar to other people, though poisoned by prejudice and greed.

Göring, who often hastened to chapel services to get a good seat, was among the prisoners Gerecke saw most often. Seated near the altar and its simple ornaments, with an organ wheezing nearby, Göring sang hymns louder than anyone else. “He almost drowned out the organ,” Andrus remembered. He may have valued chapel only for its social opportunities, though, because he was a lapsed Lutheran, he informed Gerecke.

Hans Frank, the balding and dour former governor of Nazi-occupied Poland who had taken part in the Nazis’ “Beer Hall” Putsch of 1923, had become something of a model prisoner under the influence of Father O’Connor, who baptized the Nazi in his cell on October 25. A lawyer, once Hitler’s personal attorney, who devolved into a brutal administrator responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews and Poles, Frank had tried
to erase Polish and Jewish culture in his region.
He now made a point of thanking prison staff for their attention, appeared emotionally composed, and professed finding relief in his Catholic faith after what he described as betrayal by Hitler when the Führer took away many of his political titles at the start of the war. (
Frank had left the Church years earlier when he joined the Nazi Party.) “
He feels essentially guilty, but since rejoining the Church has developed a serenity of approach as a protection,” Kelley observed. “
It was obvious that Frank, to himself, was a great tragic figure, a representative of God, who had sold his soul and was but purchasing it back at the cost of his life,” Kelley noted, and Frank’s sanctimonious attitude—what the doctor called his “beatific tranquility”—left a bad taste in the psychiatrist’s mouth.

Kelley formed a more positive impression of Admiral Karl Dönitz, a friendly though somewhat distant figure who often exhibited a sharp sense of humor and showed no trace of depression. With graying hair and mischievous eyes, Dönitz made good-natured jokes about the inconveniences of prison life, from the food to the spartan and seatless toilet in his cell. In a psychiatric report to Andrus, Kelley called Dönitz “
one of the most integrated personalities of the whole setup” and a man blessed with “creative capacity, imagination, good inner life.” Intent on improving his English, he read poetry and impressed Kelley with his intelligence. “
It is my opinion that Hitler used good judgment in selecting Dönitz as his successor. Dönitz is undoubtedly a leader of great stature and a most competent man,” the psychiatrist asserted.

Some of the prisoners readied themselves for the war crimes indictments they suspected were coming, while others wrote correspondence and read books. The prison librarian commented on the high level of the reading material the Nazis requested.
Many wanted works by Goethe. Hess was one of the most ferocious readers in the months to come, plowing through two books a day. Schacht read through several volumes of Beethoven’s letters.

The psychiatrist also spent time in other wings of the Nuremberg jail building, which housed lower-ranking suspected war criminals and people
the Allies were holding as possibly useful witnesses in forthcoming trials. There he frequently spoke with Karl Brandt, formerly Hitler’s personal physician and director of the Nazi euthanasia program for mentally and physically disabled citizens. Brandt worked under the direction of Leonardo Conti, who headed the medical programs of the Third Reich. In the final days of the war Hitler had ordered Brandt’s execution because the doctor had abandoned Berlin, against orders, with his family. In a notebook Kelley kept of his prison interviews, he jotted down about Brandt: “
Authorize death of those people who according to human consideration are incurable. . . . ‘Existence without living.’” Kelley came home from Nuremberg with a set of X-ray images of Hitler’s skull, taken to help treat a sinus infection in 1944, and Brandt may have guided Kelley to them.

Kelley was assembling an archive of Nazi psychological profiles. Collecting ran in his blood, especially from his McGlashan ancestors. He surely knew how deeply the acquisitive and categorizing impulses influenced his family. His grandfather McGlashan had collected twenty thousand specimens of butterflies, gassing them and displaying their bodies in cases he had designed and patented. He could watch them at his leisure, stare at them as closely as he wanted. Their mysteries were frozen, no longer impenetrable. Each butterfly contained a world. Decades later, McGlashan’s grandson found the specimens of Nuremberg just as engrossing.

He soon received permission from Andrus to begin administering the Rorschach inkblot test to the Nazis. Kelley knew the test would have little value in court, and in fact the International Tribunal never heard the results. He turned to the inkblots because he knew the assessment well and grabbed at the chance it offered to scrutinize this historic collection of men. The Rorschach assessment worked in a way similar to the techniques of general semantics, by using storytelling to enter the minds of subjects and examine their emotions, attitudes, and personality.

Even in the unnatural setting of a prison, the Rorschach opened a door to fundamental areas of the personality that might otherwise resist
scrutiny. Kelley called the Rorschach “
the most useful single technique in a mental examination.” If the Rorschach results of the Nuremberg prisoners showed patterns or similarities, Kelley would be close to discovering essential features of the Nazi mind. Like stage magic, the test depended on the skill and interpretive artistry of the examiner.

Kelley gave the Rorschach tests to the prisoners in their cells, usually with each Nazi sitting on his bed. He preferred to work with an interpreter alongside, even if the prisoner was fluent in English. Kelley had trained both Dolibois and Triest in scoring Rorschach records to avoid errors in translation. Bored with the monotony of their prison lives, most (but not all) of the Nazi inmates cooperated with the testing, and “many of them commented favorably upon the testing program,” Kelley wrote. Occasionally Kelley had to return to an inmate to clarify a response, which was made possible by “
one of the advantages of having your subject always on hand,” a special privilege of the psychiatrist who worked in a prison. He planned to repeat the Rorschach tests about a month later.

The prisoners of course interpreted the cards in various ways. Card VII, which shows an empty white area surrounded by a semicircle of connected gray and black blots, prompted a remarkable variety of responses. Karl Dönitz said, “This is very nice. Faces of two little girls looking at one another. They have the expression of being curious to learn the secrets of life. They may be dancing together, too.” Robert Ley looked at the same card and described it as, “Cloud formations. Thunder clouds.” Joachim von Ribbentrop gazed at the picture for ten seconds and remained silent.

The Rorschach testing especially intrigued Göring, who carried on an animated dialogue during the examination, laughing, snapping his fingers, commenting on the difficulty of interpreting some of the cards, and thoroughly enjoying the process and attention. Göring “expressed regret that the Luftwaffe had not had available such excellent testing techniques,” Kelley wrote in a preliminary report on the examinations. The lack of testing tools was the Nazis’ own fault, Kelley observed. “
Perhaps if the Nazis had not so whole-heartedly curtailed the function of the intelligentsia of
Germany, these testing techniques which were for a large part developed in Germany would have been readily obtained.”

Kelley’s interpretation of Göring’s results focused on several distinctive features. Most of Göring’s responses included what Kelley called “kinesthetic determinants”: the frequent use of human or animal movement in his descriptions of the images. To Kelley’s surprise, this characteristic revealed Göring’s introverted personality, not the extreme extroversion the psychiatrist expected to find. Kelley also noted Göring’s fondness for the word “fantastic” in his Rorschach responses, which often described witches, prehistoric animals, ghosts, and whirling dervishes. The psychiatrist found a narcissistic preoccupation with himself in Göring’s descriptions of such figures as “a spook with a fat stomach” on Card IX. Just as significantly, Göring accepted the inkblot pictures as whole situations instead of as details of larger scenes. “There is little attempt at critical analysis, either of the details themselves or of their relation to the general concept of which they may be part,” Kelley observed. “The situation is dealt with in the grand manner and Göring passes on to the next. . . . [T]his is his natural way of behaving.”