The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (24 page)

Göring turned against most of his companions in the dock. Frustrated and stressed, “
he could not ask for drugs now, but we felt that he would have given his right arm for a good shot of cocaine or a big dose of paracodeine,” Gilbert observed. In the end Göring was beaten down by mountains of evidence and arguments that even the force of his personality and courtroom theatrics could not overcome. Equally bad from his perspective, the press and public had grown weary of the tribunal’s proceedings. Göring “
was no longer news; all that could be said for him was that he stuck it out to the last bitter day,” wrote his biographers, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, “sitting with his head in his hands or with his chin resting on his chest, deep in thought or lost in depression.”

Jackson had meanwhile recovered his eloquence in the courtroom. He ended the prosecution’s case with a speech that many observers found masterful. He noted the defendants’ assertions of their innocence, and added:

It is against such a background that these defendants now ask this Tribunal to say that they are not guilty of planning, executing, or conspiring to commit this long list of crimes and wrongs. They stand before the record of this trial, as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain king.

He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: “Say I slew them not.” And the Queen replied, “Then say they were not slain. But dead they are.”

If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as though to say there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.

On June 21, 1946, the judges of the tribunal began their private deliberations on the guilt of the defendants. Two more months passed, and then the prisoners had a chance to make their final pleas to the court. Göring made several unbelievable claims in his statement. “
I should like to state clearly once more before the Tribunal,” he said, “that I have never decreed the murder of a single individual at any time, and neither did I decree any other atrocities or tolerate them while I had the power and the knowledge to prevent them.” Hess’s statement was notable for its incoherence. He accused the prosecution of fabricating documents and producing dishonest witnesses. An “abnormal state of mind,” he claimed, prompted the Nazis to lead Germany as they had. As he rambled on, Göring tried to get him to stop talking. “
I do not regret anything. . . . No matter what human beings may do, I shall some day stand before the judgment seat of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him and I know He will judge me innocent,” Hess said before Justice Lawrence told him his time was up.

One thing gave Göring comfort: news that his wife and daughter were free. In March 1946 Emmy and Edda walked out of the Straubling detention camp and settled in as tenants at a hunting lodge about forty-five miles northeast of Nuremberg. Their new residence, where they would live for the next two years, was
so far from a school that Emmy taught the little girl, now six years old, at home. Emmy soon petitioned the International Tribunal:

I am submitting herewith a great request. Would it be possible for me to see my husband for a few minutes? I haven’t seen my husband for a year and a quarter and I am longing so terribly for him that I don’t see any way out; I need strength to carry on without my husband. A few minutes when I could see him and could hold his hand would help me no end. From the depth of my heart I implore you not to refuse my request.

The tribunal’s administrators had no objection to Emmy’s visit, but with the trial still in progress and the heavy security at the prison, Andrus refused to allow it. “It was contrary to prison regulations,” he noted. It was also contrary to Göring’s wishes.
He consistently refused to let Emmy or other relatives come to Nuremberg to meet with him or testify on his behalf.

Once the trial ended, Andrus permitted family members of the prisoners to visit the defendants before they were sentenced. Hess refused to allow visits from his family, but Göring retracted his former refusal. “
Whatever I thought about Göring, it was hard at that time to push the pathos of separation from my mind,” Andrus admitted. Emmy and Edda arrived in Nuremberg on September 14, intending to stay with Göring’s lawyer for two weeks, and photographers eagerly captured them walking the city’s streets. Emmy visited her husband every day except Sundays, and she brought along Edda after the first several visits. “You mustn’t cry, whatever you do,” mother cautioned daughter. A wire screen separated Göring from his family. Emmy’s requests to kiss her husband or at least hold his hand were denied. Physical contact “
meant one more chance to pass a suicide weapon,” Andrus noted. Upon seeing Edda, Göring, with security officers flanking him, lost control and cried. “
You’ve grown,” he got out. Edda recited to him poetry that her mother had taught her.

The families of the defendants had to leave Nuremberg on September 29, 1946, and a few days later, after a courtroom announcement signaling the end of the tribunal’s historic 218 days in session, the judges returned to deliver their verdicts. Sharpshooters manned the roof of the Palace of Justice as the judges pronounced eighteen of the defendants guilty, while acquitting Fritzsche, Papen, and Schacht. Seven of the convicted Nazis—Hess, Funk, Dönitz, Raeder, Schirach, Speer, and Neurath—were given prison sentences ranging from ten years to life, and the rest—including
Martin Bormann, tried in absentia—were condemned to death. Those to be hanged were Göring, Rosenberg, Streicher, Ribbentrop, Jodl, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Frank, Frick, Seyss-Inquart, and Sauckel. Emmy could not avoid telling Edda about her father’s death sentence, but she added, “
The sentence probably won’t be carried out. Papi will probably be exiled to an island somewhere,” like Napoleon. Allied authorities scheduled the executions for October 16.

By imposing a life sentence on Hess, the judges gave a nod to the prisoner’s long-standing mental aberrations. Despite his assertions of its falsity, Hess lapsed back into amnesia when faced with all the evidence of the barbarity of Hitler’s leadership and the criminal acts and policies of his colleagues in the dock. Kelley approved of the judges’ relative leniency toward Hess. The Nazi was hysterically deviant, paranoid, emotionally stunted, and deluded in his view of the Third Reich as a heroic regime. “
Death sentences for insane persons are not a part of civilized, democratic law,” he wrote, “so the Tribunal compromised by a sentence which will place him behind walls for life.” Kelley made a prediction: “Later, as he realizes that he will not hang, he may relax and appear to recover. Such response will, however, be only superficial; and Hess will continue to live always in the borderlands of insanity.”

In public Kelley expressed his overall satisfaction with the sentences, complaining only that Papen’s acts also justified a guilty verdict. “
A nice long prison term would have done him a world of good,” Kelley said. He predicted trouble for the three acquitted defendants. “They are dead ducks. The German people will see they pay—not for their sins, but for having lost the war. They were the three smoothest talkers. They talked themselves right out of jail. But they’ll not be able to talk themselves out of trouble.” His forecast for the freed men was partially born out: a German court later convicted Hans Fritzsche of Nazi crimes, and he died of cancer soon afterward; Papen also received a guilty verdict from a denazification court before winning his freedom on appeal. But Hjalmar Schacht never again faced a judge and remained active in German banking until his death in 1970.

Sentenced to the indignity of hanging, Göring asked Allied authorities to allow him instead to face a firing squad. Gilbert gave him the news that his request had been denied. The Allies wanted to hand him an ignominious death. Göring acknowledged to Gilbert that his sixteen-month-long effort to keep alight the glory of the Nazi years and to retain the admiration of the German people had failed during the course of the trial. “
You don’t have to worry about the Hitler legend any more,” he said. “When the German people learn what has been revealed at the trial it won’t be necessary to condemn him. He has condemned himself.” Gilbert warned Allied officials of the possibility of Göring killing himself. Hanging was for common criminals, so Göring revived an old contingency plan.

Uncharacteristically, he asked Chaplain Gerecke to give him Holy Communion the night before the scheduled executions.
Gerecke, hearing from Göring that he believed in God but not in the divinity of Jesus or the holiness of the Bible, refused. A few hours later Göring sat at the table in his cell and wrote out a note. He then folded the paper and moved to the toilet in the concealed corner of his cell. After a few minutes there, he heaved himself onto his bunk and lay still, taking care to keep his hands visible to the guard observing him as prison regulations required.

Göring no longer needed his hands. A glass ampule, which he had just removed from his body or from the toilet, was already in his mouth. He shifted his eyes toward the watching guard for a moment, then ground his jaws together. Potassium cyanide trickled from the broken capsule and into his throat. Göring gasped, rattled, and convulsed. The alarmed guard called for help and flung open the cell door, but by this time the Reichsmarschall may already have been dead.
Andrus was among the first to rush to the cell, and he observed that Göring’s eyes were closed, his mouth hung open, and his skin was tinged green.

The Reichsmarschall had addressed to Andrus the note he scribbled in the minutes before his death. It managed to smartly dig at the colonel while freeing his subordinates of responsibility for failing to detect the poison:

To the Commandant:

I have always had the capsule of poison with me from the time that I became a prisoner. When taken to Mondorf I had three capsules. The first I left in my clothes so that it would be found when a search was made. The second I placed under the clothes-rack on undressing and took it to me again on dressing. I hid this in Mondorf and here in the cell so well that despite their frequent and thorough searches it could not be found. During the court sessions I hid it on my person and in my high riding boots. The third capsule is still in my small suitcase in the round box of skin cream, hidden in the cream. I could have taken this to me twice in Mondorf if I had needed it. None of those charged with searching is to be blamed, for it was practically impossible to find the capsule. It would have been pure accident.

Dr. Gilbert informed me that the control board has refused the petition to change the method of execution to shooting.

No other clues suggesting how Göring was able to hide the poison emerged until decades later, when Telford Taylor, who assisted and eventually succeeded Robert Jackson as chief counsel for the prosecution in later Nazi trials at Nuremberg, disclosed his belief that a US soldier and Nuremberg jail guard, First Lieutenant Jack “Tex” Wheeler, had helped Göring secrete capsules hidden in his stored luggage. A book by Ben E. Swearingen,
The Mystery of Hermann Goering’s Suicide
, amassed considerable evidence that Wheeler had befriended Göring and may have performed this final favor in exchange for the Nazi’s valuables.
As recently as 2005, however, a new confession muddied the waters: Herbert Lee Stivers, formerly one of the white-helmeted guards in the Nuremberg courtroom, said he had secretly given Göring a pen containing the fatal capsule at the urging of his German girlfriend. Stivers claimed to have believed the capsule held medicine, not poison.

The Reichsmarschall’s suicide surprised Kelley. In San Francisco to give a lecture, he had told the press on the previous day that owing to Göring’s
high IQ and stubborn character, he expected the Nazi to make a good showing at the end. “
He’ll never weaken at the gallows. He has an historic perspective,” Kelley noted. “He’ll swing through the trap shouting, ‘Heil Hitler’—not because he’s brave, simply because he can already see himself in the history books.”

Kelley must have felt a chill when he learned that Göring had taken his own life. This compelling leader—a patient, subject, and close intimate with whom Kelley had discovered a communion of interests and personality—was gone. The magician had been taken in by one final sleight of hand. He had misjudged Göring, who had eluded his professional judgment. The psychiatrist may have detected a disturbing change in his own sense of permanence. Perhaps Kelley also felt a thrill that this great manipulator whose presence had dominated his life for five months had carried out an act that Kelley did not anticipate. But in retrospect, it wasn’t really surprising that the Reichsmarschall insisted on making his death a statement of defiance. It matched Göring’s ideals and image. Kelley did not see his suicide as cowardly. On the contrary, it “
demonstrates how ingeniously clever he was,” the psychiatrist told reporters, “and a last gesture to leave the whole American Army flat. In the German mind, his act is a fairly heroic one, placing him historically with the Big Four—Hitler, Himmler, Göbbels and himself.” If all of the other highest-ranking Nazis avoided the shame of hanging, why not Göring? Kelley wrote:

Göring, however, went a step further than his former associates. He stoically endured his long imprisonment that he might force down the Allied Tribunal and browbeat the prosecuting lawyers on their own terms. By these methods he established himself with the German people. His suicide, shrouded in mystery and emphasizing the impotency of the American guards, was a skillful, even brilliant, finishing touch, completing the edifice for Germans to admire in time to come.

This was a striking, surprisingly laudatory interpretation of the Nazi’s final act, almost as if Kelley were describing a glorious twist to the
curtain-closing of a play rather than the end of a life. A suicide, accomplished with skill, could wound enemies and build a grand legacy in one dramatic gesture. The image of Göring orchestrating his own farewell, on his own terms, burned in Kelley’s memory for years.