The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (5 page)

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T
HE
P
SYCHIATRIST

W
hen Douglas Kelley stepped into the drama of Ashcan, he had no experience with war criminals and little expertise in treating the withdrawal of addicts from drug dependency. The assignment had come up unexpectedly on August 4, 1945, when he received new orders from the US Army’s executive command.
“You are to contact Captain Miller . . . [at] Palace Hotel at Mondorf Lesbains, a small town approximately 10 miles south of Luxembourg City,” it read. “Captain Miller will give you specific instructions as to your mission.” Kelley did not know that these orders would catapult his life in a new direction.

During the previous two months a swarm of psychiatrists and other physicians had applied for permission to come to Mondorf to examine and try to find the reasons for the behavior of the top Nazi captives. One, the American psychoanalyst John Millet, hoped to “add to our information concerning the character and habitual desires of the German people.” Others who sought to interview the Nazis wanted far more than their time.
“Some went as far as to propose dissecting the brains of the . . . perpetrators: this would involve executing the men by a shot to the chest so as not to damage brain tissue,” writes medical historian Daniel Pick. The US military turned them all down in favor of one of its own who had not even requested the honor.

It was a plum assignment, a rendezvous with the men widely regarded as the worst criminals of the century. Kelley’s period as the supervisor of
several psychiatric hospitals had taught him that aberrant behavior often had mysterious and fascinating sources, and he set his own goals for his stint in this holding pen. He arrived eager to probe the prisoners for signs of a flaw common to Nazi leaders: the willingness to commit evil acts. Did they share a mental disorder or a psychiatric cause for their behavior? Was there a “Nazi personality” that accounted for their heinous misdeeds? Kelley intended to find out. “The devastation of Europe, the deaths of millions, the near-destruction of modern culture will have gone for naught if we do not draw the right conclusions about the forces which produced such chaos,” Kelley later wrote. “We must learn the why of the Nazi success so we can take steps to prevent the recurrence of such evil.”

Kelley had formed immediate impressions of Göring. From his meetings with the other Nazi prisoners, he recognized that Göring “was undoubtedly the most outstanding personality in the jail because he was intelligent,” as Kelley wrote in his medical notes. “He was well developed mentally—well rounded—a huge, powerful sort of body when he was covered up with his cape and you couldn’t see the fat jiggle as he walked, a good looking individual from a distance, a very powerful dynamic individual.” But having also lightly touched on politics, the war, and the rise of Nazism during their initial cell-bound conversations, Kelley was not blind to Göring’s dark side. The ex-Reichsmarschall displayed ruthlessness, narcissism, and a coldhearted disregard for anyone beyond his close circle of family and friends. That very combination of characteristics present in Göring—the admirable and the sinister—heightened Kelley’s interest in him. Only such an attractive, capable, and smart man, who had smashed and snuffed out the lives of so many people, could point Kelley toward the regions of the human soul that he urgently wanted to explore.

Outsized ambitions ran in Kelley’s family. The McGlashans, the family of Kelley’s mother, June, were one of California’s most precocious and eccentric clans. Kelley was proud of their extravagant saga. They were larger
than life, an obsessive assortment of achievers, collectors, and builders of edifices, especially monuments to themselves. The patriarch was Charles Fayette McGlashan, who had arrived in California at age seven from Wisconsin and grew up to become an energetic criminal defense lawyer, newspaper publisher, lover of nature, inventor and holder of patents, and amateur historian.

In the early years of the twentieth century Charles McGlashan’s house crowned a hill overlooking Truckee, a rough Northern California town crouched in the Sierra Nevada above the blue jewel of Lake Tahoe. Surrounded by poppies, bachelor buttons, and lilac bushes and perched on a tall stone foundation that sparkled with mica, the house was a startling, two-story structure with white Grecian columns and tall, arched windows that flashed in the sun. Truckee residents long remembered the magical view of this bizarre dwelling, its windows illuminated by twinkling light-bulbs, that rose from the moonlit snow. Every room held treasures that told stories: Persian rugs, cases crammed with Edison music recordings, sculptures and mementoes, furniture chosen with great deliberation.

“
Our house sang out from the hill, conspicuous as a wedding cake,” remembered one of Kelley’s cousins. In the rotunda Charles McGlashan often planted himself in his favorite seat, a black, padded-leather chair that faced a view of a spectacular mountain peak. A footbridge connected the house to a similarly designed circular tower atop one of the region’s natural oddities: the Rocking Stone, a sixteen-ton, delicately balanced boulder famous for tipping back and forth at the slightest push. In decades past members of the Washoe Indian tribe had stored food at the base of the boulder, whose motion frightened scavenging animals.

The tower sheltered McGlashan’s extensive collection of twenty thousand butterflies, Indian curios, and artifacts from one of the nation’s most infamous tragedies. During the winter of 1845–1846, several families migrating west got stuck in a blizzard and had to spend months in the freezing mountains near Truckee. Many in this group, known as the Donner Party, died, and before the rest were rescued, the starving survivors resorted to
eating the corpses of their family members. McGlashan spent years collecting remnants from the group’s campsites in the nearby mountains and built his house just three miles east of Donner Lake, the scene of the worst months of the tragedy. The museum tower on the Rocking Stone housed many gruesome artifacts, such as the little toe bone of one of the casualties, scavenged from one of the party’s fire pits. Nothing like this incongruous pair of buildings existed anywhere else in the Sierra Nevada.

For years McGlashan, an imposing figure with a nobly receding hairline and an aggressive stare, had roamed the region on horseback, stopping to chase butterflies for his collection. “
Give me a mountain meadow and you can have the metropolises of the world,” he once told a friend. “I would rather chase butterflies on the Truckee meadows than compete for position and fees and fame in any city. Big frog in a little pond? That suits me.”

However, Charles McGlashan couldn’t help seeking fame and controversy. As a reporter he traveled to Utah to follow up the threads of the much-disputed Mormon Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857. Two decades later he met James F. Breen, a Donner Party survivor, and that encounter set him upon an obsessive, lifelong pursuit of the story of the tragedy, which many in the region considered better forgotten. Lewis Keseberg, the villain of Donner Party lore who had allegedly hastened the deaths of other members of the group, especially intrigued him. Was this man as evil as many people believed?
McGlashan tracked down Keseberg in Sacramento, interviewed him, and became convinced of his innocence.

McGlashan took responsibility for locating the rotted cabins of the Donner Party families. At age thirty-one he wrote
History of the Donner Party
, an authoritative work based on scores of interviews with the survivors, which remains in print to this day.
In the decades that followed, he took charge of an enormous and ultimately successful effort to build a large monument to the Donner victims at the site of one of the cabins. Others may have seen the Donner tragedy as a horror story that leant no distinction to the Sierra region, but to McGlashan it was something more personally important. To him, restoring the sad events of the migrants to
contemporary memory brought distinction to himself and his family, and he took ownership of that calamitous winter. He came to view his research on the events of the Donner Party not just as a groundbreaking interpretation of a human disaster, but as proof of his own worth and achievement. And McGlashan’s descendants accepted this view. Their family’s distinction was wrapped up in the grisly facts of the human catastrophe that had happened so close to their land. The McGlashans ensured that the Donner Party would never be forgotten. In turn, the Donner Party became a foundational element of the McGlashan family identity. It was a powerful, strange, mutual dependence.

This all-consuming project took a toll on McGlashan’s family. His wife, Nona, disliked his frequent absences and his attachment to his work, which made him distant and tense even when he was home. He hiked out to the Donner cabins on the slightest pretext, content to sit among the ruined foundations and tree stumps while imagining that horrific winter decades before.
He collected splinters of wood from Donner Party cabin logs, which he later encased in vials and sold for a dollar each to fund his Donner monument. When McGlashan was absent from the meals that Nona prepared for their family, “his empty plate enlarged before her eyes until it filled the whole table,” one of their daughters wrote. “If you want to know the truth,” Nona said late in life, “I was the chief sufferer of the Donner Party.”

McGlashan’s polymath interests led him in many directions, including politics (he was elected a California assemblyman in 1884 and chairman of the notorious Anti-Chinese League soon after, as well as being nominated for the state’s governorship by the Labor Party) and biology (with Kelley’s mother, June, he discovered a butterfly species that became known as
Melataea macglashani
). To others unfamiliar with his workaholism, McGlashan seemed attentive, polite, sharply intelligent, and sensitive. He had a hypnotic gaze, white hair, and a mustache that gave him authority, and complete ease before an audience. If California could boast of imperial families in the years before Hollywood showbizdom, Charles McGlashan headed one of them.

His daughter June followed him into law and was one of the first women admitted to the California bar.
They practiced together for several years, and courtroom observers noticed that June had inherited her father’s fire as a speaker and persuader. McGlashan taught June, a fellow introvert, that it was pointless to try to make others understand one’s own motivations. He told her to simply do what she thought was best without bothering to explain why and see if others would follow. It was a haughty approach that belied the value of differing opinions and the importance of forming connections with other people.

Charles McGlashan had won many plaudits for his work in law, government, history, and science—he was a great man in the minds of most people around him—and he fed on public praise.
When publicly challenged, such as when the committee controlling the erection of the Donner Party monument changed his wording of the stone inscription, he would quickly withdraw his support and become bitter. June shared her father’s dark and brooding qualities, which lay hidden behind the public sparkle. She bottled up her anger and tried to contain her tension.
Before arguing a case in court, she often clenched her fists so tightly she drew blood. And like her father, June would hole up to restore her energy when she felt drained.

In 1909 June married George “Doc” Kelley, a Truckee dentist who practiced law part time, and she left her father’s office. Doc was famously affable, a man of simple enthusiasms who immersed himself in the civic life of the town, and who had originally courted June’s sister. For a few years June continued working, as the county deputy district attorney, a job that sometimes pitted her against her defense attorney father in court. “
The ring of steel and clash of swords brought juries and witnesses to the edge of their seats,” a McGlashan family member recalled. “They insulted each other in sophisticated, polished displays of a high intense disdain that drew on the dramatic instincts of both to the fullest.”

In August 1912 June gave birth to a son, Douglas McGlashan Kelley. The family moved from Truckee to San Francisco in 1919, and Doc set up a dentistry office at Ninth and Irving, where he worked for more than fifty years. Young Douglas felt the intense love and protection of June,
which contrasted with the easygoing companionship of Doc. To her, the boy was the embodiment of the McGlashan line; he was not an amiable nonentity, as June increasingly came to find her husband. As a student, Douglas immersed himself in brainy activities: helping build dioramas for local science exhibits, selling cards that described the constellations, hunting wildflowers, collecting stamps, and reading hungrily and widely. In research notes he took around this time describing the attributes of people born under his astrological sign, Leo (and surely ascribing them to himself), Douglas listed: “
Super-vitality, courage, brusque, waste no time in politeness, men of action, energy, enterprise, never listless, stubborn . . . very touchy, passionate . . . perhaps genius . . . generally rise to top of whatever position they choose.”