The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (8 page)

By midsummer 1945 the Hermann Göring familiar to his Nazi peers had returned to health in prison. Confident and charismatic, he ached to again challenge the world. He became a feisty leader of a group of several fellow prisoners who had found their way, unwillingly, to Mondorf. Like Göring, Karl Dönitz had sent messages to General Eisenhower protesting that his treatment was not in accordance with the Geneva Convention standards for prisoners of his rank captured in war. Eisenhower refused to order any changes in Dönitz’s treatment, noting in a public statement his displeasure
with the almost luxurious conditions of captivity in which some Nazis lived in the days immediately after their surrender. He declared that “
senior Germans will be given only minimum essential accommodations which will not be elaborately furnished and that all prisoners will be fed strictly upon the ration that has been authorised for German prisoners of that particular category.”

After two months the presence of Göring and other top Nazis in Mondorf was no longer a secret. Reporters spread word of the prisoners idling away their hours in a luxury hotel, and Radio Moscow gave its listeners a weird and fantastical description of Nazis confined to a palace in which they were served rich cuisine and vintage drinks on silver platters, grew fat and sassy, and were chauffeured around the prison grounds in luxury automobiles. Alarmed by these fabrications, Colonel Andrus declared an open house for the press on July 16 and issued subsequent invitations for reporters to examine the prison. He used these opportunities to show that no Nazis were being pampered on his watch.
Reporters arrived and wrote about the ordinary food, the condition of captives’ underwear, the tidiness (or lack thereof) of their cells, and the fences and guns that surrounded the prison.

Andrus’s discipline, reporters learned, was no sham. He enforced behavior that grated against many of the inmates. The Nazis were required to rise to their feet upon the arrival of visiting Allied officials, for example, and on one occasion Dönitz—like Göring, upset over treatment he thought unbefitting a former head of state—failed to do so. “
Get up, that man!” Andrus shouted, and Dönitz reluctantly rose from his chair. The early press reports, however, had already swayed public opinion. Allied officials wanted Göring and the other high-ranking Nazis moved to a real prison.

Göring, among others, still considered himself a captured chief of state and reiterated that he was puzzled by his continued incarceration. Unable to imagine a forthcoming trial—there was little precedent for trying heads of state—he expected eventual release from prison. Others had more
prescience; Franz von Papen, a former vice chancellor of Germany from the early years of the Nazi regime,
felt dread when guards moved him to a cell closer to Göring’s. Few of the prisoners, however, realized exactly what the Allies had in store for them. Over in the British detention center, Dustbin, where prisoners could listen to the radio, former Nazi munitions head Albert Speer heard about a planned war crimes trial. He hinted to other prisoners that he wanted a cyanide capsule similar to those Göring possessed, but none came his way.

William “Wild Bill” Donovan, director of America’s Office of Strategic Services and a future founder of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), worked on the nascent prosecution of the upcoming war crimes trial and
frequently visited Mondorf. On August 8 the four Allied powers at last agreed on a charter for the tribunal. Although France, Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR would cooperatively prosecute and judge the Nazi defendants, the United States took the leading role in administering the International Tribunal, and one of America’s Supreme Court judges, Robert Jackson, agreed to head the prosecution. Jackson’s team targeted Göring as the top-ranking Nazi in Hitler’s absence and devoted much of its energy to obtaining his conviction.

Three months after Göring had arrived at Mondorf, he and a select group of top Nazis learned that they had another move ahead. They did not know where or when. Perhaps in preparation for this transfer, on August 6 Kelley wrote up a detailed physical, neurological, and psychiatric evaluation of Göring. He judged his patient alert, perfectly adjusted to his prison surroundings, and cooperative. Göring’s environment barely affected his emotions; instead, “strong and labile,” his emotions “are generated primarily from within.” At the same time, Kelley observed, Göring showed no interest in the affairs of others. Because of his military training and self-discipline, Göring claimed the sufferings of others did not bother him. Kelley consequently declared him “an aggressive narcissistic individual,” fixated upon himself.

To help Göring sleep after his withdrawal from paracodeine, Kelley had prescribed the barbiturate phenobarbital. He concluded in the psychiatric
report: “
Internee is sane and responsible and demonstrates no evidence of any type of psychopathic deviation.” This appraisal of Göring’s fundamental sanity would not change in the months ahead.

In the early morning of August 12, a convoy of US Army ambulances and other vehicles appeared on the front drive of the Palace Hotel, and fifteen prisoners bearing satchels filed into them. The detainees, soon to be defendants, were
deprived of belts, ties, and shoelaces. (The remaining Nazi detainees traveled separately.) Three armed guards rode in each vehicle, and Andrus jumped into a lead car. Without escorts, sirens, or any sign of the importance of its passengers, the convoy quietly passed through Mondorf and proceeded to Luxembourg City, where a pair of C-47 transport planes awaited its arrival at an airfield.

Göring, carrying his red hatbox and yanking up his roomy trousers with his free hand, was among the first out of the ambulances. Ignorant of the cargo they were about to carry,
the pilots watched with astonishment as the Nazis boarded. The captives took seats on benches running lengthwise through the planes, which were furnished with little else except a toilet bucket and urinal.

Two guards, one carrying a .45-caliber pistol and the other a billy club fashioned from a mop handle, climbed in. An armed guard kept watch over the prisoners from the rear of each plane. As each aircraft took off and banked to the southeast, most of the prisoners kept quiet, including Julius Streicher, who was airsick. The exception was Göring. “Take a good look at it,” he told his companions as they flew over the Rhine River. “That’s the last you may ever see of it.” Göring later asked to inspect the controls up front. Colonel Andrus denied the request. The city of Nuremberg lay ahead.

Kelley followed the Nazis to the Nuremberg jail. His new orders were to evaluate the mental fitness of the top twenty-two men to face justice in the trial to come. His experiences with the Nazis at Mondorf, and with Göring in particular, continued to send his thoughts soaring beyond the concerns of his official duties. Was there a mental flaw common to these prisoners? Did they share a psychiatric disorder that caused them to participate in
the monstrous deeds of the Third Reich? Working among these Germans made Kelley wonder whether he could answer the pressing questions that occupied his mind. Perhaps his scientific study of these men’s minds could identify a telling factor that would be useful in the prevention of the rise of a future Nazi-like regime.

The need was urgent. Without official sanction, Kelley was developing a plan to explore the psychological recesses of the brains of the captive Nazi leaders.

4

A
MONG THE
R
UINS

F
or years the German city of Nuremberg hosted enormous Nazi Party congresses. Its name was used on a set of laws that denied basic human rights to German Jews, and the town stood for the principles of European fascism. But by mid-1945 it barely stood at all. Heavy shelling and forty air raids had pulverized the city.
A single British air attack in January 1945 had flattened the center of Nuremberg and killed eighteen hundred people. Residents had worked around the clock for a month to find and bury the dead.
More than half of Nuremberg’s homes lay in rubble—90 percent in the old part of town—and hundreds of thousands of Germans had fled the area.
Many of those who remained lived in damp cellars.

Colonel Andrus and his procession of German prisoners motored through a city filled with eerie scenes of people huddled around outdoor cooking fires, families occupying apartments with walls sheared off and rooms exposed to view, and hungry Nurembergers emerging from underground hovels to wander among heaps of bricks that still entombed their neighbors.
Staircases led to empty air.
Lacking money, patrons of the black market used cigarettes as currency.
The water was undrinkable. Residents of the city remained angry and dangerous. The place smelled of death, dust, and disinfectant.

Although few of the people in Nuremberg understood it—residents, occupiers, and prisoners alike—this battered city would soon host an event
more momentous than the Nazi rallies that had filled newsreel frames around the world a decade before.

The US Army requisitioned the Grand Hotel, a social center of the city that had previously housed guests at Nazi Party rallies. It was one of the first large buildings in Nuremberg to undergo repair; a bomb had gutted one part of the hotel from roof to street.
Previously the neighborhood had been a risky location for Allied soldiers, a place of frequent assaults and robberies by Nurembergers. In its new function, the hotel housed military and civilian men working on the future war crimes proceedings. (
Women lived in another hotel a few blocks away, nicknamed “Girls’ Town.”) For a long time it was the only large structure in town with electric lights; at night it blazed amid the surrounding darkness. “
To arrive at my room on the fourth floor, I had to walk a temporary gangplank strung over still another cavernous hole caused by a second Allied bomb,” one Allied occupier wrote. “The gangplank had a flimsy railing on one side and the whole contraption wobbled when one walked over it.” Here the tribunal staff lived and drank and danced in a crowded American-style restaurant called the Marble Room, which was closed to German civilians. (Similarly, Americans in Nuremberg were not allowed to patronize most German bars and restaurants.)
The bar was well stocked. Dinner, served by waiters in tailcoats, cost the equivalent of 60 cents. From the hotel’s doorways and windows floated the music of the victors, a sound that one visitor remembered as “
cheap and potent.”
The Russian occupiers sometimes broke out of their isolation to party and drink prodigiously here.

The Palace of Justice was one of a few sizable buildings in Nuremberg that escaped destruction, although
an air raid had damaged the roof, gutted its upper floors with fire, and collapsed the clock tower. In the last days of the war the building sheltered Nazi SS divisions making a final stand before Allied forces overcame them in May 1945, and months later defeat still colored its six hundred rooms and endless corridors. Fleeing Germans and occupying
Allied soldiers had left the Palace of Justice’s main courtroom a mess, with shattered windows, upended chairs, and Coca-Cola cases stacked on tables beneath the still-intact chandelier and baroque
clock.
Here in wartime a special court under the eye of the notorious Nazi judge Oswald Rothaug had delivered verdicts against the Nazi regime’s political and racial opponents. The Americans were collecting construction materials from hundreds of miles around in a $5 million effort to repair the building and enlarge the courtroom for a judiciary purpose that few outsiders yet comprehended. German workers cleared broken glass and rubbish from the high-ceilinged rooms. One day during reconstruction, as a reminder of how unsafe any standing building in Nuremberg remained,
the courtroom noisily collapsed into its own basement.
Meanwhile, tanks, armed soldiers, and antiaircraft guns protected the building from an SS uprising or other rumored possible attacks by Nazi partisans or victims of the fallen regime.

Colonel Andrus’s procession of top Nazis was headed for an adjoining three-tiered prison complex built in the nineteenth century.
Kelley thought the shape of the prison evoked a gigantic left hand. Three wings extended like fingers at the top, another wing formed the pinky at the west, and a final corridor, the future home of Göring and the other prominent Nazis, took the thumb’s place at the east. Part of the prison held German civilian criminals under a different commander, but
the area that Andrus directed confined some 250 men and women in three wings, many of them witnesses and possible defendants for future war crimes trials. The building was badly damaged, requiring timbers to prop up walls and workers to rebuild the outer prison walls, which had holes in them big enough to steer a truck through. German prisoners of war, many still wearing SS uniforms, made the repairs. At night some of those same POWs retired to cells in the prison, where only one guard looked after every fifty captives. “
There was nothing to stop them from overlooking into our prison yard,” Andrus observed, “hardly any obstacle to their choosing a moment and then shooting in themselves. . . . If some fanatical gang had taken it into their heads to lead a truck with high explosives and send it speeding through the wall to the jail itself, we should have all been blown skywards.” The facility was dangerously understaffed by Americans, and Andrus considered his security contingent unwilling castoffs and poor performers. He fumed over the
security mess he and the top Nazis were entering, and he thought they had arrived at Nuremberg too early.