The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (9 page)

The colonel soon went to work fortifying the prison with more guards. He declared it Nuremberg’s “dark secret” that his security staff were “bottom of the barrel,” inexperienced in prison work, and obsessed by returning home. Some amused themselves by scrawling graffiti on the prisoners’ cell walls; others didn’t know how to use a gun. There weren’t enough men to check on the possibly suicidal prisoners in their cells more often than every half minute. Although he eventually beefed up his guard staff, Andrus never succeeded in acquiring top-quality men for the prison’s security work and suffered a turnover rate of 600 percent during the next eighteen months.

Kelley, who had now been on war duty in Europe so long that Dukie was calling herself a war widow, had a new official job. In addition to doctoring the top Nazi prisoners, as he had at Mondorf, he was now tasked with assessing the sanity of the prisoners—who ranged in age from Baldur von Schirach at thirty-eight to Konstantin von Neurath at seventy-two—and judging whether they were mentally fit for a future trial. While he accepted his official duties with all seriousness, he set them within the demands of his personal ambition. He came to understand his purpose in Nuremberg “to be not only to guard the health of men facing trial for war crimes but also to study them as a researcher in a laboratory,” he wrote. If Nazism was an illness that could infect people anywhere, even growing to epidemic proportions around the world, then the men he visited in their Nuremberg cells represented isolated concentrates of the disease that could yield a protective inoculation. Although the cause of prisoners’ behavior lay outside his official purview, Kelley had to dig more deeply to satisfy his personal ambitions. He set for himself a thrilling, officially unsanctioned, and time-limited quest. “
I took it upon myself to examine the personality patterns of these men and, to a degree, the techniques they employed to win and hold power,” he wrote. His self-appointed mission was to understand the Nazi mind. “
Of course we were not interested in whether they were guilty or not,” Kelley later spoke of this time. “Nor were we steering
towards therapeutic care. We just wanted to find out as much as possible about them.”

He toured the prison soon after his arrival in Nuremberg.
The top Nazi prisoners occupied solitary confinement cells on the ground floor of the east-running corridor, an area called the War Criminals Wing. “
Cells lay on both sides of the corridor, and at either end circular stairways led to the two upper tiers of cells,” Kelley observed. The cells, nine by thirteen feet, were austere and stripped of anything a prisoner could use to commit suicide. Bolts fixed the beds to the walls. The mattresses were stuffed with straw. Damp plaster fell from the walls. Flimsy tables that could not support a man’s weight held the prisoner’s smallest personal items, and the rest had to sit in piles on the floor. One prisoner, the former economics minister Hjalmar Schacht, described the tables as “
unsteady wooden erections of thin lathe with a thin sheet of cardboard nailed on top. Writing at this table was sheer torment for it wobbled continually.”

A single barred window admitted some light. Chairs, by regulation allowed no closer than four feet from a wall, were removed at nightfall. That left the inmates little to do but sleep and pace the rough, stone floors. The entrance doors had foot-square observation windows, never closed or blocked, that also admitted meals. A single lightbulb attached to the outside of the door glowed during the day. “
A guy could go nuts sitting in a little cell with what some of these boys have got on their minds,” Andrus noted.

Colonel Andrus demanded silence in the cell block. Even the guards kept quiet except to give orders to prisoners or point out infractions of the rules. Like every prison, however, the Nuremberg jailhouse echoed with the sounds of forced confinement. Doors slammed and heels thudded on hard floors. Keys jangled. “
The very
air
feels imprisoned,” Andrus observed with satisfaction. Wire netting enclosed the spiral stairways and covered drops through which a prisoner could attempt suicide. Guards lined the hallways, initially one for every four prisoners, checking the inmates through the door windows that gave a view of the entire cells except for the lavatory area in a corner by the cell door. But even when they occupied this small sanctuary of privacy, using a toilet that lacked a cover and seat,
the inmates’ feet could be observed. The sentinels spied upon the prisoners day and night. Kelley observed that the top Nazis found this confinement humiliating and undignified, forcing them to taste “
the bitter gall of their own boastful words.” Compared with Mondorf, this place was tough.

Other rules regulated the behavior of the prisoners. Andrus made no allowance for the former rank of his captives. They could keep in their cells only a minimum of personal articles: family photos, books from the prison library (which required the purging of Nazi texts), toiletries, cigarettes, and writing materials. Inmates’ heads and hands had to remain visible to guards while they slept, no matter how much the cold made them want to bury themselves in their blankets, and the sentries aimed blinding flashlights into the cells at night to enforce this rule.
Prisoners were not allowed to turn away. Their letter-writing was limited and monitored, and they could receive few parcels. Supervised hot showers were limited to one per week. In a fortified inner courtyard the prisoners, two at a time, could walk and exercise for fifteen to thirty minutes each day among the undernourished trees. The exercising prisoners had to walk at least ten yards from one another or on different sides of a dividing wall. Armed sentries watched from encircling guard towers.

At unpredictable intervals, guards told the prisoners to strip and stand in a corner of their cells while staff searched for contraband: anything that could be used for suicide or escape, forbidden food, and unauthorized reading material. Kelley noticed that “
these shakedowns were so thorough that prisoners needed some four hours to restore their cells to order.” If any prisoner attempted escape, Andrus reached back to his iron rule at Fort Oglethorpe to decree the guards’ response: “
If time permits they will call ‘HALT’ before they fire. The Commandant will back them fully in their actions.”

Suddenly fallen from privilege and power, looking and feeling shabby in their mismatched wardrobes, many of the prisoners directed their resentment against Andrus. They found the commandant high-handed, prickly, comically formal, and disrespectful.
He said to their faces that he could not care less about their status or their fate. Göring belittled him as
“the
fire brigade colonel”; Schacht complained that
Andrus’s breath smelled of booze. Several felt personally humiliated by having to clean their own cells, and the enforced silence infuriated others.
Joachim von Ribbentrop was notorious for performing his cleaning chores poorly, while Keitel shone with military thoroughness.

On occasion, though, Andrus showed a surprising kindness. When
former propaganda minister Hans Fritzsche arrived at the prison late at night from Russian detention, the colonel apologized because the closed kitchen could not cook up a hot meal for the prisoner at that late hour, and he sent a piece of cake to the hungry man’s cell. On another occasion
Andrus rescinded his ban on shoelaces, at least for the older prisoners, acknowledging that their use provided an ease of walking that outweighed their possible danger as an aid to suicide. The commandant also had a corny though predictable sense of humor,
sometimes repeating his favorite jokes endlessly.

Colonel Andrus, who viewed his prisoners as “
a group of men who could probably be counted as among the worst the Lord has let live on this earth,” enforced a stifling daily routine. After rising early, the prisoners were given washing water by POW workers.
Breakfast, often cereal, biscuits, and coffee, arrived in metal containers without handles. Attendants tracked every spoon; knives and forks were not allowed. Lunch usually consisted of bread, soup, meat, and vegetables. Most of the prisoners ate heartily. The 6:00 p.m. dinner marked the day’s final illuminated activities. There wasn’t much difference between the dull sleepwalking of their daytime existence and the slumber they began at their 9:30 p.m. bedtime.

Kelley was one of a small number of prison staff members with unrestricted access to the War Criminals Wing. Another was Ludwig Pflücker, the kindly German physician, himself a POW, who attended to the prisoners’ daily health needs in the Nuremberg jail as he had at Mondorf. Pflücker maintained a surgery room where he measured blood pressure and treated such disorders as
former field marshal Wilhelm Keitel’s flat feet and former governor-general Hans Frank’s hand paralysis. Lutheran chaplain Henry F. Gerecke and Roman Catholic priest Sixtus O’Connor, fluent speakers of
German, held weekly religious services in the prison’s makeshift chapel, which contained an altar and organ. Although Allied interrogators working for intelligence units and the tribunal’s prosecution could not speak with prisoners in their cells, they frequently pulled the top Nazis out of the prison for question-and-answer sessions. Welfare officer John Dolibois was now working elsewhere in military intelligence, so others filled in to help Kelley with translation.

Thus confined, silenced, and restricted, the highest-ranking prisoners hungered for company. The captives “
were quite glad to talk to anybody, even a psychiatrist,” Kelly discovered. And when they talked, the prisoners often spoke freely, torrentially, and without prompting—far more openly than they ever confided in the Allies’ official interrogators—making these psychiatric interviews
some of the easiest Kelley had ever conducted. “Every man was an authority on his neighbor,” the psychiatrist said. “
If you wanted to know about A, you talked to B about him, and you may be sure that B brought out the worst features in A. Göring talked about Ribbentrop, . . . Streicher about Frick, and so on. The only time they talked about themselves was when they wished to glorify their own position and emphasize their cleverness or innocence.”

Loneliness and isolation increased the flow of their talk, but Kelley’s skills as an examiner also made the Nazis drop their barriers. He based his interviews on an unspoken yet tangible respect between patient and doctor. The prisoners realized that Kelley wanted to understand their thinking and motivations without casting them as monsters or characters from a nightmare. His background in general semantics made him sensitive to their words, able to find significance in the cadences of their talk and the movements of their bodies, and he gleaned much without them being aware of it. He was the one person in Nuremberg who persuaded this collection of scared men with oversized egos that he wasn’t merely interested in finding out what their misdeeds were—he wanted to understand
them
.

Every day Kelley spent hours with the top Nazis. He listened to them, scrutinized them, and recorded their thoughts,
giving all of them the
first mental examinations of their lives. For Kelley, the German language sometimes got in the way, but many of the prisoners spoke decent English. (
Göring, for example, understood English well, something many Americans learned when they saw his facial expressions during translated conversations.) In any case, at all times he met the prisoners with an interpreter, whose ability Kelley checked by rotating from one interpreter to another to compare their translations. Aware that the captives might say anything to make a favorable impression, Kelley also read their letters, found transcripts of their speeches, plowed through often execrable books they had published, and watched Nazi newsreels. He interviewed their acquaintances and any colleagues he could track down.

Colonel Andrus believed that danger lurked everywhere for the Nazi prisoners in
Nuremberg jail. POWs and criminals were a risk for taking potshots at his prize captives, for example, as they walked the few hundred meters between the prison and the Palace of Justice. His fears were realized one day when an escort was taking Göring from the prison to the adjoining building. The armed guard, following Göring by the mandated six steps, suddenly heard something whiz through the air, followed by a sickening thump. Embedded in the wooden planking behind Göring was an eight-inch SS combat knife. The sentry looked up, but was unable to determine who had thrown it or whether he or Göring was the intended target. “And if Göring himself had died who could prove that an American did not do it?” worried Andrus, who kept the dagger as a souvenir. The commandant wasted no time in erecting a covered and walled walkway between these sections of the justice complex to prevent assassination and escape.

After the prisoners had settled in, US military security experts devised what they hoped were escape-proof procedures to control movement between the prison and the adjoining Palace of Justice. Starting in the court area, they set up obstacles, barriers, bells, sentries armed with firepower
and billy clubs, peepholes, searches, square-grilled windows, all-business bureaucrats, warning signs, locked doors, permit requirements, and metal-clad surfaces confronting anyone trying to pass between the two sections of the complex.