The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (20 page)

Sometime that autumn,
Kelley and translator Howard Triest traveled together to Erlangen, a town less than ten miles from the prison. They stopped at a university library and stumbled upon a hoard of books that Allied authorities had seized in denazification sweeps. Many of the books had been written by the top Nazi prisoners, and Kelley and Triest pulled out samples for their own collections. After they returned to Nuremberg, their army truck loaded with Nazi volumes, both men sought the autographs of the imprisoned authors on the title pages of the volumes and later returned to America with the books. Kelley never explained why he collected the
Nazi books, but they surely provided a conversation opener when he met with the prisoners, and he likely gained insight into the authors’ minds through their response to the requests for autographs. Besides, Kelley remained a collector of exotic species—in his case, Nazis. Speaking sixty-five years later, Triest described his own collection as “a souvenir of my time at Nuremberg and [a] tangible reminder of a difficult personal period. It was something I could show my friends and family when I returned to America to say that I really had been there. I had been with the leaders who had killed my people. For me it was about remembrance—remembrance of Nuremberg. I never thought back then that the trial would attract the interest and have the status that it does today.”

From those who trusted Kelley, the psychiatrist gleaned strategic information that he considered important enough to pass along to the tribunal’s prosecutors. He sent a series of memos to William Donovan revealing changes in the health of the defendants and their psychiatric states, but probably the most important tidbits for Donovan were the doctor’s disclosures about the prisoners’ defense strategies. In a memo on November 11, for example, Kelley wrote about Göring’s intention to call as a tribunal witness Lord Halifax (E. F. L. Wood), a conservative British politician who had met Göring eight years earlier when the Englishman favored appeasing Germany in its expansion into Austria and Czechoslovakia. Halifax was Britain’s foreign secretary when Nazi troops bloodlessly crossed the border into those countries, and he held the job of ambassador to the United States as the trial of the Nazi leaders approached.

Göring told Kelley that he had sent a letter to Halifax in 1936, a prewar peace overture. “
He states that Halifax received this letter, which could have prevented the war,” Kelley informed Donovan. In the same memo, Kelley detailed Schirach’s admission of guilt as a Nazi Party member, his acceptance of responsibility for developing the Nazi youth movement, and his acknowledgment that he signed persecuting decrees against the Jews of Austria. Jodl, Kelley reported, pointed out that the Russians committed atrocities of their own on the Eastern Front and planned to defend himself by asserting his duty to follow military orders. He strenuously denied
enriching himself with looted civilian property. Frank, on the other hand, appeared to welcome his prosecution and “has become immersed in the belief that the accused are to be subject to a divine punishment,” Kelley wrote. “He has become extremely enthusiastic in feeling that the entire group has been weak in not shooting Hitler at least two years ago.” The Nazi leaders, Frank declared, worked “in league with the devil” and now faced punishment from God “in a form more devastating than any punishment man has yet devised.” From their conversations, Kelley knew that Frank criticized his fellow prisoners for trying to save their necks instead of accepting God’s judgment. “He seems to be at about the point where he might be willing to place the blame on other ‘weaker’ members of the accused group,” Kelley wrote to Donovan. “He has stated twice that if they plead not guilty he at least will plead guilty.”

Kelley’s communication with Donovan inspired another missive to the prosecution’s special assistant, from someone only identified by the initials J. E. S.:

When Major Kelley dictated his report to you today, he talked with me some about the defendants, and I thought the following bits would be of interest to you even though the major did not include them in his statement.

It has become increasingly clear that the defendants are shaping up into a homogeneous group, all accepting Göring as their leader, with each of these good minds contributing to the general defense. This, says the major, will make the case much more difficult.

The writer went on to tell Donovan that Kelley believed the Nazis did not fear the prosecution’s plans to convict them through the massive written documentation of their misdeeds. “A document, whereas it convicts one or two beyond a doubt, does equally well in exonerating the rest, in their opinion. . . . Dönitz made the remark: ‘The Americans are preparing my defense for me—typical Yankee humor!’” the memo reported.

Kelley followed his first communication to Donovan on defense strategy with another a few days later. This time he wrote that Göring planned to cite a book he had published in 1933,
Aufbau Einer Nation
(
Building a Nation
), in his own defense. The book, Göring claimed, supported his defense that he formed the Gestapo only to fight communists and that the police organization held to that purpose while Göring controlled it. In the Reichsmarschall’s estimation, the book also demonstrated that Hitler’s rise was a revolution that “while slightly bloody was nowhere near as ruthless as similar Russian or French revolutions.” A scribbled notation on the memo reads, “Can we get this?” (To translator Triest,
Göring claimed to have written
Aufbau Einer Nation
in a single weekend.)

Acting more as a physician, on November 17 Kelley gave Donovan his medical opinion that the unforgiving and backless benches for the defendants in the Nuremberg courtroom “
will prove a trying hardship if the trial is of much duration at all” for the older members of the Nazi leadership. He was especially concerned for Keitel, Dönitz, Funk, Göring, and former Nazi commissar in the Netherlands Seyss-Inquart, whose rheumatism would cause them suffering and who “after many days might well collapse.” Kelley recommended better seating with backs and seat cushions, with which most of the other seats in the courtroom were already furnished. Photos of the courtroom in use show that the defendants did receive a backrest, although cushions aren’t visible.

In the end, Donovan had little time left to make significant use of Kelley’s information. He and Justice Jackson had begun clashing over the best approach to prosecuting the Nazis, with Donovan envisioning swaying the judges through skillful examination and cross-examination of courtroom witnesses, and Jackson wanting to rely on the piles of incriminating documentation that the Allies had discovered. Donovan was also skeptical about charging the defendants, especially the military officers, with membership in organizations that had committed crimes. After a series of prosecutorial quarrels,
Donovan left the team and was on his way home by the end of November.

Back in Chattanooga, Dukie awaited her husband’s return with her sister, Leora Brooke, and their parents. A newspaper photo showed her and Leora—whose husband served in the European theater as an army combat engineer—standing in their parents’ living room. Dukie held an ornate silver teapot, an accessory for the home she hoped she and Kelley would soon share. Wearing a tailored jacked and knee-length pleated skirt, she looked far more stylish than her older and taller sister. She had not seen Kelley for three years and communicated with him only through letters and occasional reports from his colleagues in the army who had returned to the States.

Near the fifth anniversary of their wedding, Dukie was interviewed by a Chattanooga journalist about her husband’s activities at Nuremberg. She was encouraged to comment on what it was like to be married to a psychiatrist. “
Sometimes they know what you’re thinking,” she said, “when you don’t want them to.” With his marriage on hold, Kelley was applying that skill to the Nazi defendants.

7

T
HE
P
ALACE OF
J
USTICE

T
he trial approached. All of the top Nazi prisoners had engaged lawyers and were preparing their defenses. The German attorneys “were legally and politically respected,” Colonel Andrus acknowledged, but their trips into and out of the jail greatly increased the prisoners’ contacts with the outside world, as well as opportunities for smuggling. The suicides of Conti and Ley still weighed heavily on the commandant.
He instituted a new round of security measures designed to keep the prison secure and all tools of self-destruction out of the hands of the inmates. Anytime a prisoner and his lawyer exchanged a document, a guard inspected it. Guards removed from the prisoners’ cells anything potentially dangerous—shoelaces, razor blades, and neckties—and even confiscated eyeglasses at night. The Nazis underwent searches when they returned to their cells and when they bathed, and guards turned their cells upside down while the prisoners were out.

“
And still we were finding contraband,” Andrus lamented. A raid of General Jodl’s cell yielded a nail concealed in a tobacco pouch, a six-inch-long piece of wire, nine tablets made of unknown ingredients, and lengths of rag. Keitel had hoarded a supply of aspirin, a chunk of sheet metal, a stash of belladonna tablets (useful in treating digestive disorders), a screw, and
two nails, and he hid the shard of a metal heel-rim in his wallet. Questioned about the origin of the latter item, which had not come from his own shoe, Keitel with some pride would only say, “I have had it for a long time.”

In Ribbentrop’s messy cell, guards discovered nine unrecognizable pills (four hidden inside socks) and a sharp, two-inch-long piece of metal. Even the good-humored Dönitz had a forbidden collection: shoelaces, string, a screw, and a bobby pin. “We had no idea what he was planning to do with them,” Andrus wrote. Schacht was surreptitiously holding onto ten paper clips. Sauckel hid a broken spoon. Elsewhere in the cell block guards found shards of broken glass, loose nails, and a fragment of a razor blade. Only the cells of Göring and Hess yielded no secrets.

Protective security intensified elsewhere on the Palace of Justice grounds. A German employee of the courtroom library, the young niece of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, had warned of a possible attempt by “werewolf” Nazis to blow up the building—defendants, prosecutors, judges, evidence, and all—to prevent the trial. “
There is so much that they do not want exposed and they are so bitter,” Christine Rommel said. Allied authorities knew of similar threats and rumors. In response, five tanks equipped with 75 mm guns assembled outside the building in a show of force. Soldiers took positions along the perimeter of the structure and in the hallways, on the roof, and at entrances. Sentries demanded official entry passes from everyone coming or going, including the judges.

Room 600, the second-story courtroom for this first-of-its-kind international tribunal, had been transformed. It no longer lay in shambles.
A set of new high-intensity ceiling lights shone brightly, allowing photographers to record the scene without using disruptive flashes. Old walls had vanished to create a bigger public space. The room was quite large, able to accommodate more than five hundred people, but all of the judicial action was concentrated in a small area at its south end.

The defendants’ dock was next to the main entrance of the courtroom, with two long rows of seating for the Nazi leaders. Directly in front of the defendants were chairs for their defense attorneys. The judges’ seats faced them all, filling a bench beneath four large windows with green curtains
drawn to keep out sunlight. The flags of the four Allied powers stood behind them. Translators given the difficult job of instantly interpreting the proceedings into German, English, Russian, and French would occupy glass booths along the wall to the right of the judges. Wires connecting the translators with speakers’ microphones and headphone outlets spread across the floor and would trip up participants for the duration of the trial. Nearest the judges were the court reporters. (Defendant Schacht soon observed these tribunal staff, many of them chewing gum, and fell into the “
optical confusion” of imagining they were chewing on words.) Areas for the prosecution teams, segregated by nationality, clustered around four tables in front of a press section. Nearby was the podium from which prosecuting and defense attorneys would address the court. Press members covering the trial had the finest seating of all, upholstered and widely spaced chairs, and there was a booth in the back of the courtroom reserved for newsreel cameras. All spectators had to sit in the more spacious north end of the courtroom or in the balcony above. One chair, dwarfed by the judges’ dais and the large seating areas for spectators and tribunal staff, stood by itself like an insignificant piece of furniture. It was for witnesses. But it was very important, as Göring would eventually remind everyone.

More than thirteen hundred people contributed to the International Tribunal through the delegations of the four Allied powers and the teams of the defense attorneys, and over two hundred journalists were accredited to report on the trial for radio stations and publications around the world. Cafeteria workers at the Palace of Justice served
about fifteen hundred lunches to trial participants each day.