The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (4 page)

With Göring’s withdrawal still unfinished, a new staff member arrived at Mondorf in early August. He had been ordered to Mondorf from the US Army’s 130th General Hospital of the European Theater of Operations, where he worked as a consulting psychiatrist and was in charge of psychiatric services provided to thousands of US soldiers.

Boyish in appearance, solidly built, and ruggedly handsome, with brown, wavy hair, the new arrival was Captain Douglas McGlashan Kelley, a California-born physician. He was near the end of three years in the medical service of the US Army. His responsibility at Mondorf, as Andrus
soon explained to him, was to maintain the mental fitness of Göring and the other Nazi inmates until their disposition was determined.

After settling in, Kelley spent time with all the high-ranking Nazis at Mondorf, but he met with Göring first to make a medical examination. Göring must have noticed that this new psychiatrist did not have the distant and scholarly demeanor that he was perhaps expecting. Kelley spoke loudly and directly, and he often moved his bushy eyebrows up and down for emphasis. He began his initial examinations gently, first probing the Nazi’s medical history. Kelley did not know what to expect from his infamous patient. He had heard Göring called everything
“from a Machiavellian villain to a fat, harmless eunuch, the general tendency having been to identify him as a mere satellite of Hitler, who spent his days seeking medals, glory, and riches,” Kelley later wrote.

One Mondorf staff member who already knew the prison’s most infamous inmate was John Dolibois, an honest-faced and amiable Luxembourg native and US citizen and Army officer working in intelligence.
As a boy he had visited the Grand Hotel during its glory years, before his family emigrated to Akron, Ohio. Working at the prison since May 1945, he tried to protect his relatives in Germany by telling the detainees that his name was John Gillen. Dolibois cultivated a reputation as something of a “soft touch” among the prisoners, and he assumed the duties of a welfare officer—helping with their problems and needs and often lending a sympathetic ear to their complaints—in pursuit of valuable information to pass to the military interrogators who regularly interviewed the captives. Many of the Nazis spoke quite freely, believing they would never face trial for their crimes.
“We didn’t have to use artificial devices to get our prisoners to talk,” Dolibois remembered. “We sometimes had trouble getting them to shut up. Almost all of the men in Ashcan were eager to talk. They felt neglected if they hadn’t been interrogated by someone for several days.” Dolibois’s fluency in German as well as his degree in psychology from Miami University made him an ideal translator for Kelley, who had only a weak knowledge of the language.

A gregarious man, Göring was starved of social stimulation. He welcomed the physician’s attention and in one of their first encounters boasted to Kelley that he paid close attention to his own body. The Reichsmarschall, in fact, declared that he had the most admirable physique in all of Germany. He described “in minute detail every scar and blemish on his skin,” wrote Kelley, who began sketching a medical history:

12 lbs at birth. Not fat—slender as a child—started to gain in 1923.

1916—16 Nov. Shot down—bullet in rt flank—metal splinters and upholstery. Hosp. to Jan. 1917—16 cm scar. . . .

Was shot in upper thigh—in 1923 at Munich—9th Nov. ’23 to March ’24.

At that time given morph. self. by injections. After he left hospital took injection and by mouth for ½ to 3/years.

Kelley grew curious about the mountain of possessions that arrived at Ashcan with Göring.
The prisoner’s collection of toiletries and accessories impressed the psychiatrist, who noted lotion and body powder among the supplies, but not makeup, as had been rumored. What really drew Kelley’s attention were the three rings among the Nazi’s treasures. They were
“truly massive baubles,” Kelley wrote, one crowned by a huge ruby, another set with a blue diamond, and the third carrying an emerald. Until his captivity, Göring “always carried these rings so as to be able to select each day the color which best suited his mood,” he told Kelley. The psychiatrist also took special note of the massive emerald stored among Göring’s belongings.

Göring spoke proudly to Kelley about his well-being, strength, and prowess as a sportsman. “I have always been athletic,” Göring told Kelley as they sat side by side on the prisoner’s cot, “and until the last years of the war I spent much time skiing, hunting, and mountain climbing.” Göring seemed to believe that real danger could never threaten him. On one occasion in his youth, he had stood and watched an avalanche sweep around
him in the Austrian Alps as his companions scurried to safety, and on another he had berated his friends for panicking when their rowboat drifted near the precipice of a waterfall. “If we go over, we die, and there’s nothing we can do about it, so why get excited?” Göring remembered shouting to his friends.

Kelley asked Göring about his personal habits, and Göring replied that he ate with gusto, drank alcohol in moderation, and sometimes smoked cigars. “He claims to have a normal sexual life and states that it has not changed since his gain in weight during the 1920s,” Kelley wrote.

The psychiatrist next turned to Göring’s drug addiction. As Göring explained to Kelley, twenty-five years earlier he had taken part in Hitler’s notorious Munich “Beer Hall” Putsch, a failed attempt by Nazi Party members to seize control of the government of the German state of Bavaria. Göring, already one of Hitler’s chief aides, helped plan the revolt; organized the Nazi storm troopers, who intimidated citizens and took over government buildings; and spurred on a mob that occupied a Munich beer hall in which a high-ranking Bavarian official, Gustav von Kahr, was giving a speech. After twenty-four hours of hostage taking and confusion, the Nazis and members of the Bavarian State Police fought in the streets of Munich and exchanged gunfire, leaving twenty people dead and many wounded. Hitler and his supporters were routed, and Göring took a bullet in the thigh. A resulting infection left him hospitalized for many months, during which the drug dependency took root. While doctors had cared for his leg, Göring had received repeated doses of morphine to dampen his pain. Gradually his wound healed, but his need for morphine persisted. When doctors discontinued the shots, Göring went to the black market to obtain morphine tablets. Exiled from Germany for his role in the putsch, he was looking for work as an aviation consultant when he and his first wife, Carin, moved to Sweden in 1924.

He took his addiction with him. He complained that the pain in his leg had grown unbearable, and the idleness of being unemployed left him feeling purposeless. He upped his daily intake of morphine. The drug made him at times delusional, untrustworthy, talkative, manic, grandiose, and
insomniac. It lit his emotions like fireworks, igniting fits of rage and violence. He threw furniture around his apartment. Morphine overstimulated his hormonal secretions and his weight ballooned, to nearly three hundred pounds. The svelte, dashing aviation hero of World War I had enlarged grotesquely.

Göring made life miserable for Carin. Doctors told her he was a danger to himself and to others. She committed him to Aspudden Hospital, where, in accordance with the addiction treatment practices of the time, Swedish physicians abruptly reduced his access to morphine. Göring entered the hospital willingly, but he did not foresee the agonies that lay ahead. Physicians refused his requests for more morphine and told him to endure his withdrawal like a man. Enraged by pain, craving, and frustration, he assaulted a nurse, tried to break into the hospital’s stores of drugs, and threatened to kill himself. Göring had to submit to a straitjacket before his transfer to a much rougher institution: the Langbro Asylum for the Insane.

He remembered only a jumble of frightful images from the next three months at Langbro. Attendants tied him up in a padded room to prevent him from hurting himself and left him there for days. He was cut off from morphine and endured the full brunt of the harrowing symptoms of cold-turkey withdrawal. Released to his wife’s care, Göring relapsed into addiction and was soon back again at Langbro for another round of withdrawal. He repeated the treatment in Germany in 1927, and he told Kelley that he took a final dose of morphine during the winter of 1928–1929 to treat a sore throat. Göring’s drug use then ended for several years, even through Carin’s death in 1930 and the Nazis’ subsequent ascent to power in Germany.

Despite his occasional and controlled use of diet and sleeping pills, Göring seemed to have kicked the drug habit. A change occurred in 1937, however, when a toothache pushed him back to dependency. His dentist believed that nervousness and anxiety were causing the pain, and he gave Göring a bottle of paracodeine with instructions to take two tablets every two hours until the pain diminished. Five days later, when the pain and pills were gone, Göring, anxious to fight off his rising craving for morphine,
demanded more. The dentist warned him about the potential for dependency and refused to comply, but Göring had no trouble finding a supply. He was soon taking ten tablets a day.

Göring should have listened to the dentist’s warnings about physical and psychological dependence. Although paracodeine did not give him a sense of euphoria, he relied on it to heighten his optimism, alertness, and charm. It also swung his mood between elation and depression and seemed to exaggerate his tendencies toward egocentricity, bombast, and flamboyance in dress and appearance. He stored the tablets in his house in antique Venetian glass bowls, giving him convenient access to the narcotic whenever he felt the craving.

The Reichsmarschall told Kelley that he had taken paracodeine at a relatively low dose until 1940, when wartime stresses multiplied and he began consuming up to 160 pills a day. He reduced that alarming rate of consumption later in the war, but it edged up again as Germany’s defeat loomed.
“When he was captured, he states he was taking about 100 tablets per day,” Kelley wrote in his examination notes—about three times the recommended maximum daily dose. This amount, Kelley observed, was
“not an unusually large dose. It was not enough to have affected his mental processes at any time.”

Kelley appealed to Göring’s pride in his physical strength and prowess to speed up the withdrawal. He realized how easy it was to suggest to the prisoner that he was a mightier man than others and could quit quickly. Göring responded to Kelley’s flattery with enthusiasm, concealing his leg pains and other withdrawal symptoms he felt unless specifically asked about them. Kelley gently reduced Göring’s intake of paracodeine, and by August 12 the prisoner was free from the drug.

The physician was learning how to manipulate Göring psychologically. But he did not see how the Nazi was influencing his own thinking. By with-holding information about his withdrawal discomfort, Göring had managed to convince Kelley that his paracodeine addiction was slight, hardly an addiction at all. Kelley decided that it was more of a “habit.”
“It was the need to do something with his hands and mouth, to perform an act he was
accustomed to, and liked, doing,” he wrote. “Just as smokers are careful to have a supply of cigarettes and tobacco on their desks each morning, so Göring would place on his desk a bottle containing a hundred of his little pills. Then, during conferences or discussions, he would reach out, open the bottle, shake out a few tablets into his hand and, popping them into his mouth, chew them leisurely while carrying on his conversation.” Kelley added: “I can testify that his addiction was not very severe.”

Others at Mondorf heard differently from Göring. He told Commandant Andrus during his withdrawal that his head hurt and he couldn’t sleep. He wanted his old dosage of paracodeine restored. The unsympathetic Andrus noted that
“he had whined and complained like a spoiled child throughout the weaning.”

Göring’s long history of dependence on opium derivatives and his unsuccessful attempts to limit his paracodeine use during stressful times of the war made Kelley’s claims about Göring’s weak addiction ring hollow. A buildup of anxiety, not leg pain, had caused Göring to increase his intake to tens of thousands of paracodeine tablets during the 1930s and 1940s. Today the US Drug Enforcement Administration ranks paracodeine as a Schedule II substance, meaning that its use can lead to dependency and is restricted by law. William Lee, the junkie in William Burroughs’s novel
Naked Lunch
, mentions paracodeine as one of his favorite recreational drugs.

The Reichsmarschall played on Kelley’s professional pride, flattering him as he submitted to the physician’s direction. Kelley was pleased with the way he led Göring through the process, but it is unclear who was leading whom. In the early weeks of their relationship, Kelley had no real appreciation of Göring’s successful history of concealment, manipulation, and clever discernment of the motives of the people around him, skills that Göring had honed during his rise in Hitler’s Germany. He was no ordinary addict.

While overcoming his paracodeine habit, Göring also accepted Kelley’s help in losing weight. During a fat-shedding program that lasted five months, Göring dropped sixty pounds. Protecting Göring’s heart motivated Kelley to accomplish this reduction, but the doctor gave his patient
a different rationale: losing weight made Göring look better.
“He fancied looking like the hero of the Luftwaffe again,” Dolibois observed, “the highly decorated ace of the famous Richthoften squadron of World War I.” Göring agreed to the weight loss program and ate less. He also requested alterations to his prison garb and uniform. The waist of his pants needed to be taken in six inches.
“This concession was granted,” Kelley acknowledged, “not because we were interested in Göring’s appearance but because, without refitting, he would have been unable to keep his trousers up.”

Now in much better health, Göring lost some of his animosity toward his captors, and his disposition improved. He remained anxious, however, sometimes accusing guards of plotting to murder him. He disliked solitude, and one night the violence of a passing thunderstorm, which Göring experienced in the solitude of his cell, set off what at first seemed a heart attack.
A doctor called it just a palpitation. Gradually he climbed back into the skin of Hermann Göring, the confident and shrewd player of power politics who had dominated wide stretches of Europe before his capture. He became more comfortable, loquacious, and fascinating to the reassuringly intense psychiatrist who sat and patiently absorbed his every word.