Hermann Goering and the Nazi Mind

We will go down in history as the world's greatest statesman or the world's greatest villains. Herman Goering The airplane lay stationary on the runway. It was unsafe to take off. Explain the pilot, especially with such precious cargo on board. You see, the cargo was highly valuable in the context of a Europe newly liberated from Nazi tyranny. It was both heavy physically, some could say cumbersome and fragile at the same time. Fragile in more than one way.

But the cargo was not an it. It was they a person, a very important person, a ranks Marshall nonetheless, one of only two people to hold the rank in hundreds of years. The cargo was Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, the highest ranking of all the Nazi leaders to survive the Second World War. Welcome to ancient to recent. My name is Joseph Parkinson and we are starting a new series looking at Doctor Douglas Kelly, the US Army psychiatrist sent to assess the man who would stand trial after World War 2, with a special focus on his relationship with Herman Wilhelm Goering. Episodes of the Ancient Recent podcast are every Friday and are available on YouTube, Apple Podcast and Spotify. This was a rare stationary moment for Goering in 1945. For weeks he had been on the run. He had left his beloved hunting retreat and personal estate, Karen Hall, and had been briefly arrested in the dying days of the Reich after offering to take over the reins of power from the Fuhrer, something that had sent Hitler into a rage. But by April 1945, Hitler had bigger problems to worry about. The S S had been given the order to murder Goering, but Goering had made his way out of their iron grip, one of very few who could make such a claim.

Goering had tried to communicate with the Allies, sending a letter to the US High Command. He had offered to help the Allies form a new provisional government with him of course, as its leader. He was, after all, the new Fuhrer, the long appointed successor to Adolf Hitler. And with Hitler dead, so Goering thought surely he was the natural successor that the Nazis may have forfeited their right to rule due to the war they had unleashed that had lay a consonant, Germany included, to waste.

And their crimes of murdering millions, including 6,000,000 Jews, seems not to have occurred to the Reichs. Marshall, Yes, he would be the new leader. He was, after all, indispensable. Or at least that's what he thought. During was arrested by US Brigadier General Robert I Stack near the Austrian village of Rachstadt. Stack telephoned the field office of Dwight D Eisenhower to inform the leader of the Allied forces of Goering's arrest.

Goering was certain that he would soon be released, and he and his family were taken by American soldiers to a nearby castle to begin what he assured them would be a brief period of confinement. Goering was treated well, eating dinner with Stark and drinking champagne with American soldiers, even posing for photos with them. The next morning, Goering was taken to the airstrip for transportation. A larger plane was brought that could deal with his considerable bulk.

So massive had Goering grown by the end of the war that he could not buckle in his own seatbelts. The plane made its 55 minute journey to Augsburg, where U.S. intelligence officers waited to interview Goering. Goering's pilot was named Beau Foster and Goering exchanged jokes with him. When Foster asked the Rice Marshall when did Germany start developing jet engines, Goering replied too late and howled with laughter. In Aunksburg, Goering was no longer treated as an honoured guest.

Goering had begun sending a stream of correspondence to Dwight D Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of all Allied forces in the Western theatre, demanding an audience which Goering believed that his rank entitled him to. After Aunksburg, Goering was to be moved again, his destination this time Mondorf lesbian in Luxembourg where he was to be detained in AUS prison facility that the Americans had wittily nicknamed Ashcan. The British had a similar facility nearby that they nicknamed Dustbin.

The prison was a grand house, but one that had seen better days. It was further reduced by the insistence of American officers that it be stripped of any niceties, chandeliers, furniture, the windows that had afforded stunning views, the town now Criss crossed with iron bars. Only straw mattresses and folding beds were to be left for the prisoners. The palace was fortified with barbed wire, machine gun post, searchlights and watchtowers to ensure that the Nazi prisoners would have no illusion as to their status.

The new commandant was U.S. Army Colonel Burton C Andrus and he hoped to keep the purpose of the facility secret. Despite the fortifications. It was a forlorn hope, but he still endeavoured to shroud the facility in mystery. Ashcan was home to a veritable who's who of Nazi a listers, Karl Dernitz, the former head of the Kriegs Marine, the German Navy and the man who had replaced Goering as Hitler's successor. As one last act of revenge by the Fuhrer against the disloyal, Goering was in residence.

The last commander of the Wehrmacs, the German army. Wilhelm Keitel, accompanied by his deputy Alfred Yodel. The mentally unstable director of the German Labour Front. Robert Ley. Hans Frank, the former governor of Nazi occupied Poland. Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi philosopher who attempted the impossible task of making a coherent philosophy a Nazism, an endeavour to which he unsurprisingly failed. Julius Reicher, the repugnant editor of Dare Sturmer puerile newspaper full of lurid tales of Jewish sexual perversion. Not so much a dog whistle as he was a foghorn of pure racist bile, A man so perverse and guttural in his race hatred that he was shunned by the other Nazis. Andrus was worried that news of the inmates identity could escape and lead to the prison being storm and inhabitants murdered by vengeful Luxembourgers eager to pay back the years of brutal occupation they had experienced at the hands of the Nazis.

Andrus was a vision of a professional soldier, 5 foot 10, born in Washington state and had served in the trenches of World War One. He had previously been the warden of Fort Oglethorpe, a prison in Georgia that had a bad reputation for lawlessness. Before his appointment. The inmates run the prison. There were frequent riots and escape attempts. Andrus put an end to this, introducing solitary confinement for misbehaving prisoners and ordering the guards that anyone who attempted to escape was to be shot. Fort Oglethorpe became a model of order and discipline under Andrus's watch.

Goering reported to Andrus on arrival and the two men took an instant dislike to each other. Goering had brought with him, his manservant, a dozen suitcases that included his dress uniform, silk underwear, hot water bottle and slippers. Goering also brought 80,000 Reichmonks, the equivalent of $1,000,000 in today's money. Goering was confined to a bear cell with nothing but a single chair that almost collapsed under his immense girth. A bed, a desk built of flimsy material especially designed not to support a human weight so as to thought suicide attempts. All inmates were subject to a physical, with Goering's confirming A quickened pulse and irregular heartbeat, his breathing rapid and shallow, his hands shaking. Goering continued his steady stream of 1 sided correspondence to Eisenhower.

The guards were insubordinate, the cell Spartan. His luggage, complete with jewels and cash, had been confiscated. The food was not to his taste. Even his servant had been sent away. Andrus finally lost his temper with Goering's pretentiousness, informing Goering in no uncertain terms to cease his complaining and acclimatize himself to his new life as a prisoner. The prisoners awoke early and assembled at 7:30 in the dining hall for a breakfast of soup, cereal, and coffee. Lunch typically consisted of pea soup, beef hash and spinach, and dinner was powdered eggs, potatoes and tea. The prisoners were allocated seats, Andrus making a point of making prisoners who particularly despised each other sit nearby.

Hermann Goering was the son of a judge and a colonial official. Born in southwest Africa, Goering had served with distinction in the embryonic German Air Force in the First World War. He had shot down 22 Allied planes and survived a crash landing. He was a decorated war hero, but he had, like many Germans, taken Germany's defeat in the war badly restless and dejected in the humiliating turmoil of Weimar Germany. He had encountered Hitler early in Hitler's rise to power, first hearing Hitler speak on a soapbox during found Hitler's witch's brew of anti Bolshevism, Jew hatred and extreme nationalism intoxicating. Goering's reputation as a war hero allowed him to soon assume a leading role within the Nazi Party. Hitler wanted Goering to lead the Sturm Abtiligen or SA, the Nazi paramilitary Brown Shirts.

But after the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Goering left Germany to live in Italy and Sweden for several years. Goering was a key player in the Nazi Party's March to power, playing an important role in many of the most significant events that allowed Hitler to become the Fuhrer. The Knights, the long knives, the foundation of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, the establishment of Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp.

Goering was involved in all of them. Goering helped craft the Nuremberg Laws, the legal basis for stripping German Jews of their rights and clearing the way the Final Solution. By the outbreak of World War 2, Goering was one of the most powerful and recognizable faces of the regime. Goering used his position of power to indulge his every whim to amass a huge fortune that afforded him an extravagant life. Hunting properties, lavish parties, sparkling metals, fine art, nothing was too good for the Reichs Marshall.

But as the war turned against Germany, Goering lost influence to figures such as Himmler and Martin Bornman. Of all the trinkets, baubles and brick, a brack that Goering brought with him to Ashcan, one was truly indispensable. As the US servicemen went through Goering's luggage, they found a vast collection of pills that Goering insisted was medication for a heart condition. Andrus confiscated the pills and sent some for analysis to understand just exactly what they were.

US scientists found that these were no heart medications, but instead they were a painkiller called paracodine that Goering was self medicating with as many as 40 a day. So severe was Goering's addiction that the Reichs Marshall had managed to acquire the entire world's supply of this particular drug. Goering had instructed German pharmacist to mass produce the drug specifically for his personal use. The position of Reichs Marshall does have some perks after all. Andrus was warned not to make Goering go cold Turkey, but instead to begin Weaning goering off the drugs and to keep his superiors informed of Goering's progress. On the 26th of May, Andrus ordered the prison medical staff to begin the process of gradually reducing Goering's dosage, first down to 38 pills, then down to 18. In early August there was a new arrival at Mondorf, Captain Douglas M Kelly.

Handsome, stocky, with brown WAVY hair and a California charm. He was an Army psychiatrist three years into his service and just explained to Kelly that his task was to maintain the mental well-being of his inmates. Kelly immediately met with the prisoners, but he found Goering particularly intriguing. Kelly's relaxed style was different to the other US personnel. One U.S. Army personnel who already knew the prisoners was U.S. citizen, but Luxembourg born, John Dubois. Dubois presented an image of being an amiable fellow that many of the inmates thought of as a pushover. But Dubois was an intelligence officer and he was feeding information to his superiors.

Many of the Nazis felt that they would never stand trial, and so they were eager to talk. Kelly began using these conversations as a basis to create a psychological image of each of them, particularly Goering. Goering would sit at the end of his bed boasting to Kelly about his adventures, his deeds of daring do. He seemed to believe that he was invincible. Kelly asked Goering about his exercise routine, pastime, hobbies, childhood, war record, time in the Nazi Party, and sex life. Goering explained his long history of drug abuse. Turing had participated in Hitler's failed attempted coup, the Beer Hall Porch in 1923, an amateurish, bungled attempt to seize control of local government and repeat Mussolini's March on Rome that had led to a gun battle in the streets of Munich.

Several Nazis had been killed. Goering was wounded, being shot in the thigh. Goering subsequently developed an infection that required a long hospital stay, and it was during this convalescence that Goering received regular large doses of morphine, which he subsequently became addicted to. After leaving Germany, Goering moved to his first wife's native land of Sweden, but his addiction followed the newlyweds. Goering's addiction started to get the better of him in the mid 1920s, resulting in his first wife committing him to a recovery facility in Sweden, where he was forced to go cold Turkey, which drove him nearly insane. He assaulted a nurse and tried to break into the hospital's drugstore before being forced to wear a straitjacket. He overcame his addiction but relapse to get in 1927 during fought back, even avoiding drugs during the morning for his first wife Karen, who died in 1930.

But in 1937, things took a turn once again. A toothache led his dentist to introduce Goering to paracodeine, instructing him to take 2 tablets a day. Goering's cravings became insatiable and overcame his willpower. His addiction spun out of control. Goering fought hard to control his cravings, but as Germany began to lose the war, the stress and Goering's declining power gave a further boost to his insatiable thirst. By the end of the war, Goering was taking close to 100 paracodeine a day, three times the maximum recorded dose. Kelly learned how to manipulate Goering by appealing to his vanity.

He encouraged Goering to kick his drug habit and lose weight. By appealing to Goering sense of himself as a great man, Goering set about transforming his life. Goering lost considerable weight and kicked his pill habit. Douglas Kelly had no particular experience with war criminals or drug addicts. His assignment had come quite out of the blue. Many psychiatrists had applied for the opportunity to understand the Nazi leaders. Some had wanted to understand the Nazi mind, one even wanting to remove the brains of the Nazi leadership for dissection. the US Army turned them all down, picking instead Douglas Kelly, who had not even applied for the job. Kelly was intrigued by the Nazi leadership and wanted to understand what had driven such men. Were they mad?

Did they have a particular personality type? Was there such a thing as a Nazi mind that could be isolated, studied, and possibly eliminated? Was there something unique to the Germans as a people? He was determined to find out. Kelly recognised straight away that Goering was highly intelligent. A cut above the other Nazi leaders, Kelly observed Goering. Goering was intelligent, that was for sure. He was jovial, charming, funny even.

But there was another sight of Goering. He was also ruthless, driven, and had a total disregard for those beyond his immediate friends and family. The city of Nuremberg had a special place in Nazi mythology. Nuremberg was the site of many of the Third Reich's greatest triumphs. Hitler held his annual mass rallies for the Nazi Party faithful, lapping up their adulation as the hysterical crowds drank in his siren song of blood and soil. It was in Nuremberg on the 15th of September 1935 that Hitler announced a new set of laws to protect the blood of the German folks, the mineshaft.

German Jews, one of the most integrated Jewish communities of any society in the world, that identified so strongly with Germany, that had disproportionately of all Germany's minorities volunteered to fight in the trenches of the First World War, were stripped of their rights. No Jew was allowed to marry or have sex with a non Jew. Jews were stripped of their citizenship and became stateless persons. By 1945, the spiritual home of National Socialism was a shell of itself.

Heavy bombing had destroyed much of the city and its citizens had been reduced by the ravage of war to desperation. Many Nuremberg residents had fled. Those that stayed lived out their days and shattered bombed out homes, many of them huddled in basements without running water or electricity. Scarcity, desperation in the presence of large numbers of occupying soldiers with cash and rations at hand, led to a flourishing black market.

Many German women sold their bodies to British or American soldiers for a packet of cigarettes, a loaf of bread or a pair of nylon stockings. But soon enough Nuremberg would attract the world's attention yet again. It was because Nuremberg's special place in Nazi folklore that had been selected for the trial of the century. The surviving leaders of the Third Reich were to face justice in the very heart of the empire that they had built, the Palace of Justice. It was one of the few buildings not to be completely destroyed by Allied air power, though it had taken substantial damage. It's upper floors had been gutted by fire and clock tower had collapsed.

It had been the scene of a desperate last stand by fanatical S S units in May 1945, and during Hitler's reign the courts had dealt out punishments to the enemies of the Reich. But now it was to be the leaders of Nazism who would stand in its docks and have to give account for their years in power. The courtroom was littered with shattered glass, discarded Coca-Cola bottles, fallen masonry. The ceiling had to be propped with Timbers and it was German workers who were responsible for making the courtroom fit to hold such a historic event. Even after a monumental effort, the courtroom floor collapsed in and itself and had to be totally refitted. Andrus feared an uprising by fanatical Nazis attempting to free the defendants.

Andrus was frustrated by a lack of staff and guards, with many inexperienced personnel and high turnover. Most security staff were desperate to go home, and some so inexperienced that they didn't know how to handle a gun. So severe was the lack of staff that Andrus could only perform suicide checks at 32nd intervals. Kelly was assigned a new job. He was to assess the sanity of the prisoners to make sure that they were fit to stand trial.

But Kelly was beset by a clash of interests. Who did he serve, the prisoners or the authorities? Was he to betrayed occupation, confidentiality, or did that not apply to the greatest criminals of all time? Kelly also wanted to understand the prisoners for personal reasons. Why had these people done the things that they did? Why had they gone along with it all along? Was it something about them as individuals? Something about the Germans?

Were they insane, crazy or just drunk on power? Was there a personality type linked to Nazism that can be understood, diagnosed and eradicated? Kelly needed to know. The 22 top Nazis under Kelly's care were isolated from the other prisoners and subject to a strict routine of observation and control. The cells were stripped of anything that could be used to commit suicide. Chairs removed at night, only a single light bulb a slit open to provide food and water.

Silence was to be maintained in the cells, but the jails echoed with the sound of pacing, muttering and the jangling of keys. Inmates were to be observed even when on the toilet. Andrus didn't care about the inmates rank, he treated them as common criminals, which is kind of ironic because they were, if anything, exceptional criminals. Only a few personal items were allowed, books, pictures and a pen for writing letters. The inmates had to show their head and hands above the sheets while in bed and were not allowed to turn away from the door even while sleeping.

Letters were monitored. 1 hot shower a week was allowed and that's under observation. Exercise was permitted for 15 to 30 minutes a day. Prisoners were forced to stay at least 10 yards apart, all under the constant watch of armed guards. The prisoners were subject to strip searches at random intervals. Any contraband, however small, was confiscated. The inmates grew to despise Andrus. Some complained about his insolence.

Didn't he know who they were? Some insisted that they be treated as prisoners, not as criminals. But Andrus was capable of acts of kindness as well. When Hans Frischer arrived from Russian detention late at night, the kitchen was closed, so no hot food was available, so Andrus arranged for a slice of cake to be sent to his cell. The Nazis were more relaxed around Kelly, many of them intensely bored, and welcomed the opportunity to speak freely, especially dishing the dirt about their enemies.

Who is a braggart? Who is a coward? Who is all show? But mostly they boasted each with an inflated sense of their own importance and the great accomplishments of the Thousand Year Reich. Kelly was able to get them to talk by treating them with respect. Gone was the prison formalities associated with Andrus, and in a more relaxed environment they opened up. Kelly convinced the Nazis that all he wanted to do was to understand them, to listen to their stories and get to know them as people.

He spent hours in the company of each inmate, sometime with an interpreter, speaking German. But many, such as Goering, spoke good English. Kelly obsessively sought every clue, every means to understand his inmates. He met and interviewed their friends, family, acquaintances. He read their letters, watched news reels, devoured books about them and poured through newspaper clippings. Anything to give him an edge, to pick up the hidden detail he may have just let slip through the cracks.

All the while, Andrus had other, deeper concerns. Andrus didn't just have to worry about the prisoners killing themselves, he also had to worry about them being murdered by others, or worse still, being liberated. As Goering was being escorted between compounds by AUS guard, a dagger implanted itself in a wooden beam thrown by an unknown assailant. Was it meant for Goering, or perhaps for the security guard? Was it an assassination or a rescue attempt? Nobody knew.

Andrus kept the weapon and ornate s s dagger as a memento to protect the inmates. Andrus ordered the construction of a long wooden walkway sealed off to shield the inmates as they walked to and from the court. Of all the inmates, it seemed that Goering found it easiest to adjust to prison life. He complained less than others and kept up his jovial disposition, but he did confess to Kelly bouts of depression and loneliness.

He missed his family. Goering tried to raise himself and others, always cracking jokes and chatting away. Goering even kept a notebook of banned jokes that poked fun at the Fuhrer and other Nazi leaders, which he used to read aloud at dinner. Such comedy would have landed others in front of a firing squad only months before. The one subject that Goering was serious about was his personal life. He kept pictures of his wife and daughter in his cell and was the most prolific letter writer of all the inmates. Goering had been married twice.

His first wife, Karen, had died in Sweden in 1930. Goering had stayed in Germany during her final days due to commitment to the Nazi cause. But in 1937, Goering married Emmy Solomon, a glamorous singer. After his second marriage, he moved the body of his first wife to the family estate, which he renamed Karen Hall. Was this maybe an admission of guilt? There were rumours about Goering's personal life, but it does seem that Goering's marriage to Emmy was indeed a happy 1 and it produced Goering's only child.

Either Turing, starved of attention, spoke freely to Kelly. He loved to speak of his passion for animals, and the Nazis had indeed introduced progressive reforms to protect animal rights. But Kelly could not help notice that Goering had gone out of his way to protect cats and dogs, but had presided over some of the most appalling crimes against humans in all of history. Firstly as Marshall of the Luftwaffe, which had carried out raids and civilian targets such as Rotterdam and London. Later the Final Solution, the mass murder of 12 million people, including 6,000,000 Jews. Kelly began to form a picture of Goering. Charming, intelligent, charismatic, cultured, wicked, selfish, ruthless, heartless.

Kelly asked Goering if he really believed in Nazi racial ideology. Did he really believe that the Germans were a nation of Superman, born to rule the world? Nobody believed in that rot, said Goering. But it was good politics. To Kelly, Goering showed a complete lack of any form of morality. During did, however, seem if not necessarily to have liked Kelly, to at least have enjoyed him. Goering gave Kelly a signed photograph of himself, almost as if he was trying to confirm Kelly's image of Goering as a narcissist. Kelly interviewed all of the prisoners and found them all interesting in their own particular way. Kelly spent much time with Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi philosopher, and Kelly found Rosenberg to possess A1 track mind and all roads always lead to the Jews not capable of being intellectually flexible, understanding others perspectives or taking on country information. Despite his pretensions of being a great intellectual, Rosenberg could hardly compete a sentence with his thoughts. Often trailing off, Rosenberg felt himself to be totally innocent.

He could not connect how his years of propagandizing the worst race hatred imaginable would make him culpable for those inspired by his ideas. Even less impressive was Yulia Striker. Striker stood out as an outcast. He was a long winded peddler of race hatred, A fanatical Nazi. anti-Semitism wasn't part of his worldview, it was his entire worldview. For Striker, everything came back to the supposed maligned influence of the Jews.

Striker advanced outlandish theories such as Jesus Christ was an Aryan, the Jews were a race of paedophiles, and that the Virgin Mary was a prostitute. Striker was hated by the other Nazis. Dernitz even went as far as to petition Andrus for Striker to be removed due to his reputation as a sadist, pervert and rapist. Striker was described by Rebecca West, columnist for The New Yorker, as a dirty old man, the sort of witch that gives trouble in parks. Striker, like the others, took no responsibility for his crimes.

He was no stranger to the Nuremberg jails that he was now confined in. During the Reich he had been a frequent visitor where he used to partake in whipping of inmates. Striker considered himself a martyr for the German people and for the Nazi cause. Robert Lay, the leader of the Nazi Labour Front, the body that took over from the trade unions after they were crushed, had hidden a shed in the mountains immediately after the war.

Lay had attempted suicide three times already and was highly volatile. Badly injured as a pilot in World War One, where he received suspected brain damage, he gave the appearance of intelligence but was described by one US interrogator as just a, and I quote, bullshitter of the highest order. He was a bundle of nervous energy, constantly pacing and shouting, waving his hands. Leigh was a devoted follower of Hitler who wrote a book about the Fuhrer so dripping in praise that Hitler himself and embarrassing and had all the copies pulped.

Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister from 1938 to 45, famous for brokering the Nazi Soviet pact that started the war and also for his alleged sexual relationship he conducted with Wallace Simpson, the wife of the Duke of Windsor, former King Edward the 8th of Britain. Ribbentrop was shocked to be arrested. He wasn't a military personnel, he was a diplomat. Ribbentrop was a poorly educated former booze salesman. He had contempt for Americans based on a stint in New York where he had failed to sell champagne, which he attributed to the low level of cultural development amongst Americans, prickly, sensitive and personally attached to Hitler, who he clung to in need of a strong figure to lead him. Another was Ernst Kelton Bruner, the most senior Gestapo figure at the trial, a former lawyer with a scarred face from a car crash.

Despite his considerable frame, Kelly assessed that he was a typical bully, brutal when in power but a coward when threatened. As Kelly continued his interviews, preparation for the trial began. Massive amounts of documentations were needed to be compiled from all over Europe. This required huge amounts of manpower. And there was a further problem. Nothing like this had ever been attempted before. The Nazis had, after all, been the legal government technically of Germany, and the crimes that they had committed, at least within Germany, had been hypothetically at least legal.

Under whose law were the Nazis to then be tried? Should there even be a trial? The Soviets advocated simply shooting the Nazis and being done with it. But the British and Americans wanted to make a point. After the First World War, a myth had emerged in German society. The stab in the back, the idea that Germany was a helpless and innocent victim picked on by the victorious Allies. And this sense of victimhood had fuelled the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.

And the Allies wanted to make sure that nothing like that would happen ever again. The Nazis had to be held accountable for what they had done. Their allies didn't want a show trial. They didn't want martyrs. They wanted to avoid anything that could be presented as the Nazi leadership being victims. They wanted real justice so that for hundreds of years people would point to what happened at these trials as an example of due process, where the lies and the crimes of the Nazis were finally exposed. The OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the US wartime Intelligence Department was responsible for handling the trial, with the proceedings to be led by William Wild, Bill Donovan and Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson. And there was no lack of evidence. Death fans, gas chambers, mass graves, millions of eyewitnesses, 10s of millions of documents, from train timetables to letters, telegrams, minutes of meetings, orders, all telling the same story of a systematic program of mass murder orchestrated by Hitler and the leaders of the Third Reich. Kelly wanted to understand the Nazi mind. What is it that drove people to commit such heinous crimes? And this was happening at a very interesting time. In the early and mid 20th century, sociologists and psychiatrists had speculated on the cause of crime. Was it a personality disorder, a mental health problem? Was it the cause of social and economic forces? Or was it something entirely different? After two world wars and quick succession, there had even been speculation that the Germans as a people may possess a personality type that made them uniquely aggressive. Richard Brichner had published in 1943 a book called Is Germany Incurable, claiming that fascism and Nazism are simply a symptom of Germanness.

Kelly was joined by John Dubois, who had been absent for a number of weeks. Kelly was also joined by Howard Trieste, a German native and member of the US Armed forces. Trieste concealed his Jewish identity from the inmates. Trieste had fled Germany shortly before the war, with much of his family staying behind and subsequently being killed in Auschwitz. Kelly claimed to have spent as much as 80 hours with each inmate.

That's probably an exaggeration, but he did spend a considerable amount of time with Goering. Kelly came to understand that Goering, despite his claims of being a great German patriot, motivated by a desire to advance his people and actually embrace Nazism for more cynical reasons. He was an extreme nationalist of sorts. But after World War One, Goering was a man without a purpose and he joined the Nazi Party because it gave him an opportunity to rise quickly.

Kelly was familiar with the work of Doctor Harvey Checkler, who had written a book called The Mask of Sanity in 1941, the first to be published, on the concept of psychopaths. A psychopath makes a pretense of fitting into society's norms. They can be charismatic, charming, highly successful, but they are in fact utterly ruthless and completely lack empathy. Was Goering what we would today call a psychopath? Kelly asked Goering about Ernst Rohm, the founder of the Nazi Brown Shirts.

The essay Goering and Rome had worked closely together in the 1920s and were friends, but Goering had Rome killed in the Night of the Long Knives. When Kelly asked how Goering could have sanctioned the murder of a close friend, Goering simply shrugged his shoulders and said he was in my way. The only people Goering had genuine personal feeling for were his wife and daughter. Goering began to feel comfortable around Kelly, entrusting Kelly to take a number of letters to his wife, Emmy.

Goering even asked Kelly if, in the event of something happening to him and his wife, Kelly would adopt their daughter EDA and take her to the United States of America. On the 8th of October, an ambulance arrived at the prison grounds. A tall, scrawny man with a shock of black hair stepped out. Rudolf Hess was back in Germany for the first time in four years on May 10th, 1941. On the advice of his astrologer. Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer, the third highest ranked Nazi, had piloted A Messerschmitt fighter to Scotland, parachuting out in an attempt to meet Douglas Douglas Hamilton, third Duke of Hamilton, that Hess had met in the 1936 Munich Olympics. Hess wanted to meet the King, get Churchill sacked and form an alliance with Britain to attack the USSR. Hitler had no prior knowledge of these plans and declared Hess insane.

Hesse was taken into custody, imprisoned for a time in the Tower of London. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Hesse served in the First World War and was an early member of the Nazi Party. Imprisoned in Landsberg for his role in the Beer Hall Porch, where he transcribed Mein Kampf, Hesse served as private secretary to Hitler and was named as Deputy Fuhrer in 1933. Hess played a role in many of Hitler's most brutal crimes, including the Knights of the Long Knives and the Nuremberg Laws.

Hess totally lacked charisma or independent thought and needed a strong personality to cling to in captivity. Hess claimed he had amnesia before then claiming that it was faked, before then flipping back again to claiming once more to have lost his memory. Hess teeted on the verge of personality disorder, imagining that the British and Jews were plotting to kill him. He had twice attempted suicide. Andrus escorted Hess into the prison, where he by accident encountered Goering. Upon seeing the former Reichs, Marshall Hess clicked his heels together and gave the Nazi salute. Andrus immediately gave Hess A stern dressing down, informing him.

That the Nazi salute was banned. Multiple doctors had described Hess as delusional, bordering on insane, but Andrus believed that it was all a show. Kelly assessed Hess to be a quack. Hess was a hypochondriac, believer in astrology, and advocate for alternative medicine. Hess had even set up a factory producing homeopathic remedies in Germany. The only qualification for working there was to not possess a medical degree. The inmates confided in Kelly and also the Catholic and Protestant chaplains that had been assigned to them. Hans Frank, the former governor of Poland and one of the most brutal criminals, seem to have rediscovered his Catholicism, something so sorely lacking when he had been presiding over the mass slaughter of millions of Poles of both Catholic and Jewish faith.

Some understood that the trial was coming and prepared themselves. Kelly wanted to get a deeper understanding of the minds of the inmates and so he set about administering the Rorschach inkblock test. These tests depended heavily on the skills of the observers, giving tests in cells, working with interpreters to try and make sure that there was nothing lost in translation. Inmates were eager to participate, many commenting favourably on how much they enjoyed the tests.

The test cards prompted a wide variety of responses. One card showed an empty wide area surrounded by a collection of connected black dots led to the greatest range of replies. Dernan said. It was 2 little girls lay said thunderclouds. Ribbentrop gazed for 10 seconds and then said nothing. Goering enjoyed the experience, laughing and giving a running commentary and expressing sadness that the Luftwaffe had not had such excellent tests.

Maybe if the Nazis had not so thoroughly persecuted the intellectuals of Germany, they would have. Kelly noted that Goering loved to use words like fantastic and would often describe the images in ways that seem to relate back to himself. Goering's results showed a highly imaginative, aggressive, ambitious person who sought to subjugate the world to his will, but also someone who seemed to live in a fantasy world of his own making.

Hess, on the other hand, seemed to be totally lost by the experiment, shaking his head in disbelief and expressing complete confusion and dismay. Kelly found Robert Leigh's test the most interesting. Leigh, Kelly suggested, had brain damage from his experience in the First World War. Leigh had offered confusing descriptions, failed to identify colours and gave nonsensical answers. The test showed that the many of the men had odd or obsessive personalities. They were all perfectly sane.

On the 8th of October, Kelly administered to Goering the Thematic A Perception test, a test designed to show a person's worldview, self-image, and relation with others. He showed Goering 20 cards showing people in simple settings and asking Guri to tell a story about who the people he was seeing were, what he thought their history was, what he perceived them to be doing, and what he thought would happen next. Goering, staring at one image, stated there is a man, a farmer, deeply devoted to his work and the lover of nature. His fate is resolving around two women, one pregnant woman leaning against a tree, undoubtedly a woman from the country, and the other one a young girl mentally more alert from the city.

The man is impressed by the younger girl. A conflict arises within the man's mind, but due to the expectant child and his devotion to the soil, he will return to his wife and the young girl will go back to the city and go on her own way. Was Goering revealing something about himself? Was he may be expressing some inner suppressed thought about his two wives? We will never know. On the 6th of October, the Nuremberg staff were informed an inmate in a different wing not housing the Nazi high command had committed suicide despite all of Andrus's efforts. The person in question was Leonardo Conti, a Swiss born Nazi physician, an early member of the party who had overseen experiments on prisoners.

Conti had strangled himself. He wrapped his neck with a shirt sleeve and tied the end to the bars of the window before jumping off his chair. Andrus removed all chairs from the cells and increased the frequency of observation. During the third week of October, the prosecutors of the International Tribunal completed the indictment against the most senior 22 Nazi leaders. The defendants were presented with the charges that included membership of the s, s and Gestapo, conspiracy to wage aggressive war, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Each was informed individually.

Kelly noted their responses. Goering did not flinch, merely saying so It has come. The greatest trial in all of time was about to begin. Thank you for listening to Ancient to Reason. My name is Joseph Parkinson. In our next episode, we will conclude the story of Doctor Douglas Kelly and Herman Goering. Episodes of Ancient Recent are out every Friday. You can listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.