Did Hermann Goring Make Money From The Holocaust
It's been eight months since Minnesota author Jack El-Hai's book "The Nazi and the Psychiatrist" (Public Affairs) was released in the United states of america. Since then, editions also have been published in Norway and France, where it became a nonfiction bestseller. And presently the volume will be translated and published for Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, Chinese and German audiences. On Sabbatum, it was historic every bit the Minnesota Volume Laurels winner in nonfiction.
The book has been more widely received in Europe, El-Hai said in an interview this week. "It'due south just a closer story to them," he said. "Their countries were occupied. It'due south more personal to them."
To refresh readers' memories: "The Nazi and the Psychiatrist" explores the intersection of the lives of former Reichsmarschall and Luftwaffe master Hermann Göring, ane of the top 22 Nazi prisoners at Nuremberg, and Dr. Douglas Kelley, the U.S. Army helm and psychiatrist whose task it was to appraise the prisoners' states of listen and whether they would be fit to stand trial. A U.S. psychologist, Gustave Mark Gilbert, took upwards where Kelley left off, just months before the trials began, and the two doctors came to quite different conclusions about the prisoners. Where Gilbert saw monsters, Kelley (with rare exception) saw people with unnervingly human traits whose psychological makeup "was in the normal range."
Kelley's decision that the "qualities that led the top Nazis to commit and tolerate acts of horror existed in many people, living in many places," though validated since then by many of his successors in the field, remains a much-debated and sore topic.
El-Hai first heard mention of Kelley past way of Dr. Walter Freeman, the subject of El-Hai's previous book "The Lobotomist" (Wiley, 2007). Freeman had been studying fellow psychiatrists who committed suicide, including Kelley. El-Hai made a mental note to follow upwardly at a later date. He somewhen located Kelley'due south oldest son, Doug Kelley, in a small town in Northern California. Doug Kelley, now a 65-yr-erstwhile Postal Service retiree and trauma survivor in his own right, gave El-Hai free access to the piles of boxes that Dr. Kelley had shipped to himself after his three years in Nuremberg.
Exploring that trove, El-Hai said, was "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity." Upon opening the first box, he establish a drinking glass vial of the paracodeine pills (a rare form of opioid) to which Göring was addicted. Also in the boxes were Kelley's notes and observations of the results of the Rorschach and other tests he administered, along with the biographies he had each prisoner write – some in High german and some in English.
As he mined the details of Göring and Kelley'southward interactions, El-Hai found that his own assumptions about the "Nazi personality" were being tested. Hither are some excerpts distilled from our conversation this week:
MinnPost: Did y'all arroyo this topic with any beliefs – formed in childhood or later in life – that were challenged?
Jack El-Hai: Definitely. I lost a lot of relatives in the Holocaust, mainly in United states of americaS.R., Greece and Romania. My thinking was that these men, the planners of the Holocaust, were out of their minds. They had to be. How else could it accept all happened? How could people of normal sensibilities and connection with other people take done these terrible crimes?
But through working on the book, I accept to come down with Kelley. Much to his … corking disappointment and surprise, he could notice no signs of psychiatric disorder or mental illness in any of [the 22 prisoners] except one. And he expected to. As a psychiatrist, he believed that psychiatric medicine could explain all kinds of human behavior, including criminal behavior … way out on the fringe.
Merely he ended, using tools available at the fourth dimension – the assessments, the Rorschach and the others – that there were no signs of psychiatric illness and that these men had personalities and behavioral traits that were inside the normal range (which isn't to say that everybody has them). And that they expressed themselves during this really unusual time of opportunity for people similar them who were grasping for power and hungry for attention and wealth. And that they, similar many, many other people in similar circumstances were willing to walk all over other people to get what they wanted.
So, yes. That's how I at present recall of them every bit well.
MP: How do you explain the fact that Drs. Gilbert and Kelley came to such different conclusions in their assessments of the prisoners?
JEH: Kelley had a very bad command of German language and e'er worked through interpreters. But what Kelley had that Gilbert didn't was great facility in understanding and interpreting the assessments that they used: the Rorschachs and the all-encompassing interviews with the Nazis. … Gilbert was really a neophyte with the Rorschach. He was also colored in his assessments because he was Jewish. And he probably felt the same thing I did when I came into this book: personally wronged, harmed and attacked.
Gilbert is a hard person for me to read, to understand, considering even in his own book virtually Nuremberg he doesn't say much about himself. I call up Kelley reveals a lot nigh himself. And one affair he reveals is that he believed he was a lot like Göring, and maybe ane or ii of the others, and was able to put himself in their shoes. That gives me organized religion in his judgment. I don't think he was deceived past [the Nazi prisoners] at all. He was well aware of who Göring was, and what he was capable of – his viciousness and coldness. Merely he could understand them I think in a mode that Gilbert could non.
One of the of import outcomes of Kelley'due south work is [the conclusion] that there aren't monsters. People like Göring volition, along with their despicable qualities, have some good qualities. And that'southward what makes them human.
MP: In looking at the Rorschach test results, what was about interesting and revelatory to y'all?
JEH: That Göring was unusually imaginative in his responses. He showed a richness of imagination that none of the other 21 Nazis displayed. He was a great storyteller and a joke-teller, and he could see the big motion-picture show.
Unlike some of the others, he wasn't a single-minded drudge. He was … not like [Alfred] Rosenberg or [Julius] Streicher or [Joachim von] Ribbentrop or some of the others, who personified the "banality of evil" that Hannah Arendt talked almost. There was nothing bland well-nigh Hermann Göring. He was an exceptional person. Whether you were on the receiving end of his bad side or good side, he was an unforgettably colorful person.
MP: Dr. Kelley became increasingly disturbed subsequently his time at Nuremberg. Exercise you retrieve he was traumatized at that place?
JEH: I think he was traumatized before the war began by his upbringing. His male parent doesn't seem to have been a big presence during his upbringing – but his mother was. Equally Doug [the son] told me, she represented the dark side of the family. She was a pessimist, saw life as a struggle to overcome obstacles and other people. And she taught that to Dr. Kelley when he was growing up. He saw the globe that style, as well: In club to prove himself he had to practice remarkable things. And that'southward why he institute this opportunity to spend so much time with the Nazis at Nuremberg irresistible.
I didn't come beyond annihilation that suggested to me that he was traumatized by the state of war. He was really in his element, finding innovative, novel solutions to a problem. … I retrieve he was invigorated by the war. Only afterward, the experience in Nuremberg was crushing to him because he realized that psychiatry couldn't explicate it. If these men weren't mentally ill, then what?
And that's why he turned to criminology.
To me it makes sense. And it would make sense to almost people, because nosotros don't assume that the majority of people in prison are mentally ill. In that location certainly are a lot of people in prison who are mentally sick. Only when we hear of someone who commits a murder, with the exception of spree killers, nosotros don't blitz to assume that they are mentally ill. And I don't think nosotros should for spree killers either. …
I think that mentally ill people overall are less likely to commit crimes. And it bothers me a lot when I hear a rush to the assumption that so-and-so – Newtown or elsewhere – is mentally ill. I don't call back it's fair to people who are mentally ill to assume that.
MP: What did y'all brand of the parallels between Kelley and Göring's cyanide suicides?
JEH: 1 of the inaccuracies of Walter Freeman's account of Kelley'southward suicide is that he [believed] that Kelley's suicide was straight connected to Göring's, and that information technology's likely that he brought the cyanide back with him from Nuremberg and kept it with him for 12 years. Göring came to Nuremberg with cyanide and managed to salve information technology all those months. I can't imagine a reason why Kelley would want to requite Göring cyanide or the other way around. And there's a lot of evidence now that a U.S. guard helped Göring get admission to the cyanide that he already had hidden.
I came to believe a more subtle connection [between the suicides]: that Göring and Kelley both chose this mutual fashion of ending their lives because they were similar guys. What appealed to them was a dramatic ship-off, a ship-off that would say, "Go to hell" to some of those who were left backside.
MP: How practise y'all answer those who understandably have trouble accepting the idea that "enormous numbers of people" take the potential to act as the Nazis did, and that "it can happen hither"?
JEH: How I explain this has been on my mind a lot lately, because at the finish of this calendar month I'm giving a Holocaust Remembrance Day talk at a young men's Hebrew association center in Queens, New York. The person who asked me to speak told me that there would be a lot of Holocaust survivors there, and she asked me to be sensitive in how I talk well-nigh this. She said they are not going to welcome a message that these personalities and behaviors are in the normal range.
But what I would have to say to them is that if they were not in the normal range, and then that ways the perpetrators are non responsible and should non exist punished. If nosotros believe that they are psychologically disordered or mentally ill, nosotros shouldn't execute them, we shouldn't ship them to prison. The fact that they practise fall within a normal range makes them responsible and makes their penalties possible and moral.
MP: What has become of Dr. Kelley's namesake and son?
JEH: In my mind he's the hero of this story because he is the person who has thought about it for so long and has come up out of information technology a salubrious and emotionally thriving person.
He's well-nigh 65 now. He retired from the Postal Service around the time that I started talking to him. … And he still has all the papers.
I admire him a great deal. … He went through something very terrible and traumatic when he was young – he was 10 when his male parent killed himself, and he witnessed it. He had some really rough years every bit a teenager and in his 20s. His youthful rebellion, which was already nether way by the time his begetter killed himself, was in his heed all tangled up with his father's decease and weird family dynamics.
Just he figured it out, and he's a very happy, healthy, contented person now. He saw [his father's drive to succeed] as a threat to his life considering his father was and so overbearing in pushing that on him. So he broke the chain. His grandmother introduced his father to it, his father introduced him to it. But information technology ended there, which I think is not bad.
Source: https://www.minnpost.com/mental-health-addiction/2014/04/men-and-monsters-nazi-and-psychiatrist-explores-one-historys-most-tr/
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