The Nazi and the Psychiatrist Read Online Free PDF Page B

executing the men by a shot to the chest so as not to damage brain tissue,” writes medical historian Daniel Pick. The US military turned them all down in favor of one of its own who had not even requested the honor.
    It was a plum assignment, a rendezvous with the men widely regarded as the worst criminals of the century. Kelley’s period as the supervisor ofseveral psychiatric hospitals had taught him that aberrant behavior often had mysterious and fascinating sources, and he set his own goals for his stint in this holding pen. He arrived eager to probe the prisoners for signs of a flaw common to Nazi leaders: the willingness to commit evil acts. Did they share a mental disorder or a psychiatric cause for their behavior? Was there a “Nazi personality” that accounted for their heinous misdeeds? Kelley intended to find out. “The devastation of Europe, the deaths of millions, the near-destruction of modern culture will have gone for naught if we do not draw the right conclusions about the forces which produced such chaos,” Kelley later wrote. “We must learn the why of the Nazi success so we can take steps to prevent the recurrence of such evil.”
    Kelley had formed immediate impressions of Göring. From his meetings with the other Nazi prisoners, he recognized that Göring “was undoubtedly the most outstanding personality in the jail because he was intelligent,” as Kelley wrote in his medical notes. “He was well developed mentally—well rounded—a huge, powerful sort of body when he was covered up with his cape and you couldn’t see the fat jiggle as he walked, a good looking individual from a distance, a very powerful dynamic individual.” But having also lightly touched on politics, the war, and the rise of Nazism during their initial cell-bound conversations, Kelley was not blind to Göring’s dark side. The ex-Reichsmarschall displayed ruthlessness, narcissism, and a coldhearted disregard for anyone beyond his close circle of family and friends. That very combination of characteristics present in Göring—the admirable and the sinister—heightened Kelley’s interest in him. Only such an attractive, capable, and smart man, who had smashed and snuffed out the lives of so many people, could point Kelley toward the regions of the human soul that he urgently wanted to explore.

    Outsized ambitions ran in Kelley’s family. The McGlashans, the family of Kelley’s mother, June, were one of California’s most precocious and eccentric clans. Kelley was proud of their extravagant saga. They were largerthan life, an obsessive assortment of achievers, collectors, and builders of edifices, especially monuments to themselves. The patriarch was Charles Fayette McGlashan, who had arrived in California at age seven from Wisconsin and grew up to become an energetic criminal defense lawyer, newspaper publisher, lover of nature, inventor and holder of patents, and amateur historian.
    In the early years of the twentieth century Charles McGlashan’s house crowned a hill overlooking Truckee, a rough Northern California town crouched in the Sierra Nevada above the blue jewel of Lake Tahoe. Surrounded by poppies, bachelor buttons, and lilac bushes and perched on a tall stone foundation that sparkled with mica, the house was a startling, two-story structure with white Grecian columns and tall, arched windows that flashed in the sun. Truckee residents long remembered the magical view of this bizarre dwelling, its windows illuminated by twinkling light-bulbs, that rose from the moonlit snow. Every room held treasures that told stories: Persian rugs, cases crammed with Edison music recordings, sculptures and mementoes, furniture chosen with great deliberation.
    “Our house sang out from the hill, conspicuous as a wedding cake,” remembered one of Kelley’s cousins. In the rotunda Charles McGlashan often planted himself in his favorite seat, a black, padded-leather chair that faced a view of a spectacular mountain peak.