Anatomy Of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals

hi good evening welcome to Nashville spy Museum my name is Vince Houghton I'm the museum's historian and curator and it's a topic tonight that we don't deal with all too often I think it's one of the more fascinating topics it's hard to ignore when some kind of event happens around the world whether it's a serial killer or a mass shooter or a terrorist trying to figure out what makes this person tick you know why did they do this and some people are soothed by answers about why did they do it you know the psychoanalysis of these individuals who do these atrocious things you know did they have mommy issues where they bullied in school is it some kind of socio-economic casualty and this is natural and it's far easier than trying to explain how one group of people which essentially started out as a political party ended up murdering six million innocent people and that's not something I'm prepared to tackle but fortunately we have someone here tonight who has and who is dr. Joel Dimmesdale I give you his CV but we'd be here all night he's the author of more than 500 publications and is the author of anatomy of malice psychological examination of the Nuremberg war criminals or the enigma of the Nuremberg war or Nazi war criminals he which came out actually relatively recently from Yale University Press dr. Dimmesdale obtained his BA in biology from Carleton College and then his MA in sociology and his MD from Stanford he obtained his psychiatric training at Massachusetts General Hospital and had completed a fellowship in psycho biology at the New England regional primate Center which sounds I love monkeys it sounds like a lot of fun with it lots of monkeys yes all right he was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School from 1976 until 1985 and then he moved to his current position at the University of California in San Diego or he is a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor in the department of psychiatry at UCSD he has been a consultant to the President's Commission on mental health the Institute of Medicine the National Academies of science and NASA and the National Institutes of Health and you're here to him hear him and not me so without further you dr. Joel Dimmesdale thank you very much Vince and thank you all for coming this evening you know research tries to address enduring questions and sometimes these questions straddle many areas of Medicine history and our ideas of what the nature of man is my book focuses on these issues in the context of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg the Nazi hierarchy embodied the essence of malice what drove them that's a question that captivated the world 70 years ago and it captivates us today when we encounter malice in contemporary events I'll discuss this question in the context of to investigators explorations of the Nuremberg war criminals with extensive interviews and Rorschach testing my book describes what these investigators did what their investigations did to them and why the data were sequestered and locked up for so many years I've used a number of sources interviews from family members interviews of people who were at Nuremberg and archival evidence locked away in the most unusual places not just here in the obvious places like the National Archives or the Library of Congress but in very unusual places by the end of the war millions of non-combatants had been murdered and Europe was in ruins the world was determined to understand the nature of the malice of the Nazi leaders Peter Townsend and the who stated the problem lyrically what is it like to be evil no one knows what it's like to be the bad man to be the sad man behind blue eyes no one knows what it's like to be hated to be fated to telling only lies but my dreams they aren't as empty as my conscience seems to be so how could the war criminals do what they did were they suffering from a psychiatric disorder were they criminally insane Psychopaths sadists delusional what do psychiatrists think before describing the research on the perpetrators it's useful to review their deeds the mass murders have a peculiar sense of familiarity because they a cue they echo our images of hell and the desolation of Hill from medieval paintings as the critic George Steiner pointed out the concentration camps are the transference of hell from below the earth to its surface the camp's embody often down to minutiae the images and chronicles of Hill in European art and thought fleeing the racking the mockery of the damned in a place of whips and hell hounds of ovens and stinking air now Steiner made one other observation that haunts this particular history he observed that anyone who spends time studying in these dark places must be prepared for an inner resonance of great discomfort please recall this comment as it will become eerily relevant to the Nuremberg investigators there were of course many targets but principally the Jews the dots on this map are not cities but rather locations of some of the 40,000 concentration camps in Greater Germany alone there were slave labor camps ghettos concentration camps POWs camps euthanasia centers this was a vast industry of detainment slave labor and murder there would be retribution for these crimes and for a time the Allies couldn't agree about the process thus initially most of the war criminals were detained at the Palace Hotel a luxury spa Edmund Dorf luxembourg with the codename ashcan security was so tight that quote in order to gain access you needed a pass from God and someone to vouch for his signature the war criminals posed for photos on the veranda of the hotel and were nicknamed the class of 1945 curiously John Kenneth Galbraith was on the premises and he sensed the drama lurking behind these walls quote suppose someone had written a play and put all these characters on the stage when the curtain went up the play bill would have read a jail in Luxembourg in June 1945 while the Nazis posed on the veranda at ashcan the Allies debated if and and where the war crimes trial might be held they settled on nuremberg a city so devastated in the war that arguably it had more bombing damage even then Dresden the city was destroyed but paradoxically the courthouse and the prison survived the war criminals were thus transferred from the palace hotel to the Nuremberg prison many people asked me how I got involved in this area and I've spent most of my professional life in this middle box seeing patients conducting research running a laboratory but something happened 40 years ago that I can't forget and I thought I'd read a piece from the book this was my office that I'm talking about by the way I was in my office in the Attic of a little isolated building on the Massachusetts General Hospital grounds there was a loud knock on my door and I was startled because I wasn't expecting anyone and the building had few visitors a man walked in carrying a gun case and asked are you Dimmesdale and I said yes and he said I'm the executioner and I and I have come for you he came into my office sat down on my psychiatric couch and gestured to his lung gun case and started to open it and I said a little prayer to myself wondering who I had pissed off so remarkably but when he opened the case I saw that it was not a gun case after all but it was a document case and it was filled with Scrolls of World War two documents he went on to say I was the Nuremberg executioner the hangman of Nuremberg and these documents prove that I am who I say I am and we want to tell me that he was proud of his job and that while still being professional about it he enjoyed hanging the criminals they were scum dimma steel and you need to be studying them and not the survivors this was a topic that was much too dark and I shelved it for many years but it gnawed away at me and besides how could I study people who had died so many years before and then I discovered the power of archives the archives are like an Antiques Road house there they're frequently not really curated so not even the librarians know what they have they have a box that says something like Nuremberg 1946 but no inclination of what's in there so I've studied in many many places one of my first ventures was here in the Library of Congress when I was looking at Justice Robert Jackson papers he was the lead American prosecutor at the at the trial and I saw this this telegram popped out and it was a from Harvard criminologist Sheldon Glueck and it was an unusual telegram urging the appointment of psychiatrists psychologists anthropologists to study the war criminals in fact look suggested that a thorough pretrial examination be made of the war criminals and many professional societies in psychiatry and neurology joined in on this effort today there'd be no way all these societies would agree about anything other than request for more funding from NIH but then there was unanimity and rapid-fire correspondence going back and forth from the societies to the prosecutor's office to the OSS they suggested three things study the war criminals give them Rorschach's and then save their brains after they were executed they the assumption then was that they might be shot in the head but these these societies wanted the brain there were many many letters in the files all all on these topics I'm going to focus on these three points about how the war criminal should be studied whether with a Rorschach and what the brains did or did not establish but in a way this begins long before it begins with this man a kind of a Brad Pitt look-alike Hermann Rorschach who was a remarkably gifted psychiatrist who died young his famous Rorschach test he was only able to get that published one year before he died how many of have in the audience have ever taken a Rorschach test it's not done very much anymore and there's a kind of a musty dated quality about the test and a mysterious quality about the test we'll go into that we get most of our ideas about Rorschach's from old movies so when he died in 1922 Rorschach had no idea that another world war was looming and that brought with it new levels of depravity and barbarity or any idea at all that people would turn to his test for answers now when one takes a Rorschach test the investigator basically asks two questions what might this be and what made you say that what part of the blot are you attending to when you say that it's a very powerful test and the the investigator looks not just at the content but also where you're looking are you responding to the color color of the block or the shading of the blot are you responding to details or the gestalt but there have always been concerns about the the the the ink blot test in that you could read into it and if you go back to Shakespeare in Hamlet this is all anticipated Hamlet and Polonius are talking Hamlet's looking at the cloud in the sky and says do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel Polonius by the mass and tis like a camel indeed Hamlet methinks it's a weasel Polonius it is packed like a weasel Hamlet no it's more like a whale Polonius very like a whale so this problem of what one sees in the Rorschach is greatly shaped by what your expectations are when you're viewing the plot itself so the assumption is that all of these defendants were depraved monsters psychopaths but what does that mean and how do you prove it in reality these were a very heterogeneous group of high-ranking defendants Hess was occasionally delusional and frequently claimed Lygia strikers pornographic racist theories were so objectionable than that the Nazis themselves had locked him up in house arrest for the last three years of the war in fact many of them absolutely loathe to each other psychiatrist Douglas Kelly and psychologist Gustav Gilbert were minor functionaries yet Nuremberg but are our major protagonists concerning the Rorschach testing they had multiple roles traditional roles that a psychiatrist has everywhere in prison to determine fitness for trial to maintain prisoners morale in the context of the war crimes trial they also were advisors to the prosecution but they had their personal goals very audacious goals to investigate the psychopathology of the Nazi leaders and to pursue their own ambitions I'll focus this evening on their interactions with four of the defendants Hess Goering Lay and Stryker it is important to recall that the circumstances in the jail the prisoners were held in small solitary cells and there were enormous pressures on everyone many of the Diaries and autobiographies of people who were at nürnberg from from the MPs to the translators to the janitors to the to the lawyers they all speak of the pressure cooker atmosphere of that trial which went on for practically a year and there were enormous concerns about suicide in the jail as well there should be these were very dark times cyanide was everywhere these are data that I pulled just from Berlin in 1945 and it shows the suicide rate and the anticipation of the Russians arriving in Berlin in April so you can see that under these enormous pressures of war suicide is is is is greatly increased Robert ley suppressed the labor unions committed numerous war crimes himself he had a history of multiple head injuries and episodes of unconsciousness he was a plane crash survivor that left him part with a partial aphasia a severe stammer and he was an alcoholic psychiatrist Douglas Kelly evaluated lay in October 1945 and said normal psychomotor reactions and normal attitudes and behavior mood is normal but effect is extremely labile the Rorschach examination reveals emotional instability and evidence of frontal lobe damage he is one of the most potentially suicidal prisoners due to his extreme instability secondary to his old head injury Leigh is competent Leigh hanged himself the next day and Kelly wrote sardonically in 1946 since Leigh kindly made his brain available for post-mortem examination we were presented with a rare chance to verify our clinical and research findings it was a great deal of popular interest in the idea of finding the lesion in the war criminals brain the race was on to prove that these were brain damaged Frankenstein like monsters this Sarasota Herald Tribune quoted the Surgeon General of the army as saying the brain proved changes were sufficient to account for the unusual behavior of Leigh not to be outdone Life magazine ran a story showing major well haymaker of the US Army Institute of Pathology here dissecting lays brain haymaker reported long-standing degenerative processes of the frontal lobe consistent with chronic encephalopathy I'd like to move on to discuss Hermann Goering and his interactions with Kelly and Gilbert Goering arrived at ashcan with 49 suitcases and loads of jewelry notably large rings and with all of Germany's Perico Dean supply Kelley spent a considerable amount of time with Goering and one starts to get a glimpse of Kelley as an astute pragmatic clinician Goering started complaining of withdrawal symptoms from the opiates Kelley writes Goering was very proud I suggested it to him that while weaker men like Ribbentrop whom he loathed would perhaps require doses of medicines should they ever be withdrawn from a drug al habit he Goering being strong and forceful would require nothing Goering agreed and cooperated wholeheartedly Goering weighed 280 pounds on capture Kelley was worried about his heart and appealed to Goering snar sauce is embedder appearance in court should he lose some weight he agreed and lost 60 pounds in five months Julius Streicher was editor of the pornographic anti-semitic newspaper he was a kind of a Hannibal Lecter with a typewriter he urged his followers to beat up his political opponents and even accused the his competitors within the Nazi Party of sexual inadequacy whereas Goering could be affable if he chose to be no.1 found striker affable indeed he was so loathsome that even the Nazis put him under house arrest Rudolf Hess was one of the other major defendants he complained of amnesia and numerous somatic ailments he was intermittently suspicious and saved samples of his food to prove he was being poisoned seen here is a photo of one of his envelopes with red sealing wax he had was convinced that the crackers in prison contained brain poison and sealed up samples which he surrendered on upon arrival to Nuremberg and asked for the Swiss Embassy to assay and they reported that indeed the envelopes contain crackers this this envelope I located right here in Silver Spring Maryland Gilbert and Kelly described Hess as rather similar emotionally withdrawn shy withdrawn and suspicious but let's let's meet the people who tested the Nazi leaders so extensively psychiatrist Douglas Kelly was one of the terminus California geniuses the top half percent of IQ in the state of California he was a Columbia Graduate an expert in forensic psychiatry personality and the Rorschach Kelly's relationship with Goering was intense and close Kelly wrote Goering is one of the easiest to get along with each day when I came to his cell he would jump up from his chair greet me with a broad smile an outstretched hand escort me to his cot and Pat its middle with his great paw good morning doctor I'm so glad you've come to see me please sit down doctors sit here then he would use his own great body down beside me ready to answer my questions Goering was charming when he chose to be charming he had excellent intelligence keen imagination great Drive and sense of humor Kelley spent hours with Goering discussing politics the war the trial testing him Goering in turn regarded Kelley as a well-connected fixer Kelley agreed to intercede with Wild Bill Donovan on growing's behalf and to personally deliver letters to Goering wife Goering writes his wife today I can send you a letter direct major Kelley the doctor who is treating me and who as my fullest confidence is bringing it to you you can also talk to him freely Goering offers Kelley one of his enormous rings in thanks Kelley refuses and then Goering respond then I'll give you something even better and more valuable a signed photograph of me by enormous good fortune Kelley was a world expert in war shock but he didn't speak German Gustav Gilbert on the far right was an American psychologist of Austrian Jewish family in Gilbert's writings one senses more feelings of hatred for the Nazis Kelley was just trying to get them to trial and was intellectually curious about them regarding them as specimens however Gilbert loathed them and urgently wanted to understand their pathology his German was impeccable but he had little expertise with the Rorschach so there you have it what I would call a collaboration from hill two brilliant men who had complementary skills they needed each other they were very different and they were very competitive with each other Kelly designed the testing protocol it was never used in evidence in in the trial and the criminals actually enjoyed completing it they they compared their IQ scores like kids today comparing at comparing SAT tests after the war Kelly assumed editorial positions and became a professor of criminology at Berkeley he included he concluded in his famous quote Nazism is a socio-cultural disease I had at Nuremberg the purest known Nazi virus cultures twenty two flasks as it were to study well let's practice it's the end of it it's the end of the day what do you see here take a moment and think about it think to yourself what do you see in this ink blot and then ask yourself what made you say that now recall that there are ten cards and typically people have multiple responses to each card and it's a it's a very challenging test to keep track of so Hans fish of the propaganda ministry says two dancing bears very clear or gnomes or Dwarfs it makes a revolting impression not at all friendly the bloody color makes me feel uncomfortable Robert ley says a butterfly there are colors here black and red and white keeps perseverating black and red and white a stork or goose would be better it looks like it was tipped with its legs pulled in jaws of the butterfly Hermann Goering laughs and says those are two dancing figures very clear shoulder here and face there he claps his hands and he cuts off the bottom part of the the figure with his hand and he says the top red is the head and the hat the face is partly white Rudolf Hess says parts of an insect with blood spots mask of an island savage the opening is for the mouth it is devilish and that is why the eyes and beard are red so Kelly and Gilbert's first two conclusions were very similar they regarded them the Rorschach's and all of the defendants that they tested as strained as sane and aggressive individuals but their bottom conclusions are fundamentally different Kelly said that they were basically ordinary people influenced by mendacity and bureaucracy creatures of their environment people could be found behind big desks anywhere Gilbert on the other hand said these were narcissistic Psychopaths but there were peculiar things going on in the prison for instance when Kelly left goring wept and he asked Kelly to adopt his daughter Etta if his wife died in the war meanwhile the competition between Kelly and Gilbert just smoldered getting hotter and hotter and again I would suggest the recalling this quote from Steiner that anyone who spends time studying in these dark places has to be prepared for an inner resonance of great discomfort Kelly and Gilbert raced to public to publication but they actually didn't publish their Rorschach's no one would touch it to a certain extent the field was aware of the toxic conflict between Gilbert and Kelly and also there was an odd sense of unease when people started looking at the Rorschach's they didn't see quite what they were expecting to see malee Harrower was one of the world's foremost Rorschach expert and she was a friend to both Kelly and Gilbert she tried constantly to persuade them to compromise with each other she tried to get colleagues to to view the documents she invited colleagues to a conference in London shipped the Rorschach's and and imagine if the world's greatest Rorschach expert picked you as one of the 10 people to review the most challenging important war shocks ever obtained everyone declined everyone declined everyone took a look at the Rorschach's and claimed that they were too busy so again they didn't want to get involved Molly meanwhile was approaching Gustav Gilbert and negotiating to publish some of his Rorschach findings and Gilbert got impatient with the editorial review I don't know how many of you are academics but it takes a long time a lot of back-and-forth and he then did something which he came to regret he simultaneously submitted the same manuscript to another journal and as luck would have it the new publisher selected Molly Harrower as the blind impartial independent reviewer Gilbert's Rorschach's finally were released in 1975 and we'll come back to that I'm afraid I have some very sorry news about dr. Kelly on New Year's Day in 1958 he committed suicide in front of his family he was cooking a New Year's dinner got in a quarrel with his wife to his study came out and said I think I've killed myself and died a minute later his son explained in a recent interview I think maybe he knew he was on a runaway train I think he knew what was inside but he didn't know how to make it go away Kellee study was filled with chemicals medications and Nazi memorabilia he died with cyanide and regardless of them of why or what his motives were there were wild speculations about about where he got the cyanide people were obsessed with the question about where the poison came from so me Ali and seltzer published Gilbert's Rorschach's in 1975 and according to them the Rorschach's showed that they were a homogeneous group of warped Psychopaths who were distinctly savage and devilish but Molly Harris said how can this be they may they may have been very corrupt malicious people but no one could ever call them homogeneous given how different they were in their persona and behaviour and then she went on to say wonder wonder whether what the Rorschach's would show of of cabinet ministers these were not these were not the Nuremberg the original Nuremberg criminals were cabinet ministers they weren't the people who who shot or killed the prisoners so she decided to conduct an ingenious experiment she because of her expertise with the Rorschach she adds hordes of Rorschach's from all sorts of people so she took through three groups of Rorschach's the Nuremberg war criminals the Unitarian ministers and psychiatric outpatients and she snipped off the top of each Rorschach so the the names were not available and she shuffled the deck and sent them to Rorschach experts and said well can you find any common features in one set versus another do you find there are some unique features and though when the Rorschach experts confronted these blindly they could not discern any common characteristics in the war criminals so what are the intellectual traditions in trying to understand malice there are multiple intellectual strands and Kelly and Gilbert correspond to two of the strongest and most familiar strands Gilbert clearly believed in psychopathology Psychopaths were described as violent manipulative impulsive callous lacking empathy or remorse curiously there has always been a suspicion that there was something wrong with the brains of the Psychopaths they don't learn well from their life's experience which is fortunate for the rest of us they don't respond to stressors with a typical stress response and some of them do in fact have some brain abnormalities remember Robert lays brain for instance there are contemporary studies and one asks is that a bad person or is it a bad brain there are a number of neuroimaging studies today which are contrasting violent Psychopaths with various comparison groups I just picked picked one randomly a recent study which purports to show that the MRI shows thinning of the cortex of psychopaths well if Gilbert believed in psychopathology Kelly was swayed by a social psychological perspective that we're all capable of evil under certain circumstances and this was certainly shown by a number of prominent social psychological studies that were all familiar with and Hanna Erin's work she described evil not just as as banal but you know kind of a quote that tends to be forgotten she described the Nazi evil as like a fungus that spreads the Yale shock experiment by Stanley Milgram certainly demonstrated that people would obey Authority do terrible things when kitty Genovese was murdered it stirred up Darlie and LAN today's work to study how people would stand by and watch watch things happen and do nothing and then of course the Stanford Prison Experiment by Zimbardo where people would adopt sadistic behaviors when placed in certain roles well I've discussed the two most prominent scholarly traditions but there are other traditions to account for and explain malice and they need to be kept in mind a third perspective is a legal perspective a forensic perspective and that is that people make mistakes and make restitution indeed there are variations from state to state as to how existing psychiatric disorders influence judgment and sentencing although psychiatrists and courts may use words like psychiatric disorder and insanity may use similar words but the nuances and the surrounds are vastly different in those realms and the fourth perspective is a religious perspective that's embodied very commonly in Paul writes for we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities against powers against the rules of rulers of darkness of this world against spiritual wickedness in high places and I think the fifth perspective is the darkest of all when I graduated from college I still remember our commencement speaker giving this quote which this was what what a quote to send people off into the world the Greek philosopher of bias who concluded most men are bad so what's the burden of proof if you were working in this area with a sample size of 21 would you find this convincing it was a heterogeneous sample men who were in solitary confinement for a year awaiting a death sentence is this the right context to really try to get an understanding were these even the right Nazis to test should one have tested the concentration camp guards would one can differences with that kind of testing and was the Rorschach even administered properly in the the quote of Kelly remember Goering is sandwiched between Gilbert and Kelly on a sagging little cot in a smelly 100 square foot room is this the optimal technique for doing a Rorschach so all that said this is the best and only information we have about war criminals since Nuremberg in all of the subsequent trials in the contemporary war crimes trials in The Hague there is no Douglas Kelly there is no Gustav Gilbert there's no one there trying to do the research there are psychiatrists there and they confine their task to the narrower question of ability to stand trial so there's something very special about about these data and I believe they do have something to tell us I'm going to conclude I read a little piece from the foreword I thought I'd read the afterword from from my book I was on another improbable quest for answers what is it about this topic that leads to archives in such improbable places this time I was back home in California walking through the redwood trees that stand like sentinels around the library yet UC Santa Cruz a subdued light filtered through the moist early morning air and the groves were filled with the scent of the redwoods and the cause from the Steller's Jays I had come to the library in the hopes of learning more about malice for unclear reasons its archives held some of Douglas Kelley's papers the files were useful in revealing more information about Kelly magician astronomer television producer rocontour but included few new documents pertinent to Nuremberg I was of course disappointed but then I started to reflect what any archives have answered my question about malice the Bible says pointedly the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of Cruelty the poet Pablo Neruda concludes more hopefully the earth is Abed blooming for love soiled in blood Kelly found some darkness in every person Gilbert found a unique darkness in some I believe they were both right thank you you turn me up alright that's better so we're gonna open up for questions and answers so I want to as as our host here tonight I'm going to take the right of the first question and you kind of alluded a little bit to what I was going to ask as academics we like to have our own information we like to take our own primary sources and understand them I guess as a psychiatrist you probably want to make conclusions based on your own observations in this case you're obviously using other people's observations you even refer to fact where these tests done in the exact way that you would have done them how different do you have to approach obviously these are all these people are dead so how different do you have to approach this but you're looking at other people's data or looking at other people's methods did you have to evaluate their methodology before you even got started I mean how differently did you approach this because you weren't the one actually doing the direct analysis asking the questions doing these tests you're kind of piggybacking on other people's information good question let me tease that into two parts how does one try to make sense of data secondhand and another part which I think you were implying what what would I do differently straight-out say it what would you have done differently thank you I think you know it's an interesting thing obviously I can't interview the dead there are the the some of the protocols are available the IQ tests are no one has criticized the IQ test there they were standard IQ tests and they showed a range from very gifted to dull normal Julius Streicher for instance could barely make change you know you know in a mental arithmetic challenge on the other hand some of the others were very bright actually Douglas Kelly commented that he was interviewed in The New Yorker in 1949 or 1950 and he said yes yes Goering was bright but he was no genius and of course Kelley was a genius because he was a bonafide the genius certified by Turman so I think the IQ tests are pretty irrefutable other than that I think the the challenge of history is sifting through the past and you can't expect a uniformity of views and you kind of triangulate there's a cacophony of viewpoints which I encountered and it's just you go to the archives and it's Khorasan quarrelsome down there it's so noisy with people disputing maybe not actively face-to-face but offering different opinions so I think one one tries one's best as one can to look for a theme now the second question what would I do differently today well there are a couple things you know psychiatry has changed enormous Lee I mean we're not even we're not even sure about the words anymore that there's a shifting of words and that's true for all of Medicine I mean psychiatry is singularly vulnerable to this but even cardiology such as it was in 1945 was a little iffy Goering for instance was reported to have sustained many heart attacks in prison but that word doesn't mean the same as it does today EKGs were hard to come by in in prison in 1945 there were no serum enzymes that many of you are familiar with and indeed heart attack then could mean anything from a palpitation to a sudden death and so even when you read medical charts it's a little difficult to sort through and psychiatry it's the same thing if they use a term like schizophrenia did they mean something different from what I would say today one of psychiatry's big changes came about with the DSM or the diagnostic Statistical Manual and psychiatry periodically updates this every 10 or 20 years to use the best evidence for what we think coheres as we describe diagnoses and what what has emerged in the research so for the last 25 years we've been much more precise about documenting exactly what we're seeing in an interview as opposed to just skipping to the bottom and stamping a diagnosis on someone the other area is is new it's not ready for primetime but I'm going to mention it anyway please remember I said it's not ready for primetime and and feel free to shout at me but I'll remind you about that and it has to do with the an emerging field of neuro law the this question about is it a bad man or a bad brain and predictably you know absolutely that even today the neural defense is being offered very commonly with with variable success from the defendants point of view but I think that one would definitely want to be doing careful neural imaging there are studies for instance where I showed showed one study that looked at structural changes in a group of psychopaths you could also look at functional studies so if I show you a picture of me falling off the platform most of us would wince at looking at that well it turns out as I mentioned the psychopaths don't have much empathy and when when psychopaths are confronted with a scene like that or when people smash their hand in a car door they don't have a visceral response a psychophysiological response their gift there they're just disembodied from a response and curiously their the the their brains don't light up either in response to that empathy producing stimulus so I think one can predict that people will be using such probes in the future there was a study published in science maybe five years ago some of you may remember it you know we all go to conventions and judges go to conventions as well and I think the meeting was in Vegas and they gave judges two vignettes and asked them how they would sentence people and both vignettes were for a crime of violence of robbing a liquor store or something like that and they presented a history and the vignettes were exactly the same but one of the vignettes had an extra paragraph that a defense psychiatrist had produced evidence arguably that the defendants brain had some deficits in processing so the question is did that extra information potentially influence the judges one way or the other what do you think how many how many thought it how many thought the judges would would would vote the same regardless okay how many thought the judges would would massively cut the sentence for the well I have comfort for everyone here the the judges did cut the sentence but only by a month so they they did they did take it into consideration I think and I think that's important the question of volition intent it may well mitigate a sentence but the person is still held responsible the other I'm sorry I'm going a little long-winded but the the other approach that may may start to take take off is studies of oxytocin which is one of the hormones elaborated in the brain and oddly enough there's evidence that when people have empathy they have more of an oxytocin response and some people have tried experimenting some studies with oxytocin and Psychopaths it's very much up in the air but I think I think things will evolve if we have the will to study it and you know in the international sense of war criminals I'm not sure whether we would but other questions laughing at somebody falling off a stage doesn't make me a psychopath if sorry so we are gonna also I mean Lucille Ball could fall off the sage witch but she was such an athlete that that she wouldn't get hurt I would probably break a leg so he did when I open up to the audience please wait Amanda and Laura over they're gonna have microphones so when they come over to you yes ma'am thank you very much great presentation you said they were both they they both liked each other a lot but you said Kelly didn't speak German right but but well first off Koreans guerring did speak English but Kelly Kelly had a translator with him when he spoke when he spoke with the prisoners and the some of the prisoners spoke impeccable English this is one of I think one of the most challenging disheartening things about about Nazi Germany was that at the pinnacle of the leadership we're not talking about uneducated people who were rat who were just kindled by rabble rousing and politicians many of these people were very educated had PhDs in literature in in in chemistry and political science rudolf hess the deputy Fuhrer his English was superb he had spent four years in a British psychiatric hospital so his English was pretty darn good after that it would be it would be another long evening to go into that and I'm sorry but but that there if you want to read more about about house I discuss him extensively thank you what I want to say is are you familiar with professor Fallon James Fallon yes well you know he went to have his brain examined because his mother informed them that there had been some very uh bad characters in their family line and when he was given this examination that was found out that he had his brain showed all the signs of a psychopath but he had never committed any crime and he wanted to know well if I had this in my brain how come I haven't done things and they believed that it was due to him and his social environment that he was in a good environment that didn't make him want to go bad so I have this feeling that I believe it a little bit of it has to do with the brain and also the genes I read Rock dr. Robert Harris book you're familiar with him on psychopathy as a cop a--they are you sir you know all right and there was another dr. Kiel who has this a machine that book where he did the forensic mm uh MRIs on people I'm not familiar with dr. Kiel yeah I don't know if I'm pronouncing the name correctly but sure I I have come to the conclusion that I believe it's a little bit of both this is only a layman's opinion I'm no professional you know but I have noticed that there is in certain families you can have three children two will do very well but there's one that's always a problem and I always wonder why is that they had the same advantage all three of them but to come out great and one comes out bad and I'm going to conclude on this dr. Kelley when he did Hermann göring's what does the Russia test I looked at one of the pictures that he asked going to look upon and I saw the same thing Goering did and I went around and to my friends they never saw it so I wonder why not I'm looking right at it he described he claimed he saw a man with a big belly a cigar in his mouth and I had on his head when I looked at that picture I saw that same thing and I don't know what it implies about me but I have a feeling that it's a little bit of both in my opinion I think it's the brain and sometimes it's two G that's the only thing I can think up I'm not a professional dealing with the school so but I've been it has always interests me this type of thing that's why I'm here tonight and I try to read all these books because I wonder why do we do what we do you know I grew up in a very bad neighborhood but I never got there do you have a question I mean you are really interesting but do you do you feel us a little bit of both so so let me try to distill that into a couple a couple shorter take questions you're talking about the complexity of behavior and sorting it out and how do you understand it you know we all struggle with that and we all struggle we see families actually Goering had a younger brother and the younger brother was repeatedly arrested by the SS because the younger brother was helping Jews and Goering Goering was furious with his younger brother because he had to kind of keep bailing his brother out and he he was giving Herman a black a black eye so to speak in the Nazi Party and one point the younger brother said Herman I've been reading and hearing rumors of terrible things going on in in the East is it true and herman replied oh don't believe any of that propaganda you're not a politician you were always the black sheep of the family so yes we are different in our families the mystery of how much is is encoded in our genes and encoded by early life invent events I'm sure it's it's a mixture of all of those things now the second as to the cigar and the big Billy and the Rorschach so I showed you and maybe many of you saw certain images the same way that that various of the Nazis did please remember that if you are really a Rorschach test er you making a very little of emphasis on what you're saying Rudolf Hess saying you use all bloody insect spots or something like that instead the Rorschach investigator is looking to see are you responding to color or to shade are you responding to body parts or not and and the investigator is looking at that on multiple multiple multiple cards so the fact that if if any of you saw the same things in the one card that's one card one snippet of data also it comes back to the question of do you believe the Rorschach is a valid instrument or not and and I and I think my take on it is that it's a very sensitive instrument I'm an amateur photographer and I think looking at a Rorschach is like taking a telephoto photograph without a tripod there's a lot of jiggle to it and you have to be to be very careful with it another question yeah thank you see you've got the executive branch basically he's 21 guys - Hitler might assembler and gurbles and has anybody looked into the backgrounds of the lessor once you refer to the concentration camp guards I'm interested in the SS officers that bow would order the shooting of prisoners outright or the hole destruction of a village as was done at one village in France if he goes a couple of SS officers had been killed 600 people were just killed somebody ought to give this order when these people were interrogated later or brought to trial or whatever did they get the same psychological workups as the executives did well that's the Stute question as I meant to say there were many war crimes trials the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg the first one tried the highest-ranking Nazi as they could find there were subsequent trials trials of the doctors trials of the lawyers all similarly high rank but not the highest rank and then there have but Kelly and Gilbert were gone they were not studied that way there have been some studies there's a study of I think Danish collaborators and they looked at that of it's a appreciable sample size of roughly 500 Souls and there were some equivocal findings which I I mean they were there were some subtle things about not I had a very strong response to it one way or another of understanding what was encountered I wanted to study the cabinet ministers the people who were least able to argue that I was just a cog in the wheel of state if there was a group of people that had intentionality will power this was the group to study so I was interested in the predation people as opposed to the real hands-on murderers seems to me from the way you described Gilbert and gorings interactions I mean one interpretation might be that goring was trying was trying to ingratiate himself to to Gilbert so that he could perhaps get better to better treatment I mean he got a letter to his wife I mean and maybe he thought it could get up a lesser sense I mean he was trying to ingratiate himself that's what seems like from what to me so so first of it was Kelly Kelly okay I just wanna so absolutely absolutely Goering was occurring was capable of being a very charming man and everybody knew it and Kelly knew it the Kelly spent a lot of time with Goering and and you know yes he delivered a letter to Goering his wife but he called Goering pretty straight in his analysis Kelly claimed to have spent 80 hours interviewing Goering now that you know whether whether he amplified that a bit I don't know but he spent a lot of time with him so was Goering trying to get a lighter sentence Goering knew he would be executed he knew he would be executed and the only thing he was trying for was to be shot as opposed to hanged that was the only thing that that Goering was after he was in negotiations with the OSS they was in all sorts of negotiations to try to let him have a decent execution from the military point of view he found the idea of of hanging humiliating so I don't think I don't think he was trying to get off from from from his relationship with Kelly did eventually were they going to to hang him and that's why he committed suicide yes he he he was sentenced to hang and killed himself with cyanide one hour before he was hung and this is one of those mysteries that will never be solved oddly there's this wild competition I gave during the suicide no I did I did so there are there are there are four people who have argued that they gave Goering the cyanide the fact is he killed himself with cyanide an hour before he was to be hung and and gorings you know I mentioned that Robert ley had had strangled himself as well their suicides were very different Goering x' was done out of defiance whereas Lai's was done by remorse and that the paradox of this so here we have Robert ley the one war criminal whose brain we have and who we know had substantial brain injury and yet he was the one war criminal who had substantial remorse um hello you mentioned that Gilbert loathes the Nazis correct yeah I was just curious if you thought that had any effect on his research or the found the findings that he had compared to Kelly who seemed to form more relationships with them they they had a different style of interacting with the prisoners and Gilbert with had a more formal interaction with them and some like Hess actually I think got along better I'm inferring this with with Gilbert then with Kelly I have a quote in the book Gilbert Gilbert kept a diary a very interesting diary called the Nuremberg diary so and he describes an interviewer you know interviews with with Stryker and how Stryker was so obsessed with with pornography and race defilement and anti-semitism and Gilbert commented I think quite candidly that you know 15 minutes with Stryker was about as much as he could tolerate and I like I share that point of view I think if I if I were to to interview Julius Streicher today I'd probably go home and take a shower with Faisal hex a more mundane question we know that Kelly obviously admired Goering and so forth and so on and then how do we know how he reacted to Goering suicide and could there possibly be any connection with the way that Kelly chose to end his life the same capsule may be retained from Goering who knows well that's that's what everyone noticed that these two men who were quite close and they both killed themselves with the same tool but we can't we can't possibly discern where where Kelly got this idea and cyanide was everywhere the last performance of the German Philharmonic before the Russians liberated Berlin the Hitler Youth came through the orchestra handing out cyanide capsules for people to take so they wouldn't have to face the Russians so cyanide was everywhere at the time and culturally as I showed you just from Berlin the the suicide was was very high at that point so the question was did Kelly admire Goering for his suicide I don't think he admired Goering for that he Kelly wrote that and this is not a tip that's not a full quote but it was so typical for Goering to go out that way and that was a it was a defiant stance that that humiliated the Allies of course there the Goering was the number one person that that the Allies wished to hang but I don't I don't think I would say that that Kelley in my admired him I have not seen anything in the stuff that I've looked at right that's a fascinating presentation I was interested in the way you approach the topic and that you instead as a psychiatrist you didn't put these people on the couch yourself like liftin for the Nazi doctors you know he he had all these people and he interviewed some but he came to his own conclusions about doubling and that's how they handled you know killing people so I wondered why you didn't just put them on the couch yourself you know using Gilbert's and Kelley's material and then adding your own you know biographical stuff I mean this is a great story and it's fascinating to hear their interactions but why did you approach it that way who that is I think one of the toughest questions anybody's asked me and they were tough questions but but I didn't rush into writing this as I said this was 45 years ago that the executioner came to me and I I continued reading a little bit and thinking and ultimately I was struck by by Galbraith this quote about imagining this as a play with with the curtain going up and a mansion in Luxembourg and Monde or Luxembourg and I found it very interesting to look on the one hand for of the war criminals I just picked four because they were would be a very long book if I picked all 21 but but also because each of them was distinctly different and I wanted to try to hone in on that and I then I'm focused on the other side the people Kelly and and Gilbert and I didn't talk this evening about the warden of the jail who was a very interesting man nor did I talk about Robert Jackson very much the the justice it seemed to me that each of these were characters that just seemed to ask to be written in a certain way I'm sorry that sounds mystical but that that's just the way I felt I should write it you said you found a card in Silver Spring now I've lived there for 71 years where did you find that card in Silver Spring a relative of of one of the major people I've talked about so we're gonna wrap this up so that you have opportunity to go sign some books and talk to me let me ask one final question there actually was a Nazi high-level Nazi war criminal that was captured long after this Adolf Eichmann yeah did anyone psychoanalyze him that it kind of apply these same things now that psychiatry had moved forward a little bit people knew a little bit more about things so interestingly Gustav Gilbert was called back to Jerusalem to testify in Eichmann's trial not that Gilbert had any interactions or had not that he had done any testing of Eichmann but just because he had somebody had told Gilbert in the war what Eichmann was doing so it was more data about about about Eichmann Eichmann was subjected to psychological testing and Gilbert tried about it and the judge cut him off and said that's irrelevant we just want to know what you knew about what I command did and Gilbert was chagrined but that's would take us very far well please join me in thanking dr. Joel Dimmesdale for talking to us tonight and he will be in the back if you want books signed and sort of chat with Dahlia thank you you

Channel: IntlSpyMuseum

Views: 40,077

Rating: 4.5154395 out of 5

Keywords: Nazi, Rorschach Test, spy museum

Id: EbiWEmm7fqY

Length: 83min 50sec (5030 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2016