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News Review
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PHOTO: US HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM.
Hermann Göring at Nuremberg, 1946.
What happened when Nazi war criminals took the Rorschach test?
Bella Rough Journalist
Clinicians spent more than 80 hours assessing some of Adolf Hitler’ s closest confidants.
IN August 1945, armed with a few inkblot cards and his intuition, a psychiatrist from California undertook one of the most morbidly compelling missions in the history of his field: the probing of the Nazi mind.
US Army Major Douglas M Kelley had arrived in Nuremberg a few months after Germany formally surrendered.
Twenty captured Nazis— including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Robert Ley— were awaiting trial for war crimes, and Dr Kelley was the chief psychiatrist tasked with determining whether they were unfit to appear in the dock by reason of insanity.
Dr Kelley also saw another opportunity:“ To learn the why of the Nazi success, so we can take steps to prevent the recurrence of such evil.”
So, over five months, Dr Kelley, along with his colleague, the prison psychologist Dr Gustave Gilbert( PhD), spent more than 80 hours assessing the personalities of some of Adolf Hitler’ s closest confidants.
This involved the standard paraphernalia of psychology— interviews, personal essays and IQ tests. But they also used the Rorschach test.
Developed back in the early 1920s by a student of Jungian psychoanalysis, Hermann Rorschach, it was used primarily as a tool for diagnosing‘ psychotic disorders’ like schizophrenia.
But by the time Dr Kelley— an apparent expert in the inkblot field— adopted it, proponents believed it could discern motivations, personality and perceptions, rooted in the belief that subjects‘ projected’ their subconscious emotions and conflicts through their interpretations of the blots.
This was done by tracking the way they identified colour, space, movement, shading and human and animal figures in the blots.
Such was the apparent power of this tool, it could also be used to determine
whether the subject was insane. So, what about Göring? Mad or bad?
A scented Nero?
On the ground floor of Nuremberg Prison, in solitary confinement, the one-time Supreme Commander of the German Air Force submitted to multiple Rorschach tests.
“ Oh, those crazy cards again,” he had laughed to Dr Gilbert.
“ You know, one of the old gents [ in the prison ] said you showed him a lot of vulgar pictures.”
Göring, for much of the Nazi years, had been Hitler’ s second-in-command. He was also a military leader known for his self-indulgent opulence, his silk suits adorned with pearled swastikas, and his country palace furnished with the looted antiquities of Europe’ s finest museums.
He was described by Hugh Trevor- Roper— the UK historian tasked in the months after the war with proving that Hitler was actually dead— as“ a voluptuary, a scented Nero fiddling while Rome burned”.
Along with various war crimes, Göring was to face trial in Nuremberg for his role in creating the Gestapo, his oversight of the forced-labour factories across occupied Europe, co-ordinating anti-Jewish laws, and authorising
‘ A fantastic dance. Two men, here are their heads, their hands together, like whirling dervishes.’ the development of the Final Solution, which was responsible for the murder of six million Jews.
When Dr Gilbert placed Rorschach Card II before him, Göring laughed, as he usually did during the test, and said:“ Two dancing men.
“ A fantastic dance. Two men, here are their heads, their hands together, like whirling dervishes,” he added, placing the card face down— his usual sign that he had nothing more to say.
But Göring also noted the“ red hats” in Card II, beginning a pattern of observing clothing and uniforms in many of his responses.
To Dr Kelley, this was significant. He had noted that prior to his imprisonment, Göring only wore the finest suits and silk underwear. He had also carried a leather cosmetics bag filled with 72 different hair and skincare products.
He had even managed to keep some of these products with him during his confinement, along with three large bejewelled rings.
“[ Göring ] was able to describe every scar and every irregularity on his skin in detail,” Dr Kelley wrote of his obsession with his body.
“ When we spoke about the injuries he had suffered in 1916 during aerial combat, when he was shot down, he precisely gave the length and width of the remaining scars in centimetres and enumerated the various ones individually.”
Weight loss
Göring seemed to have escaped the deprivations faced by many of his countrymen in the last months of the war.
He weighed 127kg when he arrived at Nuremberg.
Dr Kelley, presumably concerned about the impact on his health despite the shadow of the hangman’ s noose cast across Göring’ s future existence, convinced him to lose weight.
“ I pointed out that he would make a better appearance in court should he lose some weight,” Dr Kelley wrote.
Unsurprisingly, given his colossal vanity, Göring agreed— his only condition being that some German prisoners would take in his uniform after he lost PAGE 42