43 representation of the cross-section of either a carburettor or a fountain”. In response to the same card, Göring had seen trolls from Norwegian theatre.
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43 representation of the cross-section of either a carburettor or a fountain”. In response to the same card, Göring had seen trolls from Norwegian theatre.
Hess’ response to Card II of the Rorschach test—“ two men discussing a crime and thinking about blood”— was deemed significant.
It prompted Hess to go on a tangent about bloody thoughts, confirming for Dr Kelley that despite the claimed memory loss, he still had“ bloody memories”.
Ten days into the trial, Hess claimed his memory loss was entirely fabricated as a‘ strategy’ for his defence.
“ How did I do? Good, wasn’ t I?” Hess asked Dr Kelley after revealing his‘ ruse’.“ I really surprised everybody, don’ t you think?” But Dr Kelley was not convinced. Though he believed Hess was exaggerating some elements of his memory loss, he found the very fact that Hess suddenly dismissed his symptoms so publicly was characteristic of a genuinely mentally ill person.
He subsequently admitted to Dr Kelley that his mind was weak, and his memory loss was in fact real.
He was sentenced to life in prison, eventually taking his own life while the sole inmate of Berlin’ s Spandau Prison in 1987, aged 93. He remained a loyal Hitler supporter to the very end.
Robert Ley
Of all the Nazis assessed, Robert Ley was the subject of most interest to Dr Kelley. As the leader of the German Labour Front, Ley was to face the Nuremberg tribunal over his role in the arrest and disappearance of union leaders and the use of foreign slave workers.
His behaviour in prison had been erratic and often unintelligible. He would begin conversations with Dr Kelley calmly, and then suddenly“ stand, then pace the floor, throw out his arms, gesticulate more and more violently and begin to shout”.
The tribunal was concerned Ley would be unfit to stand trial. He had suffered two head injuries prior to the war that Dr Kelley believed had damaged his frontal lobes, causing emotional instability and suicidality.
For Dr Kelley, Ley’ s Rorschach records only confirmed this, as he was frequently unable to project any interpretation onto the inkblots, noting only their colours or describing them as clouds.
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2008-0922-501 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 / bit. ly / 45yOtiT
Robert Ley.
PHOTO: US HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM.
The body of Göring after he killed himself in prison.
“ Definitely that of an individual suffering from damage to his frontal lobes,” Dr Kelley wrote.
Ley could identify a bear in Card IV, but when prompted to elaborate, he described a“ head and teeth with terrific legs”.
Ley continued:“ It has shadows and peculiar arms. It is alive and represent [ s ] Bolshevism overrunning Europe.”
Ley then tried to convince Dr Kelley of his idea for a US-German alliance that would allow for a new Nazi Party, but without the“ evil spirit” of anti-Semitism.
This, according to his vision, would be managed by the surviving Nazis from their cells in Nuremberg, with its task to fight the spread of Bolshevism in Asia. The biggest provocation to Ley’ s self-identity was the fact he was being branded a criminal.
“ Stand us against a wall and shoot us, well and good, you are victors,” he told Dr Kelley.
“ But why should I be brought before a tribunal like a c-c-c- [ criminal ] … I can’ t even get the word out!”
According to Dr Kelley’ s inkblot analysis, Ley could be judged insane.
In the Rorschach test, this was usually based on uncommon or illogical responses to the inkblots that bear no resemblance to their actual form.
When Ley took his own life two weeks after receiving his indictment by strangling himself with a towel, Dr Kelley saw a rare opportunity to verify these findings.
Ley’ s brain was removed and analysed by a neuropathologist who confirmed a degenerative atrophy of the frontal lobes, although he was uncertain whether a brain injury was the cause.
A second opinion, however, was less certain of“ any definite pathology in this case, at least such as would lead one to suspect a clinical organic condition”.
Dr Kelley’ s reaction to this is unknown; regardless, the media had already enthusiastically taken up the‘ brain-damaged Nazi’ line, with newspapers across the world claiming this caused Ley to“ lose his sense of relative values”.
‘ It has shadows and peculiar arms. It is alive and represents Bolshevism overrunning Europe.’
Rorschach revisited
When Dr Kelley first shared his findings in a paper presented at the 1946 annual meeting of the Rorschach Institute, his conclusions were not quite what people were expecting.
Although he was writing more than a decade before Hannah Arendt wrote about the‘ banality of evil’ in relation to the Eichmann trial, the idea that the Nazis were a product of catastrophic but fundamentally human failings rather than a monstrous satanic force, Dr Kelley was saying the same thing.
“ We must conclude not only that such personalities [ of the Nazi war criminals ] are not unique or insane but also that they could be duplicated in any country of the world today,” he wrote.
While Nazis like Göring were“ strong, dominant, aggressive, egocentric personalities”, it is a personality Dr Kelley said you could find“ anywhere in the country— behind big desks deciding big affairs as businessmen, politicians, racketeers”.
Not only were the Nazis not insane, Dr Kelley argued, but there was no‘ Nazi pathology’ that could explain how so many otherwise‘ ordinary’ men could commit and endorse such atrocities.
Published in 1947, 22 Cells in Nuremberg went on to sell poorly. This was in contrast to the book written by his colleague, Dr Gilbert’ s Nuremberg Diary, published in the same year.
It had argued the Nazi war criminals were a psychiatrically disordered group of narcissistic psychopaths.
Göring, Dr Gilbert wrote, was a“ psychopath trying to make a mockery of all human values”, with an obvious
Dr Douglas M Kelley.
“ pathological egotism and inability to stand anything but flattery and admiration for his leadership”.
There was clearly a willing audience for such an assessment back in 1947.
By 1958, Dr Kelley had spiralled into alcoholism and depression. He took his own life one evening by swallowing a potassium cyanide pill— the same as Göring had done 12 years earlier.
In the decades since, there have been some attempts to reanalyse or replicate the Nazi Rorschach responses.
An analysis by Rorschach experts in the 1970s, which used Dr Gilbert’ s primary notes, arrived at a similar conclusion to his own.
However, multiple subsequent studies, some even using a newer and more robust systematised approach to scoring Rorschach responses, were unable to determine a unique Nazi pathology.
To many physicians, the Rorschach test is at best an occasionally useful self-reflection tool, and at worst a relic of psychoanalysis’ murkier past— perhaps even a complete pseudoscience.
“ Seventy years after the Nuremberg trial, we are still fighting over what these Rorschachs mean,” psychiatrist Dr Joel Dimsdale wrote in his 2016 book on the Nazi Rorschach tests.
“ If you knew what you were looking at, you could discern a menace lurking in the prisoners’ responses.
“ If not, well, they were just— more inkblot responses.”