Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Nuremberg Personality Tests

Starting point is 00:00:00 At the end of the Second World War, the Allies indicted 24 top surviving Nazi leaders and put them on trial in Nuremberg, Germany. With these high-ranking Nazi officials incarcerated, psychologists saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study the men responsible for some of the most heinous crimes in human history. What made them tick, and why did they do what they did? Learn more about the Nuremberg personality tests and what they discovered about Nazi leaders on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Starting point is 00:00:57 Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The Second World War didn't end like other wars in the past. Previously, a conquered ruler might have been exiled like Napoleon, or summarily executed if there was a conflicting claim to a territory. At the end of the First World War, the Kaiser lived the rest of his life in seclusion in the Netherlands. Leading German military officers were simply out of a job and found alternative employment. World War II, however, didn't end like the First World War. It wasn't decided by a treaty, rather it was decided by total unconditional surrender and occupation. When the war was over, the question amongst the Allies was,

Starting point is 00:01:39 What do we do with these Nazi officials? No one wanted them to get off scot-free, yet there was no precedent in military history or an international law for prosecuting people for crimes conducted during a war. The British wanted summary executions. The Soviets wanted a show trial. The Americans, however, wanted due process. The Allies eventually agreed that high-ranking Nazi officials who were responsible for the conduct of the war, including civilians, were to be tried as criminals. To this end, they wrote the Charter of the International. International Military Tribunal. This would serve as the basis for trying officials for crimes

Starting point is 00:02:13 against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Instead of a judge and a jury, a tribunal of judges from each allied country would serve judgment and sentencing on those found guilty. There were several trials that were conducted over the course of several years, but for the purpose of this episode, I'm going to focus on the first trial which received most of the attention, which was the International Military Tribunal itself, which had 24 of the highest ranking surviving Nazi defendants. Top German leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels had all committed suicide. One of the 24 indicted Nazis, Martin Borman, had gone missing.

Starting point is 00:02:49 His remains were discovered in 1972 and were positively identified via DNA analysis in 1998. Those who were captured were still very high up in the German command structure. The biggest fish was probably the head of the Luftwaffe, Herman Gehring. Others included foreign minister Joachim von Ribentrop, leading generals Wilhelm Kytel and Alfred Yodel, and the head of the Kriegsmarine Carl Donuts. All 24 men were accused of at least two of the following four crimes. One, participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace. Two, planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace.

Starting point is 00:03:24 Three, participating in war crimes. And four crimes against humanity. The tribunal lasted almost a year from November 1945 to October 1946. But this episode isn't about the tribunal per se. During the trial, the prisoners were given to doctors, dentists, chaplains, and what is relevant to this episode, psychiatrists. In particular, an American psychiatrist by the name of Douglas Kelly. Kelly was a researcher at the Rorschach Institute and volunteered for the Army right after Pearl Harbor. At the end of the war, he was the chief psychologist for the entire European theater.

Starting point is 00:03:58 His initial assignment was to determine if the defendants were mentally competent to stand trial. Kelly recruited as his assistant, another American officer, officer Gustav Gilbert, who, in addition to being a social psychologist, also spoke German. They had ample access to all of the accused prisoners, and he actually found that they were more than willing to talk. Most of them were bored and wanted to brag about their achievements. Kelly said that they were the easiest group of patients he ever had to interview. Both Kelly and Gilbert knew that they were sitting on a psychological gold mine. They had a limited amount of time to interview and study men who were responsible for some of the

Starting point is 00:04:32 greatest crimes in history. There were three clinical tests that were administered to the prisoners. The first was the thematic app perception test, or TAT. The TAT is a projection test where a patient is given an image and then they have to construct a story telling the events which led up to the image and the backstory of the characters. The second test was the classical Roershack test. The Rorschach test, as you might be familiar with, is a series of ink plots that have no particular meaning or shape. The patient then has to interpret the ink plots as to what they look like. The final test which was administered was the Welsher Bellevue intelligence test to measure IQ. The only part of Kelly and Gilbert's research that became part of the official tribunal

Starting point is 00:05:12 was that they said all of the men were competent to stand trial. None of them had any significant mental impairment which prevented them from being tried. Many of the tests which they administered were never officially approved. They just went ahead and did it given that they had the opportunity. Their findings were not what they expected, and probably not what most of you would expect either. They assume that these men would be found to be monsters and psychopaths, but that's not what they found. They found them to be wholly normal. The results of the Rorschach test were extremely average. There was no fundamental difference between the results of the Nazi prisoners and that of an average

Starting point is 00:05:49 American who took the test. 30 years after the test were administered, a psychologist by the name of Molly Harwer conducted a double-blind test to compare the Nazi results with a group of members of the clergy and of hospital patients. She found no difference between the groups. The IQ test results were shocking and weren't made public for years. Of the 21 prisoners tested, they scored an average of 128, which was the cutoff level for very superior or genius level on the test. Many of the Nazis were excited to take the test and were quite pleased with the results.

Starting point is 00:06:22 Wilhelm Kytle noted how much better the tests were than the, quote, silly nonsense that the German psychologist resorted to. It was later discovered that he, banned intelligence tests from the German military when his son failed one in becoming an officer. The highest scoring German was Yalmar Schott, who scored 143. He was actually one of the only accused to be totally acquitted. He was formerly the head of the Reichs Bank, but spent almost the entire war in a concentration camp because of his objections to Hitler. And he was surprised to have been arrested, given his imprisonment during the war and his work with various

Starting point is 00:06:53 Hitler assassination plots. Arthur Seisenkwart, the Chancellor of the Netherlands and the person responsible for the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to concentration camps, scored a 141. Both the head of the Navy, Carl Donnitz, and the head of the Air Force, Herman Gehring, scored 138. The lowest score by a decent margin, yet still above average, was Julius Stryker. Stryker was the Nazi that other Nazis thought was crazy, and feel free to replay that again just to let it sank in how ridiculous that statement is. Stryker was the editor of the main Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer and was a true believer. He was a virulent anti-Semite and considered by many Nazis to be the most anti-Semitic of them all,

Starting point is 00:07:36 which, again, is really saying something. The official tests were not the only things gleaned from the Nazis. Much of what was learned came from conversations with the men over a period of months. One American who had access was a translator by the name of Howard Trieste. Trieste was a German-born Jew who managed to escape. Germany when he was a child to the United States, but most of his family didn't. He was responsible for censoring mail for the prisoners and got to know several of them quite well. Stryker, the virulent anti-Semite, took a liking to Trieste because he looked strongly Aryan,

Starting point is 00:08:09 not realizing that he was actually Jewish. The Auschwitz commander, Rudolf Hos, took pride in having killed so many Jews, and in fact having gone well beyond his original quota. On October 16, 1946, 10 of the convicted Nazis were executed by hanging. Garing killed himself with a cyanide capsule just hours beforehand. One prisoner, Robert Lay, killed himself before the trial began, and it was believed he had advanced dementia. Three were acquitted, and the rest were sentenced to imprisonment veering from 10 years to life. But even after the trial was over, the interpretation of the psychological data was just beginning.

Starting point is 00:08:44 Both Kelly and Gilbert later released books that gave their theories on the Germans that they studied, and they had very different interpretations. Gilbert's book was titled The Psychology of the Dictatorship, which was released in 1950. He felt that the Nazi leaders did what they did because they grew up in an atmosphere of absolute submission to authority. Intelligence and morality took a backseat to loyalty and an ability to follow orders. Kelly's book was titled 22 cells in Nuremberg and it was released in 1947. Kelly's take was, what happened was the result of what he called a sociocultural disease. He was hoping to find that there was some sort of Nazi personality,

Starting point is 00:09:21 that future researchers could look for as some sort of early warning sign. He couldn't find one. He found that the defendants were essentially sane. He wrote a paper in 1946 before the trial was even over, in which he said he felt, quote, not only that such personalities are not unique or insane, but also that they could be duplicated in any country in the world today. End quote.

Starting point is 00:09:44 Despite the above average intelligence of the men on trial, Kelly thought that they were truly nothing special. They were, quote, not spectacular types, not personality such that appear only once a century. They were men who displayed, quote, overweening ambition and low ethical standards. The narrative after the war was that the Nazis had to be individual monsters because that was the only thing that made sense of what happened. Yet he wrote, 75 years ago, quote, I am quite certain that there are people even in America who would willingly climb over the corpses of half the American public if they could gain control of the other people. half." End quote. Douglas Kelly died on New Year's Day in 1958 in front of his whole family when he mimicked

Starting point is 00:10:26 the suicide of Herman Garing by swallowing a cyanide capsule. Several years later, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt explained this phenomenon during the trial of Adolf Eichmann by coining the phrase, the banality of evil. What she found in Eichmann and what Kelly found at the tribunal were men who weren't psychopaths, although some of them clearly were, or not even necessarily fanatics. Rather, they were people who didn't think for themselves and were willing to put morality aside for personal advancement. The debate about the psychology of Nazis hasn't ended, and it probably never will. The work done by Gilbert and Kelly, despite being the only work of its kind, has been both criticized and supported.

Starting point is 00:11:06 In many respects, the interpretation of Douglas Kelly and Hannah Arendt is more frightening than thinking that Nazi leaders were all psychopaths. Because if the people who did such heinous things, or allowed them to happen, were somewhat normal. and not necessarily sadistic, it implied that if the conditions were right, it could happen anywhere. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just wanted to extend a big thank you to everyone who is supporting the show over at patreon.com.

Starting point is 00:11:42 I have show merchandise available there, including hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers. Plus, it really just helps me get this show out every single day, including, of course, weekends and holidays. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it right on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Nuremberg Personality Tests

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