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Authors: Jack El-Hai
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monstrous deeds of the Third Reich? Working among these Germans made Kelley wonder whether he could answer the pressing questions that occupied his mind. Perhaps his scientific study of these men’s minds could identify a telling factor that would be useful in the prevention of the rise of a future Nazi-like regime.
The need was urgent. Without official sanction, Kelley was developing a plan to explore the psychological recesses of the brains of the captive Nazi leaders.
4
A MONG THE R UINS
F or years the German city of Nuremberg hosted enormous Nazi Party congresses. Its name was used on a set of laws that denied basic human rights to German Jews, and the town stood for the principles of European fascism. But by mid-1945 it barely stood at all. Heavy shelling and forty air raids had pulverized the city.A single British air attack in January 1945 had flattened the center of Nuremberg and killed eighteen hundred people. Residents had worked around the clock for a month to find and bury the dead.More than half of Nuremberg’s homes lay in rubble—90 percent in the old part of town—and hundreds of thousands of Germans had fled the area.Many of those who remained lived in damp cellars.
Colonel Andrus and his procession of German prisoners motored through a city filled with eerie scenes of people huddled around outdoor cooking fires, families occupying apartments with walls sheared off and rooms exposed to view, and hungry Nurembergers emerging from underground hovels to wander among heaps of bricks that still entombed their neighbors.Staircases led to empty air.Lacking money, patrons of the black market used cigarettes as currency.The water was undrinkable. Residents of the city remained angry and dangerous. The place smelled of death, dust, and disinfectant.
Although few of the people in Nuremberg understood it—residents, occupiers, and prisoners alike—this battered city would soon host an eventmore momentous than the Nazi rallies that had filled newsreel frames around the world a decade before.
The US Army requisitioned the Grand Hotel, a social center of the city that had previously housed guests at Nazi Party rallies. It was one of the first large buildings in Nuremberg to undergo repair; a bomb had gutted one part of the hotel from roof to street.Previously the neighborhood had been a risky location for Allied soldiers, a place of frequent assaults and robberies by Nurembergers. In its new function, the hotel housed military and civilian men working on the future war crimes proceedings. (Women lived in another hotel a few blocks away, nicknamed “Girls’ Town.”) For a long time it was the only large structure in town with electric lights; at night it blazed amid the surrounding darkness. “To arrive at my room on the fourth floor, I had to walk a temporary gangplank strung over still another cavernous hole caused by a second Allied bomb,” one Allied occupier wrote. “The gangplank had a flimsy railing on one side and the whole contraption wobbled when one walked over it.” Here the tribunal staff lived and drank and danced in a crowded American-style restaurant called the Marble Room, which was closed to German civilians. (Similarly, Americans in Nuremberg were not allowed to patronize most German bars and restaurants.)The bar was well stocked. Dinner, served by waiters in tailcoats, cost the equivalent of 60 cents. From the hotel’s doorways and windows floated the music of the victors, a sound that one visitor remembered as “cheap and potent.”The Russian occupiers sometimes broke out of their isolation to party and drink prodigiously here.
The Palace of Justice was one of a few sizable buildings in Nuremberg that escaped destruction, althoughan air raid had damaged the roof, gutted its upper floors with fire, and collapsed the clock tower. In the last days of the war the building sheltered Nazi SS divisions making a final stand before Allied forces overcame them in May 1945, and months later
The need was urgent. Without official sanction, Kelley was developing a plan to explore the psychological recesses of the brains of the captive Nazi leaders.
4
A MONG THE R UINS
F or years the German city of Nuremberg hosted enormous Nazi Party congresses. Its name was used on a set of laws that denied basic human rights to German Jews, and the town stood for the principles of European fascism. But by mid-1945 it barely stood at all. Heavy shelling and forty air raids had pulverized the city.A single British air attack in January 1945 had flattened the center of Nuremberg and killed eighteen hundred people. Residents had worked around the clock for a month to find and bury the dead.More than half of Nuremberg’s homes lay in rubble—90 percent in the old part of town—and hundreds of thousands of Germans had fled the area.Many of those who remained lived in damp cellars.
Colonel Andrus and his procession of German prisoners motored through a city filled with eerie scenes of people huddled around outdoor cooking fires, families occupying apartments with walls sheared off and rooms exposed to view, and hungry Nurembergers emerging from underground hovels to wander among heaps of bricks that still entombed their neighbors.Staircases led to empty air.Lacking money, patrons of the black market used cigarettes as currency.The water was undrinkable. Residents of the city remained angry and dangerous. The place smelled of death, dust, and disinfectant.
Although few of the people in Nuremberg understood it—residents, occupiers, and prisoners alike—this battered city would soon host an eventmore momentous than the Nazi rallies that had filled newsreel frames around the world a decade before.
The US Army requisitioned the Grand Hotel, a social center of the city that had previously housed guests at Nazi Party rallies. It was one of the first large buildings in Nuremberg to undergo repair; a bomb had gutted one part of the hotel from roof to street.Previously the neighborhood had been a risky location for Allied soldiers, a place of frequent assaults and robberies by Nurembergers. In its new function, the hotel housed military and civilian men working on the future war crimes proceedings. (Women lived in another hotel a few blocks away, nicknamed “Girls’ Town.”) For a long time it was the only large structure in town with electric lights; at night it blazed amid the surrounding darkness. “To arrive at my room on the fourth floor, I had to walk a temporary gangplank strung over still another cavernous hole caused by a second Allied bomb,” one Allied occupier wrote. “The gangplank had a flimsy railing on one side and the whole contraption wobbled when one walked over it.” Here the tribunal staff lived and drank and danced in a crowded American-style restaurant called the Marble Room, which was closed to German civilians. (Similarly, Americans in Nuremberg were not allowed to patronize most German bars and restaurants.)The bar was well stocked. Dinner, served by waiters in tailcoats, cost the equivalent of 60 cents. From the hotel’s doorways and windows floated the music of the victors, a sound that one visitor remembered as “cheap and potent.”The Russian occupiers sometimes broke out of their isolation to party and drink prodigiously here.
The Palace of Justice was one of a few sizable buildings in Nuremberg that escaped destruction, althoughan air raid had damaged the roof, gutted its upper floors with fire, and collapsed the clock tower. In the last days of the war the building sheltered Nazi SS divisions making a final stand before Allied forces overcame them in May 1945, and months later
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