The Nazi and the Psychiatrist Read Online Free Page B

athletic,” Göring told Kelley as they sat side by side on the prisoner’s cot, “and until the last years of the war I spent much time skiing, hunting, and mountain climbing.” Göring seemed to believe that real danger could never threaten him. On one occasion in his youth, he had stood and watched an avalanche sweep aroundhim in the Austrian Alps as his companions scurried to safety, and on another he had berated his friends for panicking when their rowboat drifted near the precipice of a waterfall. “If we go over, we die, and there’s nothing we can do about it, so why get excited?” Göring remembered shouting to his friends.
    Kelley asked Göring about his personal habits, and Göring replied that he ate with gusto, drank alcohol in moderation, and sometimes smoked cigars. “He claims to have a normal sexual life and states that it has not changed since his gain in weight during the 1920s,” Kelley wrote.
    The psychiatrist next turned to Göring’s drug addiction. As Göring explained to Kelley, twenty-five years earlier he had taken part in Hitler’s notorious Munich “Beer Hall” Putsch, a failed attempt by Nazi Party members to seize control of the government of the German state of Bavaria. Göring, already one of Hitler’s chief aides, helped plan the revolt; organized the Nazi storm troopers, who intimidated citizens and took over government buildings; and spurred on a mob that occupied a Munich beer hall in which a high-ranking Bavarian official, Gustav von Kahr, was giving a speech. After twenty-four hours of hostage taking and confusion, the Nazis and members of the Bavarian State Police fought in the streets of Munich and exchanged gunfire, leaving twenty people dead and many wounded. Hitler and his supporters were routed, and Göring took a bullet in the thigh. A resulting infection left him hospitalized for many months, during which the drug dependency took root. While doctors had cared for his leg, Göring had received repeated doses of morphine to dampen his pain. Gradually his wound healed, but his need for morphine persisted. When doctors discontinued the shots, Göring went to the black market to obtain morphine tablets. Exiled from Germany for his role in the putsch, he was looking for work as an aviation consultant when he and his first wife, Carin, moved to Sweden in 1924.
    He took his addiction with him. He complained that the pain in his leg had grown unbearable, and the idleness of being unemployed left him feeling purposeless. He upped his daily intake of morphine. The drug made him at times delusional, untrustworthy, talkative, manic, grandiose, andinsomniac. It lit his emotions like fireworks, igniting fits of rage and violence. He threw furniture around his apartment. Morphine overstimulated his hormonal secretions and his weight ballooned, to nearly three hundred pounds. The svelte, dashing aviation hero of World War I had enlarged grotesquely.
    Göring made life miserable for Carin. Doctors told her he was a danger to himself and to others. She committed him to Aspudden Hospital, where, in accordance with the addiction treatment practices of the time, Swedish physicians abruptly reduced his access to morphine. Göring entered the hospital willingly, but he did not foresee the agonies that lay ahead. Physicians refused his requests for more morphine and told him to endure his withdrawal like a man. Enraged by pain, craving, and frustration, he assaulted a nurse, tried to break into the hospital’s stores of drugs, and threatened to kill himself. Göring had to submit to a straitjacket before his transfer to a much rougher institution: the Langbro Asylum for the Insane.
    He remembered only a jumble of frightful images from the next three months at Langbro. Attendants tied him up in a padded room to prevent him from hurting himself and left him there for days. He was cut off from morphine and endured the full brunt of the harrowing symptoms of cold-turkey withdrawal. Released to