Jack El-Hai on Psychiatry, Nuremberg and Trying to Figure Out Nazis

Summary

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Murder Sheet Podcast:

Jack El-Hai on Psychiatry, Nuremberg, and Trying to Figure Out Nazis

Release Date: May 20, 2026
Host(s): Áine Cain & Kevin Greenlee
Guest: Jack El-Hai (author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist)

Main Theme & Episode Overview

In this episode, the hosts sit down with Jack El-Hai, author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, to discuss the life and work of Dr. Douglas Kelley—a U.S. Army psychiatrist who was assigned to evaluate high-ranking Nazi officials during the Nuremberg Trials. The conversation explores Kelly’s deep dive into the psychology of the Nazi leadership, his methods, findings, ethical conflicts, and lasting impact on our understanding of evil, authoritarianism, and human nature. The episode delves into the intersection of psychiatry and criminology, the personal dynamics between Kelley and his infamous patients (especially Hermann Göring), and draws connections between historical and contemporary threats of authoritarianism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Stage: The "Why" of Evil

[01:39–03:59]

• The hosts introduce the core question: “Why?”—as in, what psychological factors could prompt humans to perpetrate atrocities like the Holocaust and other Nazi war crimes.
• Dr. Douglas Kelley sought to answer these questions when assigned to evaluate Nazi leaders post-WWII.

The Infamous Prisoners: Focus on Hermann Göring

[05:05–07:04]

• Göring was Hitler’s designated successor, held multiple top positions, and was deeply involved in all aspects of the Nazi regime.

• He was initially underestimated due to his flamboyance but was highly intelligent, strategic, and manipulative.

• Quote:
  “That portrayal of Göring seriously underestimated him because Göring was highly intelligent, he was a great strategic thinker, he was charming...a master manipulator.”
  —Jack El-Hai [07:29]

• Göring was addicted to narcotics for much of his adult life, which influenced his behavior yet did not diminish his cunning.
  [08:55]

Dr. Douglas Kelley: The Army Psychiatrist

[10:12–12:58]

• Kelley, only 33 at war’s end, was tasked with determining the Nazis’ mental fitness for trial, but used the unique opportunity to probe deeper into their psyches, seeking any shared psychiatric disorder.

• He was skilled not only in psychiatry but in stage magic, adding to his ability to disarm and connect with subjects.

Methods: Rorschach and More

[13:03]

• Kelley administered the Rorschach inkblot test, IQ tests, the Thematic Apperception Test, and conducted extensive interviews—sometimes addressing philosophical and historical topics with the prisoners.

The Prisoners’ Motives

[17:41–19:37]

• Many Nazi defendants, including Göring, sought to justify their actions or cement a legacy; Göring in particular hoped to cast Nazi actions as patriotic, not solely racist or militaristic.
• Göring manipulated Kelley to get letters to family, and Kelley had his own unsanctioned research ambitions.

Secrecy and Ethics

[19:37–21:46]

• Kelley’s superiors were largely unaware of his deeper research. His official job: preventing prisoner suicides (not wholly successful; e.g., Robert Ley did take his life).

Life in Nuremberg Prison

[20:36–22:24]

• The defendants found their imprisonment isolating and tedious, with little to do and constant monitoring. Göring craved conversation, even with his captors.

Rudolf Hess

[22:24–25:38]

• Hess feigned amnesia during captivity. Kelley quickly deduced he was faking and noted Hess’s antagonistic relationship with Göring.

• Memorable moment:
  El-Hai tells the “biscuit” story—discovering in Kelley’s archives a box of biscuits refused by Hess, believing they were poisoned, and having to decide whether to open a 60-year-old sealed package. [24:00]

Psychiatry Meets Criminology: Kelley’s Conclusions

[25:53–28:06]

• Kelley concluded there was no shared psychiatric disorder among the Nazi leaders—they were “normal” in personality tests, which alarmed him.

  Quote:
  “What Kelly ultimately determined was...none of these men suffered from any kind of psychiatric disorder. They all fell within the normal range of human personality. And that meant...if these men were normal, then there must be others like them who would do the same thing, given the opportunities.”
  —Jack El-Hai [25:53]

• Evil, he realized, was not an aberration, but a human possibility.

Early Theories of Psychopathy?

[28:06–28:58]

• The term “psychopath” was only just emerging; Kelly was unaware of it when conducting his evaluations.

Kelley and Göring: A Battle of Wits

[29:01–30:15]

• Mutual respect, but not friendship—El-Hai likens their encounters to “King Kong vs. Godzilla”, an epic struggle of charisma and intellect.

Kelly’s Dual Allegiances and Ethical Quandaries

[30:27]

• Kelley, at times, provided trial prosecutors with information gleaned from his interviews—a conflict of interest unthinkable by modern standards but indicative of the “trailblazing” and ambiguous nature of his role.

  Quote:
  “He had an allegiance to the defendants in the doctor-patient kind of relationship, but he was also an officer in the U.S. army...a very awkward position for him to be in.”
  —Jack El-Hai [31:41]

Göring’s Trial Goals and the Reality

[32:51–34:36]

• Göring saw himself as the legacy-bearer for Hitler and the Third Reich; he predicted the defendants would be revered in postwar Germany, which proved unfounded due to overwhelming evidence revealed at the tribunal.

The Impact of Holocaust Film Footage

[34:36–36:12]

• The showing of camp liberation footage shocked even defendants. Silence and visible distress followed—a powerful, transformative moment for all present.
• Quote:
  “When after that day...Kelly described how there was just silence. Nobody knew what to say. And some of the defendants were visibly upset.”
  —Jack El-Hai [36:12]

Kelley’s Departure and Göring’s Fate

[36:12–40:49]

• Kelley left Nuremberg in early 1946, honorably and voluntarily, not due to any scandal (contrary to the movie’s version).
• Göring ultimately evaded the gallows by committing suicide with a cyanide capsule—an act of final defiance, and the means by which he procured the poison remains uncertain.

Was There a “Nazi Germ”?

[42:19–43:50]

• Kelley found no unique “Nazi virus”—no pathology but shared characteristics: drive, lack of empathy and remorse, opportunism, and a lust for power.

Implications for America: “It Can Happen Here”

[43:50–45:09]

• Like Sinclair Lewis's It Can’t Happen Here, Kelley was deeply concerned that authoritarianism was not just a “German problem.”

  Quote:
  “Well, he not only believed that it could happen here, he believed it was happening in the US...He said, it is happening here.”
  —Jack El-Hai [44:11]

Kelley’s Tragic Personal End

[45:31–47:01]

• Following personal and professional decline, disillusionment, alcoholism, and a failed book, Kelley took his own life in 1958 using cyanide—mirroring Göring’s method—before his family.

The Research Journey: Magic Shows, Archives, and Family

[47:17–50:49]

• El-Hai discovered Kelley’s story while researching for another book and gained access to a trove of original Kelley documents and artifacts through contact with Kelley’s son, Doug.

• Doug, despite a difficult upbringing, was eager for his father’s story to be told and trusted El-Hai with the family papers, enriching the book’s depth and authenticity.

Book Becomes Film: The Movie “Nuremberg”

[50:49–54:03]

• El-Hai details the lengthy adaptation process—culminating in the film’s 2025 premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.
• He emphasizes his satisfaction with the portrayal of key themes, especially the necessity of international justice and the dangers of incipient authoritarianism.

Upcoming Work

[54:07–57:12]

• El-Hai previews his next book, The Case of the Autographed Corpse, about an Apache medicine man’s wrongful conviction and the involvement of mystery writer Earl Stanley Gardner’s Court of Last Resort.

Closing Thoughts

[57:12–58:59]

• El-Hai emphasizes key takeaways: the lasting value of international criminal justice, and the urgent need for societies to guard themselves against the rise of authoritarianism—echoing Kelley’s own warnings.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “What could prompt a human being to do this to other people?”
  —Anya Cain [02:45]
• On Göring:
  “He had a great sense of humor, he loved to tell jokes about himself, lots of self deprecating jokes, and he was a master manipulator.”
  —Jack El-Hai [07:29]
• “Kelly set up for himself a project unsanctioned...to determine whether these men shared any kind of psychiatric disorder that could account for their behaviors...”
  —Jack El-Hai [12:22]
• “He [Kelley] concluded there was no Nazi virus...no illness. The men were normal.”
  —Jack El-Hai [42:32]
• “Evil as lack of empathy.”
  —Gustav Gilbert (referenced by El-Hai), [43:12]
• “He believed it could and was happening [in America].”
  —Jack El-Hai [44:11]
• On Kelley’s suicide:
  “He did take his own life on January 1, 1958, using cyanide, just as Göring had, and in front of his family at a New Year's Day party.”
  —Jack El-Hai [46:27]
• On the value of international justice:
  “International efforts to bring war criminals to justice are important...and we're seeing today those efforts are hobbled by the refusal of of some countries, including the United States, to participate in them.”
  —Jack El-Hai [57:12]

---

Useful Timeline

• 00:01–01:21: Ads & general intro (skipped for summary)
• 01:21–14:00: Background on Kelley, Nuremberg, Göring, and methodology
• 17:41–25:38: Prisoners’ motives, Kelley’s secret project, and life in prison
• 25:53–28:58: Psychiatry / criminology intersection, no discovered “Nazi disorder”
• 32:51–34:36: Göring’s goals for the trial
• 34:36–36:12: Impact of camp footage on defendants
• 36:12–40:49: Kelley’s exit; Göring’s suicide
• 42:19–46:27: Concluding findings; American relevance; Kelley’s tragic end
• 47:17–54:03: Research process, access to Kelley’s archives, film adaptation experience
• 54:03–57:12: Preview of El-Hai’s forthcoming book
• 57:12–58:59: Final reflections and key lessons

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Episode Takeaways

• Psychiatric evaluation failed to find a “madness” or unique pathology among Nazi leaders—placing responsibility on ordinary human nature and context, not aberrant psychology.
• Kelley’s realization: authoritarianism and evil are potential in any society, not limited or confined to one time or place.
• The process highlighted the blurred ethical lines of psychiatric involvement with war criminals, especially in novel historical circumstances.
• El-Hai’s work (and the film adaptation) connects past and present, serving as a warning and a call to sustained vigilance against rising authoritarianism and the normalization of atrocity.

---

Transcript

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Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty I'm Kevin and today we will be hearing the story of a man who got the opportunity to speak face to face with some of the most notorious Nazis in history in an effort to try to figure out what made them what they became.

[Anya Cain]

Content Warning this episode includes discussion of genocide, war crimes, murder, and pretty much every crime you could probably think of. Why? That's the question a lot of us have when we look at all of the violent and terrible crimes that happen in the world. Why does this happen? What sort of person does these things? How can we stop them from happening again? Douglas Kelly asked all those questions when he looked at all the evil the Nazis were responsible for during World War II. Dr. Kelly was a psychiatrist and the army sent him to Nuremberg after the war to work with the Nazis who faced trial for their war crimes. Dr. Kelly was determined to use this opportunity to get some answers. What on earth could prompt a group of people to try to perpetuate something as evil, heinous and awful as the Holocaust? These Nazis murdered 6 million Jewish people across Europe. They also targeted other groups for mass murder and persecution, including Roma people, people with disabilities, prisoners of war from the Soviet Union and ethnic Poles. The scope of their crimes cannot be overstated when we're talking about just the Jewish victims. We're talking about 2.7 million people murdered in killing centers like Auschwitz. We're talking about 2 million people murdered in mass shooting operations, massacres perpetuated by the Germans and their allies. And we're talking about somewhere around a million Jewish people murdered in labor camps, concentration camps and ghettos. Again, this is murder at an industrial, unfathomable scale. Why did this happen? What could prompt a human being to do this to other people?

[Kevin Greenlee]

Kelly's story was told in the recent movie Nuremberg, which was based on the Nazi and the Psychiatrist, a book by Jack El High. It is a terrific book, a fascinating story, very well told. True crime fans may be familiar with Jack from Long Lost, the podcast he hosted, which focused on the 1951 disappearance of the Klein brothers. It was our real pleasure to sit down and talk with Jack about Douglas Kelly and his quest to figure out what made certain people become Nazis.

[Anya Cain]

My name is Anya Cain. I'm a journalist.

[Kevin Greenlee]

And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney.

[Anya Cain]

And this is the Murder Sheet.

[Kevin Greenlee]

We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases.

[Anya Cain]

We're the Murder Sheet.

[Kevin Greenlee]

And this is Jacques El Hai on psychiatry, Nuremberg and trying to figure out Nazis.

[Jack El Hai]

It.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Well, your book starts at the end of another story, which is the story of World War II, and it deals with the question people were asking themselves. What do we do with these people and how do we figure out why this happened and how we can make sure it doesn't happen again? With that said, let's talk about Hermann Goering. Who was he and what was his role in the German government?

[Jack El Hai]

Hermann Goering was one of the very highest ranking members of the German government. He was Hitler's designated successor for almost all of the war. And he held a number of posts, including head of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, and head of the Reichstag, the legislative body. He was also given the rank of Reichsmarschall, which was an extremely high rank in the German military. I believe when Goering attained that rank, he was only the second person in history ever to. So he had his finger in a lot of parts of the Nazi piece. And when the war ended in 1945, he was among those German officials, civilian and military, who were rounded up and arrested and held for what was uncertain at the beginning. But as things transpired, they were held for trial. And so the first Nuremberg Trial, which is called the International Military Tribunal, was run by the four large Allied nations to try these very high ranking members of the German government and military.

[Kevin Greenlee]

You wrote in your book that one interrogator initially thought of Goering as, quote, the fat man in endless screenplays who leads the gang of killers from his expensive dinner table, but later found that he was far more shrewd and dangerous than any celluloid character. What was it about him that initially led people to that misimpression and what made him more complicated than that?

[Jack El Hai]

During the war, the British and American press characterized Goering in a very clownish, buffoonish kind of way. It was because of his fondness for fancy uniforms and lots of jewelry, lots of medals. Guring lived on an estate where he had wild animals like leopards and lions roaming the ground. And there was a lot to ridicule there. But that portrayal of Goering seriously underestimated him because Goering was highly intelligent, he was a great strategic thinker, he was charming. That's how he rose to the top of first the Nazi Party leadership and then the German government. He had a great sense of humor, he loved to tell jokes about himself, lots of self deprecating jokes, and he was a master manipulator. He could manipulate people very well through the force of his personality and his intellect. So he was a driving force in much of what went on in Germany during the war and in the pre war years as well.

[Kevin Greenlee]

So he was also addicted to drugs. How did that affect him?

[Jack El Hai]

Guring first became addicted to morphine after the Young Nazi Party's putsch in Munich in the early 1920s. And Guring was shot in the leg during the fighting of that putsch. And while he was recovering, he was given morphine for pain control and became addicted to it. But Goering did overcome that addiction in the late 1920s and was not taking drugs until the late 1930s when because of a dental procedure he had, a dentist prescribed him a narcotic called pericodine. And Guring became addicted to that narcotic and he continued using it long past his dental troubles and throughout the war, until by the time he was arrested on the final day of World War II, he had an enormous supply of pericodine with him and was taking dozens of these little pills a day to help him keep his equilibrium and to help him feel like his mind was clear.

[Kevin Greenlee]

So the psychiatrist of the title, of course, is Captain Douglas Kelly. So who was he and how did he get involved in this story?

[Jack El Hai]

Douglas Kelly was a US Army Military psychiatrist who was in Europe, Western Europe, During World War II, working in field hospitals, helping to treat soldiers who had come down with what today we would call ptsd. And Kelly and his colleagues had some success in helping those soldiers recover. Before that, he had been born in 1912 in the northern California town of Truckee, near Lake Tahoe, and he had attended medical school at the University of California since childhood. He had a strong interest in stage magic, performing magic before audiences, and was very good at it, Even contributed tricks to music magazines of the 1930s. And so when the war ended, Kelly was there in Europe, already of relatively high rank and with a good reputation, although he was quite young. He was only 33 when the war ended. He was available. And so that's why the International Military Tribunal called him to initially come to Luxembourg, where many of the Nazi leaders were being detained to work among them. And what the court wanted Kelly to do was to determine whether these men met the very low bar of legal mental fitness, meaning would they understand charges against them and could they participate in their own defense if there was a trial? And this was something Kelly could handle quickly and easily. And he saw it would be a waste of the opportunity he had being among these men. Lots of psychiatrists around the world envied him for his position among these men, who were widely, already widely regarded as some of the arch criminals of the 20th century. And so Kelly set up for himself a project unsanctioned. He did this on his own to determine whether these men shared any kind of psychiatric disorder that could account for their behaviors and their heinous crimes committed before and during the war. So that's why he was there.

[Kevin Greenlee]

What strategies did he use to try to get these men to open up to him?

[Jack El Hai]

Kelly had at his disposal a number of psychiatric assessment tools that he used. The main one that he relied on is the Rorschach inkblot test. And this is a test used much less frequently today, but back in the 30s and 40s, we used quite a lot even to diagnose psychiatric disorders. And that's how Kelly used it. And some of the listeners may be familiar with these inkblots. They're just abstract inkblots on cards that are shown to subjects, and the subjects are asked to say what they see in the cards. Since the images are abstract, the idea is that anything the subject says is a projection of something going on inside the subject. So Kelly relied on that. He used other tests. He tested all of the German defendants for iq. He used a test called the Thematic Apperception. Test similar in some ways to the Rorschach, but I would say he in large part relied on interviews, time spent with these men in their cells, one on one asking them questions, trying to delve into their psyches and in the case of Herman Guring, also exploring historical questions. Kelly asked Goering questions like what was the attraction of the German people to Adolf Hitler? He seems like such an unlikely person to become a dictator of a highly civilized nation. Also questions like why did the Germans break so many of the foreign treaties they entered into before the war? Things like that. So Kelly spent hundreds of hours talking to these men and used that as well as the test assessments to come to his conclusions.

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[Kevin Greenlee]

So he had his goals. When he was talking with them, did they have any goals or motives when they were talking to him?

[Jack El Hai]

Yes, several of them did. Several of them wanted to justify their actions. Guring, in particular had suspected that a trial of this kind was coming. He suspected that he would be convict of war crimes of different types, and he also suspected that he would be sentenced to death. But he wanted to use the trial as a defense of Germany and to make a case that the Nazi regime was not about antisemitism only, or racial hatred only, or military domination and conquest, that the leaders did what they did out of patriotism, nationalism and loyalty to Hitler. So that was part of what Guring wanted to get across. And he had other agendas in his talks with Kelly. And he was a manipulative guy and he had ways of getting what he wanted. One of his agendas was trying to get back into communication with his family. His wife and his daughter were outside the prison and he had no contact contact with him. Kelly agreed, again unsanctioned, to carry letters between Guring and his family. So Kelly, it should be said, had an agenda himself, you know, his project to learn more about these men and to eventually write a book about his experience among the Nazis, which he did write in 1947. It came out. It was titled 22 cells in Nuremberg.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Did Kelly's superiors know about these other projects he had in mind?

[Jack El Hai]

They did not know about Kelly's work. To find out whether the Nazis shared some kind of psychiatric disorder. They probably suspected his interest in writing a book. I don't think he made a secret of that for much of the time he was there, which was about eight months among the prisoners, he was working on his own. Not a lot of attention paid to what he was doing to the prison administration. Kelly's main job was to keep the prisoners from killing themselves. And Kelly was not completely successful in that one of the defendants, Robert Ley, did succeed in committing suicide before the trial started.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Yeah, that brings up a question. What was life like for these prisoners?

[Jack El Hai]

Well, according to them, as they told Kelly, it was extremely boring that they were all kept alone in separate cells in the Nuremberg prison, which was adjacent to the courtroom where the trial would happen. They were treated adequately. They had guards always watching them to try and prevent suicide. And so that's why so many of them were willing to talk to Kelly when he arrived, because they were desper desperate for intelligent conversation. Guring said as much that he was starving for human interaction. And they had routines. They had to follow the prison routine. They did gather together often to eat together. And when that happened, Guring assumed what he thought was his rightful place as de facto leader of the group. It was not a pleasant time for these men who had been living quite high during the war and were used to not receiving orders, but to giving them.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Yeah, that must have been very difficult for someone like Goering to adjust to this more isolated existence.

[Jack El Hai]

But at least Goering, unlike some of the others, had the benefit of a sense of humor and could joke about it. Some of the others were humorless. That made it harder for them to get by during those months and had very rigid approaches to life that being in a prison completely disrupted. So some of them, like Robert Lay, the one who had committed suicide, had a lot of trouble addressing.

[Kevin Greenlee]

You mentioned Robert Lay. Another one of the prisoners that Kelly worked with, of course, was Rudolf Hess. Can you talk about him?

[Jack El Hai]

Hess is so interesting, I think, because he left Germany just a few years into the war on his own initiative. He flew a plane from Germany to Scotland, crash landed the plane, he parachuted out, and he was on a self appointed mission to try and broker a peace with the British so that they could join forces and fight against the Russians who by that time were in the war now against Germany. And the British were not at all a recession to any of that. And they imprisoned Hess for all the years until the war ended. One of the very interesting artifacts that I found while I was researching the book. This was among many, many boxes of materials that Dr. Kelly brought home from Nuremberg when he returned to the States. And that these boxes were kept in the Kelly family for decades before I had a chance to see them was a box wrapped in paper and labeled something like biscuits served to Rudolf Hess, but refused because he thought they were poisoned. And one of the harder moments of my research was deciding whether I should open this box with 60 year old cookies inside. I decided not To. I didn't think seeing very, very old biscuits would be edifying to me a lot, very much. And so I left them alone. Once the preparations for the trial began in Nuremberg, Hess was sent to Nuremberg. All this time, even during his time in the Tower of London as a prisoner, he had been professing to suffer from amnesia and would not. He said he could not answer questions about his Nazi past because he just couldn't remember. And so Dr. Kelly, when Hess arrived, inherited this patient who said he couldn't remember anything. And Kelly quickly came to the conclusion that Hess was faking his amnesia, which Hess eventually did admit. So Hess was such an interesting figure. He antagonized Goering during those months before the trial by pretending not to recognize Guring during his supposed suffering from amnesia. And that that upset Guring so much that someone would not recognize him or have any idea who he was. There could be a lot of really interesting books written just about Rudolf Hess. And I found him a really compelling, fascinating, dastardly character.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Yeah, he's a very enigmatic character. He's very. He's always really interested me. You wrote that Kelly's work at the prison involved the intersection of psychiatry and criminology. Can you discuss what you meant by that?

[Jack El Hai]

Yes. So Kelly was a psychiatrist and was using psychiatric assessment tools to try and diagnose these men. The goal, however, was not to treat them, but to determine how they were responsible for their criminal behavior. That's where the criminology comes in. And what Kelly ultimately determined was that his hypothesis that there must have been a shared psychiatric disorder was wrong. That, in fact, none of these men suffered from any kind of psychiatric disorder. They all fell within the normal range of human personality. And that meant that. Well, that meant a lot of things that were very frightening to Kelly. One was that psychiatry could not explain their behavior. And then the other was that if these men were normal, then there must be others like them who would do the same thing, given the opportunities, or do very similar things. And that led Kelly to the belief that this authoritarianism, Nazism that they espoused and all the crimes that came with it were not a German problem or an Italian or Japanese problem. They were a human problem. And that despite the end of the war, the defeat of Germany and the Axis powers, that. That the rest of us would be faced with people like this in the future again, as we always have been, in all kinds of areas of human endeavor, not just government, military, politics, but in every field that people are active in. And this led Kelly, when he returned to the States to begin warning Americans that authoritarianism was in our future.

[Kevin Greenlee]

The word psychopath had only recently been coined. At this time, did Kelly believe Goering was a psychopath?

[Jack El Hai]

No. And the reason for that is that, as you said, it was a new term. It had only first been described during the war. I'm not even sure that Kelly was familiar with it when he met with the German defendants. I know he later became familiar with it because I had a chance to look at his personal library of books, and the first book about psychopathology was on the shelves. Psychopaths, sociopaths, et cetera. None of that entered into Kelly's thinking because those were just terms too new for him to be familiar with.

[Kevin Greenlee]

And what did Garrett think of Kelly?

[Jack El Hai]

Goering admired Kelly. They. I would say they admired each other, although they never, ever became what I would call friends. But they admired each other for their shared qualities. They were both smart, charming, manipulative, all of that. And that's what made the meetings that these men had in their in Goering cell such interesting encounters because they were evenly matched and similar. When I. One of my big sources for the Nazi and the psychiatrist was Kelly's oldest son, Doug, who I tracked down in Northern California before I started my research. And I'm still in touch with Doug. And whenever we get together on the phone and talk about Kelly and Guring meeting together in this prison cell, we always refer to it as King Kong versus Godzilla, because these guys were engaged in this epic struggle for dominance, and it was an even match.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Did Goering ever give Kelly information or hints about trial strategy or things of that nature that Kelly was in a position to pass on?

[Jack El Hai]

Yes, he did. Kelly entered into his work with the German defendants, probably not considering that he would at some point pass on information to the prosecution in the trial, but he eventually did, at the request of the prosecution. And the kinds of information that he passed had to do with the defense strategies of the various defendants, especially Guring. I don't think what Kelly passed on had a big influence on the outcome of the trial, but it was illustrative of the many masters that Kelly found himself having once he was doing this work. He was probably the first military psychiatrist ever to be placed among suspected war criminals. And so he had no guidelines to follow, no mentor to take advice from. And so he had an allegiance to the defendants in the doctor patient kind of relationship, but he was also an officer in the U.S. army. He had an allegiance to the military. He had been brought to Nuremberg by the court. He had responsibilities to them and then later on to the prosecution because he was providing them with information. It was a very awkward position for him to be in, and I like to cut him some slack for being in that position. But if this were happening to a psychiatrist today, I think in conducting him or herself the way Kelly did, I think that kind of conduct would be unheard of, unethical, passing along information to the prosecution, et cetera. And we saw some of that in the psychologists who worked among the prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war, and they were censured for it. So Douglas Kelly, though, was the trailblazer. And he was in a tough spot.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Yeah. Yes, indeed he was. What were some of Goering's goals for the trial?

[Jack El Hai]

Trial, I mentioned that when for meals, Goering would get together with his fellow defendants. And one of the things he kept telling them was that, yes, the trial may not go well for them individually, but that in the long run, these men would be revered. Goering predicted throughout Germany after the war, he said there would be statues of them all over the country. And so his goal was to just make Nazi Germany's case in Hitler's absence. Hitler had committed suicide. Guring felt that it was his responsibility to make sure this happened. Fortunately, that goal of Guring's failed. He failed in that goal. And it was because of the mountain of evidence that the prosecutors were able to bring together really, in a very short time in the months after the war ended that showed without a doubt the crimes that had been committed. Crimes against peace, humanity, war crimes, and who was responsible. Because many of these documents had the signatures of the defendants on paper and showed that they knew what was happening. So that's one thing that Guring underestimated and one thing that the Allies were counting on, that this trial would have the effect of proving for many years to come how culpable the Nazi regime was and who individually was responsible.

[Kevin Greenlee]

One of the most dramatic moments in the trial was probably when footage from the concentration camps were shown. Can you tell us about that moment and how it affected some of these people?

[Jack El Hai]

It's hard to imagine now because many of us have seen concentration camp footage, newsreels, et cetera, over the years. But at that time, these kinds of films had never before been viewed. And so when the courtroom darkened, it was early in the trial, in December 1945, to show a. I think it was about a seven, excuse me, a 10 or 11 minute collection of films from different concentration camps. It was shocking, not just to spectators in the audience, not Just to judges and attorneys, but also to some of the defendants. Not that they didn't know about the Holocaust and about the mass murder of Jews and others in the concentration camps. They knew that, but. But to have the visual evidence of the worst parts of it right in front of them was shocking. So when after that day when the film was shown as the defendants were leaving the courtroom and walking back to the prison, there would Kelly described how there was just silence. Nobody knew what to say. And some of the defendants were visibly upset that.

[Kevin Greenlee]

When did Kalia leave Nuremberg?

[Jack El Hai]

He left in January 1946. So this is while the trial is still underway. I think there are some misapprehensions out there about why he left. The movie Nuremberg that adapted my book for the screen gives the impression that Kelly had to leave because he had leaked some information to a reporter. That information was published. It looked very bad. And so the army drummed him out. But that's not what happened. That leak did happen, but Kelly, he was not seen as all that important. And Kelly was scolded, but still kept in good standing. He left in January because he felt that his work was done there. He was eligible to be discharged. He had served many years in the army by this point and, and he left in good standing. He was honorably discharged, of course, and he received a promotion in rank just before his discharge. So he left, came back to the States and started pretty quickly writing his book.

[Kevin Greenlee]

And meanwhile of course the trial went on. You talked about how Goering was very much aware of his own self importance and he, he was upset when someone like Hess didn't seem to remember him. I'm curious, how did a guy like that handle cross examination?

[Jack El Hai]

Initially quite skillfully. He was at his best, Herman Guring, when in one on one type conflicts with other people. He could handle himself very well. And, and so in Guring's initial days of giving testimony in the trial, which was after Kelly left Nuremberg, he was scoring some points against Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor. But eventually that tidal wave of evidence came in and began being produced in court and Guring could no longer argue against it. And by the time the trial ended, there was no question in anyone's mind that he was going to be convicted.

[Kevin Greenlee]

What did Goering do to avoid the gallows?

[Jack El Hai]

He did something very Hermann Goering. Like on the eve of his scheduled execution by hanging, he pulled out from a hiding place somewhere in his cell a cyanide capsule. This was probably one of the capsules that the German government had issued to all of the top leaders as the war neared an end. And Guring put it in his mouth and chopped on it and died within seconds of cyanide poisoning. And this suicide in this fashion was really a act of defiance against the allied powers. Guring had asked earlier on not to be hanged and instead to be executed by firing squad, which he considered a more dignified method of execution. And the court refused to grant him that request. So Guring was saying, you're not going to have control of me, me at the end, I'm going to take control of my own exit. And that's what he did. There's a lot of speculation on how Guring came to have this cyanide capsule in his cell, because his cell was searched countless times over the months that he occupied it. And no one knows. But I think the best theory is that he made a deal with one of the American guards to get a capsule that was hidden in Guring's effects that he had with him when he was arrested. And if the guard would do that, get it out, give it to Guring, then Guring would give him something else, a value in exchange, like jewelry or a watch, something like that. I think that's probably what happened, happened.

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[Kevin Greenlee]

So we've talked about how Kelly went into this kind of hoping to find some sort of common deviant trait, or I think you called it, like a Nazi germ in these men. Did he find such a trait?

[Jack El Hai]

No. He concluded that there was no Nazi virus. That and there was no illness. As I said, men were normal. They did share some personality traits. Many of them, the defendants were type A workaholics. Many of them, if not all of them, lacked remorse for what had happened during the war. They lacked conscience, and most telling, they lacked empathy for a time. Kelly's time at Nuremberg overlapped with a man named Gustav Gilbert. He was a PhD psychologist, also working with the defendants in a way similar to Kelly. And Gilbert came to. He also wrote a book after his experiences and came to define evil as lack of empathy. And so that's what these men had in common, in addition to, you know, lust for power, desire to control others, and opportunistic eagerness to take advantage of circumstances so they could arise to power.

[Kevin Greenlee]

When I was reading your book, I kept on thinking, one of my favorite writers is Sinclair Lewis. He once wrote a book about the coming of fascism in America called It Can't Happen Here. I'm curious. Does Kelly not finding a common deviant trait. Great. Does that mean that in his mind he believes something like that could happen here?

[Jack El Hai]

Well, he not only believed that it could happen here, he believed it was happening in the US because he returned to America with a changed perspective, having spent all this time among the Nazi leaders. And he looked, for instance, at some of the political demagogues of the US south who had legislated all these Jim Crow laws, terrible restrictions on voting for black voters and their use of propaganda. Emotionally manipulative propaganda, exactly as the Nazis had used propaganda. And he said, it is happening here. And he, in his book, laid out a plan for Americans to help defend themselves against future authoritarianism. So he believed it could and was happening.

[Kevin Greenlee]

He even made a point to have his son read his book, didn't he?

[Jack El Hai]

Yes, he did have his son read his book. Well, actually, Doug, the son was only 2 or 3 years old when the book was published. I think if I remember right, Dr. Kelly did have his son read it sometime during the 1950s. Yeah.

[Kevin Greenlee]

What was Kelly's career like after the trial?

[Jack El Hai]

It's very sad, tragic, because Kelly underwent some professional shocks. The one shock that I alluded to before was that psychiatry couldn't explain these men. If it couldn't, what could? And then some personal problems befell him. He became an alcoholic. His marriage was greatly troubled. The book that he wrote, 22 cells in Nuremberg, was a flop because the message that the end of the war didn't mean an end to authoritarianism, that was not a popular message. And Kelly came to see himself in his later years when he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, not in psychiatry, but in criminology. He saw himself as undervalued and unappreciated. So over the years, he grew angry and very depressed. Doug told me about how difficult his father was to grow up with. And so Dr. Kelly did take his own life on January 1, 1958, using cyanide, just as Guring had, and in front of his family at a New Year's Day party.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Yeah, it is very, very sad. You've talked a little bit about your research. I'm curious, how did you come across this story? How did you get yourself in situations where you even have the option of opening up and looking at a 60 year old biscuit?

[Jack El Hai]

Well, I first heard about Dr. Kelly through the research. I did an earlier book titled the Lobotomist, that was about another psychiatrist. But while researching that book, I learned that this other psychiatrist had met Dr. Kelly at a psychiatric conference in 1938. And what struck him deeply about Kelly was that Kelly was there not to present a talk or a paper. He was there to give a magic show before his psychiatric colleagues. And I just thought that was so interesting and unusual. I can't imagine a magic show where everybody in your audience is a psychiatrist. And so Kelly's name lodged in my mind. And then, of course, I found out about his work among the Nazi defendants and became even more interested. So I started looking for archival information about Dr. Kelly. There wasn't much in places like the US National Archives and even a collection at the University of California mostly contained materials from after the Nuremberg period. So I went in search of his family. And that's how I found Doug, the son. And Doug invited me to come and look, to see, look and see what he had. And I arrived at Doug's house and he had brought up from the basement these 15 boxes of materials that his father had brought home from Nuremberg. And I was overwhelmed. It was medical records, essays that he had the defendants write, memos between him and the prosecution and the court, all of his Rorschach results and interpretations. And then these artifacts, like the biscuits and others, convinced me that there was a book here, a really intriguing book, and that so much of this material was important because it had remained hidden for so long.

[Kevin Greenlee]

What does it feel like when someone trusts you with that kind of material about their father?

[Jack El Hai]

Yeah, Doug the son is a trusting person. That's one of the reasons why I've kept in touch with him all of these years, and I consider him a friend. Soon after I first arrived to look at the materials he had, he told me that he had been waiting for years for somebody to come and ask about the stuff he had and that no one had until I had sent him an email about it. And so Doug was motivated to get his story, his father's story, out there. And. And Doug, even though his father was so difficult to grow up with, Doug did love Dr. Kelly, his father, and wanted people to better understand his story. And I think that's why he was so supportive of my project and helped so much with it. Doug was only 10 when his father committed suicide. Doug witnessed it. But he was a very perceptive child, very bright like his dad, and was able to give me all kinds, kinds of insights into his father's work and personality.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Then you mentioned earlier that of course, the book has been adapted into a movie. Can you talk about that process?

[Jack El Hai]

Sure. It was really long process. My book came out in 2013, and even before that I had published an article also titled the Nazi and the Psychiatrist. Same topic. And. And when I published that article in Scientific American Mind magazine, I sent a link to a screenwriter I knew named James Vanderbilt. I knew James because his production company had earlier option that previous book, the Lobotomist. And I thought he might be interested in this subject. And he really was. He saw the article, he saw a book proposal I later wrote, and he was attracted to it very quickly. So the book the Nazi and the Psychiatrist was optioned even before it became a book. And over the years, many years that followed, James sent me drafts of the screenplay he was writing from it, which he titled Neurobrand. And so I saw it develop it and evolve over time and also commented on it. I initially didn't know how to. How to comment. Who was I commenting as? Certainly not as a screenwriting critic. James knows everything about that. I don't know anything. And I didn't want to be some kind of history fact checker, the history police, to point out inaccuracies, because I knew that any inaccuracies in the screenplay, they were there for a reason, for the cinematic, dramatic storytelling sake. So I decided just to comment, to do whatever I could to help this movie become the best movie it was in my powers to help it become. But really Nothing happened happened for a long time until the end of 2023, when by this time James had affiliated with another production company and they were really interested in the story and things got going very quickly. I began shooting in early 2024. I visited the set in the spring of 2024. It was shooting in Hungary and had a chance to see some of my favorite scenes shot and to see how that's done. That was the best work trip of my life to be a part of that. And then I didn't see the completed movie though, until September 2025 when it actually had its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. So I was in an audience of 2,000 people seeing it for the first time along with all those people. It was really thrilling and unearthly.

[Kevin Greenlee]

That must have been a little overwhelming.

[Jack El Hai]

It was. Was, yes.

[Kevin Greenlee]

I want to jump ahead a bit. I saw your next book is published by Pegasus, who published our true crime book last year. And it's on a subject I find very interesting and I hope in a few months when it comes out, you come back and talk about it. But can you just give us a quick description of it?

[Jack El Hai]

I'd love to come back to talk about it. It's titled the Case of the Autographed Corpse and it's about an Apache medicine man living on Apache reservations in eastern Arizona in the middle decades of the 20th century who was wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife in 1933 on the stupidest, silliest evidence you can imagine, but that a all white jury at the federal nearest federal courthouse was persuaded to believe he was sentenced to life in prison. Went to prison, tried all kinds of ways, getting affidavits from witnesses and trying to get pardoned and sentenced commuted, that kind of thing. But he spent 20 years in prison and finally in desperation he wrote to a famous mystery writer of the time. Earl Stanley Gardner, who wrote all of the Perry Mason mysteries, was one of the top selling authors in the world by the early 1950s. And Gardner was also a trial lawyer before he became a mystery writer and had an organization up and running called the Court of Last Resort, similar to today's Innocence Project, working with people who had been wrongfully convicted of serious crimes. So Gardner and and the medicine man, whose name was Silas John Edwards, met in prison and they took to each other, they liked each other, they were about the same age and agreed to jointly reinvestigate Edward's case, did so over the next couple years and got him out. And it's a really remarkable story that Gardner himself did write about a couple of times in magazines, but never at much length. And I thought it really merited more length because it's a fascinating window into Apache spiritual life in that part of the 20th century and then the life of a best selling authority same century. And to have those come together I thought was just incredible.

[Kevin Greenlee]

I'm really looking forward to that one. Before we wrap up our last question, as always, is there anything I didn't ask that you would like that you think is important and that you'd like to share with our audience?

[Jack El Hai]

Well, just one thing I'll quickly add is that I am happy with the movie Nuremberg and there are some historical inaccuracies in it. I don't think they're very important. I think the movie is mostly accurate, mostly factual. And what I like best about it is that it gets across some of the points in the Nazi and the Psychiatrist that I think are important, that international efforts to bring war criminals to justice are important. And we're seeing today those efforts are hobbled by the refusal of of some countries, including the United States, to participate in them. And then the second is Kelly's point about what we can do to prevent incipient authoritarianism or what people can do in any democracy. Those are really important points that I think could help us today. So I'm very pleased with how the movie Nuremberg turned doubt.

[Kevin Greenlee]

We really appreciate Jack sitting down and taking the time to talk with us today. We enjoyed his book and we look forward to his upcoming book on Earl Stanley Gardner. It will be really, really interesting. Interesting.

[Anya Cain]

We will be including a link to his book in our show notes. Check it out.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Thanks so much for listening to the Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email [e-mail] if you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the appropriate authorities.

[Anya Cain]

If you're interested in joining our Patreon Patreon that's available at www.patreon.com murdersheet if you want to tip us a bit of money for records requests, you can do so at www. Buymeacoffee.com murdersheet we very much appreciate any support.

[Kevin Greenlee]

Special thanks to Kevin Tyler Greenlee who composed the music for the Murder Murder Sheet and who you can find on the [e-mail] if you're looking to talk

[Anya Cain]

with other listeners about a case we've covered, you can join the Murder Sheet Discussion group on Facebook. We mostly focus our time on research and reporting, so we're not on social media much. We do try to check our email account, but we ask for patience as we often receive a lot of messages. Thanks again for listening.

[Jack El Hai]

Sam. It.