Ep. 67- Nuremberg Trials with Jack El-Hai

The Nuremberg Trials were the first attempt at coming to terms with Nazi criminality.  While there was a legal component to this, there was also a psychological element.  What made Nazi minds tick?

In this episode, I talk with Jack El-Hai about his work on psychiatrist Douglas Kelley who worked with the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg.  This book also forms the basis for the new film Nuremberg.

Jack El-Hai is an author with a particular interest in medical history.

El-Hai, Jack. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII (2013)

Follow on Twitter @holocaustpod.
Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

The Holocaust History Podcast homepage is here

You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.814)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust history podcast. I'm your host, wait, I'm in born. And today we're talking as often about Nazis, but really about what makes them tick. and I have an amazing guest, Jack Elhi, who has written a book that is now, the basis for the feature film Nuremberg, which is about, a psychiatrist at Nuremberg who talked to the top Nazis that were tried there.

and came away with some thoughts about who they were and what made them tick. But way more than that, there's so much more to this story and I really can't wait to get into it. So Jack, thanks so much for coming on.

Jack El-Hai (00:41.574)
Thanks for inviting me here, Waitman. I'm glad to be here.

Waitman Beorn (00:45.294)
Um, can you tell me a little bit about how you got into this particular topic? Cause I mean, it's, you know, it's a topic I was actually looking up, uh, before we started, you know, that people have written lots of books, um, you know, about, about Nuremberg and about, and even, even, saw somebody who'd written another book even on, this topic. Um, so how did you, how'd you get into it in, in, this time period?

Jack El-Hai (01:08.908)
I got onto this story by chance, without planning. And it happened because before I wrote The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, I wrote another book about a different psychiatrist. That book is called The Lobotomist. And as I was researching that book, I found out through going through that lobotomy doctor's papers and records and notes,

that in 1938 he had attended a conference of the American Psychiatric Association and met Dr. Douglas Kelly there. And what struck him about Dr. Kelly was that Kelly was at the conference not to give a talk or to present a paper and nothing like that. He was there to give a magic show. And as I later learned, Dr. Kelly was a lifelong

fan of stage magic and very good at it himself. He was a professional magician in his early years. So that lodged in my mind. And then when I did a little more checking up on Dr. Kelly years later, I learned that he had worked with the defendants at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. That was interesting. So I set off in search of his papers. I like there to be papers.

when I write on a topic. Dr. Kelly's papers were not in any of the usual places, like the National Archives or even in some university archive. And not finding anything like that, I decided to search out members of his family. Dr. Kelly, I knew, had died in 1958. So after much effort, I did track down Dr. Kelly's oldest son,

who was living in Northern California at the time. And I wrote to Doug and I told him I was interested in his dad's career and I wondered if he had anything. And Doug wrote back to me and said, yeah, I've got some stuff. Why you come over and take a look? He later told me that he'd been waiting for years for somebody like me to contact him with a question like that. So I did visit Doug in Northern California.

Jack El-Hai (03:29.744)
He invited me into his living room. I had been hoping maybe he'll have a scrapbook or a photo album or some file folders. What he had brought up from his basement was 15 bankers boxes jammed with stuff. And Doug invited me to have at it. So as I went through all that stuff, I realized that what was here was medical records of the 22

defendants in that first Nuremberg trial and also memos that between Kelly and members of the prosecution and people involved with the tribunal and also Kelly's own notes. He had all of the defendants write autobiographies. Those were in there signed by the defendants and then there were some artifacts too. One of the most interesting to me was a glass vial that was inside a jewelry box.

looked like a bracelet case or something and it was full of pills and the label on the vial said Herman Goering's paracodene pills and so that's when I learned that Goering had brought this gigantic supply of this narcotic paracodene with him when he was when he surrendered when he was arrested and there it was just a

This material was just a trevertrove of historical wealth that had not been seen by anyone outside of the Kelly family for decades and decades. And so I knew early that it could be and should be the basis, the foundation of a book about what Dr. Kelly experienced in Nuremberg.

Waitman Beorn (05:18.485)
And that's a great point to bring up. mean, and again, for all you hoarders out there, we love you historians because you leave us stuff like this to work on. And it's great. know, a lot of times people write books and they sort of say it's the undiscovered story or something, but here you really have found new information about this person that tells us something new about the past. And that's why I I really enjoyed the book. Before we get started into sort of the Nazi stuff, mean,

Douglas Kelly himself is a really interesting guy from a very interesting family. Maybe you can talk a little bit a little about that before we get into sort of what he does during the war.

Jack El-Hai (05:56.282)
He is.

Jack El-Hai (06:02.299)
Sure, well Douglas Kelly was born in 1912 in Truckee, California, which is this pretty town. It's the north edge of Lake Tahoe in California. And his grandfather was a big name in Truckee. He was the newspaper editor, lots of other things in Truckee, but he was also the preeminent historian of that time on the Donner part.

And for those of you who don't know, the Donner Party was this group of overland travelers, 19th century, making their way to California who got caught in some horrible blizzards and snow storms in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Truckee on their way in and had to spend the winter there and many of them died. And those who survived kept going by cannibalizing the bodies of those who died.

And so Charles McClashen, who was Kelly's grandfather, had built this private museum made up of artifacts he had picked up nearby on the site where the Donner Party group members had been. And he wrote the first history of the Donner Party as well. So there is this dark stuff in Kelly's past. Kelly's father...

practiced in San Francisco as a dentist, and his mother was a highly accomplished woman, one of the first women attorneys in California. But his mother had a dark perspective on the world. She thought the world was not overall a welcoming, kindly place, and she imparted that to her son, Douglas.

So Doug attended medical school at the University of California, specialized in psychiatry. And when World War II began, he joined the US Army as a psychiatrist working in military hospitals in Western Europe, primarily treating soldiers who suffered what was then called shell shock or combat exhaustion today.

Jack El-Hai (08:23.119)
we would call most of that PTSD. And he and his colleagues developed some useful techniques for treating soldiers who had that kind of disorder. So he was at the war's end, right there in Western Europe, probably the highest ranking psychiatrist in the vicinity. And when the International Military Tribunal decided it needed a psychiatrist to evaluate these

22 high ranking civilian and military German defendants, evaluate them to determine whether they were mentally fit to stand trial. Kelly was their guy. He was close by. He didn't know what he was going for until he arrived on the scene and quickly established for himself a set of tasks that were much more challenging than simply determining

the legal competency of these men to stand trial.

Waitman Beorn (09:28.781)
And can you talk a little about, because I think one of the things that I really appreciate from the book is a lot of detailed things I didn't know about the early incarceration of some of these guys and how they expected to be treated versus how they were treated and then how they're moved from one place to Nuremberg. Can you give us a little background in how that

how that occurred and how that took place, because I it was fascinating.

Jack El-Hai (10:00.837)
Sure, well to begin with, many of the highest ranking, most important of the Germans who would be sought as war criminals were no longer on the scene. So that includes Hitler and Goebbels and others. And so the others were in various places in Germany, Austria and elsewhere arrested.

And many of them were initially brought to a town called Mondorf in Luxembourg. It's a resort town, still is. And they were held at a commandeered hotel. But that doesn't mean that the accommodations there were luxurious. Once the German prisoners arrived, the rooms were very spare. And so gradually more and more of them came.

until there was this sizable group, including Herman Goering, who had surrendered in Austria and been taken to Mondorf, along with some of the others. And Goering arrived with this drug, paracodene, with him. had cornered nearly the entire world's supply and had that with him.

and many other suitcases, boxes full of rings, uniforms, clothing, and so on. And eventually this group was flown from Luxembourg to Nuremberg once it was decided that there would be a trial and that it would be in Nuremberg.

Waitman Beorn (11:40.622)
Can we talk a little bit about Guring? Because his past, I think, is interesting in sort of how he gets to where he is. certainly, for our listeners, I haven't seen the movie yet, but I will. But I think as a good historian, it's better to read the book first. But as I understand it, sort of the movie focuses on the Guring-Kelley relationship, right? Which is important. And we'll talk also, I think, about his relationships. Because he had relationships with all of the...

all the defendants as well. But because the of the Guring Kelly relationship is highlighted, maybe we can talk a little about who is Guring, and particularly sort of where does he come from in terms of his psychology, I suppose, from the beginning and then to where he ends up at the end of the war.

Jack El-Hai (12:30.107)
Well, like several of his fellow defendants, Göring was a World War I veteran. He was a flyer, a highly decorated flyer. And after the war ended, he was at loose ends like many other German veterans were in the early 1920s. And in Munich, he came across this man, young Adolf Hitler, who was talking about his new group, the National Socialists.

And Guring, as he later told Kelly, was attracted to this group for two reasons. One was it was drawing in a large number of veterans of the First World War. And Guring believed that any new political party that would gain any influence in Weimar Germany on the right had to have those veterans as part of its group.

And then the other thing was that, though, despite the membership of these veterans, the party hierarchy itself was small and easy to rise through. And that, too, attracted Goering. So he was a really early member of the Nazi party. And once the Nazis came to power a decade later, he had amassed, he amassed all kinds of responsibilities and titles.

He was the head of the Reichstag, the German legislature. He was a Reichsmarschall, which is the equivalent to a six-star general in the U.S. In other words, there weren't any others. And many other positions, he was the head of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. I think I counted up at one point that he had more than 30 titles in the Nazi government.

not to forget that for nearly all the war, Göring was Hitler's designated successor to lead Germany. That ended in the final days of the war when Hitler became disenchanted with him. so when, when Göring surrendered around the last day of the war in 1945, this was quite an important catch. And

Jack El-Hai (14:54.523)
once he made it among the other people who would become defendants in this trial, he was the highest ranking of all of them.

Waitman Beorn (15:04.619)
And it was really fascinating, you know, because, because Guring has a very high opinion of Guring and he seemed to be under the impression for quite some time after his capture that he was going to be working with, with the allies, with Eisenhower potentially leading, you know, a new, a new interim government and things like this. And of course he's, he's disabused of that notion, but can you talk a little about sort of

his outlook at the end of the war and where he thought he was going.

Jack El-Hai (15:38.48)
He saw himself as one of the world's foremost statesmen. And so when the war ended, he had a vision of himself leading Germany in this new Europe, whatever would take shape after the end of World War II. And he assumed that he would be treated in captivity like a leading statesman and a world leader. He was not.

General Eisenhower flatly refused to treat him in that manner. He was treated like a prisoner and like all the others. initially, Guring was dissatisfied with that, unhappy. But if nothing else, Herman Guring was an adaptable, intelligent person. In the US press and maybe the press of other countries, I don't know.

During the war, Göring was often depicted as clownish because he loved fancy uniforms and parades and he was thought to be very superficial, but actually he was highly intelligent and shrewd and did not make many mistakes and he was a force to be contented with.

Waitman Beorn (17:02.325)
And so when Kelly meets him and the others, what is he supposed to be doing? And then what does he end up doing? Because it seems like he sort of goes off-piste a little bit and expands his roles to take advantage of the opportunity that he's been given.

Jack El-Hai (17:19.471)
That's right, on his own initiative, he expanded his own role. And this is where a lot of Kelly's behavior makes more sense when you think of the context of what he was working within. He was one of the first, if not the first, military psychiatrist ever to be put in with war prisoners who had been accused of war crimes.

So who was he responsible to? He was a physician. So on one level, he's responsible to these men as his patients. And he did treat them medically when they needed it. On the other hand, he was an officer in the US Army. He had responsibilities to the military. And he was also an important figure in the workings of the military tribunal.

He had responsibilities to the court as well. And so the lines were not solid and it was a little fuzzy what he was supposed to be doing and who his allegiances should be with at times. So once he got past the problem of whether these men were mentally fit to be tried, this is a very low psychological bar,

It just means can they tell right from wrong and understand the charges against them and participate in their own defense. Kelly needed more. so he had brought along with him some expertise in several psychiatric evaluation tools. One of them was the Rorschach inkblot test that many people are familiar with in which the subject is shown these cards that have abstract inkblot.

images on them and the subject is asked to describe what he sees. There was another test called the Thematic Aperception Test, very similar except it wasn't an abstract image, it was a realistic scene of some kind that the subject had to tell a story from. And then there were IQ tests and other assessments and along with extensively interviewing the defendants,

Jack El-Hai (19:43.004)
Kelly wanted to use all this information to determine whether these men shared any common psychiatric disorder that could account for their crimes and their heinous behaviors during the war. And Kelly referred to this unknown disorder, if it existed, as the Nazi virus, not a physical virus.

but a psychological virus that they all shared. So that's what Kelly set out to determine.

Waitman Beorn (20:14.605)
Can you talk a little bit, because I want to come back to this, but I'm really interested in sort of a little of the details with Warshock test, because I think we're all, I don't think we're as familiar as you think we might be with it, because we're all familiar with the idea that it's an ink blot, and you look at it, and you say that that's in a bird, or that's whatever.

But what we're going to come back to later on, of course, is analyzing this and having other people also analyze it. So I'm curious, can you tell us a little bit more about how does it actually work? Is there kind of a rubric, I suppose, as like when people look at this inkblot, most people see this, most people see that, because how do you...

without it being completely and totally subjective on the part of the psychiatrist, how is it used to sort of identify personality traits?

Jack El-Hai (21:10.843)
The Rorschach test had been developed about 20 years earlier by a Swiss psychiatrist. So by that time there had been some guidelines developed on what to do with it. And Kelly was considered one of the most skilled American interpreters of Rorschach results. So that means evaluating not just what the subject says he sees, a bat or a ship or whatever.

but how long he takes to say it, how he expands on it. Some of the Rorschach cards have colors in them, how the subject interprets the colors, whether the answers are indicative of somebody who has an expansive worldview or looks within primarily. And at that time, 1940s,

Kelly and others used the Rorschach as a diagnostic tool to diagnose psychiatric illnesses. It's not used that way now. Nowadays, when it's used, it's more of a personality guide, personality test. so Kelly was looking not just at what the subject said, but how he said it or what he left.

out. was, as Kelly himself said, it was as much art as it was science.

Waitman Beorn (22:45.877)
And I guess he's certainly initially he's doing this through an interpreter, which is, I guess, problematic in a certain sense, right? Yeah.

Jack El-Hai (22:55.253)
It's not ideal, that's for sure. But many of the German defendants did know English, including Goering, and so Kelly was able to go back and forth with them in English, but some of them did not. And so that's where the interpreter came in. There were several interpreters on staff that Kelly used. And one, Howard Treest, who is quite prominent in the movie,

Waitman Beorn (23:26.233)
Were the prosecution folks interested in that question in terms of what made Nazis tick and was there something, you know, psychiatrically generally common among them? I mean, because the book has moments where Kelly sort of obliquely or very generally has conversations with the prosecution, but

It doesn't seem like the prosecution is saying, we want you to find out these things. Can you find out these things from the the defendants?

Jack El-Hai (24:02.203)
The didn't care. As long as the defendants met that low bar of being competent to stand trial, the prosecution, the court, had no interest in their psychological workings. This was strictly of interest to Kelly because he was a psychiatrist. He knew it was important or he sensed it was important.

And there were dozens of other psychiatrists and psychologists who being there with the arch criminals of the 20th century, all in one place together would gladly have switched places with Douglas Kelly and done the same thing, essentially. So it was Kelly's project and the administration of the prison and the court was not aware of

Waitman Beorn (24:58.029)
And so what is he doing with the prisoners? In what ways is he treating them, I suppose, mentally, but also sort of investigating them?

Jack El-Hai (25:12.091)
The investigative part of it comes out in interviews. Some of these 22 men, Kelly interviewed extensively, including Goering and some others. Kelly, by the way, did determine that one of the 22 was probably not competent to stand trial, and that was Robert Lay.

who is little known now, but he was the head of a government organization called the German Labor Front, which took charge of slave labor activities and other labor related programs. Lay also, like Ehring, had been a pilot in World War I, had crashed, and Kelly suspected he had suffered brain damage.

And, but as it turned out, it was a moot question because Lay committed suicide before the trial began.

Waitman Beorn (26:15.863)
And of course that's going to be a theme that runs through, you know, Nuremberg is the, the attempt to, to, to prevent that. And, you know, Guring of course is ultimately, is ultimately successful in that. So what, what is he doing with Guring initially? Because Guring comes in essentially as a drug addict, you know, a pretty, a pretty substantial drug addict.

Jack El-Hai (26:23.727)
Right.

Jack El-Hai (26:35.333)
So.

Yeah, immediately Kelly had to get rid of Goering's addiction to the pericodene and he did so by appealing to Goering's vanity. He said, normally for a normal man, it would be very hard to kick this habit. But I'm paraphrasing here, but you are not a normal man.

You are an extraordinary man, clearly, and you should be able to do it." And Guring liked that approach. That appeal resonated with him, and he did kick the habit of his pericotin quite promptly. Then there was another matter of Guring having heart problems. He initially claimed he took the pericotin

to treat his heart pain. That was not true as it turned out. And so the last thing the Allies wanted was for Guring or any of the others to die in prison before they were tried. And so with Guring, Kelly had to make him fit, physically fit. had to lose weight, he had to become strong. And Guring did, once the trial began, he did appear.

much leaner, if you look at before and after photos from the trial, a much leaner man than he had been when he arrived. And then he did treat minor physical ailments that other defendants developed in the months before the trial. There was nothing very serious.

Waitman Beorn (28:25.005)
And can we talk about another guy that's really interesting? I wasn't aware of some of this, too, that, know, Rudolph Hess, you know, the guy who claimed to who flew to to England was was an amnesia or claimed that they didn't remember anything. And so Kelly's involved in that investigation as well.

Jack El-Hai (28:48.271)
Yes, Rudolf Hess was the deputy furor during the war, so that meant that he was third in line after Hitler and Goering, but he was, psychologically speaking, he was really a loose cannon. And he got it into his head early in the war to fly to Scotland on his own, he was a pilot, and to try and broker a peace between Britain and Germany so they could unite their effort to fight against.

Russia. Hess made that flight, his crash landed his plane in Scotland, he parachuted out and tried to get these peace talks going. But of course, Churchill would have nothing whatever to do with him. And he spent the rest of the war in prison in Britain. And then he was once the preparations for the trial got underway, then he was

transported to Nuremberg. it was starting while he was in prison in Britain that he began to say that he had amnesia. And so the amnesia would come and go. And then he also exhibited paranoia. There may have been some justification for it. He believed that the British were trying to poison him. So one of the artifacts that I found among Kelly's papers

Waitman Beorn (29:59.534)
you

Jack El-Hai (30:16.269)
was a package wrapped up that contained cookies that Hess had been served while a prisoner in Britain and that he refused to eat because he thought they were poisoned. So those had been preserved and Kelly took them home for reasons I don't know why he did that. So when Hess arrived in Nuremberg, he was in one of his amnesia phases.

He professed not to recognize Guring or really remember anything from the Nazi regime. But then in the course of the trial, he admitted that he was faking that and he was held responsible for his acts and he was sentenced to a long prison term.

Waitman Beorn (31:09.975)
So as Kelly is interviewing these folks, he's sort of establishing, I guess, relationships with them. And it seems like that one of the more, I guess, close relationships is the one he established with Guring. Can you talk a little bit what's the nature of that? I mean, friendship's probably too strong, but what's the?

What's their interaction like and what is each getting out of it?

Jack El-Hai (31:41.028)
You're right, friendship would not be accurate to describe their relationship. These men, Kelly and Goering, were very much alike in some ways. They were both highly intelligent, egotistical, convinced of their rightness all the time, used to getting their way, and highly manipulative. And when I was talking with Dr. Kelly's son, Doug,

about all this, he and I would refer to their meeting as King Kong versus Godzilla because they were so well matched in certain ways. in the manipulation that was going on, they were both completely aware of it and used it to get what they wanted. Initially, Herman Goering wanted some contact or connections with his family. He had a wife and a young daughter.

who were for a time not being held in custody, then they were being held in custody and then they were released again. And Guring was very concerned about their welfare. And Kelly, for his part, wanted access to this intriguing mind, Guring, and wanted to continue their talks and even to extend the talks beyond...

Guring's state of mind, but to try and understand Guring's motivations before the war, during the war, what he thought of Hitler, what he thought of the Holocaust, all of that. And so they mutually manipulated each other. And I would say that they developed admiration for one another, but not friendship. Kelly was well aware of Guring's

dark side and of his lack of conscience, lack of remorse and really lack of feeling for anybody else other than his own immediate family. And Kelly never lost sight of that. And so that would prevent any kind of friendship. But they spent an awful lot of time together and got to know each other well.

Waitman Beorn (34:03.569)
And what is is geringing out of this? mean, does he? Does he just he just bored? I mean, does he is it a chance for him to sort of explain his side of things or what is what is he what is his sort of takeaway from this?

Jack El-Hai (34:17.771)
It's such a rich brew of motivations that Goering had to take part in these conversations. He was bored. He had nobody to talk to and Goering was a super extrovert and got his energy from being around and talking with other people. But also Goering wanted a platform. He wanted to explain himself and he did a lot of that with Kelly.

And then as the trial drew near, he wanted some insights that might help him develop not his own defense so much, but Göring had a plan to try and justify the acts of the Nazi regime in court so that people would stop looking at he and his colleagues as criminals.

and more as leaders who had had the misfortune to lose the war. And had they won the war, the tables would be turned.

Waitman Beorn (35:24.533)
I mean, and I guess this is a Holocaust podcast, right? So what you've seen, I'm guessing Kelly's notes and the summaries of their conversations and these kinds of things. What are they saying? Not just going, but what is what are they saying about the Holocaust in these conversations?

Jack El-Hai (35:47.548)
Goring professed, and you have to take this with a block of salt, not to be anti-Semitic. He said that anti-Semitism was a part of the Nazi platform in lawmaking once the party became the government, but that he didn't believe in it, but it was necessary, Goring said.

to rouse the public and to get them behind the government's programs. But Göring talked a lot about how when he was growing up, the family's closest friend was this Dr. Epstein, a Jewish man who became, who took the family in into a castle that he owned, that where Göring spent his growing up years. Herman, his name was Herman.

Epstein. So Hermann Göring was named after this Jewish man. And he talked about other Jews he knew and not exactly admired but tolerated. And he tried to give the impression that it was all part of a formula that the Nazis had found necessary, but it was not truly to be believed in. And those claims really rang hollow.

once the trial began and how much evidence was presented that Göring played an instrumental role in the Holocaust, that is the deaths of so many Jews during those years.

Waitman Beorn (37:33.429)
I mean, did they have that kind of a direct conversation? Did Kelly sort of mention camps and say, you know, what were you guys doing and, you know, were you involved in this?

Jack El-Hai (37:47.618)
Yes, the subject of camps came up. Göring said they were intended to be work camps, not death camps, and that he professed to be shocked by the knowledge that some of them had become death camps. And it was under Göring's authority that the very first concentration camps were started, Göring said, to contain political opposition.

So, and with some of the other defendants as well, Kelly got into some of these questions. Many of the defendants were just unrepentantly anti-Semitic, like Rosenberg, who was the party, he did hold office, but not high office in the government. He was kind of the philosopher of the Nazi party and wrote all these long, tedious books.

about Nazi philosophy that few people read, but were often cited to justify anti-Semitic actions. And Robert Lay, who ended up committing suicide before the trial, was very anti-Semitic. And of course, Stryker, the publisher of Der Stürmer, the large anti-Semitic newspaper that really incited many people to hateful acts, was also there.

It never changed his tune at all.

Waitman Beorn (39:19.991)
Can you talk a little about about Hans Frank because he's one of the guys who I mean, he's a thoroughly odious person and deeply complicit, but he was one of the few people who kind of admitted, you know, what what he had done. What were the what were the conversations like with him?

Jack El-Hai (39:44.7)
Frank claimed in prison to have undergone a religious conversion and then that was what had led him to see the light. Kelly didn't buy it at all. Kelly believed that this was a false conversion. He didn't believe in Frank's faith. There was one other defendant who Kelly thought was similarly hypocritical and that was Albert Speer.

who was the only of the defendants to express remorse for what had happened, but he would not own up to his own part in the Holocaust, which was proven later by evidence. So Kelly tended to have a low regard for these guys and to think that they were trying to game the system.

by pretending to be either religiously swayed or repentant.

Waitman Beorn (40:51.237)
And were these the kind of things that, what conversations did he have with the prosecution? mean, cause as you point out, he is kind of in a somewhat of a difficult ethical position, because he has to a duty of care to his patients. But does he write the prosecution and sort of say, Hey, I think this guy's lying or this guy said this.

in our session about the Holocaust or about his guilt or whatever. How does that work?

Jack El-Hai (41:23.513)
Among the papers that Doug Kelly showed to me that had belonged to his father were memos that Dr. Kelly had passed to the prosecution. And this mostly contained information that Kelly had gleaned in his conversations with the men in their prison cells. And from Goering, for instance, he gathered information on how Goering was going to conduct his defense.

once that part of the trial occurred. And that was helpful. So I would say that Gellings, excuse me, Kelly's participation in the prosecution was limited, but it was helpful what he gave them.

Waitman Beorn (42:15.917)
So as we move into the trial itself, what is the reaction of the defendants? One of the that you identify, of course, are the different sort of inter-defendant relationships between various factions and cliques and this kind of stuff. How do they take having to go sit in court for eight hours a day for over a year, almost a year of court dates?

Jack El-Hai (42:45.829)
Here's where Goering's leadership skills became apparent because he really went to great effort and was mostly effective in rallying these men to not cave, to not give in to the prosecution's suggestions that they were criminals, that they had done anything wrong.

and Goering's message to all of his fellow defendants was, we did what we did for Germany and for Hitler. And they were all devoted to number one Hitler and number two Germany. So there were camps though that developed in a couple of different ways. earlier mentioned Julius Streicher, the newspaper publisher.

He was in a camp all by himself. Nobody liked him. And he often ate by himself and tried to initiate conversations that the others wouldn't respond to. Everybody thought that he was beneath them. And then there was another kind of clique that resulted once another mental health professional arrived at the prison. His name was Gustav Gilbert.

He was not a psychiatrist, he was a PhD psychologist, more of an academic leaning person than Kelly was. And they, so there was a time, an overlap period of a few months when both of them were seeing the prisoners. And so they developed their own relationships, different relationships with different prisoners. Gilbert had the advantage of being fluent in German.

So he could converse with the prisoners whose English was not so good. Also, Gilbert was Jewish. And so that gave him an advantage among the prisoners who wanted to show somehow that they really weren't anti-Semitic. And of course, with those who were unrepentant anti-Semites that made them not interested in him.

Waitman Beorn (45:09.453)
One of the things that's really fascinating, sorry, one thing that's really fascinating that comes out in the book is the relationship between Gilbert and Kelly. And so I'm wondering if you can, if you can talk about this because without putting too fine a point on it, you have two people that are hoping in some ways to capitalize off of their access to these extraordinary events, to these extraordinary people. And it seems like they don't exactly get along sort of even from the beginning.

Jack El-Hai (45:09.774)
And so.

Jack El-Hai (45:40.26)
They were both enthusiastic about their assignment to Nuremberg because they had similar motives. They both wanted to learn something important from these men who were concentrated in one place and to produce a book about it. initially they considered writing a book together, but then there was a personality clash between them and it might have been more than personality. It might have been a

wish for glory clash and so that joint project was abandoned. Kelly left Nuremberg first in January 1946. Gilbert stayed through the end of the trial.

Waitman Beorn (46:25.421)
And this is something really quickly that I thought was really fascinating. Why does he leave? Because he's in the middle of it, it's almost, I guess it's close to being over, roughly speaking. I would think he'd want to stay through the end of it.

Jack El-Hai (46:47.257)
He thought that he, Kelly, thought that he had learned enough and that he had what he needed. Also, another important consideration is that Kelly had gotten married just before he went to Europe. So he had spent most of the last previous four years without seeing his wife at all and he was very anxious to get back to her and his,

Waitman Beorn (46:51.563)
Okay.

Jack El-Hai (47:15.451)
He was eligible for a discharge and he was honorably discharged in 1946. He took that opportunity.

Waitman Beorn (47:24.993)
I mean, I imagine it's, it's, it's hard to convince your wife that, you're choosing now to the war is over and you're choosing to hang out with Nazis rather than, rather than come home to her. That's probably not, not a relationship saver.

Jack El-Hai (47:37.762)
No, and Kelly's wife, her nickname was Dookie. She had been alarmed by various things Kelly had told her during his time in Nuremberg, including the fact that at one point, Herman Goering had asked Kelly if he, if Kelly and his wife, would adopt Goering's daughter, Etta, if something happened to Goering and to Goering's wife, Emmy.

So, Kelly, I don't think ever seriously considered doing that, but he mentioned it to his wife, and she was appalled and outraged, did not want to raise Hermann Göring's daughter and all of that. so, she was keeping in touch with him during his time in Nuremberg, and she was too, was really anxious for him to return.

Waitman Beorn (48:35.635)
so we, we should probably, wrap up Nuremberg though the story again, Kelly, think is one of the interesting is obviously what, are the most interesting elements of the story. the, the perpetrators are, are all but three convicted. you know, and obviously Guring kills himself, but can we talk a little bit about, about just about that? you know, how does, how is he able to do this? What are the theories about sort of how he.

how we managed to do this.

Jack El-Hai (49:08.015)
I'll start out by saying that nobody knows for sure how Guring did it. But I think the most believable speculation is that Guring, who had good relationships with the guards in the prison, was able to make an arrangement with one of them that in exchange for watches and rings and jewelry that Guring had brought into the prison.

Waitman Beorn (49:10.594)
Yep.

Jack El-Hai (49:37.884)
with him and that he would give to a guard. That that guard in return would take from Gehring's stored belongings these cyanide capsules that he had hidden within all of his clothing and other belongings. And so that to me is the most likely theory. And in fact, when Gehring died on the

evening before he was to be executed. He did have a cyanide capsule with him that he used. There was a second capsule also in his cell in a container of some cold cream or some kind of facial concoction. so he had two of them with him and that's remarkable. So one of the...

big questions I had going into this research is what was the connection between Göring's suicide by cyanide and Kelly's own suicide by cyanide 13 years later, 12 years later? And I came to conclusions about that. I don't know if we want to get into that now or... Okay.

Waitman Beorn (50:57.325)
I do. I do. I want to get into it later, though, because I want to because the nice thing, of course, is that the book doesn't end with Nuremberg, you know, and I think that's that's important. So Kelly comes back to the United States armed with, you know, the sort of metaphorical suitcase full of of evidence. What does he do with it? What's his next step?

Jack El-Hai (51:23.023)
He uses these massive papers that he brought back with him to write his own book. That book was called 22 Cells in Nuremberg. It was published in 1947, so he worked hard on it because he didn't return home until early 1946. And it was published to silence, pretty much. And the book flopped.

because it presented a picture of the psychiatric state of the Nazis that the American public did not want to hear. This horrible war, long war, had just ended. These trials were in progress. The United Nations had been born with the hope of making the world a peaceful place. But Kelly...

postulated that none of that would stop recurrences of the appearance of fascism, war crimes, crimes against peace, genocide. None of that would end because these men that he examined in Nuremberg were, in psychiatric terms, normal. They did not suffer from any kind of psychosis or...

or psychiatric disorder. When Kelly said normal, he didn't mean that it was okay what they did. What he meant was that there are people within the normal range of personalities all around us who exhibit those qualities of lacking conscience, lacking empathy, and wanting to take any opportunity to gain power. And they're not all.

politicians are working in government, some of them are in business, some of are in education. They're all over in every human endeavor, in every country, in every era. And that was an unwelcome message at the time, very different from what Gilbert came out of Nuremberg with. And so the book sold poorly.

Waitman Beorn (53:40.046)
I mean, this was, I think, fascinating because I think if, if, if you ask anybody who knows anything about, you know, popular, popular knowledge about Nuremberg and psychiatry and, and, you know, interviews with the Nazis, it's Gilbert, right? People, Gilbert is the one that sort of is the, famous, if you will, of the two. And I'm curious sort of how is, is that how this happens? Because he comes to a different conclusion about the Nazis.

Jack El-Hai (54:04.387)
not just a different conclusion, but a different conclusion based on some of the same evidence that Kelly used. Because Gilbert also applied Rorschach testing to the prisoners and some of the other same tests that Kelly used. So it was a matter of interpretation. Gilbert wrote his book and a second book after that that did much better than Kelly's book. And

I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't say a whole lot about why Gilbert's medical argument was more convincing than Kelly's at the time. But I can say that his message was more welcomed because it did fall on the side of showing that the German defendants were monsters, were exceptional.

people, not normal. They were sick. And if you believe that, you believe that maybe this won't happen again, or that we can contain people like that. But the flip side is you also believe that they are not responsible for their actions as much as someone who is normal and makes a choice. And that's why I prefer

Kelly's interpretation that after all the whole point of the trial was to hold these men responsible and that if we're going to do that we should believe that they made choices, they're not monsters who are just being monsters and that's why I find Kelly's conclusions more satisfying.

Waitman Beorn (55:58.466)
And this is such a, I think it's such an interesting disconnect between the two men because I think most Holocaust historians, most professionals, those of us that sort of, you know, do this all the time would find Kelly's to be absolutely the absolutely the correct, you know, judgment. mean, these people, 90 % of the 99 % of them were not, you know, clinically.

abnormal human beings. And I think for all the reasons you just mentioned, right? mean, like that's the scariest finding of all. You know, it'd be actually quite comforting if they were all crazy monsters that somehow had gotten into positions of power, because then you can say, as I think you were suggesting, well, I'm not a monster. I'm not clinically insane. So like, therefore this doesn't bother, this doesn't touch on my life. And there's no chance of this happening here because we're not like that. But Kelly's argument,

Jack El-Hai (56:32.036)
It is.

Waitman Beorn (56:53.581)
And there's some amazing quotes in the book where he directly applies this to the United States. Um, you know, he makes direct comparisons with American racism. And it'd be great to hear some, some of that from you as well, you know, where, where he says, look, like this is a human condition. It's not a, a psychological illness and that we need to be on our guard for, for this, for this happening in our, in our, in our house.

Jack El-Hai (57:18.713)
Yes, so Kelly came home having spent all this time with the Nazi leaders and having learned about them and he saw American society differently as a result. He saw Nazism or things very similar to Nazism in the politics of racial segregation in the South.

And in the politicians of the South who were governors, members of the Senate who applied emotional arguments to problems and expected their constituents to respond emotionally, not with critical thinking, but with emotions and feelings of

wanting what they don't have, et cetera, et cetera. And so initially, Kelly was focused on them, but he knew it was a strain that had run all through American history for many, many years. And he developed some recommendations in his book, kind of laid out a program, how to save our democracy from this, from American style fascism.

And it included things like legislation to make it easier, not harder, for qualified voters to cast their ballots. And changing our educational system to emphasize critical thinking over emotional reacting. And then finally, Kelly also proposed that politicians should be

subject to a mandatory psychiatric exam. I don't know if that would fly now, that given his line of work, that's what he thought would be best. So if he were with us now, I think he would say something like, see, I told you.

Waitman Beorn (59:33.23)
And it's what's really interesting. Again, I mean, we can't sort of read this history without the elephant in the room of the current situation that we're in, not just in the United States, but sort of globally. But he also talks about police because one of the things he does in his post-war life is he becomes sort I guess, one of the first academic criminologists. I picked up on this when you mentioned that because he also says, you know, that he thinks policemen.

need to be have psychological evaluations and that a large number of them are not fit to be policemen.

Jack El-Hai (01:00:11.589)
Right, and he put his money where his mouth was because he became a consulting psychiatrist to several police departments, including in Berkeley, where he eventually settled. Yes, he believed that in the 1950s, one third of the police officers in the US, he said, were no better than the criminals they were hunting. And so he brought out his battery of tests, Rorschach and others to examine.

police officer recruits and to weed out the ones that he thought were unfit for police service. So Kelly's move to criminology was a direct result of what he had learned in Nuremberg because he came to believe that psychiatry couldn't explain the behavior of this man because they were in a psychiatric sense not sick.

Maybe in that case, criminology could explain.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:15.693)
Which is kind of like a shift, I suppose, towards sociology, that kind of an approach, because it's more looking at, I mean, think at one point you quote him, I think, from saying something like that criminals are not born or whatever, that they are created by society, which speaks to his sort of his move into criminology. And I guess.

I guess you kind of you gave the spoiler earlier, but you know, how does he how does he die? I mean, because this is a really, I think, incredibly strange and really shocking sort of end to his to his story.

Jack El-Hai (01:01:45.733)
You

Jack El-Hai (01:01:59.1)
In the 12 years after Kelly came home from Nuremberg, he had a number of setbacks. He had some professional setbacks. He believed that his colleagues didn't regard him and his work as a psychiatrist as highly as they should. He became a heavy drinker. His marriage ran aground. He was depressed.

Lots of things, he also believed that he was being targeted during the red baiting years of the McCarthy era. lots of things were going wrong for him. And he would not seek psychiatric help, ironically, for any of this. And so I went into the book trying to figure out what was the connection between the deaths of these two men, Guring and Kelly.

and both using the same means of death and not a common means of death and a very painful, though swift, means of death. And so I determined that the connection is not literal in the sense that Kelly thought, okay, Herman used cyanide to end his life. I'm gonna do the same thing.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:05.132)
Right.

Jack El-Hai (01:03:27.003)
It was more like these men were similar and that a death by cyanide appealed to each of them for the same reason. It's dramatic. It makes a statement. In Göring's case, the statement was, the allies are not going to hang me. I'm going to go my way to hell with them. And Kelly's statement by the time his suicide happened, he was so distraught.

and upset was that the world didn't regard him as he wanted it to. He was sick of it and nobody understood him. And so he went out in big fashion with cyanide in front of his family on New Year's Day.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:15.435)
I was going to say, because he doesn't, you know, what he doesn't do is say essentially goodbye crew world. You've, you've, you've done me wrong and I'm going to kill myself. He gets in a fight with his wife. And so it's sort of this like domestic dispute that ranges across the house. you, mean, like, you just paint this picture a little bit?

Jack El-Hai (01:04:36.889)
Yes, so this was New Year's Day. The family was gathered in the house near Berkeley to watch the Rose Bowl football game on TV. Kelly and his wife, Dookie, were preparing food in the kitchen. Kelly burned his hand somehow and got upset. He had been drinking quite a bit already too. And he just stormed out.

and went upstairs where he had an office and a lab and came back down the stairs and stood on the landing and faced his family and holding this canister of cyanide and said, I can't take it anymore, words to that effect. And this is where the perspective of Doug, his son,

was so valuable to me because Doug was present. He was only 10 at the time, but he was present and remembers it very well. And he believes his father was in a way play acting. He was acting out his frantic emotions and may not have actually intended to put cyanide in his mouth, but did so impulsively because Doug said that

After he poisoned himself, Dr. Kelly had this surprised look on his face as the cyanide was taking effect. Now that could be the action of the cyanide itself giving him that expression on his face. But Doug really believed that his father, had he thought about it and not acted impulsively, probably would not have taken his own life.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:31.949)
And was this, mean, this is I'm getting into the details a little bit, but was this a cyanide pill? Because again, it's it's it'd be a weird thing to have laying around the house. I mean, I guess, especially considering, you know, I love that you're not trying to draw a straight line between Herman Guring and Kermit Guring's death and Kelly's. think that's that's that's absolutely sort of the justest thing to do. But it's also if it's a pill, it's a very weird thing to sort of choose when you have other options.

Jack El-Hai (01:06:58.683)
It wasn't a pill. It was loose granules.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:00.717)
Okay. something you'd had in the lab or whatever that. Okay. Well, I I mean, again, I think I think the story, the story is amazing, you know, and I guess, I guess, would you, would you suggest that in some ways Nuremberg had led, led in some ways to his suicide or was this something more sort of directly responsible for, for

or directly stemming from his own kind of issues in his own professional and personal life.

Jack El-Hai (01:07:38.084)
I would call it a mix. think his experiences in Nuremberg set him off balance and destroyed, or that's probably too strong, damaged his faith in psychiatry, his chosen profession. And yes, he found another criminology that he thought might be better, but he was knocked off course.

by the events in Nuremberg and what he learned there. So I think it contributed. then adding on all the other problems he developed in his last years, I think that's what tipped him over.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:20.817)
I want to switch gears really quickly just because, you know, we rarely have a guest on whose whose work has turned into a movie. And I'm curious, what's what's that like? You know, I think we all all of us would love to have written something that that gets picked up for a movie. What's that like as an author? What? What input did you have? You know, how how are you involved, if at all in sort of the movie itself?

Jack El-Hai (01:08:48.859)
The process of my book becoming a movie took 14 years. So I had a lot of time to adjust and try and understand it. I believe that in any year, there are hundreds of books published, nonfiction and fiction, that would make wonderful movies. But only a very small number do. Why?

Waitman Beorn (01:08:56.557)
Okay.

Jack El-Hai (01:09:18.125)
I think it's luck. It's unpredictable and unmanageable and I think it's just a stroke of luck. In my case, it happened because my earlier book, The Lobotomist, had been optioned by a production company. And when I got interested in Dr. Kelly's life, I began by writing a magazine article.

I always test drive my book ideas as articles first. So I wrote an article, also called The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, for a magazine called Scientific American Mind, and that was published in 2011. And I suspected that the people at the production company that had optioned my earlier work might be interested in this too. So I sent a link, sent them a link to the article.

And James Vanderbilt was a member of that production company. James Vanderbilt went on to write the screenplay for Nuremberg and directed. And so over the next few years, he sent me a couple of drafts of the screenplay that he had written. He was really taken by the story. He has since told me that he never read a story before that so quickly seemed to him.

to be material for a movie. And so I looked at these screenplays, commented on them, sent them back, but then the production company broke apart and James wasn't attached to them anymore. And so there was a time when nobody had an option on the Nazi and the psychiatrist anymore, but James kept working on it. And finally he...

attached himself to another production company called Bluestone. This was in 2023, so a lot of years had gone by with nothing happening, it seemed to me. And Bluestone got into action very quickly. And at the end of that year, 2023, I learned that they really intended to make a movie about it. And then I reviewed a couple more drafts of the screenplay. I was happy with it. And

Jack El-Hai (01:11:40.281)
And then it happened. It was a lot of excitement at the beginning, then nothing for a long time, and then a lot of excitement at the end.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:50.406)
And did you get a chance to, I like, I always imagine there's this tension. And I mean, I don't necessarily mean an antagonistic tension or even a deep tension, but, how much do they ask you once, once they sort of, you know, say we're going to do this and what do think of the, of the script or whatever, you know, because you kind of are the, the, expert, I suppose, for, for the, for the film, do they ask you to, you know,

What are your comments on this? Did you make suggestions to change the script at all or?

Jack El-Hai (01:12:23.867)
No, I didn't see it as my role to be the history police in reading the screenplay or even to be much of a fact checker. I wanted to look at it as a movie, knowing that movies tell stories their way and books tell stories their way. And I wanted this to end up as a movie that would entertain people and would move them.

And then educate them? Well, that's lower down on the list for me anyway. So I was not focused on whether the whole film was historically accurate. Hint, it's not. No movie based on actual events is 100 % historically accurate. But I came to the conclusion, I liked the movie very much and came to believe that

It is, well, I use kind of a weasel word in describing it. It's essentially factual, which means mostly factual or factual enough so that the message, which was most important for me to see in the film, so that the messages come through, messages that are in my book as well.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:50.21)
Well, I'm looking forward to it. I'm definitely going to go, I'm going to go check it out. And I think it's, it'll be great going to it actually having read the book, you know, because the book goes into for the listeners, a lot more detail about lots of these things, you know, and, and, and it is insightful. I really, I really found some really interesting things that I hadn't known about or hadn't thought about, brought up in it. But before we let you go, we always ask everybody.

you know, what is one book on the Holocaust that has been important to you or influential to you that you would recommend to our listeners?

Jack El-Hai (01:14:29.371)
Well, since we're talking about the Nuremberg trials, trials with an S on the end of it, plural, many people don't know that there were 13 Nuremberg trials, and the one that you and I have been discussing, it was the very first, 12 followed. And there's a book I like which is about one of the other trials. It's called Justice at Nuremberg.

by a writer named Ulf Schmidt. it's about, so these other trials that followed, there was one about trial of judges, German judges, there was one, an SS trial, there was a munitions maker's trial. This one is about the doctor's trial, which because of my interest in writing about psychiatry and medicine is especially important to me and intriguing to me.

So this is a really detailed account of the doctor's trial and what issues came out of it. It still resonates a great deal today and it was an important trial and that's the book that I would recommend.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:40.269)
Absolutely. That's great. And we'll put that in the as always in the show notes along with links to to Jack's web page and to the book itself. Again, highly recommended for everybody else. Again, thanks for listening. You know, I hope you're continuing to find the podcast to be engaging. Tell your friends and thanks again for listening. And Jack, thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate you taking the time to tell us about your about your work.

Jack El-Hai (01:16:08.888)
And thank you for the good questions, Waichman. I appreciate it.