We the Women
Norah O'Donnell, Kate Andersen Brower
Recommended for fans of History
The Nazi and the Psychiatrist
by Jack El-Hai
A gripping dual portrait of Hermann Göring and the American psychiatrist who studied him at Nuremberg, asking whether the Nazi leaders were monsters or disturbingly ordinary men.
What It's About
Jack El-Hai tells the story of Douglas M. Kelley, a young U.S. Army psychiatrist assigned to assess the mental fitness of the top Nazi prisoners awaiting trial at Nuremberg. Kelley saw the job as a scientific opportunity: if he could identify a psychological defect shared by these men, he might explain how Nazism happened and help prevent it from happening again. Much of the book centers on his long conversations with Hermann Göring, the most charismatic and manipulative of the defendants, and on the uneasy rapport that grew between them.
El-Hai draws on Kelley's personal papers and records to follow him from the detention center in Luxembourg through the trial and into his troubled postwar life. That includes his professional rivalry with the psychologist Gustave Gilbert over who owned the interview and test data, and Kelley's uncomfortable conclusion that the Nazi leaders were not clinically abnormal in any way that set them apart from ordinary people. The second half traces how that idea, and his time with Göring, shadowed him in the years that followed.
The writing is brisk and narrative-driven, closer to a true-crime or biographical thriller than an academic study. Chapters move between Kelley's life and the prisoners' stories, with plenty of vivid detail about Göring's vanity and cunning. It is an easy, absorbing read that raises big questions about evil without burying the reader in theory.
Read this if you…
- are fascinated by the Nuremberg trials and the people behind them
- want a narrative history that reads like a psychological thriller
- are interested in how psychiatry has tried to explain evil and atrocity
Skip it if you…
- want a comprehensive scholarly history of the Nuremberg trials or the Holocaust
- are put off by a book that spends long stretches inside the charming persona of a Nazi leader
Key Ideas
- 1
The search for a Nazi personality
Kelley hoped psychiatric interviews and Rorschach tests would reveal a distinctive pathology in the Nazi leadership. El-Hai shows how that hope collided with his findings: apart from a few individuals, the prisoners looked psychologically unremarkable. The book treats this as the story's central unsettling idea, anticipating later debates about the banality of evil and the capacity of ordinary people for atrocity.
- 2
Göring as a seductive, dangerous subject
Göring emerges as intelligent, funny, vain, and calculating, a man who understood how to charm the people guarding him. El-Hai uses the Kelley–Göring relationship to show how proximity and personal rapport can blur moral judgment, and how even a trained observer can be drawn in by a skilled manipulator.
- 3
Science, ambition, and professional rivalry
The book portrays Kelley as brilliant but ambitious, eager to publish and make his name. His clash with Gustave Gilbert over interview material and test results shows how the scientific study of the defendants was entangled with ego, careers, and competing interpretations, which shaped what the public later learned about the Nazi mind.
- 4
The lasting cost of studying evil
El-Hai follows Kelley well beyond Nuremberg, into his career in criminology and his personal struggles. The book suggests that close engagement with the defendants left a mark on him, and it invites readers to consider what such work does to the people who undertake it, without reducing his life to a simple cautionary tale.
Limitations
This is a focused, popular history, not a full account of the trials or the legal proceedings, and the victims of Nazi crimes stay largely in the background. Some readers feel the psychological analysis stays fairly light, and that Kelley's methods, including heavy reliance on Rorschach testing, deserve more critical scrutiny than they get. Because the book leans on Kelley's own papers, his perspective dominates, and Gilbert's side of their dispute gets less sympathetic treatment. Those wanting deep engagement with the scholarship on perpetrator psychology may find it introductory.
Questions Readers Ask
- Is The Nazi and the Psychiatrist the basis for the film Nuremberg?
- Yes. The 2025 film Nuremberg, with Rami Malek as Douglas Kelley and Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring, draws on El-Hai's book. The book gives far more context on Kelley's background, his rivalry with Gustave Gilbert, and his life after the trials than a film can, so it works well as a companion or a deeper follow-up.
- How does it compare to Gustave Gilbert's Nuremberg Diary?
- Gilbert's book is a firsthand record of his conversations with the defendants, written soon after the trial. El-Hai's is a modern narrative history built around Kelley, Gilbert's rival. Reading both shows how two experts with access to the same men reached and presented their conclusions differently, and El-Hai helps explain the tension between them.
- Do you need to know a lot about World War II to follow it?
- No. El-Hai introduces the main defendants and the setting clearly, and the story is driven by personalities rather than military or legal detail. General familiarity with who the Nazi leaders were helps, but a newcomer to the period can follow it easily.
- Published
- 2014
- ISBN
- 9781610394635
- Difficulty
- beginner
- Category
- History
Book details and cover from Google Books.
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