The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai

The full name of the book is The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII. A friend posted that the author, Jack El-Hai, is her cousin and she congratulated him on the movie, named “Nuremberg,” that will be coming out based on the book. It sounded interesting to me so I checked it out. It was fascinating!

I marked so many quotes there’s no way I can include them all in this write-up. I read a lot of them to my husband, who is a WWII buff. Many of the facts I read to him he already knew, but even he was surprised by some.

Dr. Douglas M. Kelley was an American Army doctor who was assigned to be the psychiatrist to the Nazi’s held for a trial of war crimes in Nuremberg after World War II. The Nuremberg trial was a joint effort by France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The military goal for his assignment was that he would ensure the Nazi’s were deemed sane so they could not get away with the horrible acts they committed in the war by way of an insanity plea. Dr. Kelley had another goal: to find out what characteristics made the Nazis able to commit such horrendous acts. He thought they must be unique in some way that enabled them to do such inhumane, evil, unthinkable acts to their fellow humans. Perhaps they had a common psychiatric disorder, “a type of ‘Nazi mind’…that could account for their behavior. He wrote:

The devastation of Europe, the deaths of millions, the near-destruction of modern culture will have gone for naught if we do not draw the right conclusions about the forces which produced such claims. We must learn the why of the Nazi success so we can take steps to prevent the recurrence of such evil. *

Spoiler alert: He found there was nothing unique about them and, in fact, he came to believe nearly anyone in a position of power could potentially do the same kind of evil.

One time I read the account of a woman who had survived the Holocaust. At something like the age of 15, she came home one day from school, was put on a train with her family, ended up in a concentration camp where her mother, father, and brother were sent to die, and she suffered through horrendous years in the camp. She marveled at the fact that this all happened in the space of a few hours after having woken up and gone to school with no clue her life would be torn apart. She talked about a “thin crust” of civility and humaneness in mankind.

One of the first things I learned about the Nazi leaders, including Herman Göring, is they were incredibly unaware of the reaction others in the world had to what they had done. Göring kept demanding a one-on-one meeting with General Eisenhower (who completely ignored the request), all of the prisoners felt they should be treated as the VIPs they were, top executives, people who deserved honor and respect for the historical and amazing things they had done for their country. At one point the warden of the prison where the Nazis were held (US Army Colonel Burton C. Andrus) grew so disgusted by their attitude regarding the way they complained of “alleged theft of property or other violations of human rights,…the inconveniences,…[their] opinions as to any indignity or deference due [them],” ** he wrote a scolding missive to them that included:

The commandant, his superiors, the Allied governments, and the public of the nations of the world are not unmindful of the atrocities committed by the German government, its soldiers, and its civil officials. Appeals for added comfort by the perpetrators and parties to these conditions will tend only to accentuate any contempt in which they are already held.” **

Ha, “not unmindful.” Indeed.

For most of the war, Göring was “second in authority” only to Hitler. He was so deeply involved in Germany’s worst crimes that the US Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson said, “‘The podgy finter of Göring was in every pie.’” ** As happened during most of the trial, when this phrase was translated to him, Göring “exploded with laughter.” ***

Göring delighted in hearing of his escapades while he was leading Germany. He was proud of them! I was surprised by that. When I learned about the Nuremberg trial in school, I assumed the German leaders must have been ashamed. Just the opposite, though. They were so conceited, so narcissistic, they were oblivious. Göring was even charming, a jokester, and a leader of the other prisoners, reminding them to keep their dignity and maintain behavior appropriate to such incredible and historic men of power.

I think I was the most shocked by what Göring said during the trial here:

Unlike many of the others, Göring did not try to blame Hitler or pin the responsibility for the actions of the Nazi regime on colleagues. He repeatedly admitted to his own decisions and portrayed himself as a moving force of the Reich. Several weeks into the trial, he summed up his attitude in a remark audible to spectators in the courtroom, ‘Damn it, I just wish we could all have the courage to confine our defense to three simple words: Lick my ass.’”

Wow! The equivalent of “Kiss my ass.”

A caption for a photo of Alfred Rosenberg said, “Kelley decided that Nazi Party philosopher Alfred Rosenberg ‘had developed a system of thought differing greatly from known fact.’” Alternative facts, anyone?

A major turning point in the trail was when they showed films with “images all too familiar to people today,” “scenes of stick-limbed camp inmates, haunted faces, yawning crematoria doors showing incinerated skeletons, stacked corpses, and bulldozers tumbling mounds of bodies into mass graves.” The people at the trial — the attorneys and judge, the spectators, the prosecutors, defenders, and the Nazis themselves had not seen these films. Everyone was shocked. People cried, turned away from the screen, and covered their eyes. The judge forgot to dismiss the court, and the defendents “remained seated as if turned to stone,” and “were slow to rise when the judges filed out in disgusted silence.” ****

Some of the Nazi leaders claimed they did not know, but there was overwhelming evidence that they did, and “everyone sensed there was something horribly wrong…even if [they] did not know the details. They didn’t want to know.” Göring “knew about the atrocities and details of the ‘final solution’ planned for the Jews. The Holocaust had occurred with his assent and assistance. ****

I could go on and on with stories and quotes. El-Hai did an amazing job of making the trial and the characters involved into real people whose words and actions revealed enough to feel like you knew them. Göring managed to smuggle cyanide into his cell and committed suicide, not out of guilt, it seems, but to show everyone how clever he was to have gotten the cyanide, and to rob the prosecutors of giving him the punishment he saw coming (hanging).

I was a little surprised that the book continued on for a short while with Dr. Kelley’s life after the trial. I realized that the book really was about the doctor, not just the trial. El-Hai acknowledges the help of Doug Kelley, the oldest son of Dr. Kelley. It turned out Doug Kelley had an “extensive collection of papers and photos chronicling [Dr. Kelley’s] time at Nurenberg, as well as the years before and after,” ***** in addition to many remembrances of his father and the experience of being his son.

It’s a good book. Engaging writer, great stories, incredible detail.

* The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII, by Jack El-Hai. Copyright 2013. Published in the United States by PublicAffairs, a Member of the Perseus Books Group, page 24.

** Ibid. Page 10.

*** Ibid. Page 12.

**** Ibid. Pages 135-136.

***** Ibid. Page 225.