How a Psychiatrist at Nuremberg Got Inside the Nazi Mind

When the Allies prepared to put Nazi Germany’s top leaders on trial at Nuremberg after World War II, the U.S. Army tapped a young psychiatrist, Captain Douglas McGlashan Kelley, for an extraordinary assignment. Kelley’s task was to assess and preserve the mental stability of the captured Nazi elite—men like Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess—as they awaited judgment for war crimes that had shaken the world.

Kelley, who had been overseeing psychiatric services for thousands of G.I.s, was surprised by the order. He had “no experience with war criminals,” writes Jack El-Hai in his 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII. Nor did he have experience with addiction withdrawal, an issue Göring, in particular, was struggling with.

But Kelley quickly recognized the opportunity. Rather than just look after the prisoners, he envisioned a far more ambitious project: probing deep into the Nazi mind, looking for an explanation of how anyone could commit the heinous deeds these men were accused of. Were the Nazi leaders somehow different from the rest of humanity?

His conclusions would make him one of the most controversial figures in the history of psychiatry—and later play a role in a shocking personal tragedy.

Kelley reported for duty in Mondorf-les-Bains, a small resort town in Luxembourg, in August 1945, the same month he turned 33. The Americans had established a top-secret interrogation center there and converted a one-time hotel into a prison (nicknamed "Camp Ashcan") for captured Nazis. Among its occupants were Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had briefly become Germany’s head of state after the suicide of Adolf Hitler, and Hermann Göring, Hitler’s longtime second-in-command, who would have succeeded Hitler had the two not had a falling out in the final days of the war.

In preparation for their war crimes trial, the Army soon transferred Göring and other Nazi leaders to a prison in the bomb-flattened city of Nuremberg, Germany. Kelley moved with them, responsible for interviewing and producing mental evaluations of 22 prisoners prior to trial.

“He began to study them as subjects, as a biologist might scrutinize animals confined in laboratory cages,” El-Hai writes. For Kelley, the prison was “a psychiatrist’s playground.”

With Hitler and several of his key subordinates either dead by suicide or rumored to have escaped to South America or elsewhere, Göring was the most famous Nazi in captivity. He was also the one Kelley spent the most time with, keeping copious notes on their conversations.

The two men shared several common traits, El-Hai says. Both could be charming and cleverly manipulative. Both also had narcissistic tendencies, in El-Hai’s view, along with outsize egos.

In Göring’s case, that included a conviction that while he might be executed for his crimes, German history would exonerate—and lionize—him. “In 50 or 60 years, there will be statues of Hermann Göring all over Germany,” he told Kelley. “Little statues, maybe, but one in every German home.”

El-Hai says that he and Kelley’s son, Douglas Jr., a major source for the book, used to joke that “Kelley meeting Göring was like King Kong meeting Godzilla.”

After months of interviewing and administering Rorschach inkblot tests to Göring and his fellow Nazis, El-Hai wrote, Kelley had concluded that “none of the top Nazi prisoners, except [Robert] Ley, who had experienced traumatic brain injury, showed any signs of mental illness or personality traits that would label him insane.”

As to Göring specifically, El-Hai writes, Kelley “was astonished that such a clearly intelligent and cultured man so blatantly lacked a moral compass and empathy for others.”

Göring and 21 other Nazis went on trial before the International Military Tribunal in November 1945 at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.

About two months into the nearly year-long trial, Kelley left Nuremberg and returned to Chattanooga, Tennessee. He said he wanted to get home to his wife, resume his civilian career and start work on a book based on his experiences. He recalled in it that Göring “wept unashamedly when I left Nuremberg for the States.”

Göring spent hours on the witness stand, offering a spirited, often defiant defense of both his own behavior and Nazism in general, The New York Times reported. But his wartime record spoke for itself. He was found guilty on all four of the charges against him: conspiracy to wage war, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. On October 1, 1946, the tribunal sentenced him to death by hanging. They rejected his request for a firing squad.

As El-Hai tells the story, hours before the scheduled execution, Göring slipped a small glass capsule filled with potassium cyanide into his mouth and crushed it with his teeth, most likely dying within seconds. In a note he left behind, he claimed he’d had the cyanide the entire time he was in prison and managed to conceal it despite repeated searches of his cell.

News of Göring’s suicide took Kelley by surprise. But in the aftermath, Kelley expressed a controversial admiration for his decision to take matters into his own hands, calling the suicide “a skillful, even brilliant, finishing touch.”

The Allies had another finishing touch in mind—reportedly transporting Göring’s corpse to the former concentration camp at Dachau for cremation in one of its infamous ovens.

Kelley had returned to a busy civilian life, at various times practicing psychiatry, running a psychiatric hospital, teaching, lecturing and working on his book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, published in 1947. His public statements often focused on his experiences at Nuremberg and his conclusion that Nazis weren’t all that different from other people.

“Without Hitler, these people are not abnormal, not pervert[ed], not geniuses,” he told the Nashville Tennessean. “They are like any aggressive, smart, ambitious, ruthless businessman.”

Not everyone agreed with Kelley’s diagnosis. Gustave Gilbert, a psychologist who briefly served alongside him at Nuremberg, took a different view. Gilbert had stayed through the trials and written a popular book about them, Nuremberg Diary.

Unlike Kelley, Gilbert maintained that Nazis were indeed a breed apart. Göring, he concluded, was an “aggressive psychopath.” Both Kelley and Gilbert have since been faulted for trying to explain the “Nazi mind” from such a small sample size.

Kelley transitioned from psychiatry into criminology, becoming a go-to consultant for police departments in California, where his family was now living, and a star witness in headline-making criminal cases. When the director Nicholas Ray wanted an expert on juvenile delinquency to review the script for his 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, he chose Kelley for the job. Kelley also began appearing on a local TV program called “Science in Action.”

From all appearances, Kelley had found professional success. But his home life in Berkeley was another story. He drank heavily, fought with his wife and behaved tyrannically toward his son, says El-Hai.

On New Year’s Day 1958, apparently after a fight with his wife, Kelley stormed off to his upstairs study, then emerged to announce that he was about to take cyanide and would be dead in 30 seconds. After putting something in his mouth and swallowing, El-Hai writes, he collapsed “like a slackened marionette.” Witnessing the event were Kelley’s wife, father and 10-year-old son. Kelley was dead on arrival at a Berkeley hospital.

The irony of Kelley dying the same way as his most famous patient was lost on no one. Some early accounts even suggested he might have snuck the poison home from Nuremberg, although evidence soon emerged that it came from a U.S.-based chemical supply house.

Friends and associates struggled to understand his decision, with many newspaper headlines deeming it a mystery. “He must have just cracked—boom, like that,” Berkeley’s police chief, a close friend of Kelley’s, told a reporter. Others blamed overwork or a stomach ailment.

At least one newspaper noted another irony: His January 6 episode of “Science in Action” was supposed to have been devoted to “the science of happiness.”

Whatever Kelley’s motivation, El-Hai writes, “the cyanide was a deliberate evocation of Göring’s defiant suicide…. It is no coincidence that cyanide, a poisonous agent with a uniquely dramatic effect on the body, was their selected means of escape.”

The two men—very different in many ways, surprisingly similar in others—would now be forever entwined in history.

If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or self-harming behaviors, call or text 988 to get help from the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.