The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII

This book was quick and interesting, but lacked a certain <em>je ne sais quoi</em> for me and, at times, felt a bit "forced" in its attempt to give the relationship between its two titular characters a causal weight in the events that eventually befell the Kelley family.<br> <br>Like <em> <strong>Dr. Douglas M. Kelley</strong> </em> (below), I am fascinated by the inner workings of the human mind. Likewise, the human capacity for evil revealed in criminology and the study of history (in particular the events of and surrounding WWII) capture my curiosity and desire to understand. Kelley and I are certainly not alone in this, and in the decades since WWII scholars from a variety of fields have sought to unravel the sociological, psychological and historical underpinnings of what happened. All of this is to say, that I did not find Dr. Kelley to as exceptional as the author may have intended.<br> <br><a title="Douglas Kelley teaching circa 1955" href="http://imgur.com/bMxyOGN" rel="nofollow noopener"> <img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1407162809i/10648911.png" alt="Douglas Kelley teaching circa 1955" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"> </a><br> <br>That notable figures who work with notorious criminals are often somewhat egotistical is not surprising. <a title="John E. Douglas" href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/54208.John_E__Douglas" rel="nofollow noopener">John E. Douglas</a>, the original "Mindhunter," is an example that stands out (see: <em> <a title="Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas" href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/126584.Mindhunter__Inside_the_FBI_s_Elite_Serial_Crime_Unit" rel="nofollow noopener">Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit</a> </em>). What author <strong> <a title="Jack El-Hai" href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/300083.Jack_El_Hai" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">Jack El-Hai</a> </strong> refers to as <strong> <em>tele-empathy</em> </strong>, <em>"the ability to feel what others are feeling and thinking" after carefully examining them"</em> (p.201), seems like it would be requisite for the job. From studies such as the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison Study (both of which El-Hai refers to toward the end of the book- including some dubious extrapolations), we have learned more about quotidian obedience to authority. Books such as Martha Stout's <em> <a title="The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout" href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/72536.The_Sociopath_Next_Door" rel="nofollow noopener">The Sociopath Next Door</a> </em> describe that individuals who completely lack conscience are by no means an anomaly. <br> <br>The most interesting pieces of information in re. the over-the-top character of <em> <strong>Hermann Göring</strong> </em>, which are almost unfathomably bizarre (his extreme pill addiction, his letter writing campaign to President Truman regarding the inhumane conditions in which he was being kept, his obsession with wild animals etc.), were brushed over too quickly for my liking, in favor of Kelley's family history. <br> <br><a title="Goring with lion cub" href="http://imgur.com/wsraXlr" rel="nofollow noopener"> <img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1407162809i/10648912.jpg" alt="Goring with lion cub" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"> </a><br> <br>While I enjoyed this book, I feel like it could have done more. Perhaps that was not the author's intention, but somehow the parallels between Göring and Kelley failed to draw me in as stories unto themselves. Furthermore, these characteristics seemed to me less exceptional, less notable than one might believe based on this material alone. Kelley told journalists that: <blockquote> <em> <strong>"[Göring] is still the same swaggering, vain, conceited braggart he always was. He has made up his mind he's going to be killed anyway, so he's very anxious to be considered the number one Nazi, a curious kind of compensation" (p.116).</strong> </em> </blockquote>This desire to rise to the top (one that Kelley, apparently, shared with Göring) seemed, to me, unsurprising. It certainly didn't seem like a trait so noteworthy as to suggest that two men sharing it would somehow be distant reflections of one-another. I'll withhold the other "big" parallel as not to spoil anything, but I, again, thought it was a bit overstated...

Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, who served as a psychiatrist for the U.S. Army in World War II, received an order to be the lead psychiatrist and work with the high level Nazis being detained for trial at Nuremberg after the war. He saw it as an opportunity to try to discern if there was there a common flaw among the Nazi leaders? “We must learn they why of the Nazi success so we can take steps to prevent the recurrence of such evil.” “What made these men criminals?” “Were they born with evil tendencies?” “Did they share psychiatric disorders?” “The trial and it run-up served as fascinating laboratories for the study of group dynamics of aggression, criminal motivation, defense mechanisms of the guilty, depression, and the response of deviant personalities to the judicial process.”<br /> His conclusions are as relevant in the United States today, in 2013, as they were in 1947.<br /> Hermann Göring, President of the Reichstag, Hitler’s deputy, Prime Minister of Prussia, Reich Minister of Aviation and Commander in Chief of the Luttwaffe, Minister of Economics, member of the Secret Cabinet Council, director of the Hermann Göring Works manufacturing combine, field marshal, chairman of the Reich Council for National Defense, Reich Forestry and Hunting Master, and Reichsmarshall, was the highest ranking Nazi in detention. After seeing the films taken when the concentration camps were liberated, he stated he didn’t know the extent of the atrocities committed against the victims and thought it was enemy propaganda. Until that point, he wanted all co-defendants to “defend themselves, be proud of their actions, and accept the punishment of the victors as a unified group.” At first, he told his fellows, to expected exile, then a group execution which “would grant them an afterlife as national martyrs.” Unlike the others, he didn’t blame Hitler or the Nazi regime. He considered himself a moving force in the Nazi movement.” Kelley spent a lot of time with Göring, admiring his intelligence but aware of his dark side. In a letter to his wife, Göring suggested that if both of them did not survive the war, their daughter should be sent to live in the US with Kelley and his wife. <br /> The first two pages of THE NAZI AND THE PSYCHIATRIST tell about the suicide of Dr. Kelley on January 1, 1958. The book then moves back to May 6, 1945. Realizing the war was soon ending, Göring sent a letter offering to help the Allies form a new government for the Reich. The Americans captured him but he didn’t get to meet with General Dwight Eisenhower or any other officials. Instead, he was taken into custody as a criminal for his crimes in World War II. At the time, he was addicted to paracodeine, taking forty pills a day. (Five tablets had the narcotic effect of 65 mg of morphine.) An army official found that “Göring’s hoard of [paracodeine] amounted to nearly the world’s entire supply.”<br /> During the war, Kelley recognized “combat neurosis” and “combat exhaustion,” now referred to as PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder and worked to rehabilitate soldiers and determine who could return to the battlefield or noncombatant duty and who should be returned the US for further treatment. In the early years of the war, only 2% of the its victims in the North Africa campaign could return to duty. After Kelley trained physicians in ways to treat it, more than 95% of the service personnel were able to do so. He was able to use some of techniques when he worked with the Nazi prisoners to help keep them fit for trial. He combined psychiatry with criminology and also developed group therapy as psychiatric tool. <br /> One of Kelley’s co-workers, Captain John Dolibois a welfare official helping detainees with their problems and listening to them observed “they spoke quite freely believing they would never face trial. We sometimes had trouble getting them to shut up. They felt neglected if they hadn’t been interrogated for a several days.” The psychological staff was able to easily get information where traditional interrogation methods failed. <br /> Relying heavily on The Rorschach or Ink Blot Test, he concluded,“These people without Hitler are not abnormal, not pervert[s], not geniuses. They were like any other aggressive, smart, ambitious, ruthless businessman, and their business happened in the setting up of a world government.” Others, working with him, particularly Lieutenant Gustave Mark Gilbert who held a PhD in psychology and wanted to gather information to write a book, came to a different conclusion. <br /> THE NAZI AND THE PSYCHIATRIST presents a detailed picture of the detainees lives before and after Nuremberg, a description of the courtroom itself, the reaction of the Nazis to the testimony and the verdicts, It also tells what happened to each prisoner after the trial. While most of the book deals with Hermann Göring and the relationship between him and Kelley , the book presents information about each of the main defendants, the men at the higher leadership roles in the Nazi regime. For example, Julius Streicher, editor of the exceedingly anti-Jewish Der Stürmer, was considered loathsome, a pariah among the other prisoners. He had a reputation as a sadist, rapist, and collector of pornography. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, had only an elementary school education and had worked in the liquor business previously. Kelley questioned whether Hess’s amnesia was real, faked, or somewhere in between (had been faked then turned real) but was able to show he was capable to stand trial.<br /> The book also states that Hitler had gastrointestinal disorders for more than twenty years though no organic cause was ever found by doctors. Because of that, he feared death and acted impulsively. He believed he had stomach cancer and “turned his attention from successful assaults on Great Britain to a campaign in the east that resulted in defeat.”<br /> There were three suicides among the detainees, two by hanging before the trial and one, Göring’s by swallowing a cyanide capsule the night before he was to be hung.<br /> After Kelley returned to the United States, Kelley was urged to write, but he wanted to get away from the detentions and trial. Eventually, did write about his experiences and examination as well as taught and trained law enforcement personnel. His family life was extremely complex with him alternating between kindness and vicious enforcer. He and his wife had major arguments and his children never knew how he would react to anything. He refused to see a psychiatrist because he didn’t want to appear weak before a peer since he was an expert in the field. He was excessively strict with his children, especially his oldest son, because he wanted to train him to not act like the Germans did. He was to be observant and analytical. His son began thinking of killing his father when he was seven years old.<br /> Based on his interpretation of their psychological make-up and trying to answer his original questions about why the Nazis acted as they did, Kelley said. “Unbridled ambition, weak ethics, and excessive patriotism that could justify nearly any action of questionable rightness.” They were “Not monsters, evildoing machines, or automata without soul and feelings.”<br /> He wrote 22 Cells “to influence the thinking of the American people and hoped readers would understand the qualities that allowed a group of men to dominate a country and let them believe they had the right to do so....That America could become Germany.”<br /> Some of the Nazi prisoners compared Germany to the United States and it’s racial bigots and ultranationalists, such as white supremacists Senator Theodore Bilbo, Congressman John E. Rankin, Governor Eugene Talmadge and Huey Long. To prevent people with personalities similar to the Nazis from gaining control of the US, “Kelley advocated:<br /><br /> removing all restrictions on the voting rights of US citizens, convincing as many Americans as possible to vote in elections, and rebuilding the educational system to cultivate students who could think critically and resist using ‘strong emotional reactions’ to make decisions. Finally, he urged his countrymen to refuse to vote for any candidate who made ‘political capital’ of any group’s race and religious beliefs or referred indirectly or directly to the blood, heritage, or morals of opponents. ‘The United States [would] never reach its full stature’ until it has undergone this transformation<br /><br /> Near the end of the book, we read more of Dr. Kelley’s suicide, by cyanide capsule.<br /> At the beginning, NAZI AND THE PSYCHIATRIST presents a list of the principle characters including their job titles. The final book will include eight pages of photos and a full bibliography which includes writings by both Dr. Kelley and Lieutenant Gilbert. <br /> I received an advance copy this book from Goodreads.com and am very glad I had the opportunity to read it. Kelley’s comments about preventing similar experiences in other countries, quoted above, echo strongly in the US political atmosphere today.

(nb: I received an Advanced Review Copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley)<br /><br />Jack El-Hai’s latest book, “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” tells one of the lesser-known stories of post-World War 2: the psychological analysis of the infamous Nuremberg Trial defendants. It is a fascinating journey.<br /><br />The book follows Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, a celebrated Army psychiatrist. As a Captain serving in the European theater, he developed techniques that greatly slashed the detrimental effects of combat fatigue, enabling soldiers to return to their units mentally healthy and able to resume fighting. Always an intellectually curious man, Dr. Kelley was overjoyed to be reassigned to work with the surviving Nazi leaders.<br /><br />Kelley served as a regular physician as needed, but his specialty was analyzing the psychological fitness of these prisoners. Of particular interest to Kelley was Hermann Göring, Hitler’s Reichsmarschall and choice to take over Germany after his death.<br /><br />Dr. Kelley performed the psychological evaluations as required, but he went one step further. Under the guise of administering routine tests, Kelley dug deeper into his Nazi “patients,” trying to discover if there was some trait, some gene, some sort of special indicator that facilitated these men becoming Nazis.<br /><br />His findings may surprise you. So painstakingly thorough was his methodology, that much of Dr. Kelley’s research is still being analyzed over 60 years later.<br /><br />During his tenure at Nuremberg, Dr. Kelley developed close professional relationships with some of history’s most-feared men. The sheer normalcy, even collegiality, with which Kelley and Göring interacted was especially unexpected: the guy who created the Luftwaffe could be charming, intelligent, and even funny.<br /><br />Naturally, most of “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” focuses on this period in Dr. Kelley’s life. However, he was definitely not an ordinary Army doctor. Kelley came from an intellectually driven background, where mental discipline and broad curiosity were taught from a young age. After he left the Army, Kelley took a while to find his bearings, eventually settling at his alma mater, UC Berkeley, where he was the star professor in the school’s new criminology program.<br /><br />In addition to teaching, Kelley served as a consultant to numerous law enforcement agencies, TV shows, even Hollywood movies.<br /><br />As his professional life became more hectic, life at home with his wife and three kids began to suffer. And we are left to wonder if there might be a touch of psychosis in the psychiatrist.<br /><br />“The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” is a fascinating book—with a promising title like that, how could it not be? One risk with historical treatises is that the author sometimes over-reaches, padding what could be an interesting story with endless, dry recitation of facts.<br /><br />Happily, “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” avoids this pitfall beautifully. Author Jack El-Hai presents plenty of information; indeed, I came away with a new understanding of both behavioral psychology and psychiatry, as well as the Nuremberg Trials. What El-Hai does so well is keep the story moving. No single part of the story bogs down in minutiae. He presents all manner of salient facts and details, but he does a wonderful job editing.<br /><br />As the title suggests, at the core is the relationship between a Nazi (Göring) and psychiatrist Kelley. The pre-War and post-War life of Dr. Douglas Kelley bookends his Nuremberg experiences, and this information is crucial. Also, we go inside the Nuremberg Trials, even after Dr. Kelley had returned stateside. This, too, is critical.<br /><br />The resulting book is a gripping, informative, oddly bittersweet account of two men, and how their extraordinary lives came tangent to one another for a brief moment in time. It is most definitely a story worth reading. That it’s true makes it all the more compelling.<br /><br />Highly Recommended

For more than seven decades, we've been trying to understand the nature of the Nazi mind. Was there something uniquely psychopathic about them, or could their horrors be wreaked by any country's leaders and citizens?<br /><br />One of the first people to get an opportunity to try to answer this question was Captain Douglas M. Kelley, a 32-year-old psychiatrist in the U.S. Army medical service, who was assigned to attend to the 22 top Nazi defendants being held in Nüremberg, Germany, in the months before their trial began for crimes against humanity. Kelley spent long hours talking to the defendants and administering what were then relatively new psychiatric tests, like Rorschach ink blot testing and Thematic Apperception Tests.<br /><br />Among the Nazi bigwigs Kelley was responsible for, the top patient was Hermann Göring, former head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler's one-time designated successor. Göring's huge personality and appetites were like a tractor beam for Kelley. He was charming, intelligent and quick-witted, but it soon became clear that he had no regard for anyone outside his small circle of family and close friends.<br /><br />As the book description tells us, Göring managed to kill himself with a cyanide capsule in his cell the night before he was scheduled to be hanged. Twelve years later, Kelley also killed himself with cyanide, after a long slide into emotional illness and alcoholism. The book description concludes that Kelley's suicide shows "the insidious impact of the Göring-Kelley relationship, providing a cautionary tale about the dangers of coming too close to evil."<br /><br />I think the book description is misleading. Author Jack El-Hai does not try to make an argument that Kelley's exposure to Göring and the other Nazis somehow tainted him and led to his suicide. He does argue that there are some similarities between Göring's and Kelley's motivations for suicide and for choosing cyanide as a method, but that's the extent of it.<br /><br />The value of this book is not in some sensationalistic link between Göring and Kelley. Instead, the real value is the inside look at the minds of these Nazi leaders and how they revealed themselves to Kelley, whom many of them came to trust. El-Hai writes a great deal about Göring, but there is also extensive and valuable discussion of Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Robert Ley, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Julius Streicher and others. This should be of interest to many history readers, especially those who enjoyed books like Anthony Read's The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle.<br /><br />Secondarily, El-Hai gives us an insightful look at the early days of criminal psychology and psychiatric testing. Kelley was active in both fields, including in the years after Nüremberg, when he lectured and consulted, was a professor of psychiatry at Wake Forest University and, in 1949, became the first head of the newly-established department of criminology at the University of California at Berkeley. Many of the concepts we take for granted today were in their infancy during this period, and El-Hai provides a clear and interesting view of what the field was like at that time.<br /><br />Finally, El-Hai provides a fascinating description of various analysts' views of Kelley's records of the psychoanalytic tests of the Nazi defendants, and their debates about what they revealed about the Nazi psyche.<br /><br />Rights to The Nazi and the Psychiatrist have been optioned to turn it into both a film and a stage play. I suspect in both cases, the hook will be the same sensationalistic one as in the book description. While that may make a good selling strategy, I hope people will read and appreciate the book for its actual content.

From a historical perspective, this is a hugely informative and compelling book. Unfortunately, it's greatest weakness is that it features very little of the actual conversations between Dr. Kelley and Hermann Goering. Their face-to-face should have been the most riveting delivery of the premise of the book. I suspect those possibilities are why this book was optioned for a movie adaptation before it was even published.

This was honestly a pretty disappointing read. The book jacket bills it as the story of two great, dangerous minds coming together in a flash of tension and influence such that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins as the heroic American psychiatrist seeks to understand the evil and secrets of the Nazi mind. But instead what you get is a rather plodding history of Nazi imprisonment and the casual relationship that existed not just between Kelley and Göring but between Kelley and a whole host of Nazi prisoners. There's some psychiatric research that goes on, to be sure, and some frank conversations between the varied characters of the drama, but none of it amounts to anything approaching the "fatal meeting of the minds" that the title promises (even if some people do die along the way). The book's epilogue reveals that the author befriended and was greatly informed by Kelley's surviving son; this ends up meaning a lot in terms of the content of the book, such that this really ends up reading like a congenial biography of Kelley that had to be given a little rhetorical flair at the book's outset and in the marketing to sell it...which is ironically the same kind of fate that one of Kelley's own books met, according to a chapter in this book. Ultimately I felt like I learned a bit about Kelley, but still didn't get inside his head; the rest of the book's content I could have learned from other, probably more engaging histories.

¿Qué hizo a esas personas cometer semejantes crímenes? Muchos nos preguntamos eso. Pero la verdad, tal como relata ese libro, es que la maldad está en las personas. No necesitan estar locos, o dementes, sólo deben tener ambición y una brújula moral desviada.<br /><br />Este libro recopila muchas entrevistas, retazos de vidas de criminales que fueron juzgados por la muerte de miles y miles de personas. Y la verdad es que el final me sorprendió. Siento que ese doctor, era incluso tan malo como ellos.

This book offers some little known information about the Nazi prisoners at Nuremberg, along with differing psychiatrical opinions as to what made them tick, ie, why they did what they did, with the most emphasis on the role of the titular doctor Doug Kelly and what made him tick.<br />This exemplifies the bogus notion that psychiatrists actually know anything - virtually all they do is postulate opinions they want to have accepted as theories, but since none of what they do is actually science, of course they're inevitably unsuccessful, and the cycle returns to just differing opinions.<br /><br />And even if there were a consensus, science isn't a subject ruled by what the majority thinks.<br /><br />Anyway, in this case there is no agreement on why this group of high-level Nazis behaved as they did, so after the trial is over the book swerves to the rest of Kelly's life, from 1946-1958. He became a highly accomplished man in his nebulous field, as well as associated ones, eg., criminology, and ultimately became a noted professor at Berkley. Sadly for him, he was besotted with his own demons, and ends up killing himself by chewing on a cyanide tablet - the same way his most infamous Nuremberg client - Hermann Goering - did. Ha! So, was he crazy (too)? <br /> <br />Then a lot of time is devoted to reading about how Kelly's oldest son felt he was mistreated as a child because his father had high expectations and standards for him. Aww.... Woe is he.<br />All the characters in this whole historical account are pretty much screwed up, but in reality not so much more than we find in the general public. <br />If you have a natural skepticism about social 'sciences', and psychiatry in particular, this may just seal the deal for you. There aren't enough pearls to compensate for the lost time reading it takes.

Çok iyi bir kitap daha, bir gazeteci tarafından yazılmış, edebi derinlik beklemeden okunmalı. Nürnberg Mahkemesi'nde yargılanan üst düzey Nazi yöneticilerini ( Görring, Hess, Dönitz vd) yakından izleme ve inceleme fırsatı bulmuş Amerikalı psikiyatrist Dr Kelley'in bulgular ile vardığı sonuçlar uzun uzun anlatılmış. Bu arada aynı görevi yapan psikolog Gilbert'in vardığı sonuçlar çok farklı. <br />Kitabı iki yönüyle okumak gerekli. İlki Dr Kelley'in kişiliğini ve hayatını öğrenme, ikincisi Kelly ve Gilbert arasındaki görüş farklılığındaki doğru tarafı bulmak için düşünmek. Yazar ise tamamen farklı niyetle yazmış kitabı, o Görring'in Dr Kelley'i etkilediğini hatta tamamiyle ele geçirmiş olduğunu vurguluyor. Ayrıca bu 22 üst düzey nazi yöneticisinin, insan kasaplarının kişilikleri hakkında daha ayrıntılı bilgi edinmek de kitabın bir başka artı yönü. <br />Dr Kelley Nazi'lerin de bizler gibi normal isanlar olduğunu ancak çok rahatça güç, otorite, hükmetme vb isteklere evet demelerini ve hedefe ulaşmak için son derece egoist ve duyarsız olduklarını söyleyerek bu durumun her ülkedeki insanlar için de geçeli olabileceğini, ABD'de fırsat çıktığında ırkçılık ve milliyetçi duyguların faşist yönetici profillerini kolayca yaratabileceğini ileri sürmekte. Bugünkü Amerika ve Trumph'ı düşünürsek hiç haksız değil. <br />Gilbert ise Nazi'lerin psikopat olduklarını ruhsal problemi oan insanlar olduklarını onları bizler gibi normal kabul etmenin yanlş olduğunu savunuyor. Yani LePen, Willers,Putin, Saddam, Kaddafi vb liderlerin normal olmadıklarını psikopat olduklarını ileri sürüyor. O da haksız sayılmaz. <br />En iyisi kitabı okuyun kendi kararınızı kendiniz verin.

A very interesting book (I'd give it 5 stars, but being fairly technical, it may not appeal to a general audience.) If you enjoy reading about histories about WWII in Europe, you may find this a fascinating read. It is about a young US Army psychiatrist who was assigned to the supervise the mental health of key Nazi leaders during their incartitation leading up to their war crime trials in Nuremberg. Much of the story is based on the doctor's own notes as he interviewed such leaders as Hermann Goring, Admiral Donitz, Alfred Jodl among others. Although the book concentrates mostly on these post war interviews, it continues to follow the professional career of the psychiatrist after he left the Army and became a well known criminal psychiatrist working with many police departments and lecturing at universities around the US. However, the most interesting passages that appeared throughout the book related to the interviews with Goring, probably one of the more "colorful" and complicated prisoners who, for the most part, opened up about his wartime activities and his views as to why he felt "justified" in his role as a close follower of Hitler.