The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

The book opens with a disquieting tour of a Mediterranean-style villa in Kensington, California, home of Dr. Douglas McGlashan Kelley, a psychiatrist and criminologist. The house held a laboratory stocked with bone saws, chemicals, and two human skulls. Kelley's children slept in basement bedrooms and dreaded the unpredictability of their father's goodnight visits. The scene foreshadows catastrophe: On New Year's Day 1958, Kelley stormed out of an argument with his wife, retreated to his upstairs office, and returned to the staircase landing concealing something in his palm. He shouted a terrifying statement and swallowed.

The narrative leaps back to May 1945, when Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking surviving Nazi official, was captured by American forces. Göring held the unique rank of Reichsmarschall and served as chief of the Luftwaffe, the German air force. He expected a meeting with General Eisenhower but was instead stripped of privileges and transferred to a detention center code-named Ashcan in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg. Other senior Nazis arrived as well, including Robert Ley (director of the German Labor Front, the Nazi state labor organization) and Julius Streicher (publisher of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer). Among Göring's belongings, guards found brass vials of potassium cyanide and thousands of tablets of paracodeine, a synthetic opiate to which he was severely addicted.

In early August 1945, Captain Douglas McGlashan Kelley, a young Army psychiatrist, arrived at Mondorf to maintain the prisoners' mental fitness. He had no experience with war criminals, but he set a personal goal beyond his official duties: He wanted to determine whether the Nazi leaders shared a mental disorder or personality type that could explain their crimes. The book traces Kelley's background at length. His maternal grandfather, Charles McGlashan, was an eccentric California lawyer obsessed with the Donner Party, a group of migrants stranded in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1845-1846. Kelley's mother, June, inherited her father's intensity, instilling in her son a relentless drive to dominate. After medical school, Kelley completed a fellowship at Columbia University, where he became expert in the Rorschach inkblot test, a projective assessment in which patients interpret symmetrical ink patterns. He also embraced general semantics, a discipline emphasizing rational thinking over emotional reaction. He married Alice Vivienne "Dukie" Hill in 1940 and during the war pioneered front-line treatments for combat exhaustion.

Kelley examined Göring first, discovering a figure who was intelligent, narcissistic, and coldhearted. He appealed to Göring's vanity to accelerate drug withdrawal, and by mid-August Göring was free of paracodeine and had lost 60 pounds. That same month, the prisoners were transferred to Nuremberg, the bombed-out city that would host an international war crimes tribunal. The defendants occupied solitary confinement cells under constant surveillance. Kelley's official task was to assess their sanity; unofficially, he spent hours daily with them, and they spoke more freely to him than to interrogators.

In Göring's cell, the two men built a mutual fascination rooted in shared qualities: self-confidence, stubbornness, and intense self-focus, though Kelley did not consciously acknowledge the parallels. Göring revealed he had joined the Nazi Party to advance himself, dismissing its racial ideology as "good political propaganda." In a pivotal exchange, Göring mentioned ordering the murder of his old friend Ernst Roehm during the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, a violent purge of rival Nazi leaders. When Kelley asked how he could kill an old friend, Göring replied, "But he was in my way." Göring even asked Kelley to take custody of his daughter Edda should both parents die.

Kelley administered Rorschach inkblot tests to the prisoners. Göring's responses revealed a surprisingly introverted personality with narcissistic preoccupation. Rudolf Hess, Hitler's former deputy leader who had flown solo to Scotland in 1941 on an unauthorized peace mission, arrived claiming total amnesia. Kelley evaluated Hess as sane but profoundly neurotic, his memory loss a mix of genuine hysterical autosuggestion and deliberate malingering. Kelley declared that none of the defendants, except the brain-damaged Ley, were sufficiently deviant to require custodial care; they were "eccentric or fanatic" but legally sane. Two suicides shook the prison: Leonardo Conti, one of Hitler's medical advisors, asphyxiated himself in his cell, and shortly afterward Ley strangled himself despite Kelley's recent finding of "no evidence of suicidal intention."

In late October, psychologist Gustave Gilbert, a Columbia-trained New Yorker with Jewish Austrian immigrant parents, arrived as prison psychologist. Gilbert retested prisoners and reached starkly different conclusions: Where Kelley read imagination and power in Göring's Rorschach responses, Gilbert found "qualitative mediocrity" and "superficial and pedestrian realism." The two agreed to collaborate on a book, but the partnership soon collapsed.

The trial opened on November 20, 1945. The prosecution screened footage of liberated concentration camps; Göring covered his face while others wept or turned away. Hess astonished the courtroom by declaring he had been simulating amnesia for "tactical" reasons. When Kelley announced his departure in late December, Göring wept, revealing the depth of their bond. Kelley brought home boxes of records and Nazi artifacts and informed Gilbert he intended to write a book alone.

Göring later delivered a 12-hour defense of the Nazi regime from the witness stand before evidence of his knowledge of the Holocaust undermined his credibility. Verdicts arrived in the fall of 1946. Eleven defendants, including Göring, were condemned to death. The night before his scheduled hanging, Göring bit down on a cyanide capsule he had concealed throughout his imprisonment and died. Kelley called the suicide "a skillful, even brilliant, finishing touch."

Back in the United States, Kelley reached his most troubling conclusion: The top Nazis showed no signs of mental illness. They were people with "unbridled ambition, weak ethics, and excessive patriotism," and their like "could very easily be found in America" (170). He warned that "there is little in America today which could prevent the establishment of a Nazi-like state" (163), pointing to white supremacist politicians as evidence. He published 22 Cells in Nuremberg in 1947. Gilbert published Nuremberg Diary around the same time, arguing that the defendants were psychopaths with a distinctive personality type, an interpretation more palatable to postwar American audiences.

Kelley built a prominent career at UC Berkeley, teaching criminology and consulting for police departments. At home, his inner turmoil deepened. He drank heavily, argued violently with Dukie, and once fired a gun at her feet. He channeled intense energy into training his eldest son Doug as an intellectual prodigy, producing both brilliance and deep resentment. He refused psychiatric help, believing it would undermine his authority.

On New Year's Day 1958, the scene foreshadowed in the opening played out in full. After an argument in the kitchen, Kelley stormed upstairs, then returned holding potassium cyanide. Facing his wife, his father, and his 10-year-old son, he shouted that he would take the poison and that "nobody will care." He swallowed and was pronounced dead at Herrick Memorial Hospital. The author argues that Kelley's choice of cyanide deliberately evoked Göring's suicide: Both men, unable to tolerate the indignity of their perceived circumstances, chose the same dramatic means of escape.

In the decades that followed, scholars continued to debate the Nazi Rorschach records. Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments and Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment supported Kelley's view that ordinary people can commit atrocities under certain conditions. In 1995, a team of researchers published The Quest for the Nazi Personality, concluding that "the differences among the members of this group by far outweighed any similarities" (222), decisively vindicating Kelley's position. Doug Kelley inherited his father's Nuremberg papers after Dukie's death in 2007 and organized them into folders labeled with the defendants' names, keeping the collection close at hand.