New film 'Nuremberg' highlights psychiatrist who analyzed Hermann Göring

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NEW YORK (AP) — A once-overlooked army psychiatrist tasked with analyzing Hermann Göring and other Nazis accused of war crimes is getting the kind of attention that he had sought in his lifetime.

“Nuremberg,” starring Russell Crowe as Göring, centers on the Nazi military commander's conversations with Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, played by Rami Malek. Kelley's mission was to determine whether Göring and more than 20 other Nazi officials captured at the end of World War II were fit to stand trial in Nuremberg. The movie is directed by James Vanderbilt and based on a 2013 book, “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” by Jack El-Hai, who helped Vanderbilt write the screenplay.

Through many hours at facilities in Luxembourg and Nuremberg, Kelley will find himself alternately taken and frightened by a man notorious for his role in the Nazis' attempted conquest of Europe and beyond. Göring turns out to be unexpectedly good and clever company, if not convincing in his assertion that he knew nothing of Hitler’s worst atrocities and cared only to restore Germany to greatness after its humiliating defeat in World War I.

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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org. Helplines outside the U.S. can be found at www.iasp.info/suicidalthoughts.

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Kelley, an ambitious and demonstrative man who took his own life in 1958, might never have inspired a major Hollywood production had his name not turned up while El-Hai was working on a previous book. While writing about Dr. Walter Freeman, who helped make lobotomy a common treatment, El-Hai came upon an encounter between Freeman and Kelley at an American Psychiatric Association gathering in the late 1930s.

“What struck Freeman about Kelley was that Kelley was not there to present a paper or do anything like that. He was there to give a magic show on the stage to entertain all his fellow psychiatrists,” El-Hai told The Associated Press. “So a few years after I finished ‘The Lobotomy,’ I decided to find out what I could about Dr. Kelley’s story.”

El-Hai got in touch with Kelley's eldest child, Doug, who gave him access to a trove of his father's archives, some 15 boxes containing everything from medical records to a package of cookies Nazi leader Rudolf Hess refused to eat out of fear they had been poisoned. In “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” El-Hai follows Kelley's life from his rise in the psychiatric profession through the controversies of his years after returning home from Europe, starting with his contention that in the U.S. there are people who, to gain power, “would willingly climb over the corpses of half of the American public.”

As a professor of criminology at the University of California, Berkeley, Kelley was a showman in the classroom who cracked jokes, drew elaborate designs and performed magic tricks. As a consultant to the Berkeley Police Department, he openly challenged the competence of law enforcement officials and was eventually monitored by the FBI, which suspected him of political subversion. He also gave lectures around the country and published a book about his wartime findings, “22 Cells in Nuremberg,” which sold few copies and is long out of print.

His death echoed the suicide of Göring, who 12 years earlier had taken a cyanide pill he’d hidden in his cell. Göring’s life ended in secret, Kelley’s in front of his family. After a loud argument with his wife, he rushed upstairs to his study, reemerged with a cyanide capsule in his hand and shouted “I don’t have to take this anymore!” Kelley left no explanation. His son, according to El-Hai, believed he had been overcome by his “emotions and inner pain.”

During a recent interview with The Associated Press, El-Hai spoke of Kelley's findings, the parallels between Kelley and Göring and why he believes the story resonates now. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

EL-HAI: One of Kelley’s central questions that he had going into this work was the question that was strongly of interest to me: Did these men who were all defendants in this first Nuremberg trial share any psychiatric disorders, illness, his personality traits, any of that? And Kelley found to his disappointment that they did not — none of them, with the possible exception of (German Labor Front leader) Robert Ley, who killed himself before the trial. They certainly had neuroses, but many people who function normally have neuroses. That made him afraid and made him believe that people like that are in our population in far greater numbers than any of us.

They were all people who believed that the ends justify the means and that most of them were, on a personal level, on a quest for power. And that was more important than ideology. So they would attach themselves to an ideology that allowed them to rise and to crush anybody else who got in their way.

El-HAI: There was very little remorse.

El-HAI: He wanted to be treated as a head of state, which he considered himself to be. He said to some of his fellow defendants, “Don’t worry, before much time goes by, there will be statues of us all over Germany.”

El-HAI: Especially if the alternative was to be hanged, which they all considered to be an execution method for a common criminal. Kelley observed that by poisoning himself right before the execution, Göring was putting a thumb in the eye of the American authorities. “You’re not going to do with what you want to do with me.” And that really resonated with Kelley.

EL-HAI: It was not a concern of mine. As a result of the courtroom scenes that are in the second half of the film, Göring loses a lot of his luster, as happened in the real courtroom. Rami, in playing the counterpoint to the villainous Göring, maybe had to think about it more, because I have always seen those two characters as being more similar than not similar.

When I was writing the book, I often discussed with Dr. Kelley’s son, Doug, what it must have been like for them to be in this jail cell together, and we always jokingly characterized them as King Kong versus Godzilla. They were both egomaniacs. They were both absolutely certain of their rightness. And they were both socially charming and highly intelligent.

EL-HAI: I was OK with James Vanderbilt’s approach from the start. Whenever he would send me a draft of the screenplay, I didn’t see it as my job to find inaccuracies and things that weren’t factual. I know movies are a different medium from books and that what makes a book good is not the same as what makes a movie good. And so what we’ve ended up with in “Nuremberg,” I think, is a movie that is mostly factual, and more important, delivers the messages that are very close to the messages in my book.

Douglas Kelley’s message was that Nazism, fascism, or whatever you want to call it, has always had the potential for coming alive in our country. He saw it immediately when he came back from Europe, and it’s certainly easier to find now.