For all that the world has changed over the last eight decades, the nature of evil has remained as unclear as it was in 1945, when the extent of Nazi atrocities began to surface. At that time, some wondered if there was a particular psychopathology shared by the genocidal party’s highest-ranking members. At the forefront of those seeking an answer was Dr Douglas Kelley, an American psychiatrist who evaluated 22 Nazi officials to assess their competency to stand trial at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity.
Kelley had been treating US combat veterans in Europe before receiving an offer to work at Nuremberg Prison. There he administered IQ and Rorschach tests among a series of other evaluations. A few of the Nazi defendants were indeed quite strange, but Kelley decided that all were competent to stand trial.
Though his job was to assess competency, Kelley was far more interested in whether these Nazi defendants were linked by some sort of deviance that facilitated their monstrous deeds. Nuremberg was an ideal setup: In the controlled environment of a prison, he had near-constant access to high-ranking members of a regime that had just unleashed what is arguably the most intense period of cruelty this world has seen.
If evil was a trait (or collection of traits) that could be identified, now was the time to do so. Kelley, a man of grand ambition, had hoped to unmask evil and articulate its nature in a way so that others might spot it in future — and avoid ensuing widespread atrocities, such as what later occurred in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and East Timor, among at least several other locations.
But in his quest to find an aberrant psychological link common to the high-ranking Nazis, Kelley was unsuccessful, eventually concluding that, ‘they were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are’. This conclusion was disappointing for him on a professional level. And for humanity in general, the implications were bleak: If people with common personalities can become architects of genocide, then genocide is likely very difficult to prevent.
While at Nuremberg, Kelley formed a rapport with the highest-ranking defendant, Hitler’s former deputy Hermann Goering. Kelley knew that Goering had both extreme levels of ruthlessness and vanity. But he also found him very personable, clever and energetic — rather like Kelley himself. Both men commanded attention, and both pursued a ‘high-emotion, fast-accelerating life journey before an awed audience’, wrote Jack El-Hai, author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.
This book, published in 2013, has recently been adapted by James Vanderbilt to the film Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe as Goering and Rami Malek as Kelley. The film’s production finished in May 2024. El-Hai says it will see release in November or December of this year, assuming things go according to plan. ‘The film covers the battle of wits equally as much as the book does’, says El-Hai about the relationship between Kelley and Goering.
El-Hai believes the suicide resulted from ‘a combination of circumstances’, including Kelley’s own ‘resistance to receiving psychiatric help’, along with his ‘disillusion that many people share the personality traits of the German war criminals’.
Goering, seeking one last time to assert power over life and death, killed himself by swallowing cyanide the night before his scheduled execution. By then, Kelley had returned to the US and was working on his book 22 Cells in Nuremberg. His quest to pinpoint evil went unrealized, but he had ample material for a book and a closeup perspective available to few others on earth.
Kelley’s book did not fare as well as he had hoped, and it soon went out of print. But his resume was solid enough for him to become a professor of criminology at UC Berkeley, where he also served as the president of the Society for the Advancement of Criminology (later known as the American Society of Criminology).
Along with these pursuits, Kelley helped various police departments root out applicants who were psychologically unfit for a career in law enforcement. What few people realised, however, was that Kelley himself had become psychologically unfit. His high standing and charming exterior hid a private life of alcoholism and sudden bursts of rage. He was overworked, but it also seemed there was something deeper gnawing at him.
On New Year’s Day 1958, Kelley and three generations of his family had gathered at his California home to watch the Rose Bowl football game. At some point in the late afternoon, he and his wife began arguing in the kitchen. He then dashed upstairs and into his study room. Soon emerging from that room, he stood atop the staircase and announced to his wife, father and son that he was going to take cyanide. He then did as promised. Kelley, aged 45, was pronounced dead soon after at a local hospital.
He left behind his wife, three children and one pressing question: Why did he kill himself? There was no suicide note, and no one ever identified a clear motivation. El-Hai believes the suicide resulted from ‘a combination of circumstances’, including Kelley’s own ‘resistance to receiving psychiatric help’, along with his ‘disillusion that many people share the personality traits of the German war criminals’.
Some speculated that Kelley, who had a collection of Nuremberg items, possessed Goering’s unused cyanide capsules. This remains unproven, but it seems that Kelley brought back something else from Nuremberg — something all too hard to swallow.
Ray Cavanaugh is a freelance writer from Massachusetts, USA, who has written for such publications as The Guardian, TIME and The New York Times.
Main image: Still of Russell Crowe in Nuremberg.