Jack El-Hai on Psychiatry, Nuremberg and Trying to Figure Out Nazis

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_01] I'm Kevin, and today we will be hearing the story of a man who got the opportunity to speak face-to-face with some of the most notorious Nazis in history in an effort to try to figure out what made them what they became.

[00:00:14] [SPEAKER_00] Content warning, this episode includes discussion of genocide, war crimes, murder, and pretty much every crime you could probably think of. Why? That's the question a lot of us have when we look at all of the violent and terrible crimes that happen in the world. Why does this happen? What sort of person does these things? How can we stop them from happening again?

[00:00:41] [SPEAKER_00] Douglas Kelly asked all those questions when he looked at all the evil the Nazis were responsible for during World War II. Dr. Kelly was a psychiatrist and the army sent him to Nuremberg after the war to work with the Nazis who faced trial for their war crimes. Dr. Kelly was determined to use this opportunity to get some answers. What on earth could prompt a group of people to try to perpetuate something as evil, heinous, and awful as the Holocaust?

[00:01:10] [SPEAKER_00] These Nazis murdered 6 million Jewish people across Europe. They also targeted other groups for mass murder and persecution, including Roma people, people with disabilities, prisoners of war from the Soviet Union, and ethnic Poles. The scope of their crimes cannot be overstated. When we're talking about just the Jewish victims, we're talking about 2.7 million people murdered in killing centers like Auschwitz.

[00:01:38] [SPEAKER_00] We're talking about 2 million people murdered in mass shooting operations, massacres perpetuated by the Germans and their allies. And we're talking about somewhere around a million Jewish people murdered in labor camps, concentration camps, and ghettos. Again, this is murder at an industrial, unfathomable scale. Why did this happen? What could prompt a human being to do this to other people?

[00:02:04] [SPEAKER_01] Kelly's story was told in the recent movie Nuremberg, which was based on The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, a book by Jack El-Hai. It is a terrific book, a fascinating story, very well told. True crime fans may be familiar with Jack from Long Lost, the podcast he hosted, which focused on the 1951 disappearance of the Klein brothers. It was our real pleasure to sit down and talk with Jack about Douglas Kelly and his quest to figure out what made certain people become Nazis.

[00:02:34] [SPEAKER_00] My name is Anya Kane. I'm a journalist.

[00:02:37] [SPEAKER_01] And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney.

[00:02:39] [SPEAKER_00] And this is The Murder Sheet.

[00:02:41] [SPEAKER_01] We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're The Murder Sheet. And this is Jack Elhye on psychiatry, Nuremberg, and trying to figure out Nazis.

[00:03:40] [SPEAKER_01] Well, your book starts at the end of another story, which is the story of World War II. And it deals with the question people were asking themselves, what do we do with these people? And how do we figure out why this happened and how we can make sure it doesn't happen again? With that said, let's talk about Hermann Goering. Who was he and what was his role in the German government?

[00:04:08] [SPEAKER_03] Hermann Goering was one of the very highest ranking members of the German government. He was Hitler's designated successor for almost all of the war. And he held a number of posts, including head of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, and head of the Reichstag, the legislative body.

[00:04:34] [SPEAKER_03] He was also given the rank of Reichsmarschall, which was an extremely high rank in the German military. I believe when Goering attained that rank, he was only the second person in history ever to. So he had his finger in a lot of parts of the Nazi pie.

[00:04:56] [SPEAKER_03] And when the war ended in 1945, he was among those German officials, civilian and military, who were rounded up and arrested and held. And held for what was uncertain at the beginning. But as things transpired, they were held for trial.

[00:05:21] [SPEAKER_03] And so the first Nuremberg trial, which is called the International Military Tribunal, was run by the four large allied nations to try these very high ranking members of the German government and military.

[00:05:38] [SPEAKER_01] You wrote in your book that one interrogator initially thought of Goering as, quote, the fat man in endless screenplays who leads the gang of killers from his expensive dinner table, but later found that he was far more shrewd and dangerous than any celluloid character. What was it about him that initially led people to that misimpression? And what made him more complicated than that?

[00:06:05] [SPEAKER_03] During the war, the British and American press characterized Goering in a very clownish, buffoonish kind of way. It was because of his fondness for fancy uniforms and lots of jewelry, lots of medals. Goering lived on an estate where he had wild animals like leopards and lions roaming the grounds. And there was a lot to ridicule there.

[00:06:31] [SPEAKER_03] But that portrayal of Goering seriously underestimated him because Goering was highly intelligent. He was a great strategic thinker. He was charming. That's how he rose to the top of first the Nazi Party leadership and then the German government. He had a great sense of humor. He loved to tell jokes about himself, lots of self-deprecating jokes.

[00:07:02] [SPEAKER_03] And he was a master manipulator. He could manipulate people very well through the force of his personality and his intellect. So he was a driving force in much of what went on in Germany during the war and in the pre-war years as well.

[00:07:26] [SPEAKER_01] So he was also addicted to drugs. How did that affect him?

[00:07:31] [SPEAKER_03] Goering first became addicted to morphine after the young Nazi party's pooch in Munich in the early 1920s. And Goering was shot in the leg during the fighting of that pooch. And while he was recovering, he was given morphine for pain control and became addicted to it.

[00:07:54] [SPEAKER_03] But Goering did overcome that addiction in the late 1920s and was not taking drugs until the late 1930s, when because of a dental procedure he had, a dentist prescribed him a narcotic called pericodein. And Goering became addicted to that narcotic. And he continued using it long past his dental troubles.

[00:08:22] [SPEAKER_03] And throughout the war, until by the time he was arrested on the final day of World War II, he had an enormous supply of pericodein with him and was taking dozens of these little pills a day to help him keep his equilibrium and to help him feel like his mind was clear.

[00:08:47] [SPEAKER_01] So the psychiatrist of the title, of course, is Captain Douglas Kelly. So who was he and how did he get involved in this story?

[00:08:57] [SPEAKER_03] Douglas Kelly was a U.S. Army military psychiatrist who was in Europe, Western Europe, during World War II, working in field hospitals, helping to treat soldiers who had come down with what today we would call PTSD. And Kelly and his colleagues had some success in helping those soldiers recover.

[00:09:24] [SPEAKER_03] Before that, he had been born in 1912 in the Northern California town of Truckee near Lake Tahoe. And he had attended medical school at the University of California since childhood. He had a strong interest in stage magic, performing magic before audiences,

[00:09:47] [SPEAKER_03] and was very good at it, even contributed tricks to music magazines of the 1930s. And so when the war ended, Kelly was there in Europe already of relatively high rank and with a good reputation, although he was quite young. He was only 33 when the war ended. He was available.

[00:10:12] [SPEAKER_03] And so that's why the International Military Tribunal called him to initially come to Luxembourg, where many of the Nazi leaders were being detained, to work among them. And what the court wanted Kelly to do was to determine whether these men met the very low bar of legal mental fitness,

[00:10:39] [SPEAKER_03] meaning would they understand charges against them, and could they participate in their own defense if there was a trial. And this was something Kelly could handle quickly and easily. And he saw it would be a waste of the opportunity he had being among these men. Lots of psychiatrists around the world envied him for his position among these men who were widely, already widely regarded as some of the arch criminals of the 20th century.

[00:11:08] [SPEAKER_03] And so Kelly set up for himself a project, unsanctioned. He did this on his own to determine whether these men shared any kind of psychiatric disorder that could account for their behaviors and their heinous crimes committed before and during the war. So that's why he was there.

[00:11:33] [SPEAKER_01] What strategies did he use to try to get these men to open up to him?

[00:11:38] [SPEAKER_03] Kelly had at his disposal a number of psychiatric assessment tools that he used. The main one that he relied on is the Rorschach inkblot test. And this is a test used much less frequently today, but back in the 30s and 40s we used quite a lot even to diagnose psychiatric disorders. And that's how Kelly used it.

[00:12:09] [SPEAKER_03] And some of the listeners may be familiar with these inkblots. They're just abstract inkblots on cards that are shown to subjects, and the subjects are asked to say what they see in the cards. And since the images are abstract, the idea is that anything the subject says is a projection of something going on inside the subject. So Kelly relied on that. He used other tests.

[00:12:38] [SPEAKER_03] He tested all of the German defendants for IQ. He used a test called the thematic apperception test, similar in some ways to the Rorschach. But I would say he, in large part, relied on interviews, time spent with these men in their cells, one-on-one, asking them questions, trying to delve into their psyches. And in the case of Hermann Goering, also exploring historical questions.

[00:13:08] [SPEAKER_03] Kelly asked Goering questions like, what was the attraction of the German people to Adolf Hitler? He seems like such an unlikely person to become a dictator of a highly civilized nation. Also, questions like, why did the Germans break so many of the foreign treaties they entered into before the war, things like that? So Kelly spent hundreds of hours talking to these men

[00:13:35] [SPEAKER_03] and used that as well as the test assessments to come to his conclusions.

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[00:15:19] [SPEAKER_01] Did they have any goals or motives when they were talking to him?

[00:15:23] [SPEAKER_03] Yes, several of them did. Several of them wanted to justify their actions. Goering, in particular, had suspected that a trial of this kind was coming. He suspected that he would be convicted of war crimes of different types, and he also suspected that he would be sentenced to death. But he wanted to use the trial as a defense of Germany

[00:15:52] [SPEAKER_03] and to make a case that the Nazi regime was not about anti-Semitism only or racial hatred only or military domination and conquest, that the leaders did what they did out of patriotism, nationalism, and loyalty to Hitler. So that was part of what Goering wanted to get across.

[00:16:22] [SPEAKER_03] And he had other agendas in his talks with Kelly. He was a manipulative guy, and he had ways of getting what he wanted. One of his agendas was trying to get back into communication with his family. His wife and his daughter were outside the prison, and he had no contact with them. Kelly agreed, again, unsanctioned, to carry letters between Goering and his family.

[00:16:51] [SPEAKER_03] So Kelly, it should be said, had an agenda himself, you know, his project to learn more about these men and to eventually write a book about his experience among the Nazis, which he did write in 1947. It came out. It was titled 22 Cells in Nuremberg.

[00:17:12] [SPEAKER_01] Did Kelly's superiors know about these other projects he had in mind?

[00:17:17] [SPEAKER_03] They did not know about Kelly's work to find out whether the Nazis shared some kind of psychiatric disorder. They probably suspected his interest in writing a book. I don't think he made a secret of that. For much of the time he was there, which was about eight months among the prisoners, he was working on his own.

[00:17:43] [SPEAKER_03] Not a lot of attention paid to what he was doing. To the prison administration, Kelly's main job was to keep the prisoners from killing themselves. And Kelly was not completely successful in that. One of the defendants, Robert Lay, did succeed in committing suicide before the trial started.

[00:18:05] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, that brings up a question. What was life like for these prisoners?

[00:18:10] [SPEAKER_03] Well, according to them, as they told Kelly, it was extremely boring that they were all kept alone in separate cells in the Nuremberg prison, which was adjacent to the courtroom where the trial would happen. They were treated adequately. They had guards always watching them to try and prevent suicide. And so that's why so many of them were willing to talk to Kelly

[00:18:39] [SPEAKER_03] when he arrived, because they were desperate for intelligent conversation. Goering said as much that he was starving for human interaction. And they had routines. They had to follow the prison routine. They did gather together often to eat together. And when that happened, Goering assumed his, what he thought was his rightful place

[00:19:07] [SPEAKER_03] as de facto leader of the group, it was not a pleasant time for these men who had been living quite high during the war and were used to not receiving orders, but giving them.

[00:19:21] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, that must have been very difficult for someone like Goering to adjust to this more isolated existence.

[00:19:28] [SPEAKER_03] But at least Goering, unlike some of the others, had the benefit of a sense of humor and could joke about it. Some of the others were humorless. That made it harder for them to get by during those months and had very rigid approaches to life that being in a prison completely disrupted. So some of them, like Robert Lay, the one who had committed suicide,

[00:19:57] [SPEAKER_03] had a lot of trouble.

[00:19:59] [SPEAKER_01] You mentioned Robert Lay. Another one of the prisoners that Kelly worked with, of course, was Rudolph Hess. Can you talk about him?

[00:20:06] [SPEAKER_03] Hess is so interesting, I think, because he left Germany just a few years into the war on his own initiative. He flew a plane from Germany to Scotland. Crash landed the plane. He parachuted out. He was on a self-appointed mission to try and broker a peace with the British so that they could join forces

[00:20:35] [SPEAKER_03] and fight against the Russians, who by that time were in the war now against Germany. And the British were not at all receptive to any of that, and they imprisoned Hess for all the years until the war ended. One of the very interesting artifacts that I found while I was researching the book, this was among many, many boxes of materials that Dr. Kelly brought home from Nuremberg when he returned to the States,

[00:21:05] [SPEAKER_03] and that these boxes were kept in the Kelly family for decades before I had a chance to see them. It was a box wrapped in paper and labeled something like biscuits served to Rudolf Hess but refused because he thought they were poisoned. And one of the harder moments of my research was deciding

[00:21:34] [SPEAKER_03] whether I should open this box with 60-year-old cookies inside. I decided not to. I didn't think seeing very, very old biscuits would be edifying to me a lot, very much, and so I left them alone. Once the preparations for the trial began in Nuremberg, Hess was sent to Nuremberg all this time, even during his time

[00:22:03] [SPEAKER_03] in the Tower of London as a prisoner, he had been professing to suffer from amnesia and would not, he said, he could not answer questions about his Nazi past because he just couldn't remember. And so Dr. Kelly, when Hess arrived, inherited this patient who said he couldn't remember anything and Kelly quickly came to the conclusion that Hess was faking his amnesia,

[00:22:33] [SPEAKER_03] which Hess eventually did admit. So Hess was such an interesting figure, he antagonized Göring during those months before the trial by pretending not to recognize Göring during his supposed suffering from amnesia. And that upset Göring so much that someone would not recognize him or have any idea who he was. There could be a lot of really interesting

[00:23:03] [SPEAKER_03] books written just about Rudolf Hess, and I found him a really compelling, fascinating, dastardly character.

[00:23:12] [SPEAKER_01] He's a very enigmatic character. He's always really interested me. You wrote that Kelly's work at the prison involved the intersection of psychiatry and criminology. Can you discuss what you meant by that?

[00:23:29] [SPEAKER_03] Yes, so Kelly was a psychiatrist and was using psychiatric assessment tools to try and diagnose these men. The goal, however, was not to treat them, but to determine how they were responsible for their criminal behavior. That's where the criminology comes in. And what Kelly ultimately

[00:23:58] [SPEAKER_03] determined was that his hypothesis that there must have been a shared psychiatric disorder was wrong, that in fact none of these men suffered from any kind of psychiatric disorder. They all fell within the normal range of human personality and that meant a lot of things that were very frightening to Kelly. One was

[00:24:27] [SPEAKER_03] that psychiatry could not explain their behavior behavior. And then the other was that if these men were normal, then there must be others like them who would do the same thing given the same opportunities or do very similar things. And that led Kelly to the belief that this authoritarianism, Nazism that they espoused and all the crimes that came with it were not a German

[00:24:56] [SPEAKER_03] problem or an Italian or Japanese problem, they were a human problem. And that despite the end of the war, the defeat of Germany and the Axis powers, that the rest of us would be faced with people like this in the future, again, as we always have been, in all kinds of areas of human endeavor, not just government, military politics, but in every field that people

[00:25:26] [SPEAKER_03] are active in. And this led Kelly when he returned to the States to begin warning Americans that authoritarianism was in our future.

[00:25:41] [SPEAKER_01] The word psychopath had only recently been coined at this time. Did Kelly believe Goering was a psychopath?

[00:25:50] [SPEAKER_03] No, and the reason for that is that, as you said, it was a new term. It had only first been described during the war. I'm not even sure that Kelly was familiar with it when he met with the German defendants. I know he later became familiar with it because I had a chance to look at his personal library of books and the first book about psychopathology was on the shelves.

[00:26:21] [SPEAKER_03] Psychopaths, sociopaths, et cetera, none of that entered into Kelly's thinking because those were just terms too new for him to be familiar with.

[00:26:32] [SPEAKER_01] And what did Goering think of Kelly?

[00:26:36] [SPEAKER_03] Goering admired Kelly. I would say they admired each other although they never ever became what I would call friends but they admired each other for their shared qualities. They were both smart, charming, manipulative, all of that. And that's what made the meetings that these men had in their enduring cell

[00:27:05] [SPEAKER_03] such interesting encounters because they were evenly matched and similar. One of my big sources for the Nazi and the psychiatrist was Kelly's oldest son, Doug, who I tracked down in Northern California before I started my research. I'm still in touch with Doug. Whenever we get together on the phone and talk about Kelly and Gurring meeting

[00:27:35] [SPEAKER_03] together in this prison cell, we always refer to it as King Kong versus Godzilla because these guys were engaged in this epic struggle for dominance and it was an even match.

[00:27:50] [SPEAKER_01] Did Goering ever give Kelly information or hints about trial strategy or things of that nature that Kelly was in a position to pass on?

[00:28:02] [SPEAKER_03] Yes, he did. Kelly entered into his prosecution and the trial but he eventually did at the request of the prosecution and the kinds of information that he passed had to do with the defense strategies of the various defendants especially Gurring. I don't think

[00:28:31] [SPEAKER_03] what Kelly passed on had a big influence on the outcome of the trial but it was illustrative of the many masters that Kelly found himself having once he was doing this work he was probably the first military psychiatrist ever to be placed among suspected war criminals and so he had

[00:29:01] [SPEAKER_03] no guidelines to follow no mentor to take advice from and so he had an allegiance to the defendants as in the doctor patient kind of relationship but he was also an officer in the U.S. army he had an allegiance to the military he had been brought to Nuremberg by the court he had responsibilities to them and then later on to the prosecution because

[00:29:31] [SPEAKER_03] he was

[00:30:13] [SPEAKER_03] and they were censured for it so Douglas Kelly though was the trailblazer and he was in a tough spot

[00:30:20] [SPEAKER_01] yeah yes indeed he was what were some of Goering's goals for the trial I

[00:30:27] [SPEAKER_03] mentioned that when for meals Goering would get together with his fellow defendants and one of the things he kept telling them was that yes the trial may not go well for them individually but that in the long run these men would be revered Goering predicted throughout Germany after the war he said there would be statues of them all over the country and so

[00:30:57] [SPEAKER_03] his goal was to just make Nazi Germany's case in Hitler's absence Hitler committed suicide Goering felt that it was his responsibility to make sure this happened fortunately that goal of Goering's failed he failed in to bring together really in a very

[00:31:27] [SPEAKER_03] short time in the months after the war ended that showed without a doubt the crimes that had been committed crimes against peace humanity war crimes and who was responsible because many of these documents had the signatures of the defendants on paper and showed that and one thing that the

[00:31:57] [SPEAKER_03] allies were counting on that this trial would have the effect of proving for many years to come how culpable the Nazi regime was and who individually was responsible

[00:32:11] [SPEAKER_01] One of the most dramatic moments in the trial was probably when footage from the concentration camps were shown Can you

[00:32:24] [SPEAKER_03] many of us have seen concentration camp footage newsreels etc. over the years but at that time these kinds of films had never before been viewed and so when the courtroom darkened it was early in the trial in December 1945 to show a I think it was about a 10 or 11 minute collection of films from different concentration camps

[00:32:53] [SPEAKER_03] it was shocking not just to spectators in the audience not just to judges and attorneys but also to some of the defendants not that they didn't know about the Holocaust and about the mass murder of Jews and others in the concentration camps they knew that but to have the visual evidence of the worst parts of it right in front

[00:33:23] [SPEAKER_03] of them was shocking so when after that day when the film was shown as the defendants were leaving the courtroom and walking back to the prison there would Kelly described how there was just silence nobody knew what to say and some of the defendants were visibly upset

[00:33:47] [SPEAKER_01] when did Kelly leave Nuremberg he

[00:33:50] [SPEAKER_03] left in January 1946 so this is while the trial is still underway I think there are some misapprehensions out there about why he left the movie Nuremberg that adapted my book for the screen gives the impression that Kelly had to leave because he had leaked some information to a reporter that information was published looked very bad and

[00:34:20] [SPEAKER_03] so the army drummed him out but that's not what happened that leak did happen but Kelly it was not seen as all that important and Kelly was scolded but still kept in good standing he left in January because he felt that his work was done there he was eligible to be discharged he had served many years in the army by this point and he left in good standing he

[00:34:50] [SPEAKER_03] was honorably discharged of course and he received a promotion in rank just before his discharge so he left came back to the and started pretty quickly writing his book

[00:35:04] [SPEAKER_01] meanwhile of course the trial went on you talked about how Goering was very much aware of his own self importance and he was upset when someone like Hess didn't seem to remember him I'm curious how did a guy like that handle cross examination

[00:35:22] [SPEAKER_03] initially quite skillfully he was at his best Herman Goering when in conflict one-on-one type conflicts with other people he could handle himself very well and so in Goering's initial days of giving testimony in the trial which was after Kelly left Nuremberg

[00:35:52] [SPEAKER_03] he he was scoring some points against Robert Jackson the chief American prosecutor but eventually that tidal wave of evidence came in and began being produced in court and Goering could no longer argue against it and by the time the trial ended there was no question in anyone's mind that he was going to be convicted

[00:36:19] [SPEAKER_01] what did Goering do to avoid the gallows he

[00:36:23] [SPEAKER_03] did something very Herman Goering like on the eve of his scheduled execution by hanging he pulled out from a hiding place somewhere in his cell a cyanide capsule this was probably one of the capsules that the German government had issued to all of the top leaders as the war neared an end and Goering

[00:36:52] [SPEAKER_03] put it in his mouth and chopped on it and died within seconds of cyanide poisoning and this suicide in this fashion was really an act of defiance against the allied powers Goering had asked earlier on not to be hanged and instead to be executed by firing squad which he considered a more dignified method of

[00:37:21] [SPEAKER_03] execution and the court refused to grant him that request so Goering was saying you're not going to have control of me at the end I'm going to take control of my own exit and that's what he did there's a lot of speculation on how Goering came to have this cyanide capsule in his cell because his cell was searched countless times over the months that he occupied

[00:37:51] [SPEAKER_03] it and no one knows but I think the best theory is that he made a deal with one of the American guards to get a capsule that was hidden in Goering's effects that he had with him when he was arrested and if the guard would do that get it out give it to Goering then Goering would give him something else a value in exchange like jewelry or watch something

[00:38:21] [SPEAKER_03] like that I think that's probably what happened

[00:38:23] [SPEAKER_01] so we talked about how Kelly went into this kind of hoping to find some sort of common deviant trait or I think you called it like a Nazi germ in these men did he find such a trait

[00:38:36] [SPEAKER_03] no he concluded that there was no Nazi virus that and there was no illness as I said that these men were normal they did share some personality traits many of them the defendants were type A workaholics many of them if not all of them lacked remorse for what had happened during the war they lacked conscience and most

[00:39:06] [SPEAKER_03] telling they lacked empathy for a time Kelly's time at Nuremberg overlapped with a man named Gustav Gilbert he was a PhD psychologist also working with he also wrote a book after his experiences and came to define evil as lack of empathy and

[00:39:36] [SPEAKER_03] so that's what these men had in common in addition to you know lust for power desire to control others and opportunistic eagerness to take advantage of circumstances so they could

[00:39:56] [SPEAKER_01] on thinking one of my favorite writers is Sinclair Lewis he once wrote a book about the coming of fascism in America called it can't happen here I'm curious does Kelly not finding a common deviant trait does that mean that in his mind he believed something like that could happen here

[00:40:15] [SPEAKER_03] well he not only believed that it could happen here he believed it was happening in the U.S. because he returned to America with a changed perspective having spent all this time among the Nazi leaders and he looked for instance at some of the political demagogues of the U.S.. South who

[00:40:47] [SPEAKER_03] propaganda emotionally manipulative propaganda exactly as the Nazis had used propaganda and he said it is happening here and he in his book laid out a plan for Americans to help defend themselves against future authoritarianism so he believed it was it could and was happening

[00:41:13] [SPEAKER_01] he even made a point to have his son read his book didn't he

[00:41:16] [SPEAKER_03] yes he did have his son read his book well actually Doug the son was only two or three years old when the book was published I think if I remember right Dr. Kelly did have his son read it sometime during the 1950s yeah

[00:41:36] [SPEAKER_01] what was Kelly's career like

[00:41:46] [SPEAKER_03] shocks the one shock that I alluded to before was that psychiatry couldn't explain these men if it couldn't what could and then some personal problems befell him he became an alcoholic his marriage was greatly troubled the book that he wrote 22 cells in Nuremberg was a flop because the message that the end of the war didn't mean an

[00:42:16] [SPEAKER_03] end to authoritarianism that was not a popular message and he Kelly came to see himself in his later years when he was a professor at the University of California Berkeley not in psychiatry but in criminology he saw himself as undervalued and unappreciated so over the told me about how difficult his father

[00:42:46] [SPEAKER_03] was to grow up with and so Dr. Kelly did take his own life on January 1st 1958 using cyanide just as Goering had and in front of his family at a New Year's Day party

[00:43:05] [SPEAKER_01] yeah that's it is very very sad you you've talked a little bit about your research I'm curious how did you come across this story how did you get yourself in situations where you even have the option of opening up and looking at a 60 year old biscuit

[00:43:22] [SPEAKER_03] well I first heard about Dr. Kelly through the research I 38 and what struck him deeply about Kelly was that Kelly was there not to present a talk or a paper

[00:43:51] [SPEAKER_03] he was there to give a magic show before his psychiatric colleagues and I just thought that was so interesting and unusual I can't imagine a magic show where everybody in your audience is a psychiatrist and so Kelly's name lodged in my mind and then of course I found out about his work among the Nazi defendants and became even more interested so I started looking

[00:44:21] [SPEAKER_03] for archival information about Dr. Kelly there wasn't much in places like the U.S. Archives and even a collection at the University of California mostly contained materials from after the Nuremberg period so I went in search of his family and that's how I found Doug the son and Doug invited me to come and look to see look and see what he

[00:45:01] [SPEAKER_03] and I was overwhelmed and I overwhelmed and I was overwhelmed all of his Rorschach results and interpretations and then these artifacts like the biscuits and others convinced me that there was a book here a really intriguing book and that so much of this material was important because it had

[00:45:29] [SPEAKER_01] remained hidden for so long. What does it feel like when someone trusts you with that kind of

[00:45:35] [SPEAKER_03] material about their father? Yeah. Doug, the son, is a trusting person. That's one of the reasons why I've kept in touch with him all of these years. And I consider him a friend. Soon after I first arrived to look at the materials he had, he told me that he had been waiting for years for somebody

[00:45:59] [SPEAKER_03] to come and ask about the stuff he had and that no one had until I had sent him an email about it. And so Doug was motivated to get his story, his father's story, out there. And Doug, you know, even though his father was so difficult to grow up with, Doug did love Dr. Kelly, his father,

[00:46:25] [SPEAKER_03] and wanted people to better understand his story. And I think that's why he was so supportive of my project and helped so much with it. Doug was only 10 when his father committed suicide. Doug witnessed it. But he was a very perceptive child, very bright like his dad, and was able to give me all kinds of

[00:46:49] [SPEAKER_03] insights into his father's work and personality. And then you mentioned earlier that, of course,

[00:46:56] [SPEAKER_01] the book has been adapted into a movie. Can you talk about that process?

[00:47:01] [SPEAKER_03] Sure. It was a really long process. My book came out in 2013. And even before that, I had published an article also titled The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Same Topic. And when I published that article in

[00:47:22] [SPEAKER_03] Scientific American Mind Magazine, I sent a link to a screenwriter I knew named James Vanderbilt. I knew James because his production company had earlier options that previous book, The Lobotomist. And I thought he might be interested in this subject. And he really was. He saw the article,

[00:47:49] [SPEAKER_03] he saw a book proposal I later wrote. And he was attracted to it very quickly. So the book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, was optioned even before it became a book. And over the years, many years that followed, James sent me drafts of the screenplay he was writing from it, which he

[00:48:14] [SPEAKER_03] titled Nuremberg. And so I saw it develop and evolve over time and also commented on it. I initially didn't know how to comment. Who was I commenting as? Certainly not as a screenwriting critic. James knows everything about that. I don't know anything. And I didn't want to be some kind of history fact

[00:48:40] [SPEAKER_03] checker, the history police, to point out inaccuracies. Because I knew that any inaccuracies in the screenplay, they were there for a reason, for the cinematic, dramatic storytelling's sake. So I decided just to comment, to do whatever I could to help this movie become the best movie.

[00:49:05] [SPEAKER_03] It was in my powers to help it become. But really, nothing happened for a long time until the end of 2023, when by this time, James had affiliated with another production company. And they were really interested in the story. And things got going very quickly.

[00:49:28] [SPEAKER_03] I began shooting in early 2024. I visited the set in the spring of 2024. It was shooting in Hungary. And had a chance to see some of my favorite scenes shot. And to see how that's done, that was probably the best work trip of my life to be a part of that. And then I didn't see the completed movie,

[00:49:52] [SPEAKER_03] though, until September 2025, when it actually had its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. So I was in an audience of 2,000 people seeing it for the first time along with all those people. It was really thrilling and unearthly.

[00:50:08] [SPEAKER_01] That must have been a little overwhelming.

[00:50:10] [SPEAKER_03] It was, yes.

[00:50:12] [SPEAKER_01] I want to jump ahead a bit. I saw your next book is published by Pegasus, who published our true crime book last year. And it's on a subject I find very interesting. And I hope in a few months when it comes out, you come back and talk about it. But can you just give us a quick description of it?

[00:50:32] [SPEAKER_03] I'd love to come back to talk about it. It's titled The Case of the Autographed Corpse. And it's about an Apache medicine man living on Apache reservations in eastern Arizona in the middle decades of the 20th century, who was wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife in 1933 on the

[00:50:58] [SPEAKER_03] stupidest, silliest evidence you can imagine, but that a all-white jury at the nearest federal courthouse was persuaded to believe. He was sentenced to life in prison, went to prison, prison, tried all kinds of ways, getting affidavits from witnesses and trying to get pardoned and

[00:51:23] [SPEAKER_03] sentence commuted, that kind of thing. But he spent 20 years in prison. And finally, in desperation, he wrote to a famous mystery writer of the time, Earl Stanley Gardner, who wrote all of the Perry Mason mysteries and was one of the top-selling authors in the world by the early 1950s. And Gardner was also a trial lawyer before he became a mystery writer and had an organization

[00:51:53] [SPEAKER_03] up and running called the Court of Last Resort, similar to today's Innocence Project, working with people who had been wrongfully convicted of serious crimes. So Gardner and the medicine man, whose name was Silas John Edwards, met in prison and they took to each other. They liked each other. They were about

[00:52:14] [SPEAKER_03] the same age and agreed to jointly reinvestigate Edwards' case. Did so over the next couple years of the time? And he was a part of the story. And he was a part of the 20th century. And he was a really remarkable story that Gardner himself did write about a couple of times in magazines, but never

[00:52:42] [SPEAKER_03] at much length. And I thought it really merited more length because it's a fascinating window into Apache spiritual life in that part of the 20th century and then the life of a best-selling author, same century. And to have those come together, I thought was just incredible.

[00:53:04] [SPEAKER_01] I'm really looking forward to that one. Before we wrap up, our last question, as always, is there anything I didn't ask that you would like, that you think is important and that you'd like to share

[00:53:15] [SPEAKER_03] with our audience? Well, just one thing I'll quickly add is that I am happy with the movie Nuremberg. And there are some historical inaccuracies in it. I don't think they're very important. I think the movie is mostly accurate, mostly factual. And what I like best about it is that it gets across

[00:53:40] [SPEAKER_03] some of the points in the Nazi and the psychiatrist that I think are important, that international efforts to bring war criminals to justice are important. And we're seeing today those efforts are hobbled by the refusal of some countries, including the United States, to participate in them.

[00:54:01] [SPEAKER_03] And then the second is Kelly's point about what we can do to prevent incipient authoritarianism or what people can do in any democracy. Those are really important points that I think could help us today.

[00:54:18] [SPEAKER_02] So I'm very pleased with how the movie Nuremberg turned out.

[00:55:03] [SPEAKER_01] We really appreciate Jack sitting down and taking the time to talk with us today. We enjoyed his book and we look forward to his upcoming book on Earl Stanley Gardner. It will be really, really interesting.

[00:55:15] [SPEAKER_00] We will be including a link to his book in our show notes. Check it out.

[00:56:34] [SPEAKER_01] Thanks so much for listening to The Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us at murdersheet at gmail.com. If you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the appropriate authorities.

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[00:57:18] [SPEAKER_01] Special thanks to Kevin Tyler Greenlee, who composed the music for The Murder Sheet, and who you can find on the web at kevintg.com.

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