Among the Nazis who were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 was Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring. Less widely known, though, is the involvement of the US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who spent more than 80 hours interviewing and assessing Göring and 21 other Nazi officials prior to the trials. As described in Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Kelley was charmed by Göring but also haunted by his own conclusion that the Nazis’ atrocities were not specific to that time and place or to those people: they could in fact happen anywhere. He was ultimately destroyed by this discovery, and what he saw as the world’s reluctance to heed it.
The writer-director James Vanderbilt, whose script for David Fincher’s enigmatic serial-killer drama Zodiac similarly explored the real-life case of a professional being corroded by his pursuit of truth, has used The Nazi and the Psychiatrist as the basis of his new film, Nuremberg. Russell Crowe plays the preening, charismatic Göring, Rami Malek plays Kelley, and Michael Shannon is Robert Jackson, the American supreme court justice who was not only instrumental in mounting the trials but went head-to-head with Göring in court.
