Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit Nuremberg: The Trial of Göring About this episode Warning: This episode contains discussion of suicide.
When the Nuremberg Trials began in November 1945, Hermann Göring was the highest-ranking Nazi to face justice for the crimes of the Third Reich. Charismatic, manipulative and unrepentant, he became the central figure of the proceedings. This episode examines Göring’s performance in the courtroom and his unusual relationship with U. S. Army psychiatrist Dr Douglas Kelley, who was tasked with assessing the mental state of the Nazi defendants.
For this, we're joined by Jack El-Hai, author of ‘The Nazi and the Psychiatrist'. Through their exchanges, Jack explains how Göring sought to control his legacy and what his case revealed about the psychology of power and guilt in the aftermath of war.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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2:25 Dan Snow? When the guns finally fell silent in Europe in May 1945, the world was left with a daunting question: How do you deliver justice for crimes so vast, so organised and so coldly executed that they defy the imagination? The Nazi regime had collapsed, it had been destroyed. Hitler was dead. Many of his closest lieutenants had fled or had taken their own lives or were now desperately trying to disappear into the chaos of a defeated Reich. But one of those lieutenants, one man, once Hitler's chosen successor, the bombastic head of the Luftwaffe, the charismatic, peacocking aristocrat of Nazi Germany, well, he'd chosen a very different path.
3:11 Dan Snow? Hermann Göring surrendered himself in grand style with his large assortment of luggage to the occupying American troops. But as soon as he'd taken into Allied custody and realised what lay ahead, he was already preparing for his next stage. Not on the battlefield this time, but in the courtroom, where international law would be reshaped. Over the next year, in a grey stone palace of justice in Nuremberg, 22 Nazi leaders would stand trial. It was unprecedented. Four nations judging those they accused as being the architects of a war that had cost more than 60 million lives. It was part legal process, part public reckoning
3:55 Dan Snow? and part lesson for the future. Lesson for us.
4:04 Dan Snow? But behind the scenes, in the cells adjacent to the courtroom, there was an unusual relationship unfolding between Göring and the American psychiatry assigned to assess him, Major Douglas Kelly. He seemed to be expecting a madman, a monster, a caricature of evil. Instead, he found a man who was disturbingly normal, quite charming really, disciplined, razor sharp and frighteningly capable of self-justification. The conversations between Göring and Kelly would expose a truth that was really far more unsettling than the idea, the image of a raving Nazi fanatic. It was this: The truth is that even the most prolific criminals can wear a smile, can quote poetry, can crack jokes, can sound reasonable,
4:49 Dan Snow? can be good company.
4:52 Dan Snow? In this episode, we go into the courtrooms of the Nuremberg Trials. We're going to also explore the psychological jewel between the war criminal and the man tasked with understanding him. We're going to look at how Göring turned that courtroom into his final stage and how the Allies fought to establish a new kind of justice. And also what Göring's relationship with Douglas Kelly can teach us about power and responsibility and evil, a terrifying normality of people that commit extraordinary crimes. We're joined by Jack Elhai, author of the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, which has just been adapted into a movie and is hitting our cinema screens very, very soon. This is the story of Herman Göring on trial at Nuremberg and its uncomfortable lessons.
5:56 Dan Snow? When Herman Göring took his seat in the dock at Nuremberg in late 1945, he wasn't just another defendant, he was the most senior surviving architect of Hitler's Third Reich. He was a First World War hero who had turned Nazi party enforcer. He'd become head of the German air force. He was an economic czar and for years he'd been Hitler's chosen heir. But to understand how he got here, how we ended up in Nuremberg, we need to first rewind. Göring was born on the 12th of January, 1893 in Bavaria. He was raised in a world that was steeped in the prestige of old hierarchy of uniform and title and empire.
6:36 Dan Snow? He grew up in a castle, actual castle called Waldenstein, owned by his godfather and, brackets, his mother's lover, who was a wealthy Jewish physician and merchant named Herman Eppenstein.
6:50 Dan Snow? From an early age, Göring was drawn to a career in uniform. He was rebellious at school and from sixteen onwards, he was sent to one of Germany's most prestigious military academies. He became a professional soldier just as Europe slid towards catastrophe. During the First World War, he transferred from the infantry to the air service and he very quickly made his name as a fighter ace. By 1918, that famed ace of aces, Manfred von Richthofen, or the Red Baron, well, he was dead and Göring had briefly stepped into his shoes. He'd commanded Richthoven's unit, the famous Flying Circus. He'd won the gallantry award, Paul le Merité, the German Empire's highest military order, curiously with a French name, but more on that another time. Defeat in the First World War radicalised Germany.
7:34 Dan Snow? It radicalised Hitler, it radicalised Göring too. After the war, he had a stint of flying commercially in Denmark and Sweden, but he went home in 1922 and he joined Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Movement, bringing some celebrity, really, bringing a wartime reputation, but also swagger and connections. As a former military officer of some repute, he was put in charge of the party's street fighters, the brown shirts. He was badly wounded in the groin during the failed Beer Hall putsch of November 1923, when Hitler tried to seize power. And he was given morphine for the pain and he developed a serious addiction that would stay with him for the rest of his life, but you'll be hearing more about that later on. Immediately after the putsch, he fled into exile as the party collapsed, but he did return
8:15 Dan Snow? when foolishly, the government offered amnesties and the political fortunes shifted. From the late 1920s, Göring was one of the Nazis' most effective operators. He was a power broker. He was elected as a Nazi delegate to the Reichstag in 1928. He rose to its presidency in 1932 as the party surged. When Hitler took power in 1933, Göring moved fast. He became Prussian Minister of the Interior, he built up a police state, he purged officials, he empowered loyalists, he created the Gestapo, he opened up the first concentration camp, Oranienberg, where victims of the Nazis were subjected to the euphemistically titled
8:59 Dan Snow? policy of protective custody, meaning just illegal imprisonment and usually mistreatment and torture. The titles, the honours, they came thick and fast. In 1935, he took command of the newly reconstituted Luftwaffe. In 1936, he became economic tsar of the four-year plan. So he was in charge of overseeing the vast rearmament of the German, well, German armed forces. And he was also placed right at the centre of state-sanctioned plunder. He seized Jewish businesses, he squeezed newly occupied territories for all they are worth, and he funnelled immense wealth into his own pockets. Göring had a ridiculous, ostentatious country estate at Karrenhall. It became a playground for his ludicrous whims and obsessions.
9:43 Dan Snow? It had a lion cage, it had a 400-square-metre train set, complete with model airplanes that could drop little wooden bombs. It was home to his vast, private collection of looted artworks, pieces he had confiscated from artists classed as degenerates, and those he stole from museums in cities like Paris and Brussels as the war in Europe began. At the outbreak of war in 1939, Göring stood firmly as Hitler's designated successor. In 1940, he was elevated to Reichsmarschall, the highest military rank in the Reich, one that had been specially created for him by Hitler, and Göring went on to design his own special uniform. But the arc of that relationship would bend dramatically over time.
10:27 Dan Snow? Early on, Göring was the charming fixer, he was cultivated, he was vain, he was loyal. He helped translate Hitler's ambitions into reality, but the gigantic challenges of the Second World War laid bare his limits. The Luftwaffe failed to defeat the RAF, to break Britain in 1940. His empty boasts about crushing Soviet industry, and then his catastrophic inability to supply the encircled Sixth Army at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 to 1943, really, well, tarnished his reputation, if not destroyed it, in the eyes of the Führer. As the ground war went on and on, Göring's empty promises stacked up, and rivals like
11:09 Dan Snow? Himmler and Bormann whispered about his failings, and Hitler was all too keen to listen. By April 1945, with the regime collapsing around them, the Nazi leadership disintegrating, Göring's relationship with Hitler imploded for good. Now, let's hear all about that from Jack. Jack, great to talk to you. Thank you so much.
11:32 Speaker 02 For having me here.
11:34 Dan Snow? There is a general absolute meltdown of the Nazi senior leadership. As those Soviet tanks got ever closer to Hitler's bunker in Berlin in April and early May 1945. Let's look at Göring in particular. He's actually not in Berlin. What happens to his relationship in that last week or two of the Third Reich? What happens to Göring's relationship with Hitler?
11:54 Speaker 02 It deteriorated quite a bit. Göring thinks, because he had spoken with Hitler about when and whether he should assume the leadership of the government. With the collapse of the regime and the war coming to an end. And Hitler didn't take well to those kinds of questions. And he even sicked a group of SS stormtroopers to go to where Göring was. But Göring talked those guys out of it. Meanwhile, however, Hitler designated the Admiral Donuts to be his successor when the government did fall.
12:36 Speaker 02 And Göring made his escape to Austria as the war wound to its final days.
12:44 Dan Snow? Because Göring, just to get people up to speed, was not in Berlin. Göring was in his, one of his sort of palaces somewhere, was he?
12:50 Speaker 02 Right. And that's where the SS troops went after him. But Göring had spent most of the war as Hitler's successor. So this was quite a change in fortune for him.
13:04 Dan Snow? So he says, hey, just Hitler, look, I hope it's all going well in Berlin. Just let me know when you want me to take the reins of government. And Hitler goes berserk. Okay. So then he's in his luxury confinement. He makes his way to Austria, does he? What, in the last hours or even after the armistice? He makes his way, the ceasefire, he makes his way to Austria.
13:22 Speaker 02 And that's because he knew that his surrender would be inevitable. And he did not want to have to surrender to Russian troops. And so he went to where there was an American line to surrender.
13:36 Speaker 05 To the American army and he drove his automobile up to where the American line was, got out, told them who he was and asked if they would unload his luggage.
13:51 Dan Snow? Yeah, and because he is in Bavaria, so he is a few hours away from the Austrian borders. That's not a big mission for him.
13:58 Speaker 05 No, he made that part of the trip easily, but he had the intent in the very last hours of the war and after the war was over to surrender. He knew he would have to.
14:10 Dan Snow? When you mentioned this luggage that the Americans are supposed to unload, are there a few impressionist painters in there, a few beautiful looted bits of art?
14:17 Speaker 05 No art that I know of, but he did have some other interesting items with him. By this time, Göring was addicted to a narcotic called paracodine. And he had cornered almost the entire world's supply of paracodine and had thousands of tablets with him. And he also had a lot of luggage and hat boxes full of things to wear and quite a bit of jewelry, rings, things of that sort. So he was coming with a lot of baggage.
14:54 Dan Snow? Yeah, well, and he was coming with baggage in all senses. He is the most senior, well, he's one of the most senior Nazis now in captivity. Is there any debate over how he should be treated, where he should be kept, what he should face amongst the victorious allies?
15:11 Speaker 05 There had been some earlier debate among the allies about how the top leaders in general should be treated. Churchill, for instance, at one point thought they should all be lined up and shot. And it took Roosevelt and interestingly Stalin to take the opposite position that there should be a trial and a trial that didn't look like a kangaroo court. But in Göring's case, he arrived thinking himself a possible successor still to Hitler.
15:46 Speaker 05 And thinking that there was a chance that he could head a new German government after the war, and he hoped that the Allies would treat him like a head of state, not like a prisoner. But the Allies were not on board with that at all, and treated him as a prisoner from the start of his captivity.
16:06 Dan Snow? And in pretty hard, this was not a pampered captivity like the SS had kept him in just at the end of the war. This is pretty harsh?
16:12 Speaker 05 It was not so harsh at the very beginning. He was taken along with many of the other Nazi leaders to a former hotel in Mondorf in Luxembourg, which is a resort town, and I'm sure had been a quite nice hotel, but the rooms had been stripped of all the luxurious furniture and very basic furnishings put in their place. And that's where Göring and his comrades spent the first part of their captivity. They didn't go to Nuremberg until later.
16:48 Dan Snow? So they're all sent to Nuremberg. Why was that city chosen?
16:53 Speaker 05 Mainly because of the facilities available in Nuremberg and the symbolic value of that city. As far as the facilities go, even though much of the city had been bombed out, there still was an extant Palace of Justice and prison alongside of it. The Palace of Justice, which had courtrooms in it, had to be rebuilt quickly in time for the trial. But the symbolic value of Nuremberg was immense, because this, of course, was where Hitler had held all of his gigantic Nazi Party rallies at the end of the 1930s.
17:34 Speaker 05 And it was symbolic of this Nazi ambition for great power. And to hold the trial there was a show of the fall of this ambition.
17:48 Dan Snow? So it's the ideal backdrop. It's symbolic. It's also logistically possible. There is a useful place that they can be tried, and there are barracks for all the necessary officers of the court. The trials be presided over by judge from each of these Allied victorious nations?
18:04 Speaker 05 There are judges from all four of the allied nations in charge of the trials. So that was the Soviet Union, France, Britain, and the US. And Justice Lawrence of the UK was the presiding judge.
18:18 Dan Snow? It's quite a compressed timeline, isn't it? I mean, you're building up a docket of criminality stretching across years, across continents, including some of the most monstrous crimes ever committed by human beings. How much work was there to get ready for these trials?
18:31 Speaker 05 Oh, it was incredibly stressful work for the allied prosecutors to gather up the evidence. Fortunately, the Germans had left behind a lot of paper evidence. And there was all the evidence in human casualties left behind and still living in the camps. But it was an immense effort, a huge prosecutorial effort to bring all of this material together and to go through it and comprehend it in time for the trial, which was scheduled to begin in November 1945. Göring and many of his colleagues were captured in the spring of 1945.
19:14 Speaker 05 So that just left a small number of months to put it all together.
19:18 Dan Snow? Yeah, very, very quick. We won't get into the trials, we'll quickly sum them up at the end. But the reason I'm talking to you today is because I'm so interested in this relationship between Göring and this US Army psychologist. So tell me about Douglas Kelly.
19:30 Speaker 05 Douglas Kelly was an MD psychiatrist who had grown up in California, a beautiful town called Truckee at the north end of Lake Tahoe, and had attended medical school in California and had enlisted in the US military after the war started for America. And he was sent to Western Europe to work in a series of military hospitals there. And his main job during the war was to treat soldiers who had suffered what was then called battle fatigue or shell shock. We would now call it PTSD. And it's astonishing.
20:13 Speaker 05 How many of the casualties from the early years of the war came from PTSD? And not from physical wounds in the North African campaign, for instance, up to seventy five percent of the casualties were psychiatric casualties. So the goal was to take these soldiers and to restore them to mental health. So that they could be returned to battle. And that's what Dr. Kelly was working on along with some of his colleagues there. And he had great success. He was considered to be very innovative in developing techniques of treatment for these kinds of soldiers and getting them back onto the battlefield.
20:59 Speaker 05 So when the war ended in the spring of forty five, he was close by, he was there, he was relatively high ranking. And he went to first to Luxembourg, then to Nuremberg, without really knowing what his job would be among the German prisoners.
21:20 Dan Snow? And what was the job? So he had an official role, which was what to do a psychiatric evaluation on them?
21:26 Speaker 05 Right, his task was to see that all of the top twenty two German defendants were mentally fit to stand trial. And that mentally fit qualification is a low legal barrier. It means that they could understand right from wrong and could understand the charges against them. And so twenty one of the twenty two, in Kelly's judgment, did meet that criteria. And he was able to wrap up that kind of examination of the men in short order. But Kelly also recognized that he was the envy of his profession.
22:08 Speaker 05 Because he was in the presence of this group of men, considered the arch criminals of the twentieth century, who were at least charged with committing awful, heinous crimes never before seen on a scale. Like that, and he wanted to do more with them. He wanted to find out if they shared any common psychiatric disorder, or what he called a Nazi virus, that could account for their behaviour. So he made that his mission. And he spent really the rest of his time in Nuremberg until January forty six, working on that and coming to his conclusions.
22:53 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History. There's more to come.
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25:47 Speaker 06 After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty. From Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
26:26 Dan Snow? So how civilized the US Army just allowed him to take these gentlemen and do a gigantic scientific evaluation on them, a test? One that could have enormous consequences for the future of the race.
26:38 Speaker 05 I don't think the US Army knew exactly what he was doing and what his goals were, or that his goal was to write a book after he returned back to the States from Nuremberg. But the Army did allow him to subject the defendants to these batteries of tests. Dr. Kelly was a big proponent and considered a gifted interpreter of the Rochac inkblot test, which many people would recognize as these inkblots on a card that the subjects are supposed to interpret. But he gave them other tests as well, in which they had to tell stories,
27:16 Speaker 05 and he gave them IQ tests. Plus, he spent many, many hours with each of the defendants in one-on-one conversations in their cells.
27:27 Dan Snow? And tell me about some of those verbal sparring sessions between him and Göring. We'll say a bit more about Göring. He's a figure of fun to many, but he was obviously an extraordinary charismatic. He was a very decorated war hero from the First World War. He had enormous gifts. How did Kelly find him?
27:43 Speaker 05 Kelly found Herman Göring in not great physical shape. He was addicted to this narcotic, paracodine, and he was overweight and suffering from heart problems. And the last thing the Allies wanted was for Göring, or really any of his co-defendants, to suffer some big health setback or to even die before the trial would start. So Dr. Kelly's first task was to wean Göring off the paracodine. And he did that by appealing to Herman Göring's ego, which was considerable, telling him that throwing off an addiction to a drug
28:27 Speaker 05 like this is very difficult, but that a man of his strength of character could do it. And Göring agreed that he should be able to do it, and he did very successfully. And they got the weight down, too. But what Kelly found in terms of personality and psychological makeup in Göring... Was someone actually quite similar to Dr. Kelly himself? They were both very intelligent, men strongly motivated by powerful egos, who rarely saw themselves wrong in any sense of the word. And Kelly saw that Göring had quite a bit of charm. He had a good sense of humor.
29:09 Speaker 05 He told jokes to his jailers about himself and even about Hitler. Kelly, however, was not blind to Göring's darker side. And he also was able to determine that Göring was without remorse, without empathy, quite bloodthirsty in the decisions that he had made, and quite cold in judging the effect that his work during the war had had on other people.
29:39 Dan Snow? Did Göring claim ignorance about lots of things that happened to be going on in the bureaucracy and say, well, it was my problem? Or was he, did he double down on things like the antisemitism, on the Final Solution, on this gigantic war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, for example?
29:54 Speaker 05 Well, interestingly, he did claim some ignorance. But as far as the Nazi ideology went, he claimed that it wasn't important, that he was not a huge believer in the antisemitism and other ideological points that were a big part of the Nazi movement. And Göring said that his attraction to the Nazi party, when he joined in the 1920s, in the early years of the party, was that it was small, which meant he could rise quickly to the top of it, and that its members included many German veterans of World War I. And he believed that group was essential to have in the fold
30:37 Speaker 05 to overturn the Weimar government in the 1920s. So Göring painted himself as not an ideological devotee, but instead as an ambitious, patriotic man, really an opportunist, who could use what the Nazis were doing and advance the Nazi program for his own gain.
31:03 Dan Snow? Is one of Kelly's most important conclusions, that although he lacks empathy, I mean, so do lots of guys, there is actually nothing particularly psychotic and outlier about Göring. I mean, is the true horror of the Nazis is actually, these people were reasonably normal and yet were able to preside over this empire of evil?
31:28 Speaker 05 That's exactly right. Kelly went into his time with Göring and the other defendants expecting to find grave psychiatric problems in them, disorders. But through all of his testing and his discussions and interviews with him, he did not find that. He never found the Nazi virus that he was looking for and instead came to the conclusion that all of these men fell within the normal range. And this was quite frightening to Kelly because it meant that if they were in the normal range, then there were many others like them also in the normal range in our society.
32:11 Speaker 05 Maybe not necessarily working in government or the military, but working in other endeavors, business, education, everything, who have the tendency to want to amass power and walk all over the backs of half the population, as Kelly put it, to gain power over the other half. And this led him to a realization that the end of the war would not stop these war crimes, crimes against humanity, instances of genocide. The trial, the conclusion of the trial would not stop any of that. The creation of the United Nations would not stop any of that.
32:53 Speaker 05 And we would always be burdened by these people in our society and always have been. And so that it was up to the rest of us to try and develop a plan, programs, to combat them in the future.
33:07 Dan Snow? Göring, ist er schwer für die Prozessoren zu bringen? Ist er eine gute Beweislage? Ist er persuasiv? Ist er charismatisch?
33:14 Speaker 05 Göring verbrachte seine Zeit in Gefängnis in den frühen Monaten, die entscheidende Zeit, als er auf der Straße war. Er wusste, dass das Gericht unbestimmt war. Er wusste, dass er auf der Straße gestellt werden sollte, um zu sprechen. Und er musste seine Zeit nutzen, um eine Beweislage zu schaffen, dass alles, was die Deutschen getan haben, aus Patriotismus und Loyalität zu Hitler war. Und das ist wirklich so, wie alles ausgeschlossen wurde. Während der Zeit auf der Beweislage im Frühjahr 1946. Der Gerichtsfall begann mit der sehr ehrlichen Aussage von Robert Jackson
33:58 Speaker 05 für die Prozession, die alle glauben, dass er persuasiv und noble und有力 war. Aber dann, als Göring auf der Straße kam, begann er alle seine Rede, wirklich Propaganda, für den Nazi-Regime zu verteidigen. Und Jackson, der diese Krossexamination und Testimony durchführte, war nicht vorbereitet für das und war unter dem schlechten Geschehen. Und für ein paar Monate hatte Göring die beste Hand. Und Görings Beweis ging nicht zerfallen, bis ein wenig später, als die Prozession all diese Papierbeweiszeichen vorstellte gegen Göring,
34:41 Speaker 05 die seine Signale auf Befehle und Befehle zur Holocausten und viele andere, die Göring nicht ablehnen konnte, wo seine Fortschritte verändert wurden. Und im Endeffekt hatten die Rechtsberater kein Problem, ihn zu verfolgen.
35:01 Dan Snow? Ihr hört zu, dass Dan Schloss Geschichte ist. Geht nicht in die Nähe, es gibt mehr zu kommen.
35:12 Speaker 02 This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, or a restaurant. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.
35:55 Speaker 02 Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.
36:02 Speaker 06 After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty. From Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
36:42 Dan Snow? He was convicted to death by hanging. That hanging was due to take place on the 16th of October, 1946. What happened just before that?
36:54 Speaker 05 Goring did not want to be hanged, not just because he didn't want to be killed, but also because hanging was considered a bad form of execution if you're a former leader of a country. Hanging is for, in their minds, for highwaymen and common criminals. So Goring did not want this fate. Many of his... colleagues in the prison also did not want that fate. But Goring had brought into the prison with him when he first arrived, among all of the stuff in his luggage, some cyanide capsules.
37:32 Speaker 05 And no one knows for sure how this happened, but most likely, one of the American guards developed a trading relationship with Herman Goring, in which Goring would provide the guard with valuables, jewelry, rings, gemstones, things like that. And the guard brought to Goring from his stored luggage, these capsules of cyanide. So the night before Goring's scheduled execution by hanging, Goring had in his cell with him in a jar of face cream, cold cream, something like that, one of those capsules.
38:14 Speaker 05 And he put it in his mouth and broke the capsule and died almost instantly, which was a horrible setback for his American jailers and for the Allies in general.
38:30 Dan Snow? Did Kelly feel in any way responsible? Because was he partly monitoring them in case they did try and take their own life to try and head that off? Did he get the rap?
38:39 Speaker 05 That was part of Kelly's job in the prison, to try and make sure that the defendants did not kill themselves. And so he had earlier failed in that with one of the defendants named Robert Ley, who was the head of the German labor front, slave labor organization. Ley did kill himself even before the trial began. And Kelly was not in Nuremberg any longer when Goring took his life. He was back in the States. He received the news of Goring's death, like everybody else, by reading the newspaper.
39:14 Speaker 05 And he was surprised, but also a bit in admiration, because he realized that Goring was grandstanding by taking his life in this way. He was showing his defiance to the Allied authorities and not allowing himself to be executed the way they wanted. He was going out his way.
39:38 Dan Snow? Did Kelly come to have a sort of grudging fascination for or friendship with, admiration for Göring, do you think?
39:45 Speaker 05 I wouldn't say they ever had a friendship because Kelly was too aware of Göring's bad qualities. But I think they did have an admiration. They were very much alike. I think each of them recognized that. They were both master manipulators and they knew that the other was in the process of doing that manipulation. And so they used each other to get what they wanted during the times they were together. So I think what Kelly was left with after Göring took his own life was the effect of seeing how Göring's
40:26 Speaker 05 suicide made a statement and could show defiance. And that would come into play 12 or so years later when Dr. Kelly himself took his own life in the same way by swallowing cyanide.
40:43 Dan Snow? Are the two related or was it just that that was an obvious way to take your own life in that period? I mean, do you think it was in some way a sort of homage or a copying of Göring?
40:53 Speaker 05 That was one of the central questions. What was the connection between these two men's suicides, which looked so similar? I concluded that it wasn't the case that Kelly, at the end of his life, was thinking, I'm going to do what Herman did. I think it was more like he had in his mind still the effect that Göring's suicide had on everyone else making this statement and showing defiance. And those were things that Kelly wanted to show too at the end of his life because of the circumstances of the last 12 years of
41:34 Speaker 05 his life. His life had gone downhill quite a bit since Nuremberg. A lot of personal problems, marital problems, drinking problems. So I think the effect of a death by cyanide appealed to them both for the same reasons, and that's why they both chose him.
41:52 Dan Snow? Can I just come back to the conclusions that Kelly drew from his time spent with some of the most evil men of the 20th century, if not of recorded history, to emphasize that he didn't think that any of those men demonstrated particularly rare or unusual mental outlooks or personalities. They were reasonably normal guys.
42:13 Speaker 05 He detected some common points among them, but these were things that a lot of people exhibit. All of the German defendants were type A workaholics. So they devoted themselves fully to their work and what they perceived as their mission in their work. Many of them were also lacking in empathy or simply not interested in knowing what the consequences of their actions were. But again, this is something that a lot of people in our world exhibit. And what I like about Kelly's conclusions, that these men fell within the normal range
42:53 Speaker 05 and were not monsters or unusually deviant, psychologically deviant examples of our species, is that if you call them monsters or deviants, how responsible are they for their actions? You have to ask that. And in Kelly's accounting, in which they fall within a normal range, they are responsible and they made choices that are open to many of us to make. And they chose the course of evil, of hurting millions of people. And that's what I think is appealing about Kelly's conclusions.
43:33 Speaker 05 On the other hand, what frightened him is, should be frightening to all of us, that fascism and authoritarianism can arise anywhere, anytime. And of course, it has, even very recently, in countries with democratic traditions. So I think Kelly's conclusions go a long way to explaining not only just how those men behaved during the war, but how people are behaving now.
44:03 Dan Snow? Jack, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. You're having a busy fall because your book, The Nazi and the Psychologist, Herman Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelly, and the Fatal Meeting of Minds at the end of World War II, has been turned into a movie.
44:16 Speaker 05 It has, and I feel good that I can honestly recommend the movie. I've seen it twice now, and I think it's very good. No movie based on history, I don't think, can be expected to be 100% factual. But this movie is essentially factual, and it delivers the messages from Kelly and Göring's story that I think are important.
44:41 Dan Snow? Well, thank you for helping to transmit those messages to new generations. We are very grateful. Thank you very much also for coming on the podcast.
44:48 Speaker 05 Glad to have been here. Thank you, Dan.
44:52 Dan Snow? In October 1946, the judges at Nuremberg delivered their final verdicts. Herman Göring, once the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, was found guilty on all counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to hang, but he chose his own ending. He bit down on a cyanide capsule that had been smuggled into his cell. Even in death, he tried to seize the narrative, to deny the court the final word. But the legacy of Nuremberg was never just about one man's punishment. It was about establishing a precedent. And for the first time in history, the architects of a war of annihilation were held publicly and legally to account.
45:35 Dan Snow? In the quiet spaces beneath that courtroom, Douglas Kelly walked away with a conclusion far more unsettling than he had expected. He did not find insanity. He found functionality, charisma, ego, patriotism, all twisted together into cruelty, the kind of reasonably normal personalities that metastasized, given the right conditions, into monsters. In Göring, Kelly recognized something that we don't really want to admit, that the capacity for extraordinary harm doesn't set at the fringes of humanity, but uncomfortably close to the center.
46:20 Dan Snow? And today, that truth is important. Nuremberg was a warning as much as a reckoning. It taught us that structures, that systems matter, accountability matters, vigilance matters, because history isn't shaped by villains hiding in the shadows, but by confident people who sound reasonable enough as they dismantle the world around them.
46:44 Dan Snow? Thanks to Jack for joining us. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you found it interesting, please consider sharing it and subscribing to the podcast if you haven't already done that. And if you have any topics you'd like us to cover, you can reach us at the email in the show notes. And who knows, maybe your idea will become an episode on the feed. See you next time.
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