Episode 77 Transcript: The Psychiatrist Who Explored Nazi Minds

All right, so once again, we're very excited. This has been one we've been looking forward to.

 

This is an extra special guest.

 

Absolutely, yeah. So we have Jack El-Hai, not a clinician. Jack El-Hai is a writer and a journalist. He's a New York Times bestselling author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, which, if you haven't read yet, people would probably know it from the movie that's currently on Netflix. It’s a major movie set in Nuremberg, opened in theaters worldwide, directed by James Vanderbilt.

 

Had Russell Crowe, Rami Malik, among other incredible actors, Michael Cannon. Yeah.

 

Yeah, exactly. So he writes nonfiction books, long-form narratives, and the free monthly “Damn History” newsletter for writers and readers of popular history. I have to check that out.

 

Honestly, me too.

 

Yeah. He covers history, medicine, science, crime, and anything else that intrigues him and might intrigue you. Along with “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” he's written four other books, plus articles that have appeared in Smithsonian, The Atlantic, GQ, Wired, Scientific American Mind, The Washington Post magazine, many other publications. “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” is just one of several of Jack's nonfiction stories that have been adapted for screen, stage, and podcasts. He enjoys the adventures of bringing adaptations of his work to major media. He also enjoys giving talks, leading workshops on the topics of his books and the craft of nonfiction writing. So, I mean, we're delighted and excited.

 

Thank you for being here.

 

You know, I want to talk, and obviously, I'm happy to hear about everything, but obviously we're kind of biased to talk about the Nazi and the psychiatrist because that's more in our wheelhouse. And so I think that's what we're going get started with and probably spend most of our time on. But first of all, welcome and thanks so much for being on.

 

It's my pleasure, and it's great to be here with you.

 

We usually start by hearing a bit about people's careers and kind of what got them started. Can you, obviously I just gave the bio, but can you tell us a little bit like how you got into journalism and how this like all started exciting you to do all these things?

 

I began writing magazine journalism in the mid-1980s, so that dates me. And I gravitated to writing about history early on because I saw that it often was not being done well, and I understood that there was a lot of opportunity in an area of writing that others were maybe not doing so well in. And so I decided to give it a hand. And I wrote primarily magazine journalism for a couple of decades until the early 20th 21st century, when I wrote a book called “The Lobotomist,” and that was about a psychiatrist, Walter Freeman, who was the developer and advocate for surgical lobotomy as a treatment for psychiatric disorders. And that's what started me in writing about psychiatry and the history of psychiatry, because while researching that book about Dr. Freeman's work, I noticed that he had made a notation in one of his journals that

 

 at the 1938 conference of the American Psychiatric Association, he met a very interesting psychiatrist named Douglas Kelley. And what stood out in Dr. Freeman's memory of Dr. Kelley was that Kelley was there, not to present a paper or to give some kind of talk, but to give a magic show for his colleagues. And that stood out in my memory too, when I read about it. And I thought I want to learn more about this guy. And so after I finished “The Lobotomist,”  then I turned my attention to Dr. Kelley and found out, of course, about his work in Nuremberg among the defendants at the first Nuremberg trial and how interesting and I thought groundbreaking his work there was. And, after I discovered there wasn't much about Dr. Kelley in the usual archives that I would consult first, I tracked down one of his surviving sons and asked him, Do you have anything from your father's career? I'm interested in it. And he said, Yes, come on over. So this was Doug. He's the oldest son of Dr. Douglas Kelley, and he lived in Northern California at the time. I took a trip, visited him, hoping to find, you know, some scrapbooks or photo albums, whatever. And instead, Doug had brought up from his basement 15 bankers' boxes full of stuff. And I used that word “stuff” deliberately because it was such an interesting mix of materials. There were the medical records of the 22 top German defendants. It was such a stroke of luck. There were also autobiographies that Dr. Kelley asked each of them to write for his own information, and artifacts as well. One of the first things I saw was a glass vial inside a jewelry case that was filled with little red pills, and it was labeled Hermann Goering's Pericodine.

 

And that's how I learned that Hermann Goering, the highest ranking of the defendants in that trial, was addicted to this narcotic, Pericodine, at the time of his arrest. And there was much more of great interest in there. I was the first person outside of the Kelley family to see any of this since 1946. And it was I felt very lucky, it was a spectacular feeling, but also overwhelming because I could see how important this material was, and I felt obligated to do a good job with it. And these boxes became the foundation of my book.

 

So I wouldn't expect it at all because so you went through via Kelley, not like what you'd expect, where someone would be interested in Nuremberg and want to get more deeply into that, though obviously it must have been pretty compelling as well.

 

Yes, and it was, you're correct. It was because of Dr. Kelley, not because of any, you know, I was predisposed to be interested in Nuremberg, and that's the way my stories go. I'm usually following a person, a nonfictional character, instead of events, following them where they went and what they made of their experience.

 

Well, when I wow, I have so many thoughts, because how cool is this? I mean, just how cool and yeah, meaningful and heavy it is to kind of be unearthing some of this information. But okay, where my head went when I first encountered your work was when I was in high school, my senior year, I was never kind of super into English, if I'm being honest, but my senior year, instead of just taking a classical English class, I got to take an expository literature class. And it's where I totally fell in love with a particular kind of writing. Oftentimes, these nonfiction stories told in a fictional way. The book that absolutely drew me in was In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. To this day, one of my favorite books. And this book had a similar experience to me, just insofar as you take something profoundly and objectively, if there can be an objective to evil, and you watch somebody sort of sift through it in this way that feels so much more complicated. And yeah, my sense in the work of Dr. Kelley, especially again as you so beautifully put it together, is that it was complicated. These people were people, and like what he came to and how he was thinking about it was incredibly complicated. So we'll get more into that, but I just have to say, I'm just so, as a psychologist who's interested in people and how people's minds work, if that's not the most obvious thing I've said on the podcast, I just find this to be so fascinating, though, when people are not presented as uni-dimensional caricatures that are otherworldly, but like even the people who do some of the most evil things are people. They're real-life human beings.

 

That has been my writing philosophy throughout most of my work. But in the case of “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” I even found a historical figure who believed that as well or came to believe it through his examination of the defendants. So that was a double treat in this book.

 

Right. So why don't you take us through that a little bit and give us we keep talking about Dr. Kelley, but you know, but maybe just a little summary of who he was and why he's important to you.

 

Sure.

 

Douglas Kelley was born in 1912 in a town called Truckee in California. If any of you've ever visited Lake Tahoe, you will know. You're from the area.

 

He was from there, that's why.

 

Yes, he was. And his grandfather he grew up in Truckee, and his grandfather, who also lived in town, was a newspaper editor there, and also the first historian of the Donner Party, that horrible tragedy that happens in the mountains in that region. And so young Douglas grew up in the atmosphere of a family where grandpa was intensely interested in this story of winter hardship and death and cannibalism, and even had a private museum dedicated to the Donner Party in which he displayed finger bones and other bodily parts that he had found scrounging the mountain. Dark. And so it was a dark upbringing. And so he grew up with kind of a dark cast to his personality and a dark view of humanity. Bad things are going to happen if you're not careful. So he attended medical school at the University of California and when World War II broke out, then he enlisted in the U.S. Army and worked as a military psychiatrist in some of the field hospitals in Western Europe that had been set up to treat the many soldiers who had been affected by what today we would call PTSD. And back then it went by various other names. And he and his colleagues, I think, were amazingly successful in treating PTSD in the sense that they returned many of these soldiers to the battlefield, whether that was good for the soldiers. Right, exactly. Yeah, but it's what the army wanted anyway. Yeah. So when the war ended, Kelley, he was just 33 at the end of the war. He was close by to where the  leading German defendants were being held in Luxembourg initially, and he was available and he had a good reputation, and that's why he was called upon to work with them initially, simply to help the court determine whether these men were, in a legal sense, mentally fit to stand trial.

 

Yeah, competent to stand trial. Right.

 

And that's a lower bar of fitness than the medical bar would be. And it was also something that Dr. Kelley could accomplish very easily and quickly. But he understood that he was in a really enviable position. Yes. There were dozens, scores, hundreds maybe, of other psychiatrists who would have loved to be there with him among these men who were there, even then were thought of as being the arch criminals of the 20th century. And why did they do what they did? What made them behave the way they did? So, Dr. Kelley, on his own initiative, set up a project for himself under the radar.

 

The court  had nothing to do with this to determine whether these men shared any psychiatric disorder that would account for their crimes and behaviors. And he went into this study believing that there must be a disorder. All he had to do was find it. So, he had the battery of tests that were available at the time, the Rorschach Inc., etc., what he and his colleagues back then used to diagnose psychiatric disorders.

 

We still do. I give it all the time. It's actually still a widely used test.

 

We have more data to support the scoring of it than how it would used to be scored, but he also relied heavily on interviews with the men, discussions to try and understand their motivations and how they justified what happened. And his conclusion really turned his world upside down because he found that there was no common psychiatric disorder. In fact, none of them suffered from any psychiatric disorder in his estimation. And instead, he found that they all fell within this normal range of personality types, which upset him a great deal, because first of all, it indicated to him that psychiatry wasn't going to be of much use in understanding people like this, but even worse, that it meant that there were others like that, other people like that out there among us, everywhere, and in every country, every era that we have to contend with, and that the end of the war and the bringing to justice that was going on in the trials was not going to put an end to authoritarian movements, Nazi-like movements, totalitarianism, and history has certainly borne that out. And so working in Nuremberg among these men set Dr. Kelley off on a on a path that ultimately was not good for him. He went into a downward spiral that we can get into if you would like to.

 

Right, yeah, we can talk more about that as well.

 

Well, one thing I guess I want to say, I'm thinking about even and this is deviating just for a second, but I'm thinking about the field of particularly forensic psychiatry and how it's, you know, over the last half decade plus has moved, I think, to continue to ask some of these questions. One of the people on my mind is Dorothy Lewis out of Yale, who's a colleague of yours. I've gotten to speak with her a couple of times. Yeah. She had a documentary on HBO called Crazy, Not Insane, and she was one of the last people to talk to Ted Bundy before he was executed. And she brought a similar question to this idea, and I get of just sort of like, why and how do people do really awful, horrible, vile things.

 

No, in their cases, she thought they had some significant mental illnesses. And again, I think that even I mean, even in like and it's somewhat different, yeah.

 

But even so, again, this idea that people, she does come to a different conclusion. But this idea that like people, it's not just that, like, oh, this is just like a super small, deviant kind of person…that  there's a story of how people get to this place, and oftentimes it does have to do with but you know,  I think it's probably similar in the ways that in both cases society has an interest in this.

 

He wasn't just there as a neutral observer who, you know, just was, maybe he felt he was, but certainly people have a vested interest in understanding these things. And certainly, can you imagine if he had said, for instance, that these people were insane and could not stand trial? I mean, would the army have ever even tolerated that? I mean, the things they did just to get it to come to trial as opposed to immediately executing these people, you know, was remarkable, really.

 

Yes, and one of the comforting things about his finding that these men were not madmen was that, well, if they're non-madmen, then they made choices to do what they did, and then we can hold them responsible. And yeah, of course the trial could proceed.

 

Exactly. Gosh. And so in your story, though, you focus on the relationship with him and Herman Goering. And of course, that's pretty much what the movie's entirely about. Can you say more about that?

 

Yes. Well, when Kelley first arrived among the defendants, Goering, who was the highest ranking of all the defendants, attracted Kelley's attention right away.

 

I guess we should say, I mean, you know, he was head of the Luftwaffe, right?

 

Yeah, I mean he was the second in command of the Nazis.

 

Yeah. He was anything about what people remember about history anymore.

 

He also, Göering also held the rank of Reichs marshal, which made him not only the highest ranking officer of any kind in Germany, but also the highest ranking officer in all of German military history. So it was like the equivalent of maybe a six-star general in the U.S. Army. And right away Kelley was interested in Goering. Goering had many advantages. Goering was highly intelligent, he was charming, he was a jokester, he loved to tell jokes about himself and even about Hitler. He had a very good analytic mind, and he was a great conversationalist and an open conversationalist. But Kelley could not ignore these dark and dangerous aspects of his character that he - he had felt no remorse for anything that had happened. He seemed not to have a conscience, and he completely lacked empathy for anyone outside of his immediate family, which was just his wife and daughter. So Kelley had to approach him carefully. Both men were master manipulators. And right away they set about to manipulating one another. Goering convinced Kelley to, also under the radar unsanctioned, pass letters from Goering to his wife and daughter outside the prison. And then  Kelley convinced Goering to engage with him in these wide-ranging long conversations in Goering's prison cell about  what  Goering considered to be his motivations and even topics of strictly historical interest, like what was the attraction of the Germans to Adolf Hitler, why did the German government break so many foreign treaties, things like that, that Kelley just wanted to get straight in his own mind. So Goering gave Kelley the opportunity to have insights about Goering. And it was very helpful to Kelley in as he was reaching his conclusions about what these men were all about.

 

I was curious, so that part was historically accurate where he gets them to sneak the letters to Goering's family?

 

Yes, absolutely. In those 15 boxes that Doug, the son, showed to me were copies of all those letters.

 

Wow.

 

Interesting. Yeah, which you think is a brilliant technique or technique, right? If you want to suck someone into your orbit, get them to do a favor for you.

 

Well, that's exactly where my mind was going, was the idea. I mean, the word narcissism was thrown out a few times in the work, and, assumedly this person was diagnosably narcissistic. I mean, Goering as a figure, I mean, just comes to mind the in psychiatry /psychology, we call it the dark triad of psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. These really bad personality traits to all come together. Somebody who lacks remorse and empathy, somebody who wants to feel powerful, somebody who might feel like a chip on their shoulder, bad combination to come together to be able to produce really awful things. And again, growing to me, I was like, these are this is what this looks like to me. And one of the thoughts I was having was that, you know, I work quite a bit with people with personality disorders, obviously in a very different way, different kind of people. But one of the things we know about personality disorders we certainly know more about, I think, now than we did then, is that somebody's emotional world can become incredibly almost infectious when you're talking with someone like this. And so I was thinking about this idea that Herman Goering's probably raging narcissist who's got all this probably intense emotional affect inside of him. And it made me think about how  Dr. Kelley probably got sucked into his emotional world a bit. And I wonder if, in your experience of going through his work, as you kind of conceptualize Dr. Kelley, if your sense was that he was kind of won over by Goering, at least maybe even in parts, or if there was a sense of kind of coming to, like, oh, this person's I get it.

 

Yeah, I did not get that sense because throughout it all, Dr. Kelley remained staunchly anti-Nazi. And as time went on, he learned more about the crimes of the Third Reich. All of this was just being discovered at the time. And as Dr. Kelley learned more, he became even more disgusted by what Goering and these other men had done. So Kelley was quite a formidable man in his own right, and maybe that doesn't come through as strongly in the movie as it does in my book. But when I have talked with the son, Doug, and I've stayed in touch with Doug all these years, he was a very valuable resource for my book. We have always referred to those jail cell meetings between his father and Goering as King Kong versus Godzilla. I mean, these were two evenly matched men. And it could be that Rami Malik's portrayal in the movie makes him look a little less formidable than Dr. Kelley really was.

 

Well, and I guess in my mind, just to be clear what I was thinking to you, I guess I shouldn't say won over in that agreed with what Goering did, or or any sense of being like okay with it, but more like even in the movie, they the word “friend” gets used a bit. Or sort of like again, not a sense of like anything you did is okay, but sort of like a sense of: “I see your humanity.” And I imagine that is part of how we came to this conclusion of like this isn't just some insane psychopathic human. This is a human being with motivation, and he was able to see that is my sense.

 

Yes, in that sense, Kelley was won over that way or went that way on his own. And he even declared that Nazism and other forms of totalitarianism are not a German problem or an Italian or Japanese problem um from the war but are a human problem. And that what he really wanted to do was to understand their motivations. And what he came to believe was that most of these men were power-hungry and opportunists for power, and that the ideological underpinnings of Nazism were just rungs on the ladder that they used to climb to the top of their departments or of the party or the government office that they ran. And that it was not so much about ideology. It was more about them and what they thirsted for and how they could get it.

 

Right.

 

I mean, the sense is that they had, at least as portrayed in the book and there is that, you know, they like someone like Goering had no particular problem with Jewish people or anyone else, but if that was the prevailing way to get ahead, then he was happy to do it and to do the things that, you know, the horrible things that he needed to do to rise to power, I imagine.

 

Yeah, Goering did say that, but that has to be taken with a huge grit.

 

Well, say more about that. That gets into justification. How did they justify their actions?

 

Well, another way that  Goering was manipulating Kelley was that he was using their conversations to develop, to formulate his defense in the trial. He would try out arguments on Kelley and see how it worked. And so one of his arguments was that the Nazi regime was not about anti-Semitism or racial hatred or military conquest, none of that. It was all about patriotism and loyalty, especially loyalty to Adolf Hitler, who, after all, was the figure, as Goering said, who made Germans feel German again. But the evidence, overwhelmingly the evidence presented in the trial and uncovered later, shows that these men did base their policies on racial hatred and anti-Semitism. The documents that Goering signed are legion in establishing Germany's  anti-Jewish laws and  all of that. So we have to be careful about what they say versus what they did.

 

Sure. Well, and this is where my question to you, and I yeah, I'm on feel free to take this however you'd like to take it. But my question to you is when you think about Kelley's story, and particularly these conclusions surrounding  that and again, I will say maybe to back up for a second, I am not an expert in this by any means in regard to this history or these particular people, but my guess is there is more common shared psychopathology as we know it now. Because I think we've probably created more of an understanding, particularly of personality and trauma-based psychopathology that might help us understand some of this more. But let's again say it's not just some crazy quote unquote, I'm doing air quotes here, deviant thing, but that this is not a German problem. This was not just a problem of a particular kind of bad egg, but this could happen and it could happen again. This is a human problem. And I wonder for you, like, what do you imagine are things to be learned from this story, from this relationship, and from what Dr. Kelley and his work with these people found?

 

Well, Kelley, throughout my research and writing of the book, ended up persuading me. There were others at Nuremberg who thought differently from him, including  Dr. Gustav Gilbert, who was in the movie also and  overlapped with Kelley for many months.

 

And then there's a later one, too, right?  Goldenson?

 

Leon Goldenson. I don't think he and Kelley ever met. But Gilbert was a PhD psychologist, so his background was a little bit different, but he came to very different conclusions about the defendants, even looking at some of the very same Rorschach results and other test results. He believed that in some cases psychiatric disorders could  explain some of their behaviors. But I became persuaded by Dr. Kelley, in part because, as I said earlier, I think history has borne out what what he said. And also I was swayed by the experience he wrote about in his book that he published in 1947, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, about returning to America with changed eyes after spending all this time with the Nazis and looking, for instance, at the American South at that time, politically ruled by these demagogues who were legislating Jim Crow laws and enacting voting restrictions against black voters and even more powerfully manipulating the electorate through propaganda in the same way that the Nazis had in Germany. And he believed that this was a sign of incipient authoritarianism in the U.S. He was saying not that it could happen, he was saying it is happening.

 

It is happening.

 

Yeah, and so he rolled out a plan to help America defend itself against authoritarianism. And there are three points to the plan. I think two of the points are very well taken. And had we followed them in 1947, we'd be in much better shape than we are now. And that  includes  one point that had to do with education. From kindergarten through university learning, he thought critical thinking must be emphasized in schools because becoming a critical thinker safeguards you against the emotional manipulation that's inherent in political propaganda. And the other point he made had to do with voting, that voting should be made as easy as possible for all qualified voters. And we're seeing now many efforts to make voting more difficult even for qualified voters. And had that happened, I think we'd be in a different place. Now, his third point I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts on, because he believed there should be mandatory psychiatric evaluations of anybody interested in running for a political office. Yes.

 

Yeah, I think it's giving psychiatrists a lot of credit.

 

Well, this is, I mean, it brings to the fore an idea that I think is actually being incredibly grappled with as the field of mental health, psychiatry, psychology, all of it. And I mean, we've been having conversations even on my own teams about this recently, which is that we have to distinguish between somebody doing something awful, horrid,  unacceptable, and true mental health psychopathology. Because there's a ton of unhelpful stigma around this idea that, you know, we'll use one of the more obvious ones right now. Anybody who's a shooter, a mass shooter is, you know, mentally insane. And some of the ways that this gets caught up in like mental health stigma. And so this idea between how we have to find some differentiation between this. Not everybody who does something bad has a psychiatric illness, and psychiatry has something to offer, I think, people who do have something to offer in helping remediate systems and individuals who do bad things. And I just I don't think psychiatry is at a place where we can wipe our hands of it and be like, well, this isn't a psychiatric issue, so we don't have anything to do with it.

 

And yet again, like well, yeah, though cynically I think we're really good after the fact.

 

Right. Right. I do feel I mean wewe do this now more and more for clergy, for people in the police force, that there is a necessity to do psychological evaluation. So again, I mean, I certainly would be thinking about again, what do we have to offer to safeguard some of this in our understanding of the problem?

 

I don't know. Psychiatrists had  brushes with grandiosity of thinking they can solve the world's problem. This is a different discussion. But at any rate, my question now seems so mundane compared to that, but you mentioned he died by suicide, not just any suicide. He died by the same suicide that Goering did. And so it's easy being psychologist, psychiatrist, you know, to make a lot about sort of taking suicide. I don't know if you do, or do you just think it was convenient, or do you think this was some kind of weird identification? Or I don't know. What's your thoughts?

 

It was one of my central questions when I went into my research. What was the connection between these two suicide thoughts? Yeah. Your listeners may not know that Hermann Goering committed suicide by poisoning himself with cyanide just hours before he was to be executed.

 

He didn't want the public show, basically, right?

 

Right. And he said that he strongly objected to being hanged, which he thought was a form of execution for highway robbers and not former leaders of nations. So he did that, and his Goering’s suicide was in that sense then an act of defiance. He was telling the Allied powers, I'm not doing it, I'm not doing it your way, I'm going out my way. Okay, twelve years later, Kelley has had a lot of problems in his life since Nuremberg, not only some of the professional problems of  doubting his medical specialty and his marriage, too, I think, right? His marriage and he had a drinking problem. As Doug explained to me, his father was a very difficult man to grow up with. And he believed that in his teaching work, and he was by this time a professor at the University of California, not in psychiatry, but in criminology, that he was underappreciated. And so he grew very angry and depressed. And I think he chose cyanide to end his life, and he did it in spectacular fashion, standing on the landing of the stairway in his home with his family staring at him, wondering what he was doing, and he swallowed the cyanide and died within 10 seconds. He did it also as a theatrical kind of aggressive, yes, that really is. He was saying, you know, nobody understands me, I'm in great pain, no one cares, all of those kinds of things. And so I think the connection was not that Kelley was imitating Goering, but that they were similar men who both had reasons for wanting to go out in a dramatic theatrical way. And they chose the same drug for that reason.

 

That I think that's one of the most compelling parts of the movie in regard to like the emotionality of it, are these moments where you can where it's, and it's beautifully portrayed, this experience of how these two men see themselves in the other, these two people who feel so I think probably better than the other, and have so much stake in feeling like I am better than you, and you don't get to tell me I'm morally, you know, inferior to you. That they see parts of themselves in each other and I imagine how, especially for Dr. Kelley, how terrifying that must have felt.

 

In the movie, Goering’s final words are “Abracadabra,” (in the movie) and that's in homage to what magic tricks Kelley had taught him. Of course, no one knows what his final words or if he said anything. But it is a very clever touch, and those are things that a filmmaker could do that I could not do in a nonfiction book. I had, you know, I want to keep it factual, but the filmmaker has more license.

 

Yeah. I know we're getting to the end, and gosh, I feel like we've barely scratched the surface. But I did want to know, as you're doing all this research and doing this, is there anything that fundamentally surprised you compared to when you were going in and what your assumptions were?

 

Well on one level, a surprise that I felt was that going into it, I was a believer that these men were monsters or insane. I am Jewish and I had family members killed in the Holocaust. Goering signed the papers that enabled the Holocaust and anti-Jewish laws in Germany. So that changed within me. Another change which surprised me even more was that, as I did my research and began connecting with and relying on the son, Doug, so much, I began to see him as the hero of the story because he survived this really difficult upbringing by a difficult man and came through it intact, perceptive, able to remember so much. Without him, without Doug, the son, there would have been no book. And so that was not something that I expected at all.

 

Well, and again, I would love to commend you and just how much I admire your work because I think that what you're modeling, even in your work of writing this book, especially from the vantage point that you have from it, I think it's so important. I really believe this as a psychologist and as a person who lives in the current world we live in, is that we have to stop believing in monsters. Because I actually think the more that we do that, we remove and we distance ourselves in a way that makes it really easy to never see it where it actually exists. And again, to not say then that, oh, people are just people or to excuse any of the atrocities that people across history have done, but to stop acting like these are people who are just completely so deviant and distant from the everyday person that it could never be. Because again, I think that really cripples our capacity to do the critical thinking of how does this happen and how does it happen to the every, you know, not the every man, but like the world that we continue to live in. This stuff happens.

 

And how can we prevent it if that's at all possible?

 

Gosh, can you share… I was really struck by the last quote in the film, which I could summarize. If you know it, do you know it by heart?

 

Well, it didn't come from my book, but I've seen the movie enough so that I can paraphrase it at least by someone named Collingswood. And it's something like “ the only way to know what mankind is capable of is to look at what mankind. Mankind has done.” That's not the exact words, but it's something like that.

 

It was an excellent last punch of the film, I thought, because I thought that's exactly if I were to have a takeaway from this. Well, that's the takeaway.

 

Well, we're very impressed with what you've done. And we really appreciate that. And I have to go back. I remember “The Lobotomist” too. I wish we had more time to talk about that. But yeah, yeah.

 

This work that you've done to bring Dr. Kelley's story to life. Because again, I'm with you. I think that what at a general level, like the theme of like as we're talking about, that these aren't monsters and this is something more complicated, is so important and so relevant. And so thank you for your work and thank you for coming on and talking to us about this.

 

Oh, thank you, thank you for such thoughtful questions. I enjoyed it.

 

Oh, yeah, thank you. So once again,  you've been listening to the Mind Dive podcasts, and I'm your host, Bob Boland.

 

And I'm Dr. Kerry Horrell, and we've been with we've been listening to Jack El-Hai, who's The New York Times bestselling author of “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.” If you're interested as well, his book has been adapted to a movie  called “Nuremberg,” starring Russell Crowe, Rommy Malik, among awesome cast.

 

I'd say get the book.

 

Yeah, absolutely. But both are out there. And again, thank you for joining us.

 

My pleasure.

 

So once again, okay, do it.

 

 you want to do it? Let's do it again. All right, yeah. We've been your hosts.

 

I'm Dr. Kerry Horrell.

 

And I'm Bob Boland.