Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Nuremberg" & the Psychology of Evil

Transcript

"Nuremberg" & the Psychology of Evil · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:02
  G'day humans!
• 0:04
  Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  It's been one of the most
• 0:09
  uncomfortable questions that humans have asked themselves ever since the atrocities of the
• 0:13
  Holocaust and the Second World War.
• 0:16
  Were top Nazi leaders mad?
• 0:20
  Were they psychopaths?
• 0:21
  Were they
• 0:22
  evil?
• 0:23
  Were they sort of like religious fundamentalists in the sense that they
• 0:26
  were committed to a deranged ideology?
• 0:28
  Were they just amoral narcissists who were grasping for
• 0:32
  power in the wrong place at the wrong time?
• 0:35
  What the hell happened?
• 0:38
  Jack Elhigh wrote the book
• 0:39
  about what the hell happened and what was going on in the minds of senior Nazis.
• 0:44
  It's a book that
• 0:44
  became the recent movie Nuremberg, in which Russell Crowe played Herman Goering.
• 0:50
  It was the
• 0:50
  story of this intellectual cat and mouse game between Goering and 21 other senior Nazis who
• 0:55
  were imprisoned in Nuremberg jail awaiting the trial of the century, the Nuremberg trials,
• 1:00
  a cat and mouse game between Goering and the young US psychiatrist who had been appointed
• 1:06
  to determine whether or not Goering was insane.
• 1:09
  And this psychiatrist spent eight months in
• 1:12
  Nuremberg jail, well, not sleeping in Nuremberg jail, but spending his days in Nuremberg jail
• 1:16
  with Goering and these 21 other senior Nazis, trying for the life of him to find some commonalities
• 1:22
  between them, to find the pathology, to find out what evil meant, to try to identify the traits
• 1:29
  and characteristics that might give humankind some guidance to be able to identify monsters like this
• 1:35
  in the future.
• 1:36
  Now, this psychiatrist's private notes stayed secret until they were released
• 1:40
  specifically to today's guest, just for research, on his book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.
• 1:47
  Jack joins me to share what he learned about this fascinating moment in history,
• 1:52
  in psychiatry, and what we all should understand about evil.
• 1:56
  Please enjoy, as much as I did, the one, the only, Jack L. High.
• 2:04
  At the end of World War II,
• 2:06
  Hermann Goering was the highest-ranking member of the German Nazi government,
• 2:12
  still standing.
• 2:13
  And his colleagues, Adolf Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, had all taken their own lives.
• 2:21
  And a good question is, why didn't Goering?
• 2:24
  He had cyanide capsules in his possession.
• 2:27
  And it's because through all of the work he did in a multitude of positions in the Nazi government and military, he believed that he was the person who should lead Germany forward in this transitional time for the country.
• 2:46
  Of course, the Allies would have nothing to do with that.
• 2:49
  But that was Goering's position when he was arrested.
• 2:54
  And he was the head of the Luftwaffe, head of the Reichstag.
• 2:59
  He held the military position of Reichsmarschall, which was the highest rank possible in the German military.
• 3:09
  and he was a guy who was in on it from the very beginning.
• 3:14
  He was an early member of Hitler's National Socialist Party
• 3:18
  and he climbed his way to the top and stayed there until it all crashed down.
• 3:23
  And it's not like he was arrested hiding in a bunker in Berlin
• 3:26
  and dragged out Saddam Hussein-style to face justice.
• 3:30
  He just rocked up.
• 3:31
  He gave himself in.
• 3:32
  He brought his motorcade with dozens and dozens of bags full of gems
• 3:37
  and all of his wealth and surrendered to the Allies.
• 3:40
  Is that right?
• 3:41
  That is right.
• 3:42
  He sought out the U.S. Army.
• 3:44
  He did not want to be captured by the Russians.
• 3:48
  And he knew the Americans were close by.
• 3:52
  Goering was actually in Austria at this time.
• 3:55
  And he wanted to be in American custody
• 4:00
  because he thought that was the way
• 4:02
  he would accomplish his goal of returning as a German leader.
• 4:06
  So he plausibly thought that the Americans would see him, even though he was one of the most important and senior Nazi officials, as a viable transitional leader of Germany into whatever Germany would hence become.
• 4:20
  By the way, how was Germany administered at this point in time after the Nazis fell?
• 4:25
  How were roads getting cleaned?
• 4:28
  and the political situation.
• 4:32
  There were zones operated by the Allied governments,
• 4:36
  France, the UK, US, and USSR.
• 4:40
  And they were still mainly Germans
• 4:43
  who were doing that kind of work.
• 4:46
  But the Allies had divided the place up
• 4:50
  and were administering it all.
• 4:52
  But at the time Goering was arrested,
• 4:55
  it was on the last day of the war.
• 4:57
  So none of that had yet happened.
• 4:59
  I see.
• 5:00
  So the Nazis were still functionally in control of Germany when he gave himself up.
• 5:04
  And so he ostensibly, I suppose, was the leader of Germany at that point?
• 5:09
  Well, no, not really, because Hitler had soured on him in the final days of the war and had
• 5:17
  appointed somebody else to be his successor.
• 5:20
  That man was Karl Dönitz, who was a naval man.
• 5:24
  So Dönitz was the designated Fuhrer, the next successor.
• 5:32
  Dönitz was also arrested and was held, along with Goering and 20 others, for this first Nuremberg trial.
• 5:40
  I see.
• 5:41
  I'll bet Goering didn't like that since for many years he'd always been the heir to being the Fuhrer in the case of Hitler's demise.
• 5:49
  He especially didn't like it because Hitler had sent out an SS squad to kill him and that Goering had convinced those guys not to kill him and had left his estate and then sought out the protection, really, of the Americans.
• 6:06
  And what was the nature of the souring?
• 6:08
  Why was Hitler so, why did he have such animosity to Goering that he actually wanted to kill him?
• 6:13
  Because in the final days of the war, Goering had suggested to Hitler, maybe you want to leave off of being leader now that things are crashing down.
• 6:26
  And I'm happy to take it up in your place.
• 6:30
  And Hitler saw that as treasonous and insubordination and all of that and reacted very badly to it.
• 6:40
  Right.
• 6:40
  Okay.
• 6:41
  And do you know, I mean, Goering was a very proud man and a very vain person, as comes across in your book.
• 6:48
  Did he assume, was he transactional enough in his ideology that he assumed that he would lead a Germany that was not a Nazi Germany and he would be okay with that?
• 7:00
  he knew that Germany had to change.
• 7:03
  He didn't know how.
• 7:05
  Nobody knew how.
• 7:07
  Yes, he was pragmatic
• 7:09
  enough to want to take Germany wherever it would be going, and he thought it would be good for
• 7:17
  Germany for him to do so, because he was already an acknowledged leader, or had been for many years
• 7:24
  now.
• 7:25
  And do we know if the allies knew whether he was still alive?
• 7:31
  That I'm a little less clear on, whether they believed he was alive up to the time that he was
• 7:38
  arrested.
• 7:40
  They may have suspected that, like the others, he would have committed suicide.
• 7:45
  Yeah.
• 7:45
  And so when he just shows up and American soldiers suddenly realize who he is, this is
• 7:51
  obviously an incredible scalp for them to have.
• 7:55
  What do they do with him?
• 7:56
  Is there any debate
• 7:57
  about that?
• 7:58
  How does he avoid being just shot?
• 8:00
  If he's just rocking up in a fancy Nazi car to a
• 8:04
  U.S. checkpoint, what happens?
• 8:06
  Well, he made quite a stagey theatrical appearance
• 8:11
  with his entourage and all the luggage strapped into the automobile.
• 8:18
  He was taken into custody
• 8:21
  brought to an airport and then flown to eventually to Luxembourg, a town called Mondorf,
• 8:32
  where other high-ranking Nazis were also being held in a converted hotel.
• 8:38
  And there was some
• 8:39
  difficulty in getting him there because the two-seat plane that he was initially supposed
• 8:46
  to travel in couldn't take off because he was so heavy.
• 8:51
  He was a big man.
• 8:53
  And so they had to find
• 8:55
  another larger plane to get him off the ground to his destination.
• 9:00
  Okay.
• 9:00
  A lot of sauerkraut and dumplings and pork knuckle when you're at the very top of the Third
• 9:06
  Reich for a decade or more.
• 9:09
  But as he strongly believed, he was the picture of the perfect
• 9:14
  German male.
• 9:16
  He thought his body type was ideal.
• 9:19
  Right.
• 9:20
  And we'll come to his body type and his
• 9:23
  vanity and the way that the psychiatrist played into that in order to get back into shape.
• 9:29
  But at this point in the story, so he's in custody.
• 9:33
  At what point do the allies start
• 9:34
  trying to figure out, like there's always a conundrum when you win a war against a bunch
• 9:38
  of tyrants, right?
• 9:39
  Do you leave the tyrants to be savaged and disemboweled and torn limb from limb
• 9:45
  by their people, as was the case with Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi in recent memory?
• 9:51
  Or do you
• 9:54
  just court-martial them and kill them?
• 9:56
  Do you lock them up forever in a Guantanamo Bay?
• 10:00
  How did the idea come about that you're going to hold a trial that has never been held before,
• 10:06
  you know, whose jurisdiction is questionable and whose legal basis is sort of being invented as it goes along.
• 10:13
  The Allies had been discussing this for almost a year before the war ended, what to do with the leaders of Germany.
• 10:22
  And the conversation went back and forth quite a bit.
• 10:26
  Initially, the weight was on the side of lining them against a wall and shooting them.
• 10:34
  But eventually everyone came around to the idea of holding a trial, a historic trial, because it was the first time an international group, a group of nations, had gotten together to try the defeated members of a government that had lost a war.
• 10:57
  So this was completely new.
• 11:02
  But what won over the allies to this idea was the belief that trying the Germans in a trial that would not be a show trial like the Russians had been conducting for quite a while already,
• 11:20
  would allow the public in all of the countries to see the massive amount of evidence that had
• 11:28
  been accumulated against the Nazis that told explicitly who did what and what was done.
• 11:38
  And that that knowledge through the trial would have a great benefit in the future,
• 11:46
  foiling any attempts to resurrect a positive image of the German government, and then,
• 11:53
  ideally, foiling other efforts to impose authoritarianism or Nazism in the same way
• 12:02
  in the future.
• 12:03
  So that was the part of the idea that won over the Allies.
• 12:07
  And I have to say,
• 12:09
  It succeeded very well for a very long time.
• 12:13
  We're now 80 years past, and it is still performing well in that way.
• 12:21
  Well, it succeeded until the children of the people who were directly involved died,
• 12:26
  which has sort of just happened over the past decade or two.
• 12:30
  And now you're seeing a predictable, I suppose, in hindsight, upsurge in people doubting the credibility of that story, unfortunately.
• 12:39
  I say as the grandson of someone who lived through all that and who just lost my father
• 12:43
  last year you know you can sort of see the final you know pins in the bowling alley
• 12:50
  topple over and more and more people become skeptical about what now feels like ancient
• 12:53
  history but that setting that aside so getting this down on the record the idea that if you have
• 12:59
  a forensic accounting of exactly what happened then that will sort of safeguard us for future
• 13:05
  generations.
• 13:06
  The other component of that was the instinct of this psychiatrist who you dug into and
• 13:12
  whose papers you went over equally forensically and his desire to not only articulate the facts
• 13:19
  of what happened, but to try to dig into the why of what happened by spending all this time with
• 13:24
  Goering and the other senior Nazis and interviewing them and getting to know them and trying to
• 13:28
  understand them.
• 13:30
  Who was this psychiatrist and what was his initial remit supposed to be?
• 13:35
  He was Douglas Kelly.
• 13:37
  He was a military psychiatrist, and he was really my entry point into the story, not the trial or the defendants.
• 13:47
  I had no particular interest or insights into either of those before I learned about Dr. Kelly.
• 13:56
  He was a native Californian who had attended medical school at the University of California.
• 14:04
  He was a psychiatrist with a good, solid reputation, especially as an interpreter of the results of a test known as the Rorschach inkblot test.
• 14:17
  Many people might be familiar with those cards with the inkblot images that are shown to subjects.
• 14:23
  And Dr. Kelly was working in field hospitals in Western Europe at the end of the war.
• 14:31
  These hospitals were treating soldiers who suffered from what today we would call PTSD.
• 14:38
  And Kelly and his colleagues had impressive successes working with those soldiers.
• 14:45
  So Kelly was there when the war ended.
• 14:49
  He was relatively young, only 33 years old, but he had a good reputation and he was relatively high in rank in the army.
• 14:59
  So when the International Military Tribunal, this court that had been set up by the Allies, began putting together the process of a trial of these 22 high leaders of Germany, they needed a psychiatrist to come in to examine the defendants to see if they were mentally fit to stand trial.
• 15:25
  And so this was to determine whether they met the legal bar of mental fitness, which is quite a bit lower than the medical bar for mental fitness.
• 15:37
  And determining that was something that Kelly could do quite handily and quite quickly.
• 15:43
  And he realized to do it quickly would be a waste of this wonderful opportunity.
• 15:50
  He knew that many other psychiatrists would have gladly traded places with him because there he was among men who already were being thought of as the arch criminals of the 20th century.
• 16:04
  And he had a chance to study them.
• 16:07
  And so he decided he would study them more thoroughly than what the court required.
• 16:13
  And he set up a project for himself completely under the radar, unsanctioned by the allies, to determine whether these defendants suffered from a shared psychiatric disorder that might account for their crimes and heinous behaviors before and during the war.
• 16:35
  That's what he did.
• 16:37
  And that's how he spent most of the eight months that he was with the defendants in the run up to the trial and then a few months during the trial itself.
• 16:50
  so he's brought in for this fairly dull prosaic reason uh of like just making sure that they're
• 16:56
  not so batshit crazy that they can't even understand the concept of a trial or you know
• 17:00
  what they're up against and instead he launches this sort of covert personal hobby horse of trying
• 17:05
  to understand trying to i guess glean similarities uh similar dysfunctions similar traits amongst
• 17:12
  these people who as you say are probably guilty of the worst things that human beings have ever
• 17:19
  done on an industrialized scale.
• 17:22
  How does he begin to broach that?
• 17:24
  What do we know about,
• 17:24
  for example, his initial meeting with Goering?
• 17:29
  In his initial meeting with Goering, he was
• 17:31
  treating Goering as a patient because Goering needed medical help.
• 17:37
  One thing that was discovered
• 17:39
  after Goering was arrested was that among all of these suitcases and other containers of
• 17:49
  stuff that he had brought along with him was nearly the world's entire supply of a drug
• 17:56
  called pericodine, a narcotic painkiller.
• 18:00
  And sorry, pericodine, is that different from
• 18:03
  the codeine that we know?
• 18:05
  It's a different form of codeine that was manufactured in Germany.
• 18:10
  So that's why Goering was able to corner the market.
• 18:14
  And he was addicted to it.
• 18:16
  He was taking
• 18:17
  dozens of pills of paracordine every day.
• 18:21
  It was an addiction that had begun in the late 1930s when he was prescribed paracordine
• 18:27
  after some dental work.
• 18:30
  And do you know the effect?
• 18:32
  Is there a psychoactive effect of codeine in addition to the addiction?
• 18:36
  Is it a bit like we might think of Oxycontin and those kinds of drugs in modern day where
• 18:42
  they give you a slight buzz, a slight high feeling of comfort?
• 18:47
  Yes, there was that buzz.
• 18:49
  And also, Goering said that he took it to keep his mind clear.
• 18:54
  And he popped it like candy.
• 18:56
  Even during meetings he was having with other people, he had a bowl on his desk, and he would pop it periodically.
• 19:04
  And but the allies wanted him off of it.
• 19:11
  Nobody wanted Goering or any of the other defendants to suffer from medical problems before the trial that might result in their premature death.
• 19:21
  So Kelly convinced Goering to wean himself off of pericotine by appealing to Goering's vanity.
• 19:33
  Kelly told him, this is a difficult thing to break an addiction like this, but you are not a normal man.
• 19:42
  You are an exemplary man, and you, above most others, have the willpower and the strength and fortitude to break this kind of addiction.
• 19:53
  And Goering accepted that and did break it.
• 19:56
  He also lost quite a bit of weight that had been contributing to his heart problems and had earlier made it impossible for him to take off in the airplane.
• 20:08
  Yes, I think it's a good sign that you could probably lose a few kilos if you're too fat for your airplane to get off the ground.
• 20:16
  And the same tactic was used by Dr. Kelly, the appeal to his unique willpower and vanity?
• 20:25
  Yes, but in this case, it was less effective because Goering was very proud of his appearance.
• 20:32
  As large as he was, he thought it was a good look.
• 20:35
  But Kelly was able to persuade him that for health's sake, he should lose weight.
• 20:43
  So their initial meetings were very much as doctor and patient.
• 20:48
  That changed, though, over time.
• 20:51
  And didn't Dr. Kelly also tell him that for the television cameras in the court, that foreign audiences would deem him to be more virile if he was slimmer?
• 21:04
  I don't know if the virility came into it.
• 21:08
  That may be my interpretation.
• 21:10
  But certainly more attractive for the cameras, moving pictures or still photos, all of it.
• 21:17
  Yeah, right.
• 21:18
  So that's another way to appeal to his family.
• 21:21
  Do you get the impression from accessing Kelly's writings that he was going into these early meetings with his plan fully formed about developing some kind of theory of the Nazi mind?
• 21:31
  Or was this something that gradually dawned on him over the course of his experiences with Goering and others?
• 21:38
  I think it came to Kelly quickly that he didn't know even why he was among these men initially.
• 21:47
  And then he found out about the court's interest in having him determine the fitness of the defendants.
• 21:54
  And I think that's when his brain began working.
• 21:58
  How am I going to make the most of this?
• 22:00
  And then he carried it even further beyond his medical psychiatric project to writing a book.
• 22:08
  Very early on in his time with the defendants, Kelly decided he was going to write a book about them when he returned to the States.
• 22:18
  and not to bury the lead for too long jack but the but much of what's fascinating about your
• 22:24
  work is this conflict that kelly starts to develop between his empathy for these people as human
• 22:30
  beings and in fact his charm in a way his sense of being charmed by their personality strengths at
• 22:37
  the same time as he is obviously wrestling with the magnitude of the evils that they were able to
• 22:43
  pull off.
• 22:44
  Does his initial impressions of Goering give us insight into that?
• 22:50
  How is
• 22:51
  Goering behaving?
• 22:52
  Is he warm and friendly?
• 22:54
  Is he cold and aloof?
• 22:56
  No, Goering could not be cold
• 22:58
  and aloof.
• 22:59
  He was friendly.
• 23:01
  He was charming.
• 23:02
  That was one of the defining qualities of Herman
• 23:04
  Goering.
• 23:05
  Charm, along with intelligence, good sense of humor, and a great analytical mind.
• 23:15
  One of the things Kelly did with all of the defendants was test their IQs.
• 23:20
  And Goering was
• 23:21
  immensely proud that he, of the 22, came out third from the top with an IQ of 138, which is quite
• 23:30
  high.
• 23:33
  But Kelly was never seduced completely by Goering's great, admirable qualities,
• 23:45
  because also apparent early on were his dark and dangerous qualities.
• 23:51
  Goering, like many of the
• 23:52
  others, seemed to have no conscience.
• 23:55
  He certainly felt no remorse for anything that had happened
• 23:59
  during the war and before.
• 24:02
  And he seemed to display no empathy for anyone other than his
• 24:10
  wife and young daughter, who were, of course, living outside the prison.
• 24:14
  So in their conversations,
• 24:18
  these were not just conversations to determine what Goering's psyche was like.
• 24:23
  They talked a lot
• 24:24
  about the war and military strategy, things like that.
• 24:28
  And Goering's ruthlessness became evident
• 24:33
  in those talks.
• 24:35
  And yet it's coupled with this.
• 24:36
  I mean, when you say he had a total lack of empathy,
• 24:39
  it is a big exception to say, except for his wife and daughter, who he was constantly
• 24:44
  asking about and concerned about.
• 24:46
  And when he was in the German government, he was responsible for
• 24:51
  forestries or something.
• 24:52
  He was a great, far ahead of his time, advocate for animal rights.
• 24:59
  And he believed in treating animals, especially animals who were hunted,
• 25:10
  far more kindly than he believed in treating many subjects of Germany.
• 25:17
  So especially Jews
• 25:19
  and the other targeted groups.
• 25:22
  And his empathy toward his wife and daughter, these were more
• 25:27
  extensions of his feelings about himself.
• 25:30
  They were part of him.
• 25:32
  And he didn't think of them
• 25:34
  as separate from him.
• 25:36
  Anyone who was separate from him was not going to get empathy.
• 25:40
  One of
• 25:41
  the questions Kelly asked him early on had to do with an event in Germany before the war started
• 25:48
  called the Night of the Long Knives.
• 25:51
  And this was a purge of Nazi ranks before the war.
• 25:55
  And
• 25:56
  one of the people who Goering ordered murdered during that Night of the Long Knives was a man
• 26:02
  named Ernst Röhm, who Goering had known for many, many years, and they had been close friends.
• 26:10
  So
• 26:10
  Kelly asked him, how could you order the murder of your good friend wrong?
• 26:18
  And Goering looked at Kelly like he was a simpleton and said, but he was in my way.
• 26:27
  And that really is such a succinct summation of how a narcissist thinks and how someone lacking in empathy thinks.
• 26:40
  the the writings of dr kelly talk about how he would come into the inter-guring cell
• 26:46
  and uh he would say he writes he'd jump up from his chair greet me with a broad smile and an
• 26:51
  outstretched hand escort me to his cot and pat its middle with his great paw good morning doctor i'm
• 26:56
  so glad you've come to see me please sit down doctor sit here what's that about do you think
• 27:02
  Is that an act?
• 27:05
  Well, not really, because it's part of the manipulation that both Goering and Kelly were good at.
• 27:16
  And they both wanted things from each other.
• 27:19
  Kelly wanted access to Goering and his thoughts and his feelings and to get Goering to take all of these tests that Kelly wanted.
• 27:28
  Goering, in turn, wanted access somehow to his family outside of prison.
• 27:35
  But as time went on, Goering also wanted Kelly's unconscious help in developing his defense.
• 27:44
  Goering knew this trial was coming
• 27:46
  he knew he would probably be convicted
• 27:49
  of war crimes
• 27:50
  and he also knew that he would probably
• 27:52
  be sentenced to death
• 27:53
  but he saw the trial as
• 27:56
  a way to defend Germany
• 27:59
  and to show
• 28:01
  that in Goering's mind
• 28:03
  or at least in the defense he offered
• 28:06
  anti-Semitism, racial hate
• 28:10
  thirst for conquest
• 28:12
  these were not part of what
• 28:14
  Germany was trying to do during the war.
• 28:16
  Instead, it was all about nationalism, patriotism,
• 28:20
  and loyalty to Hitler.
• 28:23
  So that's the case that Goering was experimenting with as he talked to
• 28:28
  Kelly in these long hours they spent in Goering's cell.
• 28:33
  Right, I see.
• 28:34
  So he's sort of A-B testing
• 28:36
  different claims to see which ones just aren't going to fly and which ones might be more plausible.
• 28:42
  I mean, presumably Goering and the other senior Nazis, between the time of their capture or in Goering's case, surrender, they've gone from a mindset of, well, perhaps we can be involved in the next German government and we can work with the Allies to, you know, find some kind of conciliation to, they're definitely going to hang me.
• 29:03
  but I do have an opportunity to correct the record and to not make this a cakewalk for them by making
• 29:10
  Germans proud I mean you write about how well you quote Kelly writing about how Goering would say
• 29:17
  that in 40 or 50 years time every German house is going to have a statue of me it might be a little
• 29:24
  statue but they'll have a statue of me I mean that struck a chord with me since we currently have an
• 29:29
  occupant of the White House who seems very obsessed with there being statues of himself and
• 29:33
  placards of his name all over the place.
• 29:36
  That's an interesting characteristic for someone who
• 29:39
  is about to be found guilty of the worst crimes ever and hanged.
• 29:44
  And the fact that those statues didn't appear in Germany or anywhere is a testament, I think,
• 29:52
  to how effective that trial was in swaying public opinion and convincing people that what had gone
• 30:00
  on in Germany was really horrific and that war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against
• 30:06
  peace, all of those things really did happen and that there was nothing praiseworthy about the
• 30:14
  German government.
• 30:15
  And in convincing Germans themselves about who the target of blame should
• 30:19
  be for the horrors that they went through.
• 30:21
  You know, it was easy after World War I for them to blame foreign powers and blame the
• 30:27
  Treaty of Versailles and blame Germans who stabbed them in the back and blame their own
• 30:31
  military leaders and whatever, but not actually blame Germany.
• 30:36
  And as you say, it's obviously a testament to something that went right over the way
• 30:40
  that the war was able to be framed by the Allies inside Germany itself, that Germans
• 30:45
  emerged from it with no ambiguity about who the villains were.
• 30:50
  And maybe this is the place for me to mention that there were 21 defendants, and they used several different types of defense.
• 31:03
  Three of them were acquitted, but the others were all convicted.
• 31:08
  And some of them said they were following orders.
• 31:12
  Some of them said these terrible things must have happened, but I didn't know about it and used defenses like that.
• 31:20
  And I think it's notable that when evidence of the Jewish Holocaust came out in court, none of the defendants claimed it did not happen.
• 31:32
  and they were there.
• 31:36
  If it didn't happen, if they believed it didn't happen
• 31:39
  or they simply wanted to float that out there,
• 31:42
  that's a defense they could have used, but they chose not to.
• 31:46
  In fact, one of the guys on trial was this guy
• 31:50
  who was in charge of the Eastern Territories, right?
• 31:53
  Rosenberg, Alfred Rosenberg.
• 31:55
  He was the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories.
• 31:57
  And if people know their geography of greater Germany
• 32:01
  during the Third Reich, the Eastern Territories, of course, meant Poland and the death camps.
• 32:07
  How did Rosenberg's psychology, let's just try to assess whatever psychological patterns Dr. Kelly
• 32:13
  was or wasn't able to glean.
• 32:15
  As he talks to all these people, what did he notice about the
• 32:17
  differences between Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, Goering, the various people?
• 32:25
  Well, Rosenberg, as an example, Kelly believed that Rosenberg was completely caught up in his own anti-Semitic fantasy world.
• 32:38
  Rosenberg held a number of posts in the Nazi government, but probably he was most influential as a party philosopher, someone who laid out in very long, unreadable books what the philosophy and scientific basis was for the Nazis' racial beliefs and anti-Semitism.
• 33:04
  And this was all Rosenberg wanted to talk about with Kelly.
• 33:12
  And yet Kelly and Rosenberg did get along because Rosenberg was interested in talking.
• 33:19
  And there were several others like that, like Julius Stryker, who was the publisher of the newspaper Der Sturmer, anti-Semitic newspaper.
• 33:30
  And Kelly also could talk with him because Stryker was, he made no bones about what he was about.
• 33:41
  And he was happy to talk about it.
• 33:44
  The ones Kelly didn't like were two in particular.
• 33:50
  Albert Speer was one of them because Speer made noise about feeling remorse and wanting to take responsibility for some of his actions in the armaments, departments that he headed, etc.
• 34:09
  But Kelly could tell that Speer would not take responsibility for everything he did, including the worst things that he was responsible for.
• 34:20
  And that kind of hypocrisy really rankled Kelly.
• 34:24
  What were those, Jack?
• 34:25
  Just remind us, you know, for people who aren't into the minutiae of the Nazis' roles.
• 34:29
  Wasn't Speer an architect and designer for the Nazis originally?
• 34:33
  Yes, that's how he began.
• 34:36
  But Hitler later put him to work in the industrial part of Germany's efforts, making sure that industries, especially the armaments industry, were putting out what the country needed.
• 34:51
  And so to achieve those ends, Speer used slave labor in the industries very ruthlessly.
• 35:02
  Many people died as a result of Speer's initiatives.
• 35:07
  So some of those Jews, some of those young male fit Jews who were rounded up from concentration camps and put to work would have been working as unpaid slaves to make weapons for Speer.
• 35:20
  Even the elderly as the war went on and things were going worse for Germany.
• 35:26
  And then another figure, another of the defendants that Kelly disliked was Hans Frank, who was also in charge of Poland, eastern territories for a time.
• 35:43
  And Frank claimed to have undergone a religious conversion in prison.
• 35:50
  And Kelly would have none of that.
• 35:52
  He believed that Frank was faking his conversion so that he would receive lighter treatment.
• 35:59
  As it happened, Frank did not receive lighter treatment.
• 36:02
  He was executed.
• 36:04
  Speer did, however.
• 36:05
  He got a long prison sentence, but he was eventually released and went on to write a
• 36:11
  bestselling book and to spend his final years in freedom.
• 36:16
  And so thinking about the way that we
• 36:18
  think about evil, right?
• 36:20
  I mean, there are a lot of ways that people can do bad things.
• 36:25
  There are
• 36:26
  fundamentalists.
• 36:27
  I mean, if you think about jihadists or the other people who pulled off
• 36:30
  9-11 or bin Laden, these are people who presumably genuinely believe that they are doing the right
• 36:37
  and are possessed by an ideology that makes them do evil things
• 36:44
  because they think that it's the correct way to live.
• 36:48
  And then there are pragmatic people who do evil just to sort of get along
• 36:53
  because they don't want to step out of line.
• 36:55
  Maybe their lives or livelihoods would be in threat.
• 37:00
  Did you see that sort of mosaic of different characters
• 37:04
  in the Nazis who Kelly was looking at?
• 37:07
  Did one predominate over the other?
• 37:11
  There was not a lot of variety that Kelly found, and that's because he was not dealing with, say,
• 37:18
  the followers.
• 37:20
  He was dealing with the leaders.
• 37:21
  These were people who were setting policies
• 37:23
  and issuing orders.
• 37:25
  And what he found about them was that, in general, they were opportunists,
• 37:31
  that they climbed the Nazi ideological ladder to get to the top, to achieve power and to exercise
• 37:40
  it.
• 37:41
  And he thought that most of the defendants fit into that category.
• 37:45
  It was about personal
• 37:47
  satisfaction, they felt.
• 37:50
  It was less about the ideology of the Nazi party.
• 37:55
  That doesn't mean
• 37:55
  that these men weren't anti-Semites and racist.
• 37:59
  Of course, they were.
• 38:00
  But their prime motivation
• 38:03
  was for self.
• 38:05
  And they shared some other traits.
• 38:07
  They were all what today we would call type A
• 38:11
  workaholics.
• 38:12
  They worked very hard and neglected their personal lives as a result.
• 38:19
  And many of
• 38:20
  them shared Goering's trait of lacking empathy as well.
• 38:24
  One of Kelly's colleagues, a psychologist
• 38:27
  named Gustav Gilbert, who was there among the prisoners at the same time Kelly was,
• 38:34
  came to define evil as a lack of empathy.
• 38:39
  And that came from his direct experience with these
• 38:43
  defendants.
• 38:45
  It's interesting because I sort of have always put their love of animals and their
• 38:51
  love of nature and their love of family and community into a bucket in my brain that says
• 38:58
  that maybe empathy is not the right way of thinking about these things.
• 39:02
  Because if you were
• 39:03
  truly a Nazi ideologue, let's take Hitler for example, you presumably thought that the empathic
• 39:11
  thing to do for the German people was to restore their rightful place in history and to get rid of
• 39:17
  all of the cockroaches and vermin who kept dragging down the people who you have empathy for.
• 39:25
  I've always coded it as being less a lack of empathy and more a very diligent, highly rationalist
• 39:33
  boundary drawing of who is deserving of being inside the circle of empathy and who is not.
• 39:41
  For many of these men, Goering included, but possibly excluding Hitler, it wasn't about that.
• 39:50
  It was about their personal thirst quest for power.
• 39:57
  And that purifying Germany, all the rest of it, was the road they were following.
• 40:07
  But they would have followed another road if there had been another road.
• 40:12
  And Goering told Kelly early on that the reason why he joined the new Nazi party in the early 1920s was because it was small and that he felt he could rise to the top easily, which he did in very short order.
• 40:32
  And all of the ideological aspects of Nazism were filtered through this opportunism, according to Kelly, and I believe so also.
• 40:47
  There were ideologues in the Nazi party who made the laws and enforced them.
• 40:56
  But these were not the men at the very top.
• 40:59
  These were people further down, maybe people like Adolf Eichmann, who carried things out.
• 41:08
  And the psychology of being a follower is very different from the psychology of being a leader of an authoritarian movement.
• 41:17
  Hmm.
• 41:18
  Fascinating.
• 41:18
  In fact, there's a moment where Kelly quotes Goering as saying that his basic motive had been a single driving ambition to achieve for Hermann Goering supreme command of the Third Reich.
• 41:33
  That was what he was all about.
• 41:35
  I'm going to be number one and I'll do whatever it takes to get there.
• 41:39
  And at one point, Kelly says, how did you feel about being Hitler's yes man?
• 41:46
  And Goering says, show me a no man in Germany who isn't six feet under the ground, which is true.
• 41:54
  True then and true now in authoritarian movements, in Trump's movement in the US.
• 42:04
  The people who lack loyalty or who he thinks lack loyalty are out quickly.
• 42:12
  so one of the things that tormented kelly and that's really interesting and also unsatisfying
• 42:18
  about your work intentionally is that there is no grand narrative that kelly comes away with at the
• 42:23
  end of all this he spends eight months with with these guys and he walks away with with what what
• 42:29
  what is his vast you know effortful grand theory of the psychopathic nazi mind give us that has
• 42:38
  any predictive power at all about who we should keep an eye on who is vulnerable to doing this
• 42:42
  sort of thing.
• 42:44
  It was upsetting to Kelly to find out that not only was there not a shared
• 42:51
  psychiatric disorder, there were no psychiatric disorders among these men, that they all fell
• 42:58
  within a normal range of personality and behavior.
• 43:03
  And that really flipped out Kelly
• 43:09
  because, first of all, it called into question
• 43:12
  the usefulness of his beloved medical specialty,
• 43:16
  psychiatry, in understanding people like this.
• 43:19
  But also it suggested that if these guys are normal,
• 43:23
  then everywhere else there must be
• 43:28
  similarly normal people like them.
• 43:31
  That doesn't mean that everyone would be like them.
• 43:34
  We're not
• 43:34
  all mass murderers and genocidal maniacs at heart, but that there are a significant number of those
• 43:43
  who are.
• 43:44
  And even if they don't go into politics or government or military work,
• 43:51
  They go into something else and they express their personalities and their desire for power in those realms.
• 44:01
  So most of them do not become murderers.
• 44:03
  They just become terrible bosses and demagogues wherever they are.
• 44:09
  And so this changed Kelly's perspective on everything.
• 44:16
  When he left Nuremberg in January of 46, came back to the States, he saw his country differently.
• 44:24
  He not only believed that authoritarianism was possible in the U.S., he thought it was happening because when he looked to the southern states of the U.S. and their Jim Crow laws, their voting restrictions, not allowing black citizens to cast ballots, and the use of propaganda, emotionally manipulative propaganda, much as the Nazis had used in Germany.
• 44:53
  and their conquered territories, he thought, it's here.
• 44:57
  And he went out speaking and writing
• 45:01
  articles, and then his book, ultimately, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, making this argument and even
• 45:08
  prescribing a cure or what he thought would help.
• 45:13
  But nobody wanted to hear that.
• 45:16
  It was a bad time
• 45:17
  to be giving that message after this long, bloody war in which tens of millions of people had died.
• 45:23
  Everyone wanted to think the Germans are defeated.
• 45:26
  Nazism is dead.
• 45:28
  Authoritarianism is dead.
• 45:30
  It was a German thing or that they were madmen and that this was an expression of their insanity.
• 45:37
  But Kelly didn't believe that.
• 45:40
  And his book flopped.
• 45:42
  And he was professionally dissatisfied for the rest of his life.
• 45:47
  not just professionally dissatisfied, but personally dissatisfied.
• 45:50
  He became more and
• 45:51
  more erratic and just remind us how his story comes to its unfortunate end.
• 45:59
  Yes.
• 46:00
  And this is tragic, but when he returned to the US, Kelly developed a drinking problem.
• 46:08
  His marriage was in big trouble.
• 46:12
  As I learned from one of my most important sources for the Nazi and the psychiatrist, Dr. Kelly's son, Doug, who I tracked down, Kelly was a really difficult parent, a hard father to grow up with.
• 46:29
  And then he felt unappreciated and dismissed in his professional work.
• 46:38
  Kelly ended his life as a professor, not of psychiatry, but of criminology.
• 46:43
  And he thought that maybe this discipline, this social science, could explain things that psychiatry couldn't.
• 46:50
  But it all led to anger and severe depression.
• 46:56
  And on New Year's Day in 1958, Kelly's family was gathered in his home near Berkeley, California, and he got into an argument with his wife and stormed upstairs to his office where he had a small laboratory, came down holding this container of powder.
• 47:19
  and made a statement, an anguished statement,
• 47:23
  to the effect of, nobody understands me,
• 47:28
  I'm impossibly unhappy and will always be so.
• 47:33
  And he put some of that powder in his mouth, it was cyanide,
• 47:37
  and killed himself in front of his family.
• 47:40
  This was the same method of suicide, an unusual method,
• 47:45
  that Herman Goering had used 12 years earlier when he cheated the hangman at Nuremberg and
• 47:52
  took his own life just hours before he was supposed to be executed.
• 47:58
  It is hard to interpret that as a coincidence, I would imagine.
• 48:03
  I mean, if you have spent your life
• 48:07
  trying to convince people that this insight that you gleaned from spending eight months with
• 48:14
  the most senior living Nazi is of vital importance for the survival of humankind and our understanding
• 48:22
  of evil.
• 48:24
  And then you end up 12 years later, killing yourself with cyanide, the same substance,
• 48:31
  as you say, that may have been de rigueur in Nazi Germany as a way to kill yourself if you
• 48:36
  were captured by the enemy, but it's not a normal way to kill yourself if you're a 40-something
• 48:40
  family man in 1950s America, the parallels are sort of chilling.
• 48:49
  That was one of my central questions that I went into my research with.
• 48:55
  What was the real
• 48:56
  connection between these two suicides that played out so similarly?
• 49:02
  And what I decided was that
• 49:06
  Kelly was not imitating Goering.
• 49:10
  Instead, that this very theatrical, stagey, and defiant way
• 49:18
  of going out appealed to both of them for similar reasons.
• 49:24
  Goering really was thumbing his nose at
• 49:27
  the allies, telling them, I don't want to be hanged.
• 49:31
  I'm not going to be hanged.
• 49:32
  Here's how I'm
• 49:33
  I'm ending my life.
• 49:35
  And then Kelly, as desperately unhappy as he felt, was telling his family and
• 49:44
  anyone else who heard that he couldn't take it anymore.
• 49:50
  And he even conducted his suicide
• 49:55
  on a stage of sorts.
• 49:57
  It was the landing in the stairway of his house.
• 50:01
  So he was on a platform
• 50:03
  overlooking all of his family.
• 50:06
  And Doug, the son who I relied upon so much in the book,
• 50:11
  was 10 years old at the time,
• 50:13
  remembers it vividly, described the scene for me.
• 50:17
  And it was incomprehensible to Kelly's family.
• 50:23
  And young Doug, when he ran over to his father
• 50:27
  and saw an expression on his face
• 50:31
  that to Doug looked like surprise may have not been exactly what Dr. Kelly was planning.
• 50:41
  It
• 50:41
  might have been impulsive without thinking to the full extent what the consequences were.
• 50:49
  I mean, you want to talk about narcissism and showmanship and a lack of empathy.
• 50:56
  I don't think Goering was the only one with those traits.
• 50:59
  Well, killing yourself, as Kelly did, is a horrible thing to do to your family.
• 51:04
  Yes.
• 51:28
  Nigel Farage being the next Prime Minister of the UK,
• 51:31
  Marine Le Pen in France,
• 51:33
  the alternative for Deutschland in Germany.
• 51:38
  There are common characteristics in the sense of being
• 51:43
  not always virulently racist,
• 51:45
  but certainly xenophobic and containing appeals
• 51:49
  to a blood and soil vision of what nationhood should be
• 51:53
  that's usually at least ethnically coded.
• 51:56
  um and the anti-semitism thing is interesting because it's become so taboo in general because
• 52:01
  of the holocaust i suppose that it gets coded in different ways and certainly less overtly than
• 52:06
  the the nazis did um the pomp and bombast and sense that we've all been sold up the river and
• 52:14
  we need to restore greatness in very visible and iconic ways with statues and glory and icons and
• 52:22
  things is obviously certainly part of Trump's shtick, but that might be unsurprising from a
• 52:28
  real estate mogul who always liked putting his name in gold letters on everything anyway.
• 52:33
  What seems to be lacking, and I'm just interested in your general thoughts, is this high IQ,
• 52:41
  interpersonal, relational kind of commitment that Goering seemed to have to fostering,
• 52:49
  I guess, the well-wishes of Kelly and others around him of articulating the minutiae of
• 52:56
  German strategy and thinking deeply about, you know, arcane political and military questions.
• 53:05
  That doesn't, it strikes me, seem to be a hallmark of any of the modern day people who we
• 53:12
  fear are authoritarian.
• 53:14
  Where do you see us?
• 53:15
  Well, nor was it a hallmark of Adolf Hitler.
• 53:19
  So I think in the authoritarian movements that you named all around the world, there are intelligent people behind them.
• 53:33
  But maybe they're not out front.
• 53:36
  They're in the background.
• 53:38
  And despite the ideological variations among these groups in different countries and who gets scapegoated in those movements, if Douglas Kelly were alive today, I know he would say that the thing they do have in common is their emotional manipulation of citizens through propaganda and falsehoods.
• 54:06
  And that's why one of Kelly's recommendations for democracies around the world to thwart authoritarian movements was to strengthen their educational systems, to teach all the way from the youngest children to students of university age critical thinking,
• 54:29
  which is thick coming which is thinking that allows you to come to opinions based on information
• 54:38
  from a variety of sources and having the ability to judge which sources are credible and which are
• 54:44
  not if you're a good critical thinker you are immune to a lot of the emotional sway of propaganda
• 54:55
  and the feelings of victimhood that propagandists like to target.
• 55:02
  So I'm guessing that all of those authoritarians that you referred to do that.
• 55:10
  Do you mean the modern-day people who I cited?
• 55:12
  Yes.
• 55:12
  Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily call them all authoritarians,
• 55:14
  but the people who we fear authoritarianism as coming from their ilk.
• 55:20
  how do you feel as a historian and a not a historian a writer of history and a writer
• 55:25
  and a teacher about the capacity for critical thinking at the moment because if that's the
• 55:30
  thing that we need then it does not seem like we are creating an environment where
• 55:37
  through social media and algorithms and artificial intelligence and devices and the fragmentation of
• 55:44
  the media landscape, we're doing a very good job at training ourselves in critical thinking about
• 55:50
  the news.
• 55:51
  Yes.
• 55:52
  Overall, critical thinking has taken a hit even since Kelly's time,
• 55:57
  since the time he was writing about it and lamenting its weakness.
• 56:03
  So in that regard,
• 56:05
  we're in worse shape than we were when he was alive.
• 56:09
  And in another regard, too, at least in
• 56:11
  the U.S., that another point Kelly made was that voting in elections should be made as easy as
• 56:22
  possible for qualified voters, not more difficult.
• 56:27
  And in the U.S., we have efforts now on the
• 56:31
  federal level to make registration for voting more difficult, even for people who are clearly
• 56:38
  qualified to vote, who are citizens, and using the excuse that fraud is possible, even though the
• 56:49
  actual occurrence of fraud, election fraud, is minuscule.
• 56:53
  So that's part of it as well.
• 56:56
  I mean, there was another part of it, too, which I have very mixed feelings about that Kelly
• 57:03
  advocated, and that was requiring psychiatric examinations for anyone running for political
• 57:10
  office.
• 57:12
  Yeah, how would that go?
• 57:15
  Not well, I don't think.
• 57:16
  There's lots of room for abuse.
• 57:19
  Just because someone has a psychiatric disorder, that shouldn't automatically disqualify them from
• 57:25
  holding office or assuming that they would do a job.
• 57:30
  I mean, I suppose you could
• 57:33
  extend it to, given the recent history of the United States, you could extend it to degenerative
• 57:38
  like mental competence.
• 57:40
  And if, you know, you had three independently appointed physicians,
• 57:44
  all unanimous in their diagnosis of a damaging neurological disease, as was probably the case
• 57:52
  in the last administration, then maybe that could have saved everybody a second Trump term if Biden
• 57:59
  had to bid farewell a couple of years earlier and had allowed for a proper Democratic primary.
• 58:04
  Who
• 58:04
  knows?
• 58:05
  But that doesn't seem crazy.
• 58:06
  But the idea that merely someone being narcissistic or
• 58:11
  even psychopathic, you know, technically, that that should rule them out from being president.
• 58:16
  I mean, we live in systems that are supposed to have enough checks and balances that they can
• 58:21
  handle such an individual.
• 58:23
  And even good presidents have been narcissistic, I'm sure.
• 58:27
  And it kind of undercuts Kelly's other argument that he couldn't detect any kind of psychiatric disorder in the defendants.
• 58:36
  So how would examining a political candidate achieve anything or detect anything?
• 58:45
  No, I mean, it does seem like the way that Kelly was frustrated by his inability to find a pathological sort of easy diagnostic tool.
• 58:57
  it should not have led him down such a path of kind of defeatism, because in actual fact,
• 59:03
  all it means is that there was a uniquely combustible set of circumstances in Germany
• 59:10
  in the 20s and 30s that was able to prey upon motivations that already existed in German
• 59:16
  national life and was able to flourish.
• 59:20
  So the answer is, do our best to avoid
• 59:24
  a set of highly combustible, frustrating circumstances from arising that put enormous
• 59:31
  pressure on a population that can only, or not only, but that has the potential to express itself
• 59:40
  in highly dysfunctional ways.
• 59:43
  That can be as reassuring a conclusion as the conclusion that
• 59:48
  all of the Nazis were just psychopaths.
• 59:54
  Kelly cast a much wider net, saying that there are people like this everywhere and all around us.
• 1:00:06
  But he was emphatic that authoritarianism was not a German thing,
• 1:00:17
  and or Italian or Japanese as it was believed back then.
• 1:00:21
  And that is a human thing.
• 1:00:23
  And that's
• 1:00:23
  why we would always be dealing with people like that.
• 1:00:27
  And I think history at least bears out
• 1:00:32
  the fact that the end of World War II, of course, did not end authoritarianism,
• 1:00:38
  didn't end war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocides.
• 1:00:42
  We still have all that with us.
• 1:00:45
  so um how yeah i don't want to be misunderstood yeah i don't want to be misunderstood what i was
• 1:00:52
  just saying when i when i said that nazism was the result of motivations that already existed
• 1:00:56
  in german national life the that particular flavor of authoritarianism i think was particular to
• 1:01:04
  that moment in europe where anti-semitism was extremely popular and widespread and you know
• 1:01:10
  nationalism was regarded as a good thing.
• 1:01:12
  But what I'm saying is that whatever motivations
• 1:01:16
  exist in any national life, in any population, are going to be able to come out in equally perverted
• 1:01:22
  ways if you put them under the pressure cooker that Germany endured from 1914 to 1932.
• 1:01:28
  So yeah,
• 1:01:33
  avoid the pressure cooker, and then you won't have to find out the perverted ways in which one's
• 1:01:38
  one's national character uh might be expressed that's absolutely right yes so the coming back to
• 1:01:47
  trump um the iq thing does trip me up a little bit like the fact that goering was
• 1:01:55
  highly intelligent we might be able to say like we can sort of get out of the trump isn't interested
• 1:02:03
  in details and strategy card by saying,
• 1:02:06
  well, although Goering was, maybe Hitler wasn't either.
• 1:02:10
  But you do find it all reassuring that Trump seems
• 1:02:18
  to just be a guy who follows his gut and has no interest
• 1:02:24
  in statecraft, policy, understanding very much at all
• 1:02:34
  except for how to get deals done and bloviate and look good to his base.
• 1:02:42
  I sort of find that, I don't know, maybe I'm being too optimistic
• 1:02:47
  and putting lipstick on a pig, but I do find it reassuring
• 1:02:50
  when I think about the aptitude and diligence and IQ of the senior Nazi command.
• 1:02:59
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:03:01
  I don't know if Trump's qualities are signs of low intelligence necessarily,
• 1:03:10
  but what I do know is that however he is, he has made choices to be that way.
• 1:03:19
  And that is how he has chosen to respond to situations, you know, long before his political life that he's been in and now as president.
• 1:03:30
  And since he has made choices, that means he can be held responsible.
• 1:03:36
  If you think that Trump is insane, a madman, a monster, then you're letting him off the hook, it seems to me, because monsters do what monsters do.
• 1:03:51
  In a way, they can't help it.
• 1:03:53
  But Trump can help it.
• 1:03:55
  Trump and others like him can help it.
• 1:03:59
  And that's why we can hold them to account.
• 1:04:03
  well that opens a big can of worms about how much of anything we can help and about free will and
• 1:04:10
  and all kinds of things doesn't it i mean can he help it uh you know can any of us help it
• 1:04:14
  could hitler have helped it uh you know could could hitler have done otherwise and would that
• 1:04:20
  make it any better you know if we if we learned that he had a psychiatric disorder that made it
• 1:04:26
  impossible for him to have done otherwise would that absolve him of the moral crimes uh you know
• 1:04:31
  in a strange way i almost feel like it's beside the point that people should be judged on the
• 1:04:35
  outcomes of their actions regardless of um how culpable they are because then we can all get
• 1:04:40
  into a a question about how much agency we genuinely have in choosing who who we who we
• 1:04:48
  are at the deepest level but there is the legal standard of mental fitness that we discussed at
• 1:04:53
  the very beginning, if someone cannot, say, understand what crimes they've been charged with
• 1:05:03
  or is not well enough to participate in his or her own defense, how can we hold that person?
• 1:05:13
  First of all, how can that person get a fair trial?
• 1:05:16
  And secondly, how can we hold that person
• 1:05:18
  responsible any more than someone who has a cold sneezes a lot.
• 1:05:24
  And if sneezing were a crime,
• 1:05:25
  should they be held responsible?
• 1:05:28
  So you're right.
• 1:05:29
  It is getting into the thickets.
• 1:05:31
  And to me,
• 1:05:32
  it's comforting that Kelly came down believing that these men were normal, therefore could be
• 1:05:39
  held responsible.
• 1:05:41
  And that it's probably true in the vast majority of cases of demagogues and
• 1:05:48
  despots and authoritarians, that they too are normal and can be held responsible.
• 1:05:56
  The place that would be interesting to wrap here, I think, is in the question of Goering
• 1:06:00
  being a follower, and so many of the Nazis being followers, being ambitious people who
• 1:06:08
  simply wanted to set themselves up in powerful situations and were savvy enough to be able to do
• 1:06:13
  so inside the system that ended up ruling Germany and the party that ended up ruling Germany.
• 1:06:21
  And that is sort of what I find most chilling about today's moment, because I've been really
• 1:06:27
  shocked.
• 1:06:28
  I haven't been shocked by Trump being Trump.
• 1:06:34
  We all knew it was going to be a shit show
• 1:06:36
  from day one and it is what it is.
• 1:06:40
  I'm shocked that Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State.
• 1:06:44
  I'm shocked that the Vice President is a man who wrote a book a decade ago
• 1:06:50
  about the plight of the working class, of the working poor in America
• 1:06:54
  and how they were screwed over by the likes of Donald Trump.
• 1:07:01
  I'm shocked that the legislative branch in America
• 1:07:06
  is not behaving as a co-equal branch of government
• 1:07:09
  but is just abrogating its responsibility to be independent
• 1:07:17
  because it's afraid of not towing the line for one person
• 1:07:22
  that is a psychological characteristic
• 1:07:24
  that if you'd asked me 10 years ago
• 1:07:26
  would that come to pass
• 1:07:27
  I would have been like
• 1:07:28
  nah they're Americans
• 1:07:29
  They're independent.
• 1:07:30
  They're like, it's the whole Western frontier thing.
• 1:07:32
  It's like they're libertarians.
• 1:07:34
  They don't want to be told what to do.
• 1:07:35
  They're like, they'll tell them to go fuck himself.
• 1:07:38
  Why has that not happened?
• 1:07:42
  I'm not an expert on contemporary politics, but I believe that it ties in with the opportunism that Kelly identified that Rubio and Vance and the others.
• 1:07:56
  Trump has cleared away for them to rise high in power.
• 1:08:05
  And he can end it, too.
• 1:08:08
  He can block that path.
• 1:08:11
  And if it's what they want more than anything else, all of these other considerations go to the side.
• 1:08:19
  I do find it encouraging, though, that while, as you said, the legislative branch has not been fulfilling its responsibilities, by and large, the judicial branch has, with the exception of the highest court.
• 1:08:35
  But all of the lower courts have been doing, I think, as good a job as could be expected to restrain Trump and his policies.
• 1:08:49
  Well, if you ask the president about the highest court in the land, he won't regard them as being toadies.
• 1:08:56
  They've pushed back enough that they still have an appearance of independence, and I don't think they're going to let him get his way with birthright citizenship, for example.
• 1:09:05
  Yeah, I completely agree.
• 1:09:07
  But that's because they're insulated, isn't it?
• 1:09:09
  I mean, that's because essentially the judiciary is genuinely insulated from Trump's rantings and ravings in a way that I suppose a member of Congress is not, at least their political future is not.
• 1:09:20
  There's not much he can do about it, or there's little he can do to stop them, at least so far.
• 1:09:28
  when you think about kelly's time with the senior nazis and you look at the 80 years in between and
• 1:09:34
  you look at the next 80 years are you optimistic or pessimistic that we can avoid finding people in
• 1:09:42
  cells with people like goering in the coming century um there will be people in cells like
• 1:09:52
  that in the coming century.
• 1:09:54
  I think it's inevitable because nothing will stop them,
• 1:10:00
  the people who really want to, nothing will stop them from advancing their ideas.
• 1:10:07
  So we need those prison cells.
• 1:10:09
  We need international courts.
• 1:10:13
  And the international
• 1:10:14
  courts we have are hobbled because of the lack of cooperation of some of the largest countries,
• 1:10:21
  including the U.S. and the Russian Federation.
• 1:10:24
  So we're in a different era than we were at the
• 1:10:29
  end of World War II, when there was a much higher degree of international cooperation.
• 1:10:34
  There was the Nuremberg trials, but also the birth of the United Nations.
• 1:10:39
  And all of that
• 1:10:40
  is playing out very differently now.
• 1:10:43
  I think it's tragic that international courts,
• 1:10:48
  given the great start they had in Nuremberg are not more effective now.
• 1:10:58
  I wish they were.
• 1:10:59
  I know
• 1:10:59
  there are problems that people perceive with some of the judges and some of the trials, but
• 1:11:08
  still the movement of international justice needs to go on.
• 1:11:14
  So no, I'm not optimistic that the
• 1:11:17
  that we'll see any less of this, but I am cautiously optimistic that at some point
• 1:11:25
  things will turn so that these people will be held to account and justice will prevail.
• 1:11:34
  And just out of interest, Jack, what was your involvement, if any, on the turning of your book
• 1:11:39
  into the screenplay of Nuremberg and then the production of the film?
• 1:11:43
  Did you have a consulting
• 1:11:44
  role?
• 1:11:45
  I was not a consultant, but the screenwriter and director, James Vanderbilt, did send me four
• 1:11:52
  different drafts of the screenplay over about a 12-year period.
• 1:11:57
  And I commented on them.
• 1:12:01
  I had to think hard about who am I commenting as.
• 1:12:05
  You mentioned earlier, I'm not a historian.
• 1:12:10
  I'm a journalist who writes about history.
• 1:12:16
  And so I did not want to be the history police or the fact checker in looking at these screenplays.
• 1:12:24
  What I decided on is that I would be someone who loves movies and to comment in a way that would help this screenplay become the best movie it could down the road.
• 1:12:36
  And then later on, once the movie began shooting or just before it began shooting, I did talk with one of the important members of the cast about his role and how he's interpreting it.
• 1:12:50
  And I did go to Hungary in 2024 to see some of the shooting as well.
• 1:12:56
  Oh, how fabulous.
• 1:12:57
  I assume that was Rami Malek who you were talking to.
• 1:12:59
  It was Rami Malek.
• 1:13:01
  Playing Dr. Kelly.
• 1:13:03
  How did you feel about his performance?
• 1:13:06
  Well, what we talked about was he was interpreting the role, he wanted to interpret the role in a way that was a little different from Dr. Kelly in real life.
• 1:13:21
  In real life, Kelly and Goering were equally formidable.
• 1:13:27
  When I talked about their encounters with Doug, Dr. Kelly's son, we always refer to them as King Kong versus Godzilla.
• 1:13:35
  And Rami Malek's Kelly was not King Kong or Godzilla.
• 1:13:40
  He was less self-assured, less confident than Kelly was in the same situation.
• 1:13:49
  I think that fit the dramatic story that was being told in Nuremberg, as opposed to the story that was being told in my book.
• 1:13:58
  So I think that was a good change for the movie.
• 1:14:03
  But it was something that needed to be talked about.
• 1:14:07
  Yeah, right.
• 1:14:08
  That's interesting.
• 1:14:09
  Did you find that jarring?
• 1:14:12
  No, because I had read all these drafts of the screenplay even before Rami Malek did, and I could see how a little bit of that was written into the part.
• 1:14:26
  Right, right.
• 1:14:27
  And what did you think of Russell Crowe as Goering?
• 1:14:28
  No, I was amazed.
• 1:14:33
  I loved his portrayal of Goering.
• 1:14:37
  I thought he captured just the right amounts of charm plus scariness.
• 1:14:45
  And from what I've been able to see, audiences have really responded to that.
• 1:14:51
  That pretty much sums up Russell Crowe's personality, I think.
• 1:14:54
  Charm plus scariness.
• 1:14:56
  Put that on your Academy Award, Rusty.
• 1:14:59
  Jack, it's fascinating to talk to you.
• 1:15:01
  Thank you so much for joining us.
• 1:15:03
  Well, thank you for having me with you, Josh, and for your interest in my work.
• 1:15:07
  It was fun.