The real-life story behind Nuremberg is more unsettling than a simple tale of a psychiatrist studying monsters. U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas McGlashan Kelley examined Hermann Göring and 21 other senior Nazi prisoners before the first Nuremberg trial. He searched for a psychological explanation for their crimes but found no single diagnosis that could contain them. The men could be intelligent, ambitious, persuasive and socially competent while remaining responsible for extraordinary atrocities.
The film’s real question: can psychology explain evil?
Nuremberg (2025) is based on a documented historical relationship between U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas McGlashan Kelley and Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking surviving Nazi leader in Allied custody after the Second World War. Kelley was assigned to examine Göring and 21 other senior German political and military figures held for trial.
But the real story is not that Kelley discovered a single disorder shared by the Nazi leadership. He was looking for a psychological explanation that could make their crimes intelligible. What he encountered was more disturbing: men who could be intelligent, articulate, ambitious, socially skilled and psychologically recognizable while still being responsible for extraordinary crimes.
The film dramatizes that investigation and Kelley’s unusually close relationship with Göring. It draws principally on Jack El-Hai’s 2013 nonfiction book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII. The historical record supports the central relationship and the broad events, but not necessarily every conversation, confrontation or psychological revelation shown on screen.
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Who was Douglas Kelley?
Douglas McGlashan Kelley was an American psychiatrist who served with the U.S. Army during the transition from wartime medical work to the occupation and prosecution of Nazi leaders. In the months before the first Nuremberg trial, he was given sustained access to 22 high-ranking prisoners, including Göring and Rudolf Hess.
His duties were practical as well as investigative. Kelley had to help determine whether the defendants were mentally competent to stand trial. He also monitored the psychological dangers of confinement, public exposure, intense interrogation and the possibility that prisoners might break down or take their own lives before the proceedings were complete.
That made Kelley more than a courtroom witness who would appear briefly to offer an opinion. He interviewed the prisoners repeatedly, observed their behavior and tried to understand how they saw themselves. His access gave him a rare view of the defendants outside the formal courtroom, although it also created serious questions about professional boundaries, confidentiality and the purpose of psychiatric observation in a prison controlled by the victorious Allies.
Why Hermann Göring became Kelley’s central subject
Göring was a particularly compelling and difficult subject. He was one of the most prominent surviving Nazi officials, a central defendant at Nuremberg and a man with considerable intelligence, confidence and theatrical ability. He could dominate conversations, present himself as a statesman rather than a criminal and adapt his manner to the person in front of him.
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For Kelley, Göring was both a patient-like subject and an active participant in the examination. The psychiatrist was trying to observe him, while Göring understood that he was being observed and could shape what he revealed. That uncertainty is at the heart of the story: was Kelley uncovering Göring’s personality, or was Göring performing a carefully managed version of it?
The relationship became unusually close and consequential. The publisher’s description of El-Hai’s book presents it as an improbable and dangerous meeting of minds, and the film uses the Kelley-Göring relationship as its dramatic engine. That does not mean the two men became friends in any ordinary sense, or that Kelley accepted Göring’s worldview. It means that prolonged access, intellectual curiosity and Göring’s forceful personality created a relationship unlike a simple one-time clinical examination.
What Kelley was trying to find
Kelley wanted to know whether the Nazi leadership possessed a distinctive psychological characteristic—a “Nazi personality”—that could explain the movement’s crimes. If the men responsible for mass violence were demonstrably psychotic or otherwise incapable of understanding reality, their behavior might be placed inside a familiar medical framework.
That is not what the investigation produced. Kelley’s interviews and psychological work did not establish a clean, universally accepted disorder shared by the defendants. Accounts of the prison instead point to a more uncomfortable conclusion: the men could be organized, persuasive, intelligent and socially functional without being psychotic in a way that made their actions easy to dismiss.
This distinction is essential. “Not psychotic” does not mean “healthy,” “normal,” innocent or morally ordinary. Nor does the absence of one shared diagnosis mean that individual defendants had no psychological abnormalities. It means that psychiatry could not place the entire Nazi system inside a single clinical category and thereby explain away responsibility.
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- Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, paperback
The historical lesson is not that the Nazi defendants were “just normal people.” Their conduct was shaped by ideology, political institutions, obedience, ambition, antisemitism, racism, careerism and organized state power, as well as by individual personality. Psychological interpretation can illuminate those factors, but it cannot replace moral, legal and historical judgment.
Interviews, testing and the prison’s psychological pressure
Kelley’s work involved psychiatric interviews and psychological testing. Reporting on the prison describes Rorschach-related testing carried out with psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who also observed and interviewed the defendants. The purpose was not simply to label the prisoners. The investigators were assessing sanity, competence, emotional stability and the risk of psychological collapse or suicide under the pressure of imprisonment and trial.
These examinations took place in an extraordinary environment. The prisoners were isolated, facing possible execution and aware that the proceedings would define their public legacy. They were also surrounded by investigators who represented the powers that had defeated them. Any interview was therefore both a psychological encounter and a political situation.
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That context makes the surviving material difficult to interpret. A defendant’s charm might reflect personality, strategy or both. Apparent calm might indicate emotional stability, denial, training or an effort to control the room. A test result could not by itself explain a political movement or establish why an individual participated in crimes.
The ethical problem: Kelley was not operating in ordinary clinical conditions
The Kelley-Göring relationship also raises a question that the film’s intimacy can make easy to overlook: this was not a conventional doctor-patient relationship. Göring was a prisoner awaiting trial, and Kelley’s work served military, legal and intelligence purposes as well as medical ones.
Ordinary expectations of doctor-patient confidentiality did not operate in the usual way. Scientific American reported that Kelley passed information learned in conversations with Göring to American officials, including William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was involved in the wider intelligence and prosecution environment.
That does not make every exchange deceptive, nor does it mean Kelley was merely an interrogator in a doctor’s uniform. It does mean that the relationship had competing purposes. Kelley wanted understanding; the authorities wanted information; Göring wanted to protect himself, influence his treatment and control the story told about him. The resulting relationship was psychologically intimate but institutionally unequal and ethically compromised.
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Nuremberg is a historical drama adapted from nonfiction, not a documentary transcript. Its factual foundation includes Kelley’s assignment, his access to the 22 defendants, the importance of Göring, the Nuremberg trial setting and the question of whether psychological abnormality could explain Nazi criminality.
Its dialogue, pacing, composite moments and emotional confrontations are products of dramatic adaptation. A scene may communicate a documented tension without reproducing a conversation word for word. A private exchange may be based on several recorded encounters, or may be an imaginative reconstruction of what the historical relationship meant.
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The safest way to describe the film is this: it dramatizes a documented relationship and a real psychiatric investigation; it does not reproduce the surviving record line by line.
That distinction is especially important when the film presents Kelley and Göring as locked in a psychological contest. Göring did possess the intelligence and charisma to challenge Kelley, and Kelley did develop an unusually close perspective on him. But the historical evidence does not justify treating every apparent victory, confession or manipulation in the film as independently verified fact.
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Kelley published 22 Cells in Nuremberg in 1947, presenting his observations of the prisoners and his interpretation of their personalities. The book was less successful with American readers than Gustave Gilbert’s competing Nuremberg Diary. One reason was that Kelley’s interpretation made uncomfortable comparisons between the authoritarian tendencies of Nazi Germany and dangers that could also exist in the United States.
That aspect of Kelley’s thinking helps explain why his story extends beyond the trial. He was not only asking how individual men could commit crimes. He was also considering how authoritarian behavior, mass obedience and political power could develop within modern societies.
What happened to Douglas Kelley after Nuremberg?
Kelley did not vanish when the first Nuremberg trial ended. He continued working in psychiatry and criminology and held academic and professional roles, including work associated with the University of California, Berkeley. He also consulted with law-enforcement agencies and continued publishing and thinking about criminal behavior, public power and the conditions that allow authoritarianism to grow.
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The continuing work matters because Kelley’s central problem was larger than the diagnosis of a few prisoners. He wanted to understand how people who were capable of planning, persuading and functioning within institutions could become participants in a system of mass violence. That is a question about individuals, but also about governments, professional loyalty, ideology and the social rewards attached to obedience.
The cyanide parallel between Göring and Kelley
The most chilling fact in Kelley’s later life is the manner of his death. Kelley died by suicide on January 1, 1958, after ingesting cyanide in front of members of his family. The method echoed Göring’s death, although the two events were separated by more than a decade.
Göring used cyanide to avoid execution at Nuremberg in October 1946. He had been sentenced to death, but the poison allowed him to die shortly before the sentence could be carried out. Kelley’s use of cyanide therefore created a striking historical symmetry: the psychiatrist who had studied Göring later died by the same method.
But the parallel is not an explanation. It is tempting to conclude that Kelley was psychologically destroyed by Göring, unconsciously identified with him or somehow reenacted the prisoner’s final act. The available historical accounts do not prove any of those claims.
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- Author: Chernow, Ron.
- Publisher: Penguin Books
- Pages: 928
- Publication Date: 2011-09-27
- Binding: Paperback
The responsible conclusion is narrower: Kelley’s death echoed Göring’s in method, but no source establishes that the Nuremberg assignment directly caused his suicide. Kelley’s decline and death were more complicated than a single cinematic chain of cause and effect. The resemblance is documented and deeply unsettling; its meaning remains unresolved.
Was there really a “Nazi personality”?
Not in the sense of a single official psychiatric diagnosis that explained all of the defendants. Kelley’s investigation did not reveal a universal clinical category that could account for Nazi leadership.
The phrase can still be useful if it is treated as a historical question rather than a diagnosis. Kelley was asking whether a recognizable combination of traits—authoritarianism, ambition, ideological commitment, emotional detachment, conformity and a hunger for power—could explain the defendants’ actions. The answer was not a neat medical label. Those characteristics can exist in different combinations, and they operate within institutions and political movements rather than in isolation.
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That insight does not reduce the defendants’ responsibility. It does the opposite. If criminal responsibility depended on obvious madness, perpetrators could be dismissed as exceptions. The Nuremberg story shows why legal and moral accountability cannot be replaced by the hope that every perpetrator will look psychologically alien.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How historically accurate is Nuremberg?
The film’s central premise is historically grounded. Douglas Kelley really did examine 22 senior Nazi prisoners. Hermann Göring really was the most important figure in his psychological investigation. Kelley really did publish an account of the prisoners, continue working in criminology and die by cyanide suicide years later.
What cannot be assumed is that every scene is a literal reconstruction. Historical films compress time, combine people and conversations, sharpen conflicts and give private meaning to events that may be documented only indirectly. The film may accurately capture the pressure and intellectual tension of Kelley’s assignment while still inventing or rearranging individual moments.
Viewers should therefore separate three levels of claim:
- Documented foundation: Kelley’s assignment, the 22 prisoners, Göring’s central role, the psychological examinations, Kelley’s later writings and his cyanide death.
- Historical interpretation: the extent to which Göring manipulated Kelley, the meaning of Kelley’s warnings and the psychological significance of their relationship.
- Dramatic reconstruction: exact dialogue, private confrontations, timing and scenes created to give the story shape and emotional force.
Keeping those levels separate makes the story more compelling, not less. The documented facts are already extraordinary; they do not need invented certainty.
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Why Kelley’s story still matters
The real-life story behind Nuremberg is ultimately about the limits of explanation. Kelley tried to make mass atrocity legible through individual psychology. He found that intelligence, charm and social competence could coexist with participation in immense crimes, and that no diagnosis could carry the full meaning of ideology, institutions and personal choice.
His relationship with Göring shows how difficult it is to study a powerful manipulator without becoming part of the situation being studied. His later career shows that the questions raised by the prison did not end with the trial. His death gives the story a tragic symmetry, but not a solved mystery.
That is why the most accurate summary is not that Kelley “found the secret psychological diagnosis of the Nazis.” He found that diagnosis alone could not contain what they had done.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Douglas Kelley in real life?
Douglas Kelley was the U.S. Army psychiatrist assigned to examine 22 senior Nazi prisoners held for trial at Nuremberg. His duties included assessing whether the defendants were mentally competent to stand trial, monitoring their psychological condition and studying their personalities and motives.
Did Douglas Kelley diagnose the Nazis with a single “Nazi personality”?
No. Kelley did not establish one universally accepted disorder shared by the Nazi defendants. His work suggested that people could be intelligent, organized, charming and socially functional without being psychotic in a way that made their crimes easy to dismiss. That does not mean they were morally or psychologically healthy.
Was Douglas Kelley really close to Hermann Göring?
Kelley and Göring developed an unusually close and consequential relationship during the prisoner’s examination. However, it was not an ordinary doctor-patient relationship: Göring was a defendant, and Kelley passed some information from their conversations to American officials. The film dramatizes the tension and intimacy of that relationship.
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Did Hermann Göring cause Douglas Kelley’s suicide?
Kelley died by suicide on January 1, 1958, after ingesting cyanide in front of family members. The method echoed Göring’s cyanide suicide before his scheduled execution in October 1946. The parallel is documented, but the available historical record does not prove that the Nuremberg assignment or Göring directly caused Kelley’s death.
What book is Nuremberg based on?
The film is based principally on Jack El-Hai’s 2013 nonfiction book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII. It uses real people and a documented investigation, but its dialogue and scene-by-scene events should be treated as historical drama rather than a verbatim transcript.
The Bottom Line
Bottom line: Nuremberg is grounded in Douglas Kelley’s real examination of Hermann Göring and 21 other Nazi defendants, but the historical record does not support a single “Nazi personality” diagnosis or prove that Göring caused Kelley’s later suicide. The film’s central relationship is real; its exact conversations and psychological conclusions are dramatized.
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