Not Monsters. Not Madmen. Just Men.

About this episode

Michael Shermer interviews Jack El-Hai about the psychological evaluation of Nazi leaders after World War II and the unsettling normality of their personalities.

What kind of person helps build a regime like the Third Reich? A monster? A madman? Or something far more unsettling? Michael Shermer sits down with author Jack El-Hai to talk about the true story behind Nuremberg. At the center is Dr. Douglas Kelley, the American psychiatrist assigned to evaluate the top Nazi defendants after World War II, including Hermann Göring. What he found was not comforting: many of these men were intelligent, ambitious, psychologically functional, and disturbingly normal. This conversation gets into the strange duel between Kelley and Göring, the psychological testing at Nuremberg, the limits of psychiatry, the difference between leaders and followers, and the question that still won't go away: how do power-hungry people rise and do evil, and why do so many others go along with them? Jack El-Hai is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic , Smithsonian , GQ , Wired , Scientific American , and Discover . His books, including The Lobotomist , The Lost Brothers , and Face in the Mirror , have been translated into twenty languages. He lectures widely on writing and medical history. His book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist was recently…

People in this episode

Host: Michael Shermer

Guest: Jack El-Hai

Topics covered

• psychology
• Nuremberg trials
• Nazi regime
• power and evil
• mental health
• historical analysis

Keywords

• Nuremberg
• psychology
• Nazis
• Douglas Kelley
• Hermann Göring
• Jack El-Hai
• evil
• power
• mental health

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: The Atlantic, Smithsonian, GQ, Wired, Scientific American, Discover

Books & works: The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Nuremberg

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