Douglas Kelley

• 1. Introduction

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  Douglas McGlashan Kelley, an American Army psychiatrist, once had twenty-two of the highest-ranking men of Nazi Germany sitting in cells and waiting on his judgment. His assignment sounded simple. Decide whether any of them was mentally unfit to stand trial, and guess whether any would fall apart under the strain of the courtroom. The men who held that power over Europe were now patients of a kind, though he was not there to treat them. Kelley's answers surprised many people and troubled some. So what did he find inside those minds? What did he carry out of Germany in his luggage? And what became of a doctor who spent months studying the worst of his century?

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• 2. A Californian Doctor

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  Truckee, California, is where Douglas Kelley was born on the 11th of August 1912, to George and June Kelley. He grew up in San Francisco, where his father worked as a dentist. In 1933 he earned his degree in medicine and psychology through the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley. A Rockefeller fellowship later carried him east to the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, where he took a second doctorate, this one in medical science. Back in his home city, he became director of the San Francisco City and County Psychopathic Hospital. Then the war pulled him to Europe, where he treated American soldiers suffering from combat stress. That work put him in the right place when the Army went looking for a psychiatrist to take charge of the most notorious prisoners in the world.

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• 3. Cell by Cell

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  In August 1945, a major named Kelley received an assignment that no psychiatrist had ever held before: chief psychiatrist for the captured Nazi leadership. For five months, until the Nuremberg trials opened, he examined the prisoners one by one. Among them were Hermann Göring, second-in-command to Adolf Hitler, and Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy. Kelley worked alongside the psychologist Gustave Gilbert, and together they gave the men Rorschach tests, the famous inkblot exercise. Kelley also gave intelligence tests and asked each prisoner to write a short autobiography. By his own count, he spent roughly 80 to 90 hours with the prisoners. The brief was to observe and evaluate, never to treat. When he finished, only one man struck him as truly insane, and that man was Robert Ley.

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• 4. Creatures of Their Environment

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  "They were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are." That was Kelley's conclusion about the defendants, and it was an unsettling one. He did not find a special Nazi sickness in them. He believed that in the right circumstances, many other people would have acted much the same way. Kelley turned his findings into a book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, published in London by W. H. Allen in 1947. By then another American had taken his place at the prison. Leon Goldensohn succeeded him as the Army's psychiatric interviewer. Kelley's own interviews, however, had left behind more than a manuscript, and some of it had already crossed the Atlantic.

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• 5. Souvenirs From Nuremberg

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  When Kelley left Germany, his belongings included X-rays of Hitler's skull. He took his notes and his test results too, and he brought everything home to Santa Barbara, California. Alongside the paperwork came objects from the prison itself. There were Göring's confiscated paracodeine capsules, as well as the food packets and the written statement of Rudolf Hess. Few doctors have ever filled a suitcase with such evidence. One of those capsules would later matter far more than its modest size suggests.

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• 6. Truth Serums and Criminal Minds

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  In 1946, Kelley published a book on the Rorschach test. Years earlier, in 1942, he had also contributed clinical material to Bruno Klopfer's manual on the same technique. Next came North Carolina, where he directed the Graylyn Psychopathic Hospital at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine. A year after that, he became head of the Department of Psychology at Berkeley. From there he advised the Berkeley police, San Quentin Prison, the United States Army and the United States Air Force. His great interest was the psychology behind crime. He worked on truth serums, developing injections of sodium thiopental and sodium amytal, along with nitrous oxide and ether inhalants. He also gave polygraph tests to criminal subjects. His work helped lead to the conviction of Burton Abbott. By the end he was a professor of psychiatry and criminology at UC Berkeley.

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• 7. New Year's Day 1958

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  On New Year's Day 1958, Kelley burned himself while cooking and flew into a rage. His family described him as an alcoholic with a history of angry outbursts and of threatening suicide. That day he told them he was going to kill himself. His wife, his father and his three children all watched as he swallowed a capsule of potassium cyanide. It was the same method Göring had used to end his own life. News reports at the time said police found that the capsule matched the ones Kelley had taken from Nuremberg. His family has disputed that account. His physicians reported that before he died, he had been under heavy stress and was being treated for a stomach condition.

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• 8. Kelley on Screen

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  Stuart Bunce played Kelley in the 2006 BBC docudrama Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial, which dramatized the events at the prison. Almost two decades later, in 2025, Rami Malek took the lead role in the film Nuremberg. That film draws on Jack El-Hai's 2013 nonfiction book, The Nazi And The Psychiatrist: Herman Goring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII. The book's title promises a meeting between two very different men, and the 2025 film puts Kelley at its center for a new audience.

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