transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] It is a weakness not to be able to stand the side of dead people. The best way of overcoming it is to do it more often, then it becomes a habit.

Speaker 2:
[00:07] That's how to turn your population into killers.

Speaker 1:
[00:11] How did this happen? How do you get these highly educated, intelligent, cultured people like the Germans, the home of, you know, of Goethe? I mean, come on, Beethoven, wow. And then turn them into Gustav Stepping Nazis in a matter of a few years. How does that happen? Is there something in the people themselves? Or is it the environment? Is it the culture? What is it? And all the assassination attempts on Hitler's life mostly failed, just barely. Even the July 20 bomb plot, had the table not been there to block the energy from the blast, had he had the two bombs in the suitcase rather than only the one, had the meeting not been moved from the concrete building, which would have retained the blast energy instead of wood building with the glass windows, the energy that escapes the room, all that probably would have killed him.

Speaker 2:
[00:52] Yep. And Hitler viewed those fortunate events as destiny, making him even more dangerous. When leaders like that start believing that they're ordained to do what they consider to be great, that's a very dangerous leader when that happens.

Speaker 1:
[01:16] Hey, everybody. It's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of The Michael Shermer Show, brought to you by The Skeptic Society. Here's our newest issue, Skeptic Magazine. Every three months it comes out. Go to skeptic.com/magazine to get yours. Check out that cover, AI generated. Aliens are here. They're gods. And also brought to you by Big Nerve, the platform for The Skeptic Society, where we're hosting our discussions and debates and gathering up different interesting ideas like these. And there's prize money. Big Nerve is putting up prize money for the best ideas and challenges you can come up with. So check it out. Skeptic dot big nerve.com/welcome. All right. My guest today is Jack El-Hai, an award winning writer who has published hundreds of articles and more than a dozen books. He has led workshops and given talks at the Mayo Clinic, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and many other institutions along with talks at conferences at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, the American Psychological Association and other organizations. Jack's books include Face in the Mirror. This is about the first face transplant ever done. I don't know anything about that, but I want to hear about that if we have time. The Lost Brothers. This one is super interesting. The Lobotomist, a maverick medical genius and his tragic quest to rid the world of mental illness. Here's the book he's on here to discuss today because it's now a major motion picture. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and A Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of World War II. Also known as Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe. Oh my God, what a star. And Rami Malek as Douglas Kelley, and Michael Shannon as Justice Robert Jackson. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the book has been translated in more than 20 languages, and Nuremberg is being released in over 40 countries. I just watched it again, Jack, on Amazon Prime, right? Is that where I saw it, Amazon Prime?

Speaker 2:
[03:17] It could be, but it's on Netflix as well.

Speaker 1:
[03:20] Oh, Netflix. No, no, no. It was Netflix. That's right. Sorry. Yeah. It was Netflix. Yeah. Yeah. So what did you think of the movie? Just to kind of riff on the fun stuff here. You're the author of the book on which it was made.

Speaker 2:
[03:31] Well, I was relieved. I liked it, and I feel good that in all honesty and candor, I can recommend it to my friends. What I like about it is that it is essentially factual. There are some inaccuracies, but any history-based movie made for entertainment will have inaccuracies in it. But it gets across the messages from my book that I thought were most important. And I did see different drafts of the screenplay over many years, four different drafts. So it wasn't a surprise to me how it turned out.

Speaker 1:
[04:13] Yeah. So your book is 2013. So here we are in 2026 when the film comes out. So wow, 13 years. I guess that's pretty typical, right? It takes a long time.

Speaker 2:
[04:23] I don't know if it's typical, but I think it happens fairly often. And there were years when I didn't know if it would come out ever.

Speaker 1:
[04:34] Yeah. All right. But before we get into all that stuff, because it's so interesting, how did you get into studying the Nazis and Göring and Kelly and all this stuff?

Speaker 2:
[04:44] Well, I have written previously about a psychiatrist in that book you mentioned, The Lobotomist. And it was through my research for that book that I became acquainted with Dr. Douglas, excuse me, Dr. Douglas Kelley. And he came to my attention because this earlier psychiatrist, the lobotomy doctor, met Dr. Kelley at a psychiatric conference in 1938 and was very struck by that meeting because Kelley was at the conference, not to deliver a paper or give a talk, but to give a magic show for his psychiatry colleagues. And that really fixed in my memory that someone would do that. And just imagine, psychiatrists must be a really hard crowd for a magic show. And so it was a little later that I learned about Dr. Kelley's work with the 22 German defendants at the first Nuremberg trial, the International Military Tribunal. And that really got me hooked. So I tracked down Dr. Kelley's oldest son, Doug, and found that he had a trove of papers and other materials from his father's time in Nuremberg and I was off and running.

Speaker 1:
[06:02] Oh man, you got primary documents. That's nice.

Speaker 2:
[06:04] Wow. Yes.

Speaker 1:
[06:06] Now this whole trial just as a bigger picture, this is different than the famous film Judgment at Nuremberg starring Spencer Tracy.

Speaker 2:
[06:12] Yes, it's a different story. That film, very good movie, is a fictionalized account of one of the other Nuremberg trials, the Judges trial, which was a few years later after the trial I wrote about. So it's different people involved, different outcome, almost everything is different.

Speaker 1:
[06:33] The other amazing thing about reading your book is just where psychiatry was and psychology for that matter. At that time, I mean, the Rorschach ink block test, I mean, oh my God, we studied that when I was undergraduate in psychology. It's like an odd historical event in the history of our field, but come on, really?

Speaker 2:
[06:53] But in Dr. Kelley's time, it was a mainstream assessment used not only to gauge and measure personality as it is occasionally still today, but as a diagnostic tool. And Kelley was not alone in using it that way, and he was considered one of America's best interpreters of these ink blot test results.

Speaker 1:
[07:15] Yeah, here they are. You have them pictured in your book. In case people forget what these things look like. There's that funny scene in the movie, I think it was Ley who was given his interview with the ink blots. What's it look like? A vagina, a vagina. Oh, a Jewish vagina. It's like, come on. I guess the idea, though, is they're projecting something that they're having in their head, and that's real information of a sort, I guess.

Speaker 2:
[07:40] So you were talking about Dr. Ley's result, Rorschach result.

Speaker 1:
[07:44] They all look like vaginas, like, okay, what's on this guy's mind? Okay.

Speaker 2:
[07:48] Well, these were kind of warped guys, and who felt free to respond with whatever came into their mind, which is the purpose of the test. They should do that, but in their case, it was very telling. But all of them found the Rorschach intriguing, and in Hermann Göring, who was the highest ranking of the defendants, found it especially intriguing, and he told Dr. Kelley that had he known there was such an assessment, he would have used it for Luftwaffe recruits during the war.

Speaker 1:
[08:25] Interesting. Yeah, just to remind people, of course, Hitler killed himself, as did Himmler and Goebbels. So Göring was the highest ranked Nazi still alive, let's see, except with the Admiral.

Speaker 2:
[08:38] Admiral Karl Donitz.

Speaker 1:
[08:40] Yeah, didn't he sign the surrender to Eisenhower?

Speaker 2:
[08:44] He did. At the very end of the war, the final days, Hitler had designated the Admiral as his official successor. But before that, before those very last days of the war, Göring had been Hitler's designated successor. They had a run-in with each other at the end of the war. And in fact, Hitler had ordered soldiers to kill Göring, but Göring was able to head off that effort.

Speaker 1:
[09:14] Yeah, I remember there's that scene in Downfall where Göring writes Hitler that letter saying, hey, I know it's all over now, so you said I'm the next guy, right? So I'm going to go ahead and be the next guy now.

Speaker 2:
[09:27] Hitler did not take well to that.

Speaker 1:
[09:30] No, that was so funny. Oh my God. Well, but the bigger picture here is what are they after? They want to know how did this happen? How do you get these highly educated, intelligent, cultured people like the Germans, the home of Goethe? I mean, come on, Beethoven, wow. Then turn them into goose-stop stepping Nazis in a matter of a few years. How does that happen? Is there something in the people themselves or is it the environment? Is it the culture? What is it?

Speaker 2:
[10:01] And Dr. Kelley found himself in a unique position, a really enviable position because here he was, perhaps the first military psychiatrist ever in history to be placed among suspected war criminals in a prison with the opportunity to assess them. So he took that opportunity and really ran with it and developed on his own. This was under the radar. His supervisors did not initially know about it, but he started a project to determine whether these men shared some psychiatric disorder that would account for their crimes and heinous behavior before and during the war. That's what Kelley did. He gave them all these assessments like the inkblot and IQ tests and other tests, and then he interviewed them all extensively. In the end, much to his horror, he concluded that, no, there was no common disorder. These men all fell within the normal range of personality, which was really frightening to Kelley. They were not mad men. They were not monsters. They were similar to people we always have around us. And there are people like this grasping for power in every society, every era, every country. And this really alarmed Kelley and also turned him professionally upside down because he realized that his beloved medical specialty, psychiatry, could not account for men like this. If it couldn't, then what could?

Speaker 1:
[11:42] Well, the answer is probably social psychology, cognitive psychology, political science, and so on. Yeah, I have here a copy of Nuremberg Diary by Gilbert, the other guy, who briefly makes an appearance in the film, but Kelley is the main guy in the film. But they both played a role there in the trial. They did.

Speaker 2:
[12:01] They were both important. They both had their own insights into the various defendants. But in the end, it's really interesting. They each looked at much the same evidence, test results, interview results, and came up with different conclusions. Kelley's conclusion was that these men were not mad men. They were not psychiatrically ill. Gilbert believed that some of them were in ways that would account for their criminal behavior.

Speaker 1:
[12:34] Yeah. There, if I recall, Gilbert was looking at the early version of far right. Now, what is authoritarianism, I think was the term later used. As if that applies to all conservatives or everybody to the right. That's too broad a brush there, I think. I was just going to read off the IQs. I don't know if he, Gilbert or Kelley, or who gave these tests. But yeah, Cisart, Incart, IQ 141. Remember, 100 is the average, 115 is one standard deviation above the mean, 130 is two standard deviations above the mean. So these guys are like over two standard deviations above the mean. Carl Dunitz, 138, von Poppen, 134, Hans Frank, 130, Keitel, 129, Albert Speer, 128. I mean, these are plus or minus, of course. Actually, do I not see Göring on here? Oh, there it is. Yeah, 138. Yeah, right. So these are smart guys.

Speaker 2:
[13:28] They're smart guys and Göring was so proud that he tested near the top of the group. But everybody was over 100, even the poorly respected Julius Stryker, the newspaper publisher, measured, I think at 106. So he was above average too.

Speaker 1:
[13:48] Yeah. And they were careerists. I mean, being part of the Nazi party means you have to work hard.

Speaker 2:
[13:54] And as Kelley concluded, they were not just careerists and, as you say, very hardworking people, but they were opportunists. What they did share, not an illness, was a desire for power and that they used the opportunities given to them by the Nazi party, especially in the early years of the National Socialists, to climb those rungs, those ideological rungs, to get to the top of the ladder and exercise power. That's what most of them were after. It's surprising. Many of them were not ideologues. Some were. But Göring claimed not to be. You have to take that with a big grain of salt. But these were men who simply wanted to run the lives of other people and get the benefits and privileges of being on top.

Speaker 1:
[14:48] And there was a lot of power for them and a lot of opportunity.

Speaker 2:
[14:51] They had life, life and death. In the case of Göring, there was a lot of wealth. Yes. Much of it's stolen wealth in the form of artworks. But Kelley, especially with Göring, Kelley formed, he developed an attraction, a professional attraction to Göring because Göring was intriguing. He was highly intelligent, as his IQ showed. He was remarkably charming. And he was highly manipulative and dangerous. He lacked remorse. He lacked conscience. So such a deadly mix of qualities. And this appealed, in a way, to Kelley because, guess what? He was like that too. He was also a quite formidable guy, highly intelligent and manipulative. And these two guys duked it out in Göring's prison cell in their long conversations, manipulating one another and trying and often succeeding in getting what they wanted from the other.

Speaker 1:
[15:58] It's an amazing story, particularly the finish, the end. I have no idea how Kelley died and how similar it was to what happened to Göring. But scientists are like this. They have big egos. They want to be famous. They want to get the big grants. They want to have the power. They want to be the top of their profession. It's really no different than in politics.

Speaker 2:
[16:17] Well, in many fields of endeavor, it's like this. And that was a point that Kelley made, that people who operate like this and who are aspiring authoritarians are in every profession, not just politics, government and the military. And of course, they don't all turn into mass murderers or architects of genocide.

Speaker 1:
[16:42] But they do work on Wall Street.

Speaker 2:
[16:45] Right. They don't have to become architects of genocide. They exercise their power in different ways and express their narcissism and hard work in their own ways.

Speaker 1:
[17:04] Yeah. Well, that's usually called the dark triad, narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. So in combination. Now again, most people, the psychologists that study this, most people don't become genocidal maniacs or mass murders or anything like that. Again, a lot of them work on Wall Street or whatever. I had a guest on who wrote a book on the positive aspects of psychopathy and that, if you want somebody to be a real killer in the Navy Seals or whatever, I mean, just fearless, he's going to go over there and just kick ass and get the job done. That's what you want. You're looking for traits like that.

Speaker 2:
[17:39] Right. And you're not looking for empathy or someone who's going to struggle with regret or any of that. Someone who will focus on the job, get it done, and work hard at it.

Speaker 1:
[17:52] Yeah. So when Kelly goes in there to talk to these guys, okay, this has never been done before and he's pretty savvy himself, how does he know when he's being bullshitted and when he's being manipulated or how does he get around that?

Speaker 2:
[18:06] Well, he doesn't, he allows Kelly to manipulate him because, so the way this happened between Göring and Kelly was, Göring was especially early in his imprisonment, was deeply interested in having closer contact with his own family, that is his wife, Emmy and his young daughter, Edda, and Kelly agreed to deliver letters between Göring and his family. He did this again without anyone in the prison having knowledge of it. But it was a quid pro quo. In return, Göring allowed Kelly to manipulate him. Kelly very much wanted access to Göring's thoughts, feelings, not just insight into Göring's psyche, but he wanted to know what Göring thought of the war's outcome, the reasons why he disregarded treaties, what the attraction was to Hitler, what Göring's attraction was to the young and then very small Nazi party in the early 1920s, all of that, because he was developing his ideas on what makes somebody an authoritarian. I use that word for lack of a better word. I don't want to say Nazi, because many of the people who have these qualities are not Nazis, but they do display authoritarian qualities.

Speaker 1:
[19:46] Yeah, you have a picture here of Kelly, the young Kelly. He's a handsome young man.

Speaker 2:
[19:49] But doesn't he look innocent? Does he look ready to go in among the Nazis?

Speaker 1:
[19:54] Yeah. Then the young Göring with his wife and young child. But that was his second wife, Karin was his first wife.

Speaker 2:
[20:03] Right. He had been earlier married and was a widower. His wife died in the 1920s, and then he in the 30s married Emmy. It was a big state wedding, Hitler in attendance, all of that. But Göring was a devoted husband and father, as many people with authoritarian tendencies are when it comes to their family. They are loyal and they are concerned, but it stops there. One of the questions that Kelley posed to Göring was talking about an event in Nazi history called the Night of the Long Knives, in which many party members were murdered in a single day, including a man named Ernst Röhm, who had been a friend of Göring's for many years. And Göring ordered the murder of Röhm. So Kelley asked, how could you do this? He was a very close friend of yours. And Göring's response was to look at Kelley like he was a naïve infant and tell Kelley, but he was in my way and that explained it.

Speaker 1:
[21:23] Right, his career path.

Speaker 2:
[21:26] Right.

Speaker 1:
[21:27] Yeah. Yeah, that's true psychopathy for sure. And Machiavellianism as well, right? So you put your loyalty values below your career values or whatever it is you're trying to get. Yeah. Yeah, that explains I think a lot of these guys. Why do you suppose Göring didn't kill himself like Goebbels and Himmler and Hitler did?

Speaker 2:
[21:48] Well, he had hopes in the final days of the war that the Allies would give him responsibility for running the new Germany. And these were not realistic hopes, given all that happened at the end of the war. But Göring believed it and even proposed it to the Allies. And of course it was rejected. He was too much involved with the crimes of the Nazi government. But he believed he could still be a player. And even when he realized he was no longer a player and that he was going to be put on trial, he saw the trial as an opportunity for him to take the stage again and defend not only the actions of the Nazi regime, but the motivations of all these men on trial and why they did what they did and remained loyal to Hitler.

Speaker 1:
[22:48] Yeah, there's that opening scene in the movie from your book of the Allies encountering Göring in his whatever car that was a stretch Mercedes or whatever, this driver in his luggage in his hat, in a hat box, and he gets out like, hey, look who it is, it's me.

Speaker 2:
[23:06] Right, and he expected the American servicemen to carry his baggage too. That is true. One of the things that he had with him in all of that luggage was nearly the entire world supply of a narcotic called paracodine that was manufactured in Germany, and Göring was addicted to it. He took dozens of these pills a day. And had for many years. So one of Kelly's first tasks in working with Göring was to rid him of this addiction. And Kelly managed it by telling Göring, this is going to be very difficult, but you are a man above other men. You are capable of doing it. And that line worked with Göring, and it seems quite easily he got over the addiction.

Speaker 1:
[24:04] Amazing. Just for lessons of our current crisis, maybe it's a less strong or less addictive drug than some of the fentanyl stuff used today or the codeine. Definitely.

Speaker 2:
[24:15] Definitely. That's true.

Speaker 1:
[24:16] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And again, he got hooked on that after he was wounded in the First World War, I think as a fighter pilot. Right.

Speaker 2:
[24:25] He was injured during the war and then injured again in the Munich Putsch, where he fought alongside Hitler and the other national socialists. And he became in his treatment for those injuries, became addicted to morphine, but then got off of morphine for some years. But he had some dental work done in the 1930s and got on to this other painkiller, paracodene. And that's when that all started.

Speaker 1:
[24:53] It's amazing. The entire German supply of this painkiller in a suitcase. Yes. Yeah. And so the weight just came with the addiction. I mean, he was huge when they caught him, right?

Speaker 2:
[25:03] He was a very big man. So big, in fact, that he was not able to fit into the two-passenger airplane that the Allies had hoped to bring him into custody with. They had to get a larger plane. But when asked about his size, Göring always put it in terms of physique, that he had this wonderful, he thought, German physique, that he was an exemplar of his nationality. But the Allies did not want him to die of a heart attack or something like that before the trial. And so Kelley worked with him also on his weight and got him down until he was so trimmed that his clothing seemed baggy on him.

Speaker 1:
[25:56] They didn't do too good a job of that in the film. I mean, Russell Crowe was pretty much the same weight the entire film. Maybe it was just the shooting time they had or whatever.

Speaker 2:
[26:05] He's shown, in the film, Göring is shown doing push-ups and things like that. But you're right, it didn't seem to reduce his size any.

Speaker 1:
[26:13] Yeah. Also surprised, they let him wear his Luftwaffe jacket, even without the insignia and metals and stuff. But they let him keep that on.

Speaker 2:
[26:21] Yes. So, they did require him to strip all the metals and officers' insignias off of it. And he was not allowed to keep his Reichmarschall baton, which was his memento of being the highest ranked military officer in German history, the equivalent of maybe a six-star general. And he was very proud of that object.

Speaker 1:
[26:52] Yeah, even more than Rubble. Yes. That was...

Speaker 2:
[26:56] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[26:57] Yeah. And I suppose he never knew about the July 20 bomb plot? You know, and...

Speaker 2:
[27:06] Yeah, that did not come up. I don't think he did.

Speaker 1:
[27:10] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[27:10] Kelley never asked him about it. It didn't come up in the trial in the context of Göring. So I don't think he was involved in that.

Speaker 1:
[27:19] And the other great scene you talk about is, you know, when they made them watch the film of the concentration camps, and Göring is just like covering his eyes, like, is it possible a lot of that happened and he didn't know? I mean, is it such a complex bureaucracy? Just stuff happens and the top bosses just don't know?

Speaker 2:
[27:39] I don't think it's credible that the man this high in the government didn't know about the camps and have an idea of what was going on there. But Hitler did isolate his subordinates in silos, just like you find in some corporations, so that one silo doesn't know a lot about what the other is doing. But none of the defendants, they were all able to make a defense. Some of them as a line of defense said they weren't aware of the extent of the killings that were taking place in the death camps. Nobody made the argument that the Holocaust never happened. And then some of them made the argument that they were acting out of patriotism, nationalism, following orders, all of that. But that didn't fly with the court.

Speaker 1:
[28:35] The boss told me to kill 6 million Jews, so hey, what are you going to do?

Speaker 2:
[28:39] Right.

Speaker 1:
[28:40] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a point I always make when I'm debunking the Holocaust deniers. Even the Nazis didn't deny it.

Speaker 2:
[28:47] That's absolutely right. And they could have.

Speaker 1:
[28:51] Yeah, they could have. Yeah. I mean, they did cover up a lot of it. I've tracked a lot of this where, like Himmler gives that speech in Posnan, you've probably heard this speech that was recorded where he's kind of uprating his generals, his lieutenants or whatever beneath him, that everybody has their favorite Jew and we got to get over that. We have a job to do here. We have to get rid of all of them. And no more of this. I can't stand the sight of dead bodies. Oh, it's terrible. We're going to stand up and this will, this is a history that will never be written and never spoken of. But we all know we're doing this, right? There it is.

Speaker 2:
[29:27] Yes. And one of the important aspects of this trial, and one of the reasons why it's good that the Allies did not line these guys up against a wall and shoot them all, was that the trial gave an opportunity for the public to get a glimpse of the mountain of evidence that the prosecutors assembled against these arch criminals. And it was overwhelming. And I think it has, that evidence still resonates in people's minds today, even people who weren't alive at the time of these trials. And that's why they're now 80 years later, there are not statues of Nazi figures in Germany or just about anywhere else. And there are not a lot of apologists for the German leaders of that time.

Speaker 1:
[30:32] That's right. You've got that discussion of Göring pictured like a boulevard's named after him and statues of him that would be erected in Germany one day. Yeah. So had the Holocaust never happened and they just fought a war and lost, it'd be like the South, right? With the statues of Southern generals and they were heroic and honorable. They had their cause, we had our cause and they lost too bad. This is very different.

Speaker 2:
[30:57] Yes. And the films that you mentioned earlier, which were shown in the opening weeks of the trial, made a huge impression. Many of us nowadays have seen films like this quite a bit. They're on YouTube, they're available to watch if you want. But back then, there had been no public screenings before of these films. And I think everyone was shocked for different reasons. The people attending the trial in the galleries were just overwhelmed with horror. The defendants were shocked. Some of them did not know the extent of what was going on in the death camps. And then some, I think, were shocked that films like this existed. Why were they shot? And so when, on the day that the films were shown, all of the defendants went back to the prison afterwards in silence. And it got everybody thinking and worrying.

Speaker 1:
[32:04] Yeah. So, I mean, the precedent set here is that no one had ever done anything like this. Crimes against humanity. I mean, the word genocide was invented by, what's the guy's name, 1946?

Speaker 2:
[32:19] Lemke.

Speaker 1:
[32:20] Lemke, the Polish jurisprudence guy.

Speaker 2:
[32:22] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[32:23] Yeah, I mean, that's just such an interesting idea. I mean, historically, there's always been genocides, but it wasn't a big deal as long as it didn't happen to you. It was like, well, this is just part of the human landscape. Now, we're going to call it something different.

Speaker 2:
[32:36] Like the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey. The Turks had always tried very hard to portray it, first of all, not as a genocide, but also as a Turkish affair. But the Nazi genocide of the Jews spanned the entire continent. It could not possibly be conceived of as a German thing. And it was on a scale never before seen, and done in an almost mechanized way that the world had not seen before.

Speaker 1:
[33:12] Yeah, I've read several books on the Eidsatz group and the Holocaust by bullets. You know, that's pretty gruesome. I guess Himmler went to one of these mass shootings into a grave and got sick to his stomach. And there's that book Ordinary Men. You probably read Christopher Browning's, aren't you? Yeah. You know, these guys are slightly older. They're a police force. They're coming in after the Vermont goes east into Ukraine, Poland Ukraine and all that stuff. And they have to kill every last Jew in every little village. And that is really hard to get people to do that. Regular people that are not, you know, weird or broken or psychiatric or whatever. They're just, how are you going to do that? I mean, this is a hard problem to solve. And I guess the gas chamber stuff came after, you know, the bullets thing is just too hard on our people, our own soldiers, right? So then it became more mechanized that way.

Speaker 2:
[34:00] Yes, and so the psychology of the followers, the people following orders is different, I think, than the study of the psychology of the people giving orders. And it was in the latter category that Kelley focused his attention because he had this really unusual, unprecedented access to these men. But I think it's quite different that people follow orders for reasons that are much different than why they give orders. And it's probably two different categories of humanity that those two groups fall into.

Speaker 1:
[34:41] Yeah, well, right. So there's perpetrators, victims, and then the bystanders. That's another one. You know, that's when Eisenhower famously had the local townspeople go into one of the camps. Because they had said, oh, we don't know what's going on over there. And so he's like put their face right in the pile of bodies. Like, that's what was going on here. Right. You can't not know something was going on. Right. And also take pictures so everybody can see this.

Speaker 2:
[35:08] And the defendants in the trial never talked about this. They never talked, unless they were forced to by watching these films, they never talked about death camps. They never talked about holocausts. They did talk quite a bit about the twisted racial theories of the Nazis. But that was, you know, on a different plane and was quite theoretical and academic and hard to follow. And Kelley certainly got his earful of that stuff, especially from a man named Alfred Rosenberg, who was one of the defendants, all kind of the party, Nazi party philosopher. He wrote these long books that nobody read, but that were all about racial theory. And Rosenberg kept trying to convince Kelley that America had its own problem with Jews, and that America had to attend to it. All of this time that Kelley spent with the German defendants changed his way of looking, not only at these defendants, but at America when he came back home. He saw, he came home and he saw what was happening in the southern states, these demagogues running these states, legislating Jim Crowe, limiting voting among black voters, and using propaganda techniques that were very familiar to Kelley from his discussions with the Germans. And Kelley began to believe this isn't something German, it's reflective of humankind, that there are going to be people like this arising all the time. And he laid out a, he went on a speaking tour to talk about it, but it was not a message that Americans wanted to hear after this long war, the Germans had been defeated. Many people wanted to think that meant the end of people like that, but of course it didn't, as we've seen. And Kelley did devise a plan to preserve democracy in the US., a three-point plan that he thought would head off authoritarians. And two of those points, I think, are well thought out and reasonable. The third is kind of silly, I think. But Kelley was very dedicated to it, and he grew frustrated.

Speaker 1:
[37:59] Go over those points again?

Speaker 2:
[38:01] The first had to do with education. He had noticed that propaganda plays on emotional responses and perceived grievances, things like that, in the population. So he thought that our educational system should do more to reinforce critical thinking skills, forming your opinions and beliefs based on evidence, you're very familiar with this, I'm sure, on evidence from a variety of sources, assessing which sources are credible, which aren't, and forming opinions that way. The second point had to do specifically with voting. And Kelley strongly believed that our voting system should make it easier, not more difficult, for qualified voters to cast ballots. And we see now initiatives that, yes, may weed out the very tiny number of people who are voting illegally, but also make it enormously difficult for many qualified voters to cast their ballots. So that's the kind of thing that Kelley was against. And the third point, which I think is silly, was his belief that candidates for political office should undergo mandatory psychiatric examinations before being allowed to hold office. I don't like that because, first of all, having a psychiatric illness is not an instant disqualification from holding office. But who decides, who examines, it's too chancey.

Speaker 1:
[39:46] Yeah, my wife is from Cologne, Germany. So she was born and raised there. And she said that in the educational system there is, this is what we did and we are never doing this again. We are never, ever, ever, ever doing this again. This is what happened. And it's like, then she comes over here and is like the History Channel. All Hitler, all day. It's like, can't you guys get over this guy? We got over him.

Speaker 2:
[40:10] Right. But something different is happening in schools. That as time goes on, fewer school students, K-12 students, are learning about World War II, the Holocaust, all that happened and it's receding in time as the survivors dwindle. And one of the things that pleases me most about the movie Nuremberg is that it is in introducing a younger audience to what happened during the war and what happened after in this effort to bring the war criminals to justice.

Speaker 1:
[40:48] Yeah. I really like the whole concept of having an international order. I mean, Göring himself, you probably have this quote here, but anyway, I had it from Gilbert where he rejects the authority of the court. I can say like Maria Stewart, forget who that is, that I can only be tried by a court of peers. Let's see, what happened? He said, Göring says, what happened in our country does not concern you in the least. If five million Germans were killed, that's a matter for Germans to settle, and our state policies are our own business. So basically, it's sort of a self-determination. I mean, that was a Woodrow Wilson thing after the First World War. You are self-determining. It's none of our business what you do in other countries, whatever. So in a way, Göring was kind of turning that around on the Allies.

Speaker 2:
[41:35] Yes. And the Allies probably remembered that there were a small number of war crimes trials after World War I in Germany. They were administered by German courts, and many of the accused were not convicted. Maybe they should have been acquitted. I don't know what the evidence was against them, but it wasn't a very strong record of conviction. And the fact that the four major Allies came together to run these trials and to conduct them, they were very flawed, but to conduct them reasonably fairly, these men had a chance to defend themselves. They were not kangaroo court show type trials as the Russians had been operating. And that meant a lot in public opinion and in our collective memory of the war and the aftermath.

Speaker 1:
[42:37] Yeah, well, there was that, you know, so where Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court Justice, is trying to figure out, how am I going to do this? You know, we got to get the support of the United, do we need the support of the United States Supreme Court? Congress, does Congress need to vote that we can have these trials? And then there's a scene where I guess, I think Truman or somebody goes, now we're not going to have Congress vote on this. And then one guy, this is in the movie, it's probably in your book too, but where he says, well, who's higher than the Congress of the United States? And then it cuts to the Vatican. Oh, the Pope. Right. And then the Pope's like, I don't want anything to do with this. Oh yeah? Well, let me remind you of what you guys did back in the early 30s.

Speaker 2:
[43:16] Right, that's a memorable scene from the movie. It's not in my book, and I don't think it's in anybody's book. Oh, I see. I don't think that happened. But it could have happened. And it belongs in the movie because it moves the audience and carries them along. Plus that scene is quite entertaining also. So these are some of the ways in which telling a story in a film is different from telling a story in a non-fiction book that's trying to write a fully accurate narrative. In a movie, not so important. And maybe not even possible because you're putting words into people's mouths, into characters' mouths. And as I was commenting on and appraising the different drafts of the screenplay over all these years, that's something I had to think about. What is my role as a commenter? I didn't want to be the history police. I didn't want to be the fact checker. And what it came down to to me was I just wanted to make comments that would make this as good a movie as it could. So that's what I limited myself to.

Speaker 1:
[44:36] And then the verdicts. Why did Göring get the death penalty by hanging? And Albert Speer, for example, didn't. He got, I think, 20 years or whatever. I read his Spandau Diary, I think it was called. He kept, kind of, recalled everything. It was super interesting. I mean, I think it's useful in that sense. But come on, he, you know, he was using slave labor. He knew what was going on in the camps. You know, he orchestrated a lot of this stuff. It was astonishing to me he didn't get hung.

Speaker 2:
[45:04] Speer was one of the two defendants that Kelley liked the least. Because he felt that Speer was a hypocrite. That he was acknowledging, and he did this in his book, acknowledging some responsibility, some guilt, but he didn't go all the way. He didn't make a full admission. And Kelley sensed this and disliked him for it. The other defendant he disliked was Hans Frank, who held a variety of positions, but quite a record of murder and killings. And Frank professed in prison to have undergone a conversion or reconversion to Catholicism. And Kelley just didn't believe it. He thought he was trying to save his skin. So that was the kind of defendant that Kelley liked the least, the hypocrites.

Speaker 1:
[46:05] Yeah. What do you make of Rudolf Hess, the, you know, he was the deputy, he was the second-in-command, that he had that crazy fly to England in 1941 in a Messerschmitt plane and parachutes out and was he really mad or was he faking or, you know, how do we, what do we know?

Speaker 2:
[46:23] Yeah, Hess is so interesting and an entire book could just focus on him. But I have to tell you, Michael, when I got a hold of these boxes of papers and other artifacts that Doug Kelley, the son of the doctor had saved, one of the first things I found was a wrapped package, a package wrapped in paper. And Kelley had written on it, these are samples of biscuits that Rudolf Hess had refused to eat because he thought they were poisoned. So here they were still wrapped up, 60-year-old cookies. And I wasn't tempted really to open that package. That package, along with all of the other materials, have since gone to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. And I just wonder a lot, what did they do with the cookies?

Speaker 1:
[47:22] Yeah, that's wild.

Speaker 2:
[47:24] But Hess was so interesting that he feigned amnesia, admitted to faking it, and then later said, no, it was real, and then admitted to faking it again. Kelley's conclusion was that he really was faking it. And the court agreed and gave him a very long sentence. He wasn't one of the ones sentenced to die, but he spent the rest of his life in prison, in Spando Prison, and he lived a really long time in prison.

Speaker 1:
[47:57] It's a weird thing. I wonder why he did that. I mean, was it that he thought once the Germans didn't defeat the British in the Battle of the Blitz, that they weren't going to be able to invade, so maybe I'll just go over there? Because he knew the, whoever the, one of the royal family members where he knew somebody there, that maybe he'd be the hero, maybe he'd be the German hero who brought the peace or something.

Speaker 2:
[48:25] Yeah, he was on shaky ground for a long time. And his idea was to approach the British with the possibility of the Brits teaming with the Germans to turn against the Russians. And by the time Hess was proposing this, it was way past any likelihood that something like that would happen. So I think he was, you know, I won't say he was delusional, but I think he was kind of soft headed and prone to bad judgment like that.

Speaker 1:
[49:04] I would say delusional is a good word. Another thing I was going to bring up when you were talking a minute ago, David Irving, who I got to know pretty well, is one of the chief Holocaust deniers as it were. He wrote a biography of Goebbels and he did one of Göring too, I think.

Speaker 2:
[49:19] He did.

Speaker 1:
[49:20] Yeah. But I remember just kind of his own ego. I mean, he used to hold his hand up and go, this hand has shaken the hand of people that shook Hitler's hand than anybody alive today. This is like in the 90s. He was very proud of that. But he kind of hinted that, but for the Holocaust, there'd be the equivalent of Hitler's birthplace and statues and Göring and Goebbels and all, just like there is in Napoleon in France. You can go to Napoleon's too. There it is. I mean, it's a huge beautiful building and there it is. How come the Germans don't have the equivalent of that? The answer is, well, because the Holocaust, that's why. Right.

Speaker 2:
[50:01] That's a very big but. And regarding Irving's biography of Göring, I had the opportunity to use it if I wanted in my research, but I decided not to. I didn't even open it. There were other biographies of Göring available, and I just did not want to taint my research with his involvement in it.

Speaker 1:
[50:29] I think that's wise for the following reason. You can't trust him. David speaks the language. He gets into the primary documents. All that's good, but he spin doctors things in a certain way, very predictably. This all came out in the trial where he sued Deborah Lipschak for calling him a Holocauster. Richard Evans and his team of grad students who ever helped him, read every single thing Irving ever wrote, every footnote, everything. And so Evans' conclusion was that of course, no historian gets it right all the time, everybody makes mistakes. But the mistakes are random, they go this way, this way. Irving's mistakes are all in the one direction of exonerating the Nazis, right? So I was like, yeah, okay. So there was one where he had a translation of a memo, Aus Rotten, the Juden. So what does that word Aus Rotten mean? And so Irving was spinning it like it means like the Aus Rotten of lice. They just want to get rid of the lice. They want to get rid of the Jews. And it's like, that's not what it means. Aus Rotten, the lice, they want to kill the lice. They're not transporting the lice out on little mini trains, right? And this was just one memo from Himmler. You know, I just got back from Hitler and no Aus Rotten, whatever it was. And it's like, you know, you just can't trust him on even just one word.

Speaker 2:
[51:52] Yeah. And if you're a researcher who is ill intentioned, as I think he is, there are many opportunities to do that. No one is going to follow your trail completely because there's so much that any researcher goes through and can spin. And that's why I decided to avoid him completely.

Speaker 1:
[52:20] This is so unlikely to happen again anywhere. I mean, it was an unusual set of circumstances that came about to put Hitler in power. I was just reading about the role of chance and contingency and how uncertain things are along the way when you don't know what's going to happen. Even Hitler's rise to power was far more contingent than most historians have allowed. Consider this observation of post-war Nuremberg trial by the Nazi legal strategist Hans Franck. Here's Franck. The Fuhrer was a man who was possible in Germany only at that very moment. He came at exactly this terrible transitory period when the monarchy had gone and the republic was not yet secure. Close quote. According to historian Timothy Rybach, who builds on Franck's acute awareness of the contingent nature of Hitler's takeover, quote, had Hitler's predecessor at the chancelory, Kurt Von Schleicher, remained in office another six months, or had German president Paul von Hindenburg exercise his constitutional powers more judiciously, or had a faction of moderate conservative Reichstag delegates cast their votes differently than history may well have taken a very different term. Both Hitler's ascendancy to the chancelory and his smashing of the constitutional guardrails once he got there, I have come to realize, are stories of political contingency rather than historical inevitability. And then continuing from Rybock. In fact, the unpredictable contingent nature of the fewer takeover came almost as much as a surprise to Hitler as it did to the rest of the country, Rybock notes, adding that as late as November and December of 1932, so he came into power of January 33, right? Matters look so grim to the Nazi leader, losing badly in the latest election, and the party being close to bankruptcy. Here's Rybock, Hitler told several close associates that he was contemplating suicide. But then a series of backroom deals had late January 33 led to the dismissal of Chancellor Schleicher and the appointment of Hitler to power. Schleicher later recalled that Hitler exclaimed, It was astonishing in his life that he was always rescued just when he himself had given up all hope. I mean, that's amazing. I mean, just right there, just like that one day, these things could have turned differently.

Speaker 2:
[54:35] Yes. Even earlier, the victorious allies after World War I, unknowingly added to those conditions favorable to Hitler's rise by imposing the Treaty of Versailles, such a harsh condition of surrender on the Germans. Had that been negotiated differently, we probably would have seen a different history.

Speaker 1:
[55:04] All the assassination attempts on Hitler's life mostly failed, just barely. Even the July 20 bomb plot. Had the table not been there to block the energy from the blast, had he had the two bombs in the suitcase rather than only the one. Had the meeting not been moved from the concrete building, which would have retained the blast energy, instead the brick building, wood building with the glass windows, which the energy that escapes the room. All that probably would have killed him.

Speaker 2:
[55:32] Yep. Hitler viewed those fortunate events as destiny, making him even more dangerous. When the leaders like that start believing that they're ordained to do what they consider to be great, that's a very dangerous leader when that happens.

Speaker 1:
[55:57] Well, I point out there though, although that's very different than had he been assassinated in the early 30s or even the mid 30s, before the war. Because by July 1944, most of the Jews were already dead that were going to be killed. The Russians were not going to go, okay, in that case, we'll just stop. That wasn't going to happen.

Speaker 2:
[56:16] Yeah, and let Göring say, leave the country.

Speaker 1:
[56:20] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[56:20] That was not going to occur.

Speaker 1:
[56:22] No, that wasn't in the cards. Yeah. Yeah. So right. So much hangs in the balance there. Okay. What else is going to ask you about some of this stuff? All right. So the trial is over. They're executed or the few that live on. Kelley goes back to the United States and then pick up his story, which doesn't last as long as I thought it would. What happens to him?

Speaker 2:
[56:46] Yeah. Kelley's life went into a bad downward spiral after his time in Nuremberg. Part of it was for professional reasons, psychiatry. He has lost some faith in it. He began a slow lean towards criminology as a possible way to understand people like this. But he felt unappreciated. He published a book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, that sold poorly. The public received it poorly. He developed a drinking problem that's hinted at the very end of the movie. Marriage problems. He was a really difficult father for his children to grow up with. He became very depressed. On the first day of 1958, as the family was gathered in their home near Berkeley to watch the Rose Bowl football game, Kelley got into an argument with his wife and became really upset and enraged. Went upstairs to his home office where he kept chemicals. It was a kind of a mini laboratory as well. One of the chemicals was cyanide that he had in powdered form. He came down the stairs with this canister of cyanide in his hand and made a statement that Doug told me about because he was present, only 10 years old, but he still remembers it. It was almost incoherent, Doug thought, but it was about Dr. Kelley's expression of how he thought nobody understood him, how unhappy he was and how desperate he was to end it. He put some cyanide in his mouth and died almost instantly. One of the questions that I went into my research on the Nazi and the psychiatrist with was, was there a connection to the suicide by cyanide with Hermann Göring's own suicide by cyanide on the eve of his planned hanging? And it's a complicated question. I don't think Kelley was imitating Göring, but I think that manner of death, very dramatic and sudden and violent, appealed to both men because they wanted to make statements out of their deaths. Göring was telling the Allies, you don't control me. I'm going to go out the way I want. And Kelley was saying, you don't understand me to his family and I'm out of here. So that, I think it appealed, that kind of suicide appealed to both men for similar reasons. That's the conclusion I came to.

Speaker 1:
[59:41] Yeah, I thought it was a very moving part of your book and surprising. You know, the cyanide thing, well, it's probably better than a gun because that's messy. Other things you might screw up and it may not work. Then you look like an idiot. Right? So I mean, all the Nazis that use the cyanide, I mean, you just bite down on the capsule, it's over.

Speaker 2:
[60:01] Within 10 seconds, it's over.

Speaker 1:
[60:03] Yeah. So you have to speculate, and you do because everybody does, how did Göring get to his capsule?

Speaker 2:
[60:10] Yeah, no one knows. But I think what's most likely is that he had capsules with him at the time of his arrest, just like the others did, the ones who used them, and that he made a deal with one of the American guards to bring him from his stored goods one or two of those capsules in exchange for something of value that Göring had. He came with all kinds of jewelry and watches and rings and medals, and I think that's probably how it happened. And there was no connection at all with Dr. Kelley in all of that. Kelley was long gone from Nuremberg by the time Göring's suicide happened, and the source of Kelley's cyanide was not the same as Göring's cyanide. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1:
[61:03] Right, of course, yeah. Yeah, plus, as you pointed out, Göring was very charming. He must have charmed one of the guards.

Speaker 2:
[61:09] The guards loved him. They thought he was funny. He told jokes about himself. He even told jokes about Hitler. He was interesting to them. So one of the guards was susceptible to this and made the deal. That's what I think happened.

Speaker 1:
[61:30] Yeah. All right, let's fast forward to Milgram in Zimbardo and the early 60s and 70s attempts to explain the Nazis through social psychology. Phil Zimbardo, I knew Phil pretty well. He died last year. Anyway, his whole thing was that people are not inherently evil except a handful of people. That it's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels, right? So that was the whole point of the Stanford Prison Experiment. We're going to flip a coin and decide who's a guard and who's a prisoner and then let them have their way and play their roles. It's the roles that people adopt. Now, he's been criticized even toward the end of his life. He kind of coached the guards to be a little more badass than maybe they would have been otherwise. He gave them those mirrored sunglasses because that was a scene from Cool Hand Luke where the guy had the mirrored sunglasses and the rifle. I think what we have here is a failure to communicate. You kind of like the little Hollywoodish. But still, before in the films in the 70s and 80s of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the actual documentary films where the guards are saying, yeah, I did this because I just really got into it. Now, some of them are saying, oh, I was faking. It's like, I don't know. It brings up this deeper issue is if you're in that system and you start to play the role, maybe you're just going along with it, maybe then self-deception takes over and you think, yeah, I really am into this. This is really the right thing to do and that sort of thing. Like ordinary men, these kinds of eventually they get into it and that becomes part of their job. It's not coldly following orders, like I don't want to do this, but I have to do it. No, it's like it's just a new role that you take on. Anyway, so I just want to get your thoughts on that.

Speaker 2:
[63:18] Well, Kelley didn't believe that large numbers of people were capable of evil acts. He believed that the responsibility goes on the small number of people who have these authoritarian urges. And sometimes it gets mixed up with the phrase that a lot of people know now, the banality of evil that came out of Adolf Eichmann's trial some years later. So again, though, that is more about the psychology of the followers, the ones who were following orders. Kelley was focused on the psychology of the leaders. And as far as the banality of evil goes, Kelley, I don't think would have agreed with that. Adolf Eichmann was certainly a banal, colorless, murderous man. But most of these defendants in the first Nuremberg trial were not colorless at all. They were not really ordinary sameing. They're quite memorable. You know, Göring with his costumes and love of pageantry and wild animals roaming his estate. These were not paper pushing functionaries. These were people who made decisions and made choices. What I like about Kelley's thoughts is that if you don't regard them as monsters, if you don't regard them as madmen, that makes them responsible for their choices and you can hold them to account. That's a comforting thought to me.

Speaker 1:
[65:10] I do think Eichmann was far more than just a paper pushing bureaucrat. He was an anti-Semite to the core and probably got much enjoyment out of it. Yeah, here's a couple of quotes from Milgram in his shock experiments. What is surprising is how far ordinary individuals will go in complying with the experimenter's instructions. It is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of evil action, but is far from the final consequences of the action. And then he reflects later, I'm forever astonished that when lecturing on the obedience experiments in colleges across the country, I face young men who were aghast at the behavior of the experimental subjects and proclaimed they would never behave in such a way, but who in a matter of months were brought into the military and performed without compunction. Actions that made shocking the victim seem pallid. He's probably referring to the Vietnam War there.

Speaker 2:
[66:07] Right. And they're overtaken by forces they think to be bigger than themselves, like national interests, patriotism, love of country, all of that. And we're all susceptible to that. And I think in certain circumstances, it takes a great deal of strength, inner strength, to overcome those feelings and to act ethically and morally. But Kelley, unfortunately, had a little opportunity to talk with concentration camp guards and other people who were following orders. I think he would have enjoyed or gotten something out of talking with them. But early in the process of the Nuremberg trials, he was at the very beginning of this 13 trial series, those people weren't up for judgment yet.

Speaker 1:
[67:02] Is that how many trials there were, 13 total?

Speaker 2:
[67:04] Yes, from 1945 to 49, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[67:09] So that included then the later ones were the lawyers and the judges who kind of passed all this legislation.

Speaker 2:
[67:16] There was also an SS trial, a munitions makers trial, doctors trial. There was many others.

Speaker 1:
[67:26] The doctors trial, that's right. Yeah, because so many people would have to be complicit in the entire system, and it was a fairly complex system. I read a book called KL about the concentration camps. It's huge. I mean, there was thousands of these camps. I had no idea. We hear the big ones, Auschwitz and Birken, and Majdanek and Mauthausen and all that stuff, but just thousands and thousands of them around there, like the Gulen.

Speaker 2:
[67:52] It's shocking when you look at modern maps showing the locations of all these camps. They're just all over the German occupied territory, and it seems like they're almost crammed in, one next to the other. Most people know the names of only a few of these camps, but there were many, many of them.

Speaker 1:
[68:13] Most of those little ones were in Germany, but the big death camps were in Poland, probably intentionally away from the prying eyes of what media or the Catholic Church or whoever's left, poking around looking into these things. Yeah, so, I mean, Majdanek, Mauthausen, well, Mauthausen was more of a work camp in Austria. They had a gas chamber there, but they probably didn't use it in an industrial level. But yeah, it's amazing how much of the Holocaust is fairly still new about what we know about it. I mean, because I read all this stuff. The books written in the 50s and 60s are not very good compared to the scholarship in the 90s and the 2000s. And then also after the fall of the Soviet Union, and all the records they took became available to scholars to look at. Because they liberated a lot of those camps before the Allies got there, or before the Americans and British got there. So there's probably still more to be found.

Speaker 2:
[69:14] Probably. And that's why there continues to be a steady stream of World War II books, some published by academic historians, and some published by people like me who are not historians, but who are more of a background in journalism, and who are more concerned with developing narratives out of this mass of evidence and information. But I don't think it will stop. It shows no signs of letting up.

Speaker 1:
[69:48] It's such a huge event, and there's so many different elements at work there. I mean, there's all the trials in Japan, and there are more crimes. I mean, there hasn't been that much done on that. We probably need more movies. I think there's one movie made about that.

Speaker 2:
[70:02] There's a quite good TV series, which I think is called The Tokyo Trials.

Speaker 1:
[70:08] That's it. That's the one I saw. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[70:10] And I thought it was very good, and it was operated differently than the Nuremberg Trials. There was a wider range and more judges involved, and also judges not just from the Allies, but from some of the occupied territories, like the Philippines and India. And that really changed the character of the deliberations.

Speaker 1:
[70:38] You probably read The Rape of Nen King.

Speaker 2:
[70:40] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[70:41] Iris Cheng's great book. Another tragic story. She killed herself. I mean, she suffered from depression. I wonder if Kelley just, he was just a problem. This is a different subject. But maybe they just suffer from brain chemistry. Maybe just a depression. It's not a social environmental thing. My wife doesn't understand me. I'm going to kill myself. Maybe it's something else.

Speaker 2:
[71:03] Well, it is true. Kelley was raised in a environment of darkness, dark events. His grandfather, Charles McGlashen, was one of the leading people of the town of Truckee in Northern California.

Speaker 1:
[71:23] The Donner Party.

Speaker 2:
[71:24] Yes, the Donner Party.

Speaker 1:
[71:25] I forgot about that.

Speaker 2:
[71:26] Unbelievable. McGlashen was the first historian of the Donner Party and also had a private museum filled with artifacts that he had gathered in the mountains, like finger bones and things like that. And so this is what Kelley grew up in. He grew up in Truckee. And so I think this got him off to a start. I mean, who knows what people are born with and what they acquire through their environment. But I think it got him off to kind of a dark start. Plus Kelley's mother, who was one of the first women practicing attorneys in California, was also of a dark personality and gave her son a bit of an adversarial view of the world. There are people that you'll find yourself in combat with as you go on in your life. So it was a start that might lead to depression. And he was truly very depressed at the end of his life.

Speaker 1:
[72:37] Yeah, and the alcohol and the drugs and whatever else probably doesn't help. Yeah, I was gonna just, a few other excerpts here from stuff I've written. Another book, The Good Old Days, The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. So it's a series of letters, like one dated Sunday, September 27th, 1942. This is from the Aizansgruppen SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Lieutenant Colonel Karl Kreschmer. Apologizes to his wife. He's writing home. I mean, these guys are married with kids, right? It's like the Auschwitz diary, the family that live right next door.

Speaker 2:
[73:14] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[73:16] He's there with his wife and kids having fun. Okay, we're gonna go light up the crematuria now, be back later tonight. Unbelievable. Anyway, this guy writes, Here's Soska. He apologizes for not writing. More, I'd like to be with you all. What you see here makes you either brutal or sentimental. His gloomy mood, he explains, is caused by the sight of the dead, including women and children. His moral conflict is resolved by coming to believe that the Jews deserve to die. As the war here is, in our opinion, a Jewish war, the Jews are the first to feel it. Here in Russia, wherever the German soldier is, no Jew remains. You can imagine that at first, one needs some time to get to grips with this. In a subsequent letter, not dated, Kreshmer explains to his wife, Hayley, how he came to grips with the conflict. There is no room here for pity of any kind. You women and children back home could not expect any mercy or pity if the enemy got the upper hand. Well, that's true when the Russians came back in at the end of the war. It was apparently pretty brutal. For that reason, we're mopping up here where necessary, but otherwise the Russians are willing, simple and obedient. There are no Jews here anymore. Finally, on October 19th, 1942, Kresmer shows how easy it is to slip into the evil of moral banality referencing the Einsatzgruppen. If it weren't for the stupid thoughts about what we're doing in this country, the Einsatz here would be wonderful since it put me in a position where I can support you all very well. I'm making a good living. Here I am being a good man for my family. Since as I already wrote to you, I consider the last Einsatz to be justified and indeed approve of the consequence it had. The phrase stupid thoughts is not strictly accurate. Rather, it is a weakness not to be able to stay on the side of dead people. The best way of overcoming it is to do it more often than it becomes a habit. Wow. Wow.

Speaker 2:
[75:08] That's how to turn your population into killers. I've been reading recently that one of the justifications, as you hinted at, one of the justifications for killing even baby, Jewish babies was that if they were permitted to live, the Jews, they believed, were a vengeful people and would seek revenge against the Germans and try and wipe the Germans out. So the Germans thought, we must wipe them out or else they will wipe us out. As it happens, there was not a lot of vengeance. There was some, but not a lot of revengeful acts by Jews against Germans after the war, much less than the Germans had anticipated if they lost.

Speaker 1:
[76:01] Yeah, there's a few horror stories that are often told by the Holocaust deniers. They're making an equivalency argument, like the Germans did these bad things, but the Jews did these other bad things. Or like in the case of Irving, there's, yeah, Auschwitz was bad, but so was Hamburg and Dresden. The mass bombing there is as if they're equivalent or Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So my counter to that is, yeah, but once the war was over, the killing stopped. It had a particular utilitarian end to it, to end the war. Right? Whereas the case of the Holocaust, they want to kill every last Jew. And it's not, it's a different motive.

Speaker 2:
[76:44] Yes, it's a completely different motive. And it was part of the war effort. It was part of the German struggle, was directed against the Jews, not just their military opponents. So yes, I agree, it was completely different. But those arguments about Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ones that Göring threw at Kelley in their conversations. And they're not equivalent.

Speaker 1:
[77:13] Well, he also made the point that had we won the war, we'd be trying you guys.

Speaker 2:
[77:18] Right, right.

Speaker 1:
[77:21] I suppose there's maybe some truth to that. But it's again, a very different motive there. This is a different question. To what extent did the mass bombing, the carpet bombing really work? You know, I guess the studies show that it didn't slow down the German war effort that much, right? Speer was able to get things back up and running after these, you know, mass bombings.

Speaker 2:
[77:43] But maybe it affected morale even more and undercut the war effort of the Germans in that way.

Speaker 1:
[77:52] Yeah, yeah. Although part of the problem is what is the general populace to do? I mean, they can't, what are they going to go in there and tell Hitler to stop it? I mean, that's the problem, right? How do you, you know, how do you stop once they're in power? Right? In game theory, this is actually a problem called belling the cat. I don't know if you're familiar with this. But the mice get together one day and decide it would be a good idea to put a bell on the cat so we can hear him coming, right? It's like, okay, who's gonna do it?

Speaker 2:
[78:23] Right, it's a suicide mission.

Speaker 1:
[78:25] Yeah. So it's crazy. Yeah. I mean, I guess that again, back to the bigger issue of your book and the film and all of this is, could this happen here? Again, I don't think the same kind of thing, but the general rise of autocracies, there's been a spike in this recently after the long stretch of more and more countries becoming democracies. Seems to be a little bit of push for that. It seems like general populace likes a strong leader in some cases. There are bad people, so maybe we need strong leaders. I don't know, but some people seem to think so. I don't think we're going to see another Hitler, but certainly other strong characters, that could happen. It does happen.

Speaker 2:
[79:11] Yes. Since the post-war years, we have seen uncountable authoritarian regimes in countries all over, and we've seen no diminishment in war crimes, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, genocides of various kinds. And to me, this lends a historical support to what Kelley concluded, that this is just a condition of humankind, and that if we're going to, unless we want to go through bloody convulsions, periodically, we have to learn to anticipate it and control it.

Speaker 1:
[79:58] Oh, I think I just noticed what your designer did with the little breaks between sections there. They used a little ink blot.

Speaker 2:
[80:07] That's very cute, isn't it?

Speaker 1:
[80:08] Because I listened to it on audio, so I didn't look at the book. You nicely autographed for me. I really appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, that was, you know, I did a replication of the Milgram experiments, along with some other famous psychic experiments in 2010 for Dateline NBC. Chris Hansen was the host at the time. So we did the smoke in the room, like you got a bunch of people filling out a form to be part of our TV show. And then, but they're all actors except the one person. And then we're pumping theater smoke under the door, you know, to see what this guy does. And all our actors are just dutifully filling out their form, like, oh, whatever. And this poor guy is like, um, okay. So my thought on that particular one was social proof, right? I mean, normally, if there really was a fire, somebody would do something, people would get up and, I mean, but if nobody gets up, it's kind of a cue like, well, I guess I shouldn't panic. I guess it's probably not what it think, I think it is because no one's responding, right? So it's not completely irrational. Same thing with the elevator. We had people get in the elevator and then turn around and face the back wall, right? See, somebody comes on, do they do that? Yeah, they do. So it's like, okay, so imitation and following the crowd. Then we did the Milgram-Mashok experiments. We only did seven people. One person, I think they probably knew about this from college or whatever. She's like, I'm not doing this. I know where this is going. But the other people did it, most of them went all the way. But they were not happy going all the way. Again, it's also artificial. Would you really do that? None of us really know how we would respond. Had I been a German and joined the Hitler Youth and then come of age? I don't know. I can't say that I just wouldn't go along with this. I don't know. I would hope not. Then maybe if I lived 200 years ago, I would gladly enslave people if I lived in Mississippi and everybody had slave. Okay, yeah, they're inferior. Everybody says they're inferior and we're saving their souls. This is good for them. We're giving them Christianity and three square meals a day. Maybe I would have made those arguments. I don't think so now, but I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[82:13] Yeah, as you said, we don't know even about ourselves until we're put there, and sometimes the result will be ugly. Sometimes it will be noble. No way to predict, I don't think.

Speaker 1:
[82:29] Yeah. With regard to the Holocaust, other interesting problem is, but some people help Jews. They hid Jews. They protected Jews. They did what they could, the Schindler's of the world. They exist, too, and so the interesting question is, why? Why do some people actually stand up?

Speaker 2:
[82:48] They operate, I think, and I'm no expert on this, but I think they operate with a higher authority. I don't mean religious faith necessarily, but a higher ethical standard, something for them to hold on to when they're knocked akimbo by circumstances around them. So they have that to fall back on. Not everybody does, but some people do.

Speaker 1:
[83:16] Yeah, most people probably don't. Most of us just go along. What are you working on next?

Speaker 2:
[83:21] I have a new book coming out later this year. It'll be out in October. It has no Nazis in it, and it has no psychiatrists in it. It's called The Case of the Autographed Corpse, and it's set primarily in Arizona, mid-20th century, on Apache Indian reservations there, and it's about injustices on those reservations, focusing on the experiences of one man, a medicine man named Silas John Edwards, who was wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife in 1933 and sentenced to life in prison, and spent many years in prison before he teamed up with a very famous writer of the 1950s, Earl Stanley Gardner. He wrote all the Perry Mason mystery books. But Gardner was a trial lawyer before he became an author, and had an organization called the Court of Last Resort, similar to the Innocence Project today. And they reinvestigated the case together and got Silas John Edwards out. And it was an amazing story to me because it's a window into the spiritual world of Apache Indians during these decades. And then also Gardner's world as a best-selling author, mystery writer, very prolific. He wrote millions of words a year when he was at his peak. And what justice meant to him, what justice meant to Silas John, the medicine man. I just thought the combination of characters was irresistible.

Speaker 1:
[85:05] All right, Jack. Well, very fascinating. I love the book. There it is again, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. Get the book and then see the movie.