Living History With Mat Mclachlan

In 1945, a young American psychiatrist named Douglas M. Kelley was given an extraordinary assignment: evaluate the 22 most senior Nazis awaiting trial at Nuremberg and determine whether they were mentally fit to face justice. Among his patients was Hermann Göring, Hitler's second-in-command, who was charismatic, manipulative and utterly unrepentant.What Kelley discovered shook him to his core. Using Rorschach tests, IQ assessments and hundreds of hours of interviews, he concluded that these architects of the Holocaust were not clinically insane. They were psychologically normal: intelligent, ambitious opportunists who had made deliberate choices to pursue power at any human cost. There was no "Nazi mind." There was no psychiatric explanation that set them apart from the rest of us.It was a conclusion the post-war world didn't want to hear. And it destroyed the man who reached it.In this episode, Mat McLachlan talks to Jack El-Hai, author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, the book behind the 2025 film Nurember