Inside the Minds of Monsters: What Nuremberg Taught Us About Today
In 1945, U.S. Army psychiatrist Dr. Douglas Kelley arrived at Nuremberg with an hypothesis: the 22 top Nazi defendants, including Hermann Göring, the second most powerful man of the Third Reich, must share a unique psychosis. He was looking for a "Nazi mind virus" that could explain the Holocaust.
As Jack El-Hai, author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, of which the new film, Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe as Göring, is based, reveals in this week’s Gaslit Nation, Dr. Kelley found something far more terrifying. There was no insanity. These men were clinically "normal." They were ambitious, hardworking, Type-A opportunists: the kind you might find in any corporate boardroom today. What made them willing to destroy half the population to rule the other half? Even Hitler, Dr. Kelley concluded, wasn't a "madman" but a paranoid hypochondriac whose fear of early death rushed him into strategic failures like the invasion of the Soviet Union.
This finding is a warning for us now. If Nazism isn't a disease but a human choice, it can take root anywhere. El-Hai points to the "sophisticated propaganda" and the evolution of ICE tactics in Minneapolis, where he and his family live, as modern terror of the early Gestapo.
How do we bring Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and their lawless killers to justice in our own Nuremberg trials? We stop waiting for a savior. We document the abuses, we protect the vote, and as El-Hai urges, we "get in where we fit in" during this time of self-defense resistance. This essential history is a reminder that the face of evil is often disturbingly ordinary.
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Scene from the movie Nuremberg (01:03):
Justice Jackson, they captured German Goring alive. What are they going to do with it? You are standing inside a secret military prison. It houses what's left of the Nazi high command?
(01:15):
Sieg Heil!
(01:19):
Never do that in my prison again. The governments of Russia, France, Great Britain and our United States will put these men on trial for their lives.
(01:28):
It can't be done. There's no international law to base the charges on.
(01:31):
The world needs to know what these men did. Dr. Kelly central command thinks you're some kind of hotshot head shrinker. You will inspect and ensure the prisoner's mental health, the one you'll have to watch the closest is Goring. He's appointed Hitler's successor in 1939 and his highest ranking German military officer of all time. He's highly intelligent, armoring and a narcissist. I am going to escape Ang man's nose Fair sure yourself. No man has ever beaten me. You want to know why it happened here? Because people let it happen. Anything less total victory, but be considered utter defeat. You have to be flawless. I'm going to put Herman Goring on the stand and I'm going to make him tell the world what he did. Are you going to defend yourself? What would you have me say about the truth for once I am a prisoner? Because you run and be lost, not because you are morally superior. I know more about this man than anyone else on the planet. You're walking into a trap. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny only when we make all men answerable to the law so that it can never happen again.
Andrea Chalupa (03:15):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of Mr. Jones. The film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see. So be sure to watch it.
(03:27):
And this is Gaslit Nation, a show about corruption in America and rising autocracy worldwide. Today, we are joined by Jack El-Hai, author of the must-read book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. It is of course the inspiration behind the extraordinarily brilliant film Nuremberg.
(03:47):
It tells the story of Dr. Douglas Kelly, the US Army psychiatrist tasked with unlocking the disturbing minds of the 22 top Nazi defendants, including Herman Goring awaiting trial at Nuremberg. What Kelly discovered wasn't, of course, these were just make Germany great again, politicians and military leaders, but a specific type of Nazi personality. And he warned that this could take root anywhere. So I went to find out from this week's guest, not just what was significant about the Nuremberg Trials and the disturbing mental maze that our hero Dr. Kelly enters, but how do we get our own Nuremberg Trials started here in America during the world's second most dangerous Nazi crisis in less than a hundred years.
(04:45):
Alright, welcome to Gast Nation, Jack.
Jack El-Hai (04:48):
Thanks, Andrea. It's great to be here and I'm looking forward to talking with you about all of that.
Andrea Chalupa (04:54):
Now, tell us about Dr. Douglas Kelly. Why was he chosen for this extremely disturbing assignment?
Jack El-Hai (05:04):
Well, Douglas Kelly was a US Army psychiatrist. He was during World War II, he was in Europe working in field hospitals, mainly treating soldiers who had developed what today we would call PTSD. And so at the end of the war, he was still there. And when the International Military Tribunal, which was set up by the four allied powers to judge the Nazi leadership on a whole set of war crimes, when that started going, they called Dr. Kelly to come and work with the defendants. Now, why Dr. Kelly? Well, he was nearby, he was available and he was very good at the work he had done during the war.
(06:03):
He was young. He was only 33 years old when this happened, and he didn't know what he was in for. So he arrived in a town called Mondo in the Luxembourg where many of the soon to be defendants had already been gathered and started evaluating them in the way that the court had asked him to. And that meant determining their mental fitness to stand trial. And mental fitness in that legal sense is a quite low bar. All it means is that they can participate in their own defense and they can understand the charges against them. So that was something Kelly could accomplish very easily and quickly. But given this wonderful opportunity, he had an opportunity envied by probably hundreds of psychiatrists around the world to work with the arch criminals of the 20th century. He decided to make more of this chance, and he was on his own initiative completely, that he wanted to determine whether there was a shared psychiatric disorder that these men had that would account for their criminal behavior and other heinous behaviors before and during World War II. So that's what Kelly was there for. And he stayed first in Luxembourg, then later in Nuremberg for a total of about nine months, interviewing the defendants extensively, giving them a battery of psychiatric evaluations, testing their intelligence, all kinds of things like that.
(07:57):
And then he left. He ended up leaving in January, 1946 while this first trial was still underway. So that's setting the scene and explaining why Dr. Kelly was there.
Andrea Chalupa (08:11):
And what were some of his discoveries? Did he go in there with a hypothesis, expecting something and then through the process get surprised and come out with something revelatory?
Jack El-Hai (08:24):
Yes. The presumption that he came with was that the defendants did share a common disorder and that he wanted to find it. But what he learned was the opposite. They did not share any kind of psychiatric disorder. And instead, Dr. Kelly's evaluations and interviews led him to believe that these men were all in the normal range of personality type. And that as you can imagine was upsetting, really upsetting to Dr. Kelly for two reasons. One was it's frightening to think that people who could be categorized psychiatrically as normal, could be capable of these kinds of crimes, the most horrendous war crimes in the history of the world. And then also this determination he made upended his concepts of psychiatry. If psychiatry could not explain the behaviors of these men, then what could? So that was a question that he left Nuremberg thinking about. It greatly changed him and his thinking to be there.
Andrea Chalupa (09:46):
So what did he attribute their lust for? Mass murder and genocide and enriching themselves too. What was the sort of psychosis or what sort of condition or how was he just like they're just greedy and evil exists? What was sort of his conclusion?
Jack El-Hai (10:06):
More than greedy? They were, but it was more than that. It was also that they were of a type who were opportunists, willing to take advantage of the political and social situation around them for what purpose, to attain power, to trample over, as he put it, has the population in order to control the other half. And that was a large part of it. In the end, Dr. Kelly ended up thinking that ideology was not so important to many of the defendants. And that antisemitism, the antisemitism that led to the Holocaust, the defendants professed, some of them, professed that that was not so important either, that it was primarily opportunism. And these men were also chronic hard workers type A type workers who lacked conscience, lacked remorse, and were willing to do what most of us wouldn't do. So Dr. Kelly was not saying that everyone is capable of these kinds of crimes far from it. But he was saying that among us always, every country, every place, every era, there are people like this who have authoritarian impulses and urges, and we should be prepared at all times for them to rise to the surface, even after been beaten down as they were by the end of World War II.
Andrea Chalupa (12:00):
And in terms of Hitler himself being sort of seen as this madman, he would give these Nazi rallies that one observer, the hero of my film, Gareth Jones, described as primal, these primal Nazi rallies, like really tapping into something primal inside people. Did Dr. Kelly have sort of an idea of Hitler being a form of contagion that he allowed these opportunists to let loose?
Jack El-Hai (12:31):
Well, Dr. Kelly never had the opportunity to interview or examine Hitler because Hitler committed suicide before Kelly's arrival.
Andrea Chalupa (12:41):
Or so they say it was in Argentina somewhere. No, go on.
Jack El-Hai (12:45):
But he did believe, he wrote a chapter, an entire chapter of the book that he finished after he returned to the states from Nuremberg about Hitler. And he did not believe that Hitler was insane. He believed though that Hitler was governed and motivated by certain preoccupations, and that those preoccupations led him to seek power much like the other men who were on trial, but also led to his own downfall. So as an example of the latter, Hitler Kelly says was a terrible hypochondriac. He believed that he suffered from all kinds of illnesses and ailments that he didn't. And midway through the war, he became convinced that he suffered from stomach cancer. And that caused him, since Hitler feared that his death might be imminent, that caused him to invade the Soviet Union earlier than he should have and earlier than his military advisors suggested. So that was Operation Barbarosa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, which stalled eventually.
(14:04):
And then the Germans got pushed back. And so that invasion ultimately failed. So what Hitler did was prepare the environment and lay the groundwork for the kind of setting that would enable people like all the other defendants to take advantage of this opportunity to seek the power that they craved and to exert it once they attain it. Hitler was always believing that he was sick or suffering from some kind of ailment. And midway through the war, Hitler became convinced that he had stomach cancer, which would soon kill him. He didn't, but this is what he believed. And as a result of that, he rushed the implementation of a military campaign called Operation Barbarosa, which was the invasion of the Soviet Union. And against the recommendations of his own military advisors, Hitler began that invasion earlier than he should have. And as a result, although it initially made some gains, it stalled and eventually the Russians pushed the Germans back. So Hitler was susceptible to poor decision-making like that because of his psychological makeup, but not insanity. But he did lay the groundwork for these other defendants who were tried at Nuremberg to exercise their power, take advantage of the opportunity to rise to the top, and then exercise dominion over others, which they badly wanted to do, and which led to many of the worst crimes of the war.
Andrea Chalupa (16:05):
And in terms of their inhumanity, the total lack of empathy that they had towards their victims, the banality of evil as Hannah Arendt called it. What did Dr. Kelly discover there in all of his interviews with Herman Goring and others?
Jack El-Hai (16:24):
Well, Hannah Arendt's phrase, the banality of evil originated long after Nuremberg around 1960 during the trial of Adolf Eichman. And Eichman was a different kind of defendant. And I don't think Kelly would have said that banality really applied to many of these defendants in this trial because banality means commonness ordinariness. And these men, although they were normal, psychiatrically were not common. Some of them were unforgettable, like Hermann Goring, a spectacular personality with both attractive and dangerous aspects. I don't think anyone who ever met Hermann Goring would characterize him as banal. So the banality of evil, I think applied to people like Eichman who were a special kind of murderous paper shuffler that, and that paper shuffling resulted in millions of deaths, but they were not leading by and large leading the efforts of masses of other people to carry out these terrible crimes. So Kelly was interested in all of the personalities of these defendants, but the one that captured his interests the most was Herman Goring. He was the highest ranking of the defendants, but also because he was the one who presented the biggest puzzle in a way, undeniably intelligent, charming, told jokes, had a great sense of humor, loving to his family, but also as I said, dangerous. No remorse, no conscience, and highly manipulative. And it was that combination that hooked Kelly and made Goring dangerous.
Andrea Chalupa (18:40):
And what sort of instruments did he use to try to get inside their heads?
Jack El-Hai (18:45):
Yes. Well, he used a number of different tests. The Rorschach was quite popular in the mid 1940s, and Kelly was considered an especially good interpreter of Rorschach results. As some of the audience may know, the Rorschach test involves presenting the subject with a series of cards on which has been printed ink blocks. So they're abstract images, they don't represent anything, and the subject is asked to describe what he or she sees there. And so because the images don't represent anything, whatever the subject says was thought to be a projection of what was going on in the subject's mind. Kelly, and many of his contemporaries use this test to diagnose psychiatric illness. Nowadays, the Rorschach test has really fallen in favor, is used by probably nobody to diagnose illness. And if it has a role at all, it's kind of a personality test type tool. So that was one that Kelly used.
(20:03):
He used another test called the thematic apperception test that I believe is still used. And it's similar to the Rorschach except instead of presenting the subject with abstract images, they are representational images like the kinds of pictures or illustrations you'd see in a magazine. And the subject is encouraged to tell a story based on what's there. And then IQ tests. Kelly tested everybody for IQ. And it's interesting to note that every one of the defendants in IQ came out above average with some of the defendants coming out very high, including Goring, whose IQ score was 138. But beyond that, Kelly relied on interviews to gain insights into the prisoners. He spent many hours, hundreds of hours with them, more with Goring than with anybody else but significant numbers of hours with all of them.
Andrea Chalupa (21:10):
I'm interested in the projection because we've seen a lot of projection coming out of the current administration in America. We've seen their sort of MAGA movement, QAnon accuse the Democrats of enslaving child sex slaves, and then the Epstein files come out and you're like, oh, that was projection as we always knew. And so did he see projection among these Nazi leaders in terms of why they felt justified in their crimes.
Jack El-Hai (21:44):
Kelly, he relied on the interviews to get answers like that. From the he was interested more in psychological traits. So for instance, with Hermann Goring, there was one card that he showed to Goring that Goring said he thought he saw a spook with a big belly. So spook meaning something ghostly...
Andrea Chalupa (22:15):
He thought he saw himself? [laughs]
Jack El-Hai (22:16):
Yes, exactly. And it was partly from that answer that Kelly diagnosed Goring with a type of narcissism that in that answer, and in some of the others, he was describing himself and that he was preoccupied with himself and thinking a lot about himself. So that's how that kind of Rorschach interpretation worked.
Andrea Chalupa (22:46):
But did they say things about their victims blaming their victims, justifying their mass murder because of crimes, perceived crimes that they themselves were committing? Were they accusing the other side of what they themselves were guilty of doing?
Jack El-Hai (23:05):
The defendants very rarely spoke about their victims. There was one interview that Kelly had with Goring in which Kelly asked Goring about the murder of a Nazi compatriot of Goring’s named Ernst Röhm. And Rome was killed at Goring's order during a terrible night of violence in Germany called The Night of the Long Knives. And it was a purge of the Nazi ranks to get rid of what the leadership considered undesirables within the ranks, including Ernst Röhm.
Andrea Chalupa (23:51):
Who was gay. Who was gay.
Jack El-Hai (23:51):
He was gay.
Andrea Chalupa (23:51):
And he spent a lot of time at the El Dorado, a famous gay club, famous drag club in Berlin. He was one of Hitler's earliest and most loyalist friends, and they killed him.
Jack El-Hai (24:00):
And Goring and Röhm were friends and had worked together for years and years. And Kelly asked Goring, how could you order the murder of your own friend? And Goring looked at Kelly like he was a naive toddler and said, but he was in my way as if that explained everything and to Goring it did, because obstacles were to be removed, not dealt with in any other kind of way. So that remark stands out in my memory, is something very revealing of Goring.
Andrea Chalupa (24:44):
Absolutely. And so he didn't find a Nazi mind virus. He just said, these were brilliant men, charismatic. They were aware with what they were doing, but they didn't care. They were opportunistic. They were seizing power and wealth for themselves. And these were the violent tools they were using to enrich themselves and get there. And in terms of those, some things they had in common was narcissism. One of did he see narcissism across the 22 Nazi defendants? Were there anything like that?
Jack El-Hai (25:20):
He saw it in several of them, but it was not something he found common to all of them. Another trait though that he did find common to all of them, I may have mentioned it a second ago, was hardworking. These were guys who had let nothing stop them in the work that they were doing to attain the power and influence that they wanted. And that has always made me think about corporate culture. Their course are plenty of type A people working in business corporations and how many of those people and in all human endeavors, not just business, we may have around us and really not recognize what they're revealing to us.
Andrea Chalupa (26:19):
Meaning a sense of overwork work above all else, achieving being overly ambitious could be something that is dehumanizing ultimately because you're putting your priority on something materialistic.
Jack El-Hai (26:36):
At the expense of relationships with others or the health and safety of others.
Andrea Chalupa (26:44):
And in terms of the toll that this must have taken on Dr. Kelly, what sort of impact did it have on him staring into the abyss of evil for so long?
Jack El-Hai (26:58):
It really changed his way of seeing the world. When he left, Nuremberg came back to the US, he saw the US with different eyes having spent all these months in the company of the German defendants in hearing their explanations and defense and excuses, et cetera. And hearing also about how they accomplished what they did in Germany. So in the us, Kelly focused quite a bit on the people governing the southern states of the us. So remember this is mid 1940s, Jim Crow laws were in effect in all of those states. There were restrictions on black voting rights and segregationists were in power, not just in the state houses, but also in the representation of these states were sending to the US Congress. And he saw Nazi-ism similarities in the work, the governance of those states. And he spoke out about it. He gave a lot of public lectures talking about this, and it made him understand ultimately that Nazism was not a German thing, it was not a European thing, it was a human thing.
(28:38):
And that meant that people like this are around us and they will do their thing periodically, the end of the war. All these Nuremberg trials weren't going to stop authoritarianism or war crimes or genocide, and that we should be ready and prepared for their resurgence. And Kelly laid out a plan for how to protect democracy from these authoritarian up swells. And he spoke out quite a bit about that. And it was beliefs like that that he held that led to the financial and publishing failure of the book. He wrote 22 cells in Nuremberg when he returned to the us, the public was not eager to hear this message. They wanted to believe that wars over the perpetrators have gone on, we're done with it. We won't see people like this anymore. But as we know now, 80 years later, that's far from the truth.
Andrea Chalupa (29:52):
This is extraordinary. So the interwar period in the US America first hugely influential America had to get dragged into this war with Pearl Harbor obviously being the major deciding factor. But then you had of course Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, great American heroes that were normalizing and glamorizing the Nazis and trying to pump the brakes on America, getting involved in what was then called the European situation.
(30:27):
The rise of fascism was a problem for Europe, not the United States and the polling in America at the time even blamed the Jews for what was being done to them. And there was a lot of great cynicism and people were just worried for themselves. And it was a horrible time of American isolationism with the Congress captured by America first. And so what did he see specifically in terms of did he see sort of for us today in America, a warning that it's here, it's now as you had laid out, but I would love to go deeper on that. Was he looking around at the Lindbergh's and Henry Ford and what was sort of his specific warning in terms of America itself, where the Nazis themselves turned to Jim Crow for insight into how to establish a dictatorship, how to use lawfare to carry out ethnic cleansing? If you can just dig deeper for us and just provide some deeper insight into what he was specifically calling out that made him so unpopular.
Jack El-Hai (31:38):
Well, I don't recall that Kelly ever mentioned Lindbergh or Ford, but I think we can find signs of what he was talking about in the plan that he laid out for our country and others to follow in the future to prevent a recurrence of Nazism and authoritarianism. One, there were three aspects of his plan. The first was had to do with education, and he thought that our educational systems from kindergarten through higher education had to be revamped to stress critical thinking, that to train, teach students to form opinions and evaluate situations based on evidence from a variety of sources. So you take in evidence using all your senses and form an opinion based on that. But that kind of thinking is contrary to the type of thinking that despots depend upon in their followers. They depend on their followers to react emotionally reacting to perceived grievances and anger and things like that. And that kind of propaganda attacks, specifically people who can be manipulated in that way. So more people who can think critically will forestall the development of absolutism in the United States and elsewhere. So that was one part. The other part had to do with voting. Kelly was seeing how these people running the southern states were limiting the voting rights or preventing in some cases of black voters. And Kelly believed that we must make it easier, not more difficult for qualified voters to cast ballots.
(33:57):
And that is not what we are seeing happening now with voter ID laws and laws that inhibit mail-in ballots, all that kind of thing. But he thought easy access to the vote was essential in blocking Nazism and fascism in the us. The third thing he advocated, I have mixed feelings about he believed that any candidate for a political office should undergo a mandatory psychiatric evaluation. And I feel mixed feelings about that. I know what he was getting at, but I think evaluations like that can be easily manipulated and abused. Who interprets them, who decides whether a candidate is eligible or not based on that kind of evaluation. It's open to abuse, I think. But those were Kelly's concerns and what he thought could be done to preserve our democracy.
Andrea Chalupa (35:11):
And it also could be considered discriminatory towards people who are neurodivergent. And like you said, who's the doctor? I mean, look at Trump's doctor, that guy auto, the bus driver from the Simpsons who's been telling us years that Trump is like He-Man.
Jack El-Hai (35:29):
The medical reports we've had from the White House since Trump's first term have been suspect.
Andrea Chalupa (35:36):
So you worked this book and it was the basis of course for the film. As you've been watching the second Trump term, what strikes you as coming from that time? How have the words of Dr. Kelly come back to you during the last year of Trump's second term?
Jack El-Hai (35:56):
This question you ask is so interesting to me because I published the Nazi and the Psychiatrist in 2013, so if you remember back, that was in the middle of the second Obama administration. And so I was not writing this and writing about Kelly's beliefs thinking that it necessarily applies very much to the American experience because I saw then that right wing extremism and authoritarian advocacy that that seemed to me on the fringes then of political discourse in our country. But now since then, all of that has moved much closer to the center of our discourse. It's in the center. And so even for me, the book has gained a resonance that it didn't have when I wrote it, and it didn't have for the first few years that it was out there in bookstores. So when I see that echoes what Kelly was talking about, what I see now is the emphasis on limiting the vote and redrawing legislative districts to influence the election in the favor of one party.
(37:24):
And I also see what seems to me a quite sophisticated use of propaganda, propaganda and lies. So it doesn't matter if something that Trump or a cabinet officer says is true. That's not why the person says it. It's to get out there to plant or to cultivate the idea among followers that it's true. And as many politicians have said, the more you tell a lie, the more true it becomes because the more people believe it. So those are the main things. The nationalism that we've seen on the far right in this country certainly echoes the national socialism that we saw in Germany. Also, I live in Minneapolis, I live in the city, and I'm speaking from there right now. And in ICE activities that have been going on here, many people object to comparing ICE to the Gestapo, the German secret police. I can understand why, because during its long run, the Gestapo was responsible for mass murders, deportations to death camps, all kinds of things that are not happening on that scale right now. But the Gestapo didn't begin that way. It began as a smaller organization focused on inhibiting political opposition to the Nazis. And in that sense, I see ice echoing that kind of secret police force and the way the current administration is running ICE.
Andrea Chalupa (39:35):
Absolutely. And this whole ridiculousness of trying to get people to pump the brakes and making Holocaust comparisons and Nazi comparisons, it started small. It started small. And we make those comparisons so it doesn't get any bigger than where we are now, and we can contain it and stop it. That's exactly what we're trying to do is avoid the worst case scenario because it's very difficult to get out of the worst case scenario. The European situation had the Americans coming in who would come in to save us today, Canada, Europe, who would do that for us today? It would take some act of war to get them involved.
Jack El-Hai (40:22):
We have to save ourselves.
Andrea Chalupa (40:24):
Exactly. And so I want to ask you, how are you there? How are you and your family in Minneapolis today? Could you describe for us what that is like for you?
Jack El-Hai (40:35):
Well, my family is fine. Me and my family we're fine. One of my children lives in an adult lives in a neighborhood that has been deeply affected by ICE attacks and enforcement. And so on her block, there's lots of people. The second in ice vehicle comes by, they run out with their whistles and honking horns, and they have prevented some detainments or arrests there in my neighborhood, less of that. But there have been events at a gas station just couple blocks from my home. Greg Bovino, who was running the ICE operation here before he was taken away from it, made an appearance and a crowd instantly gathered. There are lots of good information networks among the residents that are going, and he and his ice men were forced to move away from the gas station. They went to a nearby park where they attacked observers and protesters.
(41:58):
So it's just something that weighs on us all the time. And in the neighborhoods where many immigrants live, or brown-skinned people in general, many are afraid to leave home period, regardless of their legal status because they know they could be detained on the basis of how they look. And that means they're not going to work, they're not going to school, they're not going shopping for groceries. And many volunteers have stepped in to help with grocery shopping and things like that. So it's really changed the pattern of life here. And it's in some ways become chaotic. And in some ways it's become cohesive because neighborhoods have come together and neighbors are working together.
Andrea Chalupa (42:51):
That's your next book, and you're the expert to write it because of your Nazi history training. I have to ask you, how do we get our own Nuremberg trials in America? What we're seeing by ICE is, and of course Bovino's border patrol, it's completely lawless. There is still such a thing as international law, as our allies have warned the Trump administration, that international law still applies. As an expert on this topic, what advice do you have for Americans who are all over social media now with their whistles demanding Nuremberg trials? Now, how do we get there? What would that look like? Who are our allies in the global community who can build that justice with us?
Jack El-Hai (43:39):
So here's an instance where historical context is important. One of the significant things about this trial that I wrote about the first international military tribunal in history that convened to judge defendants for war crimes, crimes against humanity, et cetera, is that he was a group effort by several nations to get this together. So the nations were the four largest victorious allies, the us, France, great Britain, and the USSR and our country, the US was a big mover of this. The US was the driving force behind making that trial happen because we believed, and the other allies eventually agreed that it would tell the world by presenting all this evidence in trial, and there was a mountain of evidence against the Nazis that it would spread the word of what really happened and show these men to the world as they really were. And it largely succeeded in that effort. Now, 80 years later, things have really changed. There is an international criminal court, but our country does not support it. Russia does not support it. And that's because various administrations have been wary of their own people being indicted and tried. So now we're in the strange situation of in the past being a big proponent of international justice like this now being a significant opponent of it, and to the point where the United States actually sanctions judges of the International criminal court who come to decisions that the administration doesn't like. So ...
Andrea Chalupa (45:52):
Like on Israel and Gaza.
Jack El-Hai (45:54):
Exactly, yes. Until there's, and this wasn't just Trump. It was true under Biden also and others before him. So I don't see even a change of administration changing our approach to the international criminal court. So that means if there's going to be judicial action, it has to come from within, it has to be US courts. And I do have more faith that that could happen because I know that there is a determined group of prosecutors who want it to happen and that some of them have the financial resources to make it happen. But Trump has his immunity right now. There's very little he could do that would make him indictable for a crime. And so it's complicated, but my faith rests not with Canada or anybody else with voices for justice within the US. I don't think it's going to come from any other direction.
Andrea Chalupa (47:09):
So we can't entice Canada to come and burn down our White House again. We've got to rise up and do the work for ourselves, our communities, and the global community of which we need to become a member. And I do think part of our own spiritual Nuremberg trial, if you will, we as a country can't get some Democrat supporting candidate elected in 2028 by some miracle, and then all go back to normal and breathe a sigh of relief and then just check out for four years thinking, well, we dodged yet another Trump bullet because it'll come back again. He's trained an entire cultish army to normalize violence, political violence, stealing elections, working with authoritarian regimes against our democracy, disinformation and all of it. So like Dr. Kelly was warning Americans after leaving the dark minds of those 22 Nazi leaders, this is here, it's here, it's everywhere.
(48:20):
And so I think part of our mission to Nazi proof our society, the United States finally has to join the international criminal court. And I know that is going to be a very tough sell for Republican or Democrat because the United States is the founder of Israel, finances Israel. And as one person in the Pentagon told me, Israel is the whip that America cracks when they want to keep the Middle East in line. So I know that for the United States, Democrat or Republican joining the international criminal court, that's going to be an extremely tough sell. But that does seem like something that could ultimately, if we can get there, could add a layer of protection against the Nazis that live among us.
Jack El-Hai (49:10):
And in the long run, that will help us because no one gains when there are agents of genocide and war crimes and crimes against peace on the loose. And when people see that those crimes committed in various countries, no one has ever held responsible for them. So there may be many people would perceive that if we against supported a group like the International Criminal Court, there will be pain in that. But I think it would be short-term pain and in the long-term everyone would benefit.
Andrea Chalupa (50:00):
And so in terms of what we as Americans do as keepers of the watch, quite literally, especially in your city, Minneapolis, we should continue to document and bear witness to what we see and keep our own records, our own historical records, and submit what we can to investigations, to nonprofits, groups that are building cases, bringing cases. What would you say to somebody listening maybe in Minneapolis right now or anywhere where they want to feel empowered to do something right now? What could they do?
Jack El-Hai (50:39):
I would always suggest that people do what is most important to them. So for some people that'll mean getting out and protesting and getting in the faces of the opponents to others. It'll mean standing a little further away and blowing whistles and honking horns. To some it'll be documenting. The documenting is really important, I think, because it lays the groundwork for legal cases in the future. Even now, new documentary evidence from the Nazi era in Germany is coming to light photographs and writings that had not seen the light of day for decades and decades. And all of that adds to the pile of evidence and helps contain the beliefs of Holocaust deniers and others who would like to paint a different kind of history. And there are others who may want to write a bit about it, others who want to take the political route, run for office or try and influence their legislators. There's all kinds of ways. And what doesn't work is people going against their grain to do something that they're not a good fit for. We should do things we are a good fit for.
Andrea Chalupa (52:07):
So get in where you fit in.
Jack El-Hai (52:10):
Exactly.
Andrea Chalupa (52:12):
Final question for you. How did you feel about the film? What was that like? Did you get to visit the set?
Jack El-Hai (52:20):
I did visit the set. The director, James Vanderbilt, very nicely invited me to come visit the shooting. This was in the spring of 2024. The whole movie was shot in Budapest, Hungary. And so I went there, spent about a week there. By that time, all of the outdoor shooting had been done and they were doing the remaining shooting in sets built inside a gigantic sound stage. So I saw quite a bit of that. And those were the scenes of the movie taking place in the prison cells and in the courtroom and things like that. It was really impressive and thrilling for me and fun. So my thoughts on the movie are, I am relieved that I can honestly recommend it to my friends. No one should look at the movie Nuremberg or any movie based on historical events as being a percent accurate. They're just not. And that's not part of cinematic storytelling to get all the details. But I think that the movie Nuremberg is essentially accurate factually, which means mostly or enough because it conveys a couple of the messages that were important in my book and have become important in the film too. So I'm really happy with it and I hope as many people will see it.
Andrea Chalupa (54:03):
Thank you so much. Jack El-Hai, author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, and go see the film that inspired Nuremberg.
(54:11):
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(55:22):
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