<\/p>\n
NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 A once-overlooked army psychiatrist tasked with analyzing Hermann G\u00f6ring<\/a> and other Nazis<\/a> accused of war crimes is getting the kind of attention that he had sought in his lifetime.<\/p>\n \u201cNuremberg,\u201d starring Russell Crowe<\/a> as G\u00f6ring, centers on the Nazi military commander’s conversations with Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, played by Rami Malek<\/a>. Kelley’s mission was to determine whether G\u00f6ring and more than 20 other Nazi officials captured at the end of World War II were fit to stand trial in Nuremberg.<\/a> The movie is directed by James Vanderbilt and based on a 2013 book, \u201cThe Nazi and the Psychiatrist,\u201d by Jack El-Hai, who helped Vanderbilt write the screenplay.<\/p>\n Through many hours at facilities in Luxembourg and Nuremberg, Kelley will find himself alternately taken and frightened by a man notorious for his role in the Nazis’ attempted conquest of Europe and beyond. G\u00f6ring turns out to be unexpectedly good and clever company, if not convincing in his assertion that he knew nothing of Hitler\u2019s worst atrocities and cared only to restore Germany to greatness after its humiliating defeat in World War I.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n EDITOR\u2019S NOTE \u2014 This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org<\/a>. Helplines outside the U.S. can be found at www.iasp.info\/suicidalthoughts<\/a>.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n Kelley, an ambitious and demonstrative man who took his own life in 1958, might never have inspired a major Hollywood production had his name not turned up while El-Hai was working on a previous book. While writing about Dr. Walter Freeman, who helped make lobotomy a common treatment, El-Hai came upon an encounter between Freeman and Kelley at an American Psychiatric Association gathering in the late 1930s.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat struck Freeman about Kelley was that Kelley was not there to present a paper or do anything like that. He was there to give a magic show on the stage to entertain all his fellow psychiatrists,\u201d El-Hai told The Associated Press. \u201cSo a few years after I finished \u2018The Lobotomy,\u2019 I decided to find out what I could about Dr. Kelley\u2019s story.\u201d<\/p>\n El-Hai got in touch with Kelley’s eldest child, Doug, who gave him access to a trove of his father’s archives, some 15 boxes containing everything from medical records to a package of cookies Nazi leader Rudolf Hess refused to eat out of fear they had been poisoned. In \u201cThe Nazi and the Psychiatrist,\u201d El-Hai follows Kelley’s life from his rise in the psychiatric profession through the controversies of his years after returning home from Europe, starting with his contention that in the U.S. there are people who, to gain power, \u201cwould willingly climb over the corpses of half of the American public.\u201d<\/p>\n As a professor of criminology at the University of California, Berkeley, Kelley was a showman in the classroom who cracked jokes, drew elaborate designs and performed magic tricks. As a consultant to the Berkeley Police Department, he openly challenged the competence of law enforcement officials and was eventually monitored by the FBI, which suspected him of political subversion. He also gave lectures around the country and published a book about his wartime findings, \u201c22 Cells in Nuremberg,\u201d which sold few copies and is long out of print.<\/p>\n His death echoed the suicide of G\u00f6ring, who 12 years earlier had taken a cyanide pill he\u2019d hidden in his cell. G\u00f6ring\u2019s life ended in secret, Kelley\u2019s in front of his family. After a loud argument with his wife, he rushed upstairs to his study, reemerged with a cyanide capsule in his hand and shouted \u201cI don\u2019t have to take this anymore!\u201d Kelley left no explanation. His son, according to El-Hai, believed he had been overcome by his \u201cemotions and inner pain.\u201d<\/p>\n During a recent interview with The Associated Press, El-Hai spoke of Kelley’s findings, the parallels between Kelley and G\u00f6ring and why he believes the story resonates now. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.<\/p>\n AP: Kelley and G\u00f6ring seems like one of those universal stories, a world-historic monster who, on a one-to-one level, can have a certain amount of personal charm.<\/p>\n EL-HAI: One of Kelley\u2019s central questions that he had going into this work was the question that was strongly of interest to me: Did these men who were all defendants in this first Nuremberg trial share any psychiatric disorders, illness, his personality traits, any of that? And Kelley found to his disappointment that they did not \u2014 none of them, with the possible exception of (German Labor Front leader) Robert Ley, who killed himself before the trial. They certainly had neuroses, but many people who function normally have neuroses. That made him afraid and made him believe that people like that are in our population in far greater numbers than any of us.<\/p>\n They were all people who believed that the ends justify the means and that most of them were, on a personal level, on a quest for power. And that was more important than ideology. So they would attach themselves to an ideology that allowed them to rise and to crush anybody else who got in their way.<\/p>\n AP: There are a couple of things that I could imagine a psychiatrist would have found especially disturbing. One is that the Nazis weren\u2019t foaming-at-the-mouth crazy. And the other is the lack of remorse. It’s not like the movies where you break down and cry, \u201cMy God, what have I done?\u201d<\/p>\n El-HAI: There was very little remorse.<\/p>\n AP: If there was anything that mattered to G\u00f6ring, it was that he considered himself a great man and an important man and he wanted to be treated as such.<\/p>\n El-HAI: He wanted to be treated as a head of state, which he considered himself to be. He said to some of his fellow defendants, \u201cDon\u2019t worry, before much time goes by, there will be statues of us all over Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n AP: There’s a saying that none of us gets to choose when we die. But that’s not true. For G\u00f6ring there was the idea that no one was going to get him in the end. He’ll decide when his life is over.<\/p>\n El-HAI: Especially if the alternative was to be hanged, which they all considered to be an execution method for a common criminal. Kelley observed that by poisoning himself right before the execution, G\u00f6ring was putting a thumb in the eye of the American authorities. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to do with what you want to do with me.\u201d And that really resonated with Kelley.<\/p>\n AP: In movies, the villain can often turn out to the most entertaining character. Was that a concern for you?<\/p>\n EL-HAI: It was not a concern of mine. As a result of the courtroom scenes that are in the second half of the film, G\u00f6ring loses a lot of his luster, as happened in the real courtroom. Rami, in playing the counterpoint to the villainous G\u00f6ring, maybe had to think about it more, because I have always seen those two characters as being more similar than not similar.<\/p>\n When I was writing the book, I often discussed with Dr. Kelley\u2019s son, Doug, what it must have been like for them to be in this jail cell together, and we always jokingly characterized them as King Kong versus Godzilla. They were both egomaniacs. They were both absolutely certain of their rightness. And they were both socially charming and highly intelligent.<\/p>\n AP: Did you have any quibbles with the film?<\/p>\n EL-HAI: I was OK with James Vanderbilt\u2019s approach from the start. Whenever he would send me a draft of the screenplay, I didn\u2019t see it as my job to find inaccuracies and things that weren\u2019t factual. I know movies are a different medium from books and that what makes a book good is not the same as what makes a movie good. And so what we\u2019ve ended up with in \u201cNuremberg,\u201d I think, is a movie that is mostly factual, and more important, delivers the messages that are very close to the messages in my book.<\/p>\n Douglas Kelley\u2019s message was that Nazism, fascism, or whatever you want to call it, has always had the potential for coming alive in our country. He saw it immediately when he came back from Europe, and it\u2019s certainly easier to find now.<\/p>\n Hillel Italie, The Associated Press<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 A once-overlooked army psychiatrist tasked with analyzing Hermann G\u00f6ring and other Nazis accused of war crimes is getting the kind of attention that he had sought in his lifetime. \u201cNuremberg,\u201d starring Russell Crowe as G\u00f6ring, centers on the Nazi military commander’s conversations with Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, played by Rami Malek. 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