Not Monsters. Not Madmen. Just Men.
4/21/20261 hr 25 min
What kind of person helps build a regime like the Third Reich? A monster? A madman? Or something far more unsettling?
Michael Shermer sits down with author Jack El-Hai to talk about the true story behind Nuremberg. At the center is Dr. Douglas Kelley, the American psychiatrist assigned to evaluate the top Nazi defendants after World War II, including Hermann Göring. What he found was not comforting: many of these men were intelligent, ambitious, psychologically functional, and disturbingly normal.
This conversation gets into the strange duel between Kelley and Göring, the psychological testing at Nuremberg, the limits of psychiatry, the difference between leaders and followers, and the question that still won't go away: how do power-hungry people rise and do evil, and why do so many others go along with them?
Jack El-Hai is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, GQ, Wired, Scientific American, and Discover. His books, including The Lobotomist, The Lost Brothers, and Face in the Mirror, have been translated into twenty languages. He lectures widely on writing and medical history. His book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist was recently adapted into the feature film Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Michael Shermer· Host0:39
[ding] It is a weakness not to be able to stand the sight of dead people. The best way of overcoming it is to do it more often, then it becomes a habit.
Jack El-Hai· Guest0:49
That's how to turn your population into killers.
Michael Shermer· Host0:52
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 goose-step 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 the wood building