Inside the Minds of Monsters: What Nuremberg Taught Us About Today

Feb 18, 2026

Jack El-Hai, historian and author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, explores Dr. Douglas Kelley’s work at Nuremberg. He reveals that top Nazis were not clinically insane but ambitious, Type-A opportunists. The conversation covers Kelley’s tests of Göring, Hitler’s paranoid motivations, comparisons between Nazi tactics and modern US abuses, and how ordinary people can act to prevent similar horrors.

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INSIGHT

Normal People Can Commit Extraordinary Evil

Dr. Douglas Kelly found the 22 top Nazi defendants were psychiatrically normal rather than clinically insane.
This suggested authoritarian atrocities can be committed by ordinary, ambitious opportunists.

INSIGHT

Opportunism Over Ideology

Kelly concluded many defendants were opportunists who sought power and control rather than ideologues first.
They lacked conscience and remorse and were willing to trample half the population to rule the other half.

INSIGHT

Hitler As Flawed Strategist, Not Madman

Kelly did not view Hitler as insane but as driven by pathological preoccupations like hypochondria.
Those preoccupations led Hitler to strategic failures that helped others seize power.

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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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