Nuremburg, the repeatable morality play

Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded many countries across Europe and occupied them with systematic brutality. They inflicted 27 million deaths in the Soviet Union alone and exterminated two-thirds of the continent’s Jewish population. Proposals for how to punish the defeated Nazi leaders ranged from a show trial (the Soviet Union) to summary executions (the United Kingdom). In mid-1945, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States agreed to convene a joint tribunal in Nuremberg, occupied Germany, with the Nuremberg Charter as its legal instrument. For nearly a year, beginning in November of 1945, the International Military Tribunal (IMT) tried 22 of the most important surviving leaders of Nazi Germany in the political, military, and economic spheres, as well as six German organizations. The purpose of the trial was not just to convict the defendants but also to collect irrefutable evidence of Nazi crimes, offer a history lesson to the defeated Germans, and delegitimize the traditional German elite.

Since the year of the tribunal, every generation has created a cinematic history lesson about the Nuremburg Trials. There is so much to learn and feel about the drama of seeing the captured Nazis being tried according to a new idea for international law. As the films try to make sense of what happened and preserve the memory, they also offer a look at the generation who made them.

Judgement at Nuremburg in 1961 had an all-star cast. It was based on a Teleplay by Abby Mann.

Nuremburg, a TV mini series  in 2000, starring Alec Baldwin, was based on Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial by Joseph E. Persico.

Now Nuremberg in 2025 has another all-star cast. This time, the film focuses on a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, played by Rami Malek. It is based on The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai.

The most recent re-telling is a very engaging movie for being mostly dialogue and courtroom scenes. The gist is: a WW2 psychiatrist evaluates Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg trials, growing increasingly obsessed with understanding evil as he forms a disturbing bond with Hermann Goering. [See this TIME review for more]

The movie circles around the growing relationship between Douglas Kelley and Goering. Kelley’s open mind is a perfect opportunity for Goering to plot whatever advantage he can achieve. Kelley is plagued by conscience, the Reichmaster is not. Goering plays on the psychiatrist’s sympathies and weaknesses as he positions himself to become a noble victim. His behavior is a textbook case of an anti-social personality disorder strategy many now call DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) painted on a large, disturbing canvas.

Some have said the other psychiatrist who was brought in to join Douglas Kelley, Gustave Gilbert (played in the film by Colin Hanks), might have been the better psychiatrist on which to base the movie. The book he wrote, unlike Kelley’s, was quite well-received, mainly because Gilbert made a diagnosis and then proved it. But I think the filmmakers made the right decision to focus on Kelley. His empathy and his own troubled soul, which finally led him to suicide many years later, seems much more appropriate in our very unsure age, which is once again being seduced into subjugation by tyrants.

[Philosopher and filmmaker, Matthew Cooke, is dead set against these tyrants who are subject to their “dark triad” and so subjecting us all to their will.]

The amiable psychopath

Gilbert’s book is far from useless, however. In it he labeled Goering an “amiable psychopath” in an era in which the term “psychopath” was just coming into focus with some definition.  You can read about it in his collected notes: Nuremburg Diary.

There Gilbert recounts the life history of the number two Nazi. He says Goering’s  physical and intellectual “constitution” played its part in his rise to the top and aided his sadistic, aggressive leadership. But it was the cold Prussian home he experienced as a child that nurtured his lack of authentic feeling for others and led to his brutality.  He was fed on Teutonic legends and Junker militarism. As a result, Goering believed deeply in loyalty to the Kaiser, military chivalry, military aristocracy, and German superiority. Peaceful or democratic people were repulsive to him. He was never able to take punishment or to benefit from disapproval, so he became completely self-centered. The Nazi party provided the perfect opportunity for gaining power, for loyalty to an absolute Führer, for sadistic excitement, for revenge against enemies, and for unlimited financial gain. Play acting as an amiable nobleman served the needs of his fantasy image. At Nuremberg he gave a fine performance, but the final evidence of all the atrocities spoiled his heroic pose.

In the movie, Goering seems like a devoted husband and father. Kelley is portrayed as a delivery man keeping the family ties alive while Goering is in prison and his wife and daughter are in hiding. It is as hard to tell what he actually is in the movie as it is hard to unmask a sociopath in real life. One of the key strategies of psychopaths is to skillfully appear normal, even noble. So it is useful to list how these people work. It is typical to see these traits that make them “amiable.”

• Superficial Charm and Narcissism: Goering was noted for his outgoing, flamboyant personality and a powerful charisma that could charm people, including his prison psychiatrist and other captors. His ability to form appealing, though superficial,  connections probably extended to his personal and family life, where he could maintain the appearance of a normal, loving relationship.
• Lack of Empathy, Not Lack of All Emotion: Psychopathy is primarily characterized by a lack of empathy and shame, and a disregard for the rights and feelings of others, particularly those outside one’s immediate “circle.” It does not mean a complete absence of all emotion. Psychopaths can experience anger, excitement, and even a form of possessive “affection” for people they view as an extension of themselves or their property.
• Family as an Extension of Self/Status: For a narcissist and psychopath like Goering, his wife and daughter were part of his curated life and status. He displayed meticulous attention to his body and image, and his family and servants were also well attended-to as extensions of himself. Their well-being and loyalty reflected positively on him and his image of being a powerful, successful man. His primary concern at Nuremberg was that his family was all right, which aligns with protecting his “possessions” or legacy.
• Compartmentalization: Psychopaths are adept at compartmentalizing their lives.  Goering was able be intricately involved in the horrors of the Nazi regime — including planning the “final solution,” which he claimed was not his department, and at the same time was able to maintain a functional home life that appeared charmed. It is fascinating how he can demonstrate an extreme level of moral detachment and  separate his public atrocities from his private self-image.

In essence, Goering’s “warm” relationships were likely a form of selective attachment to people who served his self-image, status, and personal fantasies, rather than true, empathetic love that could extend to humanity in general. His actions demonstrated a profound lack of empathy and conscience, which are core features of psychopathy, despite his ability to maintain seemingly normal, even charming, interpersonal relationships.

Psychiatry becomes a casualty

Do you think it is indicative of our era that we would recast the Nuremburg trials by having a psychiatrist be the main protagonist? In 1961 the star was a judge (Spencer Tracey was a respectable 61 years old). In 2000 the star was a sexually-challenged prosecutor (Alec Baldwin was a 42-year old playing Justice Jackson at 53). In 2025 the star is a faulty psychiatrist (Egyptian, Rami Malek, 44, playing 33-year-old Kelley — beautifully, I might add, with a bit of Mr. Robot thrown in).

We see Douglas Kelley as flawed but also caring, daring and quick to learn. His experiences highlight the weaknesses of psychotherapy when it is subject to the culture and the state. And they highlight the inevitable weaknesses of psychotherapists when they try to navigate the mysteries of unique beings in flawed systems.

Here are his main failures that open his psychiatry to death blows:

• He is seduced by a powerful narcissist, who is probably on the malignant narcissist to psychopath spectrum (my research). If a therapist loves his client (as I always do), it is a short walk to erasing the therapist-patient boundary that keeps a clinician within ethical guidelines and delivers the best care to the client. Kelley is gradually lured into the spider web where the lie can eat him.

• When asked to break confidentiality, he does. Confidentiality is the bedrock of client-therapist trust. Kelley wants to maintain it, at first, and keeps many secrets from his superiors (like knowing the whereabouts of Goering’s family). But in the end he provides all his material and insight to the prosecutors.

Some would say maintaining the privacy of  a psychopath violates a psychotherapist’s “duty to inform.” That duty is a legal and ethical obligation for therapists to break patient confidentiality in specific circumstances, most notably when a client poses a serious and imminent threat to themselves or others. Often it is called the “duty to warn” or “duty to protect,” that requires therapists to take reasonable steps to prevent harm, which may include warning the potential victim, notifying law enforcement, or seeking higher levels of care for the client. It is a critical exception to the rule of confidentiality, designed to balance the need for a safe therapeutic relationship with the responsibility to protect public safety.

• He connects secretly with Goering’s family in the name of fact-finding (today we might call it “systems work”). This is another aspect of Kelley’s deceptive behavior. He isn’t merely collecting facts, he is delighting in the affection of Goering’s daughter. He could have had a dialog with his superior, but in the hysteria of war and the lack of trust in his commander, there s a lot of room for his defense. While watching the movie, I often wondered out loud, “Who is the Nazi here?” In several places the prosecutor also has doubts about how to apply laws that the countries sitting in judgment have also blatantly violated. How is Kelley supposed to follow his rules?

• He makes friends with his client. I wrote my dissertation on multiple relationships so I was especially interested in his dilemma. Boundaries were almost impossible to keep within the several small communities in which he was operating: 1) the military with its prohibitive regulations and demands for obedience to a commanding officer, 2) the German prisoners, who all had psychological needs and who were part of a tight-knit group with their own prohibitions and assumptions, 3) the Goering family system, in which he acted as a text book example of operating outside prescribed boundaries, not having informed consent in any number of ways.  Many critics point out the present ethics codes still assume a Eurocentric cityscape where individuals can decide their own fate and act autonomously, which no one in Kelley’s circumstances could, including him.

• From the outset, he Intends to capitalize on his experience by writing a book. After all, he has an eyewitness intimacy with the authors of evil we need to understand. That’s not bad logic. His colleague, Gustav Gilbert, as I said, also wrote a book in which he delivered the verdict that all these people were disordered. Kelley’s book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminal, has more sympathy, pathos and uncertainty. When it comes to any therapist writing a book about their clients, I asked a colleague if confidentiality were required after a client was dead — after all, one cannot get permission to tell their story, since they have died. They said. “That’s right, you can’t.”

• He would not consult and was probably too young and inexperienced for the job. Therapists are bound to refer clients to other, more competent, helpers when  they do not have the expertise to treat them. Kelley needed a lot of help and should have found it. But it is hard to imagine the clinician who had the credentials to be thrown into the cells of the unique and deranged people Kelley encountered, right? His assignment was to “keep them alive” and he failed in the eyes of his commander because Goering had a cyanide pill stashed in the uniform the higher-ups allowed him to retain. As with the rest of Kelley’s ethical missteps, there is a lot of room for forgiveness if not absolution. It would seem that the first casualty of war is not only the public truth, but the private, as well.

I imagined myself parachuted into Nuremburg after enjoying the fruitful work of helping men with PTSD, as Kelley had been doing. It seemed like a nightmare. I could relate to Kelley’s fascination and eagerness to meet these once-in-a-lifetime clients, to learn, and to be special. But he obviously did not know a great deal about sociopathy and its sister maladies or he definitely would have taken a different tack with Goering. And he probably would have taken another course with all the prisoners as a group, since they all had engaged in creating or or had been drawn into the sociopathic society of the Third Reich, a pathocracy.

As a Christian looking in from the outside, socially, and looking out from the inside, beyond ordinary awareness, I was not too surprised, just consistently sad as I watched the Nuremburg morality play rerun for our generation. The movie was so realistic, some people might call in cynical. But I think it was just being as clear as it could be: everyone has a unique story and many of us are not only fighting the traumas of normal life, we are beset by the disruption we face in our very genes.

The road to life is narrow for many reasons. I have to admit that my clients often end up on a spiritual journey, even when I am not overtly Christian with them. They need a deeper route to take, because the usual resources of society and the law are simply not enough to help them heal and grow, inside or out. Nuremburg pointed this out this lack in every character. Some may call it cynical for that reason, but I call it realistic. The Savior was not welcomed. There was very little of God in movie, but who but Jesus had any hope of making goodness out of hanging 22 devils? Wonderful things followed the horrors of the two great wars of the 20^th century. But here we are again only 80 years later, facing the same sociopaths, only now there is not enough faith or even enough trust in the law to face them down.  Or so it only appears, I hope.

*****

Today is Hild Day! Meet this great leader from the 7th century church in Northumbria at the Transhistorical Body.