How do you make sense of an entire society or nation violating its values? Consider Germany in the 1930s, in which a whole nation seemed to embrace Nazism.
It's tempting to say they're all monsters, but how could over 50 million people change in a few years? Not genetics. They must have been no more or less human in 1940 as 1920.
It's tempting to say that monsters took over and changed them. Many people thought so. At the end of World War II, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, was sent to evaluate the highest level Nazis who had been captured and were to be tried in the Nuremberg trials. He believed that these leaders must have differed from most people. He wanted to find that difference in order to help prevent people with whatever traits he found from repeating what they did. He was deeply troubled to find no meaningful difference between them and normal results on his tests.
Jack El-Hai told Kelley's story in his book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, including interacting directly with Herman Göring, at one point the second highest ranking Nazi. In our conversation, Jack tells the highlights of his book. I discuss the relevance to polluting and depleting today, where everyone is contributing, violating our own values, but contributing to much more suffering and death than even the Holocaust.
We also talk about the movie Nuremberg based on the book, including its stars, Russell Crowe and Rami Malek.
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