Quick Take
- Narration: Arthur Morey brings quiet authority to this dual portrait, modulating between clinical precision for Dr. Kelley’s observations and a heavier gravity for the Nuremberg proceedings , he handles the material with controlled restraint rather than theatrical excess.
- Themes: Psychology of evil, the banality of complicity, professional obsession and moral contamination
- Mood: Unsettling and intellectually claustrophobic
- Verdict: A psychologically rich account that is most rewarding for listeners who can sit with the disturbing possibility that evil has no single face, though Kelley’s own unraveling is the book’s most haunting thread.
I came to this one already knowing the broad outline of the Nuremberg trials, but what stopped me partway through a long drive one evening was not the courtroom drama I expected. It was the image of Hermann Göring arriving at the Luxembourg detention center with sixteen suitcases and a red hatbox. That detail lands like a gut punch. Here is a man who presided over unimaginable atrocity, and he travels into captivity with the luggage of a peacetime aristocrat. That is the kind of image Jack El-Hai builds this entire book around: the cognitive dissonance at the center of evil.
The Nazi and the Psychiatrist is not, despite its title, really a book about Nazis. It is a book about what happens to a brilliant man when he decides the most dangerous people in the world are simply puzzles to be solved. Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, the US Army psychiatrist assigned to evaluate the Nuremberg captives for trial fitness, arrived at the detention center expecting to find pathology. What he found instead was charm, intelligence, and a disquieting coherence of worldview that gradually began to erode his professional distance. The book traces that erosion with clinical precision of its own.
The Trap Kelley Walked Into
El-Hai is careful not to villainize Kelley, which makes the book more disturbing than if he had. Kelley was genuinely brilliant, and his initial hypothesis that the Nazi leadership would show measurable psychological deviance was both scientifically motivated and entirely understandable. The problem was what happened when the data refused to cooperate. Göring in particular comes across as charismatic, intellectually formidable, and perfectly capable of understanding exactly why his interviewer was fascinated by him. The dynamic between them is the spine of the book, and El-Hai handles it without tipping into sensationalism. There is something genuinely frightening about a man who can make a psychiatrist feel like the less intelligent person in the room.
Some listeners, like one reviewer here, find the book’s back half weaker when El-Hai turns the psychoanalytic lens on Kelley himself. I disagree. That pivot is where the book becomes something more than journalism. Kelley’s postwar deterioration, the grandiosity, the obsessive cyanide demonstrations, the ultimate end to his life, reads as a kind of professional tragedy. He went to Nuremberg to discover what made monsters different. He returned, possibly, having learned how similar they were to ambitious men everywhere. El-Hai earns that observation rather than simply asserting it.
What Arthur Morey Does With Difficult Material
Arthur Morey is one of the narrators who understands that the most powerful delivery is often the quietest. For a subject this grim, that instinct is exactly right. He does not linger on horror or lean into shock. His pacing is deliberate, even in the passages where El-Hai’s prose accelerates. That restraint gives the darker revelations more weight when they arrive. The structural rhythm of the book, civilian dining-car normalcy interrupting passages of genuine moral horror, works particularly well in audio because Morey commits to both registers without winking at the listener.
At just under nine hours, the runtime feels proportionate. El-Hai does not pad the material, and there are no chapters that feel like filler. The trial sequences are efficiently handled, and the book wisely spends its energy on the relationship and its consequences rather than on exhaustive historical recounting. Listeners who come wanting a full account of the Nuremberg trials will need a different book. This is deliberately narrower and more intimate than that.
The Banality Problem, Revisited
Hannah Arendt’s phrase about the banality of evil is now so familiar it has almost lost its bite. El-Hai revives the underlying question without invoking the cliche. His portrait of Göring and the other senior Nazis is not designed to humanize in a way that excuses, but rather to complicate in a way that challenges. The most intellectually honest thing about this book is its refusal to offer the reader the comfort of clear-cut monstrosity. These men were not incomprehensible. That is the problem. That is precisely what destroyed Kelley, and it is what lingers long after the final chapter.
The one legitimate criticism in the reviews, that the book loses focus as it multiplies themes, has some merit. El-Hai occasionally pulls back to survey the wider intellectual context of postwar psychology, and those passages, while interesting, do slow the momentum. But the core through-line remains intact: a man who went looking for a clean explanation of evil and found something far messier. That is a story worth eight hours and fifty-three minutes of anyone’s time.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Look Elsewhere
Listeners who will get the most out of this audiobook are those comfortable with psychological ambiguity and who can engage with the idea that the study of evil is not always a safe occupation. If you want narrative catharsis, villains punished, a clear moral lesson, the reassurance of distance between monsters and ordinary people, this book will frustrate you. If you are drawn to the history of psychiatry, to the Nuremberg period as more than backdrop, or to narratives where the observer becomes implicated in what he observes, it is genuinely compelling. Fans of Erik Larson’s dual-narrative approach will also find familiar pleasures here, though El-Hai’s prose is more clinical and less lyrical than Larson’s.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the audiobook cover the full Nuremberg trials in detail?
No. El-Hai deliberately keeps the focus narrow, centering on Dr. Kelley’s psychological work with the captives rather than the courtroom proceedings themselves. Listeners seeking a comprehensive account of the trials will find this book more interested in the relationships formed during pretrial detention.
Is this book connected to the film Nuremberg starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek?
The synopsis notes the film adaptation, so some listeners may come to the audiobook having seen it first. The book covers more psychological territory than a film can accommodate, and several reviewers note the book offers substantially more depth than the screen version.
Why does the book spend so much time analyzing Dr. Kelley rather than just Göring?
El-Hai’s central argument is that Kelley’s psychological unraveling after Nuremberg is inseparable from his exposure to the captives. Kelley came searching for pathology that would mark the Nazis as fundamentally different from other humans, and the failure of that quest appears to have had lasting and ultimately fatal consequences for him personally.
How does Arthur Morey’s narration handle the passages dealing with Göring’s charisma?
Morey takes a deliberately understated approach. He does not attempt to perform Göring’s charm but instead lets El-Hai’s descriptions carry the weight. The effect is appropriately unsettling: the reader must supply the menace from context rather than having it telegraphed through vocal performance.
