The Most Important Man From WW2 History You Have Never Heard Of

His name was Douglas M. Kelley. Who was he?

In August 1945, U.S. Army major and psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley arrived at a stripped-down former luxury hotel in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, that was a holding pen for captured leaders of the defeated Third Reich. Kelley's assignment was to examine the top-ranking prisoners — Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Jodl, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner among many others — to determine their mental fitness for a trial by an international tribunal that awaited them in Nuremberg.

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But Kelley, then 33, had a private agenda for his time with the Nazis. By extensively testing and interviewing the captives, he hoped to identify a mental disorder or "Nazi personality" common to the deposed leaders, that could explain their monstrous misdeeds. What he discovered during months he spent with the Nazis at Luxembourg and Nuremberg swept him into a dark current of bewildering psychology and personal misfortune. Yet today Kelley's work remains crucial to all efforts to understand the Nazi mind and the causes of World War II.

Kelley healed thousands of soldiers

Long before he met the Nazi leaders, Kelley helped heal thousands of U.S. soldiers who suffered from combat exhaustion, also known as shell shock. As director of U.S. Army psychiatric facilities in Europe, he introduced new treatments and novel therapies that restored countless fighters to psychological health.

He sought to understand the minds of the Nazis

Given the chance to spend unlimited time with the captured Nazi leaders, Kelley developed an ambitious plan — one far exceeding his official duties — to study the minds of the Germans through psychological assessments and in-depth interviewing. Nobody had previously considered and executed such a scheme. Many of the Nazi prisoners opened up to Kelley and confessed their motivations, triumphs, and regrets.

He used the Rorschach inkblot test

Kelley’s approach to his study of the Nazis was innovative. As one of the earliest (and most skilled) American advocates of the Rorschach inkblot test, he applied that assessment to most of the top Nazi leaders and produced results that continue to fascinate psychologists and attract new study.

He analyzed the pscyhes of the top 22 Nazis at Nuremberg

In a book he published in 1947, Kelley drew masterly psychological portraits of the 22 most important Nazi prisoners. He left for posterity an eye-witness account of the evolution of these men from confident leaders to condemned criminals.

He faced a tragic demise after the war

At the end of his life at age 45, Kelley left us with a tantalizing mystery. Was his dramatic suicide from swallowing cyanide directly connected with the similar suicide of Hermann Göring, the Nazi who most intrigued the psychiatrist? Kelley had looked deeply into the soul of the German leader and found a man who looked surprisingly like himself.

Jack El-Hai is the author of The Nazi & the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WW2.