Nuremberg: The True Story of How Hermann Göring Faced Justice and Doctor Kelley Lost His Mind

In the autumn of 1945, twenty-one men who had run the most murderous regime in modern history were brought to a courtroom in a ruined German city to answer for what they had done. Among them sat Hermann Göring — founder of the Gestapo, commander of the Luftwaffe, the most powerful surviving Nazi — stripped of his medals, ninety pounds lighter, and completely unbroken.Assigned to examine him was Dr. Douglas Kelley, a thirty-two-year-old American psychiatrist who arrived at Nuremberg expecting to find monsters. What the Rorschach inkblots revealed instead would haunt him for the rest of his life.NUREMBERG is the true story of two men locked in a remarkable psychological encounter — one fighting for his legacy, the other for his understanding of human nature. It is the story of the trial that invented international criminal law, of four Allied nations whose own hands were not entirely clean, of a Soviet prosecution that buried a massacre inside its indictment, and of a defendant so formidably intelligent he turned his own cross-examination into a performance that left the prosecution shaken.Most of all, it is the story of the question that Kelley brought home from those twenty-one cells and could never put down: What separates ordinary people from the men in that dock? His answer — confirmed a decade after his death by Stanley Milgram's landmark obedience experiments — is the most unsettling finding to emerge from the most important trial of the twentieth century.Daniel Beckett's NUREMBERG is narrative non-fiction at its most gripping — the story of justice, psychology, and the darkness that ordinary human nature carries within it. Read more