Nuremberg, out in theaters Nov. 7, stars Rami Malek as a psychiatrist tasked with evaluating Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg trials in November 1945. Malek’s character Douglas Kelley is based on a real psychiatrist who interviewed 22 Nazis to ensure they were fit to stand trial and that they would not take their own lives.
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The International Military Tribunal tried defendants for crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit these crimes, according to the National WWII Museum. Overall, there were 13 trials between 1945 and 1949.
Adolf Hitler had already committed suicide on April 30, 1945, so Kelley was asked to pay special attention to Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) because he was the second most powerful Nazi official indicted. The film ends with his trial and 1946 conviction.
TIME talked to Jack El-Hai, author of the book that inspired the movie, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII, about what it gets right and wrong about this period.
The psychological evaluations of Nazi leaders
As a psychiatrist for the U.S. Army, Kelley worked at military hospitals throughout Western Europe, treating service members with what would later be called PTSD and helping them recover enough to get back on the battlefield.
With the Nazi leaders, he spent about five months doing hundreds of hours of one-on-one interviews. “If we can psychologically define evil, we can make sure something like this never happens again,” Malek’s Kelley says in the movie.
Kelley interviews with the help of Howard Triest (Leo Woodall), a Jewish U.S. soldier who served as a translator. He grew up in Nazi Germany, and when his parents received only one visa to the U.S., they sent him. Triest’s parents died in the Holocaust.
In the interviews, Kelley used Rorschach ink blot tests, asking defendants to state what they thought the ink blots looked like. In the film, one Nazi says he sees a “Jewish vagina,” while Göring sees blood.
Defendants were presented with a Thematic Apperception Test, in which he showed them a photograph or illustration of something real and asked them to tell a story from what they saw.
He gave patients an IQ test, and even did magic tricks with them, as the movie shows, because he thought it would give them confidence in interviews, according to El-Hai.
There was another psychiatrist, Gustav Gilbert (Colin Hanks), who used the same techniques, but came to a different conclusion. Gilbert wanted to write a book with Kelley, but Kelley didn’t think they were on the same page because Gilbert thought the men had psychological disorders. However, they did not actually get into a fist fight, as the movie shows.
Kelley’s conclusions
Kelley found the defendants had average or above average IQs. Overall, he described them as workaholics and opportunists “who would not hesitate to climb over the backs of half the people in their country to subjugate the other half,” as El-Hai paraphrases Kelley’s overall assessment.
Kelley concluded that Göring was a highly intelligent, highly imaginative, extremely narcissistic person because many of his responses centered around himself. “No man has ever beaten me,” Crowe’s Göring says in the movie. He did not diagnose Göring with any serious psychiatric illnesses.
“If you believe that these men, including Göring, were psychiatrically-disordered, were monsters, were examples of really deviant human beings, then you absolve them from responsibility for their actions,” El-Hai says. “They made choices, and a monster doesn’t necessarily make choices. A monster just acts like a monster. And I like the idea of holding them accountable for their acts.”
How Nuremberg ends
Kelley did not see all of his patients stand trial. While the movie depicts him getting fired over leaking information to a fictional female journalist about the prosecution being potentially over-matched by Göring, he was promoted and was back in the U.S. by the time Göring took the witness stand, not sitting in the audience watching his client and meeting privately with him afterwards like the movie shows.
But his evaluation helped the prosecution put forward a more informed line of questioning, and by the end of the trial it was clear that Göring was well aware of the Holocaust, the atrocities at the death camps, and the war crimes against civilians.
Göring was sentenced to death, but he committed suicide via cyanide on Oct. 15, 1946. It’s unclear how he got a hold of the pills, but one theory is that a guard smuggled them for him.
Kelley wrote a book on his experience, Twenty-Two Cells in Nuremberg, and hit the lecture circuit, warning Americans about people who were like Nazis, thinking mainly of southern segregationists. He even advocated for giving psychiatric exams to anyone running for political office.
In 1958, amid marital problems and drinking problems, Kelley committed suicide by ingesting cyanide powder.
The significance of Kelley’s findings
Gilbert’s book ended up being more popular than Kelley’s book, and El-Hai thinks that’s because the thesis told the public what they wanted to hear. Gilbert concluded that the Nazis were a psychiatrically disordered group. “This horrible war had just ended. This long trial had just ended,” says El-Hai. “And I think the public was disposed to think that maybe that’s the end of this kind of behavior. It’s all behind us now. Gilbert’s conclusions allowed that kind of belief.” Kelley’s conclusions were quite different: “They advanced the idea that these people have always been around us and always will be. The war won’t stop it, the trial won’t stop it, and we will have to contend with people who are within the normal range of personality forever. So what are we going to do about it?”