G'day, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. It's been one of the most

uncomfortable questions that humans have asked themselves ever since the atrocities of the

Holocaust and the Second World War. Were top Nazi leaders mad? Were they psychopaths? Were they evil? Were they sort of like religious

fundamentalists in the sense that they were committed to a deranged ideology? Were they just

amoral narcissists who were grasping for power in the wrong place at the wrong time? What the

hell happened? Jack Elhai wrote the book about

what the hell happened and what was going on in the minds of senior Nazis. It's a book that

became the recent movie Nuremberg, in which Russell Crow played Herman Guring. It was the story

of this intellectual cat and mouse game between Guring and 21 other senior Nazis

who were imprisoned in Nuremberg Jail awaiting the trial of the century, the Nuremberg trials,

a cat and mouse game between Gering and the young US psychiatrist who had been appointed to determine

whether or not Guring was insane. And this psychiatrist spent eight months in Nuremberg jail,

well, not sleeping in Nuremberg jail,

but spending his days in Nuremberg jail,

with Gering and these 21 other senior Nazis,

trying for the life of him to find some commonalities between them,

to find the pathology, to find out what evil meant,

to try to identify the traits and characteristics

that might give humankind some guidance to be able to identify monsters like this in the future.

Now, this psychiatrist's private notes stayed secret until they were released specifically to

today's guest just for research on his book

The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.

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