Jack El-Hai
Jack El-Hai is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, recently adapted into the major movie Nuremberg, which opened in theaters worldwide in 2025. The film, directed by James Vanderbilt, stars Rami Malek and Russell Crowe.
Jack writes nonfiction books, longform narratives, and the free monthly Damn History newsletter for writers and readers of popular history. He covers history, medicine, science, crime, and anything else that intrigues him and might intrigue you.
Jack’s newest book is The Case of the Autographed Corpse: A Medicine Man and a Mystery Writer in Pursuit of Justice (2026; Pegasus Publishers). This true-crime narrative tells the story of the compelling partnership between incarcerated Apache religious leader Silas John Edwards and legendary mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner as they collaborate across prison walls to dismantle a decades-long miscarriage of justice in which Edwards was wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife. The book is an expansion of an article he published in Smithsonian.
His other published books include Face in the Mirror (winner of the 2026 June Roth Award for medical journalism), The Lost Brothers, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Non-Stop: A Turbulent History of Northwest Airlines, and The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness. His articles have appeared in Smithsonian, The Atlantic, GQ, Wired, Scientific American Mind, The Washington Post Magazine, and many other publications.
The Nazi and the Psychiatrist is just one of several of Jack’s nonfiction stories that have been adapted for the screen, stage, and podcasts. Among other adaptations of his work are the documentary American Experience: The Lobotomist, the Long Lost podcast, the stage play Sense of Decency, and the podcast Time Capsule: The Silver Chain. He enjoys the adventure of bringing adaptations of his works to many media.
Jack frequently gives talks and leads workshops on the topics of his books as well as on the craft of nonfiction writing.
859: Jack El-Hai: The Nazi, the Psychiatrist, Nuremberg, and Why to Find Humanity in Those We Call Monsters
How do you make sense of an entire society or nation violating its values? Consider Germany in the 1930s, in which a whole nation seemed to embrace Nazism.
It’s tempting to say they’re all monsters, but how could over 50 million people change in a few years? Not genetics. They must have been no more or less human in 1940 as 1920.
It’s tempting to say that monsters took over and changed them. Many people thought so. At the end of World War II, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, was sent to evaluate the highest level Nazis who had been captured and were to be tried in the Nuremberg trials. He believed that these leaders must have differed from most people. He wanted to find that difference in order to help prevent people with whatever traits he found from repeating what they did. He was deeply troubled to find no meaningful difference between them and normal results on his tests.
Jack El-Hai told Kelley’s story in his book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, including interacting directly with Herman Göring, at one point the second highest ranking Nazi. In our conversation, Jack tells the highlights of his book. I discuss the relevance to polluting and depleting today, where everyone is contributing, violating our own values, but contributing to much more suffering and death than even the Holocaust.
We also talk about the movie Nuremberg based on the book, including its stars, Russell Crowe and Rami Malek.