Imagine, for a moment, a long, sterile corridor. Twenty-two heavy, locked doors line it, each sealing a man who recently held the fate of millions in his hands. This is not the courtroom of Nuremberg, with its grand pronouncements and legalistic jargon. This is the prison, the antechamber to judgment. And in Douglas Kelly’s groundbreaking book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, this corridor becomes a laboratory for the most unsettling psychological experiment of the 20th century. Kelly, the prison psychologist, was not there to prosecute or condemn in the legal sense; he was there to understand. His task was to look into the eyes of men like Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, and Rudolf Hess and answer a terrifying question: What does evil look like up close?
The answer he found was more disturbing than any monster story. Evil, Kelly discovered, was often mundane, bureaucratic, and profoundly human. By teaching us this, his book remains a terrifyingly relevant masterpiece, a mirror held not just to the past, but to our own souls.
The Lessons from the Holding Cell: The Psychology of Evil
We often think of history’s great villains as aberrations, as inhuman fiends separable from the rest of us. Kelly’s work demolishes this comforting myth. In the quiet of his interviews and through the inkblots of Rorschach tests, he revealed the architects of the Holocaust not as slavering monsters, but as men with recognisable, if grotesquely magnified, human failings.
The Myth of the Monster is Replaced by the Reality of the Flawed Man. There was no single “Nazi personality” revealed in the tests. Instead, Kelly found a constellation of types. Göring was a grandiose narcissist, utterly incapable of empathy and obsessed with his own image and power, even in defeat. Speer, the “good Nazi,” was a master of self-deception, crafting a narrative of ignorance and regret that crumbled under psychological scrutiny. He wasn’t pure evil; he was a brilliant technocrat who chose to look away. Julius Streicher, the vile propagandist, was not a master strategist but a sadistic and compulsive man driven by a deep-seated pathology. The lesson is chilling: the capacity for great evil does not require a monstrous soul, only a profoundly damaged or unexamined one.
The Most Powerful Tool is Rationalisation. Perhaps the most crucial takeaway from 22 Cells in Nuremberg is the virtuoso-level self-justification practiced by the defendants. They did not see themselves as perpetrators of evil. They were patriots defending their fatherland, loyal soldiers following orders, or simply cogs in a vast machine beyond their control. Wilhelm Keitel, head of the OKW, embodied this to a terrifying degree. He wasn’t an ideologue; he was an obedient man whose identity was so fused with the concept of duty that he signed off on war crimes with the same bureaucratic detachment he would have used to approve supply requisitions. The lesson here is that the first step to atrocity is not hatred, but the ability to rationalise an immoral act as a necessary, acceptable, or even noble one.
Evil is a Process, Not an Event. Kelly’s observations show that these men were not born genocidal. They were hollowed out, step by step, by a potent cocktail of ambition, ideology, social pressure, and incremental compromises. The first lie, the first act of cruelty, the first moment of turning a blind eye makes the next one easier. This is the great danger Kelly exposes: the road to hell is paved with a thousand tiny, justifiable steps.
Echoes in the Corridors of Today
Why read this book now, decades after the trials? Because the 22 cells of Nuremberg are not just historical artifacts; they are archetypes that echo powerfully in our modern world.
The Relevance to the “Banality of Evil”. Hannah Arendt would later coin the term “the banality of evil” to describe Adolf Eichmann, but Kelly saw it first in the faces of the high command. This concept is more relevant than ever. Think of the software engineer who designs an algorithm to be addictive, knowing it will harm mental health, but justifies it as “optimising engagement.” Or the executive who greenlights environmental destruction, rationalising it as “maximising shareholder value.” Or the government staffer who drafts a dehumanising policy, seeing themselves not as cruel, but as “implementing the directive.” These are not cackling villains; they are modern-day equivalents of Keitel and Speer, compartmentalising their morality to serve a system or a goal.
The Relevance to Ideology and Polarisation. The Nazi defendants didn’t act in a vacuum; they were fuelled by a virulent, all-consuming ideology that gave them a framework for their actions and absolved them of personal responsibility. We live in an age of intense polarisation, where political, social, and religious identities can demand the total surrender of critical thought. When an “us vs. them” narrative becomes absolute, any action against “them” can be justified. Kelly’s book is a stark warning of what happens when loyalty to a group eclipses loyalty to fundamental human decency.
The Relevance to Personal Accountability. Ultimately, 22 Cells in Nuremberg forces us to turn the mirror on ourselves. The great unspoken question of the book is, “What would I have done?” It challenges us to examine our own capacity for self-deception. Where do we draw the line? When do we speak up against our boss, our political party, our social circle? Kelly’s work teaches us that moral courage is not the absence of fear or ambition, but the conscious choice to prioritise an internal moral compass over external pressure. It is the choice to see the person on the other side of the desk, the policy, or the border, as a human being, not an abstraction.
In the end, the power of Douglas Kelly’s book lies in its quiet, clinical setting. It strips away the spectacle of the trials and forces us to confront the unsettling truth: these were men. And if such darkness can reside in them, it has the potential to reside in us all. The twenty-two cells of Nuremberg were not just holding pens for war criminals; they were twenty-two mirrors. And what they reflect is a truth we must never stop examining.
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Read Douglas Kelley’s book here:
https://archive.org/details/douglas-m.-kelley-22-cells-in-nuremberg-1947
See also:
Worldwide Temple of Aurora 