The magician who examined Göring: Douglas Kelley, magic and the Nuremberg Trials
In 1945, Major Douglas Kelley was sent to examine Hermann Göring and the other leading Nazis awaiting trial at Nuremberg. Kelley was an American Army psychiatrist experienced in treating combat casualties.
He was also an accomplished magician and prominent figure in American amateur magic, a prize-winning performer who became a national officer of the Society of American Magicians.
Doctor and magician
Douglas McGlashan Kelley was born at Truckee, California, on 11 August 1912 and grew up in San Francisco. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, qualified in medicine at the University of California School of Medicine in 1937, and later undertook postgraduate work at Columbia University, receiving a Doctor of Medical Science degree in 1941.
Magic had been part of his life long before then.
As a student Kelley performed escapes, card magic and public stunts. Contemporary newspaper reports record Houdini-style feats, including freeing himself while restrained inside a mail sack and iron-bound sea chest, as well as blindfold driving around Berkeley. By 1931 he was active in Golden Gate Assembly No. 2 of the Society of American Magicians and had won the Fitzkee Wand Trophy for showmanship with an original card effect.
By the mid-1930s he had served as president of Golden Gate Assembly and was appearing publicly at Pacific Coast Association of Magicians conventions. A 1935 report records him opening a Hollywood convention show with ‘General Magic’.
One performance gives a particularly vivid picture of Kelley the conjuror. At the Pacific Coast Association convention in Reno in July 1937, Beatrice Houdini, widow of Harry Houdini, was crowned ‘Queen of the Convention’. Immediately afterwards, Kelley performed a barrel and strait-jacket escape.
His standing went beyond performance. By 1940 he was Regional Vice-President for the Far West of the Society of American Magicians and the following year was trusted to preside over one of its National Council meetings in New York.
His psychiatric colleagues knew about this second life too. At a psychiatrists’ conference in 1938, while other delegates presented professional papers, Kelley gave them a magic show.
Kelley also published and marketed magic.
His best-known commercial effect was The Kelley Telephone Trick. The surviving advertisement credits the underlying idea to magician Bert Douglas, with Kelley responsible for the ‘improvements, patter and presentation’. A spectator selected a card without looking at it; Kelley then made a comic call to ‘the Devil’ on a toy telephone, before another spectator apparently heard the card’s identity through the receiver. The complete trick sold for $1.50.
Kelley also published the card effect Let Him Guess in Genii in February 1938 and contributed other material to the magic press.
Yet he was increasingly interested not simply in how magic worked, but in why it worked.
Conjuring on the psychiatric ward
In 1940 Kelley published ‘Conjuring as an Asset to Occupational Therapy’ in Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation, vol. 19, pp. 71–108.
Read Kelley’s full paper here.
It was an unusually early systematic exploration of using magic therapeutically.
Kelley’s idea was not simply to entertain psychiatric patients. He wanted the patients themselves to learn and perform tricks.
A suitable effect had to be reasonably easy to master, reliable and impressive enough to produce a satisfying reaction. Learning it demanded attention and coordination; performing it required interaction with another person, control of a small social situation and the confidence to complete something successfully in public.
For someone who had withdrawn socially or lost confidence, that could have value.
Kelley discussed the psychology of conjuring alongside the practical selection and teaching of tricks. He also recognised limitations: magic was not appropriate for every psychiatric condition, particularly where deception or performance might reinforce existing delusions.
The magic community noticed what he was doing. In 1941 The Sphinx advertised Kelley’s paper to magicians as ‘the first authoritative work on the psychology of conjuring deceptions since Triplett’.
Later that year the story reached a wider audience. On 24 November 1941 Time reported on Kelley teaching simple tricks to patients at San Francisco Hospital, including disappearing thimbles, card effects and cut-and-restored cord.
One case concerned a salesman whose difficulties included an intense fear of speaking to other people. After several weeks learning magic, he performed three tricks at a patients’ party and was subsequently reported to have returned to work.
The magic press followed the story too. In January 1942 The Linking Ring described ‘Dr Douglas McGlashan Kelley, San Francisco psychiatrist’ using elementary parlour magic in treatment and discussed the idea that withdrawn patients might become more socially engaged if taught tricks.
Kelley meanwhile continued thinking about the underlying psychology.
In 1943 he published a second, still more revealing paper: ‘Mechanisms of Magic and Self-Deception: The Psycho-logical Basis of Misdirection; An Extensional Non-Aristotelian Method for Prevention of Self-Deception’, in Papers from the Second American Congress on General Semantics.
There he wrote:
‘Long before the name psychology was on everybody’s tongue, magicians employed certain of its principles under the term misdirection.’
That sentence neatly captures the connection Kelley had been exploring for years. Psychology and conjuring were not separate hobbies. Both concerned attention, expectation, perception and the ease with which the mind can be directed towards the wrong conclusion.
Magic goes to war
In 1942 Kelley was called to active duty in the US Army Medical Corps and became chief psychiatrist of the 30th General Hospital in the European theatre.
The Army faced a serious psychiatric problem. Combat exhaustion, anxiety states, psychosis and other breakdowns removed large numbers of servicemen from effective duty. Treatment increasingly emphasised early assessment and rehabilitation rather than automatically evacuating every psychiatric casualty far from the fighting.
Kelley became closely involved.
Official Army medical history records Major Kelley being brought from the 30th General Hospital to conduct an intensive one-week course in neuropsychiatry. The instructional cases included psychotic servicemen, combat psychiatric casualties returned from North Africa and men removed from divisions because of psychiatric problems. By February 1945 he had been appointed consultant in clinical psychology in the European Theater of Operations.
He also applied ideas derived from Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics to servicemen suffering traumatic neuroses, work he later described in professional psychiatric literature.
Magic had not entirely disappeared.
One of Kelley’s props was a mechanical card-finding duck. Magic advertising shows him associated with such an automaton before the war, and a 1947 account of his military work reported that he later used the device in the rehabilitation of Army patients.
The evidence does not support describing this as a formal Army ‘magic therapy programme’. It supports something more modest but still unusual: the psychiatrist who had published on conjuring as occupational therapy before the war continued to apply elements of those ideas while treating servicemen during it.
Then, in August 1945, Kelley was given an altogether different group of patients.
Twenty-two cells
With Germany defeated, the Allies were preparing to put the surviving Nazi leadership on trial. First they needed to establish whether the prisoners were mentally competent to understand the proceedings and participate in their defence.
Kelley was sent to examine them.
The prisoners were initially held at Mondorf-les-Bains in Luxembourg before being transferred to Nuremberg. Kelley assessed the senior Nazis through interviews and psychological testing and was later joined by psychologist Gustave Gilbert.
The work was not academic. Robert Ley, former head of the German Labour Front, killed himself before the trials began. Rudolf Hess displayed bizarre behaviour and claimed amnesia. The authorities needed their prisoners alive and competent enough to face judgement.
Kelley was interested in something more.
He hoped that psychological examination might reveal some common abnormality among the men who had run Nazi Germany. Was there a recognisable psychiatric type behind Nazism?
His findings provided no convenient answer.
The prisoners possessed different personalities and varying mixtures of ambition, narcissism, aggression and opportunism. Kelley found no single psychiatric disorder that explained them.
Of all his subjects, one interested him most: Hermann Göring.
Göring and Kelley
The former Reichsmarschall arrived in Allied custody vastly overweight and taking large quantities of paracodeine, an opioid he had used for years. Kelley supervised the reduction of his drug use. As Göring lost weight and became mentally sharper, the strength of his personality became increasingly apparent.
He was intelligent, articulate and practised at dominating a room. Intelligence testing at Nuremberg gave him an IQ score of 138. He joked with his captors, argued about the Nazi regime and quickly became the dominant personality among the prisoners.
Kelley and Göring spent long periods talking.
Their relationship became unusually cordial. Göring welcomed Kelley’s visits and discussed his life, the Nazi leadership, the war and aspects of the defence he intended to mount.
Kelley was not simply listening.
Surviving memoranda show him reporting information obtained from Göring and other prisoners to William J. Donovan, former head of the Office of Strategic Services and then an adviser to the American prosecution. Göring may have treated Kelley as something approaching a confidant, but Kelley remained an Army officer working within the system preparing the defendants for trial.
What interested him most was not madness but personality.
Kelley saw Göring as highly intelligent, egocentric, imaginative, ambitious and ruthless. He later described him as ‘undoubtedly the most ruthless human being that I have ever experienced’.
Yet he did not consider Göring psychotic or incapable of responsibility.
That mattered. Kelley did not believe the Nazi leaders could be tidily explained away as madmen. His 1947 book 22 Cells in Nuremberg instead presented them as recognisable human personalities rather than sufferers from some unique ‘Nazi disease’.
Kelley returned to the United States before the trial had run its course and left the Army later in 1946 with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
Göring remained at Nuremberg. Sentenced to death, he avoided the gallows on 15 October 1946 by swallowing cyanide.
After Nuremberg
Kelley continued his career in psychiatry and criminology, eventually returning to Berkeley as Professor of Criminology.
Magic remained part of his professional life. In July 1946, shortly after his return from Europe, The Linking Ring noted his work at the war-crimes trials and added simply: ‘He’s still strong for magic.’
Three years later the same journal gave an even more revealing glimpse of how Kelley combined his two worlds:
‘The way Doug Kelley works magic into his lectures on psychiatry, or as a means of argument when called as an expert in trials, is beautiful to behold.’
It is perhaps the clearest evidence that magic was not merely a private hobby. Kelley deliberately used conjuring in professional teaching and expert work, while remaining connected with organised magic.
Kelley also became a familiar public lecturer and broadcaster. His post-war talks ranged across crime, psychiatry and deception, and magic sometimes remained part of the presentation. By the mid-1950s he was still using conjuring to illustrate how easily perception could be manipulated, including in broadcast work as well as university lectures.
His own life, however, became increasingly troubled. Kelley drank heavily and faced considerable personal and professional pressures.
On 1 January 1958, aged 45, he swallowed potassium cyanide at his Berkeley home and died.
The similarity to Göring’s death produced immediate speculation that Kelley had used cyanide brought back from Nuremberg. Later magical accounts repeated the story, but contemporary police evidence is much stronger: Berkeley investigators rejected the Nuremberg-capsule claim and traced the poison to a commercial chemical supply.
His connection with magic continued almost until the end. Fellow San Francisco magicians had lunched with ‘Doug’ only a few days before his death.
On screen
Kelley returned to wider attention through Jack El-Hai’s 2013 biography The Nazi and the Psychiatrist and James Vanderbilt’s 2025 film Nuremberg, in which Rami Malek plays Kelley opposite Russell Crowe as Göring.
The film makes Kelley’s interest in magic part of its psychological duel between the two men. It also compresses events: most notably, the real Kelley returned to America and was promoted rather than being dismissed and remaining at Nuremberg to watch Göring’s major courtroom appearance.
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The historical story needs little embellishment.
Douglas Kelley spent nearly three decades in organised magic. He performed escapes and sleight of hand, won prizes, published material, headed a leading S.A.M. assembly and became a national officer. He wrote seriously about the psychology of misdirection, pioneered the use of conjuring in occupational therapy and carried elements of that work into wartime medicine.
Then he was sent to examine Hermann Göring and the other surviving leaders of Nazi Germany.
His most troubling conclusion was also one of his simplest: they could not merely be explained away as madmen.
Read about the wider connection of magic with therapy in this Magic at War article:
Tricks for the wards: Can magic help us heal?
Kelley, Douglas M. ‘Conjuring as an Asset to Occupational Therapy.’ Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation, vol. 19, no. 1 (1940), pp. 71–108. Kelley’s principal study of teaching conjuring to psychiatric patients.
Kelley, Douglas McG. ‘Mechanisms of Magic and Self-Deception: The Psycho-logical Basis of Misdirection; An Extensional Non-Aristotelian Method for Prevention of Self-Deception.’ In M. Kendig (ed.), Papers from the Second American Congress on General Semantics. Institute of General Semantics, 1943, pp. 53–60.
‘Conjuring as an Asset to Occupational Therapy’, advertisement, The Sphinx, 10 May 1941. Advertised Kelley’s paper to magicians as a major work on the psychology of conjuring.
‘Magic Helps Treat Insane.’ San Francisco News, 17 November 1941.
‘Psychiatrists Using Shell Game to Treat Insane.’ San Francisco Examiner, 18 November 1941.
‘Medicine: Magic & Mickey Mouse.’ Time, 24 November 1941. Contemporary account of Kelley teaching thimble, card and rope tricks to psychiatric patients.
Nelson, Robert A. ‘With the Mentalists.’ The Linking Ring, vol. 21, no. 11, January 1942, p. 35. Contemporary magic-press discussion of Kelley’s psychiatric use of parlour magic.
Smith, Willard S. ‘Will Cure Whom With What?’ The Linking Ring, vol. 21, no. 12, February 1942, p. 31.Contemporary commentary on Kelley’s therapeutic work.
Kelley, Douglas M. ‘The Use of General Semantics and Korzybskian Principles as an Extensional Method of Group Psychotherapy in Traumatic Neurosis.’ Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. 114, no. 3 (1951), pp. 189–220.
Kelley, Douglas M. Review of Frank Deane, The Doctor of Magic. Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 39, no. 4 (1952), p. 387.
Wiseman, Richard, and Caroline Watt. ‘Achieving the Impossible: A Review of Magic-Based Interventions and Their Effects on Wellbeing.’ PeerJ 6 (6 December 2018), e6081. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.6081.
Dixon, Lena. Evaluation of the Magic Course. Solva Care, August 2019. Later community intervention report placing Kelley within the longer history of magic-based rehabilitation.
Kelley in the magic press
The Sphinx, vol. 30, no. 8, 20 October 1931, p. 369. Records Kelley winning the Fitzkee Wand Trophy for showmanship with an original card effect and serving as correspondent for Golden Gate Assembly No. 2.
‘Magicians Will Present Stunt at 10 Today.’ Daily Californian, 24 February 1932.
‘They Can’t Tie Him.’ Oakland Post-Inquirer, 24 February 1932.
‘U.C. “Houdini” Sirkus Stunt.’ Oakland Post-Inquirer, 24 February 1932.
‘Faculty Will Not Examine Float Entries.’ Daily Californian, 26 February 1932. Contemporary evidence for Kelley’s student escape and stunt work.
The Sphinx, vol. 31, no. 9, 10 November 1932, p. 368. Notes Kelley and fellow magician Barkann Rosinoff studying together at Berkeley medical school.
The Sphinx, vol. 34, no. 5, 10 July 1935, p. 142. Records Kelley’s election as president of Golden Gate Assembly No. 2.
The Sphinx, vol. 34, no. 6, 10 August 1935, p. 160. PCAM convention report listing Douglas Kelley performing ‘General Magic’ on the public show.
The Linking Ring, vol. 15, no. 6, August 1935. Further contemporary account of the 1935 PCAM convention.
The Sphinx, vol. 34, no. 7, 10 September 1935, p. 199. Describes Kelley as president of Golden Gate Assembly and notes that he opened the Hollywood public show and represented the assembly ‘in fine style’.
Goldston’s Magical Quarterly, vol. 2, Winter 1935–36, p. 96. Records Kelley, as president, helping conduct the Society of American Magicians initiation of Reno magicians with Dariel Fitzkee and others.
The Sphinx, vol. 35, no. 9, 10 November 1936, p. 259. Advertisement for Otto the Automaton Duck naming Douglas Kelley among well-known magicians using the prop.
The Sphinx, vol. 36, no. 6, 10 August 1937, pp. 173, 175. Reno PCAM convention report recording Kelley’s barrel and strait-jacket escape and his receipt of the Ray Gamble Trophy.
The Linking Ring, vol. 17, no. 6, August 1937. Further contemporary report of Kelley’s Reno escape.
‘The Kelley Telephone Trick.’ Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine, 1937. Commercial advertisement crediting the original idea to Bert Douglas and the improvements, patter and presentation to Douglas Kelley; price $1.50.
Kelley, Douglas M. ‘Let Him Guess.’ Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine, vol. 2, no. 6, February 1938, p. 194.
‘The Kellog Gamble-Trophy Trick.’ Genii: The Conjurors’ Magazine, vol. 2, no. 9, May 1938. Surviving contents/indexing gives inconsistent spelling of the title and Kelley’s name.
The Sphinx, vol. 38, no. 4, 10 June 1939, p. 108. Congratulates Kelley on receiving a Rockefeller grant in psychiatry.
The Sphinx, vol. 38, no. 6, 10 August 1939, p. 153. Reports Kelley performing at the PCAM convention associated with the Golden Gate International Exposition at Treasure Island.
The Sphinx, vol. 39, no. 5, 10 July 1940, pp. 115, 131. Records Kelley’s election as Society of American Magicians Regional Vice-President for the Far West.
The Sphinx, vol. 39, no. 8, 10 October 1940, p. 200. Records Kelley’s dual S.A.M. membership in New York and San Francisco assemblies.
The Sphinx, vol. 39, no. 11, 10 January 1941, p. 301. Records Kelley attending the S.A.M. National Council meeting as a vice-president.
The Sphinx, vol. 40, no. 1, 10 March 1941, p. 66. Records Kelley presiding over the S.A.M. National Council meeting in New York in the national president’s absence.
Ireland’s Year Book of 1942. Includes Douglas Kelley’s Telephone Trick.
The Linking Ring, vol. 26, no. 5, July 1946, p. 69. Reports Kelley’s return from Europe and Nuremberg and observes: ‘He’s still strong for magic.’
The Linking Ring, vol. 27, no. 1, March 1947, p. 87. Calls Kelley ‘a tremendous credit to magic’ following publication of 22 Cells in Nuremberg.
The Linking Ring, vol. 27, no. 12, February 1948, p. 29. Frances Ireland’s ‘Crazy? Aren’t We All?’ describes psychiatric patients in Copenhagen practising magic and specifically invoking Kelley’s therapeutic work.
The Sphinx, vol. 46, no. 11, 10 January 1948, p. 351. Records transfer of Kelley’s S.A.M. membership while he was living in Winston-Salem.
The Linking Ring, vol. 28, no. 11, January 1949, p. 82. Reports Kelley using magic in lectures on psychiatry and as part of expert courtroom argument.
The Linking Ring, vol. 34, no. 3, May 1954, p. 117. PCAM Oakland convention advertisement naming Dr Douglas Kelley among attendees.
Hugard’s Magic Monthly, October 1957. Refers to Kelley as an ‘old time S.A.M.er’ while noting his lectures at a police convention in Hawaii.
Hugard’s Magic Monthly, January 1958. Contemporary death notice stating that Kelley ‘pioneered in magical therapy’.
The Linking Ring, vol. 37, no. 12, February 1958, p. 87. San Francisco report noting that local magicians had lunched with Kelley only days before his death.
Fitzkee, Dariel. ‘Doug Kelley.’ Genii, February 1958. Obituary by a friend of almost thirty years, describing Kelley’s long involvement in San Francisco and New York magic, S.A.M. membership and PCAM attendance.
‘P.C.A.M. News’, Genii, 1958, p. 220. Obituary noting Kelley’s Golden Gate leadership, university magic activities, friendship with Ted Annemann and John Scarne, convention attendance and continuing love of magic.
Booth, John. ‘Among the Magicians.’ The Linking Ring, vol. 38, no. 3, May 1958, p. 100. Reminiscence of Kelley and discussions about Nuremberg shortly before his death.
The Linking Ring, vol. 41, no. 10, December 1961, p. 109. Bibliographical index entry confirming Kelley’s Geniicontribution ‘Let Him Guess’.
Booth, John. The Linking Ring, vol. 52, no. 2, February 1972, p. 40.
United States Army Medical Department. Medical Consultants in World War II. Official documentation of Kelley’s wartime neuropsychiatric work, his service with the 30th General Hospital and his 1945 appointment in clinical psychology.
‘Kelley Teaches Battle Psychiatry.’ Chattanooga Free Press, 7 April 1944. Contemporary report of Kelley’s wartime psychiatric work.
‘Lessons of War Will Help Now.’ Greenville News, 19 February 1947. Retrospective account of Kelley’s wartime psychiatric work and his use of a mechanical duck in rehabilitation.
Kelley, Douglas M. 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals. New York: Greenberg, 1947.
Kelley, Douglas M. The Case of Rudolph Hess. Kelley’s published examination of Hess.
Douglas M. Kelley memoranda to William J. Donovan, October–November 1945. Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection, Cornell University Law Library. Primary evidence of Kelley reporting on the psychiatric condition, attitudes and intended defence strategies of the Nuremberg prisoners.
Douglas M. Kelley Papers. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accession 1997.A.0348. Psychiatric evaluations, interviews and associated Nuremberg material.
University of California. ‘Douglas McGlashan Kelley, Criminology: Berkeley, 1912–1958.’ In Memoriam, 1959.Institutional biography covering Kelley’s education, Army service and Berkeley career.
El-Hai, Jack. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII. New York: PublicAffairs, 2013. Principal modern biography, drawing extensively on Kelley’s private archive, contemporary newspapers and Nuremberg records.
APA PsycInfo. Entry for Jack El-Hai, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, 2013.
Death, later assessments and screen portrayals
‘UC Criminologist Dr Douglas Kelley Killed by Poison.’ Berkeley Daily Gazette, 2 January 1958. Contemporary reporting of Kelley’s death and the provenance of the cyanide.
Ryan, Joan. ‘Mysterious Suicide of Nuremburg Psychiatrist.’ San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate, 6 February 2005.Interviews with Kelley’s widow and son concerning his death and later speculation about Göring.
El-Hai, Jack. ‘A Set of Dusty Boxes: The Arresting Origins of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.’ 9 September 2013.Account of discovering and examining Kelley’s surviving Nuremberg archive.
Vanderbilt, James, writer and director. Nuremberg. 2025. Rami Malek as Douglas Kelley and Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring.
Waxman, Olivia B. ‘The Real Psychiatrist Who Inspired Nuremberg.’ Time, 7 November 2025. Includes Jack El-Hai’s assessment of the film’s departures from the historical chronology.
Freeman, Colin. ‘The Tragedy of Nuremberg’s “Nazi Whisperer” Douglas Kelley.’ The Telegraph, 16 November 2025.
Sky TV. ‘The Psychiatry of Evil: The Story of Dr Douglas Kelley | Nuremberg.’ 2025.
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