Page to Screen
Thursday, December 4, 2025 6 p.m. – 7:45 p.m.
Explore the books that have made the jump from print to the big and small screen. This month we are reading The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII by Jack El-Hai.
In 1945, an improbable relationship between the fallen Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goering, and ambitious US Army physician, Douglas Kelley, becomes a hazardous quest into the nature of evil, amid the devastation of Europe at the end of World War II. In 1945, after his capture at the end of the Second World War, Hermann Göring arrived at an American-run detention center in war-torn Luxembourg, accompanied by sixteen suitcases and a red hatbox. Joining him in the detention center were fifty-one senior Nazis, of whom Göring was the dominant figure. To ensure that the captives were fit for trial at Nuremberg, the US army sent an ambitious army psychiatrist, Captain Douglas M. Kelley, to supervise and evaluate them. To Kelley, it was the professional opportunity of a lifetime: to discover a distinguishing trait among these arch-criminals that would mark them as psychologically different from the rest of humanity. But Kelley’s quest would prove to be a dangerous one. The more he spoke with the Nazi captives, the more he began to understand and appreciate their perspective—and the more he would fall for their charms.
Now a major motion picture starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek.
Page to Screen meets on the first Thursday at 6:00 p.m. in the 2nd Floor Workforce Development Classroom at the Downtown Huntsville Public Library.
Questions? Contact asprogramming@hmcpl.org