Douglas Kelley

Lt. Colonel Douglas McGlashan Kelley (11 August 1912 – January 1, 1958) was a United States Army Military Intelligence Corps officer who served as chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg Prison during the Nuremberg War Trials. He worked to ascertain defendants' competency before they stood trial. Kelley was born in Truckee, California. He graduated from University of California at Berkeley and received his medical degree from the School of Medicine in San Francisco. He continued his studies at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, earning a Doctor of Medical Science in 1941. In 1942 he was called to duty in the United States Army Medical Corps as chief psychiatrist for the 30th General Hospital in the European Theatre. Along with psychologist Gustave Gilbert he administered the Rorschach inkblot test to the 22 defendants in the Nazi leadership group prior to the first Nuremberg trials. Kelley authored two books on the subject: Twenty-two Cells in Nuremberg and The Case of Rudolph Hess. After his examination of Hess, Kelley concluded that this defendant suffered from "a true psychoneurosis, primarily of the hysterical type, engrafted on a basic paranoid and schizoid personality, with amnesia, partly genuine and partly feigned". His diagnosis was confirmed by at least six other psychiatrists from Russia, France, England and the United States. Upon honorable discharge in 1946, Kelley was appointed Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine in North Carolina. In 1949 he was appointed Professor of Criminology at the University of California at Berkeley. He served as the President of the then Berkeley-based Society for the Advancement of Criminology (later, the American Society of Criminology) in 1950 and 1951. Kelley was portrayed by Stuart Bunce in the 2006 BBC docudrama Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial, which depicts the events at Nuremberg, as does Jack El-Hai's nonfiction book The Nazi And The Psychiatrist.