Ordinary People, Extraordinary Harm

What Nuremberg still teaches us about power, obedience, and human vulnerability

Nurenberg, Turner Network Television

Watching the film Nuremberg was disturbing on many levels. The footage of the concentration camps shown during the trial, documenting the systematic brutality inflicted on millions of Jews, remains seared in my memory. The scale of the suffering, and the knowledge that human beings were responsible for it, is almost beyond comprehension.

The difficult question many of us grapple with when confronted with such atrocities is how ordinary people came to participate in them. Often, the easiest way to resolve this discomfort is to assume there was something uniquely evil about those involved—something fundamentally different from ourselves.

Nuremberg challenges this assumption.

These men were soon to be convicted as war criminals. Yet in many scenes, they appear coherent, relational, and recognisably human. We see fear and dependency, concern for their families, and moments of vulnerability, alongside arrogance and justification—traits as evident in them as in many of the Allied Forces officers around them. It is precisely this ordinariness, set against the scale of their crimes, that demands closer examination.

Nurenberg, Turner Network Television

Ordinary Men Under Clinical Observation

The film Nuremberg portrays the wartime experiences of Douglas Kelley, a U.S. Army psychiatrist assigned to assess the mental fitness of the Nazi defendants awaiting trial. Through his interactions with the prisoners, the film traces Kelley’s growing unease as he confronts both the ordinariness of the men in his care and the moral complexity of the world around him.

Following these events, Kelley later documented his clinical observations and reflections in 22 Cells in Nuremberg. In the book, he documents in detail what most disturbed him during his time with the prisoners, not simply what they had done, but how psychologically unremarkable they appeared to be.

Across his interviews, Kelley observed that the defendants were not psychotic, delusional, or detached from reality. They were psychologically intact: capable of emotional connection, rational thought, and moral reasoning. They spoke coherently about their lives and actions, often framing themselves as dutiful officials operating within a rigid hierarchy. Responsibility was routinely displaced onto authority, ideology, or necessity, allowing profound harm to be carried out without the subjective experience of cruelty.

These clinical observations, first encountered during his time with the prisoners and later articulated in 22 Cells in Nuremberg, profoundly altered how Kelley understood human behaviour. Having found no pathological explanation sufficient to account for mass atrocity, he became increasingly sensitive to the same psychological processes emerging beyond the prison walls.

As the Allied forces assumed moral authority, Kelley began to notice how easily certainty could legitimise cruelty. Acts of retribution and collective punishment were framed as justified, even necessary. Compassion narrowed quickly once guilt was established, and individuals became categories rather than people. In this moral atmosphere, Kelley recognised the same mechanisms he had observed in the prisoners: obedience, rationalisation, and the quiet erosion of empathy.

This tension crystallised when Kelley learned of the arrest of Emmy Göring and her young daughter, Edda Göring, the wife and child of Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command. Having spent time with the family, Kelley reacted with visible distress: ‘We are supposed to be better than them.’

What unsettled Kelley was that the same mechanisms that had enabled the defeated regime to carry out atrocity were not confined to the accused Nazi leaders. They were just as present in the allied camp. They were human mechanisms, capable of emerging wherever power, certainty and moral righteousness converged.

Nurenberg, Turner Network Television

Why the Psychiatrist Douglas Kelley Wasn’t Heard

Despite the significance of his observations, Kelley’s book struggled to find an audience when it was published. In fact, he was publicly mocked on national TV. His conclusions ran counter to what many people needed to believe in the aftermath of war.

At this time, there was a powerful psychological need to see the perpetrators of the Holocaust as fundamentally different from ordinary people—to locate evil in madness, monstrosity or rare pathology. This belief created distance and safety. It reassured readers that such horrors lay outside the boundaries of normal human behaviour.

Kelley’s work threatened that reassurance. If ordinary psychological functioning did not protect against participation in atrocity, then the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ became uncomfortably thin. For many, this was a conclusion too destabilising to accept.

It would take decades before psychology was willing—or able—to demonstrate empirically what Kelley had already observed clinically.

Nurenberg, Turner Network Television

When Psychology Caught Up

Later research in social psychology provided that demonstration.

Studies showed that ordinary adults were willing to cause serious harm when instructed by an authority figure, even while experiencing distress and moral conflict. Responsibility was frequently displaced upwards, to the system, the role or the person in charge.

Stanley Milgram’s (1963) obedience experiments demonstrated that ordinary adults were willing to administer what they believed were severe and even lethal electric shocks to another person when instructed by an authority figure. Many participants were visibly distressed, conflicted and hesitant, yet they continued, often because responsibility was displaced onto the experimenter.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (1973), led by Philip Zimbardo, further showed how quickly ordinary people adopt harmful behaviours when placed into legitimised roles within a coercive system. Participants assigned positions of authority engaged in cruelty not because they were inherently sadistic, but because power, role expectations and institutional structure reshaped moral boundaries.

Together, these studies confirmed what Kelley had observed years earlier: human behaviour is shaped profoundly by systems, authority and context, often far more than we are comfortable acknowledging.

Nurenberg, Turner Network Television

Why This Still Matters

Kelley’s insight remains deeply relevant.

In systems that elevate some people above others—through rank, role, gender, faith or non-faith, expertise, charisma or perceived moral authority—the conditions for harm are quietly created. When authority is rarely questioned and loyalty is rewarded, responsibility is easily passed along. People comply, justify their choices and downplay the impact, reassuring themselves they are just doing what is required, or what is "right", or "theologically correct".

In my work as a psychologist, I regularly sit with people trying to make sense of harm that occurred in environments that once felt safe, principled or even sacred—families, organisations, workplaces and faith communities. Many are not only grappling with what happened, but with the confusion of how harm and abuse could coexist with care, sincerity or seemingly good intentions. For some, this later gives way to a painful reckoning with their own role in systems that perpetrated harm.

Kelley’s work offers a sobering but clarifying lens to understand how ordinary people can perpetrate significant harm. It reminds us that harm does not always announce itself through overt malice or obvious evil. More often, it emerges quietly through ordinary human psychology operating within systems that position themselves as morally, structurally or theologically superior—and that elevate the worth of some human beings over others through role, rank, privilege or authority.

Perhaps the most confronting implication is also the most enduring: vulnerability to harm is not confined to a few. The question is less about whether we would ever cause harm, and more about how willing we are to notice, question and resist systems that reward compliance, discourage dissent, protect status and normalise inequality.

This is not a call to cynicism or suspicion, but to attentiveness. To humility. To a willingness to examine how power operates, how authority is held, and how easily human beings—any of us—can be shaped by the structures around us.

That, I suspect, is the discomfort Kelley lived with after Nuremberg.

And it may be a discomfort worth sitting with still.

References:

Kelley, D. M. (1947). 22 cells in Nuremberg: A psychiatrist examines the Nazi criminals. Greenberg.

Vanderbilt, J. (Director). (2023). Nuremberg [Film]. Sony Pictures Classics.

Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69–97.

Mann, Y. (Director). (2000). Nuremberg [Television film]. Turner Network Television.

Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371–378.

At Curated Mind Psychology, I offer compassionate support for individuals navigating experiences of harm and coercion in relationships, systems, faith communities, workplaces, and beyond. My work is grounded in both clinical experience and research. My aim is to help clients recognise these dynamics, regain a sense of agency, and move toward healing. You can book an appointment here: Appointment Bookings.

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