Douglas Kelley spent the months leading up to the Nuremberg trials interviewing Nazis about their motivations for the Holocaust, an assignment that shook him to his core — and seemingly led to his suicide in 1958.

In the fall of 1945, a 33-year-old American psychiatrist named Douglas Kelley walked into Nuremberg Prison carrying a leather briefcase filled with Rorschach inkblot cards for what he would describe as an “astounding” task: examining the minds of the most notorious war criminals the world had ever known.

It was an unprecedented assignment in the history of psychiatry, and though it laid the groundwork for how criminals would be evaluated in the future, Kelley’s work was full of missteps and ethical conflicts.

Lines were blurred. As he attempted to understand the Nazi mind, he

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