Does the title “Nuremberg” summon a dust-coated memory of the 1961 film, “Judgement at Nuremberg,” that colors your predictions about this one? Judgement at Nuremberg’s proposition was meant to certify that the prosecutions, trials, and hangings of Nazi officials by the Allied victors were justified and further certify their juridical moral authority as absolute. In the 2025 film “Nuremberg,” writer/director James Vanderbilt takes the opposite tack. He narrows the camera’s focus to capture the developing relationship between the Nazi führer’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring and Douglas Kelley, the Army-assigned psychiatrist who is tasked with keeping Göring from killing himself before the trial body lends its distinguished imprimitur to Göring’s execution.
While discharging his duties, Kelley develops an agenda of his own. An ancillary trial aim is to also certify that the German personality harbors certain characteristics inclined toward egregious acts of brutality, such as those meted out by the Third Reich. Kelley’s alternate responsibility is to utilize his sessions with Göring to make that case. Even though the Nuremburg prosecution team was fully aware that there were fascist organizations functioning openly, with a massive following in each of the nations comprising the Allied forces, of foremost importance was the message that what happened in Germany was peculiar to Germany and could not take root in their home nations. “Nuremberg” may stand as the ultimate cinematic riposte, “We’re not so different, you and I,” to the Pax America nostrum “It can’t happen here.”
The legal team’s Chief Prosecutor notes that “There are no more national wars. All wars today are world wars.” The brutality of the Nazis is the funhouse mirror that reflects the choleric underbelly of the Allied forces. The United States, France, and England, made common cause against Germany even as they vied with them for world hegemony, and even as each of them, chiefly Great Britain, concocted partnership schemes with fascists within their own political orbits and social circles. Yet, Dr. Gustav Gilbert (Colin Hanks), the psychiatrist assigned to report to his commanding officer on Kelley’s overtures toward Göring, stole Kelley’s findings and wrote a book arguing that the Nazi personality came encumbered with a genetic character deformation.
Russell Crowe recreates Hermann Göring, cheek by jowl, as Hitler’s anointed successor. He is the pick of the litter among the 20 war prisoners on trial for a category of malfeasance newly inaugurated for the occasion by extant swains of bourgeois jurisprudence. They christened it “War Crimes.”
Kelley’s protocol is, without doubt, inflected to give wide berth to Göring’s artful manipulation. The psychiatrist pushes beyond the traditional clinical transaction to tease out the desired secret-sauce elements that would confirm his handlers’ foregone conclusions. Instead, he finds in his patient, an impressive quotient of intelligence, humor, and a narcissistic streak typical of any public figure. He concludes that the egregious brutality tendency that marks Göring can ripen in anyone subject to conditions similar to those that are present in post-World War I Germany, where the nation’s inhabitants were held hostage to the exigencies detailed in the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
As Göring’s trial date approaches, Kelley’s duties are chiseled into a more strategic detail. The prosecutor orders the psychiatrist to exploit his role as Göring’s trusted confidante to extract information about his lawyer’s trial game plan. Göring sees through the ruse. It casts his interlocutor in an entirely different light, and yet, Göring continues to shape up charming and patient, albeit still pledging fealty to Hitler’s forsaken project. As the officer who was entrusted with running the death camps, he is oddly taciturn when it comes to expressing any antisemitic sentiments.
During the final years of World War II, my father, Jacob Singer, was a medic assigned to the United States Army’s 30th Infantry Division. Medics do not carry arms. When his company was preparing to invade Germany, his commanding officer approached him. “Singer, as a symbolic gesture, the Army wants to enter Germany with the Jewish boys forming a point. We’ll give you a six-week State Department crash course in German, and send you in.” Upon hearing my father relate the story, I wondered whether this assignment had puzzled him as much as his telling of it puzzled me. Was the army sending the Jewish boys into Germany on the front lines to honor or punish them? Furthermore, if Army Intelligence was aware of the concentration camps, how is it that they were never “discovered,” and the prisoners in them “liberated,” until the war’s end?
Through a similar lens, I began to see as an opportunist ploy to “get in on the first floor,” Donald Trump’s brokering of his 20-point peace agreement between Israel and Hamas, which pretty much crumpled within days of its signing, when Hamas began slaughtering oppositionists and others in the streets of Gaza. The victors in World War II made it seem that the war registered a triumphal defeat of antisemitism. When the events of October 7 resurrected the pogrom at a rock concert in Israel some 80 years later, I became convinced that much of the enmity, directed at Israel and Jews, arrived from the cohort that wished it not so—wedded to the notion that “our boys,” who fought in World War II (maybe not quite as effectively as the Soviet troops) definitively settled a question no one on the planet wanted any “pain in the ass innocent bystander” reminders of. And the October 7th Israelis were nothing, if not innocent bystanders, the no-longer-living proof of the danger Clemenza warns Michael about in the film, “The Godfather.” He understood the potential power of bearing witness, living or dead, to unsanctioned brutality.
Göring, we learn, was named Hermann, after a Jew. According to him, his namesake was a benevolent family friend, an aristocrat, and possibly, as circumstances suggest, the Nazi’s biological father. He shamelessly parries this irony to exempt himself from accusations that he committed antisemitic acts such as running the 20th Century’s most notorious death camp. It’s complicated, as Dr. Kelley soon grocks with a rapture-like ferocity aimed at resolving this pain-in-the-ass conundrum, once and for all.
Kelley ricochets from hard-edged pronouncements that Göring is a narcissist, to losing himself in the thrall of his patient’s weltanschauung. Charm notwithstanding, Kelley reminds himself (and others) that Göring is the figure whose name is globally synonymous with the Nazis’ extermination of six million Jews.
Crowe’s creation of Göring is a tour de force. He slips seamlessly into the pacing, cadence, and constrained outrage at indignities his character countenances from commissioned war merchants trading in moral duplicity. The accusers, he reminds Kelley, are the very same factotums who dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of such activity, former US Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis Lemay said, “Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time… I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.”
The creative team, led by writer/director James Vanderbilt, gives us a film that offers a front-row seat from which to consider this dilemma. Both sides party to it leave the gallows with a new precedent set. Future wars go forward bearing attributions that bury identification of individual principals, or they go forward undeclared. By the decade of the aughts, hoped-for victories are neither within reach, nor grasp.
Only the defeat of imperialism by those who have the greatest stake in seeing it go down—working people of all nations acting in unison to challenge the competition for hegemony that defines this “ism,” can set the framework for stopping the proliferation of antisemitic acts and attitudes.
“OK,” you say. “But who are the forces prone to carrying out antisemitic acts today? Where are the dimly-lit street corners where lumpen thugs congregate, alert to the dog whistle emitted by a pauperized, squeezed, and resentful middle class, eager to blame Jews for everything that has gone awry?”
If you have been berated for not being “woke” (or woke enough), you have your answer. The embryonic fascists are the woke leftists who, in broad daylight, block Jewish students from walking to class on the well-lit Berkeley campus, or those pushing BDS-organized boycotts of Jews or Israelis invited to speak on any subject at Columbia University, or the tech-savvy bro who shoots to kill a Jewish couple leaving a program at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., or the alienated incel who attacks a synagogue. Among the woke today, in the tradition of the Stalinist counterrevolutionary thermidor that has outlived Stalin, it is acceptable to level any charge at all against a Jew, so long as you substitute “Zionist” for Jew. Catching up on the history of the Jews imparts a secular understanding of Zionism: Rather than God’s chosen people, Jews were, in every generation for thousands of years, restricted to trade categories like money-lending, “chosen” by royalty and bankers to loan the necessary funds to cover debts the monarchies incurred through financial misadventures. If the books didn’t balance, or the crop failed, or the war was lost, and the borrower monarch owed the Jew money, the debt and every one of its consequences, was blamed on the Jew, never the king, nor the aristocrat, nor the non-Jewish swindler.
Not only were Jews targeted then; they continue to be targeted now. There are plenty of targetable “pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders,” as it was put so plainly by the Clemenza character. Masked and hoodied drivers mow down passersby at random intersections. Jihadist US Air Force officers, even an army psychiatrist, go rogue on a military base and kill. Jihadists deceitfully christen themselves “socialists” and win congressional and mayoral elections, voted in by educated, middle-class, virtue signalers, who can’t distinguish between the continuators of the fascist Mufti of Jerusalem’s national(ist) socialism and the genuine article.
The Nuremberg trials marked a nodal moment in the march toward World War III that we are seeing take shape today. There is serious discussion afoot of the probability that nuclear weapons will be employed. Such are the stakes in the conflicts currently under way. If there were such an instrument as a cosmic ledger, recording the assets and liabilities of war, destroyed life and capital would be entered oxymoronically into its assets column. It would represent the rescue of the warmakers’ prerogatives, privileges, and profit rates, artificially enhanced by a ballast of US, French, and British military bases. From these, in the 1950s, the future warmakers launched their competing bids for political hegemony over tin mines and cheap labor in such faraway postings as Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Their trade wars led to new military adventures aimed at at crushing revolutions of working people and peasants planning to take power in their own name and out of the hands of the warmaking exploiters, who today continue to cultivate the useful beard of antisemitism to disguse their sacrosanct projects and set us against one another instead of solidarizing to challenge their right to rule. They “lost” Vietnam, and there were no trials or psychiatrists to gauge the level or nature of the brutality they inflicted there, let alone execute them for it.
On New Year’s Day, 1958, Dr. Douglas Kelley committed suicide, using the same type of cyanide capsule that his patient Hermann Göring swallowed in his prison cell mere moments before the Nuremberg guards were preparing to march him to the gallows.
