In the first scene of Nuremberg, it is May 7, 1945, the last day of World War II in Europe, and refugees are trudging down a country road. A GI on patrol stops to piss on a swastika on the wing of a fallen German plane, and we hear the sound of piss against metal: it’s not a subtle message. Then a big Mercedes flying Nazi flags comes barreling down the road. As the GIs raise their guns, a pudgy hand in the backseat tears a strip of white cloth from his companion’s petticoat for the chauffeur to hang out the window. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, supreme commander of the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s second in command, and the highest-ranking surviving Nazi leader, steps out of the car, stands at attention to announce his surrender, and orders the soldiers to carry his bags.
Göring, played by Russell Crowe, is the troubling centerpiece of James Vanderbilt’s ambitious film devoted to the trial of the major Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg in 1945–1946. Billed as an “epic World War II thriller,” it is based on Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (2013), an investigation of the life of Douglas Kelley, the prison psychiatrist who entered into an intense pas de deux with Göring. Kelley, played by Rami Malek, is assigned to evaluate whether Göring and the other defendants are fit to stand trial, which he sees as the chance to write a book about the Nazi mind. But his conclusion that the Nazis were no different from anyone else proves to be his undoing.
Nuremberg is not really an epic or a thriller or a true crime story but rather a failed buddy movie. Kelley makes a play for Göring’s trust by befriending his wife and daughter and carrying letters to them, against all regulations. After he watches the documentary about the concentration camps played in the courtroom, their relationship descends into violent confrontation. There’s no way to describe what happens next except as love disappointed.
It’s always painful to fall in love with a narcissist, especially an intelligent one. Göring’s last thought as he’s about to take the cyanide capsule that allows him to escape the noose is of a magic trick Kelley taught him. “Abracadabra,” he says. And he’s gone. As for Kelley, he has become convinced that under the right circumstances, even the US could produce Nazis. This is apparently so intolerable to the American public of the 1950s that he is chased out of a radio station after airing his views, whiskey bottle in hand. “Trashing our country is probably not the best way to sell your book,” the program’s producer tells him. It’s unfortunate that so powerful a sentiment—that murderous Nazi ideology and hate can reappear where you least expect it, without swastikas or uniforms—is rendered ridiculous by Kelley’s drunken raving.
In his memoir Witness to Nuremberg: The Many Lives of the Man Who Translated at the Nazi War Trials (2002), Richard Sonnenfeldt, who served as Göring’s interpreter in prison, achieves the kind of comic tragedy that the film aspires to. He describes Göring as a “jolly and venal fat man with the instincts of a barracuda, the heft of an elephant, and the greed and cunning of a jackal.” But how to convey that character on screen? In Nuremberg, Göring is closer to a sad clown than to a monster. In his encounters with Kelley, what we see are Crowe’s appealing liquid eyes and his charm. Posing hand on hip for the photographers with their large flash cameras in the courtroom at Nuremberg (which in fact was set up with bright lights to avoid the disruptive sounds of magnesium flashes) or lying on his side on his prison cot to whisper into Kelley’s ear, he inspires more amusement than horror. As for Kelley, Malek’s intense eyes and nervous energy escalate the anxiety in every scene.
A far more sympathetic character among the Americans is the interpreter Howie Triest, played by the British actor Leo Woodall, who speaks in a vulnerable voice that cracks just a little and whose heavy-lidded eyes give him a look of perpetual mourning. Triest, blond, blue-eyed, and wholesome, translated for, among others, the zealously antisemitic editor of the newspaper Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher, who considered him “a true Aryan.”
This backstory is responsible for the most poignant scene in the movie: a conversation at the Nuremberg train station in which Triest reveals to Kelley that he’s not just an American kid with German ancestors who learned the language in high school. He was born Jewish in Germany, fled to the US, and enlisted in the army as soon as it would take him: “I left this country scared and alone in the middle of the night; I came back with a goddamn army.” He has recently discovered that his parents were murdered at Auschwitz. He fantasizes about revealing that he’s a Jew to Streicher just before he is hanged. Instead, in a scene of confounding tenderness, he helps the terrified man get dressed in his cell for the walk to the gallows. Triest’s face as he watches Streicher die expresses no joy, no possible sense of reprisal, only sorrow. His eyes brim with angry tears.
Otherwise, national clichés are everywhere: Americans speaking one-liners as they hop in and out of jeeps, the Scots prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe spiking his tea with scotch. Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), who sounds a lot like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (“Are they gonna shoot him?”), comes off as determined but ultimately hapless. Nuremberg doesn’t give us the lines from his opening speech at the trial that might have provided a stronger moral compass:
That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.
Nuremberg has pedagogical ambitions (“I’m going to make him tell the world what he did,” Jackson intones), and it stages an argument about the legal foundations of the trial. Over cocktails in Jackson’s Washington, D.C., apartment, Elsie Douglas, his secretary and companion, tells him it can’t be done. There’s no legal precedent for a trial. One country can’t interfere with the internal policy of another. It’s not clear whom you’d put on trial—the whole country? The enlisted men?
Jackson responds as if he’s just figured it out: we’ll try them for “conspiracy to wage aggressive war.” Elsie counters: “And you want the United States to argue that as the prosecution…. Against Germany, a country that never attacked us.” That’s easy, Jackson retorts, we’ll have an international trial with all our allies—even the Russians, “you can’t do it without the Russians”—and four international judges. Douglas is Jackson’s moral babysitter throughout the movie; he’s never without her, but she carries so much weight that she diminishes him.
A great deal of care was lavished on authentic-looking locations—the interiors of the Palace Hotel in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, where the prisoners were first held, the jail cells in Nuremberg, the tunnel the accused took from the prison to the courtroom, the courtroom itself. Some aspects of the story are accurate, but other episodes have been invented with only the shadow of a basis in reality. In one scene, Jackson visits Pope Pius XII to seek his support for the trial. As the Vatican’s cardinal secretary of state in 1933, Pius had signed a concordat with the Nazi regime to protect Catholics in Germany. Jackson threatens him with a poisoned legacy if he doesn’t come out strongly in favor of the trial: “People will remember, sir, what you did in 1933. What you do now. They’ll tell their children. Did the Catholic Church stand with the Nazis or against them?”
To be sure, the attitude of the Catholic Church toward Nazi Germany was ambiguous or worse. But suggesting that Jackson was blackmailing the pope is silly. In Jackson’s account of the visit in his diary, the pope himself brings up the concordat, which he considers to have been a failure. He’s concerned lest the trial indict the German people as a whole. Jackson reassures him. The pope then offers to help gather evidence for the tribunal and offers Jackson several sets of rosary beads for his friends.
There are so many lost opportunities in Nuremberg. The nameless British journalist whom Kelley meets on the train is memorable mostly for her perfect red lipstick and for betraying him after a drunken one-night stand: she puts his pillow talk on the front page (“PRISON DOC TELLS ALL”), which gets him dismissed. The journalists at the trial have recently inspired several books: in Germany, Uwe Neumahr’s The Writers’ Castle (2024); in France, Alfred de Montesquiou’s fast-paced historical novel Le Crépuscule des hommes (2025), as well as his TV documentary Inside History: The Nuremberg Trials. I can’t help but wonder why the makers of Nuremberg weren’t tempted to include one of the real women covering the trials, who had more interesting things to say than the British journalist’s banal “Strap yourself in: this city’s about to become the greatest show on earth.” Take, for instance, Martha Gellhorn in Collier’s: “Goering’s terrible mouth wore a smile that was not a smile, but only a habit his lips had taken.” No easy feat for an actor, that smile.
Fact-checking this movie is arduous. “They say you’re writing all the briefs yourself, refusing help from other lawyers,” Maxwell-Fyfe says to Jackson over more scotch-spiked tea. Jackson doesn’t deny it: “Because it has to be done right.” Jackson wrote his masterful opening speech himself, but he didn’t write his briefs alone. The Americans were responsible for Count One, the common plan or conspiracy to commit aggressive war, and several lawyers were assigned to compose the briefs and assemble document books for each country the Nazis invaded. Associate Trial Counsel Sidney Alderman, not Jackson, presented this part of the case and acknowledged in his courtroom presentation the work of a staff of six lawyers. I have a box of the briefs my father, Sidney Kaplan, one of the prosecutors, supervised. He wrote to Jackson on September 29, 1945, about the work plan: documents needed to be organized and authenticated; leads pursued; the probative value of evidence considered; gaps determined and explored; proof arranged in suitable form; background data prepared for Alderman’s presentation; each new piece of incoming evidence examined; individual, group, and organizational responsibility evaluated. The idea that Jackson could have worked alone is preposterous. But it’s in keeping with the movie’s investment in individual gumption, charm, and narcissism as the motors of history.
The film about the concentration camps shown in the courtroom is another missed opportunity. We’re assaulted with the very worst scenes of skeletal prisoners and piles of bodies being bulldozed—images that had the shock of the new in 1945 but are now tragically familiar. The movie doesn’t show how the specially designed space at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice really looked on November 29: overhead lights were shone on the defendants so the entire courtroom could see them taking in the reality of their crimes. Madeleine Jacob, who covered the trial for the French newspaper Franc-Tireur, wrote:
I’ll never forget their faces broken by the horror when they found themselves suddenly face to face with the incriminating evidence: a documentary film on the concentration camps, presented in court this afternoon.
Nuremberg raises a host of questions about what it means to produce a film based on true events. Does it matter that Jackson didn’t really threaten the pope or that he actually had a large staff of lawyers who spent months gathering evidence and writing briefs? Does it matter that the movie doesn’t represent the Russian and French prosecutors and judges—only the “special relationship” between the British and American prosecutors? What difference does it make if the vocabulary is sometimes a parody of 1940s talk (“our boys,” etc.) and sometimes completely anachronistic, especially when it comes to therapy jargon that didn’t exist in 1945 (“It’s just a lot to process”; “You’re mental health professionals, for Christ’s sake!”) and the very millennial idiom “trash our country.” It’s as if Nuremberg were attempting to reproduce the jaunty talk of World War II movies and to aim at the same time for contemporary “relatability.”
As facts are telescoped and reinvented, as quick repartee and transitions from one scene to the next rely on clever juxtapositions, the trial emerges as a contest of personalities. The invented voice-over of a black-and-white newsreel consisting of footage strung together sounds at times like the commentary in a football game:
Dateline Nuremberg: As dark rumors continue to swirl about the true purposes of the Nazi work camps, the legal teams are assembling for what promises to be the trial of the century…. Hermann Göring and his Hitler-loving cronies are scheduled to face off with our boys in one week. Will justice prevail, or will the fascists go free? This reporter desperately hopes that the Allies run into no problems.
Nazi work camps? Rumors? By November 1945, when the trial opened, there was no more mystery. Auschwitz had been liberated ten months earlier on January 27; the US Army had liberated Dachau on April 29, and the trial of the camp commander had begun there five days before the Nuremberg trial opened. Tom Eagles, the editor of Nuremberg, responded to a question about the invented voice-over: “We need[ed] to have the suggestion that people hadn’t seen the footage from the camps yet, that people didn’t know exactly what was going on in the camps.” American newsreel voice-overs during World War II were famously jaunty and insensitive. But to use that tone to bolster suspense about the death camps belittles the most serious moral issue for anyone watching this movie: who knew what when and what could have been done.
Nuremberg makes much of Jackson’s weak questioning of Göring. It’s a moment of high drama for Crowe. Here the movie takes its cue from Janet Flanner, who in covering the trial for The New Yorker in 1946 delighted in Göring’s swagger and Jackson’s hesitations:
As the trial moved out of its preparatory period of massive, static documentation and entered its period of skirmishing and battle in the open, where the brains and personalities of the opponents were what counted, Jackson began to show inadequacies as the leading Allied man.
Jackson concludes with the introduction of a single document, 710-PS, a memo Göring sent to Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler in July 1941 urging them to escalate the emigration of the Reich’s Jews in order to achieve a final solution of the Jewish question. In the film, Jackson repeats the words “final solution,” while in the audience, Douglas whispers, “He’s got him.” The movie shows Göring’s strategy of constantly interrupting Jackson over translation issues that the prosecutor is forced to acknowledge but that make no difference: it’s “total solution,” Göring says, not “final solution.” He argues that he wanted Heydrich to accelerate the emigration of Germany’s Jews. Jackson looks skeptical, and the camera zeroes in on the word “emigration” in the memo. Since the movie does not show that Göring’s guilt had already been established by countless documents entered into evidence in the previous months of the trial, we might conclude that Jackson has just lost his case.
Instead of finding a way to make those documents speak, Nuremberg puts Kelley at the center of this drama, despite the fact that he had left Nuremberg months before Göring’s testimony. On the eve of the testimony the psychiatrist barges into Jackson and Maxwell-Fyfe’s offices to hand over a huge notebook of his sessions with Göring—information that will help Jackson “beat him.”
After Jackson’s low moment, Maxwell-Fyfe’s questioning of Göring incorporates various parts of the trial transcript, as the British prosecutor leads him through a bruising recitation of the statistics of extermination, year by year:
Maxwell-Fyfe: In 1945, 250,000, an estimated six million Jews in total, as well as Soviet and Polish citizens, Romani people, artists, scientists, writers, journalists, photographers, filmmakers—people killed, not in combat, not in enemy fire, but exterminated by the state of Germany. The state which you were the Reichsmarschall of, the preeminent political post of your country. You contend that you had no knowledge. At least give me this. Knowing what we know now, knowing what happened to six million Jews, I have to ask, would you still follow the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler?
Göring: Ja. I would.
Judge Lawrence: Order! Order!
Göring: Heil Hitler.
This gives the false impression that Göring’s refusal to renounce Hitler finally established his guilt. But Maxwell-Fyfe’s questioning of Göring actually ended not with the movie’s shocking “Heil Hitler” but with this:
Maxwell-Fyfe: You did not know to what degree, but you knew there was a policy that aimed at the extermination of the Jews?
Göring: No, a policy of emigration, not liquidation of the Jews. I knew only that there had been isolated cases of such perpetrations.
Maxwell-Fyfe: Thank you.
After court is adjourned, there’s a confusing scene of congratulations in which Douglas hugs Jackson, who says sheepishly, “I survived,” and tells Kelley, “You were right, I couldn’t beat him, not without help.” But Maxwell-Fyfe’s correspondence with his wife, archived at Cambridge, shows that he was less eager to help than annoyed with Jackson and concerned that the American would make the trial look bad: “I think that my cross examination of Goering went off all right. Everyone here was very pleased. Jackson had not only made no impression but actually built the fat boy up further.”
Watching the film I couldn’t help longing for the sincerity of Stanley Kramer and Abby Mann’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), which revolves around a small-town judge from Maine (played by Spencer Tracy) who’s been wrangled into serving at the trial of Nazi judges in 1947. The judge, Dan Haywood, is billeted in the grand apartment of a prominent general executed after the first trial. He enters into a melancholy romance with the general’s widow, Madame Bertholt, played by Marlene Dietrich and modeled on the widow of the Nuremberg defendant Alfred Jodl, who was known for her efforts on behalf of her husband’s rehabilitation. Heartbreaking testimony by a woman named Irene Hoffmann (Judy Garland) is based on the trial of a Jewish businessman executed for miscegenation, though in fact their relationship was never sexual. As for Haywood and Bertoldt, there was no such judge, there was no such romance, and as Telford Taylor, one of the leading prosecutors at Nuremberg, said in a 1982 interview, no serious American judge would have allowed himself to be lobbied by a widow whose husband had been executed in a previous trial.
So why am I moved by the high drama of Irene Hoffmann’s testimony and by the impossible romance of the judge and the widow, when I’m outraged by the sleights of hand in Nuremberg? Maybe it comes down to this: Judgment at Nuremberg dignifies even its flawed characters, while Nuremberg belittles its heroes and shines a disturbingly attractive light on its principal villain. Göring was known for personal charm and humor, to be sure, but also for the brutality and ruthlessness that are missing in Crowe’s charismatic Nazi and that we should not lose sight of today.
English (US) · 