Why "Nuremberg" is a Movie You Should Watch
The 2025 film is critical in its warnings and lessons, despite the age of the subject matter
This is not a movie review; I’m not a film buff by any stretch. But when Nuremberg dropped at Netflix, the history nerd in me just had to watch it.
It’s a long film, running about two and one-half hours. Russell Crowe’s outstanding portrayal of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring would be worth your cost in rental anyway (it’s free with a Netflix subscription, for rent at Apple TV and Amazon Prime, among others).
As our readers will know, Nuremberg centers around the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials in which top Nazi brass were tried for their crimes during World War II.
We know the outcome. Nearly all of the 22 defendants were executed. Yet there are admonitions in this movie which appear to have been forgotten.
The Nuremberg Trials Were Unprecedented
Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was assigned to represent the United States in the trial. And, as depicted in the above trailer, Justice Jackson’s secretary warned him that such judicial proceedings by an international court had never, ever been held before. It was a judicial risk that would be taken before the entire free world.
The Nazi defendants faced charges of crimes of war, crimes against peace, and of course, crimes against humanity. The trial lasted 10 months and for 216 sessions, with Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence of Britain presiding.
In the film, Robert Jackson appears to be idealistic and passionate about what the Nuremberg trials could render:
“We are able to do away with domestic tyranny only when we make all men answerable to the law, so that it can never happen again.”
Never happen again. More about that later.
Enter the Psychiatrist
Justice Robert Jackson may have been the lead American prosecutor, but Nuremberg focuses mainly on Army Lt. Col. Douglas M. Kelley, the psychiatrist assigned to the Nuremberg defendants to find out just what made them tick. Why did they condone such atrocities? What possible psychological abnormalities did these men possess? As actor Rami Malek, who portrayed Kelley, said in the movie, his mission was to “dissect evil,” particularly that of the Third Reich’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring. By determining if the defendants were capable of understanding right from wrong, or were in control of their behavior, Kelley would advise whether or not they were fit to stand trial.
His conclusions: other than Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy, all the defendants were psychologically sane. (Kelley later wrote “If one considers the street as sanity and the sidewalk as insanity, then Hess spent the greater part of his time on the curb.”)
In fact, they were all ordinary men. As Kelley said in a 1946 lecture, the men were simply opportunists “who would willingly climb over the corpses of half of the … public if they could gain control of the other half.”
Yet the movie depicts how Göring was perhaps beyond ordinary. He possessed high intelligence, and was an unrepentant, arrogant manipulator who was able to establish a relationship with Douglas Kelley and even cajoled Kelley into contacting Göring’s wife and daughter and delivering the Reichsmarschall’s letters to them. Perhaps even the brilliant psychiatrist was fooled by his own patient (or was working to establish a trust with him). Perhaps even Douglas Kelley fell under the sway of evil.
How Quickly We Forget
“So it can never happen again,” said actor Michael Shannon, the actor who played Justice Robert Jackson. But the sad truth is that we humans keep forgetting the bitter lessons of history over and over and over.
Dr. Douglas Kelley learned that fact when his 1947 memoir of the trials, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, proved to be unpopular. Americans resented Kelley’s warnings that such men could exist in the United States. On the other hand, another memoir entitled Nuremberg Diary, written by Kelley’s colleague at the prison, psychologist Gustave Gilbert, was much better received. In Diary, Gilbert described the defendants as psychopaths who emerged from a depraved German culture, and that portrayal appeared to have been more to the public’s liking. They would rather ignore caveats that people like them could commit horrific atrocities. After all, it can’t happen here, right?
Today, 80 years later, voices on both the far right and left in America seem to be reliving the prewar era of the late 1930s — particularly its antisemitism — that led to the horrors of World War II.
Witness the lunatic antics of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Ye (formerly Kanye West), Nick Fuentes, Ilhan Omar, and others.
It’s one thing to disagree with Israel’s policies, but it’s quite another to blame the Jews for every ill in the world.
An “America First” and Antisemitism Redux
Just as today, the 1930s saw a rise in isolationism corresponding with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Americans had participated in World War I—though not nearly to the extent that the British had—and wanted to stay out of Europe’s problems. An ocean would protect them, the proponents of the “America First Committee” surmised.
One of the leaders of that movement was aviator and all-American hero Charles Lindbergh, who announced the formation of the AFC in New York City in April, 1941.
But Lindbergh wasn’t just a political isolationist. He was also a pro-Nazi anti-Semite who traveled to Germany in 1936 to visit— yes—Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who showed Lindbergh his collection of swords and presented him with a medal. From one aviator to another, apparently.
Lindbergh’s antisemitism later appeared in a 1941 speech he gave in Des Moines, Iowa, just months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. There he accused Jews of trying to push the US into the war in Europe, among other things.
“No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences ….”
”Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”
Fast forward to 2026 and the current war with Iran. So what did I see a few days ago on my Facebook feed? This from a “conservative” who once served in my state’s legislature.
Yet why should I have been surprised? After all, Tucker Carlson, one of the most virulent and popular anti-Semites on the far right, recently sounded his latest conspiracy theory and blamed the Hasidic Jewish organization Chabad for initiating the war with Iran. Yes, the Jews made the president start the war.
“There are key players involved in this war… who believe that what we’re seeing on our television screen and on Twitter will usher in a series of events that will begin with the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, Al Aqsa Mosque, and then the rebuilding of the Third Temple.”
“This has been going on a long time in public through, in part, the efforts of a group called Chabad.”
But let’s not forget the extremists on the other side. College campuses, typically bastions of liberal and progressive thought, are now cesspools of Jew hatred, as in this recent event at San Jose State University in California.
Also recall the most recent attack on a Jewish synagogue where the attacker drove a truck into the Temple Israel near Detroit, Michigan, which contained an early childhood center. Thank God that all 140 children and staff escaped without harm.
The synagogue in Detroit was not the only one attacked last week. The UN noted that three synagogues across Canada were attacked in separate shootings recently, a powerful explosion in Belgium outside a historic synagogue in Liege last week caused significant damage, and an investigation in the Netherlands is probing a possible arson attack against a synagogue in Rotterdam.
Back to “Nuremberg”
Like Nicki, who wrote a very comprehensive article on the pros and the cons of the current war with Iran, I too experience both qualms and confidence about the conflict. I won’t get into them here, since we want this to be a politics-free zone.
But the war in Iran is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. We are entering some very ugly times here in the United States—the same nation that helped deliver Europe from the tentacles of fascism; the same nation that opened concentration camps and exposed the horrors of the Holocaust in an unprecedented legal event, so that the world would never forget.
And now?
Numerous Americans appear to have forgotten. Which is why a viewing of Nuremberg is invaluable to remind us of the evil that overtook Europe in the 1930s, and now appears to be rearing its head in our beloved country in 2026.