Movies

Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, directed by James Vanderbilt
Trailer: Sony Pictures Classics

Nuremberg
Directed by James Vanderbilt
Rated PG-13
Assessed 7 November 2025
#Nuremberg

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana

It’s not that Nuremberg is a great movie. It has its faults. However, it is a really important movie.

Facing Evil

A horrifying thought was reinforced while watching Nuremberg: too many people are making the wrong parallels of this nightmarish period in history with current events. People seem to be so blinded by political affiliations and drowning in echo chambers they might be losing sight of history, stretching the meaning of certain words to the point their meaning is lost and missing egregious threats staring right back at them that could very well lead to all this happening all over again.

In today’s society there seems to be a willful shrugging off of inevitable catastrophic consequences.

Nuremberg is not a courtroom drama. Running close to 2 ½ hours, it’s only the final 25 minutes that focus on proceedings of the Nuremberg trials, which were an unprecedented presentation to the world of the criminal conduct of the Nazi party during World War II.

Instead, Nuremberg is more of a psychological drama. It zooms in on a little-known story that is so timely.

The movie begins after the war has ended and with the surprisingly peaceful, non-confrontational surrender of Hermann Göring, a central mastermind behind the horrors of the concentration camps that killed millions upon millions. A mastermind behind the genocide that only the world’s most evil people still deny ever happened. All for a cause that ultimately led to the deaths of as many as 85 million people, both military and civilian.

With Göring in custody, the focus turns to his mindset and his capacity to stand trial.

Enter Douglas Kelley, a U.S. military psychologist assigned the intimidating task of interviewing and getting to know a face of pure evil.

What happened with Göring, the highest-ranking military officer in German history, is well known. It’s well documented.

What happened with Kelley, though, is a wholly different story.

Fat Stuff

There are aspects of Nuremberg – the movie – that are undeniably great and it’s certainly an impressive accomplishment from sophomore director James Vanderbilt, whose other feature is Truth, starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford in a 2015 telling of the downfall of Dan Rather and CBS News producer Mary Mapes.

Topping the list of the stellar cast is Russell Crowe as Göring. Crowe’s Oscar-winning svelte days as Maximus Decimus Meritius in Gladiator are in the rearview mirror. Here, paunchy and fat-faced – and speaking fluent German through his initial scenes – Crowe is on a run for another Oscar. His foil, so to speak, is Kelley, which is where Rami Malek comes in. Malik, himself an Oscar winner for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, plays something of a conflicted opportunist.

For Douglas, his first meeting with Göring is a revelation, a turning point and the opening of a door to a major opportunity. Göring is egotistical, seemingly beyond all reason. He boasts of his physique and how it pleases his wife (a lovely, petite woman Kelley eventually meets). And yet Göring’s a fat man downing 40 codeine tablets every day.

And, by the way, Göring reveals he was named after a Jewish doctor, Ritter Hermann von Epenstein, who was like a father to Hermann and his brother, Albert.

Strikingly, Göring quickly picks up on Kelley’s own ego and ambitions. "I am the book. You are merely the footnote," Göring teases Kelley.

Without a doubt the two men are completely different in almost every single way imaginable. But there is that crossed wire of ambition.

After meeting Göring, Kelley’s ambitions immediately shift from the task at hand – not only interviewing Göring but all 22 Nazi leaders imprisoned in Nuremberg – as he looks to document his study of evil in a book he hopes will lead him to fortune and glory. But, more nobly, also help prevent such a disaster from ever happening again.

Nuremberg Laws

Amid the horror, there is a small bit of poetic justice. The war started with Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws and it ended in a court room in Nuremberg.

The Nuremberg Laws were a blatant act of discrimination against Jews and, ultimately, other minorities in Hitler’s Germany. In addition to being denied their citizenship, Jews were put at an economic disadvantage and also lost their civil rights. Of course, they couldn’t marry a German, an Aryan.

With those laws, the road was paved and the gates were opened to the Holocaust.

This unprecedented level of antisemitism was a simple yet catastrophic distraction that gave Germans – Nazis (National Socialists) – an offramp for all the world’s woes. They had someone else to blame. They had their scapegoat.

It’s fascinating to hear this summation once again: within 20 years Germany went from a destroyed nation at the end of World War I to almost taking over the entire world.

Even the Catholic Church essentially kowtowed to Adolf Hitler to protect its masses when the man who would become Pope Pius XII helped negotiate the Reichskonkordat in 1933. There’s a nice movie moment in which a prosecutor from the U.S., Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon), effectively blackmails the pope over this scandalous move.

But the Jews had no such leverage.

There’s also a scary reminder Hitler was a horrible soldier and a failed painter. And yet he made people believe in Germany, he made them feel good about being German.

Amid all this is when caution and education are required when making parallels to that Nazi nightmare and current events.

Some make parallels between Hitler and Trump.

Yet those same people seem to turn a blind eye on the blatant antisemitism that’s burning with flames rising higher and higher, particularly in spaces of higher education – places where people should know better.

And we’re not even at the kicker. The unexpected punch in the gut at the end of Nuremberg.

Nuremberg Principles

Nuremberg, which is based on the book The Nazi and the Psychologist by Jack El-Hai, isn’t exclusively about the relationship between Kelley and Göring.

Also on view are Robert Ley, who, at least according to this movie’s account, was a first-order Hitler sycophant who wrote a book in such high praise of Hitler that der Führer actually had all the copies burned because he was embarrassed by it. This might be an embellishment; It’s hard to believe this would be the case, but anything’s possible with these psychos.

There’s also Karl Dönitz, who succeeded Hitler after his suicide in Berlin. Dönitz would go on to live until 1980.

Julius Streicher, dubbed the High Priest of Anti-Semitism, was so radical he was found to be unfit for leadership and removed from his Nazi posts. That marks an impressive level of hatred. He gets his comeuppance in Nuremberg, though.

Rudolf Hess proved a relative weakling as he claimed his amnesia would come and go.

Each of these despicable men – and 17 others, 22 in all – were tried on four counts: crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity and conspiracy to commit any one of those three crimes.

Many – including Winston Churchill – wanted them summarily executed with no trial. Others – including Dwight Eisenhower – wanted justice by a formal trial so their crimes could be exposed to the world.

As the trial approaches, it’s determined opening statements from the defendants would not be allowed. This, at least through this movie’s lens, is a result of Kelley picking up on Göring’s desire to use the trial as a platform to once again spread Nazi propaganda.

Are You Watching Closely?

As the relationship between Kelley and Göring evolves, Kelley becomes a clandestine messenger between the Nazi leader and his wife. It brings some humanity to the horror. Göring is a monster, but he’s also a beloved husband who has an adoring daughter. It’s mind-scrambling.

Kelley’s also an amateur magician, which becomes a device for some friendly, off-topic chit-chat. As Kelley explains his disappearing coin trick, he explains the effect is successful when the magician appears to believe in his own trick. If he believes, the audience will believe it, too.

To that, Göring suggests to Kelley he has a magic trick of his own. He’s going to escape from Nuremberg.

In another fall theatrical release, Now You See Me, Now You Don’t, the focus is on high-tech magic and – coincidentally enough – there’s an historical reference to Jasper Maskelyne, a British magician who helped defeat the Nazis with the illusions of inflatable towns and tanks. During the course of that movie – targeting a completely different demographic from Nuremberg – it’s posited magic tricks rely on people making basic assumptions about the stability of the environment they see.

It's very much in line with Kelley’s comment if you appear to believe, they’ll believe it.

And, of course, a staple of magic tricks is the deck of cards.

When Kelley flashes a King card, is it a virtue signal to the "No Kings" movement?

Don’t bet on it.

A Quiet Hero

Even with all the drama around the trial – which includes searing archival footage from the concentration camps as survivors are rescued and the remains of others are collected by bulldozer – even with the fantastic cast bringing these heroes and villains to the screen, there’s still more.

There’s a really powerful movie moment. It’s a quieter moment. One of the first people Douglas Kelley meets during his Nuremberg assignment is Howie Triest (Leo Woodall), a translator who’s intended to help Kelley navigate conversations with Göring until it’s revealed Göring can speak fluent English.

At a train station, Triest tells his story to Kelley. He escaped the Nazis and lived in Amsterdam before fleeing by night for the United States. A Jew. All alone. His parents were sent to Auschwitz. He was separated from his sister.

When he came back to European soil, it was with the U.S. army. And he landed on the shores of Normandy.

He lived to 93.

That is a story worthy of its own movie.

Closing Arguments

Why and how did it all happen?

People didn’t stand up until it was too late. They let it happen. Now, there’s all sorts of confusion and people are standing up for various things, oftentimes misguided, often violently. The media doesn’t help. There should always be a search for truth and fact, not the incessant reinforcement of party lines. But that’s not happening anymore. Opinion rules and volume now equates to authority.

In the end, Douglas got his book published. Entitled 22 Cells in Nuremberg, it was a commercial failure. While promoting the book, Kelley does the interview circuit and he gets kicked off a radio show after making a dire warning about how it could happen again and it could happen in America. That was deemed an offensive notion.

The noble side of him wanted to dissect the evil so it could be identified and blocked. In 1958, with no one heeding his warnings, Kelley committed suicide. He used cyanide. Just like Göring did to effectuate his escape "trick."

Education and media and pop culture are incessantly advocating for – often blindly – the same things and it’s yielding a populace that’s the equivalent of frogs introduced to lukewarm water that’s heating to a boil. It’s taken years, even decades, but an insidious mindset is sweeping a large swath of the world.

The creation of a lopsided media across platforms – including TV news, online press, late night talk shows and daytime talk shows – is limiting diversity of thought, oftentimes in contravention to public regulations, particularly regarding limited resources such as the airwaves. One giant echo chamber is being created as people who claim to be journalists take on the role of advocates. Advocacy should be relegated to the editorial section of whatever media is at hand. Journalists are not advocates. They are supposed to be unbiased. They are supposed to learn. They are supposed to share their findings with eyes wide open.

There should always be a healthy, but respectful tension between press and president, no matter the party in office.

That’s how freedom is safeguarded. Remove the blinders and look both to the left and to the right.

That’s how another Holocaust will be prevented.

Are you watching closely?

Indeed.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.

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