Nuremberg (The Movie)

 

As part of the late-940s early "baby boom" generation, I grew up in the shadow of World War II. My father and uncles had served in the war, and memories of the war (or, at least, of wartime) filled extended family conversations. And, of course, World war II was a popular focus for popular movies in that period - including Judgment at Nuremberg in 1961. Even before then, I had certainly heard about the trial - and the controversies about it - from m own family, even before reading about Senator Taft's criticism in JFK's Profiles in Courage.

Why World War II continues to fascinate subsequent generations so much is a subject worth considering in itself. For fascinate it does continue to do! So, here we are, 80 years after the end of the war with yet another, two and a half-hour, Nazi war crimes trial movie Nuremberg, directed by James Vanderbilt and starring Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring and Rami Malek as the army psychiatrist, Major Douglas Kelley, who is assigned to monitor the mental health of the Nazi prisoners, and who becomes personally engaged with Göring and even withhis family and most of all with the troubling issues the case raised. The film is based on the 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai. 

Nuremberg is long, but it is worth the time it takes. The principal characters - Göring, Kelley, Sgt Howie Triest (played by Le Woodall), and Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) - are all excellently portrayed, and at least the overall account seems largely rooted in historical events. (Even the account of Jackson's visit with the Pope has some factual basis. Jackson did travel from Nuremberg to Rome to attend Cardinal Spellman 's 1946 Consistory, although his explosive confrontation with Pope Pius XII, which reflects attitudes toward the Pope and the Church that became more prevalent only after Pius's death, seems hard to credit as historically factual.)

The film acknowledges the controverted legal questions that the trial raised, some of which are still debated today. Much of Nuremberg, however, focuses on the developing relationship between Kelley and Göring during their sessions together. Göring is determined to use his trial to support the Nazi ideals he still adheres to, while taking no personal responsibility for the Nazis' war crimes. Kelley, for his part, wants to write a book publishing his research on what goes on in the minds of Nazis. In real life, Kelley did write a book about the case, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, which was not well received in a world which wanted to believe that only Germans were susceptible to such criminality, and he eventually killed himself.

What Kelley discovers is that the Nazis aren’t all that unique or unusual from a psychiatric perspective, and that the crimes they committed cannot be ascribed to some uniquely German phenomenon. The film clearly want to take Kelley's side on this issue, somewhat unsubtly suggesting that the criminality prosecuted at Nuremberg reflects more universal evils, versions of which can easily recur, even in seemingly very different societies. The legal legacy of Nuremberg remains disputed and problematic, but the psychological insights Kelley took from his work in Nuremberg remain relevant and timely.