Judgment at Nuremberg, Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film about the Nuremberg trials, is rightly deemed an American film classic, featuring top-notch actors. James Vanderbilt’s 2025 Nuremberg, on the other hand—well, let’s be charitable and say it’s minor leagues.
This year marks the eightieth anniversary of the first Nuremberg trials of Germans accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity during World War II. They were part of the postwar denazification of the country, a process some deemed flawed and selective but, all things considered, was both necessary and far more effective than the “truth and reconciliation” and “thick lines” (gruba kreska) processes adopted by other countries that emerged from tyrannies.
Indeed, there’s a link between those processes and Nuremberg: the psychologization of crime and evil. Judgment at Nuremberg focuses mostly on the legal and moral questions: How could such atrocities have occurred in the heart of Europe, in a country that prided itself on being at the forefront of European civilization? Nuremberg, on the other hand, focuses on the in-prison encounters between Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), Hitler’s second-in-command, and Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), a U.S. Army psychiatrist. Kelley was charged with ensuring Göring didn’t cheat the hangman by suicide and with using his insights about the Reichsmarschall to facilitate his prosecution. Both films grapple with the problem of evil, but Nuremberg reflects the flaws of modern tastes, focusing more on what’s in somebody’s head rather than what they did.
That “psychiatrization” of crime also jibes with the modern, “non-judgmental” mind that thinks it can do “justice” while avoiding “judgment.” A line in Nuremberg illustrates that deception. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the American prosecutor at the trials, comments that the trials must delegitimize Nazism: There must be no statues to these criminals in a future Germany. Compare that to where there was no “judgment”: Stalin statues pervade Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Indeed, Nuremberg’s historical imbalance is bothersome. Yes, there was a Kelley who was chief psychiatrist in Nuremberg, charged with ensuring the defendants were competent to stand trial. It’s an interesting angle but, arguably, tertiary—not even secondary—to the historical truth of the Nuremberg trials whose raison-d’être, fourscore years afterward, has arguably faded from general American consciousness. But while Nuremberg showcases this angle—not, in my view, because it was so important, but because it melds with modern intellectual prejudices—its general history recycles historical canards.
At the beginning of the film’s trial, people are still talking about the Nazi “labor” camps as if their mission of extermination was still in doubt. The trials began six months after V-E Day. American troops had liberated Dachau, Mauthausen, and Buchenwald by April/May 1945. Polish Underground courier Jan Karski gave his eyewitness accounts to FDR and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter about what was going on in concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943. His book, Story of a Secret State, which included Holocaust details, was published in the United States in 1944. The Black Book of Poland, the Polish Government-in-Exile’s catalog of German atrocities in Poland, was published in 1942. John Heywood’s adage aptly describes all the “shocked” Westerners who had their doubts about Nazi atrocities dashed: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” In Luke 18, a blind man asks Jesus, “please let me see.” For many moderns, that is an anti-prayer.
Another example of a historical canard: Jackson is depicted visiting Pope Pius XII to elicit papal support for the Nuremberg trials after Truman and Congress appear to be wavering. If you can’t get politicians to agree to pursue justice, buttonhole a moral leader to give you legitimacy. The film shows Pius turning Jackson down, leading to a tense exchange. Jackson asks the pope if he’s with the Nazis. The Vatican, he charges, was first to give Hitler legitimacy by signing a concordat with him. It’s all very reminiscent of Rolf Hochhuth’s controversial 1963 play The Deputy, an indictment of Pius.
My biggest issue with the film, however, is the psychiatrist playing ethicist. As portrayed, Kelley is a bit naive: He seems ambivalent for a prolonged period about the Second Family’s criminal guilt. Yes, the film shows Göring’s little daughter nicely playing the piano. But Nazi guards also went home on-base at Auschwitz and read stories to their kids after a hard day’s work in the gas chambers.
Kelley does eventually wake up, but I question the judgments of a man who could sleep so long. And while I agree with him that the wrongs Göring perpetrated were not uniquely Nazi, the problem is not first and foremost psychiatric or psychological.
The real Kelley is alleged to have said that “they were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are.” Yes, their environment gave them opportunities to choose horrendous evil, which they did. But not every man even in the most depraved environments becomes utterly depraved: The concentration camps also produced saints. So, let’s recognize that the primary analytical category here is not psychiatry or psychology but ethics and morality. Hermann Göring wasn’t responsible for the structures that killed millions of people because his mommy didn’t love him enough. He was responsible because he made that choice.
Ultimately, the Nazi problem—like all human problems—is not so much in the head as the soul. There remains a “black legend” that anti-Semitic Nazi Germany was a state run by extremist Christian nationalists. One wonders whether Nuremberg is intended to be a “warning” against America’s alleged incipient crypto-Christian “fascism.” But the truth is that Nazi Germany was a pagan state, run by men who much earlier abandoned their Christianity in favor of their Nietzschean power ideologies. The problem with the mythology is that real Christianity is presented as the curse rather than the cure, while the abandonment of belief in God—which, as Dostoevsky reminds us, makes “everything possible”—gets off scot-free with the diabolical evil it enables.
