The psychodrama Nuremberg pits the Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe) against the American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) in a high stakes battle of wits. It’s the end of WW II, the full extent of the Holocaust is just being revealed and the Allies are ready to hold the world’s first war crimes trial.
With the suicides of Hitler and Himmler, Goering is undeniably the highest ranking and highest profile surviving Nazi leader. He and other top Nazis are in a military prison run by the US Army, where Dr. Kelley is assigned. The Army’s interest in the defendants’ mental heath was not primarily humanitarian – it was in preventing their suicides so they could be executed by hanging.
Kelley’s intellectual curiosity, though, is alive with the opportunity that any behavioral scientist would envy – probing the psyches of the men with the worst ever human behavior; these are the men who thought the unthinkable and acted to realize it. (And, more prosaically, he hopes to garner material for a profitable book.)
The lead American prosecutor is US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon), who has to make up the jurisdiction and rules, even the charges, for the trial as he goes along. Nuremberg reminds us that the trial was about more than criminal justice; perhaps even more importantly, the trial was a vehicle to show the world, especially the German people, the extent of the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity, a term coined by Jackson for the trial. Accordingly, the Allied prosecutors made and showed films documenting the extermination camps. These images were not yet widely viewed at the time, and Malek shows Kelley’s revulsion at seeing the atrocities for the first time.
Nuremberg also reminds us that trying Nazi leaders would come at some considerable risk – the possibility that some of the defendants could make themselves sympathetic or martyrs, or, worst of all, even get off scot-free.
Kelley immediately tags Goering as a narcissist, a diagnosis which Goering himself does not dispute. Goering is uncommonly crafty and sly, tempering his his characteristic arrogance with a jovial charm that even threatens to seduce Kelley. Indeed, climbing to the top of a pyramid of back-stabbers was no mean feat, and Goering’s skills at political infighting and social climbing are formidable. Similarly, he possesses a gift to read the room and accordingly flatter and insinuate. Goering even has the hubris to believe that he will be able to manipulate his way out of a conviction.
With some hubris of his own, Jackson is eager to win a match of wits with Goering, planning to break him on the stand. Kelley, who has seen Goering’s charm and intellect up close, thinks that Jackson is likely to lose a frontal assault and perceives that Goering’s vulnerability lies elsewhere.
The Allied officials, including Kelley initially, intuit that any person who committed such monstrous acts must be some unique kind of monster. In 1946, the concept of the banality of evil was still fifteen years away from being coined by Hannah Arendt at the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann. Kelley meets all of the Nuremberg defendants, who Nuremberg accurately depicts as the motley group they were – this one a hoodlum, that one a psychotic crank. Rudolf Hess is depicted as befuddled (or ACTING befuddled as he faked amnesia for the second time). Of course, the Nazis were bullies, and bullies are always less fearsome when they are held to account.
The people who committed the most horrific acts in human history are surprisingly, even disappointingly, ordinary. For every deranged megalomaniac who comes to power, there are plenty of opportunistic thugs who go along for the ride.
Similarly, Kelley finds that Goering is such a greedy, attention-seeking asshole, that he was happy to play along with exploiting racial hatred, even to the point of genocide, just to become richer, more famous and more powerful.
In an impressive performance, Russell Crowe captures Goering’s narcissistic entitlement, magnetic charm, manipulative sociopathy and seemingly unshakable self-confidence.
Kelley starts out with his own hubris, confident that he holds all the cards vis-a-vis Goering, who is not himself a trained psychiatrist and is, after all, locked in a prison cell. Malek is able to portray Kelley’s sense of himself as far more fragile than one would expect, with the potential to become a tragic figure.
John Slattery is very good as a straight-ahead Army prison commander, as is Colin Hanks as an unapologetically venal rival shrink.
In scenes intended to reveal Kelley’s own humanity and manipulations, the character of Goering’s wife Emmy (Lotte Verbeek) is written with too much sympathy for my taste. In real life, Emmy Goering was a real piece of work, who vied with Joseph Goebbel’s wife to outdo Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun as the most prominent figure in the Nazi Reich and who was an enthusiastic looter of Jewish-owned fine art.
The 2023 The Zone of Interest was a masterpiece on the banality of evil. On this subject, I also recommend Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary and, for the Indonesian version of banality of evil, the wonderful documentary Act of Killing. For sheer gall that supassed even Goering’s, there’s another documentary, Speer Goes to Hollywood, in which we hear recordings of Albert Speer pitching a Hollywood movie to rehabilitate his image.
Even casual students of history know that Goering didn’t escape conviction, but Nuremberg, in the tradition of fine courtroom dramas, is able to keep the audience hooked on how Goering, Kelley and Jackson will perform at the trial, and whether Goering will destroy anyone else. Nuremberg open in theaters this Friday.
