Nuremberg Movie Review

I went to see James Vanderbilt’s new Nuremberg movie the other day, starring Russel Crowe, Rami Malek, Richard E Grant and Michael Shannon. I’ve been fascinated by the history and jurisprudence of these trials since I was a Constitutional Law student and read my way through the entre transcript in the library one summer.

There have been a number of documentaries and movies about these, and similar trials. Most notably, on the documentary front there is the live record made at the time by a US Army film unit ‘Nuremberg: Its Lesson For Today’, which was not released at the time as the then Secretary of War decided that it was not in the interest of the 'army or the nation' and would not be released to the general public. However, it has since been regarded as seminal and was itself the subject of its own 2021 documentary, ‘Filmmakers for the Prosecution’.

As far as movies are concerned, the classic is Stanley Kraner’s outstanding ‘Judgement at Nuremberg, (1961) – however, wonderful as it was, that was concerned not with the initial and main Nuremberg trial as the new film is, but with the later subsidiary trial of the Nazi era judges.

Until now the only really substantial dramatisation was indeed the 2000 TV docudrama Nuremberg, (with Alec Baldwin as Justice Jackson and Brian Cox as Göring), which is explicitly about the main trial of the Major War Criminals. Apart from one serious misstep, this actually sets a high bar as it is a very good production; Cox in particular makes an excellent Göring.

The ‘misstep’ is actually a very serious misrepresentation of Jackson’s total mishandling of Göring’s initial cross-examination. It was widely judged a mess: he lost control of the witness, allowed long speeches, got repeatedly slapped down by the Tribunal for interrupting, and let Göring use the stand as a platform to attack “victors’ justice.”   It’s been described in print, without much exaggeration, as “a disaster” and even “the worst cross-examination in history”

The damage was mitigated when Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe followed up with a much tighter, document-driven cross, pushing Göring into short answers on concrete atrocities (e.g. the murder of the Stalag Luft III escapees, anti-Jewish measures, etc.) and stripping away a lot of his pseudo-statesman pose.

It is perhaps not surprising that an American production would underplay this episode, and the new movie goes some way towards restoring the balance, but not without its own problems – we’ll get to that.

This new interpretation is particularly interesting for what it omits, what it gets wrong, and the very clear messages it is attempting to get across about current American politics.

What it gets right is the acting; we have an excellent portrayal of Colonel Andrus by John Slattery, Crowe’s Göring is fine, as is Michael Shannon’s Jackson. I have a problem with Rami Malek, in that I feel his exaggerated facial features make him look a little like an extra-terrestrial impersonating a human – and this movie nothing to dispel that.

It also does an excellent job of finding an actor lookalike to represent the visage and the incompetence of the American hangman Master Sergeant John C Woods. Diagnosed by the US Army in 1930 as a "constitutional psychopathic” he was nevertheless appointed as its official hangman when they looked for a volunteer, who dishonestly claimed previous experience as assistant hangman in Texas and Oklahoma. This would have been easily falsifiable, if they had checked, they did not. He went on to botch the majority of his executions, and this movie demonstrates the particularly grisly fate of Robert Ley, when Woods had to rush down to the bottom of the scaffold to pull on his legs until he died.  It was said that many of the Nazis executed at Nuremberg fell from the gallows with a drop "insufficient to snap their necks, resulting in their death by strangulation, which in some cases lasted up to 15 minutes”.

After this initial episode most of the other executions were assigned to the UK executioner Albert Pierrepoint who had perfected the arts of the 'long drop’.

As to the movies historical solecisms, that is a long list.

Firstly, it clearly shows the indictments being delivered to the defendants in their cells by a young US Army officer. This might be regarded as a small thing, but for the fact that they were actually delivered by a famous and celebrated British lawyer called Airey Neave.  Neave was the first man to escape from Colditz, was then assigned to MI9 and transferred to the International Military Tribunal. Given his background, he had visited Germany before the war and spoke excellent German, it was thought appropriate to assign him that historic task. He later became a Conservative MP, and was assassinated by the IRA in 1979 by a car bomb at the Houses of Parliament. Did the movie makers think we might not know that?

Secondly, Jackson may have made a mess out of his cross-examination, but it cannot be denied that his opening address at Nuremberg was a masterpiece of forensic advocacy – and they butcher it.

The first paragraph is magnificent advocacy and worth using in full…

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power ever has paid to Reason.

…and they don’t use it. How they could omit that fabulous last sentence I cannot understand. What they do, on the other hand, is invent a whole new section where Jackson says that the tenets of justice “must apply to all misbehaving nations, including those represented on this bench”. He should have said that, but he did not. At the time was politically inconvenient, particularly in the light of the fact that everyone ion the court knew that the Soviet’s were responsible for the notorious Katyn massacre of Polish officers.

To be fair to Jackson, in his writings he did state that “If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us” – but no-one was brave enough to say that in open court.

Furthermore, apart from the one sided and hypocritical elements of the trial (more on that later), it is particularly ironic in the light of those words that – having been the major force in the setting up of the military tribunal designed to deal with war crimes, and arguing that all nations have the right to subject any nation to such scrutiny, the United States is one of the only ‘civilised’ countries to refuse to submit its own military acts to such scrutiny. A hypocritical position it has held since 2002. For more on this see my article One Rule for Everybody Else, and Another Rule for US.

The famous embarrassing botching of Göring’s initial cross-examination is covered, as is the recovery by Maxwell-Fyfe. But, given the exigencies of a two-hour movie, this is compressed into about five minutes. In fact, Jackson’s disastrous cross of Göring lasted two and a half days, and Maxwell-Fyfe took another full half day to fix it.

Two final comments; hypocrisy and the movies attempt tie in with current US politics.

The trial was originally widely criticised, not just by Göring, on the basis that it was ‘victor’s justice’, and that whilst the allies had not attempted industrialised racial genocide, they had – to various degrees – also committed war crimes.

Notoriously, Radhabinod Pal, the Indian Judge at the corresponding Tokyo War Crimes Trial – which many have never even heard of - issues an excoriating dissenting judgment of 1,235 pages in which he refused to convict any of the Japanese defendants, party on the basis that the allies were guilty of their own war crimes.

There is no doubt that on occasion allied soldiers were guilt of relatively small instances of war crimes on an impulsive basis, often in response to large scale Axis atrocities such as Malmedy, Oradour and the like. There is also no doubt that while some of these actions were investigated and punished, others were not.

However, the real instances which have resulted in broader charges of hypocrisy, apart from Katyn, are the sustained campaigns of the deliberate bombings of civilian populations by the allies, particularly in Germany and Japan.

The well-documented history of Allied area bombing - from Hamburg to Dresden to the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – is a subject that deserves its own treatment and is too large to do justice to here: but see my other essay on The Inherent Flexibility of the Human Moral Compass. Suffice it to say that the scale of deliberate Allied attacks on civilian populations was enormous, and the moral reckoning has never been fully undertaken.

In the documentary The Fog of War, former US Secretary of Defence Robert S McNamara recalled General Curtis LeMay, saying: "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." McNamara continued: “And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

The supposed popular belief is that the US generally believed that the killing of thousands of Japanese civilians was justified on the grounds that it saved the lives of many American soldiers.

As Bomber Harris put it in 1945:

“Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier”.

This brings us straight to the nub of the matter; the view that there is an asymmetrical value to be placed, not just on our soldiers as opposed to their soldiers, but our soldiers as opposed to their innocent non-combatants.

In any case, there is no doubt that there is an element of hypocrisy in condemning – at Nuremberg – German ‘terror’ bombings, and not our own.

Finally, there is the attempt by Vanderbilt – not a director previously renowned for highbrow entertainment – to try and get across some lessons about the current drift of US autocracy, through the actions and sayings of the character Thomas Kelley.  

To be fair, there is a historical hook for using Kelley as a post-war Cassandra. From the record:

• after Nuremberg, Kelley went back to the U.S., wrote Twenty-Two Cells in Nuremberg, and hit the lecture circuit

• he warned that people with the psychological profile of the Nazi defendants – opportunistic, ambitious, not clinically “insane” – can appear in any society, and that the danger wasn’t “monsters” but very normal, clever men with no scruples

• he specifically worried about American authoritarian currents, thinking in his own time about Southern segregationists, and even argued that anyone running for public office should have to undergo psychiatric screening – one step short of Sir Thomas More’s ancient dictum that anyone seeking public office should be permanently disqualified from holding it!

  
  

So, the basic move – Kelley coming home and saying “don’t think this can’t happen here; watch your own would-be strongmen” – is not invented out of whole cloth. Vanderbilt is taking something Kelley genuinely believed and pushing it to the foreground.

The he really pushes it. What you’ll notice in the last quarter is where the film moves from:

“These kinds of men can arise anywhere”

to

“And, by the way, I am talking about someone rather closer to home, dear audience.”

Some critics have already noted that there’s a specific line of dialogue that “practically dares the audience to draw contemporary comparisons”, which they describe as “incredibly on the nose.”

Others have gone further and say Vanderbilt “lays on the contemporary parallels with a giant shovel,” explicitly framing the film as a war crimes tribunal movie with one eye firmly on the present.

Left-leaning reviewers are very happy to read the ending as Kelley warning Americans about “domestic Nazis” and the need to be vigilant about homegrown fascism, with pointed references to contemporary politics in the closing on-screen commentary.

The structure doesn’t help the subtlety: the film spends most of its running time in period drama mode, then shifts into an epilogue where Kelley is essentially giving little lectures about demagogues, crowds, narcissistic leaders, people who promise only they can fix things, and so on. It’s hardly a puzzle who that’s meant to evoke.

Does it work artistically? I’d say it half works, half trips over its own didacticism.

Strengths:

• Because Kelley’s real conclusion was that Nazi leaders were psychologically normal opportunists, not raving lunatics, he’s a good vehicle for the idea that “the type” is eternal – that you don’t get to comfort yourself by saying “they were uniquely monstrous, we are safe.”

• Using him as a bridge to present-day authoritarianism is, in principle, a legitimate continuation of that thought: he’s the guy who looked into the abyss and came back saying “watch your own politics.”

• There’s some value in a mainstream studio film spelling out, however bluntly, that charisma + grievance + nationalism + contempt for law are a recurring pattern, not a historical one-off.

Weaknesses:

• A lot of reviewers feel what you’re feeling: the contemporary parallel is so overt it flattens the drama. One calls it a “weightless cavalcade of digestible quips and a shallow parallel to the modern political climate,” and specifically criticises the second-half Kelley as turning into an “audience surrogate” whose speeches are too didactic

• Dramatically, it undercuts the earlier, more interesting material where the film shows how men like Göring operate, and then trusts you to make the contemporary connection yourself. Once Kelley starts sermonising, it feels less like 1940s Nuremberg and more like a 2024 op-ed.

• Politically, it risks being preaching to the choir: if you already worry about authoritarian tendencies in contemporary American politics, you nod along; if you don’t, the moment reads as partisan scolding and you tune out, which arguably weakens the larger Nuremberg message about law and accountability.

Is Kelley a fair proxy for a warning about contemporary autocracy?

• Historically: It’s fair in spirit. Kelley did think societies like the U.S. were vulnerable to homegrown authoritarianism, and he really did warn about that in lectures and writing

• Textually in this film: Vanderbilt clearly pushes that into a very specific contemporary direction, with dialogue that modern audiences are meant to recognise instantly

• Artistically: Reasonable people will disagree, but it’s hard to deny that the warning is delivered with a marker pen rather than a pencil. Some will find that bracing and necessary; others will see it as an over-explicit bolt-on that slightly cheapens what is otherwise a much stronger, more ambiguous character study.

On balance you’d have to describe the last-quarter Kelley-as-Cassandra warning as conceptually justified but executed in a way that’s a bit too eager to underline itself – you can almost hear the highlighter squeaking in the background.