Review | Nuremberg

Adam C. Jones reviews the movie Nuremberg that was released in 2025.

Nuremberg (2025) is a movie that finally wants to end the Second World War. The film presents us with three representations of those present at the Nuremberg prosecutions brought against 22 captured members of the Nazi high command from November 1945 to October 1946, each bringing their own premise as to how not only to end the war, but to how end all subsequent atrocities that could ever repeat it. 

Firstly, we have Robert H. Jackson, an American jurist (a lawyer or judge) who pursues the unprecedented establishment of the trials. Jackson is depicted as an all-American man of the new world. He is secular, principled, and ostensibly universalist in his belief in the power of the law to mediate and defuse all conflict. He pursues the method of the tribunal instead of mass summary executions of Nazi party members, holding due process supreme (costing him his only chance at becoming a Supreme Court Justice). He is even shown chastising Pope Pius XII to his face for signing the Reichskonkordat with Hitler in 1933. It is only later in the film, within the grounds of the Nuremberg Rallies themselves, that Jackson reveals his motivations.

Speaking to the military psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, Jackson explains that the atrocities of Nazism “began with laws” (the 1933 ‘Nuremberg Laws’ which codified racial differences and excluded Jewish, Romani, and Black people from economic and civil life). It is here his intentions become clear: he wants to redeem the law. His position as a jurist would mean nothing to him if the law could lead to Nazism, to the holocaust. Jackson believes that the war can be ended only through the redemption of the law, and that a successful prosecution would set the precedent that all governmental powers are subject to the higher rational imperatives of legality. To quote from Jackson’s actual opening speech to the tribunal

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… The charter of this Tribunal evidences a faith that the law is not only to govern the conduct of little men, but that even rulers are, as Lord Chief Justice Coke put it to King James, “under God and the law”.

Jackson’s speech presents the stirring moral conscience of liberalism: cosmopolitan, universalist, idealist. Its gambit is that adherence to these most sacred of norms, in remembrance of the atrocities committed in transgressing them, will finally end the war and all subsequent repetitions thereof. With this, the film holds up liberalism’s finest hour, its conscience and most symbolic moment of conviction. Michael Shannon’s delivery of Jackson’s speech is a powerful and touching moment, evermore so because its aesthetic is nostalgic for liberalism’s ideological hegemony, harkening back to Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremberg as much as the trials themselves. 

Unlike Judgement at Nuremberg, the politics of the trial’s occurrence in 2025 are focused around legality and vengeance, rather than being concerned with the implications of the trials for Cold War politics. This is because, like many decent historical films, this movie is about our present conditions. 2025’s Nuremberg concerns itself not with a defeated enemy—the Soviet Bloc—but with an enemy that remains undefeated; fascism, genocide, war. 

The second character-method of ending the war is presented through Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist assigned to assess the capability of the defendants for trial and to prevent their suicide prior to sentencing and execution. Kelley is portrayed as a cocksure American hot-shot by Rami Malek, clad in a leather jacket like James Dean. His means to end the war is to medicalise the aberrance of evil. He begins the movie believing that by studying the Nazi high command he will be able to diagnose evil at its greatest strength, remedying it before it attains political power. Vanderbilt depicts Kelley as having at first only mercenary ambitions, boasting about how much money he will make from his ‘Nuremberg Book’. The arc of his character is—unlike Jackson’s eventual triumph in the courtroom—that of a descent. Kelley loses his confidence to conquer evil, coming to see the Nazi psyche as something unexceptional and depressingly commonplace.

Enter stage right the centrepiece of the film, the star performer, Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering as played by Russell Crowe. This film is caught between two poles of hatred and admiration for Goering. Goering is their most prized enemy, his mythological stature amongst Nazis is second only to Hitler himself. The contention is that only an enemy of such greatness in the field of evil could allow the forces of justice to restore themselves by besting him. As Jackson’s British counterpart Sir David Maxwell Fyfe declares, only “total victory” will suffice: as Goering falls, so does Nazism. Goering is the central contradiction of the narrative of Nuremberg. On the one hand, we have the legal narrative which requires him to be the ultimate enemy, the ultimate embodiment of wrong as the transgression of right. This means that, by definition, he cannot be corrected by right, having been elevated beyond it. If he was to be torn down, then he could not have been its supreme adversary. Goering did not fully submit to justice at Nuremberg. He was not executed by the forces of ‘good’, but rather died by his own hand via a hidden cyanide pill. By the law’s own admission (as well as that of the film), Goering escaped its final judgement, leaving it unredeemed. 

On the other side of the contradiction, this elevation of Goering by Jackson’s legal narrative is counterposed with his psychological banality. Kelley’s interviews with Nazi high command prove them to be bitter, unimpressive, detestable racists (because they are). At the end of the film, speaking on an American radio panel about his (apparently poorly selling) book, Kelley has come to adopt the Arendtian ‘banality of evil’ thesis; that everyone is capable of such crimes. 

This final scene has Kelley, driven to drink by his unheeded warnings, angrily informing the panel and their viewers that Nazism was not about cartoonish kitsch and national characteristics but a raw lust for power that can happen anywhere and could arise from anyone, He argues that if we exceptionalise Nazism, then when this happens in America—sans the “scary uniforms”—we will be completely unable to stop it before it is too late. He is not listened to on the grounds that he is being ‘un-American’ by stating its propensity for fascism, and the film ends by stating what Kelley committed suicide. The framing of the film pushes the viewer to regard it as a death of despair, apparently carried out by the same cyanide method as Goering, presenting Kelley as another one of his victims. 

This turn towards treating the Nazis as unexceptional feels rushed, not least because the vast majority of the film concerns Kelley’s psychoanalysis of Goering, which is by any clinical standard a disaster. Goering easily builds up a rapport with Kelley, playing him to get letters from his family and to rebuild his image in his doctor’s eyes, whilst Kelley obsessively indulges Goering in order to get access to his supposedly unique psyche. Goering is portrayed as having a magnetic personality, as a witty family man, mysteriously yet firmly in control of the situation. This image is not even dispelled by the anger with which Kelley berates Goering after being shown footage from the death camps during the court proceedings. Whilst Kelley’s psychiatric notes help Jackson to tear Goering down in court—showing Goering as a creature of pack loyalty to power who will neither diminish his own position as second in command of the Reich nor pass the buck to his beloved Hitler, even to escape responsibility for the Holocaust—suffice to prevent Goering’s escape from the gallows. The film even depicts the overconfident Kelley teaching Goering the sleight of hand through which he reveals his hidden cyanide pill to the camera. Goering is hence presented as triumphing over both legal and diagnostic procedure, never fully torn down within the narrative of Nuremberg. The film cannot give up the ghost of Goering, and this is its sigh of defeat; that the war against genocide was not won at Nuremberg. Germany was defeated, Nazism survived.

Neither law nor medicine ended this war, and so the film presents us with a third character-method in Sgt Howie Triest. Triest, played by Leo Woodall, is a German-Jewish refugee who fled to US alone as a child when funds for the evacuation of his family were scarce, eventually joining the US Army. He is the prisoners’ translator, leading him to accompany, and even establish an uneasy cordiality with, those who have displaced him, murdered his parents in Auschwitz, and exiled his sister. The sergeant even ends up being treated in an affable manner by Julius Streicher, the chief of the Nazi press who believes Triest to be an Aryan compatriot due to his German tongue, blonde hair, and blue eyes. Triest’s plan is to walk Streicher to the gallows, and in his final moments to declare that he has been conversing with a Jewish man. This act, which Triest does not carry out, is intimated to be one that he believes to be his final act of the war, the revenge of the oppressed. Triest plans to commemorate the end of the war with a cigarette; a pack of which he always carries around but never partakes in himself. His mother hated the habit, and as long as the war still continues, as long as Nazism persists in the world, she is not truly at peace. 

After Streicher hangs, Trieste leaves the execution chamber, reaches for a smoke, and hearing the crack of another neck from the hall behind him, returns the cigarette to its pack. He affirms that the fight is not yet over, and it is important to note that for him this fight is a social, mass activity. This is made clear earlier in the film when he explains to a despondent Kelley—Kelley having been fired from the army for drunkenly briefing the press—that surrender is not an option. Triest knows that this did not begin with ‘laws’ as Jackson claims, but with the constant and consistent refusal to fight Nazism at every step in its ascendancy. Triest provides a counter to Jackson’s legal mythology as well as Kelley’s attempt to single-handedly sound the alarm. He is neither individualist nor idealist. He does not attempt to articulate the end of the war from the position of martial victor nor from the analysis of its aggressor, but from the standpoint of its victims. And this is the standpoint which if anything may salvage the antifascist message of the film. This film is about now. International law is its nostalgic object because ultimately it is this law which lays in ruins in the rubble of Gaza today.
Imagine a repetition of the trials today. Imagine Smotrich, Ben Gvir, Netanyahu, in the docks at Nuremberg. Do we seriously believe that any of them—entitled, coddled by impunity, openly genocidal in record and rhetoric, would give such a performance as this Wagnerian figure of Goering? Would we need to draft in our best psychoanalysts for the occasion to work out that if you give a bunch of ethnonationalists unlimited money and weaponry that this would happen if they were not stopped? As long as the war is not won from the standpoint and justice of its victims, until the Palestinian people have won and the oppressor is vanquished alongside the roots of their oppression, then the war is not over. Winning Nuremberg is not a matter of redeeming the institutions which failed to stop past atrocities, but of securing what is to come after. That is to say, a world in which Goering is not a being to be elevated in order to be destroyed, but one in which mythologised men like him have long since passed, as curious, repugnant artefacts in the bloody story of world history. A world in which the present will no longer need to speak of the magnificence of his failed destruction, one in which he and the crimes of the world he inhabited no longer haunt us, but have been exorcised at last.