I might’ve been looking too hard for orange Easter eggs in “Nuremberg,” but I don’t think so. Justifying the Nazis’ ruthless consolidation of political power, Hermann Göring (Hitler’s number two, superbly played by Russell Crowe) says with a captivating smile, “We had a mandate for change.” The title of Project 2025? Not quite. That’s “Mandate for Leadership.” “Mandate for Change” is, however, the title of the first volume of Eisenhower’s presidential memoir, which I don’t think he’d have chosen if it were a Nazi talking point.
Noticeably overweight, Göring calls himself a superb physical specimen. We’ve heard that one before. Göring said people followed Hitler because he exploited their resentments and made them feel proud to be German again. He reveals this to Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), the U.S. Army psychiatrist brought in to examine him and other defendants before the Nuremberg trials. Kelley concludes that he’s a megalomaniacal narcissist who doesn’t care about anyone but himself. As we hear the tribunal sentencing Göring to death (“the record discloses no excuses for this man,” the verdict reads), Kelley, who does card tricks, is seen playing with a deck and turning up the king of hearts. No excuses, no kings.
Director and writer James Vanderbilt’s film feels like it’s in three acts. It’s borderline zany at first. Let’s get together and try some Nazis! The middle is a Wikipedia page brimming with exposition about World War II, which for today’s audiences was as long ago as the Second Boer War was when I was 30.
The drama comes when film of Nazi atrocities is played in court, conveying the impression that even elites hadn’t yet heard the full extent of the savagery. The movie’s emotional high point is a long speech by an Army translator, played by Leo Woodall, who reveals to Kelley that he a German-born Jew whose parents died in the Holocaust.
Kelley is discharged for blabbing to a reporter that he fears Göring will outfox the U.S. prosecutor, Supreme Court associate justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon). In the movie, if not in life, one reads, Jackson does nearly bungle it until he gets an assist from his British counterpart, who makes the most of Kelley’s insight (inspired by his translator friend, he returns to the team as a civilian) that Göring would destroy himself on the stand if asked to repudiate the tyrant. “Heil Hitler,” he finally says weakly. He took his own life the night before his hanging was scheduled.
Kelley goes downhill after the war and trial while trying to convince Americans that the same thing could happen here. The perpetrators wouldn’t be wearing silly uniforms, he said, and they would succeed only because no one stood up to them until it was too late. Vanderbilt isn’t saying we have Hitler and Nazis; just that we could. Kelley’s most controversial finding ought to have been the most obvious. Properly motivated or deprived, most people are capable of atrocities. But everyone wanted to hear from Kelley that Germans were ontologically different. My old boss Richard Nixon thought communists were. I’ve met people who insist that Muslims are. The human stain is thinking the stain, as well as God’s favor, is unevenly applied.