A Review of the 2025 film Nuremburg
by John M Repp
When shown at a Toronto film festival in September of 2025, the new film Nuremburg got a four minute standing ovation. But it is not being shown widely, maybe because it is so powerful and reminds the Republicans who are supporting the Trump Administration what happens to people who support a cruel dictator.
The film tells the story of the famous series of trials of high ranking Nazi leaders that the Allies captured at the end of World War II. Four of the countries who fought Nazi Germany, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States, charged the Nazi leaders with several crimes, such as crimes against the peace i.e. starting a war, and crimes against humanity i.e. taking away of the citizenship of an ethnic and religious minority, forcing them into “camps”, and later poisoning millions of them.
The American judge who had the idea for this trial was Robert H. Jackson who was a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. There was no international precedent for this kind of trial, but Jackson wanted to establish such a precedent. He even went to the Vatican to persuade the Pope to support the idea, which the Pope agrees to do. The British and the American authorities wanted to just shoot the high ranking Nazis, but Jackson thought working to establish a precedent of personal responsibility for such crimes could help prevent another world war from happening.
After World War I, the League of Nations was established. It’s mission was to prevent another catastrophe like World War I. The League was more like an alliance between many nations with the task of deterring any nation from committing aggression. Despite the fact that the American President Woodrow Wilson pushed the idea, the U.S. Congress never voted to join the League.
The movie opens in Austria during the very last day of the war. Allied troops stopped the second ranking Nazi official Hermann Goring, fleeing in a car. Goring was then arrested. A U.S. Army psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley is assigned to evaluate the mental health of the captive Nazis and prevent any suicides. The main dynamic of the film is the complex interaction between Goring and Kelley. Kelley take notes because he wants to write a book about the trials. Despite established legal ethics, Kelley tells Jackson, a prosecutor, what he learned from his interviews of Goring.
At one point, the prosecutors show films of piles of dead bodies from the death camps. The film shown is some of the footage actually taken in 1945 and it is very grim.
In the end, Goring and most of the others are convicted and most sentenced to hang. But Goring swallows cyanide before he can be hanged.
The Nuremburg trials and executions of the top Nazis did achieve a part of Judge Jackson’s goal of establishing international law and an international court system. But the effort has not been able to prevent wars of aggression and war crimes from being committed. Witness the current case of Russian aggression against Ukraine and the case of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Currently, South Africa is filing a case of genocide against Israel. Genocide is a crime of war that was part of the international crimes established and a part of the International Court of Justice’s domain. The case, formally known as the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), was filed by South Africa in December 2023. The ICJ has not yet made a final ruling on the merits of whether genocide has occurred, which could take years.