It’s been 80 years since the Allied Powers, in an effort to mete out some measure of justice for Nazi Germany’s war on humanity, gaveled in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The film Nuremberg—directed by James Vanderbilt and starring Michael Shannon as Justice Robert Jackson, Russell Crowe as Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, and Rami Malek as Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley—was recently released to coincide with the anniversary of what’s commonly referred to as the Nuremberg Trials. Though both have drawn criticism, the film and the event it depicts were necessary.
“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,” Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson declared as the Nuremberg trials began. “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 has ever paid to Reason.”
To its credit, the film includes those powerful opening words from Jackson, who was appointed by President Harry Truman to serve as the lead prosecutor at Nuremberg.Also to its credit, the film includes actual newsreel footage first revealed during the Nuremberg Trials. For almost 10 minutes, the film shows the extermination camps, the piles of lifeless bodies, the walking skeletons—all displayed while a surviving American POW describes the ways Hitler’s henchmen pursued the final solution: torture, mass-firing squads, poison gas, starvation, exposure and worse.
“All of this started with laws,” Shannon’s Justice Jackson intones, as he stands in the very place where the Nazi Party handed down the Nuremberg Decrees a decade earlier. “It ends in a courtroom…so that this never happens again.”
“Never again” is what civilization has said since Nuremberg helped bring Hitler’s unspeakable crimes to light. Sadly, civilization hasn’t lived up to that promise. In the decades since Nuremberg, civilization has, in fact, tolerated, “malignant” and “devastating” wrongs visited upon other peoples.
The film is effective at wrestling with this tension between never-again moralism, hardheaded realism and shrugging fatalism—and even at foreshadowing how this tension would impact the years after Nuremberg.
Motivated by never-again moralism, the United Nations, not long after the conclusion of the Nuremberg Tribunal, declared as genocide “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of one group to another group.
Yet in the intervening decades, in the lifetimes of those reading this, even in this very year, friendless and helpless peoples have been subjected to those very crimes delineated by the UN.
Putin has abducted Ukrainian children and placed them in Russian homes in order to forcibly Russify them and thus serve his larger goal of erasing Ukraine; targeted places of worship; tortured and massacred civilians; forcibly transferred as many as 1.6 million Ukrainian civilians to Russia; attempted through deportations and disappearances “to change the demographic makeup of parts of Ukraine,” according to a State Department report; and perpetrated genocide, according to independent analyses and assessments.
China’s Uyghur Muslim region, according to a UN human-rights watchdog, “resembles a massive internment camp…a no-rights zone.” Uyghur men are packed into freight trains, Uyghur women are forcibly sterilized and Uyghur babies are forcibly aborted. This is awful and beastly. But it’s not particularly surprising given the nature and history of the People’s Republic of China. After all, the PRC is a regime that over the decades has erased some 35 million of its subjects.
The Iranian regime and its Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthi proxies hope to eradicate Israel. In October 2023, Hamas tried to turn those hopes into reality by committing the largest-scale mass-murder of Jews since the Holocaust.
In 2014, ISIS orchestrated a mass-murder campaign against Christians and tried to exterminate the Yazidi people.
North Korea is guilty of “a wide array of crimes against humanity” and “unspeakable atrocities,” a special United Nations panel concluded in a sobering 2014 report. “The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world,” according to the 372-page document. The government-sponsored crimes include “persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons, and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.” Calling the atrocities “strikingly similar” to that of Nazi Germany, the panel’s chairman poignantly concluded, “At the end of the Second World War so many people said, ‘If only we had known’…Well now the international community does know.”
Too often, when history challenges us with those words “never again,” civilization has responded with “never mind.” Realism can be sober and reasoned—reminding moralists that in a world full of so much danger and evil, it’s necessary to husband finite resources and restrain the impulse “to just do something.” But realism can also be used to disguise Pilate-like handwashing and callous ambivalence. Realism can even devolve into fatalism—a human condition that the film challenges.
After being relieved of his duties, Malek’s Douglas Kelley concludes nothing’s going to change, nothing really matters. A German-American interpreter roars back at him, “It matters…It matters.”
Indeed, Nuremberg matters.
It matters because the Nazi regime liquidated 6 million people. The Nuremberg Trials helped Germany come to grips with that and begin the process of rejoining civilization. As Just War scholar and Providence founding editor Marc LiVecche observes in his excellent essay about the tribunal, “The Nuremberg Trials played an essential role in helping—forcing even—Germany to confront itself,” to engage in “deep self-reflection” and to accept “collective responsibility.” Indeed, a generation after Nuremberg, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt would fall to his knees at the Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes—quite literally representing his country in a public act of contrition for the Holocaust his countrymen had perpetrated.
It matters because Justice Jackson and the Nuremberg Tribunal set a standard for civilization—a standard we have often failed to meet. To the list above, we could add Cambodia in the 1970s, Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1980s, Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s, Darfur in the 2000s, Syria in the 2010s.
It matters because that standard has, at times, goaded or shamed civilization into action: Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991, Kosovo in 1999, Libya in 2011, Iraq’s Yazidi minority in 2014.
It matters because antisemitism is on a rapid rise in Europe, because Jews are being targeted in Europe and Britain, because nearly 20 percent of Jews in America were victims of assault, threat or verbal harassment in the last year.
It matters because 63 percent of Generation Y and Generation Z in America don’t know that 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime. It matters because more than ten percent of those cohorts say they’ve never heard about the Holocaust.
It matters because “There are people like the Nazis in every country,” as Malik’s character grimly reminds us—people that need to be brought out of the shadows and exposed to the light.
Unsatisfying
The film, like the tribunal and the justice it handed down, may be unsatisfying. But the Nuremberg Trials were necessary to set a standard for civilization, to challenge us, to shame us. And in this age of selfie narcissism and historical amnesia, films like Nuremberg are necessary to teach us, to help us, to remind us.
