Nuremberg ends with a sobering quote from R. G. Collingwood: “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.” It’s a fitting final thought for a film about sinful humanity’s frightening capacity for evil. Even as the film recounts a specific historical episode from 80 years ago—the Nuremberg trials of defeated Nazi leaders—Nuremberg aims to be a timeless warning.

We can sometimes think of Nazis as cartoonishly evil, assuming their sort of depravity is anomalous in history. Or we can dilute the term “Nazi” by applying it to anyone today whose politics feel “fascist” to our personal sensibility. But films like Nuremberg remind us that in the moment, evil can take a surreptitious shape—especially when it’s reinforced in society-wide patterns of confirmation bias.

Some Nazis were monstrous bogeymen; others were banal. Grievance-driven aggression, self-deception, and other sinful habits compounded in Nazism with uniquely depraved and horrific results. By 1945, as Allied armies discovered concentration camps and the extent of Holocaust atrocities became more widely known, even some Nazis struggled to comprehend the depths of the darkness in which they were complicit.

Göring and the Psychology of Evil

Nuremberg (rated PG-13) is the first major feature film about the trials since Stanley Kramer’s influential 1961 film, Judgment at Nuremberg, which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards. Other films have explored the pursuit and prosecution of post-war Nazi criminals (e.g., 2018’s Operation Finale), and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is the definitive literary take on the question of Nazi morality, which she famously summed up with the memorable phrase “the banality of evil.” But Nuremberg is the first film in 64 years that takes as its primary subject the trials themselves.

Even as it recounts a specific historical episode from 80 years ago, Nuremberg aims to be a timeless warning.

Written and directed by James Vanderbilt, Nuremberg opens right as World War II ends. The film weaves two main storylines. One follows the development of the unprecedented international court and trial, led by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon). The other follows U.S. army psychologist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) as he does pretrial psychological evaluations of captured Nazi leaders like Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), Karl Dönitz (Peter Jordan), and Rudolf Hess (Andreas Pietschmann).

Both storylines are compelling, but the film’s primary drama comes in the dialogue scenes between Kelley and Göring. Malek and Crowe deliver potent performances as men with different motivations who start to understand each other through regular meetings. Kelley initially sees Göring as basically a lab rat to help him learn more about the psychology of evil (“If we could psychologically define evil, we could make sure nothing like this happens again.”).

But Göring turns out to be more normal, even charming, than Kelley anticipated. Göring is also steely and stubborn, refusing to give Kelley ammo for whatever thesis he might try to argue about Nazism’s unique evil. This cat-and-mouse dynamic of psychological chess provides narrative propulsion in a movie that might be a tad too long (2 hours and 28 minutes).

Power of Visual Evidence

While the Kelley-Göring scenes are consistently compelling, the film’s standout moment is a courtroom scene about two-thirds through the movie and about a week into the trial. It comes at a moment when the depths of Nazi evil feel like they haven’t yet been fully demonstrated. Göring and his fellow criminals may even feel like they’re proving themselves less monstrous than expected.

But then prosecutors play real video footage of what was discovered at concentration camps when the Allies found and liberated them. (The footage is from a documentary called Nazi Concentration Camps, which you can watch on Prime Video.)

For several minutes in Nuremberg, we watch what the people in the courtroom were seeing on November 29, 1945, in the shocking and disturbing footage from Nazi Concentration Camps: burned bodies, skeletal survivors, gas chambers, massive piles of human bones, decaying heaps of flesh being moved around by bulldozers. The courtroom is hushed to stunned silence. Suddenly, all the rationalizing of the defendants falls forever flat. So does the present-day Holocaust denial that we’re seeing from antisemitic figures like Nick Fuentes. The evidence leaves no room for denial or downplaying. Look and see. This is what the Nazis did. It’s on vivid, indelible, documented display. It’s barbarous.

This was the first time most people in the courtroom had seen video evidence of Nazi atrocities. Eighty years removed, on this side of Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and other Holocaust movies, this imagery is familiar to us. Still, it’s deeply potent and important to keep in view. It reminds us of the visceral power of visual evidence to confront “nothing to see here!” manipulation, denialism, whataboutism, or other avoidance maneuvers.

Were the Nazis Unique?

Nuremberg ends with a dramatic epilogue in which Kelley is being interviewed live on the radio about his new book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg (1947), which he wrote about his interactions with Nazi criminals. The interviewer tells Kelley, “You must admit [the Nazis] were a unique people.” Kelley responds, “They are not a unique people. There are people like the Nazis in every country in the world today.”

“Not in America,” the radio host replies.

“Yes in America!” Kelley barks back. “Their personality patterns are not obscure. They are people who want to be in power. And while you say they don’t exist here, I would say I’m quite certain there are people in America who would willingly climb over the corpses of half the American public if they knew they could gain control of the other half.”

While rhetorically powerful, this coda struck me as somewhat unhelpful. It’s not that Kelley’s argument—and the film’s closing argument—lacks merit. There’s truth in what he’s saying. But in leveraging the Nazi example to universalize the “human capacity for evil,” what’s lost is a depth of appreciation for the cultural and sociological specificities of what particularly led these “not unique” German citizens to collectively perpetuate such horrors in the 1930s to ’40s.

Even if such evils theoretically could be perpetuated by people in any culture or nation at any time, the fact remains that it hasn’t happened exactly like this anywhere else. The Nazi atrocities are uniquely egregious. It matters that the power-and-control-hungry Nazis actually built an apparatus for mass extermination and carried out the genocide of 6 million Jews, when plenty of other power-and-control-hungry people don’t actualize their malformed desires in that way.

Carl Trueman raised this point in his review of The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi by historian Johann Chapoutot:

Neither the Third Reich nor the Holocaust could have happened without the involvement of large numbers of ordinary, polite, civilized human beings. How and why?

The Christian answer is that human beings at their core are sinful, depraved, and twisted toward selfishness. That’s true; but the fact that that answer is true doesn’t mean it isn’t trite. The cause that explains everything in general explains nothing in particular. The British were similarly sinful, but they didn’t orchestrate the systematic annihilation of the Jewish population in London. The French had a worse record on anti-Semitism, but they didn’t host the Wannsee Conference. So why Germany? And what of lasting value can be learned, if anything at all, from the catastrophic crimes of such a civilized nation?

I wish Nuremberg had lingered on this question. Instead of insinuating that any one of us could become a Göring, perhaps more helpful would be an analysis of the constellation of cultural, political, and personal factors that made Göring such a singular evildoer in history.

Even if such evils theoretically could be perpetuated by people in any culture or nation at any time, the fact remains that it hasn’t happened exactly like this anywhere else.

More helpful than generic claims like “Evil knows no national, cultural, or political boundaries” would be an honest (if politically incorrect) admission that some nations, some cultures, and some politics have done more evil than others. This isn’t a subjective exercise to be weaponized in defense of “my side” against the other; it’s an honest conclusion from history. Good-faith historical investigation—like carefully looking into the circumstances of Nazi Germany’s rise—keeps our appraisal objective and specific, tethered to facts.

If we want to keep something like the Holocaust from happening again, we won’t do it by lazily likening all political opponents to Nazism, collapsing all bad-actor politicians into the Hitler profile, or issuing vague warnings about fascism any time a political leader draws a line in the sand we don’t like. Instead, we can avoid repeating history by carefully attending to history in its depth and specificity.

Ironically, the universal application of a movie like Nuremberg isn’t what it tells us but what it shows us: Nazism was its own particular thing. This fact doesn’t absolve us of being alert to similar evils in the present; it rather informs us more effectively about what specific factors, patterns, and coalescing trends should especially set off alarms.