By Todd DePastino
The release of the movie Nuremberg coincides with the 80th anniversary of the opening of the famous Nazi War Crimes trial on November 20. The movie is a historical drama based on Jack El-Hai’s book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII, about Dr. Douglas Kelley’s effort to determine Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring’s fitness to stand trial in the German city of Nuremberg in 1945. The movie stars Russell Crowe as Göring and Rami Malek as Kelley and John Slattery, Michael Shannon, and others in supporting roles.
VBC veteran Donn Nemchick saw the movie and calls Crowe’s performance “captivating.” “The film is evenly paced at two hours and change, the background and WWII-era dress were spot on. We rated the film B+ and a must see for WWII-era movie buffs,” says Donn.
Movie-goers should understand just how important the trials remain in defining our current standards of international justice and how unprecedented they were in the handling of defeated enemies in war.
When the guns of World War II finally fell silent, the victors faced a question no one had ever had to ask before: what do you do with men who turned war itself into a crime?
Europe lay in ruins. The death camps stood uncovered, their horror plain for all to see. Six million Jews had been murdered, millions more civilians starved or shot or worked to death, and whole nations had been crushed under German occupation. There had never been anything like it.
The easy thing would have been to hang the Nazi leaders outright. Winston Churchill thought that best. Make it quick and final. The Soviets, practiced in show trials, preferred a spectacle with guaranteed verdicts. But the United States argued for something different. “Let’s prove that law can be stronger than vengeance,” said Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the man President Truman chose to lead the prosecution.
And so, in the bombed-out city of Nuremberg, inside a courthouse still smelling of dust and smoke, twenty-four of Nazi Germany’s highest surviving officials were called to account. They were a grim roster: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walther Funk, Hjalmar Schacht, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Martin Bormann (tried in absentia), Franz von Papen, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, Konstantin von Neurath, Hans Fritzsche, and Robert Ley, who took his own life before the trial began.
Presiding were eight judges drawn from the four Allied powers. The Americans sent Francis Biddle and John J. Parker; the British, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence—who served as president—and Norman Birkett; the Soviets, Iona Nikitchenko and Alexander Volchkov; the French, Henri Donnedieu de Vabres and Robert Falco. Alongside Jackson stood his fellow prosecutors: Britain’s Hartley Shawcross, the Soviet Union’s Roman Rudenko, and France’s François de Menthon (later replaced by Auguste Champetier de Ribes). The accused were defended by some of Germany’s best lawyers—Hans Laternser, Otto Stahmer, Alfred Thoma, and others—who argued, among other things, that their clients were only following orders.
What set Nuremberg apart wasn’t just the scale of the crimes, but the principle behind the prosecution. For centuries, rulers and generals had been shielded by the idea of “acts of state.” What they did, they did on behalf of the nation, and the nation—so it was said—could not be tried. The Nuremberg Charter swept that idea aside. It declared that individuals could be held responsible under international law for “crimes against peace,” for violations of the laws of war, and for “crimes against humanity”—a new phrase, coined to describe the systematic extermination of civilians. For the first time, the world agreed that some acts were so evil they violated not just another country’s law, but the conscience of humankind itself.
The Americans insisted that the trials be open and public. Jackson wanted the record clear and complete, every fact nailed down. “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,” he said, “is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.” Those words still carry weight. Day after day, the courtroom filled with reporters and spectators as reels of captured Nazi film flickered on the wall. The defendants sat in headphones, listening to simultaneous translation, while the prosecutors laid out the evidence: invasion orders, secret memos, even the blueprints of the death camps. The horror spoke for itself.
But the tribunal was no utopia of justice. It applied laws retroactively, punishing men for offenses that hadn’t been formally codified when they committed them. It looked only at Axis crimes, ignoring atrocities by the victors. And the Soviet judges—who came from a regime that had its own record of mass murder—condemned German aggression without irony. Critics called Nuremberg “victors’ justice,” and they weren’t entirely wrong.
Still, something remarkable happened there. Out of the rubble of war, an idea took root—that law, not vengeance, could govern the aftermath of conflict. The proceedings were translated into four languages, broadcast worldwide, and preserved in thousands of pages of testimony. The tribunal’s example would echo decades later in The Hague, in the war-crimes trials for Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and beyond.
Nuremberg didn’t make the world just. It didn’t stop future atrocities. But it did show that even in the shadow of unimaginable horror, nations could reach for principle instead of revenge. It proved that the rule of law could reach all the way up—to the very men who once believed themselves untouchable. After the bloodiest war in human history, that was no small thing.
