Michael Shannon

Though not the first film dramatizing the late 1940s Nuremberg Military Tribunals of Nazi war criminals conducted by American occupying forces in Germany, director Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg is, to date, the best known, fictionalized version of one of the twelve Nuremberg trials. Adding another fictionalized but also vital chapter to that history, director James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg follows WWII psychiatrist and U.S. Army Major Douglas Kelley sent to Nuremberg to determine the psychological fitness of Hermann Göring and other Nazi officers to stand trial. Despite its flaws, this is a powerful, important reminder of the evil that has and still remains within our world.

Those of us of a certain age may think we have heard all the stories of the atrocities of the Holocaust, and why and how it happened, but all generations, current and future, should never stop learning. And there is more to learn.

English philosopher R.G. Collingwood said, “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.” In Nuremberg, this is what is being fleshed out as U.S.Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) and Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) work to bring 12 members of the Nazi High Command to trial for war crimes.