Thereafter the prisoners lived under 24-hour surveillance, though Goering made plain that he had no intention of emulating Ley. He was determined instead to have his day in court \u2014 proudly to defend both Nazism and his own role in it. From the beginning of the Nazis\u2019 confinement, he emerged as the most forceful of the accused. Weaned off the drugs to which he was addicted, losing much of his accustomed corpulence, he sought a dignified end. In the movie, when Goering, played by Russell Crowe, demands to be addressed as Reichsmarschall, the American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek, looking disconcertingly like Freddie Mercury) reminds him fiercely: \u201cYou are not Reichsmarschall here. You are only Hermann Goering the prisoner. You are not Alexander the Great. You are a fat man in a cell.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Rami Malek as the American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, with Russell Crowe<\/p>\n
SCOTT GARFIELD\/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS VIA AP<\/p>\n
Kelley and Goering are the two principals in the film, which focuses on their long exchanges while Kelley was investigating the mental state of the prisoners, conducting ink blot tests and other such professional rituals, and even showing off his talent for card tricks.<\/p>\n
The psychiatrist sought to establish a semblance of intimacy with his charges. There was surely an element of voyeurism in his conduct. How could there not be when he was granted extraordinary access to some of the most wicked men in human history?<\/p>\n
\u2022 Inside the Nuremberg Nazi trials \u2014 booze, chewing gum and affairs<\/a><\/p>\n Only on the 73rd day of the court hearings, in March 1946, did the defence at Nuremberg open its case, with Goering taking the stand for cross-examination by Jackson. What followed was an embarrassment to the Allied prosecutors and indeed to their countries. Goering delivered a brilliant, contemptuous, largely mendacious and yet courageously self-justifying assault on \u201cconquerors\u2019 justice\u201d. He humiliated Jackson, made mock of his case.<\/p>\n Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, the British politician and lawyer, portrayed in the film by Richard E Grant<\/p>\n MONTY FRESCO\/TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n Richard E Grant, Michael Shannon and Rami Malek<\/p>\n SCOTT GARFIELD\/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS VIA AP<\/p>\n The day was saved for the prosecutors only when the American lawyer sat down, defeated. His place was taken by his British counterpart, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, played by Richard E Grant, who tore Goering to shreds. These scenes are the movie\u2019s best, although absent from Crowe\u2019s portrayal is the sense of greed, corruption and indeed evil that suffused the former Luftwaffe chief. Charm also existed but of a kind that fooled nobody with eyes to see. Crowe nonetheless makes a viewer feel that Hitler\u2019s foremost acolyte was a more sympathetic character than Kelley.<\/p>\n The movie\u2019s script \u2014 adapted by Vanderbilt from the 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai \u2014 is better than some of its acting. Goering accused the prosecutors of \u201cAmerican hypocrisy\u201d and he was by no means wrong. It was a mistake to include in Nuremberg\u2019s prosecution evidence of such episodes as the 1940 Luftwaffe bombing of Rotterdam, when Allied air forces had since flattened half the cities of Europe. It seemed even to many contemporaries a travesty that Soviet judges sat on the bench at Nuremburg alongside the British, French and Americans: until at least 1942 Stalin had murdered far more people than Hitler.<\/p>\n It is chilling to hear Goering offer some of the same excuses for dispensing with the processes of democracy that are offered today by American Maga chiefs. This does not brand the latter as Nazis but it reflects a matching, terrifying contempt for law. It is probably inevitable that such a movie as this should include extended sequences of the concentration camp films shown to the court at Nuremberg, and of the executions of those convicted, though both represent in this context a sort of pornography. Goering cheated the hanging, dying by suicide on October 15, 1946, aged 53, by biting on a potassium cyanide capsule. Nothing in his career merits applause but at Nuremberg he was allowed to pursue his own agenda more closely than that of the Allies.<\/p>\n![\"Sir](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/\/2fa8fb58-62e0-47f6-b9ca-5f8205d4161d.jpg\")
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