Making the movie Nuremberg (Vanderbilt, 2025) must have been a risky undertaking, much like the Nuremberg trial (1946) it dramatizes. The trial, or rather trials, was lengthy and complex. The movie focuses on some of the central characters, with Hermann G\u00f6ring (Russell Crowe) as the most prominent defendant, Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) as the chief prosecutor, and Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) as the psychiatrist tasked to assess the defendants\u2019 ability to stand trial.<\/p>\n
The trial was risky because the prosecutors knew that a failure to convict and execute the top surviving Nazis was intolerable. They knew that there was no established legal platform or precedence to work from; they had to create a legal framework after the crime<\/a>, an otherwise inconceivable move in the world of law. And they knew that the world was watching.<\/p>\n The movie is risky because it takes a hand in shaping our collective memory<\/a> of the atrocities committed in the name of Germany and how a world seeking justice dealt with it. Every movie is an exercise of myth-making, like it or not. One of the risks in making this particular movie was that it might make a myth, or support pre-existing myths, that erodes the fidelity of our memory of the historical record.<\/p>\n In my judgment, the movie succeeds in navigating this difficult terrain. I can\u2019t claim to have expert knowledge of the relevant history, but, growing up in Germany in the 1960s and ’70s, I did a great deal of homework on my country\u2019s troubled history. Looking back on this history and my lifelong engagement with social psychology, I want to offer a few observations.<\/p>\n The Holocaust was a massive undertaking of industrial destruction of human beings that cannot be fully understood through any one particular lens. There are economical, sociological, political, and bureaucratic forces to consider that speak to the systemic nature of the catastrophe. These levels of analysis, important as they are, do not lend themselves to effective movie-making. Audiences want to be entertained, educated, awed, shocked, and led to catharsis. To deliver this, a movie must focus on a few principal human characters\u2014characters we can love or loathe, whatever the case might be.<\/p>\n Justice Jackson first seems critical\u2014and he was, historically\u2014but he is eventually outplayed by Sir Maxwell-Fyfe (Richard Grant), the British Assistant Prosecutor, and by G\u00f6ring himself. Between the front lines, there is Dr. Douglas Kelley, compellingly played by Rami Malek, as the voice of psychology, who finds himself trapped in a minefield of conflicting expectations and obligations. We must empathize with him. He understood G\u00f6ring better than anyone in the city of Nuremberg, and this knowledge probably contributed to his demise. A decade after the trial, Dr. Kelley committed suicide<\/a> by swallowing a capsule of cyanide, just like G\u00f6ring had done to escape the unbearable burden of being.<\/p>\n I title this post G\u00f6ring as Everyman because this was Kelley\u2019s central insight. G\u00f6ring was vain, cunning, and narcissistic<\/a>, but the evil for which he was responsible emerged within a complex system of evil. Every person must ask themselves if they would have acted differently had they been G\u00f6ring. When we realize that we cannot answer this question with force and conviction, we have taken a step toward wisdom<\/a>. G\u00f6ring\u2019s cunning is eventually broken by Maxwell-Fyfe who asks G\u00f6ring if he would have followed Hitler had he known the full extent of the Holocaust. Forcing G\u00f6ring to consider conflicting preferences, he gets the \u201cyes\u201d he needs for conviction.<\/p>\n We can agree that G\u00f6ring\u2019s conviction was just, and that his execution by hanging was justifiable (I say this, although I am generally opposed to the death penalty). A fundamental ethical concern is that punishment<\/a> must come, and can only come, in the wake of responsibility. G\u00f6ring was responsible because he could have stopped the Holocaust, but he didn\u2019t. For those who believe in free will<\/a>, this all fits together. G\u00f6ring could have acted differently, he freely chose not to, and now he has to suffer the consequences.<\/p>\n Those who deny free will fall into two camps. Some predict that the concept of responsibility will wither away once free will is properly understood as an illusion (Sapolsky, 2023; Skinner, 1971). But then, what to do with someone like G\u00f6ring? My own view is that determinism, that is, the absence of free will, is compatible with the notion of responsibility and thus allows punishment (Krueger, 2026; Krueger & Gr\u00fcning, 2025). It was G\u00f6ring’s actions and failures to act enabled the Holocaust, not somebody else\u2019s.<\/p>\n Free Will Essential Reads<\/p>\n The deterministic causal flow of the universe, which made G\u00f6ring who he was through his personal dramas, traumas<\/a>, and dreams<\/a>, created a man who became a critical cause of the final genocidal outcome. His punishment acknowledges his responsibility without asserting that he was free to be someone else. By the same logic, you have license to shoot the coyote who eats your child. The attribution of free will is a metaphysical nicety that obscures rather than grounds an understanding of responsibility.<\/p>\n My hat\u2019s off to the cast of Nuremberg, and particularly Messrs Crowe and Malek. They enable us to see the humanity of human beings in extremis despite the horrors of their behavior in action and inaction. This is an insight that Dr. Kelley tried to teach, as have generations of social psychologists since. The work must continue. In the Talmud, the Ethics<\/a> of our Fathers says we are not obliged to finish the job, but we are not free to stop trying. <\/p>\n A possible inaccuracy<\/p>\n The movie shows how Dr. Kelley skillfully gains G\u00f6ring’s trust, which he then betrays when passing information to the prosecution. One of Kelley’s tactics is to show G\u00f6ring magic tricks and sleights of hand, which intrigue G\u00f6ring. Hours before his scheduled hanging, we see G\u00f6ring in his cell, moving and opening a hand, revealing the cyanide capsule he then swallows to kill himself. The implied inference is that Kelley had provided the capsule and taught G\u00f6ring how to hide it from his jailers. I do think, however, that Kelley had no role in this. The historical G\u00f6ring charmed his jailer, a young enlisted man, persuading him to retrieve and deliver to him the poison, which was locked up among his personal effects. Either way, an astonishing piece of psychology. Abracadabra!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Making the movie Nuremberg (Vanderbilt, 2025) must have been a risky undertaking, much like the Nuremberg trial (1946)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-477268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}