The film "Nuremberg" explores the trial of Hermann Göring.

Personality, history, and politics can conspire to create evil.

Göring was vain but not mad, which challenges our understanding.

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 Göring (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’ ability to stand trial.

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, an otherwise inconceivable move in the world of law. And they knew that the world was watching.

The movie is risky because it takes a hand in shaping our collective memory 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.

In my judgment, the movie succeeds in navigating this difficult terrain. I can’t claim to have expert knowledge of the relevant history, but, growing up in........

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