Written by Sarah Crane, Scholar-in-Residence
The opening credits of Stanley Kramer’s classic film Judgement at Nuremberg features a wide-angle shot of a swastika atop the Deutsches Stadion in Nuremberg, Germany, with a classic German military song “Wenn wir marschieren” (When we’re marching) audible in the background. The credits end with a dramatic explosion as the swastika is reduced to rubble. The message is anything but subtle: the Nazi period is over. American justice now reigns supreme.
In the opening sequence of the 2025 film Nuremberg, the camera zooms in on a crowd of migrants walking along a country road clutching suitcases. Amidst the crowd you can make out American infantrymen who quickly jump into action when a black Mercedes cuts through the crowd touting Nazi flags. Out of the car walks Hermann Göring, who, as one of the infantrymen declares, is the former Nazi Reichsmarschall and Hitler’s designated successor. Göring surrenders by telling the American soldiers to take his luggage. The viewer is left confused; what do we make of this man?
Before the release of Nuremberg, film portrayals of the International Military Tribunal, and subsequent Nuremberg trials, have previously been defined largely by Judgement’s depiction. Winner of two Academy Awards, Judgement at Nuremberg is in many ways a classic tale of good versus evil, where fictionalized American judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy) represents the reasonable and righteous, and former Nazi judge Dr. Ernest Janning (Burt Lancaster) represents the complex yet irredeemable. The film is a courtroom drama based on one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials, a trial of high-ranking members of the Nazi judiciary in 1947. The dramatized trial features four judges, of which Janning, the fictionalized former Justice minister, is the lead defendant.
The film’s climax is when Janning chooses to give testimony on the Feldenstein case, a Nazi show trial (based on a real case) in which a Jewish man, Lehman Feldenstein, was executed for alleged sexual relations with an Aryan woman, Irene Hoffmann. Janning served as the head judge during the trial, and decides to testify after his Defense Attorney Hans Rolfe brings Hoffmann to tears in his attempt to argue that the case’s verdict was justified. In his testimony, Janning speaks not to the case itself, but to the “fever over the land” that defined the period in which it occurred. He says that only if one understands this fever, rooted in fear, disgrace, indignity, and hunger, can one understand “what Hitler meant to us, because he said to us lift your heads, be proud to be German.” Hitler assured the German people, Janning explains, that once the devils among us, the Communists, Jews, gypsies, are destroyed, their misery will be over. He then poses to the court three questions, “What about those of us who knew better? We who knew the words were lies? Why did we sit silent and take part? Because we loved our country.”
Janning’s words are echoed by Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) in Nuremberg. In his prison cell adjacent to Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, Göring sits and smokes a pipe opposite Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), an American psychiatrist hired by the Army to evaluate the 22 Nazi defendants prior to trial. Smoking one of many on-screen cigarettes, Dr. Kelley says to Göring conversationally, “Let’s talk about Hitler…I’m curious what the attraction was, he’s a failed painter, not a very good soldier, yet was worshipped and revered.” After a brief pause, Göring answers, “He made us feel German again…I had seen Germany crushed and along comes a man who says we can reclaim our former glory. Would you not follow a man like this?” Skeptical, Dr. Kelley responds, “Depends what else he wanted to do.” Göring describes the first time he saw Hitler speak in 1922, during what he describes as a time of peace, but a time without food, jobs, or shoes. He recounts Hitler as saying that “French bellies are being filled with German pain,” and that “to make threats you need bayonets; down with Versailles!” That night, Göring declares, he became a National Socialist.
As the most recent depiction of the Nuremberg Trials on the big screen, it makes sense that Nuremberg shares some parallels to its famous predecessor. The fact that both films feature a monologue with a prominent Nazi speaking to the social origins of support for the regime might at first glance seem fitting, but is perhaps an odd choice when we remember that the focus of these films is a trial. What about these monologues help us understand the crimes at stake, or how these men ended up in the dock? What are they supposed to reveal to us about questions of justice, accountability, or the lessons we are supposed to learn from the Holocaust? A possible answer lies in Judgement at Nuremberg’s famous final lines, in which Judge Haywood and Janning also face each other in Janning’s cell. Convicted to life imprisonment, Janning has asked to speak to Haywood, and upon meeting says simply, “the reason I asked you to come…those people, those millions of people, I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it.” A pained look on his face, Haywood responds, “Herr Janning, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”
The millions of people are portrayed in both films through the same documentary footage that was shown at the actual IMT, the film Nazi Concentration Camps, comprised of actual footage taken by the U.S. Army Signal Corps upon the liberation of Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and other camps. The striking contrast between the horrifying footage relayed in this video and the civil conversations between Haywood and Janning, or Kelley and Göring, send a message of the humanity behind the men who made these atrocities possible. Pointing to Haywood’s final words to Janning, the audience encounters Nazi terror as enabled by individual decisions made by individual men in positions of power. Even if we are to believe that, as the defendants claim, they did not know the full extent of the crimes committed in their name, we are left with the impression that we should believe that they knew what their decisions made possible. Sixty-four years after Judgement at Nuremberg’s premier, the final shot of Nuremberg features a quote from British philosopher R.G. Collingwood, “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.” What are we, then, to make of the Nazi officer we encounter in Nuremberg’s first scene? What are we to take away broadly from these trials? Nuremberg’s ending credits remind us that the IMT created the foundation for all future war crimes trials. What is this foundation, really? Perhaps to remember that through these trials we are forced to encounter not only the mass crimes, but the humans who committed them.
