“Nuremberg”: Holocaust as Melodrama
May 18, 2026
The 2025 movie Nuremberg is available now for streaming on Netflix and other platforms. If it seems harsh to say that the writer of Scream (2022), Scream VI, and The Amazing Spiderman should have reconsidered being the one to adapt and direct the story of the litigation of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes, then let us say that Nuremberg is largely unserious as a narrative, uneven in tone, poorly written, miscast, and that it shapes a history of horrific consequence into melodrama.
The movie is adapted from The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII, by Jack El-Hai, which was built out from a 2011 article in Scientific American.
Nuremberg, in this context, means the trials in that city, in 1945, of 22 defendants of what remained of Nazi Germany’s leadership after the war and the suicides of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. The trials were meant to publicize guilt and establish accountability for what the Reich and its partners did, but they were also consciously intended to establish legal precedent for future prosecutions of “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and what we now call “wars of aggression.” The court was convened by the US, UK, France, and the Soviet Union.
The movie staggers under the weight of its own bad decisions. Russell Crowe, as Göring, does the best acting in the movie, but he is never shown with anything resembling the complexity of the real man. His set speeches in defense of the Nazis’ actions (with a “you too” fallacy about the Allies’ conduct) are not only hollow but are left unchallenged in the movie. Crowe’s preening for courtroom cameras is an interpretation (for our amusement) that outdoes the real Göring’s.
The movie even invents things that have the effect of giving Göring more personal power in the narrative. During the key moment in the trial, when he is asked if he would follow Hitler again, knowing the outcome, Göring shouts dramatically, “Heil Hitler,” which never happened. Similarly, the movie uses the fact that the real Dr. Kelley was an amateur magician, but it invents Göring saying “abracadabra” (to no one but himself) as he produces a cyanide pill to kill himself in his cell—an act that in life stripped some of the impact of the Allies’ intended hanging-spectacle and in the movie makes him a wry magic man. With these and other touches—including the movie’s handling of the temporary collapse of the prosecution and the suicide a dozen years later of Dr. Kelley—the movie suggests that Göring won, as it has him saying he would, earlier in the film.
With the choice of Crowe, we are left with the face of the heroes of Gladiator and Master and Commander, not the unpleasant-looking Göring, number two in the Reich, about which the judgment at Nuremberg said, “There is nothing to be said in mitigation. For Göring was often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his leader. He was the leading war aggressor, both as a political and as a military leader; he was the director of the slave labour programme and the creator of the oppressive programme against the Jews and other races, at home and abroad. All of these crimes he has frankly admitted.”
With this on the line, narratively and historically, why the weird flirtations between characters in Nuremberg? Why the silliness of a scene that looks like Wes Anderson stepped in to direct it—Rudolf Hess parachuting haplessly into Scotland and being beaten with sod shovels by farmers—in a bid for laughs? Why the Marvel-like, jump-cut gag after someone asks, “Who is bigger than the president?”, to the Vatican, exterior, day?
The movie makes an easy, mechanical choice to get its gravitas back: It shows a few minutes of the actual documentary, directed by George Stevens and produced by John Ford, that put together actual newsreels from the recently liberated camps, bodies piled so high that bulldozers had to push them into graves. Nuremberg also cuts and pastes segments of the transcript of the real trials, but one scene is almost beat-for-beat the same as Tom Cruise faltering when he faces Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. (Nuremberg is a ham-handed warning of the Trump era, in a way that even A Few Good Men’s director, Rob Reiner, a committed Democrat, would never have done.)
In the end, the only thing to be done with a movie like this is to throw it to the wolves of Reddit:
“heinously Marvelized dialogue”
“It felt like looking into a future where high-school history teachers AI generate movies about historical events to play to their sleepy students”
“I imagine if you are a Nazi, it’s fantastic”
“*Record Scratch* – Cut to Goering in a cell – yup, that’s me, I bet you’re wondering how I got into this situation”
