Rethinking Nuremberg for the 21st Century | The Nation
November 10, 2025
The new movie Nuremberg can tell us as much about the present as it does about the past.
Sometimes “history” tells us at least as much about the present as it does about the past. That of James Vanderbilt Nuremberg– the last filmed depiction of the Allied International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg – vividly illustrates this idea. In other words, what we choose to emphasize about the main Nuremberg trial speaks to our current political concerns as well as how we understand the conclusion of World War II in Europe.
Vanderbilt’s vision of the trial of 22 surviving Nazi leaders – 21 were actually in the dock – by the United States, the USSR, Britain and France speaks to his concerns over the 80 years since the trial opened to the present. During the first public session in Nuremberg, on November 20, 1945, journalists announced the opening of the “trial of the century”. The message from Nuremberg to the law and politics of the previous century was that pretending to “just follow orders” should not negate individual responsibility for widespread atrocities.
“I was just following orders” became a meme before there were memes. It featured as a recognizable slogan for the legacy of Nuremberg in a variety of 20th-century cultural, legal, and even scientific contexts – from Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiments to comic books – and was a particularly poignant title for activists protesting the conduct of the American war in Vietnam.
Vanderbilt’s film suggests that it is time for a new message, in terms of the meaning of Nuremberg for the 21st century. THE Nuremberg today – that is, the film version – emphasizes that no one should be above the law, because the dark side of humanity exists within each of us. In other words, debates about the broader application of ideas about accountability must apply to everyone, including “men of great power” around the world, in the evocative words of the chief attorney of the United States, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson.
By highlighting this message, it Nuremberg The film also aims to settle another outdated debate sparked by the trial, whether there was something uniquely bad about the Germans. Today, this question seems simply naive; At the time of the trial, the controversy was heated.
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It’s not just that evil is banal (a slogan derived, not entirely fairly, from Hannah Arendt’s writings on another famous trial featuring a list of crimes against humanity). This is because the exaltation of the moral authority of the Allies – and in particular of the Americans – resulted in suppressing, circumventing or ignoring responsibility for the law in a very selective manner. The charter governing the Nuremberg Trials defined certain international crimes essentially as “things the Nazis did” for a reason. There was simply no way to define a concept such as unlawful aggression in such a way as to include the Third Reich but exclude the Soviets and the British in Finland, for example. Nuremberg raises this issue of hypocrisy in one of the violent arguments between the highest-ranking Nazi defendant, Hermann Goering (a superbly smiling, sausage-fingered Russell Crowe) and one of the prison psychiatrists, Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek, in an irresistibly pugnacious performance).
Ideas about the role of law are central to Vanderbilt’s text. He deftly addresses the mountain of briefings on international law necessary to understand why the trial was groundbreaking and why it was so controversial, even among Allies who ostensibly agreed on Nazi criminality.
Quickly stating this context is one of Vanderbilt’s bravest decisions. It seemed clear to him, he recounted in a recent interview, that even widely understood 20th-century labels like “the final solution” would have to be explained to many young people, as incredible as that seemed to him at first. So he explains. Sometimes it’s awkward, but he emphasizes that his goal was to create a film that wasn’t just for history buffs. It’s a courageous move, because it risks alienating experts, but it’s clear: he wants everyone to be able to come see the film and learn something from it, even those who have never heard of the Nuremberg trials.
The film also effectively focuses on the fundamental lawlessness of the Third Reich’s governance of its own population, even as that regime cloaked itself in the pretense of legality. The so-called Nuremberg Laws of 1935 deprived German Jews (and later black Germans and Germans of Sinti-Roma origin) of their citizenship and civil rights. The storyline suggests that plunging people into legal limbo is a harbinger of darker times to come. In other words, he could it will happen here – and maybe it will.
