As antisemitism increases rapidly around the globe and fuels acts of violence against the Jewish people, the world marks the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II and the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials. It is in this moment that Nuremberg—a timely film that confronts the evil of antisemitism and calls us to remember the Holocaust—arrives in theaters with rare historical and moral resonance.[1]

The Nuremberg Trials began after World War II on November 20, 1945, and ended on October 1, 1946[2]. Their objective was to put twenty-two of the highest-ranking Nazi officials on trial to convict them for their crimes against humanity, particularly their sadistic extermination of over six million Jewish people in the Holocaust. The trials took place in Nuremberg, Germany; this location was the same place where the Nuremberg Laws (laws that discriminated against Jewish people, stripped them of their citizenship, and paved the way for the Holocaust) were passed ten years earlier in 1935. In the film, lead prosecutor Robert H. Jackson says, “Before the bullets flew and millions died, it all started with laws. World War II began in a courtroom. This war ends in a courtroom.”

Nuremberg begins with psychiatrist Douglas Kelley—a US Army psychiatrist assigned to evaluate the mental state of twenty-two of the highest-ranking Nazi officials before they stand on trial for their crimes. Kelley has an objective of his own: to find a common thread amongst the minds and personalities of the Nazis to find what exactly made them capable of such evil that they could kill over six million Jewish people. He initially believes that “if we can psychologically define evil, we can make sure this never happens again.” Kelley is accompanied by Sergeant Howard Triest, a Jewish and German-born US Army soldier who serves as a German-English translator for Kelley as he evaluates the Nazis.

However, a major theme of the film is Kelley’s discovery that the Nazis are not unique. Kelley’s most prominent patient in the movie is Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command. Göring turns out to be charming, personable, and humorous, with a wife and a daughter that he seems to have loving relationships with. Throughout the film, the relationship between Kelley and Göring almost seems to invoke too much sympathy for Göring, who aside from being quite a narcissist, seems on the surface to be pleasant to interact with and very human.

However, the turning point of the film occurs during the Nuremberg Trials themselves when the actual footage of the Holocaust concentration camps is played for those in the courtroom. The real Holocaust footage—displayed to the contemporary movie audience as if they were watching it in the Nuremberg courtroom themselves—obliterates any shreds of sympathy for Göring or any of the other Nazis being evaluated by Kelley. No words can describe the sickening evil portrayed in the footage; the screen silently showed piles of emaciated bodies being pushed by bulldozers as those in the courtroom sat in horrified, teary silence. Notably, Göring himself put on his sunglasses and looked away as the footage played. Not only was Göring doing exactly what had allowed this evil to spread in the first place—deliberately looking away from the deaths he caused and turning his face from the consequences of his own evil—but that even he had to look away from the graphic footage showed both his immense capacity for evil and the fact that he is indeed human. By the end of the trials, the Nazi leaders are finally found guilty and sentenced to execution, despite their assertion of innocence because they “were not aware” and were “just following orders.”

At the beginning of the movie, Triest tells Kelley that he will smoke again once the war is over. Throughout the entire movie, he refuses cigarettes offered to him and does not smoke. At the very end of the movie after the Nazis have been executed, Triest leaves alone and pulls out a lighter and a cigarette. He lights the cigarette and holds it up for a moment as if he is about to smoke it, but he puts out the lit cigarette without smoking it and leaves. Though World War II itself may have ended, the war against antisemitism and the evil it causes is not over. According to the director James Vanderbilt,

Unfortunately, the film has become timelier rather than less timely. But the thing I always loved about this story is that it’s actually timeless. It’s the old adage that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The easiest way for us to do harm to other people is to look at them as other; as different from us. We assume they’ll dress like Nazis and announce themselves as bad guys, but that’s not the way the world works. That’s not how terrible things happen.[3]

Nuremberg makes the director’s point extraordinarily clear: the Nazis were capable of such evil not because they were inhuman monsters, but because they were inherently sinful and selfish humans who pursued self-preservation and power at the expense of the Jewish people, and who—when they were given extraordinary power—remained selfish enough to choose to continue to look at the Jewish people as the “other” and to look away from the death and destruction that their antisemitism, narcissism, and ambition caused. The danger of the Nazis is not that they were forces of evil unique to 1930’s Germany, but that the human tendency toward selfishness and the pursuit of power makes us all capable of this kind of evil when we choose to turn our eyes away from antisemitism long enough for it to run its course—instead of choosing to look antisemitism in the eyes and confront it before it causes the death and destruction that occurred in the Holocaust.

In the aftermath of the attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, US antisemitic incidents skyrocketed by 360 percent[4]. Today, an estimated 46 percent of the world’s adult population (2.2 billion people) holds antisemitic attitudes, which is more than double the percentage from a decade ago. Of the world’s adult population, 20 percent have not heard of the Holocaust, and only 48 percent recognize the historical accuracy of the Holocaust[5]. Additionally, one in five young Americans believes the Holocaust is a myth[6]. On social media platforms, openly joking about “gassing Jews” or expressing admiration for Hitler has become disturbingly normalized, moving rhetoric once confined to the fringes back into the public square.

“Hitler was right” was posted on the Internet over 70,000 times last year[7], and vile antisemitic messages that praised Hitler and called for “gassing the Jews” were found scrawled on a New York City subway train about a month after the October 7 attacks[8]. The evil that happened in the Holocaust can happen again because the evil that caused the Holocaust—antisemitism backed by human selfishness and pride—are still present everywhere we look and must be repented of whenever we find it in ourselves. This sobering quote from R. G. Collingwood is displayed at the very end of Nuremberg: “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.” These alarming trends ought to caution us that the time to deliberately look antisemitism in the face and fight it—not to look away from it—is now.