The Camps and the Gallows

There is a haunting and wordless scene in Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film “Judgment at Nuremberg” that’s easy to miss. It takes place in a darkened courtroom, where Spencer Tracy is playing retired American judge Dan Haywood, a member of a three-man tribunal overseeing a fictionalized version of the so-called Judge’s Trial, the third of 12 held in the years following World War II to prosecute Nazi leaders and sympathizers accused of war crimes. The prosecution is playing a filmstrip compilation as evidence. As images of children displaying their tattoos and corpses being bulldozed into massive graves flicker past, we get a harrowing close-up of Tracy, who looks away from the screen for a moment, straight down at the table before him. It’s an incredible beat or two of acting in which Tracy serves as proxy for all moviegoers bearing initial cinematic witness to Nazi savagery. Although released nearly a full generation after V-E Day, “Judgment at Nuremberg” was the first mainstream Hollywood movie to feature authentic concentration camp footage. 

The 15-minute sequence almost didn’t make it into the film. Preview audiences were vehement that the footage be cut, with viewers leaving notes that read, “Eliminate concentration camp films,” and, “Atrocities should not be shown.” But Kramer and screenwriter Abby Mann held firm. “One of Kramer’s goals for the film was to convey the horror of what the Nazis did,” says Jennifer Frost, author of “Producer of Controversy: Stanley Kramer, Hollywood Liberalism, and the Cold War.” “He did not want to shield the audience from that. It was an important contribution to public discussions at the time.” 

Released in the U.S. on Dec. 19, 1961, a week after Adolf Eichmann was found guilty in Jerusalem of crimes against humanity and subsequently sentenced to death by hanging, “Judgment at Nuremberg” paved the way for the Holocaust-themed films to come. “The Pawnbroker” (1964) and “Sophie’s Choice” (1982) were critical and commercial hits. In 1978, at the height of network television power, ABC aired the five-part miniseries “Holocaust.” In 1997, three years after “Schindler’s List” took home the best picture Oscar, NBC aired it uncut and without commercials. 

Almost from the beginning of their use, images of and stories about the camps were forced to contend with the forces of Holocaust denial. Until recently, these forces were a minor strain in American life, with neo-Nazis forced to trade xeroxed pamphlets among themselves and cluster around fringe websites. Today, the siloed algorithmic nationalist stream delivers a perpetual and ever-heavier barrage of pro-Nazi, anti-Holocaust vomit, feeding a growing number of homegrown American hate groups. The horrifying details that stopped “Judgment at Nuremberg” audiences have become grist for the darkest meme grotesquerie mills.

Into this dark scramble of misinformation and far-right ascendency comes “Nuremberg,” which hits theaters this weekend. Directed by James Vanderbilt, it is a chronological prequel to Kramer’s 1961 classic, and concerns the first Nuremberg trial, a historic, nearly yearlong prosecution of 24 Nazi defendants, including Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring. It is based on Jack El-Hai’s gripping 2013 nonfiction book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” about the California shrink and amateur magician Dr. Douglas Kelly, who is sent to Nuremberg prior to the tribunal to determine if Göring is sane enough to be put to death. 

Late in “Nuremberg,” the trial takes center stage, but unlike “Judgment at Nuremberg,” it is less a traditional courtroom drama than a psychological thriller based on the sessions between doctor and patient. The intellectual Kelly seeks to understand the psychology of how one participates in genocide. Göring is adamant that while he was a devoted Nazi, he played no part in the extermination camps and would surely be found not guilty. Throughout El-Hai’s book and Vanderbilt’s adaptation, the question lingers as to whether the 33-year-old officer in the Society of American Magicians is getting played by the infamous reischmarschall in his care.  

As the trial progresses, their relationship evolves into something like collegial camaraderie. Kelly comes to believe that Göring and other Nazis aren’t psychopaths or “monsters,” but rather ordinary men who believed in, or decided to go along with, the Third Reich. It’s a precursor to Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolf Eichmann as personifying the “banality of evil,” a mediocrity without deep malice or hatred. Although not a Nazi apologist, Kelly’s intense individual work with Göring, coupled with his professional opinion that no “Nazi mind” exists, ran him afoul of the American military’s goal of quickly labeling them psychos en masse and expediting their trip to the gallows. Kelly was relieved of his duties before prosecutors broke Göring and sentenced him, along with 10 fellow Nazis, to death by hanging. In the hours before his execution, Göring outfoxed the Allies one last time, committing suicide with a clandestine cyanide capsule. A tragic combination of his time in Germany, a thwarted career, paranoia, alcoholism and mental illness led Kelly to mirror his former patient. On New Year’s Day 1958, he also committed suicide by cyanide pill.  

As in “Judgment at Nuremberg,” the suspense in “Nuremberg” builds to a virtuous climax that follows history through to the nooses. At its core, “Nuremberg” is a two-hander between Kelly and Göring in the fashion of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, a dichotomy that never favors the righteous straitlaced character. As Dr. Kelly, Rami Malek can’t command the screen with the same malevolent glee as Russell Crowe’s terrifying, drug-addled and lumbering Göring packed into decorated Nazi finery. However, as with “Judgment at Nuremberg,” the film’s flaws seem less important when the courtroom lights dim and the same concentration camp filmstrip begins to roll. 

Can such a film — or the filmstrip within it — have an impact in 2025? Holocaust movies struggle to find audiences these days. “The Zone of Influence,” Jonathan Glazer’s masterful 2023 depiction of another Nazi officer’s depraved adherence to Arendt’s “banality of evil,” was a global festival award winner, but it made about as much cultural and box office noise as Hedwig Höss in her garden. It’s hard to imagine “Nuremberg” breaking through, but one hopes that it will be widely seen, and be felt in the conversation around the resurgent far right. Like “Judgment at Nuremberg,” the timely core of “Nuremberg” is a reminder of how quickly evil can triumph when people go quiet and look away. In his sentencing speech, Judge Haywood calls upon us all to stand up for “justice, truth and the value of a single human being.” It would be heartening if either of these films stirred the inner-Spencer Tracy in a nation that seems to be forgetting that the Nazis were and remain the enemy. Judge Haywood may have looked away, but he never closed his eyes.