The 2025 historical drama film Nuremberg presents the intense situation that panned out when the last remaining Nazis were arrested and put on trial in a completely unique new legal setup. The plot is centered around Douglas Kelley, an American psychiatrist working with the US Army, who is given the task of making psychological evaluations of the Nazi officers, and especially of Hermann Goering, with the sole purpose of preventing them from committing suicide while in custody. Overall, Nuremberg takes the usual route historical drama films do, but the sheer gravity of the story it sets out to tell ends up making it a fairly decent watch.
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
Nuremberg begins on the 7th of May, 1945, on what is considered the last day of WWII in Europe, with Adolf Hitler already dead and the Nazi High Command in disarray. Somewhere in war-stricken Austria, the American soldiers seeing to the safe passage of the people recovering from the devastation of war are taken by total surprise when a car with Nazi flags drives towards them. From the car steps out Hermann Goering, the Nazi officer considered to have been Hitler’s second-in-command, who calmly asks the soldiers to retrieve his luggage from the trunk, suggesting that he is here to surrender himself. A few hours later, a frantic messenger reaches the house of Associate Justice Robert Jackson in Washington, DC, in the middle of the night to inform him about Goering’s unexpected surrender. This sets in motion a plan that Justice Jackson had been drawing up ever since the fall of the Nazis—to set up an unprecedented international court of justice and try the perpetrators of arguably the worst war crimes in the history of the world.
As Hermann Goering is kept imprisoned in Mondorf, a psychiatrist named Douglas Kelley is appointed to move into the prison facility, with more Nazi officers and figures now getting caught with each passing day. Among these prisoners are Robert Ley, the head of the German Labour Front; Karl Dönitz, the commander-in-chief of the Nazi navy; and Julius Streicher, the head of the Nazi propaganda department. The warden, Colonel Burton Andrus of the US Army, makes Kelley’s task very clear—he is to make psychological evaluations of each of the 22 Nazi officers and leaders now imprisoned there, specifically to ensure that they do not commit suicide and evade the legal justice that is headed their way. Kelley immediately agrees, mostly out of his own intrigue regarding the officers and their perspective on the brutal torture they had carried out on millions of Jews.
Back in the United States, Jackson receives the disappointing news that Congress has rejected the proposal for a trial against the Nazi officers and instead believes that they should just be summarily executed. Looking for some even higher power to support his cause to put the war criminals on trial and prove to the world that the USA and the other Allied nations allow anyone to legally defend themselves, Jackson meets with Pope Pius XII. Despite the pope’s initial hesitation, he is ultimately convinced when the lawyer reminds him how the Vatican City had been the very first state to acknowledge and support Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, supposedly to help the Catholics in Germany. Thus, the Nuremberg Trial is announced to take place soon, as Kelley pursues a plan of personal glory.
Does Kelley grow sympathetic towards Goering?
In Douglas Kelley’s very first interaction with Hermann Goering, he figures out the Nazi officer actually speaks English and has been fooling the official translator, Howard Triest, for so long. There is evidently a sense of respect in Kelley’s first diagnosis of Goering, as he states that the man is immensely intelligent and even more prideful. Over the next several sessions with Goering, Kelley not only gets to know the man better but also becomes friends with him, to a certain extent. Nuremberg does often float the idea that the psychiatrist actually grows sympathetic towards Hitler’s second-in-command. Or at least, the way in which he tries to understand the man makes everyone around him, including Triest and Col. Andrus, and even us viewers, feel like there is a certain feeling of admiration in him towards the Reichsmarshall.
The fact that his relationship with Goering is not the usual one between a doctor and his patient is evident from Kelley agreeing to help him reestablish contact with his wife and daughter, who have been missing since his surrender. This is totally against the rules of the US Army, which Kelley still serves, and yet he makes use of his local sources to find the location of Emmy and Edda Goering, and then visits them with a letter from Hermann. Whether he is actually sympathetic towards Goering can still be questioned, since he technically does this favor for the man in order to gain his trust and ensure that he testifies against his former colleagues in the court trial, or so Kelley would want most people to believe. But the fact that the psychiatrist is immediately sympathetic towards Emmy and Edda cannot be denied, as he feels that the woman, and especially the young girl, do not deserve the sad fate that they are having to go through.
Nuremberg actually blurs the line between right and wrong in this aspect, with Douglas Kelley knowing far too well that he is dealing with a monster who had been complicit in the brutal torture and murder of millions of innocents. It naturally becomes all the more evident to him when a video compilation from the various concentration camps is shown at court after the trial begins. But he also cannot stop himself from growing close to Goering, or from appreciating his intelligent and shrewd nature while technically trying to understand him. Similarly, he appears to be genuinely devastated when Emmy and Edda are taken away by the US Army, and the reason that he hides this news from Goering is debatable. There is obviously the fact, as he tries to suggest, that telling Goering about his wife’s and daughter’s arrest will hamper his work and create distrust between the two.
However, having worked as a secret messenger between the Nazi war criminal and his family, Kelley had grown close to them all. Therefore, his decision to keep the news from the imprisoned officer might have been similar to someone keeping terrible news away from a dear friend just to protect them from the grief and anguish that is bound to hit them. Throughout the film, numerous situations make us wonder whether Douglas Kelley’s intentions are pure and whether he is a trustworthy protagonist, for he seems to put away his moral compass whenever speaking to the Nazi officers, and especially Hermann Goering. But even if he does grow sympathetic towards the criminal momentarily, he does so out of genuine wonder and perhaps admiration of the human mind, however we may morally judge him for such a choice.
Does Kelley fail in the task that he had been given?
Kelley’s mission is quite straightforward at first, as he is to evaluate the psychological states of each of the Nazi officers being held at the prison and prevent them from taking their own lives. But what he realizes very soon after having started working in this new position is that he can personally benefit from the situation. After all, people are always fascinated by the bizarre and the macabre, and the tendency that we have to want to figure out reasons behind the most heinous crimes, to find some logic behind the misdeeds of a perpetrator, still remains characteristic of us humans to this day. Therefore, Kelley decides to run his own psychological evaluation through the interrogations and interviews with his patients, essentially to understand why they had done the horrid things they had against the Jewish population in Europe.
His real plan is to write a sensational book answering why the Nazis had become so bloodthirsty and vengeful against the Jews and sell millions of copies of the work and become rich. In the effort to execute this personal plan, Kelley makes a horrible mess of the task that he had been given by the US military. One of the toughest prisoners to deal with had been Robert Ley, who simply refused to see any wrong in what he had done and did not want to cooperate with the Americans at all. But when there is a sudden switch in Ley’s personality, and he becomes much happier and more cooperative than before, Kelley does not realize what is going on. Perhaps he is far more invested in trying to eke out information from Goering that can be used in his book on the Nazi psyche.
Kelley even goes to the extent of writing in his journal about Ley’s change of demeanor, which he wants to consider a success of his work. In reality, Robert Ley soon kills himself using a noose made from strips torn from a towel that he had been given. This is undoubtedly a setback in Kelley’s official mission, and he is clearly shaken up by it. A few days later, the psychiatrist goes on to make an even nastier mess of his task when he spills inside information to Lila, a journalist he had taken a fancy to. He mentions everything about his interactions with Goering to Lila and then also adds his own opinion about how Hitler’s second-in-command is very ready to stand trial and how Robert Jackson will lose the trial. Lila writes a detailed article on the matter, which gets Kelley immediately fired from his position.
Why does the psychiatrist change his original plan?
But as Kelley is about to leave, he runs across Howard Triest at the station, and this is where Nuremberg uses drama to build effect and provide a turning point to the protagonist’s motivations. Having always introduced himself as an American who happens to know German, Triest now reveals that he actually belongs to a Jewish family from Germany who had had to flee when the Nazi party came into power. Triest’s parents could never make it out of the country, while his younger sister had to be taken in by family members in other parts of Europe. The teenage boy was the only one who had managed to make it to the USA, following which he’d waited to get American citizenship so that he could fight against the Axis powers.
Triest reveals how deeply affected and scarred he still is from the harrowing experiences he had faced or heard of from other Jews and how he desperately wants the perpetrators to be punished. As it has already been established by now that the Allied forces did not believe that simply executing the Nazi officers without making them acknowledge their crimes would be enough justice, Triest harps on the need for the trial to work out correctly. He reminds Kelley that no matter how insignificant and purposeless the trial might seem, it would still matter to him and the countless other persecuted people all across the continent if the likes of Goering were to be found guilty of their crimes. This emotional admission is enough to change the psychiatrist’s perspective, as he had been keeping away crucial information from the prosecution. He now chooses to let the prosecution use all the information he had gathered through his conversations, instead of keeping it all away to publish it in his book in the future.
Why had Hermann Goering really surrendered?
One of the most interesting questions that Nuremberg raises and then also subtly answers is why Hermann Goering had surrendered in the first place, instead of trying to flee or taking his own life like the others. The most plausible answer to this is the extremely boastful and narcissistic nature of the Nazi officer, who always stood by his decisions and enjoyed exerting certain control over all situations. It is this habit of seeking joy in controlling situations and narratives that seemingly gets the man to surrender and try to play out an elaborate game against those he considers to be enemies. Being one of the most intelligent officers in the Nazi ranks, Goering outright denies his participation in the construction of the concentration camps, in having the German SS carry out the dirty work of the Nazi party, and even in the extermination of Jews, calmly stating that he had simply called for the Jews to emigrate out of Germany.
But when the British prosecutor, David Fyke, takes advantage of Goering’s prideful statements and makes him acknowledge his blind faith towards Hitler during the trial, things momentarily go out of control for him. It seems like Goering had genuinely surrendered and then faced the trial believing that he could get away with his crimes and even make his enemies look dull-witted in the process. The film presents a possible backstory for Goering’s absolute hatred against Jews as well, as he claims that a wealthy Jewish man, a friend of his father, would regularly take advantage of the situation and get intimate with his mother. If this sort of hatred is what keeps driving Goering even during the trial, then it is possible that he had surrendered and planned to get away only to further humiliate the people he had tortured.
Ultimately, Goering’s boastful statement about supporting Hitler is enough to have him convicted in the Nuremberg Trial, and he is sentenced to death by hanging. However, Goering manages to once again take control of his situation and interestingly proves that Kelley’s admiration for his intelligence was not entirely unwarranted. After all, Goering had been hiding a potassium cyanide capsule all this time, making use of sleight of hand, very similar to what Kelley used in his magic tricks. The capsule had definitely been the last resort for Goering, as he first believed he could defend his innocence in court and then wanted to be given the respect of a soldier by being shot dead instead of hanged like a common criminal. But when all else failed, he used his last trick and ultimately evaded justice.
What happens to Douglas Kelley?
In Nuremberg’s ending, the remaining prisoners are hanged to death, while Douglas Kelley returns to the USA to finally write his book. He goes on to become a political analyst as well, appearing on radio interviews to talk about the human tendency to want to dominate others. He frequently mentions how the United States of America is also complicit in such behavior from time to time, and his words definitely seem sympathetic towards the Nazis, and opposed to his own country and countrymen. As a result, Kelley’s book, “22 Cells in Nuremberg,” does not sell at all, making his personal project a total failure. Perhaps this can be seen as a twist of fate, punishment for his lack of conscience during the initial phase of his time with the Nazi officers. He faced a long struggle with depression as a result and finally took his own life in 1958 in the USA using potassium cyanide just like Goering, bringing an end to his promising but troubled career. Meanwhile, Robert Jackson returned to serve in the American Supreme Court, and the case laws he established during the Nuremberg Trial continue to be significant in the prosecution of modern war crimes to this day.
