Updated November 11, 2025 at 2:03 PM MST
Within months of the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the Allied powers put its surviving leaders on trial in Nuremberg, the ceremonial birthplace of the fascist party and site of propaganda rallies leading up to World War II.
Adolf Hitler had killed himself in his bunker in April 1945, but his second-in-command, Hermann Göring, was among the Nuremberg defendants. Before the trials began in November of that year, American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley spent dozens of hours speaking with and evaluating the Nazi officials.
That lesser known story, told in Jack El-Hai's 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, is the inspiration behind a new film. Its theatrical release coincides with the 80th anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trials — the first international criminal trials and a precursor to the International Criminal Court.
At the heart of James Vanderbilt's Nuremberg is the complex relationship between Kelley and Göring.
"They both wanted to get something out of the other one," writer-director Vanderbilt told NPR's Morning Edition host Leila Fadel. "Kelley has the highest ranking living Nazi basically dropped into his lap and sort of goes, this is an opportunity to dissect the nature of evil. Göring, on the other hand, is looking for his last moment on the world stage."
Ultimately, Kelley is haunted by his own conclusion, as described in his memoir 22 Cells in Nuremberg, that the Nazis were fundamentally no different than the average person and that their atrocities could be replicated anywhere.
"Göring was by all accounts an incredibly charming and funny individual," Vanderbilt said. "The fact that he loves his wife the same way that we love our spouses, that he loves his children [daughter] the same way we love our children, to me that doesn't excuse anything. It actually makes it all the more horrifying."
The material has some parallels with Vanderbilt's script for the 2007 thriller Zodiac, where one man becomes obsessed with another's crimes.
In Nuremberg, Russell Crowe leads a stellar cast as Göring — a role for which he learned to speak German — while Rami Malek plays Kelley. Michael Shannon is Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who served as the chief U.S. prosecutor at the trials.
"Nuremberg was a pretty remarkable moment in history where the world came together to choose justice over vengeance and do something that I think was truly a good act," Vanderbilt said.
Jackson helped stand up the tribunal in short order, involving British, French, Soviet and U.S. judges. He did so because, as his character puts it in the film, "the world needs to know what these men did." He also hoped to prevent the horrors of World War II from ever taking place again.
That last part proves most elusive, as the film hammers home repeatedly, though not very subtly.
In Göring's cell, with his superiors pressuring him to find out what the Nazi figurehead might say on the stand, Kelley asks the military commander what drew him to Hitler. Göring's response? "He made us feel German again." Vanderbilt denies he was inspired by President Trump's campaign slogan "Make America Great Again," but the parallels are unlikely to escape audiences.
"I wrote that scene 12 years ago," he said. "I felt it was relevant then, and I certainly feel it's relevant now. And I think, unfortunately, it will be relevant in the future."
In another true-to-life subplot, Howie Triest (Leo Woodall) returns to Germany to serve as a U.S. military translator at Nuremberg, after having fled the country for the U.S. because he was a German Jew. He tells Kelley in the film: "Do you want to know why it happened here? Because people let it happen."
A pivotal moment in the film comes when wartime footage shot as Allied troops reached the concentration camps is shown in the courtroom. The images of emaciated survivors and bodies piled up, dozens of them pushed on top of one another by a bulldozer, have lost none of their shocking horror 80 years later.
"It was something from the very beginning I knew I wanted to do," Vanderbilt said.
He told his actors to avoid doing any research for the scene in order to perform it fresh. So, on a set built to the exact specifications of the Nuremberg courtroom, with 300 extras and four cameras turned on each of the lead actors, the team observed a moment of silence. Then, they switched on the projector.
"What you see in our movie is the reaction of those actors" in that moment, Vanderbilt said. "I wanted to put you as an audience member in the same shoes as the people were in the courtroom that day when this footage was first shown to the world."
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Phil Harrell.
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