NUREMBERG: The Final Judgment of Evil

NUREMBERG is a movie all Americans, from high school on up, need to see. It takes a unique approach to the final accounting of Nazi Germany and the players that made it all happen. Lest we forget, Hitler had a plan, a "design" for a new and greater Germany. This movie focuses on the relationship between Herman Göring and psychiatrist Dr. Douglas Kelley one of several doctors sent to consider the sanity of Nazi officials on trial. One could consider their actions from 1933 to 1945 to already be a kind of insanity.

However, there is another movie one should see first, one whose horror builds so quietly you are enveloped in it before you realize it. THE ZONE OF INTEREST is a quiet almost documentary movie about the Höss family. The father, Rudolf Höss, was the commandant of Auschwitz, the infamous concentration camp in Poland.

This film shows a typical German family living well with garden parties, housecleaning, family outings, the humdrum of family life. Only this idyllic setting is literally next door to Auschwitz. The horror slowly builds. Nearly every scene shows black smoke in the background reminding us of what happens next door as if the shouting, dogs barking and gunshots aren't enough.

One scene, quietly horrific in a way I wasn't inspecting, is when a Polish maid brings in articles of clothing gathered from the cast off clothes, of mostly Jewish women led to the showers, had brought with them. The item is a gorgeous mink coat. Mrs. Höss tries the coat on and when reaching in the pockets finds a lipstick. Going over to the mirror she tries it on, approves and puts in her pocket. You slowly realize this once belonged to a Jewish wife who is possibly being incinerated that very moment. Then you find out she had been a maid to a wealthy Jewish matron and this was her payback.

Before seeing NUREMBERG, I had just finished a book by a German journalist called VERTIGO. It recounts the rise and fall of Germany's Weimar Republic created from the ashes of World War I and Hitler's overthrow in March of 1933. It's an instructive book filling in much between the war's history most Americans and probably Germans don't know.

My Opa immigrated here in 1925 and brought his wife and two children here in 1926. My father was four. While in college I spent several Christmases with my Oma and Opa and we talked briefly about Weimar Germany. As he explained and was recounted in the book, inflation reached dizzying heights. One American dollar equaled, at one point, one trillion marks! I wish we had talked more because he arrived after this inflation so lived during it. Germans were tired. They never accepted democracy and missed their Kaiser. When Hitler kept hammering on the creation of a new and better Germany many were ready to listen.

The not so great escape.

NUREMBERG has Russell Crow playing Herman Göring who we first see trying to escape, with his family, to Austria. He was Reich Marshall, second in command, just below Hitler, and in that sense responsible for everything happening during the Third Reich.. All the Nazi general staff prisoners are brought to Nuremberg, site of several infamous Nazi rallies, to be tried.

You learn there had never been a war trial before and when US Judge Robert H. Jackson is given the task he literally started from scratch. His first job was getting all parties involved to agree on a trial. One judge each came from France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union. Jackson was the prosecutor. He also had to get the Catholic churches approval so when the Pope demurred Jackson reminded him of the churches complicity.

Göing in the docket

The real interest comes from the interplay between Rami Malek, who plays Dr. Kelley and Göring. Göring fails to see the error of his ways and bows down to no one. I must admit, though, for a two and a half long movie I never looked at my watch. To see such certitude in this evil is mind bending. It is only at the end, when Jackson has run out of questions his British counterpart asks Göring point blank, "Do you regret what you have done?" "No." There, in that one word you realize evil exists among us and it is our duty to keep it at bay.

Another issue is that it was clearly apparent none of these officials ever thought they would pay (with their lives) for what they had done. Trials of this sort were new and they seemed to think they would face no penalty. Today, however, there is a different reality and that is what citizens of this world expect. The lesson here, if we can yet remember it, if we forget get the past we are condemned to relive it. As this movie clearly shows there IS evil among us and it is our duty to stamp it out before it becomes a fire!

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