NUREMBERG: A Film Review

It's been a while since the last Blockbuster epic on World War II. Not least one covering the life of a leading historical figure, who played such a significant role in all the events of Europe's most cataclysmic conflict. In this film, it is Reichsmarschall Herman Goring (Russel Crowe), Hitler's deputy and one of the leading figures in the rise & fall of the Third Reich, and the leading figure left alive for the victorious Allies to interrogate and put on trial for War Crimes in the ruins of the Nuremberg, where the Nazis most powerful propaganda spectacles had once held the masses enthralled.  

The last comparable epic was the German Film 'Downfall' (Der Untergang), with Hitler’s final days in the Bunker portrayed brilliantly by the now sadly departed Bruno Ganz. The last and only time he's ever been portrayed that well in English was by Antony Hopkins in the 1981 Film 'The Bunker.' An utterly brilliant performance by Hopkins, widely critically acclaimed for his powerful ability to capture the Fuhrer in word, mood and gesture. Capturing Hitler's rapid physical and mental deterioration during the 105-day entombment in the damp, claustrophobic concrete boxes under the bombed-out Reich Chancellery. From sweating, shaking exhaustion and visible sheer mental collapse to last manic furious outbursts, Hopkins plays Hitler as human, if not exactly sympathetic, then accessible in a way other actors have failed (all too often purposefully) to do. As in other famous roles Hopkins showed the human being, making the calmer interactions no less disturbing. Perhaps why the film itself has all but disappeared from memory. No Nazi can ever even remotely be portrayed as a human being, God forbid that! With one critic of the film at the time going as far as to write Hopkins performance (and I paraphrase the review to emphasise the point), all too often argued that any three dimensional portrayal  might one day create the spectre of making Hitler psychologically and historically understandable, where he might even appear heroic; ending his review with the rather tongue in cheek observation that 'The possibility of a musical called Springtime for Hitler is no longer a bizarre joke! Hilarious! Whether intentional or not, Mel Brookes was on firmer ground saying you can undermine an idea more successfully with humour, so people find it harder to take seriously, than by simply & forever creating a two-dimensional manic evil caricature.  

Director James Vanderbilt & Russell Crowe, in the lead role, have gone a long way to avoid making this mistake with their representation of Hermann Goering on trial at Nuremberg. It is a brilliantly scripted, filmed & paced movie. The performances and the emotional tension created between Crowe as Goering & Rami Malek as the U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelly are gripping and superb and will no doubt earn both (along with a stellar supporting cast and director) a clutch of awards at the forthcoming 98^th Oscars Ceremony. The context was well set, the characters well fleshed out and there was even room for elements of humour on issues as serious as 'Who started it! ', in discussing whether to begin proceeding with the Nazis (or British) Norway campaign! Finely balancing what could otherwise have been a movie that was all but too dark to watch. That darkness arrives when the original footage shown during the trial of the horrors discovered upon the liberation of the concentration camps integrated into the core of the film. The actors were purposefully not shown this footage prior to filming. Their reactions recorded as they watched as part of the making of this courtroom reconstruction. 

Goering was portrayed as the well-rounded, charming, charismatic, intelligent, patriotic narcissist, family man, antisemite, war hero, as well as the drug addict he was in real life. Above all he was also shown to be capable and more importantly accountable for the crimes which he was charged and convicted of. Even if the narrative and the story telling of the long defences prepared and gave, as well as the different lines of legal argument the prosecution took (in over 11 days of questioning), had to be much condensed and simplified. The point was well made and clearly depicted. The portrayals were genuine. Russell Crowe studied Goring in immense detail and gave one of the best performances of an illustrious career. Taking on a very difficult role that could easily have been over played or simply become the usual Nazi caricature. Instead, Crowe's portrayal gave Goring context and made him believable and at times quite empathetic. That is hard to do and a great credit to the actor who was born in New Zealand and grew up in Australia. Not unlike the brilliant Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge Christopher Clark a fellow Australian; sometimes distance can bring more balanced analysis. 

It took a great Swiss German Actor Bruno Ganz to play the Fuhrer most convincingly in German. A Welshman to date in English. Perhaps time for an Austrian, who knows the nuanced differences between Germans & Austrians, well enough. A role for Christorpher Waltz to play Hitler. His performance as SS Standardtenfuhrer Hans Landa in Inglorious Bastards was so gloriously unhinged that he might just be able to pull it off. If there is ever a director of Ridley Scott's or James Vanderbilt’s quality to take on a film about Hitler's rise and fall then I can only hope it will be less the hills are alive with the sound of music & Nazis , or there has to be another laugh out rubbish depiction a la Robert Carlyle in the lead in Hitler – The Rise of Evil,  then more Mel Brookes bursting  into song to sing, 'All I want is PEACE! A little piece of Poland and a little piece of France!!'  

Nuremberg is fantastic for what it included. However, it is obviously not a documentary as it cast and director make clear. It must be born in mind that every history book ever written, or documentary ever made, also must be viewed in terms of what it left out or failed to cover. Here the obvious omissions were the bombing war, the general amnesty the Allies gave themselves, and more significantly here, the vast crimes of ethnic cleansing, slave labour, deportations to the gulags, mass gang rape of women across all the territories the Red Army conquered, AND crucially that this was ramping up as the trial took place. The fact that from Yalta to Potsdam through Nuremberg, that these conferences and processes greenlit the largest 'population transfers' (in reality, the largest exercise in ethnic cleansing and ethnic reordering in European history), deserves much more attention. The lack of accountability, and the uneven application of justice still has direct consequences that stretch right into what is happening in Ukraine today as well as many of the on-going tensions that exist between states across central & eastern Europe. However, no one film could have covered all of that. They might just however have referenced it! 

Our greatest mistake in all Post WWII history is to have focused exclusively on Nazi crimes and not Communist Soviet ones. That aspect the film unfortunately chose to completely ignore and for me was the largest elephant in the room.  Perhaps in a future directors cut, extended version, many good clips that fell to the cutting room floor might make it into a fuller version. If so, I very much look forward to that. 

The film did however achieve a great deal of honesty and addressed from the very outset the immense difficultly of organising a trial, the complex legal issues and the questions of selective prosecution, retroactive justice and the limited scope of the Nuremberg trials. Not least when so many simply wanted those on trial along with many of their compatriots to be lined up against a wall and shot. 

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For those who are interested in the broader historical context and legal aspects, here is an extract from my book 'Death of a Nation – A New History of Germany' with a link to the book at the end. 

“If justice had been the point, then the post-war hearings should have been held in the Hague, whose courts had created the existing laws which governed war in 1899 and 1907, with judges from neutral countries overseeing proceedings. That way more German military and political figures would have faced charges from a broader spectrum of society, as would and should have members of the Allied leadership. However, there was a key reason that the Allies did not want to hold trials in a city which had passed the Hague conventions 45-56 which limited the rights of occupying powers. These conventions included: 

Article 46: Private property cannot be confiscated.  

Article 47: Pillage is formally forbidden.  

Article 50: No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible.  

Article 56: The property of municipalities, that of institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, even when state property, shall be treated as private property. All seizure of, destruction or wilful damage done to institutions of this character, historic monuments, works of art and science, is forbidden, and should be made subject of legal proceedings.  

The Allies accepted no limits upon their occupation, expropriation and dismemberment of Germany. The greatest hypocrisy, however, remains that the Nuremberg trials declared mass deportations of civilian populations both a war crime and a crime against humanity, whilst at the same time presiding over the largest mass deportation of civilian populations in European history; one that would continue well after hostilities had ended and did not formally come to a close until the summer of 1951. Allied nations, having waged a bitter and all-consuming total war, were in no mood to have their crimes scrutinised then or now. They gave themselves a general amnesty and focused squarely on putting Germany front and centre. Everyone else’s crimes were to be swept under the carpet, wilfully ignored and hopefully forgotten with the passage of time. When the Potsdam Protocol mentioned Germany, it referred to the area within her borders in 1937, before the war and Hitler’s annexations began; final ‘delimitation’ on Germany’s international borders, reparations and so forth were to be left to a later Versailles-style peace conference. In practice, however, the notion of another big conference quickly receded into the background. The Cold War overtook events and after the Soviet blockade and the Anglo-American airlift of Berlin, the idea of a final conference was permanently shelved. No final decisions were taken until June 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe at the ‘Two Plus Four’ talks between the two post-war German satellites, and the four Allies: Russia, the United States, Great Britain and France. By then Stalin’s legacy had been embedded for over two generations and what was left to discuss were just the de facto realities, which he had willed. In his biography of the Second World War, Winston Churchill wrote, ‘For the future peace of Europe (the shift of Poland’s border as far as the western river Neisse) there was a wrong beside which Alsace-Lorraine and the Danzig Corridor were trifles. One day the Germans would want their territory back, and the Poles will not be able to stop them.’ (14) However, none of the Western Allies ever again stepped up to the plate to argue for what was agreed at Yalta, let alone for re-establishing Germany’s borders of 1937. As early as March 1946 the Allies appeared to accept de facto realities when the Allied Control Commission of Germany announced, ‘Germany consists of the existing German territory between the Oder-Neisse line and its Western borders.’ There were still American Foreign Ministers who were willing, as late as 1947, to state that the United States did not accept the Anschluß of southern East Prussia, Danzig and Lower Silesia to Poland, but they had missed their only real opportunity to affect the future of millions at Potsdam, when the Soviets were desperate for the extension of billions of dollars in credits and wanted the maximum out of the western sectors occupied by the Allies in terms of reparations. Post-Potsdam, the issue of final borders was little more than a Cold War bargaining chip; everyone knew that to enforce their will over what had been agreed to at Yalta would have meant a hot war with the Stalin’s Soviet Union, an option that went out of the window once the Soviets also became a nuclear power in 1948.” 

To read more on the history of Germany and its influence on modern Europe, read my latest book 'Death of a Nation – A New History of Germany', or read the blog on my website at:  www.stephenrabarrow.com 

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