In ‘Nuremberg,’ a potent warning about our current politics of denial

Rami Malek attends the London premiere of ‘Nuremberg’ on Nov. 6. Photo by Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images for Sky Cinema

“You want to know why it happened here?” asks Howie Triest — a German Jew serving as a U.S. military translator — in the new film Nuremberg. “Because people let it happen. They didn’t stand up until it was too late.”

Triest’s words, as uttered by actor Leo Woodhall, serve as an implicit plea to the film’s contemporary audience: We must stand up against the advancing collapse of our own democracy, before it is too late. Dark resonances appear between scenes in the film and scenes unfolding in today’s United States.

As Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking Nazi not to commit suicide at the war’s end — that is, until after his sentencing — Russell Crowe gives us a deposed and vainglorious charmer still able to exert something of his vanished power, even from his specially constructed prison. And, as in life, the Reichmarschall has a remarkable ability to evade and deflect: He is proud of the work he did for the German people and would do it again, but claims that once the war started, he knew nothing about what went on in the concentration camps — and nor did Adolf Hitler.

Today, Göring’s various lines of defense are striking as the ur-text for Holocaust deniers, as well as for contemporary leaders who strive everyday to re-write reality by lying about it. It is impossible to hear his arguments and not be struck by parallels to the rhetorical devices we see all around us now.

Göring’s arguments relied heavily on “what-aboutism”: He argued many other countries, including the U.S., had also committed crimes against civilian populations. The Nazis were no different. Likewise, President Donald Trump and his defenders have turned to “what-aboutism” over and over. Did Trump refuse to return classified documents upon leaving office after his first term? What about Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails? Insurrection on January 6 ? What about the Black Lives Matter protests? Family-separation policy? Well, Barack Obama’s administration built the cages.

Such comparisons serve to obfuscate vast differences in intent and magnitude. They also erode the very idea that justice exists, or should exist.

The Nuremberg trials marked the first time that individuals — not states — were held criminally responsible for war crimes under international law. They shaped the development of modern international criminal law and institutions such as the International Criminal Court in the Hague — a court that Trump has repeatedly described as illegitimate. They uphold the idea that nothing, including extreme nationalism, is a defense for orchestrated violence against civilians.

But the Nuremberg trials also marked the first time that, under oath, leaders adopted the excuse that they had no concept of, or power over, the injustice executed on their watch. The Nazi leaders in the dock at Nuremberg all claimed, in some way or another, that they did not know of and were not responsible for the fate of the Jews, or anyone else who fell victim to their pitiless brutality. In the film as in life, those claims caused chief prosecutor Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) to summarize their testimony this way: “While there have been enormous crimes, there are no criminals.”

A similar phenomenon was on display earlier this year in the Oval Office, when Trump hosted Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele. Trump’s administration had just deported more than 200 chained and shackled immigrants, many with no criminal record, to an El Salvador prison made infamous by sadistic videos produced by Bukele and copied by Homeland Security head Kristi Noem.

One prisoner, Kilmar Armando Ábrego Garcia, gained particular attention after it was revealed he had mistakenly been deported in violation of a federal immigration judge’s order barring his removal to his native country. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller argued, without evidence, that two judges had declared Ábrego Garcia a member of the MS-13 gang.

And when Bukele visited for an Oval Office meeting, the administration’s line was clear: they did not have the power to return Ábrego Garcia. His fate, in the words of Miller, was at the “sole discretion of El Salvador.”

Heads turned to the Salvadorean president, who smiled enigmatically. “How could I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele asked. “Of course, I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.”

And the situation was indeed preposterous. No one, it seemed, was responsible for Ábrego Garcia’s fate. (Ábrego Garcia was eventually returned to the U.S. in June; the Trump administration is still trying to deport him.)

There have been many previous comparisons between Trump’s government and Hitler’s. Many have focused, including in the Forward, on Hitler’s first year in power, when Hitler hollowed out the civil service and re-stocked its ranks with loyalists; cracked down on the media, the universities, the judiciary, and the military; and began a campaign of horror in which Germans began to see their neighbors brutally arrested and imprisoned.

Crucially, the seeds of Göring’s Nuremberg defense were present at that time as well. Hitler and his top men characterized all reports of their barbarity as false, exaggerations spread by foreign enemies and a hostile media. Such evasions, too, are in abundant supply today.

After only two months in power, the Nazis made it illegal to protest or oppose them in any way. The Trump administration has taken frightening steps in the same direction. After several lawmakers who served in the military or the intelligence community this week posted a video in which they spoke directly to U.S. service members, urging them to uphold the Constitution and to defy “illegal orders” amid the Trump administration’s promise to send the National Guard “and more” into democratic-leaning cities, Trump posted on social media that the video constituted “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.”

Miller added that the video represented “insurrection — plainly, directly, without question.”

Nuremberg is based on the life of psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), whose encounters with Göring form the core of the film. After the trials, Kelley wrote that he found the Nazi leaders to be by and large “commonplace people whose personalities could be duplicated in any country of the world today.” They were responding, as people always will, to the opportunities presented by serving a corrupt leader, one whose only demand is fealty.