“Don’t look for the scary uniforms.” You’ll miss all the other signs.
When the fever-dream of hate returns to the world, they’ll look just like us, says psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who was assigned to evaluate Nazi leaders, in particular Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), in the excellent and timely docudrama about the Nuremberg trials, “Nuremberg,” that you can now find on Netflix.
See it. In fact, see it this week. Tuesday is Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) and we are in midst of commemorating 80 years since a trial that, according to Rebecca West, who covered Nuremberg for the New Yorker, “was botched and imperfect” in large part because it had to deal with new crimes for which there was no provision in national law or international law.
Despite the risks, Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the trials (played with pitch-perfect humility by Michael Shannon), said, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
The following haunting interaction takes place at the end of the film, between a radio interviewer and Kelley (played by Rami Malek), who was promoting his book about the trial.
Radio Show Moderator: I have to be honest, Dr. Kelley. I find some of the conclusions in your book quite unbelievable. You were dealing with the Nazis, who you must admit are unique people.
Douglas Kelley: They are not unique people. There are people like the Nazis in every country in the world today.
Radio Show Moderator: Not in America.
Douglas Kelley: Yes, in America. Their personality patterns are not obscure. There are people who want to be in power. And while you say they don’t exist here, I would say I’m quite certain there are people in America who would willingly climb over the corpses of half the American public if they knew they could gain control of the other half.
Radio Show Moderator: Doctor, please.
Douglas Kelley: They stoke hatred. It’s what Hitler and Göring did, and it is textbook. And if you think the next time it happens we’re going to recognize it because they’re wearing scary uniforms, you’re out of your damn mind.
Kelley of course was right. But finding universal commonalities in the evils of the Nazis and what we see in our own society was not what Americans wanted to hear just after the war, as people swung into the 50’s, an era of mindless good times tinged with McCarthyist paranoia. And so the book failed and Kelley ended up taking his own life just a few years later.
Americans weren’t ready to hear that they were just like Nazis and that in fact every human being on the planet is susceptible to becoming part of a collective society of monsters. We didn’t want to hear of it, even as Jim Crow was going on. Even as lynchings were taking place regularly. Even as George Wallace blocked the school doors. We didn’t want to hear it even as actual real-live Nazis still existed among us.
But what of now? Could Nazi Germany happen in 21st century America? Could the haters Make America Über Alles Again?
Yes, prophesied Kelley.
Here’s another interaction, which turned out to be crucial for the plotline of the film, and for the trial itself:
Douglas Kelley: Let’s talk about Hitler.
Hermann Göring: It’s curious that you have not asked me this question directly before.
Douglas Kelley: I’m curious what the attraction was. There’s a failed painter, not a very good soldier, yet he was worshipped and revered.
Hermann Göring: He made us feel German again.
Douglas Kelley: How?
Hermann Göring: First of all, I had seen Germany crushed. And along comes a man who says “We can reclaim our former glory.” Would you not follow a man like this?
Douglas Kelley: Depends what else you were willing to do.
While Kelley’s original book 22 Cells in Nuremberg may have gone unnoticed at the time, you can now read it online. Here’s a key passage:
The failed painter murdered millions and his people averted their eyes. He made some economic promises and pledged to Make Germany Great Again, and that’s all they needed.
True, things were much worse for Germans in the wake of Versailles and the Great Depression than they were in America in 2016. Much worse.
So in that sense, Americans were more susceptible than Germans. But Weimar Germany didn’t have Fox News to fan the flames of hate.
I’m not equating the past fifteen months to what the Nazis did between 1933-1945, but even minus the death camps, we now have enough evidence to say that the analogy holds. Murder on the streets? Check. A school filled with little girls blown to bits without a hint of regret? Check. Concentration Camps where kids die? Yep. We’ve seen needless war. We’ve seen a war on civil rights and democracy. We’ve seen military adventurism and international extortion. We’ve even seen an attempt to shake down the pope. (Ironically, the film “Nuremberg” depicts Jackson’s attempt to strong-arm the pope for an endorsement of the trial, though it was nothing like the Mafia-like threats by the Pentagon toward the Vatican last January.)
What else do we need to see?
Douglas Kelley says of Herman Göring, “You know what sets him apart from us? Nothing.”
The only difference is that we know what happened back in Göring time. That’s why they had the Nuremberg trials in the first place. To prevent it from happening again.
We have enough of a sample size now to know that this is no longer a warning of what could be. It’s a description of what is. This is the true Trump Derangement, which has infected our society with a new variant of an old plague.
We don’t need any more Truth Social abominations about destroying a civilization. We don’t need any more proof from the Epstein files. We don’t need any more edicts aimed at keeping people of color from being honored, or employed, or serving our country, or voting, or eating lunch at school, or reaching their third birthday without contracting measles.
The sample size is large enough. Yes, Trumpists might not be Nazis. Mazal tov. But Trumpism embodies a new American strain of the same evil, a highly-mutated variant of the original disease. And this one is far more lethal than the one we fended off after 2016.
The film includes the actual footage shot at the death camps that was shown at the original trial. These are the clips they showed me in Hebrew School. We stopped doing that in Jewish education, not wanting to traumatize subsequent generations, but perhaps we’ve been too quick to whitewash the history books.
Somehow, despite this unedited footage, Nuremberg is rated PG-13. It needs to be seen.
Here’s what Kelley wrote at the end of his book. It’s not too late for us to heed his lessons.
We must never forget the lessons of Nuremberg.
