By Dorothea Shefer-Vanson
MEVASSERET ZION, Israel — What my Other Half (OH) calls my “Holocaust obsession” led me to initiate our attendance at a screening of the film Nuremberg, about the trial of leading Nazi criminals in 1946. The city of Nuremberg was chosen by the Allies as the site of the trial for a number of reasons, both practical and ideological.
Nuremberg’s enormous stadium was the site of many Nazi rallies, and although devastated by Allied bombing during the war the city’s name still echoed with the regime’s past glories and recent downfall. The city was also the place where the first rabidly antisemitic laws were promulgated in 1935, providing the legal framework for the persecution and marginalization of Germany’s Jewish population and other minorities, constituting a crucial step leading to the Holocaust.
In fact, one of the first scenes in the movie (directed by James Vanderbilt) is set in the destroyed stadium, where the prominent American attorney, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, states ‘Everything began with the laws proclaimed here.”
A previous scene, this one set in the USA, has legal experts arguing about the possibility of trying Nazis on any charge or legal basis. This reminded me of the book I read a few years ago, East-West Street by Philippe Sands, which describes the paths taken independently in the late 1930s by two legal experts (both Jewish), Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, the first in Cambridge, UK, the second in the USA, in developing the legal concepts of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. Those legal models played a seminal role in the Nuremberg trials.
The focus of the movie is on the relationship between Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist drafted by the US military to see to the mental health of the Nazi prisoners, and Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second-in-command and the most powerful captured Nazi.
Actor Russell Crowe, who plays Goering, gives a convincing portrayal of the man, combining overweening arrogance with intelligence and even a certain charm, enabling him to develop an almost amicable relationship with the psychiatrist. I was particularly impressed by Crowe’s ability to enunciate German words correctly and convincingly reproduce Goering’s German accent in spoken English. But I suppose that’s what actors are supposed to do.
The part played by the American and British lawyers who lead the trial is given secondary importance in the movie, but the scenes in the courtroom bring the drama to its most extreme heights. Thus, as happened in the actual trial, the shocking scenes filmed by the Allied troops upon liberating the concentration camps are screened in the courtroom, causing consternation among the audience and considerable discomfort to the Nazis on trial there.
In scene after scene we see the British lawyer, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, sipping tea from a delicate china cup and saucer, creating a slightly comical and banal touch which one would not expect from a seasoned film-maker like Vanderbilt. But Maxwell-Fyfe is the lawyer who steps in at the crucial moment, when it seems that Goering has outwitted US attorney Jackson’s cross-examination, and proceeds in getting Goering to admit responsibility for the heinous crimes committed by the Nazis.
In the end the psychiatrist fails in his job, speaks injudiciously to a journalist, and is dismissed from his post. As the movie ends the audience is informed of Kelley’s sad fate in later life.
But the bottom line that hangs in the air as we leave the cinema is the idea that the legal system can serve as the fulcrum that gives rise to both good and evil, and we must always be on our guard to ensure that it is not abused by those in power.
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Dorothea Shefer-Vanson is an author and freelance writer based in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion.