By Sam Ben-Meir in New York
The 2025 film Nuremberg is a serious work. It is sober, restrained, and morally deliberate. In an age saturated with spectacle, it refuses emotional excess and rejects easy catharsis. It treats atrocity with the gravity it demands and judgment with the dignity it claims. And yet this seriousness conceals its greatest ethical danger.
Nuremberg (directed by James Vanderbilt) does not grossly falsify history. It does something subtler and more contemporary: it persuades us that ethics has finally arrived—precisely because it arrives after everything that truly mattered has already happened. The film’s power lies in how convincingly it stages the restoration of moral order. Its danger lies in how quietly it teaches us to accept that restoration as enough.
The ethical center of Nuremberg is not the verdict, nor even the abstract articulation of “crimes against humanity.” It is a moment of near-collapse. Robert Jackson’s cross-examination of Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) is staged as a confrontation between liberal moral reason and unapologetic power. Jackson (Michael Shannon) presses Göring toward contradiction, toward the point where acknowledgment of extermination would force moral disintegration.
Göring refuses the trap. He argues procedure, vocabulary, timing: “emigration,” not extermination; ambiguity, not admission; ignorance, not complicity. He does what power always does when cornered—treats language as a shield.
But the shield matters less than what comes after: even when the record is no longer deniable, he will not renounce the allegiance that made it possible. The trial is rescued—juridically and dramatically—by Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe (Richard E. Grant). Maxwell-Fyfe does not attempt to reason Göring into repentance. He abandons the fantasy of moral conversion altogether. His question is simpler, colder, and more devastating: Knowing everything you now know—knowing the full extent of the extermination—would you still have followed Hitler?
Göring answers: yes. With that answer, Göring convicts himself. This is the film’s fulcrum: the moment judgment finally finds traction, the moment the courtroom regains authority. It is also the moment that exposes the deepest structure of the film’s ethics—and its limit.
What Göring reveals is not ignorance, confusion, or moral blindness. He reveals fidelity. Not fidelity to truth. Not fidelity to humanity. But fidelity as sheer allegiance: disciplined, coherent, unwavering. This is why the Maxwell-Fyfe moment matters so much. Göring is condemned not because he lacked intelligence, but because—when pressed past euphemism and alibi—he affirms the allegiance anyway. His loyalty survives knowledge. His commitment is unconditional.
Legally, this seals the case. Ethically, it opens a deeper wound, because fidelity, in its most demanding sense, is precisely what constitutes a genuine ethical subject. Fidelity becomes ethical only when it risks breaking with the order that confers identity and reward. Fidelity is not stubbornness. It is not obedience. It is the capacity to bind oneself to something that claims universal validity—even when doing so is dangerous, unauthorized, or unintelligible to the existing order.
Measured against that standard, Göring’s fidelity is not fidelity at all. His loyalty is absolute—but closed. It binds him not to a universal principle, but to a particular power. It does not open outward; it seals inward. It does not interrupt the world; it reinforces it. It does not risk the self; it dissolves the self into command.
This is the crucial distinction the trial exposes without naming. A genuine ethical subject is constituted by fidelity to something that exceeds power, something that cannot be guaranteed by authority or secured by victory. Such fidelity breaks with the given order rather than entrenching it. It risks illegibility. It often appears irrational when it first emerges.
Göring’s “yes” on the stand is not the affirmation of an ethical subject but the final confirmation of ethical foreclosure. His loyalty is perfect obedience—fidelity emptied of universality. This is why the courtroom can judge him. And why it can do so only after the fact. The law condemns Göring once fidelity has revealed its full horror. Ethics, in this framework, arrives only after allegiance has already organized the world, mobilized institutions, and destroyed millions of lives. The trial succeeds because Göring admits he would still follow. But that admission comes too late to matter ethically. It matters only juridically. This is the paradox at the heart of Nuremberg.
The film condemns fidelity only once it has exhausted the world it served. It cannot show fidelity that resists power while power is still ascendant. It cannot show the kind of ethical commitment that refuses participation before refusal is intelligible or safe. The trial does not produce ethics; it stabilizes a world in which ethics has already failed. Meaning returns, but only retrospectively. Universality is affirmed, but only once victory has secured the conditions for affirmation. Judgment restores order. It does not teach anticipation.
Nuremberg is austere. It rejects sentimentality. It is grave, procedural, disciplined. This seriousness functions as moral reassurance. We are invited to believe that because the law speaks carefully, ethics has been honored; that because procedures are solemn, responsibility has been restored.
This is the film’s quiet consolation. Seriousness substitutes for rupture. Procedure substitutes for risk. Articulation substitutes for action. The viewer leaves with the sense that the moral world, though shattered, has been carefully reassembled. But ethics worthy of the name does not merely reassemble the world after it breaks.
If “Never again” names the moral grammar of retrospective judgment, then the highest ethical demand may not be repetition’s negation but anticipation’s discipline. In Ernst Bloch’s sense, ethics worthy of the name may be oriented not toward what must never recur, but toward what has not yet been achieved. The Noch-Nicht names a fidelity not to an existing order or an already intelligible law, but to the fragile possibility of emancipation that cannot yet justify itself. Such an ethics cannot wait for catastrophe to become legible, for judgment to become authorized, or for refusal to become safe. It operates too early, without permission, and often without clarity—binding itself to a future that does not yet exist and therefore cannot yet command assent.
Read this way, Nuremberg does not fail because it judges too harshly, but because it judges too late. It condemns fidelity only once it has exhausted the world it served. What it cannot show—and perhaps cannot show—is an ethics of refusal that precedes recognition, an allegiance to a future that history has not yet made possible.
The film closes with a quotation from R. G. Collingwood: “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.” Placed at the end of a film about judgment, the line appears sober, humane, and historically responsible. It reminds us that human capacities—good and evil alike—are revealed in action.
Collingwood, after all, was not only a philosopher but a professional historian. For him, history was not mere chronicle but reenactment: the rethinking of past thought, the recovery of intention. Read charitably, the line warns against innocence. It insists that we take human capacities seriously.
But when placed here, the line risks something more dangerous. If the only clue to what humanity can do is what humanity has already done, then ethics becomes structurally retrospective. We wait for catastrophe to instruct us. We learn our capacities only once they have been realized at full cost. Ethics becomes archival.
Nuremberg invites us to believe that remembrance itself is the highest ethical act. That by studying what humanity has done, we secure ourselves against repetition. But history alone does not prevent catastrophe. It explains it—afterward. History tells us what happened once fidelity to power has already won. It does not teach us how to recognize fidelity to universality while it is still fragile, unauthorized, and easily crushed.
The courtroom can judge Göring because his fidelity is complete, explicit, and confessed. It cannot judge the fidelities that are still forming—those that operate quietly through compliance, procedure, and “just doing one’s job.”
What Nuremberg cannot show—because its form forbids it—is the ethical subject who refuses too early. The one who breaks ranks before legality shifts. The one whose fidelity is not to command, but to a principle not yet named. The one whose action looks irrational, excessive, even treasonous at the time. Such figures do not appear in tribunals. History may rehabilitate them later; ethics demands them earlier. The film honors judgment. It cannot honor anticipation.
Nuremberg is an important film. It defends memory against denial and judgment against cynicism. It deserves its seriousness. But its ethics is an ethics of afterward.
The Maxwell-Fyfe moment makes this unmistakable. Göring is condemned not because he lacked knowledge, but because he possessed it and remained loyal. Justice succeeds only when fidelity has already revealed itself as annihilating. The law wins—but only because it arrives once the decisive commitments have been made. If ethics waits for such moments, it will always arrive too late. The danger is not that we will fail to judge when the time comes, but that we will congratulate ourselves for judging when nothing is left to risk.
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Sam Ben-Meir is an assistant adjunct professor of philosophy at City University of New York, College of Technology.