Right after the Roman Empire, the other topic men of a certain age tend to fixate on is World War II. What may constitute a signal our time is coming to an end is revealed by the tepid box office results of the World War II-themed new release “Nuremberg.” To be kind, the film has not created a box office blitzkrieg.
It is a quasi-factual account of the capture, trial, and eventual death of Herman Goering, the Reich Field Marshall, and second only to Adolf Hitler in power and authority over the German war machine. The film includes a brilliant performance by Russel Crowe as Goering. He gives us a complicated man, evil, but complicated. He displays cold indifference to the murderous results his ideology brought, yet he worries about his wife and daughter when his imprisonment separates them. But all the time, he is a man who is scheming, planning, and feeling very superior to all around him, and vows to “beat the hangman,” a boast he made good on.
Goering was a big figure in every sense, from his 300-plus pounds, his baby blue Luftwaffe Reich Marshal’s uniform adorned with medals everywhere, and his upper crust Prussian bearing.
Even when humbled, stripped of all his medals, and sitting as a fat and sickly man in a stone prison cell, he takes a perverted pride in his prominence as some kind of Nordic warlord.
The film’s narrative is told through the perspective of a U.S. Army psychiatrist assigned to assess and maintain the mental health of the high-level Nazi prisoners who were going to be prosecuted in an unprecedented war crimes trial. There was no precedence for this trial and no consensus from any court in the world as to the legality of it. It truly was an international “show” trial, but borne from a sense that something had to be done to address the global scale of evil that was the Nazi regime.
The Army psychiatrist, played by Remi Malek, was a real person, and he wrote a book about his time as Goering’s doctor. What may have been added by scriptwriters was his motivation to become famous for his book. Whether true or not, it does make his character not very likable, and when his counterpart is the second most important figure in one of the most murderous regimes in the 20th century, it would have been a better movie with a protagonist we could root for.
On many levels this is just another “Hollywood” version of history. But it is an important film not only by what it portrays that is true, but also by what it perpetuates that is false. Both ends of the truth spectrum are valuable teaching opportunities for parents who want to discuss history with their teenage children. I would not recommend this for any child under 14.
For the truth of this movie there is no more powerful and gut-wrenching scene than when the Nazi defendants are forced to watch a film of the liberated concentration camps. The Holocaust footage used in the dramatized version of the Nuremberg movie is the actual footage shown to the real Nuremberg defendants. The images of industrialized genocide sans sound still overwhelms even 80 years hence, and it is important for future generations to see in all its awful inhumanity to maintain the “never again” paradigm.
The second most important thing this film teaches is that, like the mantra of the infamous Nazi Propagandist Josef Goebbels, people will believe a big lie easier than a little one. And that lie proffered by the film “Nuremberg” is that Pope Pius XII was some kind of Nazi collaborator.
The producers of the film inserted this lie in an utterly fabricated nonhistorical meeting of Robert Jackson, the American Supreme Court Justice who was selected to prosecute the Nazis in “Nuremberg,” and Pope Pius XII at the Vatican.
The people who made this film had no idea, or did not care to know, that a scene of Pius casually walking down a corridor in the Vatican with some American political figure discussing things like back-room politicians is ludicrous. It never took place. Its clumsy inclusion of this scene into this otherwise okay film perpetuates the libel that has metastasized over many decades inferring Pius was not a foe of Adolf Hitler. A scandal, yes, but also an opportunity to delve into the truth of the matter.
Many historians, Catholic and non-Catholic, have debunked that notion, but “mainstream” Hollywood does not seem to care. More recently, Catholic commentator Michael Knowles produced a video project detailing how Pius was a courageous churchman in a horrible time and who, according to the state of Israel, was responsible for saving the lives of several hundred thousand Jews in Italy.
So, watch “Nuremberg.” Show it to your age-appropriate children. Where it is true, discuss how that must never happen again. And where it is false, educate your children on the life of a remarkable pope who guided the Church through one of the darkest times in human history.
