James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg was compelling and disturbing.

It drew me back to the darkened theatre three times as I wrestled with an angst that I couldn’t quite identify.

The 1945 trial at Nuremberg had been mooted as a just alternative to Winston Churchill’s call for the summary execution of Nazi leaders.

Even so, most defendants were found guilty and executed, their bodies disposed of in secret locations.

The banality of evil

My inner voice kept pestering me, asking whether this was justice or simply another form of revenge – an attempt to bury, deep in the world’s unconscious, realities too confronting to face.

Much of the movie centres on the conversations between American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley and the Nazis awaiting trial.

Conversations that revealed how utterly ordinary these men were, apart that is from being “conditioned to several explosive ideologies”. [^1]

His thesis echoes Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, which recounts how Reserve Police Battalion 101 – “middle-aged family men of working and lower-middle-class background” [^2] – shot at close range at least 38,000 Jews and deported around 45,200 to Treblinka. [^3]

Although a few refused to kill, peer group pressure and the fear of being seen as weak determined the moral compass.

Characteristics of nationalism

Dr Kelley spent hundreds of hours interviewing and testing the prisoners in Nuremberg jail.

He concluded they were not spectacular types but shared three characteristics, “overweening ambition, low ethical standards” and “a strongly developed nationalism which justified anything done in the name of Germandom”. [^4]

In Vanderbilt’s telling, Kelley forms a particular connection with Herman Goring, played by Russell Crowe.

Midway through the trial, the two argue about truth and hypocrisy as Kelley begins to feel he is being played by Goring.

Or he becomes aware of his own egoic delusions and feels compromised by the bond he has formed.

A duel of dominance

Their argument unfolds like a duel, each trying to win moral dominance.

Eventually, Goring states what is becoming obvious, “You have your freedom, and I am a prisoner, because you won and we lost, not because you’re morally superior!”

Kelley knew this. In 22 Cells in Nuremberg he wrote that, “there is no real difference between the individual German and the individual American except for the German’s more ardent belief in his ideologies”. [^5]

The book failed. Kelley suicided in 1958 using cyanide, the exact same method used by Herman Goring in 1946.

Seeking restorative justice

Still my angst lingered. I found myself wondering what might have happened if restorative justice had been attempted among all parties to the war, guilty or victorious.

A process that moved beyond winning and losing, guilt and righteousness, toward a place where we could meet in mutual vulnerability to reckon with what had been done.

Naïve? Perhaps. Yet as Emeritus Professor Cindy Skach reminds us, “justice is a subjective perception of fairness”, because as we all know, “what seems right and fair is hardly universally agreed”. [^6]

[^1]: Douglas Kelley, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, MacFadden Publications, 1961, p14.

[^2]: Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Harper Collins Revised Edition, 2017, p1.

[^3]: Ordinary Men, Appendix.

[^4]: 22 Cells, p171.

[^5]: 22 Cells, p170.

[^6]: C.L. Skach, How to be a citizen: learning to rely less on rules and more on each other, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, p91.

• Sande Ramage loves exploring, one word at a time, what she and others mean by God, spirituality, and religion. She’s a healthcare chaplain, restorative justice facilitator, pastoral supervisor, and wordsmith. Inspiration arrives through pondering dreams in Jungian analysis, walking, movies on the big screen, live orchestral music, sopranos, and devouring books.