In the two years since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, international law—a body of legal rules and cases that largely has its origins in the Nuremberg tribunals that followed the defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War—has been a constant topic of worldwide discourse. That orgy of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction was the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. And like the Holocaust, it engendered a discussion about the application of such law to mete out justice to the guilty.

But faith in the idea that the civilized world could unite to create a new era of collective security and global justice that characterized the creation of the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials has been largely proven unfounded in the 80 years since the top Nazis went on trial in 1946.

Can anyone be a Nazi?

That historic event is the subject of a new film, “Nuremburg” directed by James Vanderbilt and headlined by appearances by actors Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon and Rami Malek, which opened in the United States on Nov. 7. Though it is a historical drama, the basic conceit of the film is summed up in the final words of Malek’s character, U.S. Army psychiatrist Dr. Douglas Kelley, who administered tests to and attempted to diagnose the first 22 Nazis put on trial, who says, “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.”

In other words, anyone can be a Nazi war criminal, and in 2025, the most popular application of that belief is to the people of Israel.

Though the genocidal intentions toward their Jewish victims of the Palestinians, who were responsible for the civilian massacre and kidnapping on Oct. 7, brought to mind those of the Nazis, the international legal establishment has not shown much interest in prosecuting the perpetrators. Instead, the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, both in The Hague, devoted their attention to prosecuting the Israelis who had been attacked.

Israel’s efforts are much like those of the Allied powers that fought and defeated Nazi Germany and its allies. The Allied victory came at a fearsome cost to their own people: the German forces and civilians. The war waged by the Jewish state to ensure that the Oct. 7 criminals could not continue their reign of terror has actually been conducted with far more concern for avoiding civilian casualties than the campaigns in the air and on land fought by the United States, Britain, and especially, the Soviet Union.

Indeed, the proceedings of the ICC and the ICJ have been largely farcical shows that said more about the moral bankruptcy of the contemporary, so-called “human rights” organizations and legal institutions than anything else. The one-sided kangaroo court proceedings that led to indictments of Israeli leaders by the ICC were a travesty. The behavior of those involved went a long way to discrediting the entire concept, which was largely inaugurated by the Nuremberg trials.

What we have learned is something that has always been obvious since 1946. International law is a loose set of ideas that can mean whatever those countries or individuals that are attempting to impose it on the world declare it means. Which is to say, when it is applied by those who waged a just war against Adolf Hitler’s criminal regime, the attempt to articulate standards and rules has some credibility. But if those posing as judges and prosecutors are, instead, guided more by prejudice—and, as it happens, some of the same antisemitic prejudices as the Nazis themselves—then the results aren’t going to be anything that resembles justice.

In a way, that makes it an appropriate time to re-examine what happened in Nuremberg.

More than ‘victor’s justice?’

This widely promoted movie is clearly intended as the sort of blockbuster that is talked about as “Oscar-bait.” Unfortunately, it’s a mishmash of bad ideas, poor writing and sometimes embarrassing performances, and falls well short of the pre-opening buzz that was generated by its producers—let alone the achievement of the most important previous cinematic effort to discuss the trials, the star-studded 1961 classic “Justice at Nuremberg.”

That Stanley Kramer film was a deeply serious attempt to ponder whether the postwar accounting for the Nazis’ crimes could be anything more than, as the defendants claimed, “victor’s justice,” rather than a precedent that could set down guidelines that might help the world deter more Holocausts or render justice when mass atrocities were committed in the future.

The significance of this 2025 “Nuremberg” lies more in its ham-handed effort to promote a certain universalist idea about international justice and crimes against humanity than in any disappointment about the script, direction and performances.

At its core is an attempt to focus on Kelley, a minor participant in the first Nuremberg trials, who wrote a book about his experiences and then, despite a distinguished medical career, descended into depression and alcoholism before committing suicide in 1958.

The film depicts Kelley’s supposed journey from suspicion and a cynical desire to exploit his role in the trial to make money to one of some sympathy for and genuine interest in shrinking the head of the most important of the Nazi elites to be put on trial: Hermann Göering, played by Russel Crowe, who employs a rather unconvincing German accent and even in his current incarnation as a plump middle-aged man doesn’t much resemble the morbidly obese second-in-command of the Third Reich.

Among the many unpersuasive theatrical devices thrown into a story that was dramatic enough without the extra sauce is the idea that Kelley’s insights were crucial to breaking down Göering when he was called to testify, and obtaining his conviction and that of the other top Nazis.

That is patently absurd. There was never the slightest chance that the four-nation tribunal of American, British, French, and especially vengeful Soviet judges, who are given short shrift in the movie, were going to acquit Göering or any of the other top Nazis of the most important charges relating to crimes against peace and conspiracy to wage aggressive war (though not all, including Adm. Karl Donitz, the head of the German Navy, were convicted of participating in war crimes or crimes against humanity).

Putting the Holocaust on the record

The point of the proceedings was to establish that such crimes had happened, including the first showings of some of the most graphic film evidence of what had happened in the Nazi death camps. That was the dramatic high point of the trial and one in which the film, which merely hints at the horrors rather than shows them in their full depravity, doesn’t entirely capture, though it does at least give us the moment when Göering put on sunglasses and turned away from the sight of his evil deeds.

There is a lot about the chief prosecutor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, whom the film gives more credit for the trial taking place than he deserves, including an ahistorical confrontation with Pope Pius XII, since the plans for such a tribunal had been in the works long before the end of the war. Even though Moscow’s totalitarian dictator Joseph Stalin famously said in 1943 that the best thing would be to execute 50 to 100,000 German officers, the Soviets were themselves as interested in having a trial as the other allies.

It is true that, as the film shows, Jackson was an inexpert interrogator of Göering on the stand. Still, the effort to make that the high point of the film falls flat, more because of Vanderbilt’s uninspired screenplay than the failure of the actors. Nor does the script or Crowe’s performance tell us anything of interest about Göering, other than he was a clever actor who never stopped playing his captors, including, in an important coda to the trial that was left out of the film, convincing one of them to help him commit suicide so as to escape the hangman’s noose.

Equally unconvincing was the injection of a side plot involving a translator—a German Jew who had escaped to America, leaving his family behind to die before joining the U.S. Army, and who exhorts Kelley to help bring the criminals to justice by breaking doctor-patient confidentiality. Many such Jewish immigrants, including a young Henry Kissinger, played a not-insignificant role in the postwar American administration of Germany and the interrogation of Nazis. But having the English actor Leo Woodall, who plays this role, speak in perfectly idiomatic American English rather than with, as any person who had, as this character supposedly did, only left Germany in 1940, a German accent, is among the many small details that this production got wrong.

But the real problem here is that, unlike Kramer’s morally complex “Judgement in Nuremberg,” this film doesn’t really make a strong case for judging the Nazis that goes beyond platitudes. Worse, its conclusion seems more interested in convincing its audience that there was nothing really special about what happened in Germany that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

‘Never again?’

It’s true that the cry of “never again” has rung hollow many times since 1946, as genocides in places like Cambodia and Rwanda, Sudan or even today in China, as the Communist regime persecutes the Uyghurs. Atrocities in these countries have happened without the civilized nations of the world lifting a finger. Efforts to prosecute war crimes committed during the ethnic conflicts in Bosnia, however, have achieved some justice.

Still, the international push to redefine the term genocide—a word first coined in the aftermath of the Holocaust by Polish Jewish lawyer Rafael Lemkin, who was both an ardent Zionist and an adviser to Jackson at Nuremberg, though he is not shown in the film—in an effort to fit Israel’s war of self-defense against the genocidal terrorists of Hamas rather than an attempt to wipe out an entire people as the Nazis attempted to do to the Jews, is relevant. It demonstrates that the application of international law is only as just or good as the people trusted with carrying it out.

While the Nuremberg trials served an important purpose by putting the truth about the Nazis’ crimes on the record in a way that the world would never forget, it did not, contrary to the film’s epigraph, giving credit for it to Jackson, create a system that has succeeded in preventing the concept’s misapplication. And by failing to tell viewers something about the ideology and politics at the heart of the Nazis’ antisemitism or what it meant to Germans and their collaborators, including Göering’s sympathetically portrayed family, the new movie is nothing more than an overstuffed court procedural with defendants sporting bad accents.

The aftermath of the post-Oct. 7 war might have been an apt moment for the sort of film that would remind the world of the virtues and inherent shortcomings of a system applied by multilateral organizations or nations that aren’t always interested in impartial justice. Instead, all Vanderbilt has given us is an unpersuasive morality play that might well do more to encourage antisemites to pretend that contemporary Jews who seek to defend themselves against the spiritual descendants of the Nazis deserve to be put on trial, as opposed to inspiring faith in an impartial application of international law.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.

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