In May 1945, the victorious Allied powers faced the mammoth task of reconstructing not just defeated Germany, but also the post-WW2 international order. Keen to not repeat 1919’s disastrous Treaty of Versailles, which had humiliated Germany and stripped it of weapons, land, money and pride, a radical new proposal emerged: to apply an international law based on principles of natural justice. Think human rights, war crimes, the whole shebang.

But how to apply it to a defeated Third Reich that had strayed so far from humanity? How to criminalise the unrestrained militarism of Nazi officials, or engage legally with the surreal horror of the concentration camps? The Allies hadn’t just captured a few high-level ministers and generals; they’d also disenfranchised a huge population of card-carrying German patriots convinced the Third Reich was morally right. It is a truism to say that history is written by the victors. To those who had been fooled into thinking their Nazi leaders were heroic and morally right, these allegations of genocide and war crimes were political lies (or, at least, grossly exaggerated). To them, Germany was once again about to be dudded, just like at Versailles.

The new movie Nuremberg, written and directed by James Vanderbilt, tells part of the story of that reconstruction. Specifically, the trial of Hermann Wilhelm Göring, Chief of the Luftwaffe High Command and 2IC to Hitler himself. Göring, played somewhat implausibly by Russell Crowe, is captured fleeing Austria in May 1945 and taken to Nuremberg, where 14 years earlier the Nazis held big rallies and enacted the “Nuremberg Laws,” their first foray into racist laws targeting Jews. The Allies intend to try Göring for his crimes by a court consisting of international prosecutors and judges; principally American Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) and Englishman Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (Richard E. Grant).

In Crowe’s recreation, Göring is a magnanimous and slippery populist, capable of distancing himself from personal wrongdoing while invoking his martyrdom for the German cause. Like Adolf Eichmann, Göring says he was simply following orders. If Germany had won the war, he argues, these actions were heroic. As the loser, he has become a political tool for the Allies to establish legitimacy. And how, argues Göring, are these alleged crimes against humanity any different from the firebombing of civilians in Dresden, or the vaporisation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Sound familiar? These “what about” arguments became popular in the years that followed. Infamous French-Algerian lawyer Jacques Vergès, nicknamed the “Devil’s Advocate,” deployed them in the 1950s to defend Djamila Bouhired on terrorism charges. Bouhired, said Vergès, was not a terrorist; she was an Algerian freedom fighter engaged in a war with the colonial occupier who was now putting on a ‘show trial.’ A French court straining to legitimise its authority to subjugate the Algerian people could not acquit. The outcome was certain. Bouhired’s defence – later termed ‘la stratégie de rupture’ – lacked legal force but brilliantly whipped up the Algerian people. Unfortunately, Vergès didn’t stop there, deploying la stratégie indiscriminately later to defend not just colonial resisters, but other Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. This is why we can’t have nice things.

But Göring was one of the first. In a desperate attempt to get closer to him, the Allies send in psychologist Douglas Kelly (Rami Malek) to liaise with Göring, profile him. The dynamic between Kelly and Göring is theatrically familiar; think Frost/Nixon, or even Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lector in Lambs. Crowe is a great actor, and it’s great to see him tackling non-exorcism roles. Malek and Shannon, too, bring just enough charm and dramatic heft.

Predictably, Nuremberg strains under the weight of its subject matter, particularly when trying to cram weighty issues into the confines of the legal thriller. Timelines are condensed, legal processes are streamlined, historical characters are rolled together. There’s a sequence where the prison warden Burton Andress (John Slattery) says: “Welcome to Nuremberg” and it feels disturbingly like the film Con Air. By the third act, things feel really contrived, with our heroes desperate to eke a confession from Göring while thousands listen live over speaker radios. This stuff didn’t happen this way. Unlike Spielberg’s more detailed Lincoln, Nuremberg doesn’t always feel credible. That’s a definite black mark for a historical film.

But Vanderbilt offsets the cliches in a powerful sequence where actual footage of concentration camps is played to a stunned courtroom, while a smirking, and then dismayed, Göring looks on. These moments, of emaciated figures rescued in the war’s dying days, of piles of skeletal bodies pushed into trenches by bulldozers, of unbelievable crimes on a monstrous scale, convey what was at stake. A firing squad without a trial might have been more straightforward for Göring and his cronies. And why not? The world will continue to be preyed upon by populist figures relying on nationalism, relativism, martyrdom, or arguments of political contingency, to justify crimes against human decency. But Nuremberg’s point is that without learning from the past we’re doomed to repeat it.

For the most part, it makes that point well.

 

Nuremberg opens today in Australian cinemas.