The 2025 movie Nuremberg is a historical drama and psychological thriller. It takes place right after World War II and follows an American Army psychiatrist who has to evaluate Nazi leaders before their trials begin. You can watch it on Netflix, Prime Video or Hotstar, it is definitely worth your time, especially for Russell Crowe’s unforgettable performance.

The real Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946) gave the world a chilling chance to look closely at what drives pure evil. To see if the captured Nazi leaders were sane enough to face a courtroom, and to figure out how human beings could commit such horrific crimes, the military appointed an American psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and an American psychologist, Dr. Gustave Gilbert. Together, they spent hours studying 22 top Nazi officials, including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Joachim von Ribbentrop.

The Formation of the Tribunal and the Right to Defense

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To ensure the trials were legitimate, the Allied powers established a truly international legal framework. The panel of judges and prosecutors was drawn from the four major Allied nations: the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France. Each country provided one main judge, one alternate judge, and a chief prosecuting team. This unique configuration was designed to demonstrate global solidarity and balance out different legal traditions, ranging from Western common law to Soviet civil law.

Crucially, despite the scale of their atrocities, the Nazi defendants were explicitly given defense counsel. They were permitted to choose their own lawyers, mostly established German attorneys who understood the local legal landscape or have them appointed by the tribunal. The Allies insisted on this measure because they wanted to avoid any accusations of a ‘kangaroo court’ or mere victor’s justice. By giving the accused a robust, fair, and open defense, the tribunal proved to the world that civilized societies fight tyranny through impartial justice, granting rights even to those who had stripped millions of their own.

The most important figure among them was Hermann Göring. In the Nazi regime, Göring was officially Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command. To make sure everyone knew his power, Hitler created a special military rank just for him called Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches, or Empire Marshal of the Greater German Reich. This made him the highest-ranking officer in all of Germany. Hitler even signed a decree in 1941 stating that if he was ever unable to rule, Göring would take over with total dictatorial power. Because Göring controlled the German Air Force and ran the country’s economy, understanding his mind was the most critical part of the evaluations.

What the Doctors Found Inside Their Minds

The first and most disturbing thing both doctors discovered was that these Nazi leaders were completely sane. They weren’t losing touch with reality, they didn’t hear voices, and they weren’t suffering from mental illness. In fact, intelligence tests showed that almost all of them were highly intelligent. Göring himself scored a brilliant 138 IQ. This means the Holocaust and other wartime atrocities weren’t caused by a group of madmen losing control. Instead, they were planned and carried out by highly intelligent, capable people who knew exactly what they were doing.

Even though these men were legally sane, the two doctors found deeply damaged personalities underneath, though they disagreed on what those findings really meant.

Dr. Gustave Gilbert: How People Become Fanatics

Dr. Gilbert spoke fluent German and was able to get the prisoners to open up to him. He noticed a profound and systemic lack of empathy, seeing that these men simply could not feel the pain of others. They were able to divide their lives into completely separate boxes, meaning they could be deeply loving fathers and husbands at home while feeling absolutely nothing about ordering the murder of millions of innocent people. Many of them, especially Göring, suffered from a severe narcissistic personality distortion, showing massive egos and a desperate, endless need for power, fame, and status. Furthermore, inkblot tests revealed that behind their rigid, cold, and controlled exteriors, these men were actually full of emotional emptiness, hidden depression, and aggressive anger. Gilbert concluded that they were driven by a dangerous mix of blind loyalty to an ideology and a complete disregard for human life, all encouraged by a culture that demanded absolute obedience.

Dr. Douglas Kelley: The Everyday Nature of Evil

Dr. Kelley took a different, and perhaps much more frightening, view. He believed the Nazi leaders didn’t have some rare mental defect. Instead, he saw them as the same kind of people we see today in powerful political arenas and corporate boardrooms, driven by intense ambition, ruthlessness, and morals that change depending on what benefits them. Kelley warned that if the conditions are right such as a ruined economy, intense national propaganda, and a charismatic leader, similar people anywhere in the world could commit the exact same horrors. For Kelley, there was no special Nazi personality, but rather just human nature when you strip away its conscience. Most importantly, Kelley reminded us that these atrocities cannot happen without ordinary citizens looking the other way. Fascism needs a society that stays quiet, makes excuses, or ignores cruelty. When regular people accept hateful language and let democratic rules slip away, any society can quickly turn into a violent machine.

The Prosecution and Opening Submission

The prosecution began after the conclusive findings that the Nazis being prosecuted were indeed sane. The opening submission by the prosecuting lawyer, in the movie goes like this:

“The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because we cannot survive their being repeated.

In the prisoners’ dock sit 20-odd broken men. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatred, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power.

Civilization can afford no compromise by dealing ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom these forces now precariously survive.

Wars are no longer local. All modern wars become world wars, eventually. And none of the big nations can stay out. But the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars in a system of international lawlessness is to make statesmen responsible for the law!

And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, it must condemn aggression by any other nation, including those who sit here now, in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law.”

A Modern Reality Check: Gaza and Global Hypocrisy

The profound words delivered in that historic courtroom were explicitly meant to set a standard for the future. The international community promised that no leader or nation would ever stand above the law again. Yet, looking at our world today, those brave legal trends are completely ignored. The ideals born at Nuremberg have been cast aside, leaving behind a global system that is broken and selectively enforced.

What is happening to the people in Gaza right now is just as heartbreaking and horrific. We see unimagimable human suffering and destroyed families daily, yet the rest of the world mostly stands by, offering empty words and doing absolutely nothing to stop it. This tragedy highlights a painful truth about our world today because the global rules are rigged to favor the powerful. International law is quickly used to punish weak nations, but the strongest countries can simply ignore it.

In a deeply tragic twist of history, the very people who were once hunted have now become the aggressors themselves. The painful memory of past suffering is being used to justify the oppression of another group of innocent human beings. It proves exactly what Dr. Kelley warned us about, showing that when human beings are given total political protection and lose their moral compass, they are fully capable of repeating the very same cruelties that were once inflicted on them.

The Lasting Lesson of Nuremberg

The psychological studies at Nuremberg changed how we view evil forever. They shattered the comforting lie that massive war crimes are only committed by insane monsters. Instead, they helped shape modern social psychology, inspiring famous studies on how easily ordinary people obey cruel orders. In the end, the doctors left us with a terrifying truth, which is that the scariest thing about the Nazi leaders was not their madness, but how completely normal they were.