In the immortal—yet seldom heeded—words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
***WARNING! The following contains certain spoilers for the film!***
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“The Nuremberg trials were something I thought I knew about,” said Vanderbilt (Zodiac, Murder Mystery), whose main source of inspiration was Jack El-Hai’s *The Nazi and the Psychiatrist*. The nonfiction book chronicles the lesser-known efforts of one Dr. Douglas Kelley to psychoanalyze the German war criminals—particularly Hitler’s shrewd and calculating second-in-command, Hermann Göring—and ensure they were mentally fit to stand trial for their crimes against humanity.
“As soon as I read [Jack’s book], I was just like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that!’” Vanderbilt admitted. “I just became fascinated with it. So I used my own money, which you’re told to never do, and I optioned Jack’s book as he was writing it.”
Hewing relatively close to its source material, the film devotes a great deal of real estate to the odd “cat and mouse” relationship between Göring (Russell Crowe) and Kelley (Rami Malek), both of whom “were master manipulators,” El-Hai explained over a separate call. “Big ego and narcissistic guys. When they interacted with each other, they knew what the other was doing and tolerated it. Because each of them wanted something from the other.”
“They’re fencing with each other, probing each other, but also becoming fascinated with each other and beginning to have empathy for each other,” agreed Vanderbilt. “In some ways, [they even] try and help each other at different moments. We talked a lot about *Silence of the Lambs* [with regard to that character dynamic].”
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As he dove down the research rabbit hole with gusto, Vanderbilt decided to expand the narrative to include figures who don’t play a major role in El-Hai’s book. Figures like Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), the Supreme Court Justice who pushed for the trial to take place when “none of the countries” were interested in the formalities of a tribunal.
“They were like, ‘We just fought an entire war. We’re done. Shoot them in the head and let’s turn the page!’” Vanderbilt explained. “And Jackson was like, ‘No, this is incredibly important. We have to do this. People have to know what these men did, or else the world won’t believe it.’”
As we now know, Jackson ended up persuading the victorious Allied powers (the United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France) to his way of thinking and ultimately served as chief prosecutor on behalf of the United States.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God! I thought my movie was over here in a jail cell, but it’s also over here,’” the director said. “Usually, adaptation is subtraction. It’s a 350-page book. How do we fit it into two hours and get to the essence of it? This just kept growing, which I think was ultimately wonderful, because it gives the story a real scope.”
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In addition, Russell Crowe provided his own contributions, digging up out-of-print books containing speeches Göring gave while head of the Reichstag (German parliament) and poring over real transcripts from the trial itself.
“I remember sitting with Russell and Michael Shannon at Russell’s house with a table full of transcripts,” Vanderbilt recalled. “It was like that Charlie Day meme with all of the yarn and we’re highlighting and going, ‘Look at this! Check this out!’ He just went incredibly deep in it.”
Crowe went so deep, in fact, that he avoided social interactions with the cast and the crew because the role required him to “go some pretty dark places,” the director noted.
“He was like an actor who had something to prove when he clearly is Russell Crowe and has nothing to prove. But he gave it his all to this movie and I’m eternally grateful.”
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*Nuremberg* joins a cadre of similar historical courtroom dramas like 1961’s *Judgement at Nuremberg* (based on the trial of Nazi judges who presided over kangaroo courts) and a two-part TNT miniseries (starring Alec Baldwin as Justice Jackson and Brian Cox as Göring), with the topic feeling strangely overlooked by Hollywood.
Vanderbilt attributes this industry blind spot to a preference for the more graphic aspects of the war—be it the visceral nature of combat or the heinous atrocities of the Holocaust.
“People are fascinated with World War II, but it always seems to be the shooting war, which I understand. Battles are cinematic,” he said. “But this not only felt like fertile ground, because it hadn’t been covered, but it also felt incredibly important. There’s a whole speech in the film that Michael Shannon gives to Rami Malek, which is, ‘All of this stuff started with the [Nuremberg Laws that stripped German Jews of their rights]. They did all of these things from a legal standpoint, so I need to use laws against them. This war ends in a courtroom.’ I feel like this is the last battle of World War II. It’s not fought with guns. It’s fought with words, but it is no less intense.”
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That particular exchange takes place at the deserted and slightly eerie Nuremberg rally grounds where the racial laws were first announced in 1935. The ghostly, cemetery-like atmosphere of the location connotes the demise of the Third Reich and the brighter future the Allies hope to build from its ashes.
It’s the perfect backdrop for the clandestine meeting between Jackson and Kelley that becomes all the more effective with the inclusion of subtle sound design.
“That was an example of processing some wind and moving it around,” said Michael Babcock, the film’s sound designer, supervising sound editor, and re-recording mixer. “Every creative choice you make for what the audience is going to hear has to be the right choice. It has to be additive to what the story is and what those performances are.”
In another instance, Vanderbilt requested cricket sounds to play in the background of certain scenes as “a mood setter,” prompting Babcock to do some research on regional insects while enjoying a personal trip to Switzerland.
“Because there are places in Europe where they apparently don’t [have crickets],” he noted. “So if you need that as a tool, you just want to make sure you’re being historically accurate.”
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“The crickets were really important to me,” echoed Vanderbilt, adding that Babcock managed to successfully snag a recording of the “actual insects that would have been in Nuremberg” during the summer of 1945.
“We use the crickets at different times and some of them are just moments of calm and moments of quiet where you can feel nature. You’re in this concrete cell for so long, you’re in this giant, cavernous courtroom for so long, just being outside and feeling nature [is a relief].”
Speaking of the courtroom, the trial was held within the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, which was refurbished after sustaining heavy damage from Allied bombing.
“He wanted it to breathe a bit,” stated Babcock. “So there’s creaks, there’s little bits of wispy, windy things going on. There’s a lot of movement, particularly when all the people are in there.”
The packed space goes utterly silent, however, in a key scene where the prosecution screens horrific footage from the various Nazi extermination camps around Europe (the first time anyone had seen the extent of the Nazis’ depravity toward Jews and other so-called *Untermenschen*).
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Wanting genuine emotional reactions from the cast, Vanderbilt asked them not to watch the footage ahead of time while researching their roles.
“Those images are as chilling as they were 80 years ago,” he emphasized. “And that’s the effect I wanted, was for us as an audience of the movie *Nuremberg* to have the same feeling that those people did in the courtroom on that day.”
“There’s still a little bit of a wind tone in there, but it’s really about that film and the reverb and basically hearing a pin drop,” Babcock added. “It was the roughest scene to do as a person, as a human, but sometimes everybody’s on the same page with what needs to happen.”
A similar approach was taken with regards to the sequence in which Army translator Howie Triest (Leo Woodall) reveals his tragic backstory to Dr. Kelley at the train station.
As a Jew, he was forced to flee Germany without his sister or parents. He returned to his native country with a liberating military, but not in time to save his mother and father from a terrible fate at Auschwitz.
“At the beginning of that scene, you’re really consumed by the train station and all the people walking by and speaking different languages,” Babcock said. “There’s definitely a mood—the steam engines, the sound of trains coupling. It’s shot very well and has this kind of grand mood to it. And as you’re focusing more and more on Howie’s story, very, very, gradually, you’re losing layers and textures in the background.”
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Amidst the weighty topics and melancholic imagery, Vanderbilt never wanted the movie to feel too “dour” or didactically “dusty” in terms of its overall presentation.
“We didn’t want it to feel like a movie that was shot in 1946,” he said. “We wanted it to feel relevant and alive to modern audiences.”
To that end, he added in small moments of levity (i.e., Justice Jackson “blackmailing” the pope) that help offset the heavier elements at play.
“So many serious movies feel like you’re doing homework or eating spinach or taking medicine,” the filmmaker continued. “It was really important for me that this movie not feel that way, that it be entertaining, that it take you on an emotional journey… That is the great power of cinema. Because you can read a book about what happened in Nuremberg, you can watch a documentary about it. But a movie makes you feel.”
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Upon returning to the United States, Dr. Kelley switched his focus from psychiatry to criminology—“because he believed that psychiatry couldn’t account for the behavior of people like these Germans he had examined,” El-Hai explained—and wrote a book on his findings entitled *22 Cells in Nuremberg*.
In it, he recounted his experiences with the remaining members of the Nazi high command and laid out a number of steps that could be taken to prevent the rise of tyrants in the future. His biggest proposals involved making voting easier for eligible individuals, promoting critical thinking in educational systems, and, most important of all, subjecting politicians to psychiatric evaluations before they are allowed to take office.
Despite its fascinating subject matter, the book was a failure, mainly due to its unpopular idea that the Nazis put on trial “were not psychiatrically ill” in the way we imagine mass murderers to be.
“The behavior that they exhibited and their personalities placed them within the normal range,” El-Hai continued. “That doesn’t mean it’s desirable, but it is normal. And if they’re within the normal range, that means there are lots of other people out there like that. At the end of this terrible war and long, grueling trial, no one wanted to hear Kelley’s thought that this could happen again. That these people are always among us, in every place and in every era.”
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The indifference to his now-prescient book added fuel to the fire of Kelley’s already troubled personal life and career, which “fell apart after Nuremberg,” noted the author.
“He became a heavy drinker and his marriage began to have serious problems.”
Sadly, Dr. Kelley took his own life in 1958 by ingesting cyanide—ironically the same method Göring employed before the Allies could hang him.
“That was one of the central questions I went into the book asking,” El-Hai shared. “What was the connection between Göring’s suicide by cyanide and Kelley’s suicide by cyanide? Was there even a connection between [them]?”
Whatever the case, Dr. Kelley was indeed correct. The cautionary tale of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich “didn’t stop these horrible things from happening,” El-Hai concluded. “The Nuremberg trials didn’t stop these horrible things from happening. They’re still happening. They will always be with us and we need to always be awake to the possibility of them happening. We’re seeing signs of them right now in our government and in other countries’ governments—and there are ways to combat it.”
https://bitcoinethereumnews.com/finance/how-world-war-ii-drama-nuremberg-put-nazi-war-criminals-on-trial/
