How accurate is ‘Nuremberg’? We fact check the post-WWII movie.
‘Nuremberg’ movie trailer: Rami Malek takes on Nazis
An Army psychiatrist (Rami Malek) is brought in to look after the mental health of Nazi prisoners before their trial for war crimes in “Nuremberg.”
Rami Malek and Russell Crowe star in “Nuremberg,” a new movie about the trial of the Nazi high command.”Nuremberg” is in movie theaters now.How historically accurate is “Nuremberg”? We fact check the film.
Spoiler alert! We’re discussing light spoilers from the new film “Nuremberg” (in theaters now), so beware if you want to go in cold.
James Vanderbilt’s filmography is admittedly “chaotic.” Yet for the post-World War II drama “Nuremberg,” the screenwriter/director had to unleash his inner history buff.
“I definitely seem to return continually to sort of movies that are about obsession and kind of scratching at the door of what is the evil that men do,” Vanderbilt says.
Vanderbilt based “Nuremberg” initially on Jack El-Hai’s history book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” about the relationship between Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (played by Rami Malek) and imprisoned German leader Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) before the Nuremberg trials.
But then he did more research on Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) fighting to put Nazi survivors on trial in 1945 and ’46 for their war crimes, when the Army “just wanted to shoot them all in the head and be done with it.” Plus, he found out about the emotional backstory of Kelley’s translator, Howie Triest (Leo Woodall). Vanderbilt included those story lines, too, to lend the movie “a scope that two guys in a cell would not give you,” he says.
Vanderbilt breaks down fact versus fiction in “Nuremberg”:
Did Douglas Kelley really grow close to Hermann Göring and his family?
In the movie, Kelley is tasked with looking after the mental health of Göring and the other jailed Nazi high command. He spends most of his time trying to gain Göring’s trust to explore what makes a man commit the atrocities the Nazis did.
During their meetings, Kelley and Göring “were poking at each other and plumbing each other’s depths,” Vanderbilt says. But they “also started to enjoy each other’s company and take stuff from the other one in terms of advice and talking about life.”
As depicted in the film, the real Kelley also got to know Goring’s family, delivering letters from the German military man to his wife. One scene cut from the final movie had Göring preemptively ask Kelley if he’d take his daughter to America and raise her there, because Germany “is going to be a really bad place for her,” Vanderbilt says. “Obviously, Kelley didn’t do it, but that shows you the nature of how close they got, or at least were in Göring’s mind.”
Was Nazi concentration camp footage actually played during the Nuremberg trials?
“Nuremberg” spends a good amount of its narrative in the courtroom, as Jackson is lead prosecutor in the case against the Nazis. At one point, he enters into evidence a film showing stark, brutal footage of corpses and emaciated survivors from the death camps, letting the world truly see the Holocaust for the first time.
The movie includes about six minutes from the 52-minute film produced by John Ford that was shown at the real trials. It also was projected on a screen for the actors in that scene, and Vanderbilt asked cast members not to view it beforehand so they were “fresh to experience that,” he says. “They are great actors, so I don’t want to take anything away from them, but I don’t think that much acting was required.”
Woodall concurs. “It’s raw and it was a really tough day for everyone. But it was in some ways a useful one, too.”
Did British prosecutor David Maxwell-Fyfe really save the day?
Vanderbilt pulled dialogue from trial transcripts for his courtroom scenes, including a faceoff between Jackson and Göring during cross-examination. Jackson falters a bit during questioning, and it looks as if Göring has gotten the better of him when British prosecutor David Maxwell-Fyfe (Richard E. Grant) takes over and hammers Göring about not knowing, as Hitler’s No. 2, how many Jews were killed at these “work camps.” It turns the tide and Göring is left slumped in defeat on the witness stand.
“That really happened, that kind of fumble,” Vanderbilt says. “You try not to read stuff about your movie, but you end up doing it. And I was reading historians going, ‘Well, I bet they don’t include that,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, no, we include that.’ So hopefully the historians are satisfied with Richard E. Grant riding in.”
Did Douglas Kelley warn about the potential for another rise of Nazi-like fascism?
Near the end of “Nuremberg,” Kelley visits a radio station to promote his book “22 Cells in Nuremberg.” He warns that what the Nazis accomplished could happen again one day, but the radio hosts balk at his alarm and throw him out.
Vanderbilt says he crafted Malek’s lines in that scene from sentiment Kelley imparts in his book. “Those were his opinions, and they were not popular opinions at all. Especially then, people didn’t want to think about that. Coming out of a war that long and grueling and so many people died, everybody was ready to turn the page.”
The filmmaker captures in the film the jubilation of Allied troops going home and even a sense of revelry in Nuremberg. “But for the Germans, it’s a very different situation,” he says. “We wanted to show both sides of that aspect. And then you have Jackson sort of saying: ‘Hey, the work’s not done yet. We have to do this.’ ”