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Nuremberg is a 2025 American historical drama film written and directed by James Vanderbilt. It is based on the 2013 non-fiction book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai.

During the Nuremberg trials that followed World War II in 1945-1946, chief psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) interviews imprisoned surviving leaders of Nazi Germany to determine whether they are fit to stand trial for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. There, he enters a "battle of wits" against Adolf Hitler's right-hand man, Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe).

The cast also includes Leo Woodall as Sgt. Howard "Howie" Triest, Michael Shannon as Robert H. Jackson, Richard E. Grant as David Maxwell Fyfe, Colin Hanks as Gustave Gilbert, John Slattery as Burton C. Andrus, Wrenn Schmidt as Elsie Douglas and Lotte Verbeek as Emmy Göring.

Not to be confused with the 2000 miniseries Nuremberg, on the same subject.

Nuremberg contains examples of:

• Above Good and Evil: Göring implies that "great men" should consider themselves above conventional morality, as, for example, Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great led campaigns that killed hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of people, and yet these conquerors are still remembered and left a mark on the world, while all those who died in their wars of conquest are long-forgotten.
• Accomplice by Inaction:
  • Kelley spends most of the film trying to figure out what made many Germans embrace Nazism, viewing it as a distinct trait. Kelley spends the film being increasingly disturbed by the realization that it isn't, and he can't wrap his head around why. Howie eventually bluntly tells him that most people just didn't care enough to stop it when they were profiting off the rampant antisemitism and authoritarianism.
  Howie Triest: (to Kelley) You wanna know why it happened here? Because people let it happen.
  • Göring is also shown to be an example. The film depicts him as not personally bigoted, but he signed off on creating the concentration camps in the first place and didn't do anything to stop the Holocaust because he simply didn't care.
• Actually Pretty Funny: When they first meet, Göring tells Kelley about being shot in World War I and in the Beer Hall Putsch. Kelley comments that he's been shot a lot, to which Göring laughs and describes it as an occupational hazard. His joke that he has an excellent physique... just ask his wife, gets a chuckle in turn.
• Adapted Out: While all the real-life Nuremberg defendants who actually participated in the trial are present — albeit most of them have no dialog — along with Robert Ley, who killed himself before the trial could take place, one defendant who isn't seen or mentioned at all is Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, a prominent German industrialist who was indicted for use of slave labor, but turned out to be in such poor health that it became obvious there was no way he could stand trial, leading to his son Alfried (who had taken over the family business in the latter years of the war) being put on trial separately at a later date.
• Affably Evil: Göring can be charming when he wants to be, to the point that there are fully justified concerns about Kelley seeming to be more on his side than he should be.
• The Alcoholic: Kelley becomes one after his time in Nuremberg.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Kelley falling into the world's most obvious Honey Trap and telling a woman who he already knows is a reporter that he doesn't think Jackson can beat Göring on the stand wouldn't have happened had he not drunk himself into a near-stupor beforehand.
• Armor-Piercing Question: After successfully deflecting all Jackson's questions about the Holocaust, Göring is undone when Maxwell Fyfe asks him if he was still Reichsfuhrer for the whole time the exterminations were being carried out. Göring has to admit that he was, exposing how implausible it is that he could possibly not have known what was happening.
• Artistic License – History: Has its own page.
• Berserk Button: When Rudolf Hess is brought in, he sees Göring and immediately does a Nazi salute. Colonel Andrus then shoves him against a wall and tells him to never do that in his presence again.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: This is what many members of the Nazi high command decided at the end of the war. During the movie, Robert Ley and Göring ultimately reach the same conclusion.
• Bittersweet Ending: The trial is ultimately a success and establishes precedent that goes on to become the basis for future war crimes trials, while ten of the Nazi leaders are hanged, starting with Streicher, whose hideously Undignified Death ends up evoking pity from the watchers. Göring is convicted, but cheats the hangman by taking cyanide and dies on his own terms, enraging the Allies. As for the main characters, Jackson continues his career on the court and Triest returns to America with his sister and lives into his nineties, but Kelley ends up as an alcoholic failure just as Göring predicted and kills himself the decade after the trial while his warnings about fascism are mocked and ignored by the public.
• Black Comedy: After a better-than-usual conversation with Robert Ley, Kelley optimistically says that he thinks he's finally getting somewhere with Ley. An alarm immediately blares, alerting the US military personnel of Ley's suicide.
• Black Site: The surviving leaders of Nazi Germany are detained in a secret military prison, as said in the trailer. Historically, that was the Landsberg Prison (and ironically also where Hitler was imprisoned after his failed 1923 putsch in Munich).
• Bringing in the Expert:
  • Douglas Kelley is brought in by Col. Andrus to evaluate the mental health of all the prisoners and keep them alive throughout the trial.
  • Later on, Gustave Gilbert is brought onboard to serve as a "second opinion" as Andrus feels Kelley is losing his objectivity.
• Call-Back: Göring tells Kelly relatively early in the film, when Kelley is showing him a magic trick, that he has his own magic trick: he will not be hanged. Göring learns the phrase "abracadabra" later, when Kelley shows him another magic trick. At the end he says "abracadabra" when he produces the cyanide capsule in his prison cell.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: What Streicher's execution becomes. The hangman botched the job and rather than near instant death from a broken neck he ends up strangled and losing bladder control. This is very much truth in television as the hangman, John C. Woods, was incompetent and not qualified^note He got the job as US Army hangman by claiming to have taken part in a few executions but later investigation proved the states he claimed to have hanged people in had switched to electrocution long before the claimed dates. Additionally, Woods was the only person who had actually wanted the position, meaning that replacing him would have meant halting executions until they could find a more qualified replacement.. In real life it was even worse with some taking 20 minutes to die and having noses torn off because the trap door was to small to fit their bodies cleanly through. Woods also used the older standard drop system and took no account of different weights and builds as trained hangmen did which accounted for much of the screw up.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Various Nazi defendants, including Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, General Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach, Hans Frank, Franz von Papen, and Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, only appear in the background. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Robert Ley, Julius Streicher, and Rudolf Hess receive the most screen time and focus after Göring, including introductions indicating who they are and what they did. Even then, almost all the time at the trial focuses on Göring.
  • The judges and the actual trial received very little screen time.
• Driven to Suicide: Suffering from depression due to the poor sales of his book and people not heeding his warnings that fascism could take root in America, Douglas Kelley took his own life in 1958. He used a cyanide capsule, the same method with which Göring killed himself twelve years earlier.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Per the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, Howie Triest reunited with his younger sister, brought her to the U.S., and lived to be ninety-three. Given what we learn throughout the movie, damn is it well-earned.
• Establishing Character Moment: In the first scene with Göring, he indicates that he believes he is still in a position of power by asking the capturing US soldiers to get his luggage.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Göring's defense rests upon him being knowingly complicit in many forms of antisemitism and tyranny, but not knowingly participating in deliberate extermination, and he maintains that he built the camps for forced labour and did not know what they actually got used for. The film makes no real judgement on whether this is a pragmatic lie or if he is telling the truth, but given his lack of remorse it is clear that even if he is telling the truth, it's still not a major moral issue for him.
  • For all Göring's faults, one thing he evidently can't abide by is cowardice, which is demonstrated when he helps prove that Rudolf Hess is likely faking his amnesia. Granted, Göring does have an ulterior motive in that he's trying get Kelley to send some letters to his wife, but it's clear that he's in no mood to help his former colleague pull off an insanity plea.
• Everybody Smokes: Since smoking was much more acceptable in the 1940s, many of the characters on the Allied side are seen lighting up at one time or another.
• Everyone Has Standards: Emmy Göring is arrested on suspicion of being complicit in her husband's art plundering with Edda due to be sent to an orphanage. Kelley confronts Andrus about this, and he begrudgingly admits that punishing them for Göring's crimes is a step too far and has them released.
• Evil Virtues: Göring is a war criminal but his love for his wife and daughter is undeniable, which Kelley uses to get Göring to be more corporative, delivering letters from Göring to his wife and daughter and theirs to him. Truth in Television as by all accounts Göring adored Emmy, being one of the few Nazi leaders to not have a mistress or any affairs while married to her, and doted on his daughter, which likely contributed to the latter's inability to denounce her father's actions even up to her own death in 2018.
• Exact Words: Göring tells Kelley on the flight to Nuremberg that he will escape the hangman's noose, but doesn't say how he'll do it. He ends up accomplishing his goal by committing suicide in his cell with a cyanide capsule.
• Excrement Statement: The film opens with an American soldier taking a piss on a piece of wreckage that has a swastika on it.
• Face Death with Despair: Julius Streicher, who when faced with his execution refuses to dress, then weeps hysterically for the rest of his time onscreen. Given how most of the rest of his dialogue to that point was made up of vicious antisemitic screes, it's hard to feel too sorry for him, but Triest notably doesn't have the heart to go through with his initial idea to reveal at the last moment that he himself is Jewish and that Streicher has been confiding in someone he considers subhuman.
• Fat Bastard: A slightly unusual example; Göring is fat (which is commented on a number of times) and he's certainly a bastard, but his weight isn't treated as a visual shorthand for "repulsive, gluttonous, self-indulgent hedonist" as is common for this trope or even depictions of Göring in fiction. Indeed, his semi-successful attempts to lose weight and regain muscle, and his completely successful attempt to go cold-turkey on what had been a very high level of drug addiction are both treated as signs of his formidable willpower. He is actually less repulsive in many ways than his co-defendants, none of whom are noticeably overweight.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: While taking down Göring's vitals, Kelley asks Triest not to translate his medical observations and Göring looks up in surprise. This is the first sign that he actually understands English, as right after, Kelley catches his reaction to learning that the American soldiers call him fat.
• Gallows Humor: The footage of the concentration camps shown at the trial includes the testimony of an American sailor who had been liberated from them. He darkly jokes that, despite being a native of Hollywood, California, this is the first time he's ever been in a film. 
• Gilligan Cut:
  • Jackson is told there’s no way the Russians will do the trial. Cut to the next scene, where he’s told there’s Russians signed off on it.
  • A newsreader says they hope they have no problems. Cut to Justice Jackson and Fyfe saying that they have a problem: the Nazis are arguing that they were trying to protect Norway by beating Britain to it. Fyfe tells them that the British were, indeed, planning to use Norway as a "staging area."
• Heroic BSoD: Kelley takes seeing the footage from the camps for the first time particularly hard, because he genuinely had come to a position of near-friendship with Göring and distanced himself from the atrocities he had been told about but hadn't fully processed. His horror afterwards, and Göring's noticeable lack of it, causes him to treat Göring as a monster for the first time.
• Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: Göring is fluent in English, but has a translator present so that he can have more time to consider his responses. Kelley realizes this when he remarks that the American soldiers all call him fat and he looks up in surprise, showing that he did understand him.
• Hiding Your Heritage: Howie Triest, who is a German Jewish immigrant to the U.S. and speaks German so well because it's his first language. Downplayed in that he may just have been hiding it from Kelley, who had previously expressed a desire to understand why Germans were so different than Americans.
• Historical Badass Upgrade: Played with in terms of Göring. He was undisputedly the most prominent defendant at Nuremberg and held a large amount of influence over many of his fellow defendants (such as Hess, Ribbentrop, von Schirach, Jodl, Sauckel, Funk and Kaltenbrunner). But the movie overestimates how much influence he had over all of the defendants or how loyal the defendants were to Göring. Some of them (such as Doenitz, Streicher and Rosenberg) had been rivals to Göring within the Nazi hierarchy and that rivalry was maintained even during the trial. Meanwhile, the more conservative defendants such as Schacht, von Papen, von Neurath and Raeder disliked Göring (despite being complicit in helping Hitler and Göring gain power in the first place) and formed their own circle attempting to distance themselves from the other Nazis. Then you had the likes of Speer or Frank who were trying to present themselves and their actions in a better light to avoid execution and thus distanced themselves from Göring and his attempts of defying the trial. So the defendants were far from a united front in reality than they were presented in the film.
• Historical Beauty Update:
  • While Göring's wife, Emmy, was not ugly, most would not consider her to be nearly as attractive as portrayed in the film by Lotte Verbeek.
  • Russell Crowe is much better-looking than the real Hermann Göring.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: Despite the film not painting Kelley as a straightforward hero, it still drastically softens his image given it it doesn't mention, even in the Where Are They Now segment in the end, that he was an incredibly verbally and physically abusive husband and father (including aiming a loaded gun at his wife and pulling the trigger, only pointing the barrel at the ground at the last second) and his death happened because during a fight with his wife, he retrieved the cyanide pill and spitefully took it in front of her, his father and his ten year old son. There also isn't any evidence Kelley was discouraged by the public ignoring his warnings about how the horrors of Nazism could happen anywhere and he was actually quite successful upon his return to the US, working both as a professor in universities as well as collaborating professionally with the police in the field of forensic psychiatry. While his death at 45 is still tragic, Kelley wasn't as much of the Tragic Hero the film makes him out to be.
• Ignored Expert: Kelley feels that he is being treated as one - that many of his warnings are going unheeded during and especially after the trials.
• Inkblot Test: Kelley performs one of these on the prisoners. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz sees a torpedo impact, Julius Streicher sees vaginas and a "Jewish vagina," and Göring sees a thousand galloping horses. This helps give Kelley further insight into their minds.
• Insistent Terminology: As part of his defense, Göring claims that the proper translation for "Endlösung der Judenfrage" was "total solution" rather than "final solution."
• Improbable Infant Survival: Triest reveals to Kelley that his parents could only afford one ticket out of Germany to America. At sixteen, he got the ticket to freedom. They wanted to send his sister, Margot, too, but she was only eleven. His family never came to America. It's implied for a minute that his whole family died and, indeed, his parents were both sent to Auschwitz and died. At the end of his speech, he reveals that Margot went to Switzerland and survived. She is reunited with Triest at the end.
• Irony: Many of the Nazis ask Kelley if he is Jewish. None of them ask Howie Triest the same question. Triest even gains the confidence of virulently antisemitic Julius Streicher who believes Triest to be a "true Aryan." Kelley was a gentile; Triest was Jewish.
• Karmic Death:
  • The Nazis executed after the Nuremberg trials are maybe the most famous example in world history.
  • Zigzagged by Göring who ends up dead but still manages to cheat karma and the hangman by swallowing cyanide shortly before his scheduled execution.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • Robert Ley dies offscreen early in the film, though his corpse is visible out of focus in the next scene.
  • Goring's suicide also happens offscreen, though the audience gets to see the aftermath pretty quickly.
• Liar Revealed: Gilbert reveals to Göring that his wife and daughter have been taken into custody, moments after Kelley had lied to him about them being too busy to write a letter but that they would.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": The entire court gets one when it's looking like Jackson's questioning of Göring on the stand is backfiring completely, with Jackson looking incompetent and the evidence he presents seeming to actually back up Göring's own account.
• Narcissist: Kelley describes the captured Nazi high command as narcissists constantly, citing their Lack of Empathy, paranoia, and inflated sense of self.
• Never My Fault: Göring repeatedly insists that the concentration camps were merely intended to be work camps for political prisoners and that they evolved into extermination factories due to Himmler and Heydrich. It is never definitively proven whether or not he is lying about this, or whether he knew about what was actually happening in the camps, but the fact he confirms he would still follow Hitler even knowing what he knows now shows that he has no particular regret either way.
• Nice Guy: Howie Triest is a kind man with a very empathetic heart. He lost his parents in the Holocaust, rightfully despises the Nazis, and understands better than anyone that the men scheduled to be executed at Nuremberg deserve their fate. He still doesn't revel in Julius Streicher's panic and suffering immediately before Streicher's execution by hanging.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: It's revealed that Howie Triest was a German Jew who fled the country and came to the US only six years earlier, yet speaks without so much as a trace of a German accent.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • Göring attempts to argue this by comparing the Americans' own internment labour camps and nuking of Japan to the Nazis' own crimes, but this gets swiftly refuted by Kelley's assertion that forced labour and civilian collateral damage are different from purposeful genocide. Nonetheless, Kelley eventually comes to the conclusion that the Nazis aren't as different from "ordinary" people as he originally thought, and that similar levels of evil could arise in the USA. Indeed, his Heroic BSoD after seeing the footage from the camps contrasted with his dispassionate distance when he only knows about the atrocities in terms of words and numbers invites a certain level of comparison with Göring, who is not accused of personally leading extermination teams and committing atrocities with his own hands, but of enabling and encouraging them from a distance via words and numbers.
  • On a more personal level, Göring detects Kelley has a similar desire for fame, and implies that Kelley needs him to become a famous author, because without him he's just another nameless army doctor. However, the reasons behind their desires are completely different, as while Kelley does desire personal fame and recognition, he also hopes to advance forensic psychiatry and humankind's understanding of responsibility for atrocity, but Göring is primarily motivated by a ruthless desire for self-aggrandizement.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Kelley observes Göring is this behind his back. Kelley agrees that Göring wanted to rebuild Germany's national pride and international power; it's just that Göring's main interest was being at the top of the new system he helped create. Kelley explains to Jackson it would be out of character for Göring to be anything but an Accomplice by Inaction because he only viewed the Holocaust as a way to drum up nationalism, and it didn't directly benefit him otherwise. It’s just that stopping it didn’t benefit him either.
• Obfuscating Disability: Kelley determines that Rudolf Hess is claiming amnesia in order to escape punishment. After sitting with him, Göring points out that the first thing Hess did when he saw him was to perform a Nazi salute, further proof he's faking it.
• Offscreen Villainy: The crimes of the various other defendants are never shown.
• Only in It for the Money: Kelley initially agrees to profile Göring and the other defendants purely for monetary gain. He thinks that, if he can find the root cause of what made them genocidal maniacs, he can write a book and become famous.
• Passed-Over Promotion: Early on in the film Jackson's secretary mentions that he's been promised to be elevated to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, though Jackson mentions it's not public knowledge. Later during the trials, Jackson receives word that President Truman has passed him over in favor of Fred Vinson.
• The Place: The film is titled after the city where the trials were held.
• Riddle for the Ages: Keeping in line with history, it is never shown how Göring obtained a cyanide capsule in his cell. He lampshades this with Kelley when he tells him that his magic trick will be escaping the hangman's noose, saying if he told him how then it wouldn't be a trick.
• Save the Villain: Kelley helps save Göring when he suffers a heart attack due to his withdrawal from opiates. This act allows Kelley to gain Göring's trust and start conversing with him in English, just as he predicted.
• Spotting the Thread: Hess claims to be suffering from amnesia and unable to remember his time in the Nazi Party, to the point of being unable to recognize his old comrades such as Göring. However, Kelley and Göring point out that he reflexively gave the Hitler salute when he saw Göring upon arriving in prison, which he couldn't have known to do if he didn't remember.
• Sympathy for the Devil: The film starts to do this with Göring, but then yanks you right back during Fyfe's examination.
• Truth in Television:
  • Nuremberg was chosen largely because of its significance to Hitler and the Nazi government. In addition to the large rallies held within the city, it is also where the Nuremberg Laws were enacted during a rally in that city.
  • Dr. Kelley noted how much calmer Robert Ley seems only to learn a few minutes later that the man committed suicide. Good mood after prolonged mental illness is often a warning sign that someone will attempt suicide in the very near future, as it indicates they've come to a decision.
  • Jackson had difficulty in his examination of Göring, and it was the British David Maxwell Fyfe who had got the better of Göring with his line of questioning.
  • Jackson had indeed been promised (by FDR) that he would be named Chief Justice of the Supreme Court upon the current Chief's death. However, that event happened after FDR himself had died and Jackson was in Nuremberg. Truman, wanting to avoid further division on the court (Jackson had been publicly feuding with Associate Justice Hugo Black, who was also a potential candidate for the Chief role) selected Fred Vinson instead.
  • Julius Streicher reportedly did confide extensively in Howie Triest because he believed him to be a "true Aryan". In that vein, none of the Nazis, Streicher included, learned that Triest was in fact Jewish.
• The Unapologetic: Göring's decision to declare that yes, he would still follow Hitler even if he did know what it would enable shows that, whether or not he actively wanted the Holocaust and the war to happen he does not pretend to be wracked with remorse over it.
• Undying Loyalty: Göring literally cannot denounce Hitler to save his life. Even considering that Hitler is dead and the Third Reich is over.
• Villain Has a Point: Göring's attempts to equate the Nazis with the Americans due to their mutual use of forced labor camps and massive civilian death tolls get a quick rebuttal by Kelley, but even Kelley can't help but agree (much to his superiors' concern) that it's more likely that Göring was indifferent to all the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis rather than actively wanting them, because such a narcissistic and ambitious man seems unlikely to care either way.
• Villain in a White Suit: Göring wears the remnants of his pale-blue Reichsmarschall uniform.
• Villainous Valour: Göring displays a certain amount of this throughout the movie (in direct contrast to some of the other Nazis, particularly Julius Streicher). One example is his shout to the other defendants when they are brought into the Nuremberg tribunal for the first time.
  Göring: Seid stark für Deutschland!^note Be strong for Germany!
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The film only depicts the fates of Göring and Streicher. Only those in the audience with historical knowledge would know that ten others were sentenced to death, three (including Hess) got life imprisonment, four (including Doenitz) got prison sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years, and three were acquitted.