A Review
James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg (2025) is not a bad film. It is well acted, historically attentive, and visually disciplined. Yet I left the theater with a sense of unease that did not come from artistic choices. It came from the film’s final movements, where it tries to warn about modern threats to liberal order while standing on moral ground far too soft to bear the weight of its own warning.
The film ends with the executions of the Nazi leadership. These scenes are not triumphalist. They are sober and restrained. The narrative does not dwell on courtroom procedure or on the long hours of testimony that defined the historical trials. Only Hermann Göring takes the stand, and even that scene functions less as a legal reckoning and more as an exhibition of his ability to mythologize himself. The central drama unfolds elsewhere. Göring spends most of the film in his cell, engaged in extended conversations with Colonel Douglas Kelley, the American psychiatrist assigned to evaluate him. Göring uses these conversations to recast his history, to present his choices as inevitable, and to test how far a capable listener might be drawn into his explanations. By the time the executions arrive, the viewer has not been watching a courtroom chronicle. The viewer has been immersed in the psychology of evasion, calculation, and self-presentation. The executions feel like the necessary end of a moral confrontation rather than the end of a procedural trial.
What follows is more revealing. A young American translator steps outside after the hangings. He takes out a cigarette he has saved through the war and places it between his lips. This is the moment when the film invites its audience to relax, to believe the work is finished. Yet as he raises his lighter, he stops. He lowers his hand, removes the cigarette, and lets it fall before walking away.
The message is straightforward. The danger is not gone. Evil does not disappear because its architects have been punished. A society must remain on guard. There is nothing objectionable about that point. Yet the film ties this warning to an argument it cannot sustain. Vanderbilt insists that the Nazi defendants were “ordinary men.” He presents their ordinariness as the real warning. If such men could commit such crimes, then any society is vulnerable. The audience is meant to leave the theater with humility rather than distance, and keep watch for the radicalized ordinariness.
Vanderbilt builds his warning on a conception of justice that functions as a secular instinct. Justice appears in the film as a shared intuition, a moral reflex associated with democratic life. It requires no revelation. It does not appeal to an objective moral order. It rests on the unspoken assumption that “decent people” can recognize evil when they see it. For Vanderbilt, this assumption as enough. He never considers how unstable this foundation becomes when detached from anything beyond contemporary public sentiment, ironically assuming the stability of the same over time.
Here the internal contradiction becomes clear. Vanderbilt warns that ordinary men can be carried into extraordinary crimes by ideology. At the same time, he assumes justice is self-evident. He does not ask what secures justice against the same ideological currents that corrupted an earlier generation. He does not ask what prevents a society from redefining justice when a new consensus arises. The same kind of confidence that now condemns Nazism once supported other forms of cruelty. The film warns about authoritarianism and fails to see that a justice grounded only in cultural instincts is vulnerable to the same distortions it condemns.
This tension is difficult to ignore because of the world we inhabit. In contemporary America, morally charged labels such as “Nazi,” “fascist,” and “extremist” are used with remarkable looseness. These terms rarely operate as precise descriptions. They have become instruments of exclusion. The accusation itself is treated as proof. The punishment is social removal. The label assigns existential guilt to whoever receives it. Vanderbilt presents these words as historical realities. In our moment, they function as tools of moral theater.
This is where the film’s warning breaks down. Vanderbilt wants to condemn authoritarianism, and he is right to do so, but he relies on the immediacy of the horrors he has just placed on the screen. The audience knows authoritarianism is evil because it has seen the camps and the piles of bodies and the bulldozers pushing human remains into pits. The evil is undeniable because it has left a physical record. Our own moment treats the language of catastrophe with far less care. Entire groups are said to face “erasure.” Routine political disagreements are framed as existential threats. Legislative debates are labeled as genocide. The rhetoric is severe, but the realities beneath it do not match the claims. At the same time, the only consistent killing in our society happens out of sight. It does not involve bulldozers or open graves. It is collected quietly by biohazard disposal contractors, classified as medical waste, and moved without public attention. The contrast reveals how thin our moral instincts have become. We apply catastrophic language where there is no catastrophe, and withhold it where destruction actually occurs. A justice that speaks loudly about imaginary horrors while remaining silent about real ones has already lost its ability to judge the world truthfully.
This is the deeper relevance of the film. Vanderbilt wants to warn us about the dangers of authoritarian movements. Yet he cannot explain why authoritarianism is wrong beyond the emotional recoil produced by the images he has shown. His vision of justice rests on sentiment, and the triumph of one sentiment over another, rather than on moral architecture. A justice built on intuition can condemn yesterday’s crimes and remain blind to the quiet destruction occurring in the present. It can recoil from the evidence of history while overlooking the realities of its own age.
This is where a Christian account of justice becomes necessary. Christianity agrees with Vanderbilt’s psychological observation. The perpetrators at Nuremberg were not anomalies. They acted from desires, ambitions, and fears that Scripture identifies in every human heart. Christianity removes the illusion that evil is always “over there.” But Christianity does not end with a diagnosis of human nature. It grounds justice in the character of God. Judgment belongs to Him before it belongs to any human court. Human dignity is conferred by Him, not constructed by social agreement. Justice is accountable to a moral order that stands above cultural passion.
A Christian framework produces a thicker form of justice. It condemns evil without erasing the humanity of the wrongdoer. It restrains the zeal of a majority even when that majority believes it is acting righteously. It places judgment within a structure that cannot be bent to the mood of the moment. It recognizes that human systems are capable of mistaking fervor for virtue. Christianity supplies the weight that Vanderbilt’s humanistic justice lacks.
The translator’s unlit cigarette captures this unresolved tension. The war was over, but the moral conditions that made it possible were not. The film recognizes the lingering danger but cannot name its source. The danger is not ideologies. The danger is the instability of a culture that no longer knows how to distinguish between real evil and imagined evil. It is the instability of a culture that lacks the weight required to know why justice matters or what must undergird it for justice to remain justice at all.
The cigarette remains unlit because the danger remains. The film grasps the symptom. It does not grasp the cause. Until that cause is acknowledged, our warnings will remain loud, our judgments will remain thin, and our sense of evil will remain tragically misaligned with reality.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
