Christine Flowers: The horror of ordinary men

1961 was a seminal year in the history of the Holocaust. It was the year that Adolf Eichmann was put on trial for war crimes, a decade and a half after escaping judgment in Germany. It was during his trial that writer Hannah Arendt quipped, famously, about “the banality of evil.”

She was referring to Eichmann specifically, but at a larger level her words were meant to define the entire Nazi regime. While there were indeed inhuman monsters who were responsible for the atrocities, from faceless SS officers to people like Goebbels and Himmler, there was also, and not just according to Arendt, an abundance of “regular” Germans who either went along because they believed in reviving the mythical German empire, or because, like narcissistic sociopaths, they didn’t care about the tragedy happening to “others.”

Last night, I went to see the film “Nuremberg” which depicts the inaugural Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, with the central characters being Justice Robert Jackson as Chief Allied Prosecutor and Hermann Goering as the most high profile Nazi put on trial. The others, like Goebbels and of course Hitler had either died by suicide, or like Eichmann, escaped.

But there were two actual storylines. Unlike “Judgment at Nuremberg,” a brilliant film that dealt almost completely with the later trials of less important characters and came out the year of Eichmann’s trial and, as a totally irrelevant aside, the year of my birth, “Nuremberg” has two plot lines: the trial of Goering and the relationship between Hitler’s second-in-command and a psychiatrist named Douglas Kelly.

Kelly was engaged by the US military to assess whether Goering and his co defendants were competent to stand trial at all. That relationship, with its twists and turns, forms the heart of the film. Kelly tries to win the confidence of Goering by appealing to the latter’s narcissism, his belief that he is a “great and important man” who history will remember. And in doing so, he gets inside of his head. What he sees there is the troubling coda of the film, and an early reflection of Arendt’s “banality of evil” theory.

Kelly comes up with his own theory, that Goering might be monstrous but he is also human. That, to Kelly, is the true horror. He sees a relatively normal, albeit egotistical, man who wants power and will do whatever he needs to get it. He has no empathy or compassion for anyone but his wife and daughter who are essentially being kept in a safe house and with whom Kelly facilitates an exchange of letters. Goering, according to Kelly, did not hate Jews as a principle. He was simply willing to climb over their crushed bodies to achieve his ultimate goal: power.

When Kelly provides his report to the Allied commanders conducting the war crimes trial, they don’t want to hear anything other than that he is an aberrational monster. They refuse to believe that he is “human.” And Kelly is sidelined. But as the trial seems to be going sideways, it is his theory that Goering’s Achilles heel is his human/inhuman desire for power and not an innate hatred of Jews that plays a key role in Justice Jackson obtaining a conviction. On the stand, after brilliantly distancing himself from Hitler’s Holocaust, the prosecutor — assisted by his British counterpart — gets Goering to scream “Heil Hitler,” acknowledging that even in the face of more than six million murders, he would still be a loyal Nazi.

We all know that Goering was sentenced to death, but escaped final retribution by killing himself with a cyanide pill he’d managed to smuggle into his cell.

What we didn’t know — spoiler alert — is that Douglas Kelly took his own life twelve years later, frustrated at being unable to convince the world that evil is indeed banal and unless we realize that and treat the root of it, it will crop up again and metastasize.

That’s a powerful message for us today as we deal with hate groups all over the world and in our own country. The parallels are striking. We have otherwise normal people who are capable of dehumanizing others because we believe they are innately worthless. You know what I’m referring to. People of different races and nationalities. The unborn. Christians, Jews and Muslims. We are not Nazis. But Kelly’s theory stands strong.

In terms of artistic value, Russell Crowe must win the Oscar. He is Goering. He is chilling and charming at the same time. Rami Malek as the psychiatrist is quite good at showing the passion and then despair if Douglas Kelly. Michael Shannon as Justice Jackson is perfect, and brings to life an often overlooked hero of human rights.

But the film overall is choppy, and way too long at 2 1/2 hours. I’d definitely recommend it, since any movie about Nuremberg is worthwhile, especially for lawyers who wonder if what we are doing even matters these days.

But if you can’t get to a theater, stream “Judgment At Nuremberg” with Maximilian Schell in his own Oscar-winning role and the great Spencer Tracy as a judge. It’s actually a better film.

Either way, with October 7 only two years past, you need a reminder that the hydra has more than one head, and it rises again every generation.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and lifelong Philadelphian. Follow her on Twitter/X at @flowerlady61