The courtroom is a godsend to the movies. The stakes are life and death, the setting fits neatly on a soundstage, and the twists and turns are baked in: every successful trial is, by definition, a well-scripted play. So it’s actually a bit surprising that the most important legal process of all time—the Nuremberg trials, with the purest form of evil in the dock and the fate of international criminal law in the balance—has been dramatized by Hollywood only three times: in 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg, directed by Stanley Kramer; a forgettable 2000 mini-series with Alec Baldwin; and a new film, simply titled Nuremberg, which is in theaters now.
One possible reason is that Kramer’s film is simply too towering an achievement to try to outdo. Shot 15 years after the trials themselves concluded, with an absurdly stacked cast (name another movie where Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, Maximilian Schell, and William Shatner share a scene!), it is a still-stunning treatise on the limits of collective responsibility. In order to make this very point, however, it wisely opts to skip the tribunal’s first and most sensational phase, with the likes of Göring and Hess on the stand.
This leaves an opening, which James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg rushes to fill. Based on the 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, it’s a lively watch—at times too lively. It has things to say, but it’s also the kind of film where people burst into rooms, shouting, “We have a problem!,” and a stoic Michael Shannon, playing Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, delivers jaunty, Marvel-style lines (“Did you just blackmail the Pope?!” “I don’t want to talk about it”). Vanderbilt, who has somehow written Zodiac and Scream 5, seems to be operating in both modes at once. It’s going to make a lot of substitute history teachers very happy.
But, like the original tribunals, the movie Nurembergs are an international effort. Perhaps the most unusual film about the trials came out a mere two years ago and has the same title as Vanderbilt’s, yet there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it: this Nuremberg is a Russian blockbuster directed by Nikolai Lebedev.
Surprisingly, it is even more of an unabashed entertainment than its Hollywood cousin. The Russian Nuremberg (technically, Nurnburg) is larded with so many additional attractions—a love story, a lost-brother melodrama, an espionage plot, several clumsy action set pieces—that the trial itself is more of a backdrop than the main focus. Its political aims, however, are deadly serious. The idea belongs to Vladimir Medinsky, a quack historian and Russia’s former minister of culture, who announced it in 2018 as part of the festivities commemorating the 75th anniversary of the victory in World War II. “The United States have completely privatized the [Nuremberg] topic,” he noted during the announcement.
As much as it pains me to say this, Medinsky has a point. Stanley Kramer focuses on the later, U.S.-led trials; in Vanderbilt’s film, despite the fact that all four Allied powers conducted the prosecution, the Soviets are mentioned glancingly and given no speaking roles. (The only non-Nazi and non-American main character is the U.K.’s Maxwell Fyfe, played by Richard E. Grant as a comic-relief alcoholic who comes through in the clutch to save a floundering Jackson—an inconvenient historical detail that the film surprisingly honors.)
All of this is part of a larger and thornier issue. For Russia and the U.S., W.W. II is essentially two different wars. The Russians focus on the “Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945,” which conveniently elides the fact that Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. Conversely, the D-day-centric American version of the events tends to diminish the 27 million Soviet casualties on the Eastern Front.
Lebedev’s Nuremberg, in its own silly way, attempts to fix this. All Americans without exception are depicted as boorish nuisances; minutes into the film, a character claims that the tribunal was the Russians’ idea to begin with, not the Americans’. (The truth, as so often happens, lies somewhere in between: a Soviet jurist, Aron Trainin, had developed the crucial concept of “crimes against peace,” but the Russian authorities—baffled, then as now, by the concept of a trial without a pre-determined outcome—wanted a kangaroo court.)
Watched back-to-back, the two movies look like one massive adaptation of the Mad Men meme “I feel bad for you / I don’t think about you at all.” While the American Nuremberg barely mentions Russians, the Russian one, true to Medinsky’s vision, is absolutely shot through with the fear of ceding center stage to the U.S. In one telling scene, an American woman in uniform accosts the hero, taunts him with a quote from Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech, then immediately offers to go to bed with him. Russia’s ideal power relationship with the U.S. is, essentially, that of a hatefuck.
This makes sense. Every Nuremberg is about the society and the times that produced it. Kramer’s film ends with a blunt and brave suggestion that America, in its fear of Communism, is putting country over justice in the same way the Nazi judges did. Vanderbilt’s version, coming a little less than a year into Trump’s second term, sounds the “It can happen here” alarm even more loudly: the film’s last scene shows Rami Malek prophesizing a Fascist regime in the U.S. It’s not subtle, but it works. Conversely, Lebedev’s movie—shot before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but released after—is a state-sponsored howl of national ressentiment.
Were a modern Russian director to posit, like Vanderbilt and Kramer, that his motherland has a capacity for Fascism, too, that director would currently be in prison or exile. Which, ironically, proves this very thesis better than any film could.
James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg is in theaters now
Michael Idov is the author of several books, including Dressed Up for a Riot: Misadventures in Putin’s Moscow and The Collaborators
