CHRISTIAN TOTO: Nuremberg Should Crush TDS Once and for All.
“Nuremberg” offers a slick, satisfying look at critical trials following the Third Reich’s demise.
Until it doesn’t.
Buried in the middle of this well-packaged drama is shocking footage of the Holocaust’s atrocities. What might seem tonally imbalanced is actually a perfectly deployed smart bomb.
It’s vital to the story in play, while reminding anyone cold enough to compare President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler that they should be ashamed of themselves.
This may be a bit of a spoiler alert, but then Nuremberg has been in theaters for a couple of months now (and is now available for online streaming), so you’ve probably already read about it in reviews, but Toto is referring to this scene:
The first half is often comic. One fellow prisoner is Rudolf Hess (Andreas Pietschmann) who is feigning amnesia, and whose backstory is a farce. When Göring and other Nazi leaders are subjected to Rorschach tests, it’s done for laughs. But the second half is the trial itself, where real footage from the concentration camps is shown. It’s so horrifying it makes everything else feel phoney. This is the moment when the penny finally drops for Kelley and he sees that Göring is a monster and not his pal. Well done.
By late 1942, the Allies knew the Holocaust was ongoing. Americans have been exposed to newsreel footage of the horrors of the concentration camps since the war’s end in 1945. Hellish shots of the ovens with charred bodies in them were seen midway through Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremberg in 1961. The soul-wrenching clip of emaciated bodies being pushed into a mass grave by a bulldozer driver, after the Allies liberated the concentration camps, was a centerpiece of the documentary TV series The World At War’s episode titled “Genocide.” Despite all of that, because gnosticism runs so strongly on the left, they’ve been comparing Republican presidents to the man with the tiny toothbrush mustache since 1944. Another Hollywood movie on the evils of National Socialism isn’t going to stop them.