NUREMBERG: What Russell Crowe’s new film gets right — and wrong.

The movie’s script — adapted by Vanderbilt from the 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai — is better than some of its acting. Goering accused the prosecutors of “American hypocrisy” and he was by no means wrong. It was a mistake to include in Nuremberg’s prosecution evidence of such episodes as the 1940 Luftwaffe bombing of Rotterdam, when Allied air forces had since flattened half the cities of Europe. It seemed even to many contemporaries a travesty that Soviet judges sat on the bench at Nuremburg alongside the British, French and Americans: until at least 1942 Stalin had murdered far more people than Hitler.

It is chilling to hear Goering offer some of the same excuses for dispensing with the processes of democracy that are offered today by American Maga chiefs. This does not brand the latter as Nazis but it reflects a matching, terrifying contempt for law.

So terrifying and contemptuous, that the fascistic Drumph and his minions in the Führerbunker have gone along (albeit sometimes grudgingly) with every rogue judge’s decision, appealing them to the Supreme Court (unlike his predecessor). I missed similar scenes in Laurence Olivier’s The World at War.