Essay: Nuremberg, Justice and the Postcolonial Challenge

Dr. Abin Chakraborty reviews the movie Nuremberg (2025) and observes how the movie stands out as an ideal showcasing how justice, reparation and eventual amity might become possible through the dilution of genocidal trauma.

In Nuremberg (2025), written, co-produced and directed by James Vanderbilt, now streaming on Amazon Prime, the psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, entrusted with the responsibility of examining the psychological fitness of the surviving Nazi high-command, to be tried by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and aiding the prosecution, at the same time, asks his colleague, while going through the shelves of a wrecked library in search of biographical details of the detainees, “What if we could dissect evil? What enabled them to commit the crimes that they did and almost take over the world? So how do people actually become like that? We have a shot to figure that out. What makes the Germans different?” The film thus begins by suggesting that the organised genocide of the Jewish people, through concentration camps, gas chambers and such other means, was characteristically different from other acts of mayhem and murder.