By Karine Keyser —
Psychiatrist Douglas Kelley thinks he knows how the Nazi high command tried at Nuremberg became monsters — that is, until he spends 90 hours interviewing them in a secret military prison. Ultimately, only one was found insane, unable to stand trial. The rest of the 22 prisoners were — disturbingly — normal people.
The Nazis were “people who exist in every country of the world… who would willingly climb over the corpses of half of the public if they could gain control of the other half” Kelley said in his lectures in America afterwards. “The capacity for their evil could be duplicated in any country of the world today. They all fell within the normal range, psychiatrically speaking.”
If the atheist Berkeley professor hoped to find a scientific explanation of the abiogenesis of evil, his failure to track down the starting point or the vulnerability was so unsettling that it haunted him for the rest of his life: he had bouts of anger, suffered from alcoholism and vexingly committed suicide in the same way his chief patient, Hermann Göring, did, with a capsule of potassium cyanide.
Now a film, Nuremberg, attempts to sift through the moral morass of eight decades ago when Nazi Germany killed 6 million Jews. Captured war criminals were put on trial, to, in the words of Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson (played by Michael Shannon) — “bear witness. If we do not make the truth undeniable, it will happen again.”
Nuremberg shows the interactions between Psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (played by Rami Malek) and the highest ranking captured Nazi, Hermann Göring (played by Russell Crowe). It starts with their interviews in prison and continues into their trial, which was the first to use video footage of concentration camps as evidence. What was shown to the world, horrified the international community.
Kelley becomes obsessed with Göring, who is charming, arrogant and conniving. Apparently, Göring didn’t think he could be held individually responsible for the crimes of the nation at war. In fact WW2 was the first time individuals were found guilty of war crimes in an aggressor war.
Nuremberg is not a Christian film. It is a prodding into ample fodder for Christian thinking. Atheism has no tenable explanation for the existence of evil in the world; chemical imbalance and traumatic childhood only can go so far.
For every person who turns into a psychopath, there is also a person who overcomes those vulnerable points and become becomes a hero instead of a villain. For every Joker, there’s a Batman. Some people choose evil, blaming their circumstances, other people choose good overcoming their circumstances.
The evolutionary model of survival of the fittest doesn’t account for real life stories of people exploding with massacres. Something beyond the human psyche lurks, dark deep within the human heart and is capable of unfathomable evil.
Christianity has a more viable explanation for the existence of evil. You may laugh at the notion of Satan, but if you’re wondering how mere carnal passions get energized into unthinkable proportions in some people while not others, the devil actually appears to be the X factor that psychiatrist can’t medicate away and psychoanalyst can’t therapy away.
Nuremberg canonized itself with such great works as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. This is not a light-hearted comedy to brighten your day; it is a dark drama that will remind you that Christianity is the right path.
Crowe does a great job of humanizing a man who had a monstrous drug habit and signed off on the annihilation of millions of innocent people.
Göring swore he would not be hung like a common criminal, and true to his vow, he somehow mysteriously obtained a capsule of cyanide to commit suicide the night before he was to be hung. Hauntingly, Kelley followed suit.
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