There are war movies and then there are films that make you sit with something deeply uncomfortable long after the credits roll. Nuremberg, the 2025 historical drama now streaming on Netflix, is firmly in the second category. It does not offer the clean moral satisfaction of watching villains collapse under the weight of their own stupidity. Instead, it puts you in the room with one of the most intelligent, charming, and monstrous men of the twentieth century and asks a question that still has no comfortable answer: what exactly separates people like Hermann Goering from the rest of us?
That question, asked by a 33-year-old American psychiatrist in a prison in Luxembourg in 1945, forms the entire heart of this film. And the answers he found were, and remain, genuinely disturbing.
What Is the Nuremberg Movie and Where Can You Watch It
The Nuremberg movie is a 2025 biographical drama directed by James Vanderbilt and based on Jack El-Hai’s 2013 nonfiction book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII.” The film had its theatrical release on November 7, 2025, became available for premium video-on-demand purchase on December 23, 2025, and arrived on Netflix for streaming on March 7, 2026. It earned $46 million worldwide at the box office, which industry observers considered a strong performance for a serious historical drama of this kind.
The film runs two hours and twenty-nine minutes and carries a PG-13 rating. It holds a 71% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.4 out of 10 on IMDb based on over 66,000 user ratings at the time of its Netflix premiere. You can currently stream the Nuremberg movie on Netflix or rent and purchase it on Prime Video and Fandango at Home.
The Full Cast of Nuremberg 2025
The Nuremberg cast is one of the strongest assembled for a historical drama in recent years. Here is everyone playing a real person in the film:
Russell Crowe plays Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command and the most powerful Nazi defendant at the trials. Rami Malek plays Dr. Douglas Kelley, the U.S. Army psychiatrist at the center of the story. Michael Shannon plays Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the American prosecutor who fought to establish the legal framework for the trials. Leo Woodall plays Sergeant Howie Triest, Kelley’s interpreter and a German-born Jewish soldier whose personal history gives the film some of its most quietly devastating moments. John Slattery plays Colonel Burton Andrus, the prison commandant. Richard E. Grant plays Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the British prosecuting counsel. Colin Hanks plays Dr. Gustave Gilbert, the Army psychologist whose conclusions about the defendants directly contradicted Kelley’s. Lydia Peckham plays Lila McQuaide, a fictional journalist character. Lotte Verbeek plays Emmy Göring, Hermann’s wife. Andreas Pietschmann plays Rudolf Hess. Tom Keune plays Robert Ley. Fleur Bremmer plays Edda Göring, Hermann’s daughter. Wrenn Schmidt plays Elsie Douglas, Robert Jackson’s secretary.
James Vanderbilt directed the film, wrote the screenplay, and served as a producer alongside Bradley J. Fischer, William Sherak, Richard Saperstein, Frank Smith, and Benjamin Tappan.
Who Was Hermann Goering: The Real Man Russell Crowe Plays
Before getting into Russell Crowe’s performance, it helps to understand the actual person he was portraying, because Goering was not a background figure in Nazi Germany. He was arguably the second most powerful man in the regime after Hitler himself.
Hermann Göring was born in 1893 and became a celebrated fighter ace during World War One before joining the Nazi movement in its early years. He became head of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, and was designated by Hitler as his official successor. By the time the Third Reich collapsed, Goering was a colossal figure in every sense, reportedly weighing close to 300 pounds and arriving at the American detention center in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, with 49 suitcases, ornate jewelry, cigarette cases, silk underwear, a large supply of the narcotic paracodeine he had become dependent on, and hidden among his possessions, a set of brass vials containing capsules of potassium cyanide.
He was intelligent. He spoke English. He was charming in a way that unnerved people who expected a raving fanatic. When Kelley administered an IQ test, Goering scored among the highest of all 22 defendants. He remained, even in captivity, supremely confident that he would escape punishment and that history would eventually vindicate him.
What makes Goering genuinely disturbing, beyond the scope of his crimes, is the evidence that his ideology was largely performative. When Kelley asked him whether he truly believed in the Nazi doctrine of racial inferiority, Goering reportedly replied: “Nobody believes that rot.” When pushed about the fact that this “political propaganda” had contributed to the deaths of nearly six million human beings, he paused and acknowledged it had been “good political propaganda.” He did not believe in the cause. He believed in Hermann Göring. His loyalty was always to his own ambition and advancement, with the Nazi regime serving as the vehicle.
That is a more frightening portrait than a true believer would be.
Who Was Dr. Douglas Kelley: The Real Story Behind Rami Malek’s Character
Lieutenant Colonel Douglas McGlashan Kelley was born in Truckee, California on August 11, 1912, and was only 33 years old when the Army assigned him as chief psychiatrist at Nuremberg Prison in August 1945. He had been treating American soldiers for combat stress in Europe and had no experience whatsoever with war criminals, but he recognized the opportunity immediately.
His task was formally defined as determining whether the 22 Nazi defendants were mentally competent to stand trial and ensuring they would not break down or kill themselves before proceedings began. In practice, it became something far more ambitious in Kelley’s mind. He wanted to understand the psychological roots of what these men had done. He spent somewhere between 80 and 90 hours with the prisoners overall, with Goering commanding the largest share of his attention.
Kelley used Rorschach ink blot tests, Thematic Apperception Tests where subjects described what they saw in photographs and illustrations, standard IQ assessments, and hundreds of hours of personal interviews. He was also known to perform magic tricks with the prisoners because he believed it built confidence and loosened them up before formal sessions. He administered an IQ test to all 22 defendants and found, to no one’s reassurance, that they scored generally well above average.
His conclusion, when he finally arrived at it, was the one that nobody wanted to hear. The defendants were not psychiatrically disordered. They did not represent a specifically Nazi pathology. They were, in his assessment, “simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are,” and he argued that in any society, in any era, there are significant numbers of people capable of what they did. “They will always be with us,” he warned, “and we have to learn how to deal with them.”
Gustave Gilbert, the Army psychologist played by Colin Hanks in the film, disagreed completely. Gilbert concluded that the defendants were psychiatrically disordered, that Goering in particular was an “aggressive psychopath,” and that what happened in Nazi Germany was the result of a unique pathological culture. Gilbert stayed through the entire trials and wrote his own book, “Nuremberg Diary,” which sold far better than Kelley’s book “22 Cells in Nuremberg.” Researchers who came later suggest Gilbert’s book outsold Kelley’s precisely because it told the public what they needed to believe: that what happened in Nazi Germany was a specific aberration that humanity had now put behind it.
Kelley’s book told the opposite story. That is a hard sell after a catastrophic war.
Kelley was honorably discharged in 1946 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He brought back to the United States his notes, test results, X-rays of Hitler’s skull, Goering’s confiscated paracodeine capsules, and Rudolf Hess’s food packets. He published “22 Cells in Nuremberg” in January 1947. He went on to direct the Graylyn Psychopathic Hospital in North Carolina, headed the Department of Psychology at Berkeley, and became a prominent public lecturer warning Americans about figures comparable to the Nazi leadership.
On New Year’s Day 1958, with his marriage in difficulty and reportedly struggling with stress and drinking, Douglas Kelley ingested potassium cyanide in front of his wife, father, and three children. He died the same way Hermann Goering did. Whether he used the actual capsules he brought back from Nuremberg remains disputed. His son Doug Kelley has said it is impossible to know the true source. “I know it’s ironic,” his son said. “I think maybe he knew he was on a runaway train. I think he knew what was inside, but he didn’t know how to make it go away.”
That detail does not appear in the film. It would have made an extraordinary epilogue.
How Did Goering Get Cyanide and How Did He Die
This is one of the most discussed questions surrounding the real Nuremberg trials, and it remains only partially answered. Hermann Goering was sentenced to death on October 1, 1946. His sentence was death by hanging, scheduled for October 16. On the night of October 15, 1946, hours before his execution, he was found dead in his cell.
He had swallowed a capsule of potassium cyanide.
In a note he left behind, Goering claimed he had possessed the cyanide the entire time he was in prison and had successfully concealed it through repeated searches of his cell, which were described in Kelley’s own book as thorough enough that prisoners needed several hours to restore their cells to order afterward. The guards never saw him conceal or retrieve the capsule.
One theory is that a guard smuggled the cyanide in for him. Another is that he genuinely hid it through the entire detention and trial period. His wife Emmy and daughter Edda were released in connection with reported art thefts investigation, and Goering had gone to considerable effort to help them. The mechanism of getting the cyanide to him remains genuinely unclear. When Douglas Kelley heard the news, he described Goering’s suicide in terms that disturbed many people who heard them, calling it a “skillful, even brilliant, finishing touch.” That reaction says something about how deep Kelley’s complicated relationship with this man had become.
The film does not avoid Goering’s suicide. It is described as a haunting coda that the movie confronts directly.
The Real Nuremberg Trials: What the Movie Is Based On
The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals held in Nuremberg, Germany following the end of World War Two. They are widely considered the first time in history that an international court held enemy leaders accountable for genocide and crimes against humanity. The trials ran from November 1945 through October 1946, just under a year of proceedings.
Twenty-two surviving Nazi leaders were charged and tried. Adolf Hitler had committed suicide on April 30, 1945 and was therefore not among them. The charges brought against the defendants fell into four categories: crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit these crimes. All three of the first three categories represented newly created legal concepts with no prior precedent in international law. That was part of what made the tribunal historically significant and legally controversial.
U.S. Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, played by Michael Shannon in the film, spearheaded the effort to build this legal framework. He had to convince both American officials, who initially preferred summary executions, and the other Allied powers, to support an entirely new form of international justice. In the film, one of his more creative diplomatic maneuvers involves implying to Pope Pius XII a knowledge of the Vatican’s controversial relationship with the Nazi regime, in exchange for the Pope’s support for the tribunal. The actual Pope in 1945 was Pope Pius XII, who had been heavily criticized for his public silence during the Holocaust, and the film’s use of this detail is one of several moments where it draws on historical record without oversimplifying it.
Of the 22 defendants tried at the main International Military Tribunal, 12 were sentenced to death, 3 received life sentences, 4 received shorter prison terms, and 3 were acquitted. Beyond the main trial, there were 12 subsequent Nuremberg trials between 1946 and 1949, covering a broader range of defendants. The main trials lasted just under a year. Goering’s death by suicide the night before his scheduled hanging meant he was technically the only major defendant to escape the executioner’s sentence.
Robert Ley, the Labour Front leader played by Tom Keune in the film, hanged himself in his cell in October 1945 before the trial even began. He fashioned a noose from strips of his towel in his toilet area. The film depicts this event as a significant disruption that led to Dr. Gustave Gilbert being brought in as a second psychiatric evaluator.
The city of Nuremberg was chosen for the trials partly for symbolic reasons, as it had been the site of the massive Nazi Party rallies and the promulgation of the racial laws that stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship. Holding the trials there carried an intentional message about where Nazi ideology had led.
Russell Crowe as Hermann Goering: What Critics and Audiences Are Saying
Russell Crowe’s performance as Hermann Goering is drawing the kind of attention that suggests a genuine career highlight. The Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw described Crowe as “wittily cast as the portly, pompous Reichsmarschall,” calling it the best he has been in a long time and praising the “sly and cunning manipulator” he creates in his psychological exchanges with the Americans.
What is interesting about the performance, based on both critical response and audience reaction, is what Crowe chooses not to do. He does not play Goering as a ranting fanatic or a cartoonish villain. He plays him as a man of considerable intelligence and charm who is fully aware of how he appears to others and uses that awareness as a weapon. The IMDB audience reviews note the “electrifying” quality of his subtle, nuanced work. One reviewer called it “a masterclass in subtle, nuanced acting.” Another described walking out of the cinema with “a pit in your stomach,” which is perhaps the most accurate description of what this film achieves.
Crowe had to physically transform for the role, taking on the appearance of a man who at his heaviest weighed close to 300 pounds and who moved with the physical authority of someone accustomed to being the most powerful person in any room. The challenge is playing Goering in captivity, where that physical authority is being stripped away day by day, yet the man’s psychological certainty barely wavers.
The Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus describes the film as “driven by a commanding performance from Russell Crowe” and characterizes it as “a handsomely crafted historical drama,” while noting that its measured pacing and emotional restraint prevent it from fully realizing the complexity of its subject. That is a fair criticism. The film is deeply American-centric in its framing, with no Russian or French judge or prosecutor given any meaningful presence despite the fact that all four Allied powers participated in the tribunal. European audiences in particular have noted this gap.
Rami Malek as Douglas Kelley is the film’s other defining performance. He plays Kelley’s growing entanglement with a man he was supposed to be objectively evaluating with the kind of quiet precision that characterized his Oscar-winning turn in Bohemian Rhapsody. The moral tension at the center of his character, a doctor bound by patient confidentiality who is simultaneously expected to help the prosecution that intends to execute his patient, is where the film finds its most genuine ethical complexity.
Howie Triest: The Real Person Behind Leo Woodall’s Character
Sergeant Howard Triest, called Howie in the film and played by Leo Woodall, is one of the more quietly significant characters in the Nuremberg movie. He was Kelley’s interpreter, a German-born Jewish soldier in the U.S. Army who therefore occupied an extraordinary position: translating the words of the men who had directed the murder of millions of European Jews, including his own parents.
In the film, Triest reveals to Kelley near the end that his parents were executed by the Nazis in 1942 while his younger sister managed to escape to Switzerland. His warning to Kelley about the dangers of general impassivity toward evil, of how the regime’s cruelty went unchallenged because ordinary people failed to act, is one of the film’s most important statements and serves as the moral pivot that convinces Kelley to submit his private notes to the prosecution rather than protect them for his planned book.
The real Howard Triest survived the war, settled in the United States, and lived to see the story he participated in become the subject of a major Netflix film.
22 Cells in Nuremberg: The Book Behind the Movie
The phrase “22 cells” refers to the 22 Nazi defendants who were housed in individual cells at Nuremberg Prison while awaiting trial. Dr. Kelley interviewed all 22 of them. He published his observations in a book titled “22 Cells in Nuremberg” in January 1947, and it represents one of the most unusual firsthand accounts of any historical event.
The book is available for sale today and has seen renewed interest following the release of the film. Goodreads reviews from readers who picked it up after watching the movie consistently note the same thing: knowing that Kelley himself died by the same method as Goering makes reading the book a profoundly different experience than it would otherwise be.
Lewis M. Terman, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, called it one of the three or four most important books to come out of World War Two. That assessment was not widely shared by the reading public at the time of publication. Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” which serves as the more direct source material for the film, drew on Kelley’s original work and substantially expanded it with additional research and context. Both books remain in print.
What Does the Nuremberg Movie Get Right and Wrong
The film takes several significant liberties with the historical record, which is worth knowing if you come to it curious about what actually happened.
The most significant departure involves Douglas Kelley’s departure from Nuremberg. In the film, Kelley is fired by Colonel Andrus after drunkenly revealing his private conversations with Goering to a fictional female journalist named Lila McQuaide, played by Lydia Peckham. In reality, Kelley was not fired. He was promoted and returned to the United States before Goering took the witness stand. He was not present in the audience watching his patient testify, as the movie depicts.
The physical confrontation between Kelley and Gilbert shown in the film did not happen. Their disagreement about the psychological nature of the defendants was real and professional, but it did not escalate to the point of a fistfight.
Several details are accurate in ways that surprise people who research them afterward. Goering genuinely could speak English. He did arrive with extraordinary personal effects including the paracodeine capsules. He did develop what Kelley described as a warm daily rapport during their sessions, greeting the doctor with a “broad smile and outstretched hand” each morning. He did help Kelley examine Rudolf Hess in exchange for being allowed to write to his wife and daughter. The Rorschach test responses depicted in the film are drawn from actual test records. The detail where Kelley performed magic tricks with the prisoners to build rapport is also accurate.
Goering did ask Kelley, in real life, to adopt his daughter Edda if both Goering and his wife Emmy did not survive. This moment did not make the final film.
The film also includes a scene where the prosecution shows footage of the concentration camps during the trial, which is historically accurate. The first time this footage was shown in the courtroom produced stunned silence among defendants and observers alike. Goering’s response, as depicted in the film, of denying knowledge and then deflecting through whataboutism comparing Allied actions to Nazi atrocities, reflects his actual documented behavior during the proceedings.
Why the Nuremberg Trials Still Matter in 2025
One of the reasons this film is drawing the attention it is comes down to timing. The questions at the center of the Nuremberg Trials, about what constitutes a crime against humanity, about whether “following orders” constitutes a legal defense, about whether international law can hold powerful men accountable, are not resolved questions. They remain active legal and political debates.
The concept of crimes against humanity, which Robert Jackson helped create for the 1945 tribunal, became the foundation for every subsequent international criminal court, including the International Criminal Court established in 2002. When the ICC issues arrest warrants for sitting world leaders today, it does so using a legal framework whose foundations were laid in Room 600 of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg between 1945 and 1946.
Kelley’s warning deserves to be repeated here because it is the thing the film builds toward. He concluded after spending 80 to 90 hours with the men who ran the Third Reich that they were not psychiatrically exceptional. They were not monsters in the clinical sense. They were, as he put it, people who exist in every country, in every era. The question he came home asking was not “how do we identify and eliminate people like this?” but rather “how do we build societies and institutions that prevent people like this from gaining power in the first place?”
That is a question the Nuremberg movie leaves with you. It does not answer it, which is appropriate, because nobody has yet.
Purim Fest 1946: A Note on the Historical Footnote
One detail that viewers occasionally search for after watching the Nuremberg movie is the phrase “Purim Fest 1946,” which refers to a remark that Julius Streicher, the Nazi propagandist and pornographic antisemitic publisher, made on the gallows at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed on October 16, 1946, Streicher shouted the phrase as an expression of his antisemitic delusion, invoking the Jewish holiday of Purim, which commemorates the salvation of Jewish people from a planned massacre in ancient Persia. The remark is considered one of the most grotesque final statements in the history of capital punishment. The film touches on Streicher’s character but does not linger on this specific moment.
Is the Nuremberg Movie Worth Watching
The honest answer is that it depends on what kind of viewer you are and what you want from a film.
If you are looking for the kind of clean, cathartic war drama where justice arrives satisfyingly and evil is clearly punished, this is not that film. The historical record, which the movie follows closely enough that it cannot offer easy resolution, is messier than that. Goering cheated the hangman. Kelley came home changed in ways he apparently never recovered from. The trials created foundational international law but could not prevent future atrocities.
If you are interested in genuinely difficult questions about human psychology and moral accountability, presented through exceptional performances and careful historical dramatization, the Nuremberg movie is essential viewing. The relationship between Crowe’s Goering and Malek’s Kelley is as genuinely compelling as anything currently on Netflix. The film is slow in places. It runs almost two and a half hours. There are moments where its American-centric framing narrows what should be a more panoramic moral accounting. But the central argument it makes, the one Kelley spent his career trying to get people to hear, is as relevant as it has ever been.
The final word might belong to Kelley himself, from the introduction to “22 Cells in Nuremberg,” written in 1946: “The near destruction of modern culture will have gone for naught if we do not draw the right conclusions about the forces that produced such chaos. We must learn the why of the Nazi success so we can take steps to prevent the recurrence of such evil.”
The Nuremberg movie is, at its best, an attempt to take that seriously.
Nuremberg 2025: Quick Reference Facts
Title: Nuremberg
Release date in theaters: November 7, 2025
Netflix streaming date: March 7, 2026
Director: James Vanderbilt
Runtime: 2 hours 29 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes score: 71%
IMDb rating: 7.4 out of 10
Box office gross: $46 million worldwide
Based on: “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai (2013), itself drawing on Douglas Kelley’s “22 Cells in Nuremberg” (1947)
Where to stream: Netflix, Prime Video (rent or buy), Fandango at Home
Full Nuremberg 2025 cast: Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring, Rami Malek as Dr. Douglas Kelley, Michael Shannon as Justice Robert H. Jackson, Leo Woodall as Sergeant Howie Triest, John Slattery as Colonel Burton Andrus, Richard E. Grant as Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, Colin Hanks as Dr. Gustave Gilbert, Lydia Peckham as Lila McQuaide, Lotte Verbeek as Emmy Göring, Andreas Pietschmann as Rudolf Hess, Tom Keune as Robert Ley, Fleur Bremmer as Edda Göring, Wrenn Schmidt as Elsie Douglas, Mark O’Brien as Colonel John Amen.
