Nuremberg, Oscars and Search for Humanity |
Disclaimer: I do believe that the newly released epic Nuremberg drama ( 2025) was well intended. We do need the films on the theme today and tomorrow more than even. Thus I am grateful to the team who had conceived and produced the film and I am greeting its release. There are reasons for criticising some of the film’s features and creative decisions, but overall, the more films on the theme will appear, the better. And this is what really matters nowadays.
Commendable Interest
The new Nuremberg film premiered at the Toronto Film festival in early November 2025, and it was released first in the US cinemas a month later, with soon coming international release. The timing of the release was both historically reasoned and professionally calculated. It came to the screens at the time of commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the first, International Nuremberg Tribunal, and professionally-wise, quite conveniently for the Oscar 2026 run. The intent for Oscars is palpable in the large, over two hours, aiming for epic historical film which can not be attested as a drama because it does not produce the one.
Genre-wise, it is a rather featured historical chronicle which in a too-typical Hollywood manner re-tells a very important moment in the modern history, the setting, beginning and the outcome of the first international Nuremberg tribunal back in 1945-1946. The date which actually was not properly commemorated , or maybe not yet. We generally have had a problem with commemoration of all those WWII and Holocaust connected dates throughout 2025 due to the drastically changed atmosphere in the world which now prefers to ignore the facts of the Holocaust and its lessons. It is not ‘fashionable’ any longer. Not prestigious. Simply said, it is not required any longer in the way it was so for the decades.
The global moral doctrine that was developed and was unanimously accepted from 1945 onward, after the world saw the crimes of the Shoah, black on white, for the first time, in the organised public way, at the Nuremberg Tribunal, has become irrelevant today. That unthinkable shift in a public domain has become possible, following an absurd irony, being pushed off-stage of public concern by the crimes committed on October 7th and after it by the terrorist animalistic force. It is like the worst being added to terrible has produced something totally different and unthinkable in human perception, namely acceptance of the crimes, both by Hamas and the Nazis, in one bottle, so to say.
Prior to the October 7th 2023, many, if not all of my senior international colleagues in the field of commemorative education were planning massive events of all sorts for 2025, as it was coming ‘the year of so many commemorations of the history of WWII’, as they have mentioned. We know the rest after the massacre in Israel. The attitude towards it is and will certainly stay as one of the most shameful pages in the history of human society of the XXI century.
That’s why the idea, work and producing such films as Nuremberg by the US-British-German-Polish-Hungarian team to be released at the end of 2025 is a merit of its own, Oscars or not.
How Final was the Final Solution?
What are we aiming at by addressing and re-addressing Holocaust in the cinema? It is a grim – thus unpopular – subject, and, at the same time, the subject which has been explored to a serious degree ( also the magnitude of the Shoah makes any exploration insufficient).
There is a known opinion of Elie Wiesel about the incompatibility of the Shoah and cinema. Elie was a softly speaking and mildly mannered man, but on the subject of an impossibility in his view to film the Holocaust apart from existing documentary evidence he was emphatic and........