Nuremberg, the True Story Behind the Film: How Faithful Is It to Reality?

James Vanderbilt's new film Nuremberg (2025) brings one of the most complex and morally dizzying passages of the 20th century back to the big screen: the direct encounter, within prison walls and in the courtroom, between the highest Nazi officials and those tasked with prosecuting them, understanding them, and, in a sense, “deciphering them”. At the center of the story is the figure of American army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, played by an intense Rami Malek, assigned to assess the mental state of Hermann Göring (a monumental Russell Crowe) and the other defendants in view of the Nuremberg trials.

The film, faithful to Vanderbilt's tense and analytical style, intertwines historical dimension and psychological drama. But how much of what we see actually happened? And where, instead, does cinema intervene with inevitable narrative licenses, condensations, and choices functional to the storytelling?

In other words: how much does Nuremberg tell history and how much does it reinterpret it?

• Does the 2025 film tell a true story?
• What is historical and what is fictionalized?
• The real story
• The true role of Dr. Douglas Kelley and Göring
• When is the film released?

Nuremberg, does the 2025 film tell a true story or not?

Yes. Nuremberg is rooted in a true story, albeit filtered through the needs of cinematic language. The film draws inspiration from the 2013 book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai, an essay that reconstructs the complex, ambiguous, and sometimes disturbing relationship between American army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley and Hermann Göring during the months leading up to and accompanying the Nuremberg trials.

The historically founded elements are numerous and solidly documented:

• The Nuremberg trials (1945–1946), the first international tribunal in history called to judge the leaders of a defeated regime, establishing new legal categories such as crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.
• The figure of Douglas Kelley, actually assigned as the psychiatrist of the Nuremberg prison, where Göring and the other main defendants were held.
• The centrality of Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking official to survive the end of the Reich, a charismatic, manipulative man aware of his symbolic role.
• The legal and political context, marked by the need to build a “new” tribunal, capable of judging crimes that until then had no shared definition.
• The use of footage and documents on concentration camps, presented as evidence in court and destined to leave an indelible mark on world public opinion and on those present at the trial.

That said, Nuremberg is not a documentary, nor does it claim to be. Vanderbilt's direction takes a rigorous historical basis and transforms it into a psychological thriller centered on the mental confrontation between doctor and defendant, a duel of personalities that reflects a broader question: what happens to those forced to look evil in the eye every day?

The film amplifies tensions, timings, and dynamics for narrative reasons, but the heart of the story, the encounter between Kelley and Göring, remains authentic and surprisingly close to the real facts.

What is historical and what is fictionalized in Nuremberg?

As often happens in historical films, the general structure of events is faithful, while dialogues, timings, and some relationships are adapted for narrative needs.

What is historical

• Douglas Kelley was indeed the military psychiatrist assigned to monitor Göring and the other defendants.
• Hermann Göring was the highest-ranking Nazi official to survive the end of the war, former number two of the regime, lucid, narcissistic, and determined to use the trial as a political stage.
• Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon in the film) was indeed the US Supreme Court Justice who temporarily left his post to become chief American prosecutor.
• David Maxwell Fyfe, Baldur von Schirach, Rudolf Hess, Karl Dönitz, Julius Streicher, Robert Ley, and the other defendants mentioned are real historical figures.
• The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg took place from November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946.
• The Allies (USA, UK, USSR, France) decided to prosecute 22 of the main Nazi leaders, accusing them of crimes against peace (wars of aggression), war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
• Thousands of documents, footage, and photographs were presented to demonstrate the extent of Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust.
• Göring indeed tried to impose his own narrative, presenting himself as a statesman who had acted for the good of Germany. His answers in court were often verbose, manipulative, and designed to delegitimize the tribunal and the Allies. His death sentence by hanging and suicide with a cyanide capsule the night before the execution are historically documented events.
• Douglas Kelley did publish a volume on his experiences in Nuremberg, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, which had little commercial success. As in the film, in reality, Kelley also deeply questioned the possibility that Nazism or something similar could re-emerge elsewhere.

What is probably fictionalized or simplified?

• The character of Lila, the reporter with whom Kelley develops a personal and professional relationship, clearly appears to be a narrative invention or at least a fusion of real figures and dramaturgical functions (the conflict between ethics, secrecy, and the desire to tell the truth).
• The conversations between Kelley and Göring are based on impressions, notes, and accounts, but the dialogues as we hear them in the film are reconstructed and written for cinema, not literal transcriptions.
• The entire Nuremberg trial was very long and complex. The film, by necessity, compresses episodes, skips procedural steps, selects only certain defendants and key moments to tell a coherent narrative arc.
• In reality, multiple psychiatrists, psychologists, officers, translators, and guards revolved around the defendants; the work was collaborative. The film chooses to concentrate the perspective on Kelley to provide a strong human and psychological viewpoint, emphasizing his inner “descent” in contact with the Nazi officials.

Nuremberg, the real story

To understand how faithful Nuremberg remains to the facts, it is necessary to take a step back and remember what the Nuremberg trials really represented: a moment of legal, ethical, and political turning point in 20th-century history.

World War II: the context of the crime

Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany plunged Europe into an unprecedented spiral of violence. The invasion of Poland, France, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, the Balkans, and numerous other territories was a systematic project of annihilation. German occupations combined extermination operations, mass deportations, forced labor, ruthless repression, and a total war against civilian populations.

The most dramatic figure remains that of the Soviet Union: an estimated 27 million deaths, most of whom were civilians, victims of sieges, executions, starvation, and planned destruction.

At the end of the conflict, the Allies faced an unprecedented challenge. It was not enough to have militarily defeated the Third Reich: it was necessary to establish how to judge those who had designed, directed, and fueled a death machine without parallel. There were no precedents, no adequate norms, not even an international tribunal with the power to prosecute individuals for crimes committed on a global scale.

Nuremberg arose from this void: from the need to transform horror into law, revenge into justice, destruction into shared memory.

After an intense political and legal confrontation between:

• those who wanted summary executions;
• those who preferred exemplary trials;
• those who feared the lack of clear legal bases;

The USA, United Kingdom, USSR, and France decided to create a special tribunal with its own statute: the Nuremberg Charter.

From this, some fundamental innovations emerged:

• Individual criminal responsibility: no longer just “the State”, but individual leaders could be held accountable for international crimes.
• Crimes against peace: i.e., the planning and military aggression in violation of international law.
• Crimes against humanity: extermination, deportations, slavery, systematic persecutions against civilians, including their own citizens.

The main trial, the IMT (International Military Tribunal), represented the judicial heart of Nuremberg. In the dock sat 22 of the highest-ranking officials of the regime, figures who had shaped, politically, militarily, ideologically, and economically, the criminal apparatus of the Third Reich. Many of the names that appear in the film were actually there, in that courtroom dominated by silence and anticipation: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Karl Dönitz, Julius Streicher, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Baldur von Schirach, and many others. Each of them embodied a specific part of the Hitlerian totalitarian machine.

The tribunal did not limit itself to judging: it reconstructed, piece by piece, the entire architecture of Nazism, with an almost anatomical rigor. Gigantic documentary evidence was examined, from occupation plans to annihilation decrees, from deportation directives to extermination camp registers. One of the crucial turning points was the use, for the first time in an international court of justice, of footage shot by Allied soldiers in concentration camps: raw, incontestable images that showed the world the real extent of the Holocaust and mass executions.

Those sequences, now historical, shocked public opinion and even those present in the courtroom. For many observers, it was definitive proof that international justice could no longer ignore the evidence of organized, bureaucratized, and industrially planned crime.

In the end:

• 12 defendants were sentenced to death;
• others were sentenced to various degrees of imprisonment;
• 3 were acquitted, a choice that sparked much controversy at the time.

From Nuremberg would then arise what we now call international criminal justice, eventually leading, many decades later, to the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, for Rwanda, and to the International Criminal Court.

The true role of Dr. Douglas Kelley and Göring

One of the most interesting aspects of Nuremberg is that it shifts the focus from just the defendants' bench to the “behind the scenes” of the trial, where lesser-known but crucial figures like Douglas Kelley worked.

Douglas Kelley: the psychiatrist facing evil

In historical reality, Douglas M. Kelley was an American army major and one of the first psychiatrists called to confront what, at the time, seemed inconceivable: understanding the minds of the main architects of the Third Reich. His assignment in Nuremberg involved extremely delicate tasks: assessing the mental state of the defendants, constantly monitoring the risk of suicide, drafting detailed psychological profiles, and attempting to explain how “apparently ordinary” men could have participated, with bureaucratic discipline and ideological conviction, in crimes of monstrous proportions.

Kelley thus found himself closely observing figures like Göring, Hess, and Streicher, trying to understand if there was a fracture in their minds, a detachment from reality, or, on the contrary, an unsettling normality. Many of the questions that today structure criminology and the psychology of evil – the banality of evil, individual responsibility, the role of ideology – began to take shape precisely during that period.

The film reflects, with dramatic flair, the existential weight that this work exerted on Kelley: the difficulty of living with what he had heard and analyzed, the frustration with a society that seemed too quick to turn the page, the fear that the mechanisms of totalitarianism could repeat themselves. To this was added an intimate and unresolved tension: the more Kelley studied the Nazi officials, the more he questioned the thin line separating the monstrous from the human.

One of the darkest and most symbolic events of his biography is his suicide in 1958, which occurred by ingesting a cyanide capsule, the same method used by Hermann Göring to escape hanging. A real historical detail laden with unsettling symbolism that still today raises questions about the psychological legacy of Nuremberg and the abyss that experience opened in the psychiatrist's life.

Hermann Göring: the great accused who wanted to control the scene

In the real trial, Hermann Göring was the most famous and “cumbersome” of the defendants, as well as the one who most of all tried to reclaim the historical narrative. A man who alternated moments of ideological arrogance with phases of victimhood.

In court, he tried to turn the trial into:

• an attack on the Allies' justice system;
• an opportunity to justify wars of aggression as “necessary”;
• a defense of National Socialism presented as a response to the wrongs suffered by Germany after World War I.

The film fully captures this dimension: a lucid, skilled orator Göring, dangerous precisely because he does not appear as a “mad monster,” but as someone capable of rationalizing evil.

When is Nuremberg, the 2025 film, released?

Nuremberg, directed by James Vanderbilt, will arrive in Italian cinemas on December 18, 2025. The cast includes, among others, Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody, Mr. Robot, Oppenheimer, No Time to Die, Amsterdam, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb), Russell Crowe (Gladiator, The Insider, A Beautiful Mind, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Cinderella Man) and Richard E. Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Loki, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Logan).