Nuremberg

In the final hours of the film the courtroom at Nuremberg becomes the stage for the very fate the prisoners tried to avoid. Hermann Go‑Rie­ng, who had arrived at the American prison defiantly confident in his own cleverness, finally faces the British prosecutor David Fyke. Fyke exploits Goering’s vanity, forcing him to admit his blind loyalty to Hitler and his role in the genocide. The confession seals his conviction; the tribunal sentences him to death by hanging. Yet the bragging Nazi still clings to a last‑minute trick—a hidden potassium‑cyanide capsule that he swallows just before the noose is dropped, turning his execution into a self‑inflicted escape and leaving the judges stunned.

The other twenty‑one defendants meet the same grim end, each hanged as the world watches history being written. Amid the hangings, the film returns to Douglas Kelley, the army psychiatrist who began his assignment by promising to keep the Nazis from killing themselves. His personal ambition—turning the inmates’ confessions into a bestseller—has already unraveled: he loses his job after leaking confidential details to a journalist, and the only prisoner who truly breaks under pressure, Robert Ley, hangs himself using a makeshift rope despite Kelley’s notes proclaiming a “successful” treatment.

A decisive encounter with the court translator Howard Triest forces Kelley to confront his own motives. Triest, a survivor of his family’s Holocaust, reminds Kelley that the trial matters not only as a legal precedent but as an act of moral reckoning for countless victims. Moved, Kelley abandons his self‑serving plan and hands over the full record of his sessions, allowing the prosecution to use the psychologists’ insights in building its case.

The epilogue follows Kelley back to the United States. He finally publishes his book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, but it flops, and his subsequent career as a radio commentator is marked by cynical reflections on power and oppression—suggesting he never fully reclaimed his conscience. The lingering irony is that, years later, the once‑ambitious doctor succumbs to the same poison he once watched Goering use, taking his own life with cyanide in 1958. His death mirrors the very escape he once facilitated, underscoring how the shadows of Nuremberg continued to haunt those who had witnessed its horrors.

Last Updated: January 05, 2026 at 08:31