Nuremberg, the 2025 movie, is unsettling not because it revisits Nazi crimes—we already know those horrors—but because it dismantles a comforting myth: that such crimes required monstrous people, uniquely evil societies, or a past we have safely outgrown.
The film’s most dangerous idea is also its most honest one: atrocity is not born from madness alone, but from ordinary human traits amplified by unchecked power. That lesson does not stay confined to 1945. It echoes uncomfortably into the present—including places like Venezuela.
At the heart of the film is U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, tasked with evaluating Nazi leaders such as Hermann Göring. Kelley begins with an assumption shared by many after the war—that these men must be fundamentally different from everyone else. Abnormal. Broken. Inhuman. What he discovers instead is far more disturbing. Göring is intelligent, charismatic, strategic, and convinced of his own righteousness. He does not see himself as evil. He sees himself as powerful—and justified. Kelley realizes the danger was never insanity. It was normality paired with authority.
That realization becomes the film’s quiet indictment. The true threat, Nuremberg argues, is not a specific ideology or nationality. It is what happens when ambition, obedience, ideology, and power align—especially when institutions reward loyalty and punish dissent.
Kelley’s conclusions were not widely accepted after WWII, not because they excused crimes, but because they arrived at the wrong time. The postwar world needed moral clarity. Nazis had to be monsters. Evil had to be external, identifiable, and defeated. That narrative allowed societies to grieve, rebuild, and move forward without asking how close the danger might still be. Kelley challenged that comfort. By arguing that the perpetrators were psychologically ordinary men shaped by systems of power, he erased the safe distance between “them” and “us.” His work suggested that atrocity was not an anomaly—it was a human risk. That idea was too unsettling to embrace.
This is where the connection to modern authoritarian systems becomes unavoidable. In Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro, the same mechanisms Kelley identified are visible—not in identical form, but in structure: Just as in Nuremberg, the system does not depend on universal cruelty. It depends on obedience, fear, and the quiet normalization of harm. This is what makes the comparison uncomfortable—and necessary.
The lesson of Nuremberg is not that Venezuela is Nazi Germany. History does not repeat itself in carbon copy. What it repeats are mechanisms. The most frightening truth in the film is not that some people are evil—but that anyone can become capable of horrific acts when power goes unchecked and conscience is suppressed. That realization removes distance. It places responsibility closer to home. The reason people resist these parallels is the same reason Kelley’s work was rejected.
If Venezuela mirrors the lessons of Nuremberg, then, It means the danger is not past. It is structural.
From a Ghosts of the Battlefield perspective, Nuremberg is not a film about closing a chapter. It is a warning about what happens when societies convince themselves they are immune. The ghosts left behind by war are not only the dead. They are the lessons we choose to forget. Nuremberg insists on remembering the most uncomfortable one of all: The problem was never that monsters existed. The problem was that systems made monstrosity possible. That truth did not end in 1945. And it is not confined to any one country.
The question the film leaves us with is not whether history will repeat itself—but whether we will recognize the conditions early enough to stop it. Power concentrated in a narrow leadership circle. Institutions hollowed out but maintained as symbols. Loyalty rewarded over truth. Violence framed as “necessary” for stability. Moral responsibility diffused through bureaucracy. Individuals justify actions as duty. Ideology shields conscience. Authority replaces accountability. Systems make cruelty feel routine. Atrocity is not safely locked in history. “Never again” is not automatic.
