Between a Rockets Menorah and the Nuremberg Trials

This article was authored by Adi Rabinowitz Bedein, a third-generation Holocaust survivor from Israel, Yad Vashem and Gaza border area tour guide, and founder of the Network for Innovative Holocaust Education (NIHE):

The first thought that stayed with me while watching the film Nuremberg, currently being screened, was a doubt as to whether this was even a film about Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe and one of the senior leaders of the Nazi regime. The film focuses on Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, the American military psychiatrist who accompanied the Nazi prisoners in the period leading up to the Nuremberg trials, and especially on the dynamic that developed between him and the senior Nazi officials held in custody just before the judicial verdict. And yet, in my view, this is not a film about Göring. It is about the people around him. About the psychiatrist, about the defense attorney, about those who are forced to stand face to face with evil and decide how one conducts oneself in its presence. Göring is merely a smokescreen, a kind of distraction. The film is not meant to lead us to occupy ourselves with him, but with those who look at him.

I am generally opposed to prolonged engagement with Nazi criminals. I understand why it is interesting, it is clear why it is fascinating, and the film fascinated me as well. But this cannot be the way the Holocaust is taught. In my view, the educational and moral path must begin first and foremost with teaching people how to be good human beings. Not through analyzing evil, but through examining the dilemmas of those who stand opposite it.

Therefore, the truly central figure is the psychiatrist. He is engaged in a constant struggle. On the one hand, to remain faithful to himself and to his profession, to truth, to ethics, not to violate his professional commitment. On the other hand, to remain faithful to something deeper, not to allow evil to gain legitimacy through cold and detached professionalism. This tension, between professional truth and a moral compass, is the heart of the film.

While watching, I also thought about the importance of punishment. Especially against the backdrop of the current public discourse in Israel surrounding the death penalty for terrorists. At times it sounds populist, an emotional reaction. And indeed, no punishment will bring back those we have lost. But when one watches the film seriously, one understands that there is meaning in the very act of imposing punishment. Not as revenge, but as a moral determination.

In the Nuremberg trials, the goal was not only to judge the past. The aim was to draw a boundary for the future. To say clearly that there are acts that cannot be passed over. Not wild action and not revenge prevent the return of evil, but law, responsibility, and judgment.

At the end of the film, the punishment is indeed delivered, and it is an important moment. But precisely there, I felt discomfort. The attempt to emphasize that the Nazis were human beings, and that there are people like this everywhere, strikes me as a failed approach. Not because they were not biologically human, but because such emphasis turns evil into something banal, something ordinary, something almost understandable. There are things that do not need to be understood. There are things that must be marked as a red line.

There is also something deeper and more painful that the film reveals. The encounter with evil wounds. Not only the victims, but also those who observe it over time. The psychiatrist, through his intense engagement with Göring, was wounded. The exposure, the attempt to understand, the decision to remain too close, exacted a price. In the end, he took his own life, in the same way. It is almost symbolic. Evil, even when not justified, even when studied, is capable of penetrating inward and wounding, even to death.

This leads me to think that perhaps the approach of studying evil, in and of itself, does not make the world a better place. Dr. Kelley’s studies did not make the world better after the trial, and he did not make himself better. And perhaps this is not the way. More broadly, Holocaust education has much that needs to change. If we had truly learned from evil, we would not be seeing antisemitism erupt again, in Australia, in Europe, and around the world.

At the end of the film, a sentence is spoken that stayed with me. The only thing that can indicate what a person will do is what they have actually done. We never truly know in advance. We like to think that people are defined by intentions, ideas, analyses. But in practice, we are measured by our actions. That is what is spoken about in the end, what we did in the world. An education that focuses on understanding the evil of others misses this. It does not educate toward action.

And yet, I also feel a sense of gratitude. Because returning to the past, observing the processes that took place immediately after the Holocaust, gives perspective. The past gives perspective. To stand today in the parking lot of the October 7th Burnt Vehicles Compound in southern Israel, moments away from the place where my grandparents’ home once stood in Tekuma, Holocaust survivors who rebuilt life here, puts things in proportion. They taught us that it is possible to return to life, even after everything.

On the way back from the film, I drove through Sderot on the night of Hanukkah. I passed by a menorah built from rockets. And it was so precise. Light or darkness. We took a missile, a tool of destruction, and turned it into something that illuminates. It is an idea that is easy to turn into a cliché, but here it was tangible. We too are vessels in this world. If we want light, we must light it.