Author: Justus Wilhoit (Page 1 of 2)

At ten years old, while kicking a soccer ball on a field in Berlin, Nabil Rayk could already sense he was the “other.” The opposing team’s parents, “the Proper Germans” as he puts it, would shout insults from the sidelines. “Kick that Arab, kick that N-word” he recalled. 

“For them,” Nabil said, “sometimes sport is a replacement for war.”

A decade later, this same hostility has gone beyond the boundaries of sport. Divisions are now making their way into parliament debates and campaign rallies. These divisions are not new to European football, but their resurgence reflects the growing influence of far-right parties such as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has gained momentum across Germany through its anti-immigrant rhetoric.

For many immigrants and people of color, this prejudice is forcing their ethnic, religious, or racial identities and even their gender or sexual orientation into the spotlight. It leaves them questioning whether Germany truly sees them as part of the nation or as outsiders.

“Football is the real heavy tradition in Germany, it’s really hard to change something here in the football system, ” said Stenny Bamer, a social worker for the fan scene of  BFC Dynamo, a football club based in East Berlin, at Fanprojekt der Sportjugend Berlin. 

Fanprojekt is an independent initiative created by the Berlin Sports Organization to engage football fans aged 14 to 27 whose home teams are either BFC Dynamo or Hertha BSC, another club based in Berlin. It hopes to foster inclusion, anti-discrimination, and a sense of community through football culture.

“I see a change in the fan scenes. They are getting more conservative, more right-wing.  There is a real influence of the AfD policy on the football fans,” Bamer added.

In Germany, a football club’s reputation often carries political significance and fans play a major role in shaping it. Eastern clubs like Dynamo have traditionally been linked to right-leaning politics, while many Western clubs are seen as more left-leaning.

Prior to meeting Bamer, when I mentioned to a German sports journalist that I planned to attend a BFC Dynamo match for this story, he warned me not to go as a person of color, as it might not be safe. 

“I would never say to an immigrant person, go to a BFC Dynamo game because there are a lot of far right extremists,” Bamer said.

Bamer wants the unwelcoming atmosphere at clubs like Dynamo to disappear. He’s not alone as journalists, representatives from local NGOs, and club officials I spoke with also called for a more inclusive football environment where immigrant players are celebrated and immigrant fans feel welcome rather than treated as “others.”

Across these conversations, two main strategies for change emerged: change driven by club leadership or change as a result from the pressure of supporters. 

“In some clubs, it [change] can come from the top down. But in others, like St. Pauli, it came from the fans themselves,” Bamer said. 

St. Pauli, unlike Dynamo, is a liberal stronghold shaped by fan activism. During the 1980s and 90s, as neo-Nazi hooliganism spread through European football, more left-wing activists settled in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district and publicly stood against fascist values in the stadium, rejecting racism and extremism. 

Their pressure led the club to become the first in Germany to ban right-wing nationalist displays inside the stadium.  Today, St. Pauli remains committed to equality and diversity, and was one of 12 German clubs to publicly condemn the AfD earlier this year. 

Dynamo, in contrast, did not speak out against the party.

At Dynamo, the shift towards inclusion has been slower. Anti-immigrant sentiment and nostalgia for old identities sometimes coexist with loyalty. Bamer recalls how a Nigerian player was renamed by fans with a German nickname because they could not pronounce his last name. “Everybody loved him,” he said, “but I always had the feeling it was also a little bit of making a joke out of his name.”

Germany has 84 million people, 25 million with immigrant backgrounds, yet many including AfD supporters resist diversity.

Lede:

When he was ten years old, kicking a soccer ball on a field in Berlin, Nabil Rayk could already sense the divide. The opposing team’s parents, “the Proper Germans” as he puts it, would shout insults from the sidelines. “Kick that Arab, kick that N-word” he recalled, their racist comments disguised as team spirit. “For them,” Nabil said, “sometimes sport is a replacement for war.”

Nutgraph:

A decade later, the same hostility Nabil once felt on the soccer field continues to persist far beyond the boundaries of sport. Divisions along racial, ethnic, gender, and religious lines that have been present in playgrounds and smaller soccer clubs are now making their way into parliament debates and campaign rallies, as far-right parties like Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) gain traction and anti-immigrant rhetoric grows louder across Germany.

For many immigrants and people of color, this prejudice is forcing their ethnic, religious, or racial identities and even their gender or sexual orientation into the spotlight. It leaves them questioning whether Germany truly sees them as part of the nation or as outsiders.

In response, a renewed wave of protests and activism condemning far-right extremism has taken place in recent months, particularly within the stands of numerous football clubs’ stadiums. In Germany, football reputations carry political weight, which are largely created by the fans. East German football clubs have long been associated with right-leaning ideology, while those in the West have been labeled as left-leaning. 

Following reading the articles for this week, the ledes on the NYT articles about the state of Aleppo after its falling, and about Song Yang’s death were the strongest. In the sex worker piece, by starting off with falling, I felt the piece was cinematic given its use of photos and videos, predominantly taken at night when the streetlights were on. This contributed to setting the scene of a fall up in my mind and I wanted to read how it would unravel. I really enjoyed the structure of this piece by hooking me in with the fall, from the author directly going back and telling me as the reader how she arrived in Queens from China, her death, her family seeking the truth themselves, and then finally this overlooking message on immigrants who want to make it big in America, but ultimately don’t so what is there next step.  Song Yang’s occupation and eventual death unfortunately are just one answer to that question.

Similarly with the article on Aleppo, the article opens with Abu Sami leaving his house and having human interaction for the first time in four and a half years. Given he had been all alone for years while his city was being destroyed, I wanted to know why this man stayed put and were there people out there still looking for him after all of those years. Whereas the first one feels like a film, this feels more like a documentary, particularly because the author walks around old sites and gets interviews with some recounting Aleppo before the destruction. This article however I think does a bit much as it doesn’t really keep the same focus on Abu Sami like the other article did with Song Yang. I think the reporter was so focused on getting back to the region themselves because they missed reporting there, that he put his own personal motivatives/priorities at times ahead of the actual people that had to survive.

The structure for the Times article about AI in Gaza is a little more straightforward, especially since the article is shorter and there is not a central character. Reading the article, it follows one common problem of the use of artificial intelligence in militaries across the world. I think the article also explains it very well because I’m not sure many people think of the military when it comes to artificial intelligence. I also enjoyed that they were able to get both people and perspectives from the IDF in Israel as well as some senators and representatives who have called for greater regulation of AI in the US.

My article will be focused on how racism and anti-immigration rhetoric from far-right politics, particularly Germany’s AfD party, is playing a role in the stands and field of football clubs across the country. The article will begin with speaking on the popularity of the sport within Germany, and then transition into speaking on the role of a club’s political beliefs and reputation, and how this is oftentimes shaped by the fans.  I will then speak on the recent influx of reports that the fan scene even at the more liberal clubs is becoming more conservative, and how this has prompted protests condemning AFD and right-wing extremism. Most importantly, I will include interviews from football journalists, and people who work inside the club who have seen these changes occur in real time. 

The people I met in Berlin will become characters in my story, including the social worker who I wrote my profile on. Additionally, I hope to talk more with a player who comes from an immigrant background about their experiences with the fans, and how it affects them during their time on and off the field. As well as what they think football clubs can do better to protect their players and make the sport more inclusive, particularly towards immigrants. I have not locked down a particular player yet, but I hope to include at least one player in this article. I haven’t found that IT character as I stated in class, so at the moment I have been trying to figure out another angle of the story that still gets at the heart of sports and migration. 

I will be including video evidence of some of the chants fans have utilized in the stadium that take aim at a particular ethnic or religious identity. I additionally hope to speak to ROOTS Against Racism In Sports, a German based organization that focuses on providing guidance towards professional athletes that are negatively impacted by racism in sport. As well as one of the AfD members currently sitting on the German parliament’s committee for Sports and Volunteering who I have previously reached out to, and Ozgur Ozvatan who was a former youth national team player for Germany, works for the Berlin football association, and has done research on sports and migration following his soccer career.

In writing a story, every journalist has to answer the following questions: what happened and/or what’s going to happen. Some articles are straightforward to write, however in my experience it has often been the opposite, where constant digging for more information and analysis is required. Now once all of that is completed, what do you do with it? This is where the role of structure comes into play as discussed in John McPhee’s New Yorker piece and Rob Rosenthal’s article. I found McPhee’s description of structure somewhat difficult to understand. The man is so experienced that I felt that I was reading a chapter of his memoir rather than a ‘hey everyone here are tips to help you lay out a story.’

 I felt the opposite way about Rosenthal’s use of napkin to represent the various ways you can structure a story. As I was reading it, his use of “the e” in which you begin with the present, leave the present, and then return back to it closer to the end made me recall the process in writing the profile last week. Especially when Deb told the class that many of us had our best quotes and analysis at the bottom of our stories and to move it up. Or when Raphi told me to share more on the background of the person who I profiled.

Similar to Miriam, I believe that reporting should come first, and the structure should be taken into account once the piece is initially composed. I think if these priorities are swapped then what happens is you focus more on aesthetics of the content, rather than the content itself, something Fred Abrahams warned against in the War and Truth conversation. 

Rosenthal comes from a more radio background whereas McPhee is more narrative nonfiction and print based. Given their different mediums of journalism, I would be curious to hear what structure of the 5 Rosenthal presents McPhee would think is the most helpful in writing for print. So much about telling a story is about the little things, not just getting the main and/or supporting characters, context, and then what to do next. Which quote is the strongest? Where should it go? These are the questions I have had to ask myself many times, and I felt validated reading about how McPhee has often had similar experiences.

Structure is critical because it represents how much time and dedication a journalist puts into taking “mess” and shaping it into something beautiful. However, arguably it has greater implications for the person, place, or thing being written about. It can either provide control, approval, comfortability, etc. Or it can take that away.

In Germany, football reputations carry political weight. BFC Dynamo is located specifically in East Berlin and like several East German clubs, Dynamo’s fan base has long been associated with right-leaning ideology. A stigma that has sharpened as the far-right AfD party (Alternative für Deutschland) has gained traction in recent years.

The AfD is known for anti-immigrant rhetoric; during last year’s European Championships, it criticized the German team for being “too woke, too diverse, not German enough.” Some clubs have publicly condemned the AfD, Dynamo however is not one of them.

“I see a change in the fan scenes,” Stenny said. “They are getting more conservative, more right-wing. There is a real influence of the AfD policy on the football fans.”

When I first mentioned to a German journalist that I planned to attend a BFC Dynamo match, he warned me not to go as a person of color, as it might not be safe.

Stenny Bamer, wearing a blue beanie and black tracksuit, tells me he wants to see this stigma change at a kickoff party for Gesellschaftsspiele, an NGO that promotes inclusion through sport. The organization is hosting young athletes from São Tomé and Príncipe, an island nation off the western coast of Central Africa, for a two-week exchange.

“When I was a normal fan, I loved this reputation because everyone was like, ‘Oh, Dynamo is coming.’ But now, he pauses, “I would say that the reputation is far away from reality,” he said.

The event takes place at the Haus der Fußballkulturen, or House of Football Cultures, in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district where Stenny works as a social worker for the fan scene of BFC Dynamo through the Fanprojekt der Sportjugend Berlin.

Fanprojekt is an independent initiative created by the Berlin Sports Organization to engage football fans aged 14 to 27 whose home teams are either BFC Dynamo or Hertha BSC, another club based in Berlin. It hopes to foster inclusion, anti-discrimination, and a sense of community through football culture.

Prior to joining Fanprojekt, Stenny obtained a degree in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Potsdam and worked as a social worker at a refugee camp in Hamburg. He spoke critically on the camp’s conditions, citing cockroach infestations and how his supervisors would treat refugees.

“I said, bro, you cannot let people [live] in conditions like this, and what they said is, yeah, it’s our own fault. We were not clean.”

However, Stenny’s supervisors didn’t make any changes, and when he spoke out again on numerous instances, they would often ignore his comments. This experience impacted how Stenny sees his job as a social worker.

“Even if some ministry is paying for me, I’m not there for the ministry. I’m there for the people and I always had the feeling that, like the ministry in that area who was in response of the refugees, always saw it the other way around, “he said in semi-broken English.

“So as a social worker it’s my aim to be there for my clients, in this case the refugees,” he added.

This commitment to the people he’s assisting rather than the institution that employs him has led him to FanProjekt. However, the world of sports is not something new to him, as he shared, he’s been a devoted football fan since his late teens.

“I was interested in football violence,” he said with a smirk, fully aware of how crazy it sounds. “This is what Dynamo is famous for. For football violence and hooliganism, and when I was young, I was fascinated by this part of football.”

Stenny’s role is to guide the fan community toward inclusion and away from the racism, xenophobia, and right extremism that often plays a role in the stands.

In one match, spectators in the stands were heard shouting Juden-Schweine, meaning “Jewish pigs.” At another game, fans chanted Arbeit macht frei – Babelsberg 03, which translates to “work makes you free – Babelsberg 03.” Babelsberg 03 is a German football club located on the outskirts of Berlin, and the phrase is infamously associated with the entrance of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.

Although Stenny works with Dynamo, he points out key differences in how other Berlin-based football clubs, particularly Hertha BSC approach social issues.

“Hertha really has a straight line with racism, with anti-Semitism, with homophobia,” he said. “The management has a clear opinion, and this changes the fan culture. If the club is open-minded, the fans get more open-minded.”

At Dynamo, the shift has been slower. Anti-immigrant sentiment and nostalgia for old identities sometimes coexist with loyalty. He recalls how a Nigerian player was renamed by fans with a German nickname because they could not pronounce his last name. “Everybody loved him,” he said, “but I always had the feeling it was also a little bit of making a joke out of his name.”

“I would never say to an immigrant person, go to a BFC Dynamo game because there are a lot of far-right extremists,” he said. Germany has 84 million people, 25 million with immigrant backgrounds, yet many including AfD supporters resist diversity.

On the field, diversity is normal. “For players, migration is quite normal. If you want to play in a high-level club, you move from like Germany to England. Migration is part of the system,” he said.

In the stands, it’s different. “Nearly 100% of the fan blocs don’t reflect society. They are mainly heterosexual, white, male guys,” he said.

Berlin is composed of approximately 30% of immigrants but according to Stenny, that is not reflected at any of the clubs. “You will not find them [immigrants].  The stands don’t reflect the society and the migration part of society,” he said.

That disconnect between multicultural teams and homogenous fans is discouraging, yet Stenny hasn’t given up on the possibility of change.

He noticed a change in attendance following the pandemic, which excited him. “A lot of young people came to our stadium. With more people, for sure, more normal people also come to a game.” By “normal,” he means less aggressive than the traditional Dynamo supporters. Still, he admits hesitantly, “we are a club with a higher potential for making trouble.”

For Stenny, the problem isn’t always the fans, the club’s reputation follows them. “If we go for an away game, the police are always thinking, ‘Oh, Dynamo is coming. We must bring a lot of police.’ That makes away games more trouble than necessary. The image is also part of the problem,” he said.

That image, he adds, is difficult to change, though some clubs have shown it’s possible. “In some clubs, it comes from the top down. In others, like St. Pauli, it came from the fans themselves,” he said.  While Stenny is optimistic, he is also realistic about how deep tradition runs in the sport. “Football is a real heavy tradition in Germany. It’s hard to change something here in the football system.”

After the Syrian War in 2015, he claims that many clubs helped refugees, but momentum faded.

“If I watch the last five years,” he said, “not one of the big clubs is really taking care of this topic.”

Still, Stenny believes football still has the power to build acceptance, especially for immigrants. Once a fan of Dynamo’s chaotic culture, he now hopes that energy can fuel something more inclusive, a fandom that mirrors modern Germany rather than resists it. Whether that change begins from above or within the stands remains uncertain.

Regardless of what lies ahead, Stenny said he’s not going anywhere, determined to make diversity in the stands as visible as it already is on the field.

“Immigration will always be part of humanity. To accept this and show that it’s normal should also be one big value of the clubs.”

When Deb first mentioned embedded reporting in class last week and specifically pointed to my own travels to conduct interviews for my project, I must admit I didn’t immediately grasp what she meant. However, after reading Doornbos’s reporting in Ukraine, Dickerson’s work in the Darién Gap, and listening to Mariana Baran’s In the Dark podcast about the Haditha massacre, I began to truly understand what embedded journalism is and why it matters so deeply.

Embedding reporting somewhat takes away the divide between journalist and subject, and reminds the reader that at the end of the day, they are both just people. The removal of that divide I think is necessary in this type of reporting otherwise a story cannot reach its full potential. 

What makes embedded stories stand out to me is that they can’t be told  from afar. Just as we want our loved ones present for life’s most meaningful moments, great journalism sometimes requires being physically present. Like Miriam and Raphi’s journey to Gummersbach, I found it necessary to travel to stadiums and soccer matches myself.  Otherwise, journalism risks becoming mere hearsay, no better than tabloids. Through embedded reporting, more trust is needed, which ultimately results in greater credibility.

Baran’s persistence in the In the Dark podcast especially stood out to me. I was struck by how she and Parker Yesko went door-to-door to interview Marines, even when confronted with signs reading, “No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.” It felt almost movie-like when Baran drove through West Virginia searching for Colonel Gregory Watt, who led the first investigation into Haditha, and in the process lost cell service, getting lost, and even had to ask locals for directions. I was also curious how much flexibility her editors gave her; after all those FOIA requests stalled, many editors might have told her to move on. Yet it seems she had the backing to keep pushing, which ultimately allowed her to uncover something powerful.

Every story takes time, but with embedded journalism, excellence often comes at the cost of years of persistence. Should this level of commitment be the standard or should embedded journalism be able to happen with quicker turnarounds? Perhaps we already see glimpses of it when broadcast journalists report live from the scenes of car crashes or school shootings.

From these works, it’s clear that embedded journalism is for reporters who are gritty and unafraid to get dirt or even blood on their hands, both literally and figuratively. To me, it also raised questions of when that divide between journalist and subject narrows, does the power dynamic shift, and do the chances of exploitation from the journalist grow stronger or weaker?

I have been struggling for a while now with how I would write my own profile as currently, among those I have interviewed, many have felt like supporting characters, but not the IT STAR. Reading Cross’s piece first in particular provided me with a clear mentality of the direction I want to go. I was particularly fond of Cross’s reference to writer Lane DeGregory and how she asks prospective subjects of her stories if she could come over first, before asking them where they would like to meet. It is through reading Cross’s piece, as well as Deb’s “Dancing for Their Lives” and Hessler’s “Tales of the Trash” that I have come to understand the greater meaning of setting, particularly in covering detailed profiles.

In Deb’s “Dancing for Their Lives,” she immerses herself in a place she is unfamiliar with, and a place by the end of the night that she hopes to never return to as “the undertow of despair was too great.” In Hessler’s piece “Tales of the Trash”, he is somewhere familiar, and joins garbage man Sayyid on his trash runs. Deb enters the club as a guest of Um Nour, a woman who has to live off her body to make ends meet. However, Deb does not just stay alongside Um Nour the entire night, she pivots and makes friends with Abeer, another woman whom she initially met in the women’s restroom earlier on in the night and later on dances with. This is in contrast as Hessler doesn’t have to pivot as much as Deb does, as he is able to remain with Sayyid all the time.

Through both of these pieces, I was pleased with how they were able to tie these profile pieces back to the historical context of where they were occurring, Deb’s piece in Damascus, Syria, and Hessler’s piece in Cairo, Egypt. 

I can tell Deb is very observant about how the club is laid out, what particular women are wearing, how the men are behaving? The article is so detailed it’s as if she is writing into a notebook all throughout the night, even while on the dance floor with Abeer.  Yet, while she is paying attention to every nook and crevice of the club, she is also trying to find somewhat of a sense of comfortability or relief, and she achieves that once she realizes her translator, Nezar Hussein, unknowingly is in this club at the same time as her. 

From Deb’s article, because there were different women and men to follow, I was more focused on Deb, the journalist, rather than the subject? Whereas Hessler’s piece I was more focused on the subject, Sayyid. This begs the question that for journalists like myself, so much of writing a story is making sure your subject is the one comfortable and willing to share with you some of the hardest things they’ve experienced? However, how does a journalist have to go about getting a story when they are the ones less comfortable, and it is the subject that has more control. Deb’s piece offers an answer to this question,  showing how discomfort can sharpen a journalist’s eye and deepen empathy,  while Hessler’s illustrates what happens when familiarity allows the subject’s world to unfold more naturally.

By Raphi Gold

10/16/2025

 GUMMERSBACH— I am now in Mike Bible’s “circle of care.” This man, seated next to me on a plane five days ago by fate (he’d say God), now wants to know when Miriam and I get back safe tonight. He also wants to be my pen pal. “I’ve been getting into snail mail,” he pauses his enthusiastic drilling to tell me, “Let me write to you in New York.” I find myself promising “sure!” because saying “sure” to Mike is what got me here. 

Here, in this abandoned cinema soon-to-be church in Gummersbach, Germany, the scene won’t synthesize. Everything is out of place: half-stripped walls, stray work gloves, faded mosaic tiles, a coffee machine in Ukrainian, a ticket box in disrepair. There’s no trace of Germania Lichtspieltheater online, but we can guess the year it closed by the last movie it showed: Indiana Jones 4, tickets £4.50. 

The people don’t quite match either, least of all ourselves. Pastor Nickolas Skopych was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was visiting a friend in Gummersbach just before the war broke out; his two-week trip has turned into a nearly four-year stay. Hundreds of his congregants followed. Gummersbach is now home to as many as 3000 Ukrainians, according to Skopych (German Census data is unavailable past 2022). His new congregation bears the same name as its counterpart in Ukraine: Almaz, meaning “diamond.” 

The Americans who have come to help convert the theatre into a church for Almaz hail from the First Baptist Church, a megachurch in Hendersonville, Tennessee. The Ukrainians all speak at least three languages and have experienced traumatic upheaval. The Americans just speak English, and some have never left the country. Last night, the Americans walked five miles just for McDonalds. German McDonalds.. Still, they’re all evangelical Baptists; their parallel stories of finding God in times of need align perfectly. 

Before we know it, they’re inviting us to lunch. We’re devouring scrumptious messy Ukrainian cream puffs, and I’m chatting with Ukrainian refugees Liza and Viktoria about American television and evangelical Valentines day traditions. I venture upstairs with five Americans including Jeremy, the mission leader who is clearly fed up with the college kids on the trip. Their work ethic leaves something to be desired. We sweep for a bit, halfheartedly, then pause to explore the attic. We tear giant sheets of rubbery wallpaper into chunks. We lower an ancient control-panel from the window, then hold some rolls of film up to the light. The boys guffaw — one of them is a porn film.

It’s time for something else. Downstairs, people load bins with wooden planks. I glimpse Miriam hoisting a massive branch. Another chat with Mike leads me to a facetime interview with his Ukrainian “daughter,” Tania, whom he sponsored via U4U. Suddenly realizing it’s 5pm, I interrupt Miriam’s conversation with trip-leader Jeremy. It turns out he has a secret he’s not quite ready for the others to find out about: he’s actually a Baptist who practices Jewish ritual and learns Torah. He wears tzizit in the Sephardi style and keeps kosher. I want to know everything. 

Alas. We board the train home, which of course gets cancelled, so we pile into an Uber with a Polish couple. I write this from what I pray is our last train of the evening. With Deutsche Bahn’s fickleness, we were lucky to make it to Gummersbach in the first place. Or was it thanks to God? Either way, I know who I’m texting when we get home safe tonight.

In the first hour of Nuremberg, Major Airey Neve, a British officer captured and escaped twice by the Gestapo, who later joined the International Military Tribunal interviews each of the Nazi generals as they await trial. Their reactions vary: some lash out in anger and denial, while others listen reluctantly, but understand the seriousness of the situation, as their fate is no longer in their own hands. These early exchanges foreshadowed the verdicts to come—some generals were hanged to death, others faced imprisonment, and a few walked free.

Watching the film, I felt a complex mix of emotions. I hadn’t known much about the Nuremberg Trials before, so seeing the generals receive justice made me optimistic about the future of humanity. Yet in order to feel that sense of justice, I also felt a sense of horror and grief. One of the most disturbing moments came when the court screens footage of concentration camps: heaps of dead bodies in mass graves, survivors reduced to skeletons. Later testimonies detailing medical experiments in freezing tanks, children thrown into furnaces when gas ran out, and a train of 230 French women sent to Auschwitz, only 49 returning alive. The magnitude of cruelty is almost unimaginable.

The film’s setting in Nuremberg is also symbolic. The movie mentions that Nuremberg is considered Hitler’s “spiritual center,” it was where the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jewish people of their rights. Holding the trials there made poetic sense, the birthplace of Nazi ideology became the site of its judgment. Yet, even this city suffered under Hitler’s reign, bombed and 30,00 people trapped beneath rubble.

Additional scenes that stood out to me included when the Governor-General of Poland mentions he opposed the persecution of Jews but stayed silent, similar to an alleged assasination attempt towards Hitler by his good friend Albert Speer. His cowardice mirrors the broader themes identified by Captain Gustav Gilbert, the Jewish-American psychologist assigned to monitor the defendants. Gilbert observes three traits that enabled Hitler’s rise: blind obedience to authority, propaganda-fueled hatred towards Jews,, and a profound lack of empathy. The irony that a Jewish man held psychological power over these war criminals underscores the film’s moral tension—especially when Alec Baldwin’s Justice Jackson reminds Gilbert that he can influence whether the defendants own up to their crimes or hide behind obedience.

The film also exposes the hypocrisy at the core of Nazi ideology. Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second hand man, played by Brian Cox, claims that he and Hitler were unaware of the full scale of the killings, which I think is absurd. To play devil’s advocate, maybe they didn’t know.  Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was part of the camps in Auschwitz, boasted about accelerating the process of killing Jewish people, finding his solution through the use of carbon monoxide. He compared it to exterminating rats, all while insisting he did not see this as torturing Jews. One general even remarked on Hitler’s vegetarianism, his refusal to harm animals standing in grotesque contrast to his sanctioning of genocide.

In the end, Göring and another general chose suicide over facing execution, proof that even in defeat, they sought control. As Göring’s character declares, “The victors will always be the judges; the vanquished will always be the accused.” Yet their deaths underscored the final irony, the very men who showed no mercy to others refused to confront justice when it was their turn.