The Film Nuremberg Is Almost Unforgivable

There is an unwritten rule in cinema—an unspoken but widely understood injunction—that when it comes to dramatising the Holocaust, the task is almost impossible. Not because the events are obscure or inaccessible, nor because there is any shortage of historical material, eyewitness accounts, or documentation. But because the Holocaust, in its scale, its bureaucratic precision, and its annihilating cruelty, pushes at the limits of what art can responsibly hold. Attempt to contain it within the frame of conventional drama and you risk diminishing it. Attempt to translate its reality into the grammar of entertainment and you trespass on sacred ground.

Documentary can illuminate; testimony can reveal; archival reconstruction can educate. But glossy, emotionally engineered dramatization is another category altogether. It traffics in the aesthetics of cinema—its rhythms, tropes, and pleasures—and pleasures are precisely what the Holocaust should repel. This is the essential argument against fictionalisation: that there are some historical realities so morally vast, so structurally obscene, that any attempt to render them as narrative—three acts, character arcs, rising tension, catharsis—inevitably ends in distortion.

And yet, the industry keeps trying. Over the years, numerous films have fallen into this trap, but two recent productions illustrate the danger with particular clarity. The first is Hunters, Amazon’s hyper-stylised Al Pacino-led series about a group of 1970s Nazi hunters in New York. The show adopts the energy of a comic-book revenge fantasy, complete with wink-to-camera flourishes and pulp ultraviolence. The problem is not the desire to see perpetrators face justice—history, tragically, delivered far too little of that—but the decision to situate the moral weight of the Holocaust inside a superhero idiom. The tonal friction is jarring. The history becomes raw material, a set of plot devices for a vigilante romp. It is, to borrow Claude Lanzmann’s famous critique, a betrayal of the unspeakable.

Then there is Sky Atlantic’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a handsomely shot series whose very polish becomes part of the problem. Based on a semi-fictionalised novel, it recounts a love story forged inside one of the most brutal killing machines in human history. “Semi-fictionalised” is the key term here. Why? Why apply narrative embroidery to a place where fact is already devastating enough? Why soften, smooth, or sentimentalise an environment built for systematic extermination? The production’s aesthetic restraint—its tasteful lighting, its gentle score, its carefully curated heartbreak—creates an emotional buffer between the viewer and the reality. The result is a strangely sanitised version of horror, a story less about Auschwitz than about a romance improbably blooming in its shadow.

If this trend continues, the dark joke practically writes itself: coming next, The Dry Cleaner of Buchenwald, The Loss Adjuster of Bergen-Belsen, The Ladies’ Hairdresser of Dachau. We are only a few script meetings away from a prestige-limited series in which a plucky, resolute protagonist discovers hope, redemption, or personal fulfilment inside a death camp—as though these were simply dramatic backdrops rather than annihilating historical events.

This is why the new film Nuremberg feels almost unforgivable. It is not that filmmakers should never approach the Holocaust; rather, they must approach it with reverence, restraint, and a near-religious seriousness. Instead, Nuremberg appears—like too many recent projects—to treat history as material to be dramatised rather than a moral landscape that demands profound caution. The performances may be impressive. The cinematography might be sumptuous. The drama could be gripping. But the question is not whether it is good drama. The question is whether drama is the right vehicle at all.

The ethical difficulty is this: cinema is, by design, an emotional instrument. It amplifies, simplifies, and sculpts experience into narrative meaning. But the Holocaust resists narrative meaning. It is an event defined by its rupture from normality. To place it within familiar storytelling frameworks risks domesticating the horror—making it digestible, consumable, emotionally navigable. The audience may leave moved, tearful, shaken; but they have also been given a curated emotional journey, complete with climax and resolution. History offered no such structure.

There are ways to depict the Holocaust on screen—ways that maintain reverence and avoid aestheticisation. Lanzmann’s Shoah is the exemplar: a film built entirely on testimony and landscape, refusing reconstruction, refusing narrative comfort. But such approaches are rare, demanding, and commercially unappealing. It is easier—too easy—to reach for Hollywood craftsmanship, to trust that a “prestige drama” automatically confers legitimacy.

But legitimacy is not the same as ethics.

When filmmakers choose to fictionalise or dramatise the Holocaust, they assume an enormous responsibility. Too often, they discharge it carelessly. And that is why Nuremberg, like so many dramatizations before it, feels less like an act of remembrance than an act of appropriation—using history’s darkest chapter as narrative fuel. The result may move audiences. But at what cost?