Out of curiosity, I went back and again watched the movie Judgment at Nuremberg. Doing so, I was struck by something that should disturb all of us:

The men at the center of Nazi power were largely not madmen, but rather men living up to the sacred truth that Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.

The Nazis on trial at the famous Nuremberg hearings – held post-World War II in 1945 – proclaimed themselves to be Patriotic. Educated. Orderly. People of the law. Doing what any other group of people would do in their shoes.

When one observes what is happening in America today, these facts are what make the Nuremberg story so enduring – and so terrifying.

That’s Not Us!

We often comfort ourselves with the idea that history’s great evils are carried out by obvious monsters. But the Nazi project was not built by cackling villains alone. It was built by bureaucrats, lawyers, judges, media operators, military officials, wealthy oligarchs, and citizens who convinced themselves that what they were doing was necessary, justified, legal, or simply not their responsibility.

Take Heinrich Himmler. He was not “insane” in the casual way people sometimes want to dismiss evil. He believed with religious certainty that he belonged to a superior race and that history had assigned him a sacred duty. Once a person believes that, the rest becomes horribly simple.

The law no longer applies to them.

Other people no longer count as fully human. Cruelty starts to feel like order. Mass violence starts to feel like a necessity. That is one of Nuremberg’s most enduring lessons: evil often does not arrive frothing at the mouth. It arrives in a pressed uniform, with a stack of papers, a legal theory, and a calm explanation.

Hannah Arendt described this type of thinking as the “banality of evil,” arguing in her reporting on Adolf Eichmann that mass atrocity can be enabled not only by sadists, but by careerists, functionaries, and obedient people who stop thinking morally about what they are doing. Britannica summarizes her argument this way: Eichmann’s crimes stemmed not from some theatrical depravity, but from “thoughtlessness.”

That phrase has been debated over the years, and fairly so. Some Nazi officials were not merely passive bureaucrats; they were committed antisemites and ideological zealots. But Arendt’s core warning still stands: civilization is in grave danger when ordinary people hand over their conscience to systems, slogans, and authority.

Nuremberg forces us to confront the uncomfortable truth that entire systems of horror can be carried out by people who still see themselves as respectable.

Propaganda does not just lie. It trains people how to see.

Nazi Germany proved that propaganda is not merely about false statements. It is about building a total information environment where some people are humanized, others are degraded, and cruelty becomes easier to tolerate.

The Nazi regime, under Joseph Goebbels, centralized control over newspapers, radio, film, books, theater, music, and art. The goal was not just to persuade. It was to shape the entire moral imagination of the public. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that Nazi propaganda and censorship were used to win support for dictatorship, spread ideology, and foster indifference to the persecution and destruction of Jews.

That matters now because authoritarian movements do not need everyone to become fanatics. They only need enough people to become numb, distracted, tribal, and willing to excuse what they would once have condemned.

Propaganda works best when it turns neighbors into threats, critics into traitors, immigrants into invaders, minorities into contaminants, and violence into common sense.

The law can be corrupted long before democracy fully dies

Nuremberg also exposed judicial complicity. Many Nazi crimes were carried out through legal channels. Judges, lawyers, and legal theorists helped “nazify” German law, purge Jewish and political opponents from the legal system, and reinterpret justice through the lens of ideology rather than universal rights. The Holocaust Encyclopedia notes that judges were urged to decide cases according to “healthy folk sentiment,” not neutral principle.

This is what makes the trials so morally important. They asked a question every age must answer:

What is the responsibility of judges, lawyers, and public officials when the law itself becomes unjust?

That question is not trapped in the 1940s. It is always alive.

When courts protect power instead of people, when legality is confused with morality, when entire classes of people are stripped of protection through procedure and paperwork, a democracy is already in serious trouble.

The Nuremberg trials insisted on a radical principle: “I was following the law” is not a sufficient moral defense when the law has become an instrument of dehumanization.

Atrocity is a process before it is an event

One of the most dangerous mistakes people make is to imagine that fascism begins at the final stage.

It does not.

It begins with language. With scapegoats. With public humiliation. With conspiracy. With “otherizing.” With exclusionary policies.

With leaders telling frightened people that their suffering is caused by some dangerous set of “those people.”

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with rhetoric, legal discrimination, propaganda, social sorting, and the slow normalization of cruelty. By the time mass violence becomes obvious, a culture has usually already spent years preparing itself not to look away in horror, but to call the horror reasonable.

That is why historical memory matters. You do not study Nuremberg only to understand what happened then. You study it to recognize what it looks like before it happens again.

Germany learned the lesson—imperfectly, but concretely

One of the more interesting contrasts with our current moment is what Germany did after the war, especially around public memory and media structure.

Modern Germany did not simply decide that government should control the media. It also did not fully surrender media power to private wealth. Instead, it developed a hybrid system with strong public-service broadcasting alongside private media. The logic behind that arrangement was shaped by the lessons of fascism: concentrated propaganda power is dangerous whether it sits only in the hands of the state or is dominated by wealthy private interests capable of capturing public discourse.

That postwar instinct is worth paying attention to. A healthy democracy should not trust unchecked state propaganda. But it also should not trust the idea that billionaires buying up media outlets, platforms, and information channels is somehow the same thing as freedom.

When too much communicative power is centralized anywhere—inside the state, inside oligarchy, or inside a collusion of both—democracy begins to suffocate.

Germany was not stupid. It was vulnerable.

Another comforting myth is that Germans must simply have been uniquely gullible or uniquely evil. But Germany was one of the most educated, scientifically advanced societies in the world.

Its people were not stupid. They were vulnerable.

Economic suffering, humiliation, political instability, grievance, nationalism, and propaganda can turn a brilliant society toward barbarism faster than enlightened people like to admit. That is part of why Nuremberg still hits so hard today. Because the defendants do not look like aliens from another planet.

They look like human beings who made catastrophic choices and then built moral justifications around those choices. And that means the warning is not only about them.

It’s about us.

Nuremberg’s warning for the present

The enduring moral claim of Nuremberg is simple:

No one is above the law. Not generals, judges, party loyalists, nor propagandists.

Not even presidents.

And no nation gets a permanent exemption from history. The real warning of Nuremberg is not that monsters once ruled Germany. It is that ordinary people, under the right pressures and the wrong leadership, can normalize the unthinkable.

They can tell themselves they are restoring greatness. Or preserving order. Or they are the lawful ones. And by the time they realize what they have participated in, the machinery of cruelty is already running.

That is why remembering Nuremberg is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is a lesson that should make us look into the mirror, day after day. And particularly – TODAY.

Are you able to consider that the people who supported – or were at least ambivalent about – the Nazi regime could be you?