Transporting audiences to times past
A few years ago I spent an afternoon in Paris with a wonderful French TV crew at work on a documentary about the Nazi leader Hermann Göring. Curiously, Göring — Hitler’s designated successor during most of World War II and a mastermind of the Gestapo, concentration camps, the Luftwaffe, and important aspects of the Holocaust — has been the subject of few documentaries.
He will, however, be a focus of the forthcoming movie Nuremberg, which is adapted from my book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. Directed and written by James Vanderbilt, the film begins shooting in February 2024 with an illustrious cast and production crew.
In my filmed interview with the French documentarians, I discussed Göring’s final months as a prisoner of the Allies, one of the topics of my book.
As I answered the director’s questions, an unexpected thought crossed my mind. Here we were, a group of people thoroughly engrossed in the motivations and behavior of a notorious man and war criminal who died before any of us were born. Our discussion, and the resulting documentary, will transport viewers to a terrible time in which most of us now alive never lived.
That is part of the magic of popular history, when it is done well. It removes us from today but makes us reconsider the present. It focuses on motivation and universal human needs and struggles. It’s not about us, and yet it is.
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