November 20 marked the eightieth anniversary of the first day of the legendary Nuremberg Trials. On that day in 1945, the International Military Tribunal—consisting of prosecutors representing the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union—began the first of its thirteen trials, indicting twenty-two top Nazi leaders for their crimes against humanity. Among them were Adolf Hitler’s second in command, Hermann Göring; Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess; and Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher.
Many television networks and commentators, such as director Michael Moore, this past week have remembered the life of Ben Ferencz, the last living Nuremberg prosecutor who died in 2023.
I have personally toured the city of Nuremberg, Germany, where the Nazis held their massive party rallies, and have been inside of the courtroom where the tribunal meted out justice to the Nazi defendants, set new international standards in jurisprudence protecting human rights, and outlawed the waging of aggressive war. But my focus here is not on what happened eighty years ago, but rather, how the anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials has been marked in the United States.
On November 18, six Democratic members of the U.S. Congress, all of whom are military veterans or have served in the U.S. intelligence apparatus, posted a video on social media directed at armed service personnel. The video intercuts from speaker to speaker as the lawmakers take turns issuing a collective statement:
“This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution . . . . Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders . . . . You must refuse illegal orders.”
The six participants are Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain and astronaut (whose wife, former Congressperson Gabby Giffords is a survivor of a politically motivated assassination attempt); Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA officer; Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a former Army Ranger; Representative Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, a Navy veteran; Representative Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, a former Navy reservist; and Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, a former Air Force officer.
The lawmakers appear to be referencing the Trump Administration’s recent deployments of the U.S. Marines and National Guard to U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Memphis, and the destruction of boats near Venezuela accused without proof of drug trafficking. Whether or not the six members of Congress explicitly intended to invoke the memory of the Nuremberg Trials, their message is in keeping with the hallowed legacy of those trials, which found that the Nazi officers’s infamous self-justification—“I was just following orders”—is not a legitimate defense for committing crimes against humanity.
Predictably, the video made President Donald Trump go ballistic, resulting in a meltdown that temporarily distracted from the ongoing scandal around his alleged involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking enterprise. Shortly after the video was posted, Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social: “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT.” He later, on further reflection, posted: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” and reposted: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”
Several days later, he doubled-down, posting on Saturday, “IT WAS SEDITION AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL, AND SEDITION IS A MAJOR CRIME. THERE CAN BE NO OTHER INTERPRETATION OF WHAT THEY SAID!” Then, on Monday, the Pentagon opened an investigation into Kelly for his comments in the video, and on Tuesday, the FBI launched an investigation into Kelly and the other five legislators that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has labeled as the “seditious six.”
That Trump would take such a stand is more than a little ironic, given that many people regard his role in the January 6 Capitol riot to have been seditious. Or that, as ABC News notes, the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) prohibits: “ 'all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces, all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces, and crimes and offenses not capital,’ and is punishable in military court.”
Trump, unlike the veterans who issued the video, has never served in uniform, having claimed bone spurs to avoid the draft during the war in Vietnam, so he is likely unfamiliar with the UCMJ—and, it so often seems, with the U.S. Constitution.
What’s more, as if to spit in the face of the anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, the U.S. Coast Guard said on the same day that it would no longer classify swastikas, nooses, or Confederate flags as hate symbols. (The Coast Guard later reversed this decision).
Meanwhile, Harvard University picked November 20 to release a newly digitized, searchable archive of more than 750,000 pages of documents from the eighty-year-old tribunal.
As a film reviewer for The Progressive, I have seen many motion pictures—from Hollywood to the People’s Republic of China to Gaza and beyond—that have focused attention on the war crimes trial of the century, as well as on crimes against humanity and aggressive war. Some examples include: James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe as Göring in the dock, powerfully dramatizes the world-shaking tribunal that set such essential international precedents; China’s official submission to the most recent Academy Awards, Ao Shen’s 2025 Dead to Rights, is a Chinese WWII epic that stretches from the so-called “Rape of Nanjing” in 1937 to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo in 1946, which tried and then executed Imperial Japanese Army officers for crimes committed during the war; and the 2024 Academy Award-winning film No Other Land, made by a collective of Palestinians and Israelis, documents the forcible transfer, destruction, and sometimes death waged against Palestinians in their home community of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank by Israeli settlers and soldiers which has been termed a war crime.
Undaunted in the face of authoritarianism, the six Democrats who appeared in the video responded to Trump’s apparent threats to arrest and execute them with a joint statement later that day. “What’s most telling,” they said, “is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law. Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty . . . . In these moments, fear is contagious, but so is courage. We will continue to lead and will not be intimidated.”
On November 25, Kelly appeared on the late night television show of another public figure who had recently incurred the wrath of Trump—comedian Jimmy Kimmel—proclaiming: “I’ll tell you this: I’m not backing down! . . . Every one of us has First Amendment speech rights . . . . All of us have to stand up for the Constitution and continue to push back.”
Eight decades later, history and humanity are rendering their judgment on how the lessons of Nuremberg are remembered by some—and forgotten by others.