Hermann Göring, as played brilliantly by Russell Crowe in this new telling of the Nuremburg trials, was devoted to his wife and children. Itamar Ben-Gvir, ICE agents in the United States, Tommy Robinson, who is currently taking the credit for Labour’s new policy on asylum seekers, and Vladimir Putin all probably have a softer side which the world doesn’t get to see.

The easiest thing in the world would have been for director James Vanderdbilt to have depicted Hitler’s deputy Göring as a personification of evil in this gripping new film. Instead, the second man in the Nazi state is shown to be capable of tenderness and humour and with a charismatic charm.

And that is the central message of the film.

Rami Malek plays Douglas Kelly, the American psychiatrist tasked with assessing the jailed Nazi leadership, who concludes that men like Göring, Streicher and Himmler exist in every society. He antagonises a radio host by claiming that half the people in America were capable of climbing over the bodies of the other half if it would allow them to dominate. Kelly’s insight is gained by spending a huge amount of time with Göring and the other senior Nazis developing a relationship that almost moves from the professional to a friendship as he seeks to develop a bond of trust.

This relationship is irretrievably broken when Kelly and the other people in the courtroom are shown film of the extermination camps. Göring had denied any knowledge of their true purpose and any personal responsibility for the Holocaust. The film has had some criticism for this extended scene; however, I thought it was entirely justified. The Jews, Roma, Slavs, and gays that the Nazis wanted to wipe out were real people and it is right that modern audiences see the reality of where this race hatred can lead.

Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Putin daily demonstrate to us that they are willing to sit atop mountains of corpses to maintain governments motivated by racial hatred and grabbing land. In a scene with a very contemporary resonance when we hear Israeli leaders and their foreign supporters talk about what should happen to Palestinians, Göring says that he just wanted European Jews to be forced out of the places where they lived and made to emigrate.

Seeing the film on the day when the United States edged yet closer to initiating an unprovoked war against Venezuela, to say nothing of Iraq, Afghanistan and countless other places, the Allied charge against the Nazis for starting wars against neighbouring states shows that the French, British, Soviet and American case against Hitler’s regime is no disincentive.

One of the absurdities of what we can call the “Nazi industry” is that so much of it obscures and trivialises what they represented. Channel Four is currently showing a series in which the focus is on the size of Hitler’s penis and suggesting this is what made him the demon he was. Nuremburg goes some way to explaining the racist hatred behind the Holocaust and the Nazi project and viscerally tells us that the potential is always there for something like it to be repeated.

It is definitely worth seeing.