Nazis

WITH its harbour, picturesque beaches and rugged countryside, the island of Guernsey could be any ordinary holiday destination at first glance.

But scratch below the surface and you’ll uncover the fascinating story of its five-year occupation by the Nazis — and about an an unlikely survivor of the invasion, Timmy the Tortoise.

I was keen to learn about it during my adventure on the second largest of the Channel Islands.

So I booked several short guided day trips with Tours Of Guernsey.

Guide Amanda Johns and I ticked off all the key sites, from museums to former bunkers and even a German underground hospital.

This medical centre — which incredibly doubled up as an ammunition store — had to be the highlight, and the extensive dark passages are a must-see for any history buff.

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The huge maze of tunnels were excavated by slave labourers, leading to wards, operation theatres, escape shafts, a cinema room and mortuary.

Above ground, I headed to the northern coast to Fort Hommet, a former Martello tower which was turned into a searchlight bunker.

After the war, part of the bunker was transformed into The Shrine of the Sacred Heart, featuring 30 Biblical pictures made from seashells.

Other sites include the German Occupation Museum, a warren of rooms containing one man’s extensive collection of items from 1940.

The Pleinmont Gun Battery has been restored and offers terrific views across the English Channel.

Batterie Mirus, the largest World War Two gun battery in the Channel Islands, was my last stop.

Its underground bunker can only be viewed by private tour.

Restored by Festung Guernsey, with many original features being reproduced using a 3D printer, the walls within are still dotted with German inscriptions, including the Nazi Eagle.

Potato peel pie

It was an honour to pay it a visit the day after Princess Anne was shown around while on the island for the Liberation Day celebrations.

The day marks when Allied troops freed the locals from Nazi rule on May 9, 1945.

On the 80th anniversary this year, I witnessed a cavalcade of military vehicles, fireworks and a drone light show.

One local making headlines during the celebrations was Timmy, 87 — actually a female — who survived Nazi occupation.

She was given to Maggie Cull as a christening present in 1941, not long after she and her parents were turfed out of their home by the Nazis.

After all that history I’d certainly worked up an appetite.

Luckily my base, St Pierre Park Hotel, was just a 25-minute walk into St Peter Port, where there are pubs and restaurants aplenty.

Fifty Seven restaurant is set over two floors and has stunning views of Castle Cornet and the coastline.

The menu features steaks cooked fresh on the grill as well as some excellent fish dishes including oven-baked monkfish on chilli linguine.

As you’re by the sea, grab yourself some fish and chips — the restaurant at Les Douvres Hotel dishes up one of the largest portions I’ve ever seen.

On my last night I dined on a special Liberation Day menu at the Old Government House Hotel, close to the harbour.

This 5H property was turned into the German General Staff Headquarters during the war and it still has an old-world feel about it today.

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The menu featured a delicious potato peel pie, a dish created by locals to cope with food shortages during Nazi occupation.

The perfect meal to end my historical adventure.

Movies that depict the history of war criminals on trial will almost always be worth making and watching. These films are edifying (and cathartic) in a way that could almost be considered a public servic and that’s what works best in James Vanderbilt’s “Nuremberg,” about the international tribunal that tried the Nazi high command in the immediate wake of World War II. It’s a drama that is well-intentioned and elucidating despite some missteps.

For his second directorial effort, Vanderbilt, a journeyman writer best known for his “Zodiac” screenplay for David Fincher, adapts “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist” by Jack El-Hai, about the curious clinical relationship between Dr. Douglas Kelley, an Army psychiatrist, and former German Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring during the lead-up to the Nuremberg trials.

The film is a two-hander shared by Oscar winners: a formidable Russell Crowe as Göring and a squirrely Rami Malek as Kelley. At the end of the war, Kelley is summoned to an ad-hoc Nazi prison in Luxembourg to evaluate the Nazi commandants. Immediately, he’s intrigued at the thought of sampling so many flavors of narcissism.

It becomes clear that the doctor has his own interests in mind with this unique task as well. At one point while recording notes, in a moment of particularly on-the-nose screenwriting, Kelley verbalizes “Someone could write a book” and off he dashes to the library with his German interpreter, a baby-faced U.S. Army officer named Howie (Leo Woodall), in tow. That book would eventually be published in 1947 as “22 Cells in Nuremberg,” a warning about the possibilities of Nazism in our own country, but no one wants to believe our neighbors can be Nazis until our neighbors are Nazis.

One of the lessons of the Nuremberg trials — and of “Nuremberg” the film — is that Nazis are people too, with the lesson being that human beings are indeed capable of such horrors (the film grinds to an appropriate halt in a crucial moment to simply let the characters and the audience take in devastating concentration camp footage). Human beings, not monsters, were the architects of the Final Solution.

But human beings can also fight against this if they choose to, and the rule of law can prevail if people make the choice to uphold it. The Nuremberg trials start because Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) doesn’t let anything so inconvenient as a logistical international legal nightmare stop him from doing what’s right.

Kelley’s motivations are less altruistic. He is fascinated by these men and their pathologies, particularly the disarming Göring, and in the name of science the doctor dives headlong into a deeper relationship with his patient than he should, eventually ferrying letters back and forth between Göring and his wife and daughter, still in hiding. He finds that Göring is just a man — a megalomaniacal, arrogant and manipulative man, but just a man. That makes the genocide that he helped to plan and execute that much harder to swallow.

Crowe has a planet-sized gravitational force on screen that he lends to the outsize Göring and Shannon possesses the same weight. A climactic scene between these two actors in which Jackson cross-examines Göring is a riveting piece of courtroom drama. Malek’s energy is unsettled, his character always unpredictable. He and Crowe are interesting but unbalanced together.

Vanderbilt strives to imbue “Nuremberg” with a retro appeal that sometimes feels misplaced. John Slattery, as the colonel in charge of the prison, throws some sauce on his snappy patter that harks back to old movies from the 1940s, but the film has been color-corrected into a dull, desaturated gray. It’s a stylistic choice to give the film the essence of a faded vintage photograph, but it’s also ugly as sin.

Vanderbilt struggles to find a tone and clutters the film with extra story lines to diminishing results. Howie’s personal history (based on a true story) is deeply affecting and Woodall sells it beautifully. But then there are the underwritten female characters: a saucy journalist (Lydia Peckham) who gets Kelley drunk to draw out his secrets for a scoop, and Justice Jackson’s legal clerk (Wrenn Schmidt) who clucks and tsks her way through the trial, serving only as the person to whom Jackson can articulate his thoughts. Their names are scarcely uttered during the film and their barely-there inclusion feels almost offensive.

So while the subject matter makes “Nuremberg” worth the watch, the film itself is a mixed bag, with some towering performances (Crowe and Shannon) and some poor ones. It manages to eke out its message in the eleventh hour, but it feels too little too late in our cultural moment, despite its evergreen importance. If the film is intended to be a canary in a coal mine, that bird has long since expired.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.