FictionThatMatters.org

MGM Pictures, 1961. 186 minutes.
Produced and Directed by Stanley Kramer
Written by Abby Mann

And here are all these things that pass in the night. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something beyond that? Just simply to help people. And to be remembered for that. You know, time humbles all of us, and all of us are defeated in one way or another in the end. And I wanted something that I wouldn’t be defeated at. And if I help people, if I help people change the world just a molecule, then that would be something worth having.
–Abby Mann, writer

The current President of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, was charged by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity. How did this come to be? Nuremberg. Slobadan Milosevic, former president of Serbia? Nuremberg. Josheph Kony of the Lords Resistance Army in Uganda? Nuremberg? Saddam Hussein? Nuremberg.

Any serious advocate for international justice and human rights will eventually grow to appreciate the legacy of Nuremberg. These historic trials occurred immediately after the close of World War II and held Nazi officials accountable for their actions. Goering, Hess, Streicher, and over a dozen others were all tried under an international tribunal. The charges were conspiracy, waging aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Some were found guilty and hanged. Others received milder sentences. But what was groundbreaking was the fact that a trial occurred at all. The Soviet Union, Winston Churchill, and American leaders wanted swift retribution: summary execution of the Nazi leaders. Only the forward thinking U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson prevented this from happening. After prolonged negotiations, he convinced the Allied powers to hold a fair trial at Nuremberg, Germany with the presumption of innocence for all charged. It would have been easier to execute indiscriminately, and it was desired by the survivors of millions of victims of the German war machine around the world. Justice Jackson ensured a fair trial, preserving the vital record of Nazi war time atrocities, and temporarily vacated his spot on the Supreme Court to serve as chief prosecutor in the first trial.

The film Judgment at Nuremberg takes up where Jackson left off. The first trial concluded and Jackson flew home to resume his duties on the Supreme Court, ushering in a new era of desegregation with landmark decisions. Many more perpetrators remained to be tried, this time not by an international tribunal of Allies but solely by Americans. Judgment at Nuremberg depicts the trial of Nazi judges in 1949. It is a layered, thoughtful work with moving performances and penetrating ruminations on the nature of justice — and the value of a single human life in a world of billions.

Judgment at Nurmberg could have been a polemic against Nazism. It could have been a celebration of American liberators, or it could have only depicted the German point of view. Writer Abby Mann’s compelling script manages to avoid both. We see the drama of an international courtroom contrasted with the plight of workaday Germans. These are maidservants and socialites who lived under Nazism but claimed not to know the extent of its horrors, when they clearly should have — the death camps were often only a few miles away. But neither are they the villains, according to Abby Mann:

The villain in Judgment at Nurmberg is patriotism. People did what they did because they were good patriots. And that’s evil.

It is this insight that garnered Mann an Oscar for the script. There is blame to be apportioned, but the villain is intangible. Zeal, passion, cowardice, and fear took the lives of 6 million Jews. Nonetheless, men channeled these base passions, and they must be held accountable for having done so.

The acting performances in Judgment at Nuremberg are fantastic. Spencer Tracy as the chief justice Dan Haywood displays a nuance that seems distilled from a lifetime of distinguished acting, and Max Schell portrays a brilliant defense lawyer, dismantling cheap emotional tricks by the prosecution and attempting to prevent a purely ideological witch hunt. (The latter role garnered Schell an Oscar.) Indeed, the German perpetrators are extremely sympathetic. Burt Lancaster as judge Janning seems a reasonable, righteous defender of justice. Marlene Dietrich shines as the sympathetic widower of a Nazi general.

(There is, however, one actor who delivers his lines in a slightly bizarre way — pausing in what seem like inappropriate moments. He is William Shatner, playing the bit part of Captain Harrison Byers. He somehow makes the leap from Nazis to space aliens seem natural.)

The central question of Judgment at Nuremberg is the extent to which duty can trump the individual responsibility to think for oneself. When can responsibility no longer be dissolved into defenses of superior orders? The answer comes in an exchange between Judge Janning (Lancaster) and Judge Haywood (Tracy):

Janning: Judge Haywood, those people, those millions of people. I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it.
Haywood: Your Honor, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death that you knew to be innocent.

A singular travesty of justice can easily grow into a deluge of inhumanity.

A poignant twist of the film is that, in real life, the sentences of the Nazi judges were never fully served. Justice was mooted by politics. Germany was striving to rebuild after the war, and America was growing concerned that it would need West Germany as an ally and bulwark against an encroaching Soviet bloc. Political expediency suggested that holding officers accountable for their Nazi era crimes would rid Germany of valuable leadership. And a country without leadership would be more vulnerable to ‘Bolshevism’ than one with direction.

It is clear now — with the benefit of hindsight — that the Cold War stifled the grand aims of the United Nations, and the legacy of Nuremberg. Now that the vetoes of the UN Security Council are less divided along ideological lines, the legacy of Nuremberg is rising again. The international tribunals for Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and, now, the International Criminal Court, all used direct language from the tribunal at Nuremberg. They also rely upon its rulings as precedent.

Nuremberg still matters today. Judgment at Nuremberg shows you why.

–Deji Olukotun

Would you like to know more?

Read Norbert Ehrenfreund’s, The Nuremberg Legacy.
This is a simply written book by an American soldier and reporter who covered the Nuremberg trials. He found the proceedings so inspiring that he became a judge.

Check out the Nuremberg Trials Project at Harvard Law School.