Judgment at Nuremberg


Judgment at Nuremberg is a 1961 American epic legal drama film directed and produced by Stanley Kramer, and written by Abby Mann. It features Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Werner Klemperer, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, William Shatner, and Montgomery Clift. Set in Nuremberg, in the then American occupation zone in Germany, the film depicts a fictionalized versionwith fictional charactersof the Judges' Trial of 1947, one of the twelve Nuremberg Military Tribunals conducted under the auspices of the U.S. military in the aftermath of World War II.
The film centers on a military tribunal led by Chief Trial Judge Dan Haywood, before which four judges and prosecutors stand accused of crimes against humanity due to their senior roles in the judicial system of the Nazi German government. The trial centers on questions regarding Germans' individual and collective responsibility for the Holocaust, with the backdrop of a tense international situation including the onset of the Cold War, the Berlin Blockade, and the geopolitical ramification of the later Nuremberg Trials upon German support for the Western Bloc, placing great pressure on Haywood's efforts to reach a just verdict. In addition, the judge faces emotional challenges in his personal relationships with German people outside the courtroom who consistently claim ignorance of Nazi atrocities, but who the judge suspects may have known more than they will admit.
An earlier version of the story was broadcast as an episode of the same name on the television series Playhouse 90 in 1959. Popular interest in this effort caused an expanded focus on its dramatic elements. Maximillian Schell and Werner Klemperer portrayed the same characters in both productions.
In 2013, Judgment at Nuremberg was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The production's presentation of historical events has attracted interest over decades before and since then due to its place in the narrative portrayals of the Holocaust in film.

Plot

A military tribunal convened in Nuremberg, Germany, involves four German judges and prosecutors standing accused of crimes against humanity for their involvement in atrocities committed under the Nazi regime.
Dan Haywood heads a panel of Allied jurists who will hear and decide the case against the defendants. Haywood is particularly interested in learning how the defendant Ernst Janning, a respected jurist and legal scholar, could have committed the atrocities he is accused of, including sentencing innocent people to death.
Haywood seeks to understand how the German people could have been deaf and blind to the Nazi regime's crimes. In doing so, he befriends Frau Bertholt — the widow of a German general executed by the Allies — whose family home has been commandeered by the Americans and is serving as Haywood's residence during the trial. He talks with other Germans who have varying perspectives on the war.
Other characters the judge meets are US Army Captain Harrison Byers, who is assigned to assist the American judges hearing the case, and Irene Hoffmann, who is afraid to provide testimony that may bolster the prosecution's case against the judges.
German defense attorney Hans Rolfe argues that the defendants were not the only ones to aid or ignore the Nazi regime. He claims the United States has committed acts just as bad or worse than the Nazis, such as US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s support for the first eugenics practices; the German-Vatican Reichskonkordat of 1933, which the Nazi-dominated German government exploited as an implicit early foreign recognition of Nazi leadership; Joseph Stalin's part in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which removed the last major obstacle to Germany's invasion and occupation of western Poland, initiating World War II; and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final stage of the war in August 1945.
Meanwhile, as a strict constructionist jurist, Janning refuses to testify or participate in a legal proceeding that he profoundly feels is no better than a post-WWII Western kangaroo court of its own. As the proceeding becomes more and more intolerable to him, he dramatically breaks his silence. He chooses to testify before the Tribunal as a witness for the prosecution, admitting he is guilty of condemning to death a Jewish man of "blood defilement" charges — namely, that the man had sex with a 16-year-old Gentile girl — when he knew there was no evidence to support such a verdict. Janning explains that misled people such as him helped Adolf Hitler's antisemitic, racist policies out of naive patriotism despite knowing it was wrong, and that all of Germany bears some measure of responsibility for the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime.
Haywood must weigh considerations of geopolitical expediency against his own ideals of justice. The trial is set against the background of the Berlin Blockade, and there is pressure to let the German defendants off lightly to gain German support in the growing Cold War against the Soviet Union.
While the four defendants maintain their pleas of "not guilty" in their closing statements, Janning and fellow defendant, Werner Lampe, show clear remorse for their actions, while a third, Friedrich Hofstetter, claims they had no choice but to execute the laws handed down by Hitler's government. Only the fourth defendant, Emil Hahn, remains unrepentant, telling the Americans that they will live to regret not allying with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. Ultimately, all are found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
Rolfe goes to Haywood as he is departing Germany to inform him that Janning wishes him to visit, and he predicts that no defendant will stay in prison for more than 5 years. Haywood replies that Rolfe's position may be logical but without reverence for justice.
Haywood places a phone call, but hangs up when it is unanswered. He receives his travel documents from Byers and tells him to give his best to his German girlfriend. Byers, responding that "Americans aren't very popular in Nuremberg this morning," implies that they broke up in the wake of the verdicts. Haywood dials the phone once again; it's revealed he is trying to reach Frau Bertholt, who ignores the ringing phone with a tear in her eye.
On his way out of Nuremberg, Haywood visits the prison. Janning affirms to Haywood that his verdict was a just one, but asks him to believe that, regarding the mass murder of innocents, he never knew that it would come to that. Judge Haywood replies it came to that the first time Janning condemned a man he knew to be innocent.
As Haywood leaves the cell block, a title card says that, of 99 defendants sentenced to prison terms in Nuremberg trials that took place in the American Zone, none are still serving a sentence.

Cast

Production

Background

The film's events relate principally to actions committed by the German state against its own racial, social, religious, and eugenic groupings within its "in the name of the law", from the time of Hitler's rise to power in 1933. The plot development and thematic treatment question the legitimacy of the social, political, and alleged legal foundations of these actions.
The real Judges' Trial focused on 16 judges and prosecutors who served before and during the Nazi regime in Germany, and who embraced and enforced laws—passively, actively, or both—that led to judicial acts of compulsory sexual sterilization and to the imprisonment and execution of people for their religions, racial or ethnic identities, political beliefs, and physical handicaps or disabilities.
A key thread in the film's plot involves a "race defilement" trial known as the Feldenstein case. In this fictionalized case, based on the real life Katzenberger Trial, an elderly Jewish man had been tried for having a "relationship" with an Aryan 16-year-old girl, an act that had been legally defined as a crime under the Nuremberg Laws, which had been enacted by the German Reichstag. Under these laws, the man was found guilty and was put to death in 1942. Using this and other examples, the movie explores individual conscience, collective guilt, and behavior during a time of widespread societal immorality.
The film is notable for its use of courtroom drama to illuminate individual perfidy and moral compromise in times of violent political upheaval; it was the first mainstream drama film to not shy away from showing actual footage filmed by American and British soldiers after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Shown in court by prosecuting attorney Colonel Tad Lawson, the scenes of huge piles of naked corpses laid out in rows and bulldozed into large pits were considered exceptionally graphic for a mainstream film of the time.
According to numerous sources, Tracy's climactic monologue was filmed in one take using several cameras. Clift had trouble remembering his lines, so Kramer told him to do the best he could, correctly figuring that Clift's nervousness would be central to his character's mental state. Lancaster speaks only three lines until his lengthy monologue roughly 135 minutes into the film. Meanwhile Garland was so happy to be working in a motion picture again after seven years away that it took her a while to get into the proper frame of mind to break down and cry.

Soundtrack

  • "Lili Marleen"
  • * Music by Norbert Schultze
  • * Lyrics by Hans Leip
  • "Liebeslied"
  • * Music by Ernest Gold
  • * Lyrics by Alfred Perry
  • "Wenn wir marschieren"
  • * German folk song
  • “Wenn die Soldaten”
  • * German folk song
  • "Care for Me"
  • * By Ernest Gold
  • "Notre amour ne peur"
  • * By Ernest Gold
  • "Du, du liegst mir im Herzen"
  • * German folk song, arrangement by Ernest Gold
  • "Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13"
  • * By Ludwig van Beethoven