I last saw Judgment At Nuremberg years ago, when I was a teenager. Some films age badly, but after watching it again recently on the Turner Classic Movie channel, I can confidently say that it stands the test of time. It is a fine film that deals accurately and seriously with a historically important subject.
Featuring an all-star cast, with an Oscar-winning script by Abby Mann, this absorbing three-hour movie, directed by Stanley Kramer, was released in 1961. Despite the passage of six decades, it remains relevant and, from a strictly entertainment point of view, gripping.
Set in 1948 during the third Nuremberg war crimes trial, when the defendants were judges who had loyally served Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, this black-and-white film is loosely based on real characters and actual events.
It unfolds as the Cold War emerges, the Berlin airlift commences, and the United States relaxes its hunt for Nazi war criminals and embraces West Germany as an ally in the Western ideological struggle against the Soviet Union and communism.
As it gets under way, Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy), an aging judge from Maine, arrives in Nuremberg, a city in ruins after Allied bombing raids. He is to sit in judgment over several German judges who, a background voice intones, distorted and destroyed the judicial system in Germany to suit the malevolent needs of the Nazi government.
Haywood is a decent and earnest American who describes himself as a “rock-ribbed Republican” who voted for President Franklin Roosevelt. Now he is driven by a burning desire to understand what happened in Germany — a bastion of Western civilization — during the 12-year Nazi interregnum.
Marlene Dietrich, the German actress who denounced Nazi Germany and immigrated to the United States, plays Mrs. Bertholt, a stylish war widow who rents her house to Haywood.
The chief defendant, Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), was a distinguished law professor before being appointed as minister of justice. His intense lawyer, Hans Rolfe (Maximillian Schell), was once Janning’s pupil.
The prosecutor, Lawson (Richard Windmark), is a U.S. army colonel. Having encountered the victims of Nazi atrocities during a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp following its liberation, he despises Germans who cooperated with the Nazis.
Judy Garland portrays Irene Hoffmann Wallner, a sensitive German woman who was sent to prison after being convicted of racial defilement by virtue of her sexual liaison with a Jewish man. The judge who handed down the sentence in this notorious case was none other than Janning.
Montgomery Clift plays a traumatized German baker who was forcibly sterilized under Janning’s authority.
Although the film is inherently anti-Nazi, it tries to be reasonably objective in its nuanced portrayal of Germans who lived through the Third Reich.
The Haberstadts, Haywood’s eager-to-please husband-and-wife housekeepers, claim they knew nothing about the fate of deported German Jews. But in a bold admission, she praises Hitler for his accomplishments in building the autobahn and ending the blight of high unemployment.
Mrs. Bertholt, whose late husband was a high-ranking army officer, forms a platonic relationship with Haywood, a widower. Claiming that she hated Hitler, and that ordinary Germans were unaware of Nazi mass atrocities, she conveniently blames these crimes on officials such as Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler and argues that the past should be forgotten.
Kramer judiciously inserts stark and unforgettable clips from documentaries of the day to show what transpired in German concentration camps such as Buchenwald, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. We see emaciated prisoners, mounds of corpses and a bulldozer pushing piles of bodies into a trench for burial.
And in a clever touch, Kramer juxtaposes these horrific scenes next to a soothing scene in a rustic restaurant during which a cheerful musician in traditional garb and a violin belts out romantic German music.
In defending Janning, whom he admires, Rolfe presents a rather sophisticated and morally complex argument. He acknowledges the shameful crimes of the Nazis, but insists that they were committed by a select few, that most Germans were not aware of them, and that the United States cannot lecture Germany about morality after having adopted racially-charged eugenics laws and dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The defendants themselves avail themselves of the opportunity to plead their innocence. Wieck (John Wengraf), Janning’s university instructor, claims that he, Wieck, was an anti-Nazi and denies responsibility for complicity in Nazi crimes, even though he signed an oath of loyalty to Hitler.
Janning argues that Hitler lifted German national pride and made Germany great again. And in an incredulous comment, he claims that the persecution of Jews was merely a “passing phase.” Contradicting Rolfe, he says that, while Germans were aware of the concentration camps and the deportation of German Jews, they attempted to suppress that knowledge. “We didn’t want to know,” he says candidly.
The film makes another important point when a U.S. senator and an American army general separately tell Haywood that the Nuremberg tribunal has run its course due to current geopolitical considerations. With the Cold War raging, they say, the Western alliance needs Germany in the looming battle against the Soviet Union.
Haywood listens carefully, but justice and truth are intrinsic values he cannot discard for the sake of political expediency.
Tracy acquits himself well as a high-minded judge who refuses to be swayed by the currents of Realpolitik. Schell, an Austrian actor who won an Academy Award for best supporting actor, is tremendous as Janning’s dedicated counsel. Lancaster is often riveting, especially in an incredibly powerful scene related to Wallner’s ordeal.
Nearly 65 years after its release, Judgment At Nuremberg strikes a chord, thanks, in part, to Mann’s stellar screenplay. The film, far from being dated, addresses the twin issues of German genocide and guilt seamlessly and honestly.
Viewed from this perspective, it is nothing less than a valuable time capsule.