I'm not sure what these blog posts should be categorized as. They're not quite a review, not quite a formal critique and sort of a rant. Well, let's not put me in a box, shall we?
Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961, was directed by Stanley Kramer, written by Abby Mann and stars Spencer Tracy and everyone else. I mean that. In short, it is about the perilous intersection of politics and justice. Spencer Tracy plays Dan Haywood, a retired judge from Maine, charged with running the tribunal of a group of Nazi judges, foremost among them, Ernst Janning, played by Burt Lancaster. Judge Haywood arrives in war ravaged Nuremberg ready to give out some American justice, but quickly finds that this is more complicated than it seems. For one, he can't believe that a man as educated and distinguished as Janning could possibly be guilty of these crimes. The prosecutor is Colonel Tad Lawson, played by Richard Widmark, who seems overly zealous in this proceeding, but we'll find out why. The defense attorney is a German lawyer, Hans Rolfe, played by Maximilian Schell, who is determined to preserve the honor of the German people. Also for some reason, there's a young William Shatner, constantly taking me out of the movie. Also complicating Haywood's mission is the increasing importance of keeping the Germans as allies with the Cold War starting up. Though the movie is sort of an amalgamation of history, the themes are all right. At this time, the war crimes tribunals were diminishing in importance as the Cold War escalated.
The courtroom proceedings deal with the Nazi-era actions of the judges: a case where a man was forcibly sterilized, a Jewish man sentenced to death for having improper contact with an Aryan and so on. The question at the heart of it is were the judges most bound to country or justice? Also, to what degree were they aware of Nazi atrocities and therefore culpable for them? The latter question figures throughout the rest of the film for all the German characters. The first victim is Montgomery Clift as Rudolph Peterson, a baker's assistant who was sterilized under the Third Reich's public health laws. Lawson demonstrates the cruelty of the practice and Rolfe is left to do the unpopular, to try and defend the laws by demonstrating that Peterson is in fact mentally handicapped, and therefore the judges were right. Rolfe does this by citing Oliver Wendell Holmes' own defense of similar laws in Virginia. That's right, America gets burned. Seriously, he's not even making that up. Look up the progressive movement, people. There are two juxtaposed points of view: Lawson wants to judge the judges using the standard of justice, Rolfe wants to use the standards of the time. What affects me most in this portion is Peterson himself as he testifies. Throughout his entire ordeal, everyone, even the doctors and nurses who perform the sterilization, tell him they think it's wrong what's been done to him, but they can't do anything about it and they just do what they're told.
In this time, Haywood has also met Mrs. Bertholt, a German general's widow, played by Marlene Dietrich. She insists that no one had any idea what was going on outside of the SS. Not even her husband who was executed for what was going on in what Mrs. Bertholt sees as postwar blood thirst by the victors. Yeah, okay, lady, the Americans are the ones with the blood thirst. Also, Haywood has asked his household staff what they knew about the Holocaust, but of course, he doesn't call it that. He points out that the Nazis had a lot of rallies in Nuremberg. His housekeeper tells him that she and her husband never went. Haywood points out that Dachau is not that far away, what did they know about that? She claims they knew nothing and then asks even if they had known, what were they supposed to do? They were little people. So, you didn't know anything, but if you had known what could you have done? Haywood doesn't quite seem to be buying this, either, but is too polite to say so. Now is as good a time as any to confess my own personal bias: I'm not a big fan of the school of "We didn't know what was going on..." because I've been to a few concentration camps and besides the stench which still existed some sixty years after the fact, none of these places are so far that no one would notice. I'll grant you Treblinka and Sobibor and maybe Auschwitz are that far off, but still, nobody wondered where all the Jews went? As for the school of "I was just following orders..." I'll get to that later.
At the same time we have Mrs. Bertholt and Herr Rolfe trying to convince us that the Germans are a civilized people who got taken for a ride by some sociopaths, Colonel Lawson is committed to proving that they're all guilty because they went along with it. Why is that? Here's one of the biggest reasons that this is a landmark film. Colonel Lawson swears himself in as a witness and shows us the actual newsreel footage of the concentration camps after liberation. He shows us the ovens where bodies were burned, the gas chambers made to look like showers and some of the images were so awful that even I was shocked and I thought I had seen everything. The footage shocks the American judges and the German ones. For the first time, the German judges get some hint of what they've been accused of. One in disbelief asks a fellow Nazi inmate, something to the effect of, "We couldn't have killed that many people, right?" The Nazi answers that it's not really killing that's the trouble, it's disposing of the corpses. The former turns back shocked. On the outside, Mrs. Bertholt asks Judge Haywood about it. She acts like it's some tired anecdote that Lawson tells for the hell of it every chance he gets and for that, I could just sic Ari Ben Canaan on her ass. That would have been a plot twist no one saw coming.
The next big part of the case is when we review the case of a Jewish man, executed for having an indecent relationship with a then sixteen year old Aryan girl, Irene Hoffman, played by Judy Garland. Irene tells us that Feldenstein was friends with her deceased parents, like a father to her and their relationship was taken out of context. Some time passes and Herr Rolfe reopens the whole can of worms to try to prove that Irene and Feldenstein were having an affair. He also asks Irene why she was so irresponsible as to maintain her friendship with Feldenstein when she knew the law. Here's the irony: Irene Hoffman is the person who tries to do the right thing and because of that, she went to a concentration camp for two years. Janning finally feels compelled to speak, to explain what happened, to tell the tribunal that Germany was in a catastrophe and what the judges did, they did for love of country and they never knew it would end up the way it did.
In the meantime, the Berlin Airlift has started and Haywood is getting pressured to give the judges a light sentence. Irony. Haywood finally concludes by delivering a Spencer Tracy-esque monologue at sentencing, explaining that the judges knew what they had done was wrong under German law and international law and he can't let that go. They all get life sentences, to the distress of Mrs. Bertholt who won't answer Haywood's calls. Before he leaves for home, Haywood has a final meeting with Janning, who tries to clear his conscience. Janning begs Haywood to believe him when he says he never knew it would come to that, the millions of deaths. Haywood tells him it came to that the first time he sentenced an innocent man to death. His complicity legitimized the actions of the Reich.
First of all, Schell is so damn good as Rolfe. He won an Academy Award for Best Actor, remarkable considering how much you want to hate him or that could just be me. He is mesmerizing. He defends the wrong and unpopular and turns the tables on the world when he points out how the world praised Hitler, negotiated with Hitler and the Germans should have stopped them? Also, the film poses difficult questions about the reality of world where justice was turned upside down, what could people have done? What were Germans supposed to do? This is revolutionary as this could have so easily followed the path of films before and stuck to more clear cut good guys and bad guys. I think the conclusion the film reaches is that only because nobody did anything or pretended to not know, were the Nazis able to enact their horrible plans and for that, everyone's culpable.
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