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Rating: An unfortunate title in Italian – original title “Judgment at Nuremberg” – for one of the greatest courtroom dramas (“courtroom drama”) that cinema remembers.
The theme is the third Nuremberg trial (1948), a trial not against Nazi leaders but against four German judges, guilty of committing crimes against humanity during the Third Reich, rendering absurd verdicts to send regime opponents to extermination camps, effectively making them accomplices of the Nazi party.
The American judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy) is invited to preside over the military tribunal.
The judge is an elderly and wise man, with a rare quality: he knows and loves to listen. In his moments of freedom, outside of judicial activities, he listens to some Germans to understand the reality of Germany and the mindset of its inhabitants (guilty of bringing Hitler to power democratically and never truly rebelling against the horrors of the Holocaust).
A special encounter is with Mrs. Bertholt (Marlene Dietrich), a noble (in every sense) German woman, widow of a Wehrmacht officer, executed by Allied forces, who suggests to Haywood to look towards the future and trying to persuade him that not all Germans are Nazis.
During the trial, the Cold War begins, with the Soviet blockade on Berlin, to which the Americans respond with an airlift. This historical detail is not just a backdrop; it will be essential before the verdict when the support of Germany for the USA against the Soviet Union must be considered.
At the trial, Judge Haywood tries to understand the incomprehensible, namely how a respected and internationally esteemed jurist like Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) could have rendered some verdicts that sentenced innocents to death in extermination camps. The debate with Janning, who initially shelters himself behind an absolute silence, is difficult; Janning is a master of self-control. To make things worse, there’s the brilliant defense by the young lawyer Hans Rolfe (Maximilian Schell), who has volunteered to represent him.
Rolfe is a genius of the bar and like all great defense lawyers, he knows how to skilfully shift the discussion to lateral facts which are however important and indisputable. Things are not always black or white. Truth has many sides and screenwriter Abby Mann (Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay) wanted to tell them all, even those that went against America.
The film becomes a real masterpiece of balance when Rolfe reminds the court presided over by an American judge: 1) the support from the U.S. Supreme Court in support of eugenic practices (case “Buck v. Bell”); 2) the commercial agreements made by the USA with Nazi Germany (commerce makes one forget every moral principle: it is amorality); 3) the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that made Americans less credible in giving moral lessons to the rest of the world.
But it’s not only the Americans who must make a mea culpa. Other serious blemishes include the 1933 Hitler-Vatican agreement, the 1939 Germany-Soviet Union pact, and especially the words of praise from Winston Churchill towards Hitler: “I always want to have to deal with men of Adolf Hitler’s intelligence”. Judge Haywood will consider these arguments in his verdict.
But despite Rolfe’s defense, towards the end of the debate, Jannings will collapse – overwhelmed by the moving deposition of the frightened Irene Hoffmann (Judy Garland), protagonist of the “Lehman Feldenstein” case, based on the true story of an elderly Jewish man, tried years earlier for having a relationship with an “Aryan” woman and sentenced to death for this (1935).
Unforgettable is the testimony of the errand boy Rudolph Petersen (Montgomery Clift), sterilized because mentally incapable (for the defense), while (for the prosecution) guilty only of having a father enrolled in the communist party.
The climax of the film is the harrowing screening of authentic footage from the concentration camps (filmed by British and American soldiers after the liberation of the camps). Seeing the skin-and-bones lifeless bodies of the victims being moved by cranes is chilling – even to those of us accustomed to today’s graphic films. We can only imagine the effect these raw images had on 1961 audiences, used to much more reassuring images. A phrase following the viewing: “It wasn’t difficult to kill them. It took much more effort to bury them” leaves one even more bewildered.
But we are now at the reading of the verdict, voted by two out of three judges. No actor better than Spencer Tracy could have delivered it with the sobriety and gravity that it deserved:
“A nation isn’t a territory, nor merely a conglomerate of people. A nation is in the principles it upholds, when upholding a principle is the hardest thing to do. If all the heads of the Third Reich were sadists, maniacs, then their misdeeds would have no more moral significance than an earthquake or any natural catastrophe, but this trial has shown that, in times of national crisis, ordinary people, and even those who are capable and exceptional, can induce themselves to commit crimes so great and heinous as to challenge any imagination.”
The Nazis weren’t (except in some cases) pathological murderers. They were intelligent and balanced men who for power set aside intelligence and balance committing actions worthy of a psychopathic serial killer. And this made their crimes even more execrable than those of a serial killer.
The four incriminated judges were worse than the leaders because not only were they intelligent men but also cultured and morally upright. Their guilt was in abjuring their highest moral principles by condemning people they knew were innocent. No extenuating circumstances for any of them: life imprisonment for an unforgivable betrayal of their super-partes role.
Not a film for the faint-hearted: three hours of debate can be tiring for those who seek also visual emotions in cinema. But for those interested in the subject, they are three hours that lock you to the seat and make you discover unknown things – some politically very incorrect such as Churchill’s praise of Hitler – with truly memorable scenes, some made even more solemn by Beethoven’s music.
Eleven Oscar nominations for a stellar cast (Maximilian Schell (Oscar for Best Actor), Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, and Spencer Tracy) with all the great actors mentioned who accepted the minimum union wage just to be part of this unforgettable document.
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