When will the guilty admit their guilt?

Rating: 10/10 (29 July 2003)

This is a great film. It tries to tackle one of the most difficult periods of history ... and it contains some of the best performances on the silver screen: Spencer Tracy (as a seasoned judge in the twilight of his career), Burt Lancaster (as a respected scholarly jurist who cooperated with the Nazis), Maximillian Schell (as the young German defense attorney trying to prove that Nazi racial discrimination was no different from US racism), and Richard Widmark (as the jaded prosecuting attorney). This movie is about shame. It is about the shame that some people should have felt right after the war when the US decided that it was politically necessary to forgive Germans for their criminal conduct in order to obtain their help in fighting communism. The major Nuremberg Trial (of Goering, Hess, Speer et al) was over. The subsequent trials were not prosecuted by Justice Robert Jackson, but were handed over to other prosecutors. The American public and US Army were more frightened of Russia than Germany. Many people were sick and tired of hearing about the concentration camps and the horrors.
But this 1961 film foreshadowed the future Nazi revisionists and Holocaust-deniers. It dealt directly with the need and desire for many Germans and some Americans to refuse to face up to the many daily instances of injustice, cruelty, inhumanity, depravity and murder committed by ordinary Germans -- clerks, railroad employees, bankers, --- as well as the German military, courts, and industrial complex that relied upon slave labor.
It is a shame that Germans thought of the Nuremberg Trials as being unfair because the defendants were simply obeying their legal responsibilities during an ordinary war. But this was no ordinary war. This was genocide and everyone in Germany participated in it. As the film points out ... even the ordinary people who claimed that they did not know about the death camps were fooling or lying to themselves. They knew what Hitler had said about the Jews and promised to do to the Jews. They knew that their Jewish neighbors were taken away ... and with Jewish property taken by the state... the Jews were not coming back. If their crime was merely their willful ignorance of murder ... refusing to acknowledge it and refusing to prevent it ... then the continuing shame exposed by the film is that so many in Germany (as well as Austria, France, Ukraine, Poland, Belgium and other countries where many collaborated with the Germans) would continue to refuse to learn the full extent of the horror.
In addition, the film went further when Lancaster (the former Nazi judge) warns Schell (his defense lawyer) that his defense tactics are once again cruelly persecuting the defenseless. Perhaps it is too shameful for him to admit it, but Lancaster eventually does. He admits that he perverted justice and disregarded the rules of law and morality in collaborating with the Nazis and applying their discriminatory racial laws. Very few Nazis admitted their culpability. Albert Speer did. On the other hand, many Germans preferred to follow Goering's example: to argue that Germany was merely fighting an honorable war, not conducting a genocide.

My father was an interpreter with the US Army during the war. He had assisted in the interrogation of hundreds if not thousands of German prisoners of war. And he told me that not a single German soldier admitted being a member of the Nazi party. So who committed all the crimes? Who ran the death camps? Who arrested the victims and put them on the cattle cars? Why was it so hard to capture these culprits and bring them to trial? How did so many successfully hide in South America and even Europe? And how can it be that over fifty years after WWII anti-semitism is still prominent in Russia, Poland, France et al?
Judgment at Nuremberg is great because it doesn't focus on the Nazi leaders and the death camp commanders. It focuses on the judges who administered the laws, so it deals with the question whether there are laws that are so unjust that no judge should apply them. But is also focuses on the ordinary Germans ... the domestic servants, the Army widow. You could see that they felt some degree of shame ... but they were more concerned with trying to preserve some dignity and some love for their culture and heritage.

The final shame is felt by us ... the viewers ... when we identify with Spencer Tracy's character as he returns to (the normality of) the US. He can turn his back on Germany, the evidence of atrocities, and the need to prosecute any more criminals. Similarly, we turn our backs. Even Lancaster's admission of guilt is not satisfying in the face of so many who deny it. It took a million brave soldiers and workers in the US, Britain and other Allied countries to defeat the Nazis. It would take thousands to continue to prosecute the criminals for their barbarity. Unfortunately, the Allies did not have the stomach for that in the 1940's, 50's or 60's. It was not until 1983 that Nazi hunters were able to find Klaus Barbie. It was not until the 1990's when Swiss banks were willing to discuss claims they had been harboring gold and other valuables that the Nazis had stolen from their victims. There are still many unprosecuted claims against Germany for slave labor and against insurance companies for failing to pay claims. In 1961, as we see in Judgment at Nuremberg, there were many people who felt that enough had been said about the Holocaust. But the reason the subject seems inexhaustible is that we -- the courts, the politicians, the nations, the businesses, and the ordinary people -- have failed to deal with the full scope of criminal and immoral conduct.