Questions Without Answers - Which Is The History Of Nazi Germany

Rating: 10/10 (3 June 2002)

Lacking the big names of what people normally think of as the "Nuremberg Trials" - the trial of Nazi leaders such as Goering, Hess and Speer - this movie focuses on the lesser known people who were tried for war crimes: the German judges whose responsibility it was to dispense "justice" in Hitler's Germany. Although the big names are missing, the movie is powerful and masterfully deals with the troubling questions around Nazism: how could normally good, decent people (represented in this movie by Ernst Janning, played by Burt Lancaster, on trial with three others) have allowed themselves to be sucked into the evil that was Hitler and National Socialism? How could the German people have turned a blind eye to what was going on and simply denied all responsibility? And the movie also considers a troubling question about the United States: if Nazism was evil enough to have warranted a war and then all the effort of the Nuremberg trials, why were the Americans suddenly so willing to "forgive and forget" with the onset of the Cold War and the threat of communism?
The implication here is that the Americans never really took the secondary trials seriously. A second-rate judge (Dan Haywood, available only because he had been defeated in an election, and played magnificently by Spencer Tracy) was appointed to head the trial, the Army was putting pressure on the prosecution to go lightly. It's an amazing fact of history that within three years of the end of World War II, the feeling was so clearly against pursuing those who had played roles in the Nazi nightmare (and, of course, it's a question that still haunts us today as Nazi war criminals from time to time turn up and the response of the public is often, "he's an old man. Why bother?")
Focussing largely on the trial itself, the movie is consistently gripping throughout, and even the diversions outside the courtroom (such as the relationship between Judge Haywood and Mrs. Bertholt -Marlene Dietrich) don't detract from the suspense, as they continue to push the question: "how can you just sit there and deny knowing anything?" Anyone with an interest in the puzzle of Nazi Germany should watch this. In the end, it raises a lot of questions and offers few answers, but that may be the legacy of Nazism. But the movie makes its point. As Judge Janning talks to Judge Haywood at the end of the movie he says almost pleadingly, "we never knew it would go so far." Haywood simply responds, "Herr Janning, it went that far the first time you convicted a man you knew was innocent." Powerful stuff.
10/10