"What was to become a passing phase had become the way of life." - Ernst Janning

Rating: 10/10 (22 January 2012)

I saw "Inherit the Wind" not long ago without realizing that it's director and lead actor are also the principals in this film. Some of the thoughts I had about that picture I would second here as well. Neither one of these movies has made it into the American Film Institute list of Top One Hundred films, and only "Judgment at Nuremburg" cracks IMDb's own list of Top 250 films. That is an oversight I can't really understand, given some of the films that have been accorded such rank. Though I thought Spencer Tracy was a tad better in the earlier picture from 1960, he's superb here as well, portraying a judge with the thankless task of presiding over a World War II trial of civilian judges who promoted the Nazi cause by their own judicial decisions.
At the heart of the picture is the decades old argument over the average German citizen's knowledge and/or complicity in the atrocities of the Nazi regime. The question prompts the expected direct confrontation in the courtroom drama, and is presented with much more subtlety in those scenes with Judge Haywood (Tracy) and Mrs. Bertholt (Marlene Dietrich), as well as the German housekeepers, the Halberstadt's (Ben Wright and Virginia Christine). All throughout, one has a sense that the shame of the Nazi regime has tainted all Germans, even though for most of it's countrymen, their main objective throughout the war was simply to survive.
Yet the question of moral relativism offered in the picture is an important one. Where does one draw a line in the sand relative to absolute right and wrong? As a moral dilemma the question should be a simple one to answer. However when faced with an ethical choice to make, we know that sometimes expediency wins out over rationality, or in other words, do I choose life or death for myself and my family? It's easy to make these judgments with the 20/20 hindsight of sixty plus years gone by; not so easy when faced with that decision as a judge, a shop keeper, a soldier, a government official - all just doing their jobs and facing a brutal retribution if they don't.
I've seen my fair share of World War II documentaries and movies using real footage from the death camps, as well as having visited Dachau on a European trip in the late Seventies. I'd have to say that the images shown by virtue of Colonel Lawson's (Richard Widmark) summation are by far the most horrific ones I've ever seen. Yet there are those, even today, who deny that the horror of Hitler and Nazi Germany ever occurred. It is one thing to bury the past, as Mrs. Bertholt attempts to convince Judge Haywood - "We have to forget if we are to go on living". For present and future generations, I would change a single word in that sentence to 'remember'.