Great dialog, but unconvincing characters

Rating: 7/10 (10 September 2007)

The makers of this movie deserve credit for taking on a difficult subject - the culpability of dutiful servants of a terror regime - and for trying to illuminate it from both moral and legal angles. The choice of judges as defendants is perfect - as spelled out in a remarkable speech by the prosecutor, these men were well educated and mature when the Third Reich began to make a mockery of the rule of law. And yet, they consented to serve within this warped legal system that degraded them from independent servants of justice to accessories in crimes against humanity.
As others have noted, cast and acting are excellent. My main reservation is that, considering that this movie takes a full 3 hours, many of the characters remain too sketchy and unconvincing. The charges against three of the defendants are never spelled out, and their counsels never speak; they plead not guilty, sulk through the proceedings and are simply sentenced in the end. The only defendant that is more fully developed is a curious combination of courage, arrogance and submissiveness, brilliance and delusion, cynicism and remorse; he remains too enigmatic and out of the common for being able to 'explain' how more ordinary Germans really ticked and functioned in the Third Reich.
Some minor quibbles concern the historical context: Nuremberg, in 1948, certainly was in the middle of reconstruction, no longer just a pile of rubble; the Berlin crisis certainly did not threaten the 'loss of Germany and of Europe', and Dachau and Belsen were concentration camps alright but not the major sites of the annihilation of the Jews. Still, compared with the liberties taken by more recent Hollywood productions, this movie remains tolerably close to historical fact.