Judgment at Nuremburg: Excellent by any standard

Rating: Null/10 (3 September 2011)

At the closing scene, Herr Janning has called Judge Hayward to this cell. Janning tells the judge: "Those millions I never knew it would come to that." And Judge Haywood responds: "it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent." The Nazis had sentenced 6 million innocent Jews to death; the first time one innocent person dies, a person known to be innocent, the Nazis were on the road to mass murder.
Judgment at Nuremberg is an excellent movie. By its acting, by it topic, by its theme, by its presentation. It records a fictional judgment in Nuremberg of four Nazi Jurists in 1948 after the Nuremberg Trials of Goebbels, Goring, Ribbentrop, et. al. These Jurists were relatively small cogs in the Nazi machinery of death.
There are huge metaphysical questions involved in any aesthetic of the Holocaust. The ones discussed in this film: to what extent did these small cogs know of the massive machinery of death? At what point does one overlook the past—what's past is past—forget the past and move on? What is the appropriate punishment for being involved in this machinery of death, no matter how apparently tangential? How many murders can be committed before one loses the right to call himself human: one, two, three murders? Should the entire nation—each and every individual—be to blame for evils of the Nazi State? And those are just a few of the metaphysical questions raised in the film.
But judgment is not about metaphysical questions; metaphysical questions belong to the audience watching the trial unfold. A trial is about the exact nature of the crime, whether the right person is under judgment, whether the evidence is sufficient beyond reasonable doubt to convict, and meting out appropriate punishment. In the film, documentation for an atrocity so large was provided by eyewitness accounts and by raw film footage of camp liberation.
These four defendants did not operate the gas chambers. But so long as they convicted one innocent person—Feldenstein—than they were participants in Mass Murder. John Donne said it many years ago: "No man is an island, entire of himself.  Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind" But there is another reality a film about the Holocaust must have: psychological verisimilitude. The film must accurately portray within a brief scene what is often sub rosa: attitudes, mind-sets, hidden agendas. The judges are in the mess hall, dining. After seeing film footage from the liberators, one of the judges asks: how is it possible to kill that many people; how can that many people be killed in a day. He turns around and asks Oswald Pohl. Pohl and Eichmann were in charge of concentration camp operations. Pohl responds, with 2 gas chambers 10,000 could be killed in half-an-hour. And then he adds: "It's disposing of the, bodies that's a problem." The way the scene is played out, creates a moment of chilling accuracy about the mindset of these people responsible for cold blooded technocratic murder. Pohl is viewed in profile and from a distance, a touch of cinematic genius.