Question: Build a movie plot around this: how many of the 99 defendants were still serving their sentence when the film was released? 1
Answer:
Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy) arrives in Nuremberg in 1948 to preside over the trial of four Nazi judges, each charged with having abused the court system to help cleanse Germany of the politically and socially undesirable, allegedly guilty of war crimes. The opening statement of the prosecuting attorney (Richard Widmark) is a vicious one, depicting the defendants as having been willing, evil, accomplices in Nazi atrocities, but Judge Haywood wonders if it is really that simple.Confounded at how one defendant, a renowned German champion of justice named Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), appears to have played the greatest role in molding Germany's Ministry of Justice into a destructive instrument of Nazism, Judge Haywood resolves to gain some perspective on the period in which the German legal system strayed from a course of entirely objective justice.Probing for the truth proves difficult, though, as nobody who lived in Germany during Nazism seems to admit to having much inside knowledge. He befriends Mrs. Bertholt (Marlene Dietrich), the widow of an executed Nazi army officer, but she offers few insights, more consumed by her personal experiences than the broader matters of Nazism. Mrs. Bertholt is focusing on being a catalyst for the cultural rebirth of Nuremberg, keen on remolding the image of a city that had become notorious as the site of the Nazi raliies. An attempt to discuss the period with his housekeepers, Mr. and Mrs. Halbestadt, who had lived near the Dachau concentration camp, proves equally fruitless for Judge Haywood, as they cannot help but focus on the loss of their child in the bombing and the fact that they nearly starved from poverty. Whether anyone knew anything mattered little, for Germans were looking forward, not backward, still grappling with, and recovering from, the hardships and losses that the war brought to them and their families.Only in the courtroom will Judge Haywood have the opportunity to gain insights into the realities of the period. First hand evidence of a) all...