Nürnberg und seine Lehre

Establishing a precedent for victors' justice, the first International Military Tribunal prosecuted twenty-one of Nazi Germany's top surviving political, economic, and military leaders who, as charged by prosecutors representing the major Allied powers Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States, joined in a conspiracy to perpetrate unprecedented atrocities including crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that culminated in the Holocaust.

Filmmaker Stuart Schulberg, who served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had been commissioned by the US Department of War to create the documentary "Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today." (Schulberg's brother Budd was also in the OSS; he became a screenwriter noted for "A Face in the Crowd" and "On the Waterfront.")

Working with editor Joe Zigman, Stuart Schulberg assembled footage taken during the eleven-month trial, conducted in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, and lasting from November 1945 to October 1946, and from the wealth of the Nazis' own film archives of their nefarious actions that indicts the defendants and their machinery of evil while exposing their contempt and their evasiveness, dodging their culpability by proffering the institutional excuse of the 20th century: They were "only following orders."

But whose orders? Granted, Adolf Hitler, the dictator of Nazi Germany, and two of his top henchmen, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Schutzstaffel (SS) overseer Heinrich Himmler, had all committed suicide before the Nuremberg Trials, but in the dock at Nuremberg were, among others, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, second only to Hitler; Hitler's Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess; the Nazis' racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg; the Nazis' top architect Albert Speer; economic ministers Walther Funk and Hjalmar Schacht; foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; SS intelligence chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner; and top Wehrmacht (military) leaders Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, General Alfred Jodl, and Admirals Karl Doenitz and Erich Raeder. How responsible were these mere "order-takers" for the Nazis' heinous crimes?

"Nuremberg" sets out to answer this with two movies in one, footage of the trial proceedings juxtaposed with the historical chronology of the rise and fall of the Third Reich provided by the extensive film archives the Nazis had amassed. Setting the stage is opening footage of civilians emerging from the rubble of postwar Europe, scenes discreetly yet consciously accented by Hans-Otto Borgmann's keening musical score, although the soundtrack music soon fades, leaving only contemporary actor Liev Schreiber to narrate this riveting, heartbreaking, ultimately horrifying tale.

Schulberg and Zigman intertwine the two threads to follow the course of the trial, with the lead prosecutor, US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, laying out the first count of conspiracy whose origins lie in Hitler's 1925 manifesto "Mein Kampf," his blueprint for world domination that declared Germans to be the "master race" entitled to subjugate and even exterminate other races as the Nazi Party used "fraud, deceit, intimidation, and coercion" to come to power.

Cementing that power was Goebbels's false-flag operation to set fire to the Reichstag, the German parliament building, blame the communists for it, and use it as a pretext to declare martial law. Prosecution witness Hans Gisevius implicates Goering, seen grimacing and rubbing his hand over his face, in this plot, which launched Hitler's secret rearmament program---illegal by the terms of the Versailles Treaty that ended the First World War--- spearheaded by Goering, Schacht, and Funk, as Nazi Germany geared up for conquest.

Britain's lead prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross introduces the second count of crimes against peace, begun with Germany's seizure of Austria and Czechoslovakia before officially starting World War Two with the September 1939 invasion of Poland. Following President Franklin Roosevelt's plea, just prior to the Poland invasion, not to invade any more countries, Hitler mocks him, to the growing amusement of his assembly, by rattling off a long list of countries, many of which Hitler did indeed invade or attack subsequently, while the Nazis' own filmed record displays the destruction caused by their "blitzkrieg" ("lightning war") assaults.

Conducting the third and fourth counts of, respectively, war crimes and crimes against humanity, lead Soviet prosecutor Roman Rudenko relates the Nazis' policy of total war against both military and civilian targets that resulted in sustained atrocities everywhere Germany intruded. Soviet prisoners in particular received appalling treatment as Hitler's turn to the east exposed the Nazis' ideological core of extreme anti-communism and their belief that Russian and Slavic peoples were "untermenschen," or subhumans.

French lead prosecutor François de Menthon takes the baton from Rudenko to outline the Nazis' assault on civilians. This included the wholesale abduction of captive populations as slave laborers who were often worked to death, a manifestation of the Nazis' "master race" belief that they were fit only to serve the Germans, who even preyed upon their own elderly and infirm, branding them as "useless eaters" targeted for elimination from German society.

But the greatest assault on civilians was the extermination of European Jews with the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," better known as the Holocaust. Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess (not to be confused with deputy fuehrer Rudolf Hess) recounts the rapid, cursory sorting of arriving concentration camp inmates into those who will live to work as slave laborers and those who will die immediately in the gas chambers, with Hoess noting that, "We knew the people were dead when the shrieking stopped." Ghastly footage of horribly emaciated bodies being chucked into mass graves like garbage emphasizes this crime against humanity.

Although German audiences saw the initial version of "Nuremberg: A Lesson for Today" not long after Schulberg and Zigman had completed it in 1948, that version was never screened in American theaters. In fact, this current version of "Nuremberg" exists only because Schulberg's daughter Sandra had discovered a print among her parents' effects and had it restored. (This restored version differs from the initial version, as other reviewers have noted.)

No official explanation was given as to why the original version was not screened in the US. During a January 2024 airing of this version of "Nuremberg," Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz claimed that the US had been recruiting Nazis to be used against the Soviet Union as the Cold War escalated and American military officials did not want to antagonize the Germans. Whether the latter part is true, the US did indeed employ Nazis during the Cold War.

Most famous are the Germans from the Nazis' rocket program---who worked slave laborers to death building the V-1 and V-2 "vengeance weapons"---whose criminal wartime records had to be sanitized (Operation Paperclip) so they could enter the United States. Those such as Wernher von Braun helped to form the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that put American astronauts on the Moon.

Lesser-known but no less significant was General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's chief of intelligence on the Eastern (Russian) Front, whose entire "Gehlen Org" was grafted wholesale onto Allied intelligence agencies (such as the CIA) and for two decades after the war was the primary source of intelligence on the Soviet Union even as the "Org" provided cover for Nazi war criminals such as "Hitler's Commando" Otto Skorzeny and "Butcher of Lyon" Klaus Barbie. (Christopher Simpson's 1988 book "Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effect on the Cold War" provides an excellent overview of these activities.)

Previous reviewers have critiqued "Nuremberg: A Lesson for Today" to varying degrees, including claims of historical revisionism and propaganda mongering along with cosmetic issues such as the quality of the "restored" footage and narrator Schreiber's pronunciation of German names. These may be valid but are beside the point. It may be that decades of inundation by images of Nazism in both dramatic and documentary form have inured us to their barbarism and cruelty, dulling us to the impact of the Nazis' institutional crimes on graphic display here.

Thus, "Nuremberg: A Lesson for Today" in either version remains an essential legacy reminding us that the past is prolog. The US emerged from the war as the global hegemon and waged wars of aggression in Vietnam and Iraq, crimes for which German leaders were convicted and hanged as depicted in this stark documentary. As this review was posted, wars of aggression are still being waged by Israel against Palestinians in occupied Gaza and by Russia against Ukraine.

That Nazi Germany had committed genocide against Jews and had invaded Russia and Ukraine, then had victors' justice inflicted upon it, remains a bitter irony as the subtitle to "Nuremberg"---"A Lesson for Today"---reinforces how its lesson is a sobering one still sadly relevant today.

POINT TO PONDER: Confirmation bias is the tendency to accept only facts and opinions you agree with. Is a review "helpful" only if it validates your confirmation bias? Is a review "not helpful" if it contradicts your confirmation bias? Confirmation bias is extremely difficult to avoid. Thus, a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down is next to useless without any context to explain why you think this review is "helpful" or "not helpful." For me, helpful reviews explain why reviewers liked, or didn't like, the work regardless of whether I agree with their conclusion. But that's just me.