This week the Music Box will present the Chicago premiere of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, a film produced by the U.S. War Department in 1945 and ’46 to document the landmark war-crimes trial of 22 top-ranking Nazis by an international military tribunal. Though the movie was released in Germany in 1948 as a way of confronting citizens with the grim reality of the Holocaust, it’s never been shown in the United States until now, which gives its 63-year-old subtitle an ironic twist. For some viewers, the movie’s chronicle of Nazi aggression will seem dully familiar, the sort of thing broadcast constantly on the History Channel. On the other hand, when Newsweek recently asked a thousand randomly chosen Americans to try their hand at the U.S. naturalization test, only 60 percent of them could identify the nations we fought in World War II. So the movie’s lesson might be more rudimentary now than it was back then.
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Nuremberg may be appreciated best not as a documentary but as an artifact of the prosecution itself, structured in four parts to reflect the four indictments, though even in this respect it has something to teach us. Imperfect as they were, the Nuremberg trials were a landmark in international relations, a truly heroic effort, mere months after the bloodiest conflict the world has ever known, to establish justice rather than revenge as the norm in dealing with aggressor nations. When the Allies first began to consider the fate of Germany, Joseph Stalin had recommended the summary execution of 50,000 staff officers, an idea that appalled Winston Churchill but appealed to Franklin Roosevelt. Instead, the International Military Tribunal, jointly administered by France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States, set a historic standard for global justice and human rights, codifying the concept of the war crime and validating the notion of an international criminal court.
The first indictment, for conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, was the most complex but also the most critical: it allowed prosecutors to include Nazi acts of persecution against Jews and other minorities before the actual outbreak of war and, even more important, obviated the defendants’ claim that they were just following orders (the so-called “Nuremberg defense”). As a legal concept, conspiracy was limited to the British and American traditions of jurisprudence, so Jackson took responsibility for making the case in court. Schulberg condenses his argument into a concise history of fascism in Germany: the publication of Mein Kampf, the rise of the Nazi Party, the burning of the Reichstag, the campaign for national rearmament, the introduction of compulsory military service, the conquest of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s public pronouncements about his good intentions are contrasted again and again with his steady buildup of a war machine that could dominate the world.
Directed by Stuart Schulberg
