I just finished watching this movie for the first time. Wow, what an incredible movie. It is very clever because it makes the trial about people (judges) that you can kind of understand why they should be found guilty, but also why they should be found not guilty. They sent people for sterilization, they sent people to the camps. But well… watch the movie. The manner in which they present a case for their innocence is just well done. I really like the defense attorney.
Incredibly well written and well acted. I highly recommend it. Available on Prime Video (probably elsewhere too).
Oskar Werner’s character confronts Burt Lancaster’s in the prison yard with the truth that he was just as corrupt and complicit as the rest of them. In Ship of Fools he similarly confronts Vivian Leigh’s character when she expects men to fall all over her even though her appeal was based only on sex long faded. Stanley Kramer liked to use him as a deflationary device.
First, Judgement at Nuremberg is an amazing film. Everyone is giving an amazing performance. The whole cast is top notch. We watch it about once a year. It says a lot about the situation in post-was Germany. Some wanted the Germans crushed, some wanted justice,not vengeance. But what justice is there for the Holocaust? It’s just too much, too big. Gassing every German involved in their own ovens still isn’t enough, yet it is clearly too much.
But now I wonder what happened to Burkhalter and Hochstetter after the war. Burkhalter was high enough in the chain oif command he could have had a seat at Nuremberg. Hochstetter probably was executed.
Hochstetter was Howard Caine, who played Judy Garland’s husband in JaN. He was also in another Stanley Kramer social awareness pic, Pressure Point, where Bobby Darin plays a juvenile delinquent who joins the Nazis.
That’s right, and when it came out there were likely more people than there are today who were hyper-aware of the big fish. So focusing on people whose names weren’t known allowed audiences to think about the issues more than about the headline-making names–very smart.
The way Mann and Kramer handled the presentation of Schell’s character was brilliant (and of course they had a highly-skilled actor who could pull it off). For a plot with not much suspense in it–audiences knew that the Nuremberg trials had resulted in many convictions–the face-heel turn of the Schell character provided a solid and effective twist.
There was subtlety in the handling of Dietrich’s character, too.
Yeah, that’s what makes it really work. There’s an element of plausibility to the defense compared to say Kaltenbrunner. Of course, the same arguments could be made. Kaltenbrunner mainly argued he didn’t know … and he was really quite nice to the Jews. But it feels pretty hollow for somebody so deeply involved in planning and implementing the Holocaust.
Same with the doctors directly experimented on their victims.
But the judges… the judges have that hair of an element of plausibility.
At the real Judges’ Trial, there were 16 defendants, and four were acquitted.
If you have Netflix, have a look at 2016’s Tokyo Trial. It’s without doubt flawed, but the ambiguity of colonial powers putting a nation on trial for “crimes against peace” when, aside from the on-scene atrocities, that’s something they’ve done themselves is relevant.
