Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Nazi judges get judged.
Is it lawful to uphold unjust laws? Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy) has come to Germany to lead a tribunal considering if four Nazi judges committed crimes against humanity by enforcing the law. Was the sterilization of Rudolph Peterson (Montgomery Clift) a crime1? Was executing a man accused of breaking the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which made race-mixing illegal, itself a crime?
While Haywood considers these questions, he also strikes up a friendship with Frau Bertholt (Marlene Dietrich), a woman whose husband was a Nazi general executed by a previous tribunal. Bertholt says her husband’s death was political murder—the revenge the victors take on the vanquished—but now she wants to show Haywood that the German people aren’t monsters.
In the courtroom, defense counsel Hans Rolfe (Maximilian Schell) argues vigorously for his clients, especially the scholarly Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster). Janning says nothing in the courtroom; his stony face is the puzzle that drives the film. It is while watching Rolfe argue for his salvation by subtly arguing that the Third Reich worked for the benefit of Germany that Janning finally speaks up.
Janning’s statement? That the judges knew what they were doing was wrong and that they’re guilty. I’ve excerpted from the speech in the following footnote2, but man, it’s worth watching in its entirety.
After the guilty verdict, Janning asks to see Haywood in his cell. There, Janning again acknowledges his guilt but begs Haywood to acknowledge that he, Janning, couldn’t have known that his actions would lead to millions of deaths—that he couldn’t have known it would come to that. Haywood’s respose ends the film: “Herr Janning…it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”
Rating: 9/10. In 2022, I brought a DVD of Judgment at Nuremberg down to the Jersey Shore for a beach weekend. During a sunny Saturday afternoon, I spent three hours in a darkened room watching the film. It was the best part of the trip.
Cast and Crew
Judgment at Nuremberg is Avengers: Endgame, but for a different type of nerd. It has a murderer’s row cast3 and a script that lets that cast cook. We can’t cover every famous person in this movie, so we’ll only discuss those that won’t be returning to this column.
After seeing Montgomery Clift’s incandescent performances in A Place in the Sun and From Here to Eternity, you might think he was bound for superstardom. Instead, he’s a Hollywood what-if. While filming Raintree County (1957) with his friend Elizabeth Taylor4, Clift was in a car crash that disfigured his face and left him in chronic pain. This exacerbated his drug and alcohol dependence, which was so bad that his acting teacher referred to it as “the longest suicide in Hollywood history.” Clift was dead by 1966.
We covered Judy Garland’s early career and comeback in our Trivia section on A Star is Born. There was always a market for a beloved star like Judy, and in the last decade of her career she had her own TV show, gave live performances, and made movies. Her 1961 Carnegie Hall concert is sometimes called “the greatest night in show business”; Pitchfork recently reviewed the Grammy-winning album recording of it, giving it a 10. But, like Clift, Garland had demons, including drug addiction and body image issues; she died in 1969 of an accidental overdose.
Last time was saw Marlene Dietrich, it was in Witness for the Prosecution in her customary femme fatale role. She’s different in Judgment at Nuremberg. She’s more subtle, more vulnerable; the hurt she conveys after Haywood’s guilty verdict is haunting. Dietrich retired in 1975 and became a recluse but remained friends with co-star Maximilian Schell. In 1984, Schell made a documentary about her life, Marlene, that was nominated for an Oscar.
Speaking of Schell…he’ll be back in this column with the film The Man in the Glass Booth (1975). Tracy’ll return in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). Burt Lancaster’s up next in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). We’ll see Richard Widmark, who played the prosecuting attorney, in Murder on the Orient Express (1974). And director Stanley Kramer’s work returns with Ship of Fools (1965). But savor them all together in Judgment at Nuremberg, because you almost never have this much firepower in a film.
The Trivia
Okay: this Trivia section is about some of the Nazis tried at the Nuremberg trial.5 I acknowledge that treating names like “Hitler6” as trivia divorced from broader context feels icky; unfortunately, “divorcing proper nouns from context” is the mission statement of Knowing Without Understanding.
Here’s the thing: learning a bunch of proper nouns can provide a framework upon which more substantial knowledge can be layered. There’s some value to Pavloving “Joseph Goebbels”7 when you hear “Nazi propaganda minister,” though it is mostly as a means to create understanding in the future, an understanding that can’t be built without those proper nouns in tow.
As we’re only covering those who stood trial, we’re skipping over infamous Nazis Josef Mengele8, Adolf Eichmann9, and ChatGPT’s answer to “who was the worst Nazi,” Heinrich Himmler.10 I’ve left some details about them in the footnotes if you want your day to be worse.
Among the defendants at the Nuremberg trial were:
Hermann Göring, a WWI ace and head of the Luftwaffe during WWII. He was a soulless hedonist, fat and obsessed with enriching himself with pilfered art. He committed suicide via cyanide before being hanged.
Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s deputy. In one of the war’s more bizarre moments, he covertly flew to Scotland to try and negotiate a peace with the Brits; he was captured and, after the Nuremberg trials, spent forty years in Spandau prison until committing suicide in 1987.
Albert Speer served as the Minister of Armaments and War Production; consider him the “Nazi architect.” He was also sentenced and served twenty years at Spandau.
German Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose name you might know from the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, was sentenced and hanged.
Odds and Ends
Two actors from this film—Howard Caine and Werner Klemperer—went on to be in “Hogan’s Heroes” (Klemperer as series regular Col. Klink)11…Maximilian Schell was fifth-billed, yet won the Best Actor Oscar (over, among others, his first-billed co-star Spencer Tracy)…the Nazi army was called the Heer; with the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, it made up the Wehrmacht…arraignment is when charges are read to a defendant…the city of Frankfurt is on the Main river, which is why it’s sometimes called “Frankfurt am Main”…Karl Dönitz, also tried at Nuremberg, was Grand Admiral of the Kriegsmarine…in the film, the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia is a plot point12…Judge Haywood goes to a piano concert where the pianist plays Beethoven’s “Pathétique,” which is a real banger…Haywood mentions being a doughboy in WWI; “doughboy” is what Europeans called American soldiers.
A postscript: at the end of Judgment at Nuremberg, we get a title card that tells us about the twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials (i.e., the ones held after the one discussed in the Trivia section for the 22 leaders of the Third Reich). We learn that 99 defendants were sentenced to prison terms, but that in 1961, not one was still serving their sentence. In the film, Judge Haywood rules “guilty,” but the conflicts between personal responsibility and public duty, between justice and vengeance, and between a moment in time and the arc of history, continue to be argued.
Defense argues that none other than American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes advocated for eugenics. We’ve actually already watched a movie about Oliver Wendell Holmes for this project—the hagiography The Magnificent Yankee. That film, unsurprisingly, did not mention eugenics.
“I was even content to let counsel try and save my name—until I realized that in order to save it, he would have to raise the specter again. You have seen him do it. He has done it here in this courtroom. He has suggested that the Third Reich worked for the benefit of people. He has suggested that we sterilized men for the welfare of the country. He has suggested that perhaps the old Jew did sleep with the 16-year-old girl after all. Once more, it is being done. For love of country. It is not easy to tell the truth. But if there is to be any salvation of Germany, we who know our guilt must admit it, whatever the pain and humiliation.”
I mean, compare this lineup card to the Murderer’s Row 1927 Yankees:
Montgomery Clift (SS)
Judy Garland (C)
Burt Lancaster (LF)
Spencer Tracy (DH)
Maximilian Schell (3B)
Marlene Dietrich (CF)
William Shatner (1B)
Richard Widmark (2B)
Werner Klemperer (RF)
Good on-base and contact skills from the top of the order and a lot of pop 1 through 9. Gotta love the defense up the middle too—Garland has elite pitch-framing skills and Dietrich plays a huge center field.
Raintree County was the second of his three films with Elizabeth Taylor, and it was the one Taylor got her first Academy Award nomination for. Afterwards, Clift and Taylor were in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).
Meaning the first Nuremberg trial, which focused on 22 leaders of Nazi Germany. Note that Judgment at Nuremberg fictionalizes the real “Judges Trial,” one of twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials that focused on business leaders and officers in the military.
You know Hitler. The guy with the Charlie Chaplin mustache? The guy from Godwin’s Law? The guy you compare people you don’t like to?
Joseph Goebbels was the Nazi Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. He committed suicide, but not before poisoning his six children.
Speaking of Pavlovs: when I think “lady Nazi propagandist,” I think of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who made films like “Olympia” (about the 1936 Berlin Olympics) and “Triumph of the Will” (about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg). But history is complicated, and Riefenstahl’s complicity with the Nazis is apparently a matter of debate.
Mengele was the “angel of death” known for the genetic experimentation he did on human subjects (often twins). We’ll see a fictionalized version of him in this column in a film from 1978.
Eichmann was an SS officer who helped organize the Holocaust. He was caught by Mossad in 1960 and brought to Israel to stand trial, after which he was executed. Philosopher Hannah Arendt reported on the trial in “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”
Himmler led the SS (Schutzstaffel, “protection squad”) as well as the Gestapo (“Gestapo” is an acronym of the German for “secret state police”). The Holocaust Encyclopedia states Himmler was the Nazi official responsible for conceiving and overseeing implementation of the “Final Solution.”
From IMDB: “Klemperer, a German Jew, and his family fled Germany at the outset of the Nazi regime. He wound up in Hollywood and agreed only to play the role of a Nazi in a movie or television series if the character was despicable, as in [Judgment at Nuremberg], or a bumbling loser, as in ‘Hogan’s Heroes.’ ”
A character in the film states that “it’s rumored Masaryk committed suicide”; that’s Jan Masaryk, Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia. His death is still unsolved—it may have been an accident, a suicide, or murder. Masaryk’s father was Tomáš Masaryk, the founding father and first president of Czechoslovakia. Klement Gottwald became the first Communist leader of Czechoslovakia in 1948. There’s lots of interesting history here that doesn’t really fit into a footnote.
And a third! So sorry. "Marlene" was nominated for an Oscar but didn't win.