By Andrew O'Hehir
SALON
"Nuremberg": A lost war-crimes documentary lives again
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/index.html?story=/ent/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/09/30/nuremberg&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%2520Newsletter%2520%2528Not%2520Premium%2529_7_30_110
Why Stuart Schulberg's film of the famous Nazi trial was destroyed -- and what it can tell us nowMaybe the title of the documentary "Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today" sounds a little pedantic and old-fashioned. That's because the "today" in question is not, like, today but 1948, when this film was completed by a United States military team and shown in occupied Germany.
A compact and devastating record of the history-making trial -- held in the symbolic birthplace of the Nazi Party -- that held two dozen leading Nazi officials to account for the crimes of the Holocaust and other World War II atrocities, "Nuremberg" was never shown in U.S. theaters, and the master negative and soundtrack were destroyed, for reasons that remain mysterious. (But which can, I believe, be deduced from the evidence.)
Viewed cynically, the immediate purpose of "Nuremberg" was to convince the defeated German population that the blame for their material privation and collective despair lay not with the victorious Allies but with the deranged criminal regime that had led their nation into war in the first place. But writer-director Stuart Schulberg (an Army sergeant and the brother of famous screenwriter Budd Schulberg) clearly had larger goals in mind. For one thing, the Nuremberg trials presented a startling example of postwar global cooperation, with Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson serving as lead prosecutor alongside a team of British, French and Soviet colleagues.
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....Nuremberg introduced an explosive and controversial principle into international law: the idea that political, military and business leaders could be held personally liable for waging aggressive warfare, for murdering civilians or captured enemies, and for the ambiguous category of "crimes against humanity." It was one thing to apply these new juridical concepts to the universally loathed Nazi regime, but quite another to confront the fact that they applied to everyone else as well.
Schulberg intercuts snippets of German and Allied footage documenting some of the worst war atrocities, and even though that's no more than a few minutes of the film, and it's material many of us have seen before, in this context of judgment it assumes a hideous new power. It's oddly gratifying to hear some of the accused men, including Hans Frank, the former Nazi governor of Poland, and Hitler Youth head Baldur von Schirach, express some awareness of their guilt, and some measure of repentance.
And, to return to the question of this documentary's cloudy history: What was it about Schulberg's "Nuremberg" that made U.S. military authorities feel that it was OK for occupied Germans but had to be destroyed before Americans could see it? I'm not qualified to get all Glenn Greenwald on you, but even amid all the contradiction and ambiguity of the Nuremberg process, the argument made there was clear:
All the nations of the world had to be held to the same standard, and every nation that waged aggressive warfare and committed war crimes, no matter how large or rich or powerful, would be judged accordingly.
"Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today" is now playing at Film Forum in New York. Other cities, and DVD release, should follow.
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