Judgment at Nuremberg is a MUST SEE movie if you seek to understand what happened in Nazi Germany and what is happening now in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Made in 1961, Judgment at Nuremberg is a thinly fictionalized film account of the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials. It was written by Abby Mann and directed by Stanley Kramer. Starring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, Werner Klemperer, William Shatner and Montgomery Clift.

The full movie is available at Google Video.

The film depicts the trial of certain judges who served during the Nazi regime in Germany and the parallels with today's Right Wing dominated Supreme Court are chilling. The film was inspired by the Judges' Trial before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1947, where four of the defendants were sentenced to life in prison. One of the threads in the plot involves a "race defilement" trial known as the "Feldenstein case". In this - again thinly fictionalized - case, based on the real life Katzenberger Trial, an elderly Jewish man was tried for an improper relationship with an "Aryan" woman, and put to death in 1942.

The film examines the questions of individual complicity in crimes committed by the state. For example, defense attorney Hans Rolfe (Maximilian Schell) raises such issues as the support of the U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. for the practice of eugenics and Winston Churchill's words of praise for Adolf Hitler. In the end, Janning makes a statement condemning himself and his fellow defendants for "going along" with the Third Reich and all four are found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

The film is notable for showing actual historical footage filmed by American soldiers after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Shown in court by prosecuting attorney Colonel Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark), the footage of huge piles of naked corpses laid out in rows and bulldozed into large pits was exceptionally gruesome for a mainstream film of its day.

The next clip is Spencer Tracy as the American Judge Haywood, delivering the powerful and moving verdict where he rejects the call to let the Nazi judges off lightly to gain Germany's support in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.


Sources: Wikipedia, Amazon.com