[lit-ideas] Judgment at Nuremberg

  • From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "Lit-Ideas" <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:38:48 -0700

I just watched the 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg.   Chief Judge Dan
Haywood (Spencer Tracy) seems to represent the preferred solution.  Ernst
Janning (played by Bert Lancaster) wants Haywood to understand that he never
knew it would go that far - that far being the atrocities in the
concentration camps.  Tracy tells him, "as soon as you sentenced a man to
death you knew was innocent, it went that far."  But the Defense Attorney
played by Maximilian Schell (who won an academy award for his role) argues
that these judges did the best they could within the system fearing that if
they opted out, their replacements would do far worse.  And that, if I
recall correctly was similar to Petain's defense.    Is it better to opt out
of a society your disagree with or try to ameliorate it to some extent by
remaining in it and doing the most good you can?  The man Ernst Janning
sentenced to death was the victim of a Nazi Show trial.  This man was going
to be executed no matter what.  Ernst Janning succumbed to the inevitable
and declared the guilty sentence knowing full well the man was innocent, and
this allowed him to be just and merciful in other less publicized
circumstances.   Judge Haywood won't give him any slack, but the German
people are offended at Haywood's sentencing of this much-admired man.

 

This movie was loosely based upon real events.  The predominate view in
Nuremberg after these trials seems to have been that the victors were
punishing their defeated enemies.  Judge Haywood with the concurrence of one
of the other two judges sentences the four judges to life imprisonment.  At
the end of the movie we are told before the credits roll that none of those
so sentenced in 1949 were in jail at the time of the movie (1961).
Maximilian Schell as the defense attorney wanted to bet Dan Haywood that
none of those he sentenced would be in jail even five years from the date
they were sentenced.  The implication of that I suppose is that the German
people knew what it was to "go along" with the Nazis because they had no
viable alternative.  They were not willing to see prominent and beloved
people like these judges (at least Janning) remain in jail.

 

I sometimes wonder if the idea of Nuremberg hasn't affected us negatively to
some degree.  Since we punished Germans for obeying laws we saw as unjust
even though these laws were the laws of the land in Germany at the time, we
seem to have established a principle of sorts demanding that individuals,
any individuals, ought not to obey laws they, in their heart of hearts,
believe to be unjust.  The determination of what is just is removed (at
least in the minds of some people) from the law and placed in the
conscience.  I suppose this doesn't hurt anything if we enforce the law
despite these peoples' consciences, but if a judge relies on his conscience
rather than the established law, that could create more of a problem.  

 

The Nurembergers did have a point.  The trials never would have occurred if
the allies hadn't defeated Germany.  Crimes just as heinous are occurring in
Middle Eastern countries today but we do nothing about them - because we
aren't in a position to do anything about them.  We were in a position to
punish Nazis and those who complied with some of their more reprehensible
demands.

 

 Judgment at Nuremberg deals with lower tier officials.  The Nazi big guns
had already been tried before this trial takes place.   The Germans
presumably concurred that the architects of Nazism and its worst crimes
ought to be executed, but this movie gets into the fuzzy middle ground.  How
culpable were judges who went along to some extent with Nazi political
goals?   "Very" we said in these trials. "Not very" the Germans said after
the tribunal judges went home.

 

Lawrence Helm

San Jacinto

 

 

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