In an earlier post, I discussed Holocaust memory in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. I made the argument that, before the 1970s, popular culture cared little about the Holocaust. A useful example of this is the film Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), which can be seen as an example of the exception that proves the rule. The film deals with a fictionalized version of one of the later Nuremberg trials for judges. Spencer Tracy plays an American judge having to confront the question of the role of ordinary Germans in the crimes of the Nazis.
For all of the film's excellent qualities, it is strange to watch Judgment at Nuremberg and see that it is not about the Jewish wartime experience. Jewish actors, such as a pre-Star Trek William Shatner and Werner Klemperer, are in the film. The Holocaust is discussed, including groundbreaking use of concentration camp footage. The film deserves a lot of credit for making it possible to produce Holocaust movies that centered the Jewish experience, but that is not the purpose of the film.
Consider one of the key scenes in the film. Judy Garland plays a German woman, Irene Hoffman, who, as a teenager, went to prison for denying that she had a sexual relationship with a close family friend who was Jewish. She is brought in to testify because the judge in that case, Dr. Ernst Janning, is now on trial. Janning is an interesting character because he clearly recognizes his own guilt. This raises the question of whether is awareness makes him more sympathetic or not. He understood exactly what he was doing and the enormity of his crime, but did it anyway. That being said, Janning is not the villain of the film. Instead you have his defense attorney, Hans Rolfe, who uses the trial as a platform to defend German culture.
I would consider this scene one of the finest courtroom dialogues in the history of film, right next to the "you can't handle the truth" scene in A Few Good Men. Garland was nominated for Best Supporting Actress and Maximilian Schell, who played Rolfe, won Best Actor. That being said, in a plotline about the Nazi persecution of Jews, we do not actually have any Jews. The Jewish friend is dead so he cannot be brought in to testify. Instead, we have the decent German woman who has to testify in his place. In essence, a story about Jewish victimhood becomes a story of Germans being victimized by the Nazis.
Judgment at Nuremberg is a fantastic film that did a lot to advance the notion that Nazi Germany was such an evil that ordinary Germans became complicit in it simply by not having actively opposed it. By contrast, we do not blame ordinary Japanese people for the crimes of Imperial Japan. Similarly, today, we do not blame the ordinary Russian or North Korean for the crimes of their governments. We recognize that such people cannot be held responsible for the leaders who took charge and we excuse them for simply trying to get on with their lives. We may even be inclined to give a pass to people who may have been active supporters of these governments because they believed that they did not have any better options. This raises the question of why we treat Germans differently.
Part of what makes Rolfe such a fantastic villain is that on the surface he appears very reasonable. He argues that we need to distinguish between the genuine monsters of Nazi Germany and respectable people, like his client, who did the best they could under difficult circumstances. What he does, though, to Garland's character is to essentially put her back on trial, turning himself into her prosecutor. She may have hoped to find peace by being able to finally turn the tables on those who put her in prison, only to find the tables being turned right back again. Rolfe's defense of his client essentially amounts to saying that she really was guilty, as if prosecuting people who actually violated Nazi laws made someone less of a Nazi collaborator.
The message here is that, despite the optics of Germany losing the war and being occupied by the Allies, the "real" Germany is going to survive and be back in charge in a few years. She was found guilty previously and she will be found guilty again, along with the further crime of aiding the persecutors of Germany.
There is another scene where the defense attorney does something similar to a German victim of Nazi sterilization policy.
The film is certainly willing to deal with Nazi crimes in ways that would make viewers uncomfortable. That being said, this is not a movie about Jews. This is a film about Nazi Germany being so evil that ordinary Germans became tainted by association even as many Germans are recognized also as the victims of the Nazis. This served an important purpose at that time to forever taint Nazism and make its resurgence impossible.
Keep in mind that it was hardly implausible, in the years immediately after the War, to imagine the Nazis and their enablers in Germany coming back to power once the Allied occupation ended. After the American Civil War, Union Soldiers occupied the South for more than a decade, but then went home, leaving the South in the hands of former secessionists. Since the South was never forced to truly acknowledge either the crimes of treason or of slavery, secessionists were able to take power under the banner of the Lost Cause that made themselves the victims and cast Northerners and blacks as the villains.
In many respects, Judgment at Nuremberg is a fairly conservative film. It is a story of an American judge passing judgement on a corrupt German society who deserved to be bombed and conquered. Commemorating Jewish suffering had little to do with the film's aims. There is a certain irony here in that the film, in 1965, accidently played a role in the Civil Rights Movement when the film's showing on television was interrupted to show the Bloody Sunday attack on the Selma marchers.
A film whose purpose was to exalt American righteousness at the expense of ordinary Germans now came to question that very American righteousness. If ordinary Germans could be held accountable for the Holocaust, why not hold ordinary Americans accountable for the crimes of segregation? Ordinary Germans at least had the excuse of Nazi crimes not being broadcast on television. Ordinary Americans had no such excuse.
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