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womzillaOne of my favorite films of all time is Judgment at Nuremberg, Stanley Kramer's 1961 film of Abby Mann's screenplay about an American judge overseeing the trial of four German judges for civilian crimes against humanity during the Nazi era. It's well-written, well-directed, and brilliantly well-acted; in addition to great turns by Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, and especially Montgomery Clift, Maximilian Schell's depiction of defense attorney Hans Rolfe is one of the finest screen performances I've ever seen.
The narrative revolves around the enforcement of several Nazi policies practiced against civilians, most notably the enforced sterilization of undesirables and laws against miscegenation (i.e., marriage between Jews and Germans). The Holocaust, of course, plays a significant role, even though (importantly) none of the judges on trial was directly involved in sending people to the camps; the crimes of which they are accused all came before the war, and the Final Solution was mostly a military project.
To discuss what I want to discuss, I have to give away some of the plot and discuss the final scene of the film in some detail.
Rolfe's defense of the judges is, unsurprisingly, a version of the Nuremberg defense; he intends to establish that the judges were merely serving their proper roles in the enforcement of the laws of their sovereign nation, and as such could not be held accountable in a post-facto court premised upon the idea that those laws were inherently criminal. Rolfe's tactics bring him to the point of harassing witnesses (Clift, a mentally handicapped victim of forced sterilization, and Garland, a young woman who may have violated the Nuremberg laws with an older Jewish man) until his leading defendant, Ernst Janning (Lancaster), orders him before the whole court to stop. Janning was the judge in Garland's case and sentenced her "lover" to the camps; they were "just" concentration camps, then, not the death camps they became, but he knew that the sentence was as good as death and, worse, he knew he would convict him before the trial even began, because that was what his country demanded of him. Janning stops the trial because he won't see the earlier trial re-enacted; the woman suffered enough during the nightmare just ended, and he won't have her subjected to abuse to protect himself. His crimes were born from love of his country, but he knows, knew, that what he did was a perversion of justice. He throws himself on the mercy of the court. Terrific drama.
That whole sequence is the climax of the film. However, the reason I'm discussing this point right now is in the denouement.
Janning requests to see Judge Haywood (Tracy) before he returns to the USA. They meet in Janning's cell. They give each other awkward compliments--Janning is praised for speaking out, Haywood for his sense of justice. As Haywood starts to go, Janning calls him back.
"I want to hear from a man like you. A man who has heard what happened. I want to hear--not that he forgives--but that he understands. . . . I did not know it would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it."
Haywood's reply: "Herr Janning. It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent."
I told you all that as context for this:
In the words of Abu Aardvark, this is the election made simple:
A hooded Iraqi man standing on a box, wires clamped to his hands, believing that if he moves or falls he will be electrocuted. An Iraqi man, naked, being attacked by dogs under the direction of US military police. A soldier pointing at a pile of naked Iraqi men and laughing. All of these men were almost certainly guilty of no crime except being rounded up in a mass sweep for Loitering with Intent to Be Liberated.
One candidate in this election took control of Abu Ghraib and remade it in his own image. The other one didn't. Vote for this, or against it.
And if you vote for it, don't pretend to be shocked at what it comes to, because it has already come to that.
The narrative revolves around the enforcement of several Nazi policies practiced against civilians, most notably the enforced sterilization of undesirables and laws against miscegenation (i.e., marriage between Jews and Germans). The Holocaust, of course, plays a significant role, even though (importantly) none of the judges on trial was directly involved in sending people to the camps; the crimes of which they are accused all came before the war, and the Final Solution was mostly a military project.
To discuss what I want to discuss, I have to give away some of the plot and discuss the final scene of the film in some detail.
Rolfe's defense of the judges is, unsurprisingly, a version of the Nuremberg defense; he intends to establish that the judges were merely serving their proper roles in the enforcement of the laws of their sovereign nation, and as such could not be held accountable in a post-facto court premised upon the idea that those laws were inherently criminal. Rolfe's tactics bring him to the point of harassing witnesses (Clift, a mentally handicapped victim of forced sterilization, and Garland, a young woman who may have violated the Nuremberg laws with an older Jewish man) until his leading defendant, Ernst Janning (Lancaster), orders him before the whole court to stop. Janning was the judge in Garland's case and sentenced her "lover" to the camps; they were "just" concentration camps, then, not the death camps they became, but he knew that the sentence was as good as death and, worse, he knew he would convict him before the trial even began, because that was what his country demanded of him. Janning stops the trial because he won't see the earlier trial re-enacted; the woman suffered enough during the nightmare just ended, and he won't have her subjected to abuse to protect himself. His crimes were born from love of his country, but he knows, knew, that what he did was a perversion of justice. He throws himself on the mercy of the court. Terrific drama.
That whole sequence is the climax of the film. However, the reason I'm discussing this point right now is in the denouement.
Janning requests to see Judge Haywood (Tracy) before he returns to the USA. They meet in Janning's cell. They give each other awkward compliments--Janning is praised for speaking out, Haywood for his sense of justice. As Haywood starts to go, Janning calls him back.
"I want to hear from a man like you. A man who has heard what happened. I want to hear--not that he forgives--but that he understands. . . . I did not know it would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it."
Haywood's reply: "Herr Janning. It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent."
I told you all that as context for this:
In the words of Abu Aardvark, this is the election made simple:
A hooded Iraqi man standing on a box, wires clamped to his hands, believing that if he moves or falls he will be electrocuted. An Iraqi man, naked, being attacked by dogs under the direction of US military police. A soldier pointing at a pile of naked Iraqi men and laughing. All of these men were almost certainly guilty of no crime except being rounded up in a mass sweep for Loitering with Intent to Be Liberated.
One candidate in this election took control of Abu Ghraib and remade it in his own image. The other one didn't. Vote for this, or against it.
And if you vote for it, don't pretend to be shocked at what it comes to, because it has already come to that.
