Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
is a serious film that enables the viewers to wrestle with the demands of
justice for atrocities enabled by German jurists in NAZI Germany and the
post-war emerging Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., for which the
American military needed the support of the German people against the Soviet
Union. The film accepts the need of such support as being vital in 1947, when the
actual trial took place (the film has it as 1948). To the extent that acceptance
of this assumption is deemed spurious, the viewers would likely view the
tension as being between the need for justice, a virtue, and expediency, a
vice. Accordingly, the pressure from an American general on the prosecutor to
recommend light sentences so not to turn the German people against the Americans
and thus from helping them in the Cold War can be viewed as being astute
political calculation in the political realist sense of international relations,
or else undue influence or even corruption of a judicial proceeding.
The full essay is at "Judgment at Nuremberg."
