Nürnberg und seine Lehre: Ein Film gegen das Vergessen

WWII in Europe is coming to an end. American soldiers Budd Schulberg and Stuart Schulberg are brothers recruited to gather film evidence of war crimes committed by the Nazis. They are working under legendary film director John Ford with the goal of presenting the footage in time for the Nuremberg trial.

It is an one hour documentary about this important matter. I've seen another doc ostensibly about John Ford's role in this effort. There are some devastating footage here. I would like to see more about the preservation and quite frankly the immense amount of film stock. This has some good information and an interesting story with the Soviets. This is really solid.

Good documentary about the production of the films screened in the Nuremberg war crime trials as evidence against Nazi officials, and about the two feature documentaries about the judgment itself, the one by Stuart Schulberg, "Nürnberg: its lesson for today", and the rival Soviet one by Roman Karmen and Elizaveta Svilova, "People's Trial", called in TMDB/Letterboxd as Nuremberg Trials. It describes step by step the evolution of the research of Nazi hidden films, and political and bureaucratic difficulties imposed to the production of the films by Stuart's brother Budd Schulberg and produced by John Ford for screening in Nuremberg, and particularly the several constraints imposed to Stuart's making-off movie with the court's footage, from filming moment until the lack of screening in the United States after the release in Stuttgart. Besides that, the documentary also brings a selection of very important, interesting and often hideous footage. One interviewee, Sandra Schulberg, daughter of Stuart Schulberg, has a quote that I consider a major lesson usually ignored when it comes to fascism, racism and bigotry: "One of the big battles that took place was whether the film should be made just for German audience or whether it should be made for international audience. The people in Berlin, with military government, really felt that it primarily should be used as a de-Nazification, a re-education tool. They wanted to show the difference between Nazi justice and Ally justice. Stuart Schulberg really felt [...] that they were making a film that was not just for Germany. They felt that the Nuremberg trial was a milestone in history of civilization, and that the whole world needed to learn lessons of Nuremberg, not just the German public." Censorship against the film in the United States just two years after the trials was the first evidence that the major lesson has not been learned at all.

Film historians and the family of Stuart and Budd Schulberg discuss the making, use, and impact of 1948's Nürnberg und seine Lehre.

It always seems a bit bizarre to look at a film about making a particular film. A work of art needs to stand on its own merits, and offer a message for succeeding audiences if it is to survive. Yet, sometimes it happens that the details of a production are interesting. And sometimes it helps to understand a film in the context of its own time and place.

And so the question arises: does this movie help to understand, to explain its subject film? Alas it does not... for me. But I am an American Jew who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, with parents and friends of parents World War Two veterans, knowing survivors of the concentration camps. Their world was, to a great extent, my world. The story told in Nuremberg does not need explaining to me, neither its causes, its reality, nor its impact.

And so I cannot judge this movie. This is a movie made for some one else. It will have to be his or her task to judge it.