Plot

Fictionalized depiction of the 1947 Judges' Trial, the third of 12 trials of Nazi war criminals conducted by the American occupying forces in Nuremberg, Germany, in which former judges of Nazi Germany were tried for their actions.

It has been three years since the most important Nazi leaders have been tried. This trial is about four judges who used their offices to conduct Nazi sterilization and cleansing policies. Retired American judge Dan Haywood has a daunting task ahead of him. The Cold War is heating up and no one wants any more trials as Germany, and Allied governments, want to forget the past. The tribunal must decide whether that's the right thing to do.—Tony Fontana <tony.fontana@spacebbs.com>

In 1948 Nuremberg, Germany, the American military is holding a post-WWII tribunal on the activities of individuals within the Nazi Party leading up to and during the war. Dan Haywood is the lead judge in a three-man judiciary in one of those trials, where four men who were involved in judicial matters are the defendants. The general issues surrounding these four is whether they are guilty of international crimes or if they were just carrying out the laws of their national government, especially as they did not run or operate concentration camps for example, or purportedly know about what was happening to anyone they sentenced to life at those concentration camps. Of the four on trial, the largest question mark surrounds Dr. Ernst Janning, a globally-renowned judge. Haywood, not being well-traveled outside of the US, tries to get to know life in Germany, both then and now, to get a better perspective of the discussions at the trial, and he befriends a Mrs. Bertholt as that conduit into German life. The counsel for the prosecution is led by Col. Tad Lawson, who wants to win at any cost, which includes trotting out the emotional aspects of the genocide at the concentration camps at whatever opportunity, regardless of if it actually applies to the defendants. The counsel for the defense is led by Hans Rolfe, who sees the proceedings as German self-determination on trial. Problems on both sides are getting the German public affected to talk about and thus testify about this emotionally-traumatizing period of their past. But another issue in the background of this trial is the current Communist aggression, most specifically in Eastern Europe, and the Americans' need for German support in quashing this aggression, support which would be difficult to obtain if the Americans are putting Germans behind bars.—Huggo

In 1947, four German judges who served on the bench during the Nazi regime face a military tribunal to answer charges of crimes against humanity. Chief Justice Haywood hears evidence and testimony not only from lead defendant Ernst Janning and his defense attorney Hans Rolfe, but also from the widow of a Nazi general, an idealistic U.S. Army captain, and reluctant witness Irene Wallner.—Jwelch5742

A military tribunal is convened in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1948. The city of Nuremberg is in absolute ruins. At the trial four German judges (Emil Hahn (Werner Klemperer), Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster, Friedrich Hofstetter (Martin Brandt), Werner Lampe (Torben Meyer)) and prosecutors stand accused of crimes against humanity for their involvement in atrocities committed under the Nazi regime. They are charged with having abused the court system to help cleanse Germany of the politically and socially undesirable, allegedly guilty of war crimes.

Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy) is the chief judge of a three-judge panel of Allied jurists along with Judge Kenneth Norris (Kenneth MacKenna) and Judge Curtiss Ives (Ray Teal) who will hear and decide the case against the defendants. Senator Burkette (Edward Binns) is hosting the allied jurists. Captain Harrison Byers is assigned to Haywood as a military liaison.

Haywood knows that Hitler, Goering and Goebbels are already dead due to them committing suicide. So, they are now prosecuting the doctors, businessmen and judges, and opinion is split whether they should be prosecuted at all. Haywood is particularly interested in learning how the defendant Ernst Janning, a respected jurist and legal scholar, could have committed the atrocities he is accused of, including sentencing innocent people to death.

Defense attorney Hans Rolfe (Maximilian Schell) says that the German Judges do not recognize the authority of the tribunal to put them on trial. Prosecutor is Col. Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark). Lawson makes the case that the German judges adopted the ideologies of Nazis as educated adults and willingly participated in furthering the agenda of the Third Reich. Lawson depicts the defendants as having been willing, evil, accomplices in Nazi atrocities, but Judge Haywood wonders if it is really that simple. Hans makes the case that a judge does not make the laws and only implements the law of their country.

Haywood seeks to understand how the German people could have been deaf and blind to the Nazi regime's crimes. Janning himself was a man of impeccable credentials. He wrote legal books that are referred in many Universities. He wrote the Weimar constitution before the coming of the Nazis. He was a brilliant academic mind.

Herr Justizrat Dr Karl Wieck (John Wengraf) was the former Minister of Justice in Weimar Germany. He testifies that after the Nazis came to power, the primary role of a Judge became to punish crimes against the state. The right to appeal was abolished and the Supreme Court was replaced by a People's court controlled by the Dictatorship. Death penalty was used increasingly. Race became a legal parameter in court matters. Asocial people were sterilized.

The judges who opposed the changes were retired or removed, and the ones who remained adapted to the new reality. Janning wore a Swastika on his robe when it was introduced in 1935. Wieck is adamant that it was not possible for the judges not to know the impact of the changes and to know that they were acting against the interests of Germany. Hans attacks Wieck and says that he also took the oath of loyalty in 1934 to Nazi leadership and ideology, despite knowing that this would lead Germany to disaster.

Haywood befriends the widow Frau Bertholt (Marlene Dietrich) of a German general who had been executed by the Allies. Haywood had been assigned the mansion that once belonged to Bertholt and was appropriated by the Allied army. Mrs. Bertholt is focusing on being a catalyst for the cultural rebirth of Nuremberg, keen on remolding the image of a city that had become notorious as the site of the Nazi rallies.

Haywood talks with other Germans including his house help Herr Halbestadt (Ben Wright) and Mrs Halbestadt (Virginia Christine), who have varying perspectives on the war. Mr. and Mrs. Halbestadt, who had lived near the Dachau concentration camp, proves equally fruitless for Judge Haywood, as they cannot help but focus on the loss of their child in the bombing and the fact that they nearly starved from poverty. Whether anyone knew anything mattered little, for Germans were looking forward, not backward, still grappling with, and recovering from, the hardships and losses that the war brought to them and their families.

Other characters the judge meets are US Army Captain Harrison Byers (William Shatner), who is assigned to assist the American judges hearing the case, and Irene Hoffmann (Judy Garland), who is afraid to provide testimony that may bolster the prosecution's case against the judges. Irene and her husband believe that their testimony will make no difference, and the criminals will eventually be released.

German defense attorney Hans Rolfe argues that the defendants were not the only ones to aid or ignore the Nazi regime. He claims the United States has committed acts just as bad or worse than the Nazis, such as US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s support for the first eugenics practices. The German-Vatican Reichskonkordat of 1933, which the Nazi-dominated German government exploited as an implicit early foreign recognition of Nazi leadership. Joseph Stalin's part in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which removed the last major obstacle to Germany's invasion and occupation of western Poland, initiating World War II. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final stage of the war in August 1945.

Lawson presents Rudolph Peterson (Montgomery Clift) as a live witness of Hitler's sterilization campaign. Rudolph testifies that Justice Hofstetter presided at his trial where he was ordered to be sterilized after being asked about Hitler's birth-date. Rudolph is shown to be "slow" and a simpleton who could not form a sentence with 3 simple words. Rudolph says that after the trial, he was forcibly taken to the hospital and sterilized. Hans proves that Rudolph struggled at school and his parents had a history of feeble mindedness. Rudolph completely unravels under pressure and proves that he is indeed not in control of his mental faculties. Hans contends that the court was given a job, and they did that accurately.

Russia invades the Czech Republic and there is more pressure on the US to get the Germans to side with them in the fight against communism. Hofstetter wants Janning to support the judges, but Janning insults Hofstetter and says that he has nothing in common with party hacks like him. Bertholt tells Haywood that men like Janning and her husband hated Hitler. Hitler hated her husband, as he was a real war hero, and the little Corporal could not stand that. Bertholt says that her husband's execution was political murder, as he was tried together with the other military leaders.

Meanwhile, as a strict constructionist jurist, Janning refuses to testify or participate in a legal proceeding that he profoundly feels is no better than a post-WWII Western kangaroo court of its own. Lawson convinces Irene to testify. The case was of a Hebrew merchant named Feldenstein who was accused of having intimate relations with a girl named Irene Hoffman. He was tried for breaking the racial purity laws. Felddenstein had refuted the charge and Lawson produced Feldenstein's lawyer Dr Heinrich Geuter (Karl Swenson) in the case to testify. Emil Hahn was the prosecutor of the Feldenstein case and Janning was the judge.

Irene is also called to the stand and testifies that she never had any sex with Feldenstein. Irene says that at the time Emil threatened Irene with perjury if she tried to protect Feldenstein. Emil made a mockery of Feldenstein and at the end of 2 days, Janning sentenced him to death with a guilty verdict.

Then Lawson himself testifies and says that he was there when the concentration camps were liberated. He says that the defendants made the laws that sent millions to these camps and to their deaths. Lawson plays short movies to show the conditions at the camps. Bertholt insists that ordinary Germans including her husband knew nothing of Nazi atrocities and were wrongly punished for their actions.

Back in court, Hans produces his own witness Mrs Lindnow who testifies that Feldenstein and Irene had intimate relations with each other. Lindnow was the cleaning lady at the apartment where Irene stayed. But Lawson proves that Lindnow was a Nazi. Hans then questions Irene again and says that she kissed Feldenstein and even sat on his lap. Irene says that he was like a father to her and breaks down.

Still, Judge Haywood cannot fully come to grips with why these judges had been willing to enforce the law in such a horrific manner.

As the proceeding becomes more and more intolerable to him, Janning dramatically breaks his silence. He chooses to testify before the Tribunal as a witness for the prosecution. In his statement made under oath, Janning speaks of how economically-stricken Germany had become a nation of fearful, desperate people, and how only such a people could submit to Nazism. Hitler's promises, Janning explained, in which he openly vowed the elimination of those accountable for Germany's hardships were, at first, soothing and reassuring to them. Janning then noted that, even once the complicit realized the unconscionably and inhumanity of Hitler's approach, they stayed at their posts to help things from getting even worse, but, predictably, failed to derail the atrocities of the times.

Janning admits he is guilty of condemning to death a Hebrew man of "blood defilement" charges - namely, that the man had sex with a 16-year-old Gentile girl - when he knew there was no evidence to support such a verdict. He explained that national allegiance had motivated most of them to the point that they sacrificed their own personal senses of morality. In a deeply personal, yet self-damning, statement, he conceded that most of them should have known better, and that those that had gone along had betrayed Germany.

At long last, the issue at the heart of the case becomes clear to Judge Haywood - the choice that the defendants had to make was between allegiance to their country and allegiance to their own senses of right and wrong. Haywood must weigh considerations of geopolitical expediency against his own ideals of justice. The trial is set against the background of the Berlin Blockade, and there is pressure to let the German defendants off lightly to gain German support in the growing Cold War against the Soviet Union.

While the four defendants maintain their pleas of "not guilty" in their closing statements, Janning and fellow defendant, Werner Lampe, show clear remorse for their actions, while a third, Friedrich Hofstetter, claims they had no choice but to execute the laws handed down by Hitler's government. Only the fourth defendant, Emil Hahn, remains unrepentant, telling the Americans that they will live to regret not allying with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. Ultimately, all four defendants are found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

German defense attorney Hans Rolfe meets Haywood after the trial to inform him on his estimation that no defendant will probably stay in prison for more than 5 years. Haywood replies that Rolfe's position may be logical but without reverence for justice.

At Janning's request, Haywood visits him in his prison cell. Janning affirms to Haywood that his verdict was a just one, but asks him to believe that, regarding the mass murder of innocents, he never knew that it would come to that. Judge Haywood replies it came to that the first time Janning condemned a man he knew to be innocent.

Frau Bertholt, the general's widow, refuses to take Haywood's phone call, following which he departs. A title card informs the audience that, of 99 defendants sentenced to prison terms in Nuremberg trials that took place in the American Zone, none was still serving a sentence when the film was released in 1961.