I usually write only about books or art, and this article is also about arts and culture–movies–but more importantly, it’s about the situation America is in today. So to prove I think about other things than painting or writing novels—–

Judgement in Nuremberg. Never Again?

This  week,  I saw two excellent movies—Nuremberg and Judgement at Nuremberg. The new movie, still in theaters and also streaming, revisits the genesis of the Nuremberg trials, with a very interesting behind-the-scenes look at how the trials came to be. There had never been any sort of international tribunal before, but the Allied Powers decided that the crimes committed by the Nazi regime were beyond anything the world had ever previously seen, and justice couldn’t be satisfied merely by having won the war.

Nuremberg concentrates on the first trials, in 1945, of twenty-two high-ranking officials in the German administration. It primarily focuses on Dr. Douglas Kelley, a US Army psychiatrist brought in to interview these people for the purpose of determining whether or not they were fit, sane enough, to stand trial.  The underlying assumption was that only insane people could have carried out the atrocities of the Holocaust. The interactions between Dr. Kelley, played by Rami Malek, and Hermann Goring, played by Russell Crowe, are intense.

The salient point of the movie, Nuremberg, is Dr. Kelley’s conclusion, which was certainly not viewed with general favor at the time, that none of the accused was insane. On the contrary, Dr. Kelley concluded that the Nazi leaders were perfectly sane and focused, and the ideas that motivated them were not exclusive to Germans in any way. He concluded that the same forces exist in every society, definitely including the United States.

Judgement at Nuremberg  was first released in 1961, but was initially shown to the public as a television play, on Playhouse 90, in 1959. This movie is a fictionalized account of the Judges Trial that took place in 1947, two years after the initial trial. This brought eleven former members of the German judiciary before the tribunal. This movie takes much more dramatic license with its material than does the recent one, but the conclusion ends up very much the same. The judges, learned and thoughtful men, participated on their own volition in the kangaroo courts that were responsible for convicting and killing or incarcerating innocent victims who opposed or displeased the Nazi regime in any way. The movie brings up the often-heard excuse, “we didn’t know,” when the accused were faced with the filmed evidence of the concentration camps’ brutality and inhumanity. It makes clear that if they didn’t know, it was only because they closed their eyes to the evidence all around them.

The most sympathetic of the fictionalized Nazi judges, Ernst Janning, was played by Burt Lancaster, who comes off as a thoughtful, caring human being, gripped and torn by deep conflict over his actions. Yes—until the devastating last line of the movie, when the American Chief Judge, played by Spencer Tracy, tells him, as he tries to excuse his actions, that he became part of the problem the first time he convicted a man he knew to be innocent, and condemned him to death.

The point of both of these movies is to show that the Nazis and the Germans who supported them, either by actively joining in or by idly standing by without protest, were not unique. Bigotry and brutality exist as human qualities, whether in Germany or in America, and need only a forceful, charismatic leader to bring those qualities to the fore, plus enough people who are unwilling to stand up and say ‘no’ to allow these things to happen.

We used to say ‘never again,’ never dreaming that the same forces could ever operate here in the United States. But we’re now seeing, every day, whether in the gestapo tactics of ICE or in the piracy and murders in the Caribbean or the illegal and unprovoked invasion of Venezuela that these same forces are rampant here and now.

Is it too late to stand up? Is it too late to say no? Please G-d, no, it’s not yet too late. Let us have the strength and courage to fight against the MAGA-ts, and give the spineless worms wriggling around on the floor of the Congress a big heave-ho at the mid-term elections, so we can reclaim our country and try to repair the vast damage that has been done already. Time is running out. We have only one more chance.