Judgement at Nuremberg

Revisiting the 1961 film

Judgement at Nuremberg

A new movie about the post-World War Two Nazi atrocity trials, aptly titled “Nuremberg”, was released in October 2025, with a cast that includes Russel Crowe and Remi Malek. While I have not had a chance to check it out, it reminded me of a previous movie on the same series of trials, 1961’s “Judgement at Nuremberg.” Finding it available to stream, I decided to watch it over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Judgement at Nuremberg is based on the actual trial of three Nazi-era German judges who helped “legally” implement the Third Reich’s reign of terror against non-Aryans and anyone who did not conform to their political ideas. The trials took place in 1948- two years after the guns of WW II went silent in Europe, in Nuremberg, the scene of much of the intimidating pageantry of the Nazi Reich at the city’s massive outdoor stadium.

During the actual trial, the Soviet Union decided to blockade the western sections of the traditional German capital of Berlin, divided into four sectors: American, British, French and Soviet Russian. Berlin was embedded in the Soviet controlled sector of eastern Germany, and West Berlin depended on supply convoys through designated road and rail corridors through Soviet East Germany.

With the Soviet land blockade, the only means of supply was by air, with the Soviets gambling that Western Allied airpower would not be sufficient to sustain West Berlin, and feints by Soviet fighter aircraft would deter the perceived weak, war-weary Western allies and cause them to give up Berlin. As it turned out, due to two airfields being located in the western sectors of Belin, what became known as the Berlin Airlift was more than adequate to keep the city supplied with food, fuel, and other sundries, and the aviation innovations and operating procedures greatly enhanced future military and civil aviation safety. What the Soviet actions also demonstrated was that the Western allies needed to re-arm West Germany to counter the Soviets’ militarization of East Germany and the creation of East German armed forces, a situation that would remain until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The early impact and implications of the Berlin Blockade on the West’s administration of West Germany were accurately reflected in the movie.

Since it had been many years since I last saw the movie, I was mildly surprised as I started to watch it again. First, the cast lineup is very impressive. Spencer Tracy and producer/director Stanley Kramer had just completed another early 1960s classic courtroom drama, Inherit the Wind, a year before tackling Judgment at Nuremberg. Tracy, who plays American jurist Dan Haywood, was a principled man in real life, refusing to divorce his wife out of his adherence to his Catholic faith, despite his burning affair with legendary actress Katherine Hepburn. Tracy gravitated toward principled roles as well, including the chief American judge in Judgment at Nuremberg, attorney Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind, and the one-armed war veteran John Macreedy seeking justice for a Japanese-American comrade murdered in a Western town in Bad Day at Black Rock.

Burt Lancaster, a huge star at the time, surprisingly took the role of an older German chief justice who remains silent and stoic for most of the movie, until it’s time to shine. Richard Widmark, who acted in mainly in film noir, Westerns and military movies, plays the chief prosecutor. Widmark’s character, an Army colonel who was present during the liberation of a concentration camp late in the war, has an intense personal desire to see justice done to the Germans responsible, down to the lowest level practicable.

A young Maximillian Schell, one of the few prominent English-speaking German actors of the 1960s, plays a German civilian attorney faced with the daunting challenge of defending the Nazi judges. Whether intentional or not, his animated courtroom performances, shouting in German-accented English and gesturing wildly, were evocative, at least to English-speaking audiences, of the infamous Austrian corporal that started the whole horrific, tragic war in the first place. In scenes with Schell and Widmark standing closely at a podium during heated scenes while monitoring translations through earphones, Widmark realistically depicts a WWII soldier who can barely refrain from hauling off and belting the confounding young German attorney. Schell’s performance earned him an Oscar, the lone actor to win, among two other Oscars awarded to the movie out of eleven nominations, and the film also received dozens of other film nominations and awards worldwide.

The presence and performance of three other actors, two of which cross lines between real life and the screen in this movie, make the movie if you know the backstory. German-born actress Marlene Dietrich, a Hollywood legend well before WW II, worked tirelessly during the war to sell American war bonds and entertained troops in the Pacific and European theatres of war. Dietrich was also known for her humanitarian efforts during World War II, housing German and French exiles, providing financial support and advocating for their American citizenship.

In 1944, she was with the USO in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and followed the troops into Germany. Considering the fluid front-line situations during that stage of the war, she bravely risked being captured by German forces, which would have been a huge propaganda coup for the Nazis and, no doubt, would have ended very badly for her. For her work on improving morale on the front lines during the war, she received several honors from the United States, France, Belgium, and Israel.

In the film, Dietrich conversely plays the aristocratic widow of a German general who was previously tried and executed for war crimes, prosecuted by Widmark. Judge Haywood (Tracy) is billeted in Dietrich’s now forfeit ancestral home, and Dietrich has several encounters with the judge. In a tense scene between Tracy, Deitrich and Widmark in a Nuremberg nightclub, Widmark delivers one of the best “in vino, veritas” performances of a guy who’s had one too many and meets up with the very two people he has current-day grievances with.

Austrian-Jewish actor Werner Klemperer, who escaped Europe prior to World War Two and then served in the U.S. Army during the war, plays one of the other Nazi judges, seemly naive but also contemptuous at being judged by the “victors.” The future “Coronel Klick” of Hogan’s Heroes fame delivers a line that very well could have been prophetic: that while today they judge him, tomorrow the communists will judge the American jurists.

Actress and singer Judy Garland of The Wizard of Oz fame plays a small but disturbing role as a material witness to the fate of a non-Aryan sentenced to death by one of the Nazi judges. In Garland’s role, she is shattered by the experience, and her appearance is disturbing, perhaps foreshadowing her premature death just a few years later at age 47.

Finally, it was a pleasant surprise recalling and seeing a 30-year-old William Shatner, of Star Trek fame, playing a supporting role as Judge Haywood’s U.S. Army legal assistant. During most of the courtroom scenes, Shatner sits below the American judges, alongside the uniformed court reporters and clerk. Although he portrayed a mostly stoic American Army officer, given his Jewish heritage, his pained but measured physical responses to the most disturbing scenes in the movie probably did not take too much acting.

There were two “real world” events that immediately preceded the film’s December 1961 release that helped put Judgement at Nuremberg in perspective for potential audiences. In a remarkable twist of fate, during the spring and summer of that year, the world saw the televised trial of former senior SS officer and prime Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann in Israel. Eichmann was convicted, and the ink was drying on his death warrant during the month the film was released. Also, the film was released just four months after the start of the construction of the Berlin Wall, and most of the audience had probably recently seen startling news coverage of East Germans shot dead as they tried to escape to West Berlin, their bodies hanging in barbed wire. The movie is in black and white, as were television broadcasts in those days, which serves to underline the somber storyline.

Judgement at Nuremberg is a powerful film, and although nuanced, I think it is on par with the best courtroom dramas on film, including To Kill a Mockingbird, Inherit the Wind, and A Few Good Men. The film is available on Tubi and the Kanopy library streaming app and may be available on other streaming services. For more information, see the IMDb page for the movie at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055031/ .