Frieze Magazine | Lesson for Today

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Lesson for Today

The restoration of a documentary about the Nuremberg

Trials – 63 years after it was filmed.

It is part court TV, part spy story. The first trial ever

committed to celluloid has now garnered beneficent reviews.

It only took 63 years.

Filmed in Nuremberg during the Trial of Major War

Criminals before the International Military Tribunal from

November 1945 to October 1946, produced in Berlin, briefly

screened and then promptly forgotten for over a half century,Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (1948/2009) was accorded

the status of a Berlinale Special at this year’s International

Film Festival in the German capital. The documentary splices

courtroom footage with that made by concentration-camp

liberators and film confiscated from the Nazis – damning

evidence that was introduced on the eighth and 17th days of

trial. In 1945, three million metres of German film had been

unearthed throughout the summer and autumn by a Jewish

lieutenant, Budd Schulberg; his father had been head of

Paramount Pictures, his brother, Stuart, a director was also

involved in the search for Nazi footage. Budd would later

become a scriptwriter: he wrote On the Waterfront (1954). In

1941, his first book, What Makes Sammy Run?, was

published; it’s a highly critical treatment of Hollywood that,

in the years following the war, became a best-seller in

America.

During the war, Budd served in the American Navy and the

Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime progenitor of

the CIA. With Stuart, who directed Nuremberg: Its Lesson

for Today, he was a member of director John Ford’s Field

Photographic Branch. He died last August, aged 95.

Directing the search for canisters of Nazi footage of atrocities

(shown during the trial in the 1945 documentary, The Nazi

Plan, which Budd wrote and from which Stuart’s film draws),

Budd chanced on two prisoners of war who, it seemed, had

served as film editors within the SS, Kurt von Molo and

Water Rode. (Budd revealed this fact in 2001, to interviewer

Kurt Vonnegut.) The two prisoners informed Schulberg of

the locations of these films (formerly called desserts as

Joseph Goebbels had been in habit of screening them forguests after dinner). At least twice, by the time Budd arrived,

About this article

Published on 14/04/10

By Pádraig Belton

A photograph of the filming of the

Nuremberg trials by US Army

Signal Corps cameramen in the

Palace of Justice, Nuremberg (1945)

Back to the main site





he discovered the celluloid burning – the Nazis, despite their

defeat, still had their moles.

After the war, it also fell to Budd to travel in an open-top

Jeep, unarmed and accompanied only by his driver, to

Kitzbühel, Austria, to apprehend Leni Riefenstahl at her

chalet. He had with him a warrant naming her as a material

witness, compelling her assistance in his editing room to

identify Nazi personages in the films he had unearthed –

some by her. (Riefenstahl did not know that in 1938

Schulberg had played a small role in organizing the boycott of

her visit to Hollywood.)

Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today was given its premiere in

Stuttgart in November 1948; it then toured the country as

part of the programme of de-Nazification, but was soon

suppressed by the very American Department of War which

had superintended its creation – Washington, it seems,

feared its distribution stateside would imperil public supportfor German reconstruction through the Marshall Plan.

Recently, however, a 35mm pictorial and sound restoration

was produced by a collaboration between Josh Waletzky and

Stuart Schulberg’s daughter, Sandra Schulberg – an

independent film producer.

Peter Stein of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival said

that Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today reminded him how

powerful the images were that the first postwar audiences

were required to ingest about the German exterminations.

Fascinatingly, the film is the earliest record of how

filmmakers began to create a narrative of the Holocaust, with

imagery that has ‘now become familiar to us as archival film’.

Given the plethora of feature films about the Nazis, seeing

the real ones in the dock comes as some surprise. (Gazing on

them gathered in court, the economist John Kenneth

Galbraith remarked, ‘Who’d have thought that we were

fighting this war against a bunch of jerks?’) Among the rest of

the cast, the American prosecutor Robert Jackson’s

performance has not aged well – a country lawyer and crony

of Franklin D. Roosevelt he fumbled his cross-examination of

wily Hermann Göring. Against his crusading oratory and

grandstanding to keep the bulk of prosecution in American

hands, British Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross’s

method was to concentrate on expounding international

treaty law.

On the eve of the trial, a prosecutor, Sidney J. Kaplan, wrote

to his wife that he awaited ‘the second most important trial in

the history of the world (No. 1: the trial of Jesus Christ).’

Twenty-five hours were filmed and the rest was recorded on

audio; however, 35mm film of 1945 vintage is shot on ten-minute reels, which often break off mid-sentence. Cameras





and sound recordings were never synchronized, so even

where there exists footage of the courtroom participants

(taken from one of the three camera positions), the sound

does not match it, necessitating remastering soundtracks.

‘Almost as soon as we saw the footage my executive producer

and I said, “We know why no one has ever done this before –

because it’s too hard with this footage!”’ explained Anne

Dorfman, who produced an earlier 1996 compilation for

Court TV, drawing on Nuremberg footage from the American

National Archive vaults. Though it took five years, this

restoration replaces an earlier voice-over narration during

the trial sequences with sound recordings of the proceedings

– greatly heightening those sequences’ immediacy,

authenticity and impact.

World War II was, through to its last judicial mopping up,

the filmed war, in the way Vietnam would be the televized

one. Noël Coward downed his cigarette holder to direct andstar in In Which We Serve (1942), alongside the allegorical

Casablanca (1942) – the film that led Umberto Eco to

comment: ‘Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés

move us.’ Budd Schulberg noted two copies of Charlie

Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) when he took charge of

Hitler’s personal collection and one diary entry by Joseph

Goebbels from 1937 read: ‘I have given 12 Mickey Mouse

movies as a present for the Führer at Christmas! He seems

pleased about it.’

The ghost of Riefenstahl is very much with us today, as a new

Olympic stadium is undergoing construction in London. (It

was she, not the Greeks, who devised the Olympic torch-

relay, precisely for its cinematic uses in 1936.) She also

haunts Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009),

whose theme, if it has one, is the entangling of film with Nazi

Germany. Riefenstahl regarded Budd as her lifelong chief

antagonist (and for a while; she died at 101). He referred to

her in the Saturday Evening Post, shortly after the war, as the

‘Nazi pin-up girl’; it was only half an insult. In an interview in

2004, he said when they met, ‘she was still very beautiful,

and if you could forget her connections, very charming.’ He

called Triumph of the Will (1935) ‘worth two divisions of the

Wehrmacht’.

Riefenstahl’s film was crafted in Nuremberg 12 years before

Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, in the Nazi Party Congress

– before the Reichstag passed the racial laws which took their

name from the city. Then, Nuremberg represented the link

between Germany’s Gothic past and its Nazi future;

Riefenstahl’s 30 film cameras and 120 technicians evoked the

mysticism and religious fervour of a red-letter day surrounding a Gothic cathedral. As with Sergei Eisenstein’s





Battleship Potemkin (1925) or D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a

Nation (1915), Riefenstahl’s film raises the question: why is it

that the worse the regime, the better the propaganda?

Triumph of the Will, for all its sinister content, is compelling;

sitting through one minute of ‘Why We Fight’, the series of

seven propaganda films directed by Frank Capra and

commissioned by the US government during World War II,

on the other hand, is one minute too many.

The answer, of course, involves fascism’s greater dependence

on disguise. Beneath Riefenstahl’s perfect human columns

lay not a Reich administration of mythic German efficiency;

rather, squabbling incompetents surmounting inefficient

bureaucracies, driven for those 12 years to outdo one another

in supporting their Führer’s aggressive wars and vicious

domestic anti-Semitism. The eloquence of Nuremberg: Its

Lesson for Today rises into a rare space of artful democratic

propaganda. Finally, 63 years after its release, it is possible to

watch it.

Pádraig Belton

Pádraig Belton is a journalist based in London, UK.

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