Judgment at Nuremberg

Judgment at Nuremberg is a 1961 American epic legal drama film directed and produced by Stanley Kramer, and written by Abby Mann. It features Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Werner Klemperer, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, William Shatner, and Montgomery Clift. Set in Nuremberg, in the then American occupation zone in Germany, the film depicts a fictionalized version – with fictional characters – of the Judges' Trial of 1947, one of the twelve Nuremberg Military Tribunals conducted under the auspices of the U.S. military in the aftermath of World War II. The film centers on a military tribunal led by Chief Trial Judge Dan Haywood (Tracy), before which four judges and prosecutors (as compared to sixteen defendants in the actual Judges' Trial) stand accused of crimes against humanity due to their senior roles in the judicial system of the Nazi German government. The trial centers on questions regarding Germans' individual and collective responsibility for the Holocaust, with the backdrop of a tense international situation including the onset of the Cold War, the Berlin Blockade, and the geopolitical ramification of the later Nuremberg Trials upon German support for the Western Bloc, placing great pressure on Haywood's efforts to reach a just verdict. In addition, the judge faces emotional challenges in his personal relationships with German people outside the courtroom who consistently claim ignorance of Nazi atrocities, but who the judge suspects may have known more than they will admit. An earlier version of the story was broadcast as an episode of the same name on the television series Playhouse 90 in 1959. Popular interest in this effort caused an expanded focus on its dramatic elements. Maximillian Schell and Werner Klemperer portrayed the same characters in both productions. In 2013, Judgment at Nuremberg was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The production's presentation of historical events has attracted interest over decades before and since then due to its place in the narrative portrayals of the Holocaust in film.