The 2010 Toronto Jewish Film Festival will offer a rare opportunity to view Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, a 1948 documentary on the Nuremberg trials.
Made by writer-director Stuart Schulberg, the documentary was recently restored by Sandra Schulberg and Josh Waletzky and will be screened—almost unchanged—for the first time for a North American audience.
The 78-minute film illustrates how international prosecutors crafted their case against Nazi war criminals in one of the most infamous legal cases in history. It presents, with great detail, the indictments against twenty-one Nazi officials, among them Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and Rudolf Hess who faced charges of conspiring to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. As the film progresses, it illustrates the Nazi rise to power and their grand destructive military strategies. In addition, it presents “irrefutable proof that Jews were Hitler’s primary intended victims.”
CBC News reports:
Schulberg's documentary broke new ground — both for filming inside a courtroom and for exposing the public to a war crimes trial. Made at the behest of the U.S. War Department (later the Defence Department), it was never released to American cinemas. The original footage disappeared. Schulberg went on to make films about the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and then had a career at NBC. It was his daughter, film producer and financier Sandra Schulberg, who rediscovered Nuremberg.
“Nuremberg is an incredible piece of cinematic history,” Sandra Schulberg said, “ and our restoration allows you to hear the American, British, French and Russian prosecutors, as well as the Nazi defendants and their defense attorneys – all speaking in their own voices. You feel you are in the courtroom.”
So why was the film never released? “We have enough information to say this film was suppressed, and then the question is why — and I think there are many interesting reasons,” Sandra Schulberg said. “They range from concern about the atrocity footage to concern on the part of some U.S. military officers who were not comfortable with the fact that German military officers had been put on trial.”
In 1949, New York Daily Mirror columnist Walter Winchell wrote it was “a hall of shame” that the film was never released in the United States. He attributed its censure to government attempts to keep the Soviet Union rather than Nazi Germany on the public’s mind. The documentary did, however, air in Germany as part of a “reorientation” process undertaken by the Allies following the war.
The Toronto Jewish Film Festival began on April 17th and runs until April 25th. Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today was screened on the 18th and will open in New York on September.
Click here to view the Toronto Jewish Film Festival website.
