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Front Row: History Speaks Loudly in Rescued 'Nuremberg'
Front Row: History Speaks Loudly in Rescued 'Nuremberg'
By Michael Fox
Film Critic for the Chicago Jewish Star
At the end of World War II, the Hollywood director John Ford assigned a Jewish subordinate in his OSS film unit to find German-shot wartime footage for the Nuremberg trial of the surviving Nazi brass.
Stuart Schulberg realized that speed was essential, for Germans with access to photographic evidence were wasting no time destroying it.
The Nazis’ vast trove of documents was invaluable to Allied prosecutors, but Schulberg’s compilation films — “Nazi Concentration Camps” and the four-and-a-half-hour “The Nazi Plan” — arguably had the greatest impact on the courtroom.
So Sc
hulberg was assigned by the U.S War Department to make the official film of the trial. His concise yet comprehensive work, “Nuremberg: Its Lesson For Today,” was screened widely in Germany upon its completion in 1948.
But the film was quietly shelved in the U.S., and forgotten. For the last six years, Sandra Schulberg, the filmmaker ’s daughter and a veteran independent film producer, has devoted herself to giving “Nuremberg: Its Lesson For Today” a second life.
“I had many doubts along the way because it was so hard to raise the money, and people didn’t respond to the obvious historical mandate that it should be restored and shown,” Schulberg said in a phone interview from her East Coast home.
This riveting and invaluable film, which had a short Chicago theatrical run last year, returns for a free screening August 1, 6:30 p.m., at Spertus Institute, 610 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago.
Sandra Schulberg will be present for a discussion afterward.
The film will be introduced by Ambassador David Scheffer, who served as the first U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues.
The program is free, but reservations are recommended (send an email to FilmRSVP@spertus.edu).
“Nuremberg: Its Lesson For Today” is ostensibly a record of the trial, and Schulberg and filmmaker
Josh Waletsky went to great lengths to enhance the original film by replacing some narration with audio of Justice Robert H. Jackson and the British, French and Russian prosecutors, as well as defendants Hermann Goering, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Albert Speer, and others.
“What surprises me,” Schulberg reports, “is that people who do know this material very well, who are experts on the cinematography of the Holocaust and who didn’t expect to learn anything from the film, had never heard the defendants speaking in the courtroom in response to cross-examination, or in their final summations, justifying or expressing recognition of what they’d done.”
In the course of depicting justice being served, the doc- umentary does an exem- plary job of using the trial to frame the egregious history of the Third Reich from its beginnings through the Final Solution.
“As we get further away, the vast majority doesn’t know the details” of World War II, Schulberg notes.
She was conceived in Berlin during the blockade and born in Paris. Her father continued to make and supervise films in Germany and France through the mid-1950s, before returning to the U.S. and, eventually, signing on as TV newsman David Brinkley’s producer in Washington, D.C.
Sandra Schulberg is still unraveling the mystery of why “Nuremberg: Its Lesson For Today” didn’t screen in the U.S. One theory is that with the Cold War on, the government wanted all eyes on the Russians.
It is tempting to see veiled anti-Semitism as the real reason, given the State Department’s heartless restrictions on the number of European Jews allowed into the U.S. in the 1930s and ’40s.
Furthermore, recently declassified documents reveal U.S. efforts to camouflage or expunge the records of high-level Nazi figures — not scientists, mind you — and help them immigrate to this and other countries.
Schulberg won’t indulge in speculation, however.
“Regardless of whether there was a specific connection made between that policy of providing some refuge for some Nazis, the bigger-picture point was that the American government was trying to get the American people to focus on the Soviet threat and stop thinking about the Nazis,” she says. #
The Spertus screening of "Nuremberg" is organized in conjunction with the American Bar Association’s CLE Showcase Program on Nuremberg at its Annual Meeting in Chicago.
Photo: At the 1948 premiere of "Nuremberg: Its Lesson For Today" in Stuttgart, writer-director Stuart Schulberg (left) stood in front of the movie poster with US military film officer John Scott.