00;00;00;21 - 00;00;38;26

Jonathan Hafetz

Hi, I'm Jonathan Hafetz and welcome to Law and Film, a podcast that explores the rich connections between law and film. Law is critical to many films. Films. In turn, tell us a lot about the law. In each episode, we'll examine a film that's noteworthy from a legal perspective. What issues does the film explore? What does it get right about the law and what does it get wrong?

00;00;38;28 - 00;01;06;02

Jonathan Hafetz

How is law important to understanding the film? And what does the film teach us about the law, and about the larger social and cultural context in which the law is embedded? Our film today is the 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg. The film was written and directed by Stanley Kramer, and the film contains an all star cast including Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster.

00;01;06;04 - 00;01;37;13

Jonathan Hafetz

Maximilian Schell won an Oscar for it. Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, and her first role since A Star Is Born seven years before Montgomery Clift and a young William Shatner. The film was originally a play in 1959 that was broadcast on the television program Playhouse 90, with a script by Bobby Mann. The film is based on the real story of one of the trials at the U.S. Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

00;01;37;15 - 00;02;04;23

Jonathan Hafetz

United States first all star, which is also named the judge's case or the justice case because those who were prosecuted were judges, prosecutors, or ministerial officers of the Nazi judicial system. It was the third of 12 trials before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. The case involved multiple defendants from the German judicial and prosecutorial system. There were three judges, all from the United States.

00;02;04;26 - 00;02;43;17

Jonathan Hafetz

And the trial took place from March to December of 1947. The trial found most defendants guilty, although several were acquitted. A number of them received life sentences, although by the time the film was released in 1961, all of them had been released from prison. The film is an important exploration of issues emanating from the Holocaust and the Nazi regime, and the role of international criminal law in adjudicating guilt and innocence, and shifting from a time of war to a time of peace.

00;02;43;19 - 00;03;08;03

Jonathan Hafetz

Our guest today to explore this important film is Kevin John Heller, one of the leading experts in the field in the world. Kevin John Heller is a professor of international law and security at the University of Copenhagen Center for Military Studies. He currently serves as special advisor to the International Criminal Court, prosecutor for International Criminal Law discourse, and is an academic member of Dottie Street Chambers in London.

00;03;08;07 - 00;03;34;18

Jonathan Hafetz

Kevin holds a PhD in law from Leiden University and a JD with distinction from Stanford Law School. His books include The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law, published by Oxford University Press in 2011, and The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials, also published by Oxford, edited with Jerry Simpson. He's co-edited several other books and is a founder and contributor to the influential international law blog Opinion Series.

00;03;34;24 - 00;04;02;10

Jonathan Hafetz

Kevin's been involved in the international criminal courts negotiations over the crime of aggression, worked as Human Rights Watch's external legal adviser on the trial of Saddam Hussein, and served for three years as one of Radovan Karadzic, formerly appointed legal associates at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Kevin is a leading expert, not just in international criminal law, but on the Nuremberg trials and in particular on the US military tribunals at Nuremberg.

00;04;02;16 - 00;04;05;25

Jonathan Hafetz

I'm thrilled to have him on on film today. Welcome, Kevin.

00;04;05;27 - 00;04;24;27

Kevin Jon Heller

Thank you so much for having me. It's nice to have a chance to come in to discuss a film that is very near and dear to my heart, and if there was video, I would shift my computer and show you that I actually have a original 1961 poster of Judgment at Nuremberg right on my wall. So particularly happy with today's film.

00;04;25;01 - 00;05;05;02

Jonathan Hafetz

Before we start on the film, I just want to take a moment to pay tribute to the late Ben France, who recently passed away at age 102. Ben was the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, and was a prosecutor at the US military tribunals that followed the international Tribunal of the Major Nazi War Criminals, and was the lead prosecutor for the rights group and case, which was the prosecution of the mobile death squads that killed millions of people Jews, Roma, communists, dissidents, others and actually about a third of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust were killed by this by the, security unit.

00;05;05;02 - 00;05;24;17

Jonathan Hafetz

So, he was also was a major contributor to the development of the International Criminal Court and became a kind of a fixture in international law circles over the years. His famous motto, law, not War. I had the opportunity to meet him several times and felt like you're meeting a piece of history, so I'm sure you had a chance to interact with him as well over the years.

00;05;24;17 - 00;05;27;06

Jonathan Hafetz

So I just want to take a moment to pay tribute to him.

00;05;27;09 - 00;05;31;14

Kevin Jon Heller

Thank you. That's very nice of you to do that. He was a pretty amazing guy.

00;05;31;16 - 00;05;35;01

Jonathan Hafetz

So, Kevin, when did you first see Judgment at Nuremberg?

00;05;35;03 - 00;05;54;13

Kevin Jon Heller

I have no idea. To be perfectly honest, I certainly saw it long before I ever became interested in Nuremberg. In the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. I would have seen it sometime as a young adult. I think I saw it because I've always been. Although he's kind of heavy handed and not technically always a huge fan of Stanley Kramer.

00;05;54;18 - 00;06;14;02

Kevin Jon Heller

You know, I loved Inherit the Wind, not a perfect movie. I loved On the Beach, you know, the nuclear war movie. You know, I was really interested in those, like, 60s and 70s movies that had such powerful, you know, and very overt political messages. And so judgment Nuremberg was very much part of that series of movies that he made.

00;06;14;09 - 00;06;19;23

Kevin Jon Heller

So, again, I couldn't pick the exact year, but definitely during that era of my interest in film.

00;06;19;25 - 00;06;32;13

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah. And that in that sense, he's almost a perfect person for this type of film to try to capture the different issues that are going around. And those are other great message movies. How did it affect you when you saw it?

00;06;32;15 - 00;07;04;10

Kevin Jon Heller

I did always have kind of an interest in the Holocaust, partly, you know, as a as, you know, as a Jew who's whose ancestors came from Eastern Europe and Russia. I don't recall having any kind of particular emotional reaction to it other than thinking, wow, for 1961, in the middle of the Cold War, boy, it's brave to make a movie like this that, you know, deals so forthrightly with a major trial which shows, you know, pressure, the Berlin blockade that actually shows.

00;07;04;10 - 00;07;26;23

Kevin Jon Heller

And I'm sure you'll come back to this real film that was shown during the the actual main Nuremberg trial. It just struck me as an incredibly gutsy movie and dealing in a really serious way with an issue that wasn't forbidden, really, but certainly had never been talked about quite so openly. So I think that was really the bravery, I think was my basic reaction.

00;07;26;26 - 00;07;48;02

Jonathan Hafetz

That's a great point. And it does make mention or reference to some of the trends of the era in terms of McCarthyism. We'll play it later. But in Spencer Tracy, when he gives the verdict and not the case, there's a not oblique reference to trends that are going on in the United States in terms of what people will do in the excesses that they'll make, in terms of defensive country.

00;07;48;04 - 00;08;22;22

Kevin Jon Heller

You know, just to add to that, I think what was also so fascinating about it, and also struck me at the time when I first watched it, was the willingness to to not sugarcoat America's own record with number of these things and actually weaving in the fact that America had done some incredibly awful things not dissimilar to the Nazis, although not mass murder in the same way, but in terms of persecution, to show that in a movie in 1961, and to show the American kind of war criminal officials actually putting pressure on the judges and prosecutors, I mean, that was particularly gutsy as well.

00;08;22;24 - 00;08;48;22

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, there's a moment or there are multiple moments, but one where the defense attorney, Hans role is played by Maximilian Schell. References the U.S. sterilization program. That's one of the things you may be referring to, right. And, he refers to a famous Supreme Court case, Buckfast Bell, an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dissenting, where he says that infamous line three generations of idiots is is enough.

00;08;48;22 - 00;09;08;03

Jonathan Hafetz

Right. And so the connection, which is real between the US racial purity views and sterilization and the Nazi regime. So, yeah, it is it is really gutsy to do that in a mainstream movie like this was in 1961. What was the historical context for the trial that's depicted in the film?

00;09;08;05 - 00;09;35;18

Kevin Jon Heller

Well, as you said, this film dramatizes one of the 12 American military tribunal trials held after the main Nuremberg trial. I call them the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. They were held basically between 1946 and 1949, and this one was based on the justice case. And the justice case was the third one in the series of 12. It was actually always designed to be the third one in the series of 12.

00;09;35;18 - 00;10;03;25

Kevin Jon Heller

And it was as you, as you said in the introduction, really an opportunity to put on trial the really systematic perversion of the legal system by the Nazis and the willing participation in that system by so many judges, prosecutors, ministerial officials and so on. So in that sense, it really is just a fictional look at a and it are very similar, although not completely similar.

00;10;03;25 - 00;10;25;01

Kevin Jon Heller

Trial. What's kind of interesting about the fact that Abbie Mann and Stanley Kramer focused on the justice trial is although with hindsight, we actually look at this trial as being one of the most important, like, oh, you know, look, they're actually prosecuting judges and prosecutors, and we've had some issues with that in the United States. At the time, there was very little attention paid to the justice case.

00;10;25;02 - 00;10;49;27

Kevin Jon Heller

I don't remember the exact dates of the trial, but it was certainly not one of the ones that was a big, billboard type trial. I think there was much more interested in the first trial of the doctors. There was a lot of interest in the trial, obviously, of corporations like Farben. You know, who had created the cyanide gas, the Zyklon B for the concentration camps, the Einsatzgruppen trial, which, you know, they called the biggest murder trial in history.

00;10;49;29 - 00;11;07;17

Kevin Jon Heller

The justice trial really didn't receive all that much attention at the time. And I wish I don't know, I wish I knew precisely why. Abby Mann had been originally attracted to this trial. And then why Stanley Kramer picked it up and made a movie out of it. But that's a little bit about the historical background.

00;11;07;20 - 00;11;37;14

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, it's an interesting choice. I mean, certainly it lent a lot of dramatic possibility or different dramatic possibilities than some of the other trials. The group and trial would have been a more black and white story that had more and more complexity. A can you say just a little bit more about the importance of these military tribunals? I mean, this is a subject of your acclaimed book because what most people think of Nuremberg, they think of the IMT or the International Military Tribunal in the first, in the main Nazi war crimes trial involving the Allied powers sitting in judgment at Nuremberg.

00;11;37;14 - 00;11;41;17

Jonathan Hafetz

But these subsequent proceedings were also important. Right?

00;11;41;19 - 00;12;07;28

Kevin Jon Heller

I mean, I'm a little biased, but I think not only are they important, I think in many ways they're more important than the Nuremberg trial. I mean, symbolically, perhaps not as important, but I have often said that if the main Romberg trial gave birth to international criminal law, these trials really nursed international criminal law into its adolescence, because really, the difference was that these trials were much more criminal law in some ways than the main trial.

00;12;08;00 - 00;12;33;10

Kevin Jon Heller

These were the trials that really tried to give some meat to the jurisprudence of international criminal law, like defining the elements, the mens rea and the actus race of the various crimes, thinking through in a systematic way what the modes of participation were in crimes, what the defenses were to crimes. So much of the jurisprudence that we have today owes its origins to these trials, and really not much to the to the IMT trial.

00;12;33;10 - 00;12;50;01

Kevin Jon Heller

The I am free trial was much more about the history, probably because of the massive illegality of, you know, most of the defendants actions. But if you go back to the main IMT judgment, there's not a lot of law in there. Partly that's because there was no law before that, but partly it was just the nature of the trial.

00;12;50;01 - 00;13;06;25

Kevin Jon Heller

So these 12 trials really gave the judges an opportunity and really required them to think through a whole range of criminal law issues that we really had to have thought through in order to have a modern system of international criminal justice. So I think that's really where their importance comes from.

00;13;06;27 - 00;13;20;18

Jonathan Hafetz

You've got the larger general architecture, and then you've got the real building that starts going on here in this trial, I say. Well, what was the issue? What were the issues in the justice case? What were the charges and so talks about this a little bit.

00;13;20;21 - 00;13;39;26

Kevin Jon Heller

A little bit. So I mean basically there were four charges. The first one was kind of a general conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. Charge. And those you found in all basically all 12 of the cases. Count two and count three were then the actual war crimes and crimes against humanity that were the objects of the conspiracy.

00;13;39;29 - 00;14;13;21

Kevin Jon Heller

And so the war crimes charges really focused on the defendant's role in the Night and Fog program, the stealing away of civilians from occupied territory, bringing them back to Germany, subjecting them to essentially show trials and special courts, and then usually executing them. And then the third count was the crimes against humanity one. And that really focused on how the Nazi judicial system persecuted Jews and others within Germany and basically created a reign of terror to avoid any kind of political opposition to the Nazis.

00;14;13;23 - 00;14;49;00

Kevin Jon Heller

The fourth count, which you don't really see in the movie, was about membership in the in the SS and the SD and the other organizations that had been deemed criminal at the main Nuremberg trial. So those were the four others, a whole bunch of other really interesting aspects of it. I think one thing that doesn't appear at all in the movie, which I actually find kind of surprising, is in the justice judgment you get probably the most sustained discussion of genocide, which at that time was still a crime against humanity, but by far the most searching, understanding or analysis of genocide as a crime against humanity.

00;14;49;06 - 00;15;09;14

Kevin Jon Heller

And in fact, two of the defendants in the real trial, Roadhog and Louts, are actually convicted of genocide, even though it's not even mentioned in the indictment. So I think you can look back at these trials and say, these were the first two convictions for the modern concept of genocide in the history of international criminal law. Yet you don't actually really even see any of that in the movie.

00;15;09;16 - 00;15;27;16

Jonathan Hafetz

That's fascinating point, really important to bring out, because at the time, you know, most people think of the Nazi prosecutions in Nuremberg as genocide prosecutions, but genocide was not had not been recognized as a crime. It was in a somewhat nation state. And the acts were prosecuted at the time. Under this charge of crimes against humanity.

00;15;27;22 - 00;15;57;17

Kevin Jon Heller

Absolutely. And one of the great kind of jurisprudential legacies of the actual trial was, in dicta. But the affirmation that through that there was no nexus requirement that you did not have to have a connection between crimes against humanity and the war, that some acts were so malevolent. And the malevolent is actually the word that's used in the justice judgment, that some acts are simply so malevolent that the international community has an interest in them, even in peacetime.

00;15;57;19 - 00;16;17;27

Kevin Jon Heller

Again, pure dicta, but really, our modern understanding of genocide in many ways comes from this trial. So I think it's just kind of interesting that it's absent from the movie itself, when, as lawyers, we would probably immediately hone in on that as being the most important contribution that the trial made to modern international criminal law.

00;16;17;29 - 00;16;49;14

Jonathan Hafetz

It's a really important legal issue that doesn't come through. One of the interesting questions surrounds individual guilt, and one of those memorable moments in the film is when the chief prosecutor name in the film is Tad Lawson. The real prosecuting the case was Telford Taylor, played by Richard Widmark. Presents actual footage of the concentration camp, and this prompts an impassioned speech by Hans Rolfe, played by Maximilian Schell, the defense counsel, which then in turn prompts testimony from his client.

00;16;49;14 - 00;17;06;00

Jonathan Hafetz

The main defendant depicted in the movie is yarning, played by Burt Lancaster, which undercuts the defense of his own defense by acknowledging responsibility, at least in certain respect. So I'm going to play a little bit of the clip. First of the defense counsel.

00;17;06;03 - 00;17;46;23

Movie Dialogue

Is at the tribunal yesterday, the tribunal witness some films that were shocking films, devastating films. As a German, I feel ashamed that such things could have taken place in my country. It can never be a justification for them. Not in generations, not in centuries, but I do think it was wrong, indecent and terribly unfair of the prosecution to show such films in this case, in this court at this time, against these defendants.

00;17;46;25 - 00;18;17;11

Movie Dialogue

And I cannot protest strongly against such. What is the prosecution trying to prove is you're trying to prove that the German people as a whole are responsible for these events, or that they would allow them because he's he's not stating facts that he knows. It's not the secrecy of the operations, the geographical location of the camps, the breakdown of communications in the last days of the war and the extermination rolls into the millions.

00;18;17;11 - 00;18;47;24

Movie Dialogue

Sure, only too clearly that he is not telling the truth. The truth is that his fatalities were brought about by the extremists, the criminals. Very few gentlemen knew what was going on. Very few. None of us knew what was happening. The plays are shown on these films, none of us. But the most ironic part of it is that the prosecution showed these films against these defendants, men who stayed in power for one reason only.

00;18;47;29 - 00;19;11;00

Movie Dialogue

To prevent worse things from happening. Who was the braver man? The man who escapes or resigns in times of terror? Or the man who stays on his post at the risk of his own personal safety? The defense. We present witnesses and letters and documents from religious and political refugees all over the world, telling how else Jennings saved them from execution.

00;19;11;02 - 00;19;32;20

Movie Dialogue

The defenders were shown the many times, and standing was able to effect mitigation of sentences, but without his influence, the results would have been much worse. The defense would show that Jennings personal physician was a non Aryan, a Jewish man who kept in attendance much to his own power.

00;19;32;22 - 00;19;39;17

Jonathan Hafetz

And now I'm going to play a clip of the testimony of Ernst Young. Burt Lancaster responding.

00;19;39;19 - 00;20;04;22

Movie Dialogue

It is not his to tell the truth, but if there is to be any salvation for Germany Queen who no one would get admitted. What a lot the pain and humiliation my culture would have you believe. We were not aware of the concentration camps, not our way. Where were we? Where were we when Hitler began shrieking his hate?

00;20;04;22 - 00;20;26;08

Movie Dialogue

And I ran while we went up. This was, well, being dragged out in the middle of the night. Oh, God. Well, when we were in Belgium. Germany has a railroad terminal where cattle cars were filled with children being carried off to their extermination. Well, why were they crying out in the night to us? Oh, yes. Dumb and blind.

00;20;26;11 - 00;20;50;12

Movie Dialogue

My counselor says we were not aware of extermination of the millions. It give you the excuse only aware of the extermination of the hundreds. Does that make us any less getting? Maybe we didn't know the details, but if we didn't know, it was because we didn't want to know. Oh, yeah.

00;20;50;15 - 00;21;03;06

Jonathan Hafetz

Oh, yeah. So, Kevin, can you help unpack the connection between individual and collective guilt in this context? And what? Well, what the defense was trying to do and the response that prompted.

00;21;03;09 - 00;21;28;16

Kevin Jon Heller

No simple, easy question. I think the first thing to note is that this is fictional. They did not play the concentration camp video during the actual justice trial. They did play very famously this video during the main Nuremberg trial. And and you might recall that during set, it ruined the whole trial for him. But so obviously they borrowed that from the main trial and imported it kind of, you know, artistic license here.

00;21;28;18 - 00;21;54;27

Kevin Jon Heller

I suppose the prosecution is simply trying to impress upon the court the true horrors of the Nazis, of which these men did play a role. Again, we look back in such a a media saturated age where we've all seen, you know, endless photos and videos and documents about the Nazis. And of course, you know, we all know we all know about the horrors of the Nazis.

00;21;55;02 - 00;22;21;19

Kevin Jon Heller

But this was much newer back then. I mean, particularly at the time of these trials, you know, you didn't have, you know, the internet, you didn't have global telecommunications. You know, you basically learned about the atrocities from hearing the witnesses. Maybe your newspaper published a couple of very sanitized photos. People didn't know in a visceral way, as opposed to a completely abstract way, just how horrible the Nazis were.

00;22;21;25 - 00;22;49;26

Kevin Jon Heller

So I think that part of the reason that they would have fictionally inserted this into the movie is really to illustrate that this was new, that this was an incredibly important way to convey, in a visceral way, just what had really happened. Now that said, hey, you know, I'm actually quite sympathetic to the defense position here, and that because I've spent most of my career as a defense attorney, there is a pretty strong argument that this kind of film would have been very prejudicial.

00;22;49;29 - 00;23;16;05

Kevin Jon Heller

You know, again, we don't have a jury in the same way that we would have in an American courtroom. We just have professional judges. But the horrors of which these defendants were accused were really not connected to the concentration camps. You know, these were about like, show trials that led to summary executions, which is a terrible thing, but is not the same as hundreds of naked bodies being stacked up after they've been gassed in a chamber.

00;23;16;07 - 00;23;47;19

Kevin Jon Heller

It's not clear what relevance this kind of video has to these particular defendants. You know, and I think it's interesting. And this movie comes out in 1961, which is, as we both know, right in the middle of the Eichmann trial in Israel. And one of the ongoing complaints and I think very fair complaints about the Eichmann trial is that it was just an endless parade of witnesses talking about horrible things that happened to them that had no connection to Eichmann at all.

00;23;47;22 - 00;24;05;19

Kevin Jon Heller

None of these witnesses were talking about things that Eichmann did to them. It was just about the horrors of the Nazis and a lot of scholars have said, again, those who were very sympathetic to the prosecution in general, that, yeah, this was probably over the top. It was probably prejudicial. So I think you see a little bit of that here as well.

00;24;05;19 - 00;24;12;22

Kevin Jon Heller

And I am quite sympathetic to the defense attorney when he's complaining about at least some aspects of the decision to show this footage.

00;24;12;29 - 00;24;41;25

Jonathan Hafetz

Showing the footage operates multiple levels and operates within the drama itself, and then it operates in a way of showing the public what happened, giving a platform to the public. In 1961, or a way for the public to view in a wider sense, as you're saying, precisely what happened. And then again, when the film first aired on television in 1965 for Sunday Night at the movies, when they used to show films on TV, before cable, before streaming, and the film is shown before millions of people.

00;24;41;25 - 00;25;21;25

Jonathan Hafetz

And it's interrupted remarkably by the protests in Selma, Alabama, and that Bloody Sunday, where the police beat protesters. They interrupt the broadcast of Judgment Nuremberg, 1965, on ABC. You know, one of the three national stations in time to show this footage, which also resonates with the film in terms of what you're saying, in terms of America's responsibility. But between the film as it's shown in 1961 and then the broadcast in 1965 does help broadcast in a wider sense, Nazi atrocities which may have been less known about or less saturated in terms of their dissemination across popular culture.

00;25;22;01 - 00;25;40;23

Kevin Jon Heller

Yeah, I don't know for a fact, but even in 1961, I would have I would think that an awful lot of Americans who tuned in or 65 tuned in to watch this on TV would never have seen videos like that. They probably would have known more than people in 1947. And they might have seen more, you know, ghastly photos.

00;25;40;23 - 00;25;46;08

Kevin Jon Heller

But I would think that this would have been pretty shocking to an American TV going public.

00;25;46;11 - 00;26;07;15

Jonathan Hafetz

In terms of individual responsibility. What's the central argument for holding these defendants responsible? Because they're using, as you say, in a way that may be prejudicial. The prosecution is using the film to show where this all ultimately led, right to the gas chamber, to concentration camps, to mass extermination. But what was the role of the defendants? What was the legal theory for?

00;26;07;15 - 00;26;14;29

Jonathan Hafetz

Why they were responsible? You talked a little bit about the charges. Well, what's the defense's main argument as to why these defendants should not be held responsible?

00;26;15;01 - 00;26;38;01

Kevin Jon Heller

Well, I think the defense's main argument is actually, you know, portrayed fairly well in the movie that their argument is these were validly enacted laws, not to be questioned by judges and prosecutors that their job was to apply them, and that maybe in their heart of hearts they oppose them, or maybe even in their heart of hearts, they agreed with them.

00;26;38;06 - 00;26;57;13

Kevin Jon Heller

But that didn't matter. That they were just neutral judicial and prosecutorial officials doing their job. I don't think that defense has a lot of supports in the actual record, and I think if you go back and look at the original trial, I mean, again, it's complicated because the trial brought together a whole bunch of of different types of roles.

00;26;57;20 - 00;27;39;14

Kevin Jon Heller

But the ministerial officers were often the ones who were writing these incredibly perverse laws. You know, the judges were not simply just neutrally applying the laws, but they were actively interpreting them in different ways. They sometimes they made them even worse. Prosecutors pursued cases that they knew full well, didn't actually have any evidence behind them. What I think Telford Taylor and his team did really well was show precisely that these were not neutral officials just following the law, that they were actively participating in what the indictment calls a nation wide and government organized system of cruelty and injustice.

00;27;39;16 - 00;27;58;27

Kevin Jon Heller

You know, that they were not passive participants. They were active participants. And and I can give you a really good example of this. So in the film, one of the main subplots is, of course, the, the Judy Garland character where a Jewish man is accused of having sexual relations with an underage woman, which would have violated the law at the time.

00;27;58;28 - 00;28;49;04

Kevin Jon Heller

So the real case is called, I think it was the Katzenbach case, basically the same kind of factual situation. But what's really interesting about it is that the judge in that case, the real judge in that case at the time, a violation of, this particular law only had, like a seven year sentence attached to it. Yet he imposed the death penalty, and he did so under like a really, really strained argument, which was, well, there was another law that might have applied that said, if you violated one of the Nuremberg Laws during a like an official blackout period, you could be given the death penalty.

00;28;49;08 - 00;29;14;01

Kevin Jon Heller

And there was one witness who testified that at one point in time, the woman who the Judy Garland character was based on actually might have gone to the defendant's house at night. That that was an aggravating factor and sentenced him to death. So, again, this wasn't just the real judge applying laws as they were written. It was he was playing an active role in bringing about the death penalty that that he wanted to achieve from the very, very beginning.

00;29;14;01 - 00;29;27;21

Kevin Jon Heller

So we can multiply that over and over and over again and again. These were not just passive participants in the system, but actively played a role in perverting, you know, what was before that, a very sophisticated and very enlightened judicial system.

00;29;27;23 - 00;29;30;17

Jonathan Hafetz

I think that judge was a wild Roth act.

00;29;30;18 - 00;29;54;26

Kevin Jon Heller

Right? Yeah, I think it was right, just to add that he was known for his viciousness and apparently in real life, this case even upset some of his Nazi buddies, like they thought that he had gone too far and he was actually transferred out of the judiciary not long thereafter and given more of a ministerial job, because he was just a little too enthusiastic about perverting the laws in order to to execute people.

00;29;54;29 - 00;30;23;10

Jonathan Hafetz

The rest of the country wasn't with him yet, and he was little a little early. So yeah, he was, I think, describes an evil, sadistic man who had no reservations. There's another defendant in the case, not the Burt Lancaster. Yeah. It was just, the patent that's maybe modeled on a wild Roth act. You said the relationship. And this is a key subplot where Judy Garland is the younger woman who has the relationship with the older Jewish man, or alleged relationship with the older Jewish man who then executed.

00;30;23;10 - 00;30;42;05

Jonathan Hafetz

And they found her home that someone saw her sitting on his lap. But it's not the age. The film kind of glosses over the aged. Judy Garland is not meant to be 19, which I think was the age of the woman at the time, but it's the fact that she was Aryan and he was Jewish, right? It was a it was the it was the racial mixture aspect.

00;30;42;06 - 00;30;50;15

Kevin Jon Heller

Yeah. So it was charged as a violation of the racial defilement law. So yeah, I think they emphasize the age to make it a little creepier, I suppose.

00;30;50;15 - 00;30;51;16

Jonathan Hafetz

Right, exactly.

00;30;51;21 - 00;31;04;04

Kevin Jon Heller

And there's of course no evidence that they actually did ever have a relationship. And, you know, until her death in like 1984, she insisted over and over and over again that he was a father figure to her and nothing else.

00;31;04;07 - 00;31;25;13

Jonathan Hafetz

Ernst Channing is meant to be one of the more sympathetic of the judges. They called them the hesitant judges the extent they went along with the Nazi program. It's because they had to. There was no higher law, even within Germany, that they could have appealed to. They were applying the positive law. They were just diehard positivists and they were under also tremendous pressure.

00;31;25;13 - 00;31;51;27

Jonathan Hafetz

Right. If they didn't go along, they might be sacked or removed from office. And there's the moment where they try to paint Ernest Yarning as more sympathetic. His physician was Jewish. He wasn't really anti-Semitic. How does the film kind of grapple with these questions about holding individuals like Ernst Channing, played by Burt Lancaster, responsible when they were in this difficult position and when they weren't really directly responsible for the mass atrocities that are shown in the film.

00;31;51;27 - 00;31;52;25

Jonathan Hafetz

Within the film.

00;31;52;28 - 00;32;12;01

Kevin Jon Heller

Yeah, I mean, I think you kind of set it right. They really paint the yawning figure as a as a tragic figure, that this was someone who had done so many good things and had been such a legendary jurist and had contributed so much to German law. And look, now all of a sudden he's finds himself in this situation where, you know, he's sentencing people he knows or innocent to death.

00;32;12;05 - 00;32;34;03

Kevin Jon Heller

They paint him is really tragic. And I think this is almost one of the most unrealistic aspects of the movie. From a historical perspective. None of the judges in the actual trial fit this description as this, you know, witty, urbane, deeply educated judge. They were much more like the rat house who everybody was afraid of. So that's more of an invention.

00;32;34;05 - 00;33;05;23

Kevin Jon Heller

But what I think is really legally interesting is, in fact, when we talk about aggravating factors at sentencing in these trials, you didn't need many because the crimes were usually so bad that you didn't really have to worry about a personal factor that aggravated the sentence. But one of the things that the tribunal is not the Justice tribunal, but other tribunals, particularly ministries, pointed out they actually viewed being incredibly educated and intelligent and culturally sophisticated and accomplished as an aggravating factor.

00;33;05;25 - 00;33;29;04

Kevin Jon Heller

So one of the defendants, famously, was an opera singer, and they're like, he's an opera singer. He's traveled all over the world singing. He's worked with all of these various people of different races and religions and, you know, so on and so forth. And yet he participated in mass murder for them. That wasn't tragic. That actually made it worse because he was supposed to know better.

00;33;29;07 - 00;33;48;11

Kevin Jon Heller

You know, and I think from my own perspective, I actually find the way that the tribunals approach this to be more persuasive than how the film portrays it. I don't see it as tragic. I see it as you, more than anyone else, should have known better, and that the fact that you made no attempt to resist counts much more against you.

00;33;48;11 - 00;34;03;20

Kevin Jon Heller

Then you know your ordinary foot soldier, or even your ordinary kind of like sadistic psychopath we expect nothing else from. So I think that's an interesting juxtaposition between how the film does it and how the actual trials might have approached it.

00;34;03;23 - 00;34;19;03

Jonathan Hafetz

Is that how Spencer Tracy views it at the end, because he's ultimately he's the chief judge or three judges, but he's the one who is really kind of sitting in judgment in the film that they should have known better, that more should have been expected of of the judges in his mind. Yeah.

00;34;19;03 - 00;34;38;27

Kevin Jon Heller

Well, you're right, I think there's definitely an aspect of that in the Spencer Tracy one. I agree with that. But I still like his final line when he says it hadn't got that far yet. And so what he was doing was not as bad. And the Spencer Tracy reply as well. The first time that you sentenced a person to death who you knew was innocent, it had got that far.

00;34;38;27 - 00;34;40;17

Kevin Jon Heller

That's a very powerful moment.

00;34;40;20 - 00;34;46;06

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah. I think it is the most powerful moment in the film. Let me play it quickly now.

00;34;46;09 - 00;35;02;23

Movie Dialogue

Most people post millions of people. I never knew it would come to that you must believe it. You must believe it came to that the first time you were sentenced to death. You don't have to be innocent.

00;35;02;25 - 00;35;27;17

Jonathan Hafetz

As you said, it's the idea that once you knowingly sentence an innocent man to die, you're on the road to at least the possibility of the horrors that come. One of the other things the film captures, I think quite well, are the political pressures around the prosecution and the judges, and not find the defendants criminally responsible. So what were the pressures and how real were they?

00;35;27;20 - 00;35;47;08

Kevin Jon Heller

So, I mean, I liked I really as I said earlier, I really like the fact that we see this in the movie, because this is actually incredibly realistic and it's realistic in a whole bunch of different ways. I mean, during the trials, you had the blockade of Berlin, you had, you know, increasing tension between the Soviets and the Americans.

00;35;47;15 - 00;36;14;02

Kevin Jon Heller

And there are records of many of the judges really being terrified that at any moment during the trial, the Soviets were going to break down the doors of the courtroom and imprison them, or do something worse to them. At least one judge quite openly admitted that he didn't want to be too punitive against the defendants because the U.S. was going to need a rearmed Germany, against the rising Soviet threat.

00;36;14;02 - 00;36;33;18

Kevin Jon Heller

I mean, he was very forthright, and he shocked his fellow judges by literally admitting this during trial. So at that level, clearly they were very aware of the larger geopolitical stakes and even, again, fearing for their own personal safety at the hands of the Soviets, which that was probably overblown. But I suppose at the time they didn't know that.

00;36;33;22 - 00;36;57;04

Kevin Jon Heller

But beyond that, it is extremely accurate to say that there was a lot of pressure as time went on, particularly as the trials dragged out from kind of, you know, the, American war crimes officials, fairly unsubtle, making it clear that they didn't want a lot of really high ranking Nazis going to jail for a really, really long period of time.

00;36;57;06 - 00;37;28;16

Kevin Jon Heller

You know, just in case the, you know, they really needed the Germans again. Now, those pressures were not so much about the judges, but they were very much about the industrialists. They really the, you know, the Allied war crimes officials really were not comfortable with Telford Taylor charging Farben and Krupp and the Flic combined because of the role that these industrialists were going to have to play during the Cold War I, and also very much the generals, because the genitals were seen probably as the most sympathetic by the German public.

00;37;28;22 - 00;38;06;14

Kevin Jon Heller

They were really opposed to the prosecution of the generals that they saw as war heroes. And the Allied war crimes officials were very, very loathe to, you know, to put them away for a long time and turn them against the US. So all that was really very much a part of these trials. And you can't separate them from the fact that we're talking about the late 40s and really the beginning of the Cold War, in a way that the IMT didn't have, because, of course, the Russians were still the Soviets were still participating in it, you know, and it's worth noting, just historically, that most people think of the Nuremberg trial, and there is

00;38;06;14 - 00;38;37;02

Kevin Jon Heller

only one major Nuremberg trial for our allies. But it was not supposed to be a one off. It was supposed to be a series of four power trials, starting with the one that we actually have been going on at least three and perhaps even 5 or 6. That was the original idea, but it became quite evident even during the main Nuremberg trial, that the relationship between the Soviets and particularly the British and the Americans, was so bad that there was just no appetite to have, you know, another for power trial.

00;38;37;02 - 00;38;59;22

Kevin Jon Heller

And that was why we have the zonal trials. The agreement was, okay, we're not going to hang out together and do these trials. So we need more trials. Everybody agreed on that. So the solution was, okay, well, you can prosecute any war criminal found in your zone of occupation. Soviets, Americans, British and the French. The Americans were the ones who did the most famous trials are the ones we're talking about.

00;38;59;24 - 00;39;21;17

Kevin Jon Heller

The British never had a zonal trial because they proceeded under the royal warrant. Instead, the French tried a couple of industrialists and the Soviets tried a whole bunch of people. But until very recently, we didn't really even know anything about that. But really, the existence of the justice trial is owed to the fact that there were these rising Cold War pressures because they weren't supposed to be zonal trials.

00;39;21;17 - 00;39;24;03

Kevin Jon Heller

They were supposed to be for power trials.

00;39;24;05 - 00;39;34;27

Jonathan Hafetz

That's really fascinating, the history to overlay on the film. I mean, there's so much going on there. And of course, the defendants had all been released by 1961 except one.

00;39;35;00 - 00;39;38;26

Kevin Jon Heller

And that was absolutely a result of the Cold War.

00;39;38;28 - 00;40;07;22

Jonathan Hafetz

It's interesting to the film. It's both points. You mentioned one in terms of the military generals, where you have Marlene Dietrich, who was married to a general who was executed in the earlier tribunals, and she's meant to be a sort of sympathetic character and is talking about the need to move on and to not hold individuals responsible. That's the other element, I think, of these trials when you have the Cold War pressure you talked about, but then you also have the idea for Germany's own psyche.

00;40;07;23 - 00;40;12;18

Jonathan Hafetz

Right? It's better to forget and it's that to kind of look ahead.

00;40;12;21 - 00;40;40;22

Kevin Jon Heller

Yeah. I mean, you you can connect this right to the premiere of the movie, you know, in Berlin in late 1961. The contemporary reports said that basically all the non Germans loved the movie, and the Germans sat strangely silent during it and didn't applaud at the end, you know, because this was one of the first really, you know, major entertainment events that would have dramatized not just the Nazis but complicity with the Nazis.

00;40;41;00 - 00;41;12;28

Kevin Jon Heller

So, yeah, that's the other side of the coin, right? On the one hand, you have the rising Cold War. On the other hand, you have really a very deliberate and I would say very cynical, campaigns by ordinary Germans, particularly churches and German war vets, to try to delegitimize the trials and to try to insist upon, again, particularly the generals, you know, being these kind of noble warriors who were just caught up in this evil government.

00;41;13;01 - 00;41;45;06

Kevin Jon Heller

There was a whole bunch of polling done after the war about ordinary Germans attitudes toward, I mean, all manners of issues, but a lot of them were about the Nuremberg trials and the subsequent trials and their perceptions of Jews and of National Socialism. And it's pretty shocking how long it took for ordinary Germans to really kind of reconcile themselves to not just what the Nazis had done, but the the moral, if not legal complicity of ordinary Germans in this.

00;41;45;06 - 00;42;11;17

Kevin Jon Heller

I mean, it really wasn't until probably the 1970s that German attitudes really started to shift as the trials went on. Most ordinary Germans liked National Socialism more, had an even worse view of Jews than they had before the trials. Like they learned a lot, they actually did. The polling showed that they learned a lot more about concentration camps and the Nazi government, but it didn't really fundamentally affect their attitudes.

00;42;11;24 - 00;42;45;23

Kevin Jon Heller

They didn't become more hostile to National Socialism. They didn't become more attracted to democracy. So all of the the kind of pedagogical goals of the trial, and Telford Taylor was very clear that he wanted these trials to have a pedagogical impact on ordinary Germans just didn't pan out. And that is reflected in this kind of, again, as I said, this kind of cynical, deliberate campaign that is waged really, you know, from 1949 on until the last prisoner is released to delegitimize the trials.

00;42;45;26 - 00;43;04;08

Jonathan Hafetz

It's a really amazing story, the way that memory works and with collective guilt. And I think in that sense, the statement by the defense attorney, Hans Roth is in a way accurate, right, that he's saying it's not the men who are on trial, it's Germany who's on trial. And I think in some way that's actually a goal. That's a pedagogical goal of the film.

00;43;04;08 - 00;43;18;19

Jonathan Hafetz

Perhaps to say, you know, what is Germany's responsibility? And I think ultimately it comes down kind of where Ernst yawning is, is, you know, we we knew we knew enough. Right. What did ordinary Germans know. And that seems to be an important aspect of the film. Yeah.

00;43;18;19 - 00;43;38;25

Kevin Jon Heller

You know, one of the I think most powerful critiques of international criminal law generally is the fact that it tends to individualize guilt. Right? We don't put, you know, whole groups of people on trial anymore, at least not like they did. You know, at Nuremberg we insisted guilt is individual and rightly so. But, you know, we're not talking about bank robberies.

00;43;38;27 - 00;44;05;15

Kevin Jon Heller

We're talking about mass murder requiring the participation of hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people and the passive acquiescence of the population. And so I'm very sympathetic to this idea that international criminal law obscures the kind of structural violence that gives rise to atrocity, because you can't put an entire country on trial. And so you wouldn't see a lot of the things that you see in the movie in an actual trial.

00;44;05;18 - 00;44;20;02

Kevin Jon Heller

But at least from a moral standpoint, maybe you should precisely to avoid that kind of politicization and individualized ization that is inherent to these liberal legal trials. As Judith Sklar famously described them. I think there's a lot to that.

00;44;20;06 - 00;44;45;03

Jonathan Hafetz

We talked about the film's impact at the time it was made or around that time. How do you think it's aged and how does it speak to us today? I mean, right, it's an important international criminal law moment, obviously, for horrible reasons. With Russia's aggression against Ukraine, atrocities in Ukraine, a lot of activity around international criminal law trying to create some kind of new Nuremberg moment.

00;44;45;08 - 00;44;49;08

Jonathan Hafetz

So it's it's still relevant. I mean, how does it speak to events that are going on now?

00;44;49;10 - 00;45;05;21

Kevin Jon Heller

I think the film is very relevant, you know, as an actual film. I don't think it's aged particularly well. I mean, you know, it has in the sense that it was, you know, that they actually shot, you know, in the ruins of Nuremberg and use some of the original sites, like, I mean, there's some visuals that are really spectacular.

00;45;05;24 - 00;45;36;02

Kevin Jon Heller

You know, the acting is kind of dated. You watch it now and, you know, acting is more realistic these days. It is a little ham handed or ham fisted, right? Like it's a lot of it is on the nose and a little preachy in a way that I don't know, would be very successful in a movie today. But by the same token, I think the ideas are still really powerful, and I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is it isn't just a simple black and white good versus evil.

00;45;36;02 - 00;46;08;19

Kevin Jon Heller

The prosecutors are all wearing white hats, and the defendants are all, you know, evil men wearing black hats. They try to portray both the prosecution and the defense as much more three dimensional than, you know, in a lot of kind of comparable movies. And here we could actually contrast it with Inherit the Wind, which I actually find has aged even worse because for whatever reason, you know, the Williams Jenning Bryant and Clarence Darrow are really just one dimensional stick figures.

00;46;08;22 - 00;46;35;01

Kevin Jon Heller

You don't see that in this movie. I think the fact that they were so forthright about acknowledging, you know, in a sense, the selectivity of the prosecution is still really relevant. You know, as we talked about, it doesn't sugarcoat the fact that the US was sterilizing people that were seen as mentally defective, that there wasn't systematic racism against, you know, African-Americans and a whole bunch of other people, not mass murder.

00;46;35;01 - 00;47;06;12

Kevin Jon Heller

You know, there was never a Holocaust in the United States, but the but the movie makes quite clear that particularly these men were on trial for things that they were not the only ones to have done. And I think that's still a very relevant and valuable lesson, because, you know, there are too many movies like Zero Dark 30, which are just cartoons that in service of incredibly reactionary political agenda that, you know, hopefully so many of the movies that we see today that are deeper than that, that really do have some gray, are in some way indebted to Stanley Kramer.

00;47;06;12 - 00;47;19;10

Kevin Jon Heller

And movies like judgment at Nuremberg. I hope so, anyway. And if not, they should go back and watch a movie like this to see actually how you can add some nuance to two events that really do seem to be on the surface, black and white.

00;47;19;13 - 00;47;41;00

Jonathan Hafetz

It does really get into the gray areas, and it does really pack a lot in. I mean, you mentioned the selectivity issues. I mean, the other selectivity issue, which they they point to a defense counsel is very good at hitting them, is the use of the atomic bomb and Hiroshima and Nagasaki firebombing of I think they refer to the firebombing Dresden and certainly the bombing in Japan, what might be called the war crimes of the Allied powers.

00;47;41;00 - 00;47;56;29

Jonathan Hafetz

So the film really does get into these issues. And those are surfaced today when we're talking about Russia's aggression in Ukraine, or what about the US invasion of Iraq in 2003? So it does really echo with, I think, a lot of the issues around war crimes trials that we confront now.

00;47;57;01 - 00;48;20;27

Kevin Jon Heller

Yeah, and I'm glad it does. And, you know, in some ways it does it better than the actual judgments of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals themselves, because I can't remember which trial it is off the top of my head. But a number of defense counsel did exactly this during the trials, which is bring up Dresden, bring up Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I wish I could remember which judgment it was.

00;48;20;27 - 00;48;45;10

Kevin Jon Heller

But there is an unbelievably, shockingly awful defense of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in these judgments in a way that really just makes you cringe. And it's so clearly mental gymnastics to avoid the obvious, which was the US had committed war crimes as well. Again, not on the par with the Nazis. But, you know, we're certainly far from coming to these trials with clean hands.

00;48;45;10 - 00;49;05;17

Kevin Jon Heller

And I'm very glad that Kramer had the foresight and the and the fortitude to include that in his film. I think the film would have aged extraordinarily badly if it didn't have those nuances, because, you know, we just we don't do the kind of morality play in the same way. The world is too obviously gray. Maybe Ukraine is changing that for us.

00;49;05;17 - 00;49;08;14

Kevin Jon Heller

But but that's what I think gives it its lasting value.

00;49;08;17 - 00;49;30;11

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah it does. And some of the performance at least I think is strong. I mean, Spencer Tracy I think does get the complexity like he's he's an old school actor. But when I watch it again, I was really impressed by his skill, working through some of the issues that he had to in terms of reaching the judgment. You mentioned you saw this a long time ago as anything changed about how you see the film now from when you first saw it?

00;49;30;13 - 00;49;49;16

Kevin Jon Heller

No, not particularly. I mean, again, I think I probably I do think that some of the filmmaking has aged poorly, and I probably will recognize that now, but I still think the messages are basically the same. Again, it's a little on the nose, and I think I noticed that more now. But you have to historicist these things, right?

00;49;49;16 - 00;50;03;12

Kevin Jon Heller

Yeah. You can't compare the level of exposition in this movie to a movie in 2023. You have to compare it to 1961. And by and by those standards, this was an incredibly sophisticated, nuanced movie.

00;50;03;15 - 00;50;22;03

Jonathan Hafetz

So after 50 plus years of history and for you, after multiple acclaimed books, a career in the field of international criminal law, it still holds up fairly well in terms of the substance. I guess even if the movie and the some aspects of the movie is dated.

00;50;22;05 - 00;50;33;15

Kevin Jon Heller

Yeah. No, I really do think in that sense it remains a very nuanced portrayal of a war crimes trial. I wish we had more similarly nuanced dramatizations.

00;50;33;17 - 00;50;53;23

Jonathan Hafetz

It's the last question could go back on the set if you were sitting on set in 1961 or whenever the film was actually shot around that time, and Stanley Kramer read of your work and said, you know, Kevin, come down. What should I do? What should I not include in this film to make it more accurate but not lose any dramatic force?

00;50;53;23 - 00;51;06;15

Jonathan Hafetz

Right. Because a lot of ideas will say this. You shouldn't have done this. You shouldn't have the expected conversations between the judge and other the prosecutor. But I'm making a movie with might say, so what would you what would you tell him?

00;51;06;18 - 00;51;26;13

Kevin Jon Heller

You know, I think in general did a pretty good job given the need to to simplify, right? I mean, obviously there were 15 defendants at the actual justice trial, but we don't want to see in the movie. We don't want to see 15 defendants, you know, much less listen to them. All I have to say, and I certainly don't blame Stanley Kramer for not doing this, because he probably wasn't even aware.

00;51;26;17 - 00;51;46;04

Kevin Jon Heller

It would have been nice if they had a female prosecutor, because there was a female prosecutor in the justice trial. There were female prosecutors, and I think all but three, maybe four of the 12 trials, and not just sitting there, you know, taking notes and looking pretty. They were deeply involved in preparing the cases. They cross-examined, they did direct examinations.

00;51;46;11 - 00;52;09;20

Kevin Jon Heller

A couple of them, even not in the justice trial, even got involved in, you know, in opening and closing arguments. It would have been nice to see a little bit more of of that because Telford Taylor was really ahead of his time. You know, in terms of this, he very, very actively sought out women prosecutors and analysts and translators, etc. he did the same thing with Jews.

00;52;09;22 - 00;52;30;17

Kevin Jon Heller

There was a lot of pushback, both in Germany and by the anti-Semitic right in the US, about the fact that Jews were allowed to serve at the Nuremberg trials, because, of course, they were all too biased to possibly, be involved in these trials. And he wanted to have nothing, with that criticism. But we all we see is a bunch of kind of white male prosecutors.

00;52;30;17 - 00;52;32;00

Kevin Jon Heller

And that's just kind of unfortunate.

00;52;32;03 - 00;52;50;02

Jonathan Hafetz

I think that's a that's a great point. And that's true of other justice movies at the time, like 12 Angry Men, for example, a reflection of its time in the sense that it's all male in that way. But it's a really good point because women were involved in these ways in the trial as professionals. So that would have been something that would have been good to include.

00;52;50;08 - 00;53;01;01

Jonathan Hafetz

And then just on the Telford Taylor Point and where we start at the top, then France was a Hungarian born Jew and he was a prosecutor. That's a really good point about Telford Taylor as well.

00;53;01;01 - 00;53;20;26

Kevin Jon Heller

So I think one of the things I would praise again, though, is like such an enlightened portrayal of the defense attorney. Yeah, it's a little bombastic, but I think he deserves, you know, Maximilian Schell, his Academy Award, even today we demonize defense attorneys who were defending these people in 1961. He didn't demonize the defense attorney defending the Nazis.

00;53;20;26 - 00;53;45;08

Kevin Jon Heller

And as well he shouldn't, because there were so many incredibly skilled, dedicated defense attorneys at the Nuremberg trials. And the actual, you know, one of the ones doctors, regardless, in the justice case, he represented 5 or 6 defendants in various trials. And he was just incredibly skilled, dedicated attorney. And so I'm really again, I'm really happy that Kramer was so ahead of his time in making that choice.

00;53;45;08 - 00;53;47;21

Kevin Jon Heller

And it would have been very easy to make the easier.

00;53;47;23 - 00;54;07;13

Jonathan Hafetz

Arch and its important legacy of Newburgh itself. I mean, this is something I've written about going back to Justice Jackson at the International Military Tribunal, the importance of having a defense right and having a fair trial and the role of defense counsel and not having show trials. I mean, they're show trials in the sense of there's a dramatic effect, but the trials themselves need to be fair.

00;54;07;13 - 00;54;14;09

Jonathan Hafetz

And I think, you know, the defendants, by and large, got a fair trial in the movie, even if there were some prejudicial material shown.

00;54;14;11 - 00;54;40;21

Kevin Jon Heller

Yeah. And I think many of them would have admitted it. You know, there was I can't remember which defense attorney, but one of the defense attorneys who'd been involved in a few of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal trials, he was asked about that by a journalist, I think, in the early 50s. And he said, you know, we didn't always necessarily agree with the verdicts, but we can't really disagree with the the efforts that the judges went to to give the defendants a fair trial.

00;54;40;23 - 00;55;08;24

Kevin Jon Heller

And that, again, is pretty amazing praise. And, you know, this as well as anyone like contrasts fairly well with, say, the military commissions that we have these days. You know, in Guantanamo, we were able to give Nazis fundamentally fair trials, and yet we're not able to give the chauffeur for Osama bin laden a fair trial. I mean, that is really one of I think the most distressing, you know, erosions in American justice that we can point to.

00;55;08;24 - 00;55;14;14

Kevin Jon Heller

And again, if you can prosecute Nazis fairly, you sure as hell can prosecute members of Al-Qaeda, surely.

00;55;14;17 - 00;55;31;15

Jonathan Hafetz

I couldn't agree more. And, well, we certainly could have a whole number of podcasts or other podcasts about those issues as well. But I think that's exactly right. And the film captures that and does a good job with that basic principle about the right of a fair trial. And if you're going to have trials for atrocity crimes, they should be fundamentally fair.

00;55;31;17 - 00;55;45;20

Jonathan Hafetz

Kevin, it's been a pleasure having you on today and talking with you about the film, about Nuremberg as a leading expert in the world on this subject. So I want to thank you again for coming on law on film. It's been a pleasure having you. I.

00;55;45;23 - 00;55;59;10

Kevin Jon Heller

It's a pleasure to be here. Like I said, I spend all my time talking about, you know, Russian aggression against Ukraine these days. So it's nice to go back to trials that are very near and dear to my heart. And a movie that, you know, as I said, because I have the the poster on my wall is also near and dear to my heart.

00;55;59;14 - 00;56;00;19

Jonathan Hafetz

Okay, well thanks again.