(rough, unchecked for grammatical errors)

A brilliant professor who has been hugely influential in my development got me thinking about this movie by asking the following:

BW: An interesting film, with the documentary embedded within the "fictional" courtroom drama. What did you make of that?

Response: The images of that embedded documentary are now part of the common mind, but it was brave and important that they were included in the movie. However, I tended to agree with the prosecution that it was an emotional rather than legal tactic that obscured the question at hand: To what degree are the judges responsible for the charges?

The movie was honest enough to admit that this was an emotional appeal by noting the American prosecutor’s involvement in the liberation of Dachau.

There is more to be said, obviously, but those are some initial thoughts.

BW: What I think is remarkable is the shift of POV when the prosecutor gets up on the stand and is then a witness to the liberation of Dachau. This throws identification into the mix and conflates judgment with American identity. It’s a total qualification of the supposed universal standard.

Response: Indeed, it is a remarkable qualification in a movie that indicts patriotism and even the notion of "victor’s justice." The scene, I think, also highlights one of the central questions of the film: who speaks for the universal? During the documentary, there are shots of the principal actors, and others including black MPs, all of whom are disgusted and disturbed by the images. The reactions invoke the universal; there is no one who would not be appalled. But, as you noted, the universal is qualified by the American prosecutor’s narration; he, and America, claim to be the universal’s voice, its literal judge-jury-executioner.

The moment is damning and obscuring simultaneously. I felt the trail’s momentum shift and there was no hope for those on trail. When the German defense lawyer, however, argues that the images invoked an emotional appeal (a universal one) and obscured the question of responsibility, I was sympathetic to his argument.

The supposed universal standard, then, is troubled in at least three ways: first, it has an American accent; it is based on an arational emotional appeal; it obscures rather than clarifies who is responsible and who can judge.


I just want to take a few moments to think about this film in writing. First, the title of this post is a tribute to the film’s self-reflexivity, which begins with its own title. Perhaps obvious, but the obvious should always be stated, the film is not merely about a trial but about judgment itself. This is made obvious by the ostensible villains of the film, the indicted judges who presided over and during the Nazi period. The American prosecutors opening lines, delivered with spitting vehemence, acknowledge the uniqueness of the perpetrator’s crimes by noting that they were committed in the name of the law. Since the Nazi laws have already, and rightly, condemned, the judges are also guilty, because they were the laws’ executioners. Even more, and paradoxically, the judges are guilty of having failed the law, or rather, the Law.

One judge argues that they, and judges as such, are there to enact laws that are already in place, not to create new ones. This is rejected. By enforcing laws, Nazi laws, they have, according to the film, failed their allegiance to the Law; I use this vague term as a placeholder for the film’s own messy conceptions of universal ethics, justice and judgment.

The American tribunal, of course, is there as the Law’s avatar. That the three-man tribunal ultimately includes a dissenting opinion is a final acknowledgement that the Universal, as such, has no voice in our world, that it is always already qualified and made particular. I noted three qualifications of the universal in my response and want to explore two of them now, albeit hastily.

I claim the prosecutor’s films from the liberation of Dachau, which he aided, and Buchenwald invoke the universal through the emotional; there is no one, including the indicted judges, who are not appalled. I think this is right, but it raises the question of how we come to the universal, through what faculties can it be perceived. In other words, this moment questions the assumption that universal claims, particularly those articulated as human rights, come out of a common human rationality. After all, who would question a human’s right to life or their inherent dignity? But the teary eyed reaction of everyone in the courtroom points us in a different direction. The inherent dignity of human life, on which all human rights are founded, is a felt thing; I’m not sure one can defend it on rational grounds without slipping into a hierarchy of species (and thus stewardship of the planet), or divine presence (and thus Religion and its pitfalls) or a myriad of other failed systems. No, like the official UN Declaration, we must take it as self-evident, and thus, tautological: inherent dignity grounds all human rights whose goal is to protect inherent human dignity.

But perhaps I am misunderstanding humanity. Perhaps, rather than claim that the courtroom’s reaction is a non-rational thing, we should try to understand emotions as rationality of a different order, a different kind of reasoning that, depending on your bent, sees more darkly or more clearly. To be fully honest, I rely on my intuition to guide major decisions, including my scholarly work, but often fail to explain a certain response in any reasonable way. “I just know” must suffice.

I think the American prosecutor would understand me. Having participated in the mission to liberate the Dachau concentration camp, he argues with righteous indignation and channels that understandable fury through legal arguments. But this is not the first time he has used the films. Another character notes that this is a favorite tactic, a weapon, a “house of horrors” that every tribunal is made to suffer. The point, of course, is not to wonder if such documentary footage was really shown during the Nuremberg trials. Rather, I think the film is pointing to the heart of the trials, the thing that kept blood pumping through the excruciating process; that thing is what I have been calling the universal as emotional. Formally too, the documentary footage appears in the last third of the film and does nothing less than trump the defense’s brilliant counterarguments, which themselves deserve study. Our emotional horror, like that of the tribunal’s lead judge, overrides any sophisticated legal reasoning and we are left with one word only: guilty.

Even if some of what I am saying is true, that the universal is, at base, a felt arational thing, the Americans still seem to be its manifestation; the prosecutor and judge are horrified and find the defendants guilty. But there is a brilliantly integrated, and appropriately marginalized, presence that rejects American claims to universality, the black GIs.

They stand behind the dock where the defendants sit, next to the doors they open for witnesses to enter, and handle the microphones when the indicted are asked to make statements. They wear immaculate khaki uniforms with helmets, white gloves and white armbands with black lettering that reads, M.P, military police. And in the film, they indeed police the military tribunal’s claim to universality. The black GIs are always at the outskirts, doing things without lit faces so that their features are lost in the purposeful cover of their uniform helmets. They are a searing indictment of America in the film’s double historical context; by 1948, the date of the trail, their presence as second-class citizens and frontline shields had been solidified; by 1961, when the film is released, black GIs realized they were not going to receive the same access to resources, financial and otherwise, that their white counterparts would.

The German reaction to their presence during the American occupation, however, is not something I know much about except by way of two opposing exaggerations. First, I taught a class at Wayne State that included weekly conversations with Detroit senior citizens; it was an amazing experience for everyone involved. One black WWII veteran told us a story, several times, of his tour of Germany. During an R&R outing with his buddies, he began talking with a beautiful German woman. Later in the evening, when they were dancing, she began groping his behind and, in some versions of the story, even put her hands down the back of his pants. He was shocked and not pleased. When he asked his buddies about it, they told him that she was looking to see if he was turning into a monkey. “What?!” “Yea man, they think we turn into monkeys after midnight and she was looking to see if you had a tail.” Other seniors, including black women, acknowledged that such a myth existed. My students and I were at a loss; we were appalled, embarrassed for him, and also wanted to laugh with him and the seniors who got a kick out of the story. I still have no idea if it’s true, but it makes for a damn good tale (sorry, bad pun).

On the other side, a German tour guide gave our American Studies group a “rah rah America” narrative as she and her older mother showed us around Munich. The guide used her mother for confirmation and anecdotal evidence about the German occupation to American troops. In their story, the American soldiers were god sent and minor gods who were chased after relentlessly, partly in hopes of acquiring American citizenship through marriage. Black soldiers, in this account, were absolutely not discriminated against because they wore those godly uniforms and their strangeness made them even more appealing. There were many marriages and many mixed children during this time. Perhaps, but aside from the large immigrant Turkish population, I could count on my hands the number of black people I saw there. But, again, I confess and emphasize my ignorance in this matter.

The truth about all these things is probably in some messy middle; it is certainly not universal.