I had never thought in depth about how the Nuremberg trials set a precedent for condemning future war crimes. The movie Nuremberg led me to consider this question. By dramatizing the courtroom scenes and the moral struggles of the tribunal members, the film shows how the trials reshaped the world’s understanding of individual culpability and international law.
The most interesting aspect of the movie to me was the way it portrayed the question of blame. Nuremberg demonstrates well the potential scale of culpability in Nazi Germany. The members of the tribunal understand that the state was not the only guilty party. Instead, they consider that Hitler’s orders compelled generals, soldiers, ministers, and even ordinary people to commit atrocities. Over and over, the judges note that “following orders” did not acquit a citizen of responsibility. Rather, anyone who endorsed or enabled the Nazi regime was liable to prosecution. This shift–from condemning states to targeting citizens–transformed the world’s understanding of culpability in war, making it possible to prosecute individuals for complying with a state’s criminal activity. These legal questions are interspersed with flashbacks of war, and this dialogue–between the legal questions of the present and the scale of atrocity of the past–emphasizes the moral stakes of the trial.
The movie suggests that the judges were aware of the historical implications of the Nuremberg trials’ outcomes. On the plane to Germany, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson says that the trial symbolizes the potential triumph of morality over evil. For him and the rest of the tribunal, the Nuremberg trials are not only a legal process, but a necessary reckoning with accountability that the world must confront.
This trial’s moral implications guide the judges throughout the film, motivating them to conduct vigorous investigations. Their sense of duty to victims of the Holocaust compels them to keep the Nazi soldiers alive. I was surprised to learn that the tribunal included a psychologist specifically for this purpose–to keep the defendant from killing himself before they could be prosecuted. Even if a Nazi would be sentenced to death, his survival throughout the trial was a requirement of the tribunal’s success.
Watching this movie made me think about the international community’s obligation to intervene in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I learned recently that Russian soldiers are paid huge sums to serve. If they are killed in combat, their families are compensated. This system complicates the opposition families of soldiers may have to the regime, deescalating dissent. It also presents challenges to an international court of justice aiming to prosecute criminals of war. Russia’s infrastructure for recruiting and deploying soldiers implicates so much of the population that the judicial proceedings of war crimes, which require a court to identify a perpetrator and a victim, merit reevaluation.
