I found Nuremburg equal parts entertaining and disorienting. It was slightly tiresome to watch the triumph of law over fascism, of American spirit over German rigidity and Soviet buffonery. But more than that, the film didn’t seem to want to introduce us to the actual nuances of the accusations being applied to the defendants, the identity of many those defendants, or even the procedure of the trial itself. We don’t know what a crime of aggression is other than that it involves some kind of invasion, or the difference between that and a crime against peace or against humanity. Indeed, most of the film focused on what would presumably fall under the “crimes against humanity” charge, yet that connection is never entirely specified: what makes up a crime against humanity, and what is required to prove that charge? Leaving the answer to this question vague didn’t help the film in my opinion. Furthermore, the film didn’t spend too much time on the other crimes on which the Nazi leadership was charged, leaving it unclear when we were hearing evidence that could point to, say, a crime against peace versus another crime. The lack of differentiation made the film feel at times like it was showing us an undifferentiated litany of horrors that would somehow be horrific enough to conjure a guilty verdict on whatever happened to be the charge. In these cases, specificity matters, and I found this lacking in the film itself. 

Further, we only get one small scene with the defense lawyer actually examining a witness, and the non-major defendants blur together so that we don’t see the nuances of their cases. This was disappointing first for plot reasons, as when the verdicts are read, we see the horror in the faces of Nazis of whom we do not remember or were never told the identity. But more importantly, I also think the obscuring of the less snappy parts of the trial had the effect of evading some of the central questions of the case. Because of these factors, we couldn’t really evaluate Goering’s statement that “Justice has absolutely nothing to do with this trial.” I was struck not by the fact that the director may have left the question up to the viewer (though I would be surprised if they did given the overall moralizing tone of the film), but rather by the fact that we simply didn’t see enough of the court proceedings to be able to answer that question for ourselves. Given that Goering’s statement cut to the heart of the legitimacy of international law at the time, I think I would have liked more empirical and intellectual meat on the bones of that statement.