Judgment at Nuremberg is on TCM @ 9:45 pm (Eastern)

I've never seen it from start to finish. thanks dvr'ing it

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Great movie. Even has Col. Klink in it!

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Was a German Jew. Agreed to do Hogan's Heroes with the stipulation that the Nazis be shown as buffoons.

BTW, if you see him in other roles, he had a flawless American accent.

Damn it is so long though.

Thanks. Recording now.

I'd never seen this movie before. Thanks for the heads up.

I would be willing to bet that an embarrassingly high percentage of Americans know very little about the Nuremberg Tribunals and even less about the Nuremberg Laws. The German forced sterilization program of the "genetically inferior" was partially inspired by US eugenic policies, with California leading the way. CA didn't stop forced sterilizations until the mid-60s, yet in the late 40s the Allies were convicting Germans for the same thing. North Carolina didn't end their state eugenics program until 1977. Obviously, eugenics were just a small part of the Nuremberg Trials, but I think it was hypocritical nevertheless.

Personally, I think a large part of the Nuremberg Trials were just a series of dog and pony shows, with guilty verdicts as a forgone conclusion. I'm far from being a Nazi sympathizer, but it seems to me that it was largely a Kangaroo Court. If we had lost the war, would Curtis LeMay have faced war crime charges for firebombing every major city in Japan? You're an attorney, what's your opinion?

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I'd never seen this movie before. Thanks for the heads up.

I would be willing to bet that an embarrassingly high percentage of Americans know very little about the Nuremberg Tribunals and even less about the Nuremberg Laws. The German forced sterilization program of the "genetically inferior" was partially inspired by US eugenic policies, with California leading the way. CA didn't stop forced sterilizations until the mid-60s, yet in the late 40s the Allies were convicting Germans for the same thing. North Carolina didn't end their state eugenics program until 1977. Obviously, eugenics were just a small part of the Nuremberg Trials, but I think it was hypocritical nevertheless.

Personally, I think a large part of the Nuremberg Trials were just a series of dog and pony shows, with guilty verdicts as a forgone conclusion. I'm far from being a Nazi sympathizer, but it seems to me that it was largely a Kangaroo Court. If we had lost the war, would Curtis LeMay have faced war crime charges for firebombing every major city in Japan? You're an attorney, what's your opinion?

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Robert Taft opposed the Nuremberg trials, for some of the reasons you state, at considerable political risk to himself.

OTOH, the alternative plan was summary execution of the major Nazis, and probably lots of others. That was what the Russians were pushing for.

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I think it is Stanley Kramer's best film and that's saying something.

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as great as Judgement at Nuremberg is, my vote goes to On The Beach.

White Roach, I am happy that you watched the movie and that it led you to think about some valid issues.

I think that the Nuremberg trials were necessary. The world needed to know what happened under Nazi leadership. The interesting issue to me is why should ordinary soldiers and officers be punished for obeying the orders of their superiors? A major part of the defense of these men was, “I was just following orders.” The concentration camps were certainly crimes against humanity. The Nazis decided that they were the “master race” and “lesser races” were to be obliterated from the face of the earth. The architects of this thinking deserved the death penalty as far as I am concerned.

There was (and still is) true evil in the world. Watching movies like "Judgment At Nuremberg", "Schlinder's List", "Sophie's Choice", etc. are heartbreaking to me. I cannot understand how people can do such things to other people.

I do not think the trials were a kangaroo court, although I do think that the outcome was predictable. When the facts were laid out, what rational thinking person could not say that the actions were crimes against humanity?

The issue of sterilization was interesting. I thought that one of the most powerful moments in the film is when the German defense lawyer (and I cannot remember the quote verbatim) asked the witness if he knew who authored the “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” quote. The defense lawyer revealed that it was a quote written my Oliver Wendell Holmes in a majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court.

Had we lost the war, I am sure that many of our General Officers and political leaders would have been executed. I think the difference is that the Japanese and Germans would have carried out the executions in a summary manner. I am not sure, but I think we may have dropped pamphlets on Dresden before the pattern bombing and warned the Japanese that we were going to unleash the deadliest of bombs on Japan and requested their surrender before we dropped it. I am not saying that we were perfect. I am sure that Americans committed atrocities during WWII. But it is the winners that conduct the trials. This is not to say that such thinking is correct, only that it is the way it generally happens.

I am not aware of any trials of American soldiers during WWII. I do recall the trial of Lt. Calley for the My Lai Massacre during the Viet Nam War. I was a junior in HS and emotions were running high because of the unpopularity of that war.

One of the most interesting people I met in my life was a court reporter in the late 1970s. He took down deposition testimony by using a steno pad and a fountain pen (not the type that has a cartridge, but the type that sucks the ink up through the nib). He told me that he was a court reporter at the Nuremberg Trials. A very interesting man. R.I.P, Jack.

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And yeah, the infamous 'three generations of imbeciles is enough' was from Holmes in Buck v. Bell. The case is worth reading for a laugh as a lot of Holmes' language reads like it's straight out of Mein Kampf.

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Hitler got his idea of lebensraum and ethnic cleansing from two historical sources: The Turkish genocide of the Armenians and the American idea of Manifest Destiny and its resulting treatment of the American Indian.