THE NUREMBERG TRIALS FAILED TO SERVE JUSTICE AS PROVEN BY THIS STATEMENT ".......of 99 defendants sentenced to prison terms in Nuremberg trials that took place in the American Zone, none was still serving a sentence when the film was released in 1961."
Judgment at Nuremberg centers on a military tribunal convened in Nuremberg, Germany, in which four German judges and prosecutors stand accused of crimes against humanity for their involvement in atrocities committed under the Nazi regime.
Judge Dan Haywood is the chief judge of a three-judge panel of Allied jurists who will hear and decide the case against the defendants. Haywood is particularly interested in learning how the defendant Ernst Janning, a respected jurist and legal scholar, could have committed the atrocities he is accused of, including sentencing innocent people to death.
Haywood seeks to understand how the German people could have been deaf and blind to the Nazi regime's crimes. In doing so, he befriends the widow of a German general who had been executed by the Allies. He talks with other Germans who have varying perspectives on the war.
Other characters the judge meets are US Army Captain Harrison Byers, who is assigned to assist the American judges hearing the case, and Irene Hoffmann, who is afraid to provide testimony that may bolster the prosecution's case against the judges. (Hoffman's character bears a resemblance to Irene Seiler, a key figure in the notorious Nazi kangaroo court case, the Katzenberger Trial.)
German defense attorney Hans Rolfe argues that the defendants were not the only ones to aid or ignore the Nazi regime. He claims the United States has committed acts just as bad or worse than the Nazis, such as US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s support for the first eugenics practices; the German-Vatican Reichskonkordat of 1933, which the Nazi-dominated German government exploited as an implicit early foreign recognition of Nazi leadership; Joseph Stalin's part in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which removed the last major obstacle to Germany's invasion and occupation of western Poland, initiating World War II; and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final stage of the war in August 1945.[7][8]
Meanwhile, as a strict constructionist jurist, Janning refuses to testify or participate in a legal proceeding that he profoundly feels is no better than a post-WWII Western kangaroo court of its own. As the proceeding becomes more and more intolerable to him, he dramatically breaks his silence. He chooses to testify before the Tribunal as a witness for the prosecution, admitting he is guilty of condemning to death a Jewish man of "blood defilement" charges — namely, that the man had sex with a 16-year-old Gentile girl — when he knew there was no evidence to support such a verdict. Janning explains that well-meaning people such as him helped Adolf Hitler's antisemitic, racist policies out of patriotism despite knowing it was wrong, and that all of Germany bears some measure of responsibility for the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime.
