[“Filmmakers for the Prosecution” producer describes emptying
out her mothers loft and under a daybed, found boxes of documents
concerning the first Nuremberg trial and a 1948 never-released 16 mm
film "Nuremberg: Its Lessons for Today."]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE DISCOVERY OF A LITTLE-KNOWN HISTORY OF THE NUREMBERG TRIALS  
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Peter Canby
May 24, 2023
The NewYorker
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_ “Filmmakers for the Prosecution” producer describes emptying
out her mother's loft and under a daybed, found boxes of documents
concerning the first Nuremberg trial and a 1948 never-released 16 mm
film "Nuremberg: It's Lesson's for Today." _

,

 

There is a point in Jean-Christophe Klotz’s documentary
“Filmmakers for the Prosecution” when the producer Sandra
Schulberg describes emptying out the New York City loft where her
mother, Barbara, lived until 2002. Under a daybed, Schulberg and her
siblings found boxes of documents concerning the first Nuremberg trial
of prominent Nazis, held after the end of the Second World War, in
1945 and 1946. Looking further, Schulberg discovered a 16-mm. film
titled “Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today.” The film was on a corner
shelf, and people had been using the cannister as a party coaster, she
tells Klotz, “putting their wine glasses on it.”

The film was a print of a Nuremberg documentary made by Sandra’s
late father, Stuart, which had been commissioned by the War Department
and showed Nazi political and military leaders in the full light of
the atrocities they’d committed during the war. By the time the film
was finished, in 1948, however, its point of view conflicted with the
United States’ new Cold War
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recruiting some of those same Nazis to the Allied cause. The
documentary was denied release by Kenneth Royall, the Secretary of the
Army. Before Schulberg found the copy in her mother’s loft, her
father’s film had never been shown in theatres in the United States.

The discovery of the Nuremberg material became an obsession for
Schulberg, who knew little about either Nuremberg or her father’s
important role there. “I was tabula rasa,” she told me. She
subsequently restored the Nuremberg documentary in partnership with
Josh Waletzky, had it translated into thirteen languages, and
disseminated it widely. The restored film reached Klotz in France. He
had made two acclaimed documentaries about Rwanda; during an early
reporting trip, he’d been shot in the hip by Hutu militiamen and
almost lost his leg. It took Klotz time to realize that his repeated
trips to Rwanda [[link removed]], and his
calling to show the horrors of ethnic cleansing, had to do with his
family’s Second World War history. Klotz’s grandfather, a Jewish
physician from Alsace, was an Auschwitz survivor. As a
seventeen-year-old, Klotz’s father, Georges, joined the French
Resistance and fought against the Nazis until the end of the war, at
which point he decided to work in film. In the early fifties, he
attached himself to a Marshall Plan film program based in Paris that
was overseen by Stuart Schulberg, who became his mentor.

The Schulberg family is a storied one in Hollywood. B. P.
Schulberg—Stuart’s father—had been the chief of production at
Paramount in the late twenties and early thirties. He’d produced
more than a hundred films and introduced Clara Bow, the original It
Girl, to the American moviegoing public. In 1941, B. P.’s son
Budd—Stuart’s older brother—saw his novel “What Makes Sammy
Run?
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which excoriated Hollywood’s lack of morality, published. He went on
to write the screenplays for “On the Waterfront,” “A Face in the
Crowd,” and other films. Stuart, after his postwar exploits in
Europe, returned to the United States and eventually became the
long-running producer of the “Today” show.

Klotz had long wanted to tell Stuart Schulberg’s Nuremberg story,
and, after he received a copy of his documentary that his daughter had
restored, he approached Sandra about collaborating on a film. Klotz
knew that both Stuart (a Marine sergeant) and Budd (a Navy lieutenant)
had worked for the Office of Strategic Services’ Field Photographic
Branch under the famous director John Ford, who had stacked his O.S.S.
film division with Hollywood filmmakers and technicians. At the
war’s close, Ford and his O.S.S. boss, William (Wild Bill) Donovan
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embarked on a desperate race to collect film and photographic evidence
of Nazi atrocities. Donovan, who was a lawyer and helped plan the
Nuremberg prosecutions, hoped to use the Nazi film archives as
evidence of criminal deeds. But, by the summer of 1945, Nazi
sympathizers were destroying evidence as fast as they could locate it.

Recruited to Field Photo, as it came to be known, Stuart arrived in
Germany in July of 1945 with a mandate to collect as much visual
evidence of Nazi crimes as he could before the opening of the first
Nuremberg trial, then scheduled for mid-September. Budd arrived later,
at the beginning of August. At twenty-two, Stuart was the youngest
member of the Field Photo team and wrote almost daily letters to
Barbara back in the United States. These letters were part of the
trove that Sandra found in her mother’s apartment. Klotz quotes them
extensively in the film. In one letter, Stuart writes, “Sometimes I
think the job is a few sizes too big for me. I suppose I’ve never
had so much responsibility. There’s so much to do, and so much of it
is so important that I grow terrified.” In another, he writes,
“The job is so damned important and so many big people are counting
on us and expecting us to do our part. Unless something happens
quickly, we’re going to foul up the biggest assignment Field Photo
ever got.”

Klotz’s film records a race pitting the Schulbergs and the rest of
Ford’s Field Photo unit against what seemed like a residual German
command structure that was systematically destroying evidence. In one
instance, the Field Photo team received a tip about a secret cache of
Nazi footage at the bottom of a deep salt mine in Lower Saxony, only
to arrive there and find “acres of films—football fields of
film,” as Budd put it, still smoldering after it had been burned.
Another cache, in a building outside Berlin, had similarly been
torched just prior to the arrival of Field Photo.

Finally, the team learned of a collection of Nazi films in the old
U.F.A. film studio in the Berlin suburb of Babelsberg, where, before
the war, films including “The Blue Angel” had been made. The
Babelsberg studio, however, was in the Soviet sector, and the Soviet
officer in charge, Major Georgy Avenarius, couldn’t understand what
a group of young American officers led by Budd Schulberg wanted with
the Nazi films that he was charged with protecting. In an interview
late in life, Budd recalls explaining to Avenarius that “it’s a
long story, Major, but we are part of Commander John Ford’s—”

Major Avenarius cut him off. “John Ford? You know John Ford?

“He’s our boss,” Budd responded.

Avenarius told Budd he’d written extensively on John Ford.

It turned out, Budd Schulberg recalls, “that this man was the
greatest expert on John Ford in the world.”

“Bring a truck,” Avenarius said. “Take anything you want.”

The structure of the Nuremberg trial was the result of complicated
postwar negotiations between the Allies. Stalin and Churchill wanted
to simply execute leading Nazis, but the American team—led by Robert
H. Jackson, a legal visionary on leave from the Supreme Court—wanted
to use the trial to create the cornerstone for a new era of
international law. Among other important principles, Jackson entered
into world jurisprudence the legal concepts of crimes against peace
and crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg trial also introduced the
principle that individual politicians and members of militaries could
be held responsible for crimes committed by their states. Jackson
hoped that this last principle would be a significant deterrent to
future state crimes.

 
Jackson was adamant that the Nuremberg trial be accessible to the
press and the public—both because he wanted to show the world that
the defendants had been treated fairly and also because he wanted the
German and international publics to know about the atrocities that the
Nazis had committed. Jackson asked Field Photo to present two films at
the trial. The first was scheduled for November 29, 1945, ten days
after the trial’s opening. Titled “Nazi Concentration Camps,” it
featured an hour-long compilation of film footage taken when the
Americans and the British liberated the camps. The trial defendants
were directly and publicly confronted with images of starved inmates,
emaciated, lime-covered corpses, charred human remains stacked on
crude crematoriums, piles of bodies pushed by bulldozers into
trenches. The courtroom impact, shown in Klotz’s film, is stunning.
When the lights come up, Wilhelm Keitel, a field marshal and the head
of the German Armed Forces High Command, is wiping tears from his
eyes. Hans Frank, the governor-general of occupied Poland and a man
accused of killing millions of Poles, stares into space—also near
tears. Most notably, Rudolf Hess, who had spent the war in British
prisons and had been effectively feigning amnesia, came in to court
the next day and said he took full responsibility for everything
he’d done, stating that his memory was “once more available” and
that his amnesia had been “for tactical reasons.”

The second film, “The Nazi Plan,” was shown on December 11th, less
than two weeks later. It ran three hours and fourteen minutes—and
made the case that both the war and the atrocities committed by the
Party were premeditated. To help make the film’s argument, the
Schulbergs and the Field Photo unit had tracked down and interrogated
both Leni Riefenstahl
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Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s official photographer, each of whom
proved more than willing to rat out their Nazi colleagues.

The Nuremberg trial lasted almost a year. The defendants were
convicted on the basis of the reams of evidence collected by Jackson
and his team. Ten defendants were condemned to death and hanged in the
Nuremberg gymnasium sixteen days after their verdicts were announced.
The group included Keitel, Frank, Rosenberg, Joachim von Ribbentrop,
and General Alfred Jodl, who had surrendered the German forces to the
Allies just seventeen months earlier. Hermann Göring managed to
commit suicide the night before his sentence would have been carried
out.

The shocked reactions of the defendants to Field Photo’s evidentiary
films could have been feigned, Eli Rosenbaum, a long-term Justice
Department investigator and prosecutor of human-rights violations who
appears in Klotz’s film, told me. But television hadn’t yet been
widely adopted, he added, and it’s likely that most of the
defendants had never been directly confronted with immediate visual
evidence of the horrors that they had perpetrated. Rosenbaum spoke to
me about how important the photos and films collected by the O.S.S.
team had been in establishing the shared perception of the Holocaust;
in the film, he notes that the written word was “absolutely
inadequate” to describe the extent of the Nazi reign of terror and
that “the only compelling way to do that was through film.”

Stuart Schulberg did not begin work on his documentary—the one that
would become “Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today”—until the trial
was over. The intention of the film was to show how the case against
the Nazi leaders had been built and prosecuted. But because the
documentary was made under the auspices of the War Department, Stuart
had to rely on footage shot by the understaffed and politicized Army
Signal Corps. The documentary itself soon became mired in the new
politics of the Cold War and was never released in theatres in the
United States. At a time when the American military was beginning to
recruit former Nazis to help the U.S. in its standoff with the
Russians, the Americans did not want to circulate a film that further
demonized the Germans—particularly those in the military. “A great
opportunity was lost,” Rosenbaum observes in Klotz’s film, “to
educate Americans and to remind them of what we fought for.”

Rosenbaum was recently appointed by Merrick Garland
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Department’s War Crimes Accountability team for Ukraine
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me as “the mother of all modern-day human-rights prosecutions,”
and ends the film by noting how tragically prescient Jackson was when
he wrote that the Nuremberg defendants were “living symbols of
racial hatred, terrorism, and violence, and of the arrogance and
cruelty of power.” These are, Rosenbaum continues, “the very same
problems that we deal with today. The world has not changed as much as
the dreamers who brought us the Nuremberg trial thought it
would.” ♦

 

* Film
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* documentary
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* Filmmakers for the Prosecution
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* Nuremberg Trials
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* John-Christopher Klotz
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* Sandra Schulberg
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* Nazi atrocities
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