By Martin Gottlieb, Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer
A 1948 movie about the Nuremberg trials, made by the U.S. government, has resurfaced after rotting for decades in storage after Washington decided not to distribute it in this country.

Calling it government-made might give the wrong idea; the government-Hollywood connection was intense in those days.

The movie, Nuremberg: Its Lessons for Today, was made by Stuart Schulberg, brother of the famed writer Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront).

Both Shulbergs were second-generation Hollywooders who worked for director John Ford in the forerunner of the CIA.

The movie was found, restored, and circulated by Sandra Schulberg, daughter of Stuart. She is a film producer and financier. She spoke when the film was shown Oct. 24 at the University of Dayton as part of UD’s speaker series. U.S. Federal District Court Judge Walter Rice chaired a panel discussion afterward.

The film’s main purpose was to thwart the rise of any possible revisionism in Germany: to make sure the German people knew beyond doubt that the case against the Third Reich was rock solid, not only as to the Holocaust, but as to Hitler’s thoroughly aggressive, relentlessly duplicitous march toward war and European domination. The film was shown in Germany at the time.

The Nuremberg trials — put together in that German city by the World War II Allies in 1945 — have been criticized for putting people on trial for “crimes” that hadn’t been codified as crimes before the war.

But the trials are also widely praised for, among other things, using the special powers and resources of governments to very publicly document at length the atrocities and duplicities at a time when documents and witnesses were plentiful.

Among the “documents” were, for the first time, movies. The Allies got their hands on films taken by the Nazis, and the Hollywood corps made their own.

The courtroom saw images that are largely familiar now to many people, but were far newer and more shocking then.

The films shown in the trial are shown in the movie, though edited for length. We see, for example, half-dead people being corralled into a chamber into which automobile exhaust fumes are being funneled: a forerunner of what was to come.

In the courtroom, western Allies are shown cooperating with the Soviet Union. Kremlin prosecutors take their turn at the examination of witnesses.

This turned out to be a problem later, when the Cold War broke out in full force. Officials in Washington eventually decided they didn’t want to circulate a movie in this country that might focus hostility on the Germans (our new allies) and praise on the Soviets (our new enemies). Also, some American military men apparently were uncomfortable with putting any military men in the dock. And, after all, the government owned the movie.

So although U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson — the main American prosecutor at Nuremberg — wanted the movie released in the United States, it went into storage.

Sandra Schulberg dove into the project of finding the film and restoring it while her uncle was still alive; her father had already died.

In the panel discussion, Dr. Larry Flockerzie, a European specialist in UD’s history department, noted that the trial had an important effect that has not been much noted: It removed a generation of people who might otherwise have been leaders in Germany in the next two decades, helping to close an era.

The first trial, the subject of the movie, involved the biggest names the Allies had arrested. It was only the first of many trials.

Dr. Alexandra Budabin, a political scientist at UD specializing in human rights studies, noted that despite this country’s leading role at Nuremberg, Washington has still not signed on to the International Criminal Court, a permanent agency at the Hague, Netherlands for conducting war crimes trials. She said different American administrations have taken different positions on it. Opponents fear that American troops are more exposed to prosecution than any others, given U.S. foreign policy.

Schulberg proposed Senate ratification of the ICC treaty. She also spoke of having shown the movie to people in the Middle East who told her they had no idea about the Nazi story before, but who believed that the movie was telling the truth. One woman said that she had previously thought Hitler was a great man.

For young people and others who don’t know a lot about World War II and the Holocaust, the movie is a powerful primer, covering a great range of important subjects concisely.

For others, it may not offer an enormous amount of new information. But there’s a sort of you-are-there quality to its coverage of the trial, an immersion in that postwar time and place, when the world officially came to grips with unheard of evil, when it tried to apply civilized judgment to the collapse of civilization.