Judgement at Nuremberg Revisited

I’m a fan of old movies, mostly because I’m old but also because they’re populated by the actors of my youth, now almost all dead and gone.

I re-watched Judgement at Nuremberg a few days ago, a film I hadn’t seen in sixty-three years and had very nearly forgotten. But the cast caught my eye: Spencer Tracy in the lead role of Judge Dan Haywood, supported by Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Maximilian Schell, Montgomery Clift, Richard Widmark and Judy Garland. That’s a royal flush of my most revered actors, so how could I resist?

These were not the main Nuremberg trials, these occurred in 1948, trying a second echelon of purported criminals

Those of us who even remember those days are usually unaware of the continuing, although secondary, trails of Nazis who aided and abetted, each in their way. In this case, four top Nazi judges and prosecutors (of an actual sixteen) stood trial before a three-judge panel headed by Tracy.

Nazi Judges, of course, were the glue that held the entire German political machinery together, because everything Hitler achieved was ‘lawfully enacted’ in those incredibly unhinged latter days of his dictatorship. The movie is a thoughtful treatise on morality as well as law, and I recommend it as a prequel to America today, as we stand at the edge of a similarly potential political abyss.

I feel that is not too dramatic a representation of our times

An argument can be made I suppose in either direction, as it was in pre-WWII Germany, as well as America. There aren’t many of us around today who remember Hitler’s popularity as a leader who would save Germany from the disastrous terms of the 1918 armistice that followed their defeat in WWI.

Looking back, in 1939 a Yale University student founded the America First Committee. It wasn’t just a bunch of college kooks either, but headed by Robert E. Wood, a retired U.S. Army general who was chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Company at the time. Charles Lindbergh joined it and became the most prominent speaker at its rallies. Its highest-profile early members included Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford, none of whom were Nazi sympathizers, but all of whom wanted no part of another European war. Additionally, a good many industrialists wanted to do business in Germany, which they considered a gateway to the rest of Europe. The benign opinion before Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia was, ‘at least he made the trains run on time.’

The committee survived even that, but when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor it was quickly disbanded, having lasted only fifteen months.

So, what’s my point?

My point is that evil often rides the horse of populism, a political doctrine that claims to support the common people in their struggle against the wealthy elite. I say ‘claims to’ because it’s more often an excuse for elite supported dictatorship. So it was in Judgment at Nuremberg and so it may be trending today in America.

Donald Trump used America First in his 2016 presidential campaign and during his presidency, emphasizing the U.S.'s withdrawal from international treaties and organizations in the administration's foreign policy. Media critics have derided Trump's use of the America First policy as "America Alone.”

The law is dictatorship’s only opponent and justices decide the law

In America, the Supreme Court is the final judge of laws, and it has not served us well in recent years. 54% of Americans now have an unfavorable opinion of the court, an all-time low. I needn’t list its transgressions but will note a few anyway. Every single one runs contrary to public opinion:
          Allowing unlimited corporate money into politics,
          Reversing 60 years of abortion rights,
          Finding a Constitutional right for any idiot to carry a gun,
          Finding after finding that essentially destroyed the Civil Rights Act,
          Ruling against the E.P.A.'s ability to regulate the energy sector,
          Ruling that limited the government authority to police water pollution.

The defense in Judgment in Nuremberg argued that all judges were forced to comply, that without their judgment’s things would have been far worse and finally, (perhaps weakest of all) that they did the best they could while packing the trains off to death camps.

There are parallels

Not with any of the above excuses, but our Supreme Court is currently nit-picking its way through numerous cases of guilt already handed down by lower courts, related to a man who was once elected president yet denied (and denies to this day) losing a second election.

More recently, the D.C. Appellate Court refused to throw out a federal conviction accusing him of lying to and encouraging supporters who turned violent on Jan. 6, 2021. That decision, related to Article 14 of the United States Constitution, has yet to reach the Supreme Court. Atlantic Magazine, in an extremely detailed article finds its decisions ‘ironclad’ and ‘without wiggle room.’

We will see.

I am not the first to express my fear that America is sleepwalking its way to dictatorship in the coming election

Our current Supreme Court Justices operate at the same national level as those Germans accused in Judgment at Nuremberg.

And where, pray tell, is Spencer Tracy when we need him?