Judging Judges

20.10.2025

Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) stands as a profound examinations of moral responsibility, individual culpability, and the mechanisms through which civilized societies descend into barbarism. Released just sixteen years after World War II, at the height of the Cold War and mere months after the construction of the Berlin Wall, the film dared to ask uncomfortable questions about guilt, justice, and the role ordinary people play in enabling atrocities. It remains a towering achievement—a three-hour courtroom drama that refuses easy answers and implicates not just Nazi Germany, but the entire world in the Holocaust.

Historical Context: The Judges’ Trial of 1947

Judgment at Nuremberg draws its power from real history — the third of the twelve Nuremberg Military Tribunals held by the American occupation forces after World War II. This specific case, known as The Judges’ Trial (United States v. Josef Altstötter et al.), took place from March to December 1947 and targeted sixteen German jurists and prosecutors. They stood accused not of battlefield crimes, but of perverting the very idea of justice — of turning law into a weapon for persecution, enslavement, and extermination.

Unlike the more famous trials of Nazi leaders in 1945–46, these proceedings focused on those who had given Nazi terror its legal framework: judges, prosecutors, and officials who enforced racial purity laws, ordered forced sterilizations, and legitimized mass murder through courtroom procedures.

Chief prosecutor Telford Taylor summarized the horror in one unforgettable line: “The dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.” The tribunal dismissed the defense that the accused were merely following orders, establishing a lasting precedent that moral responsibility cannot hide behind legal obedience.

In the end, ten of the sixteen defendants were found guilty, with sentences ranging from five years to life — though all were released by 1957. The film’s story, inspired by these events, serves as a haunting reminder that justice itself can become an instrument of evil when the law loses its conscience.

Fictionalized Characters, Historical Truth

While the film condenses the sixteen defendants to four and uses fictional names, it draws heavily from real cases. The most powerful subplot involves the Feldenstein case, based on the actual Katzenberger Trial of 1942. In the real case, 67-year-old Jewish businessman Leo Katzenberger, a prominent member of Nuremberg’s Jewish community, was accused of having sexual relations with 26-year-old Irene Seiler, an “Aryan” photographer who rented rooms in an apartment building Katzenberger owned.

Both consistently denied any sexual relationship, insisting their connection was paternal. The investigating judge initially concluded there was insufficient evidence to proceed. However, Judge Oswald Rothaug, known for his fanatical Nazi loyalty and career ambition, arranged to have the case transferred to him. Rothaug transformed the proceedings into a show trial, attended by high-ranking Nazi officials. He engineered Katzenberger’s conviction by exploiting witness testimony that Katzenberger had visited Seiler at night, using wartime “lights out” air raid precautions as an aggravating factor that authorized the death penalty. On March 14, 1942, Katzenberger was sentenced to death under the Rassenschutzgesetz (Racial Protection Law), one of the Nuremberg Laws that criminalized Rassenschande (“racial defilement”). He was executed shortly thereafter. Seiler received two years’ imprisonment for perjury.

​ Rothaug was tried at the actual Judges’ Trial and sentenced to life imprisonment (he was released in 1956 and died in 1967). The film captures this case with remarkable fidelity, even displaying the actual headline from Julius Streicher’s antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer: “Tod dem Rassenschänder!” (“Death to the Race Defiler!”).

Ernst Janning’s Confession: The Film’s Moral Center

The film’s pivotal moment comes when Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), the most distinguished of the defendants and a fictional composite character, breaks his silence and confesses. Burt Lancaster speaks only three lines, none in the courtroom, for the first 135 minutes of the 186-minute film. Then he delivers a monologue that ranks among the greatest speeches in cinema history. ​

Janning begins by explaining the context in which Hitler rose to power:

There was a fever over the land, a fever of disgrace, of indignity, of hunger. We had a democracy, yes, but it was torn by elements within. Above all there was fear, fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that can you understand what Hitler meant to us, because he said to us: ‘Lift your heads. Be proud to be German. There are devils among us, communists, liberals, Jews, gypsies. Once these devils will be destroyed your misery will be destroyed.’

He then addresses the complicity of the educated elite:

It was the old, old story of the sacrificial lamb. What about those of us who knew better, we who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country. What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. Hitler himself will be discarded—sooner or later.

Janning’s speech captures the incrementalism of fascism—the way seemingly minor compromises of principle accumulate into monstrous crimes. He describes how “what was going to be a ‘passing phase’ had become the way of life”.

Finally, Janning rejects his own defense attorney’s attempts to deflect responsibility:

Where were we when Hitler began shrieking his hate in Reichstag? Where were we when our neighbors were being dragged out in the middle of the night to Dachau? Where were we when every village in Germany had a railroad terminal where cattle cars were filled with children being carried out to their extermination? Where were we when they cried out in the night to us. Deaf, dumb, blind!

His most devastating admission: “Maybe we didn’t know the details. But if we didn’t know, it was because we didn’t want to know.”

​ Lancaster’s performance is a masterclass in controlled emotion, decades of suppressed guilt erupting in a torrent of self-condemnation. According to multiple sources, Spencer Tracy’s climactic response was filmed in one take using several cameras.

The Film’s Bitter Epilogue

In the film’s final scene, Haywood visits Janning in his prison cell. Janning tells him, “I never knew it would come to that,” referring to the mass exterminations. Haywood replies with devastating simplicity: “It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”

This exchange encapsulates the film’s central argument: there is no gradation of complicity, no moment when evil becomes acceptable. The first compromise of principle contains within it all subsequent atrocities