Nuremberg: Its Lesson For Today

The outstanding film that was produced in 1948 by Stuart Schulberg (with Pare Lorentz) yet never screened in the US until
NOW!

A time to remember Whitney Harris’s work
(cf. below).

My review:

TO LIVE WITH AN OPEN HEART
(and eyes/ears) so that today may have a tomorrow!

Can we venture out of the most murderous century with 262 million dead without some solid advice?

Fortunately for us, between 1945 and 1948, a young 23 year old US Marine thought of us and our future. His film “Nuremberg: Its Lesson For Today,” until now unseen on US movie screens, constitutes a vital time-capsule.

Through the trial of that century, looking straight at both the atrocities and the blindness of WWII, Schulberg warns us that it is only without our blinders that we will move forward. Then and only then we will be able to enter into the community of nations like the International Criminal Court, something the US, Israel, China and Russia refuse to do.

This monument of a film has recently played in Iran (!) and in Argentina and Guatemala – pending further funding many other language versions are planned.

USMC Sergeant Stuart Schulberg, the youngest member of the OSS Field Photo/War Crimes unit, was later hired by the War Department to write and direct Nuremberg.

Addendum: I would follow this key film with Christian Delage’s “Nuremberg: The Nazis Facing Their Past” (which includes the testimonies of Abraham Sutzkever and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier). The extras include the rarely seen “The Atrocities Committed by the German Fascists in the USSR.” The DVDs are available through many libraries. It may be time also to view again the classic “Judgment at Nuremberg” with Spencer Tracy, Maximilian Schell, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland, around one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials.

If you want to dig in deeper even, The Yale Archives are right here.

His daughter, the producer Sandra Schulberg, has also put together an important series of films from that period called “Selling Democracy: Films of the Marshall Plan, 1948-1953”