Abstract
Judgment at Nuremberg, a film directed by Stanley Kramer with a screenplay by Abby Mann, premiered in West Berlin in December 1961 at a gala event attended by Mayor Willy Brandt, many members of the cast, and some 300 foreign and domestic reporters. The film took viewers back to the late 1940s and the trial by American judges of leading judicial figures in Hitler’s Third Reich. A careful look at the film and its reception by critics can tell us much about how the crimes of the Nazis were analysed in West Germany and the United States over a decade and a half after the end of the war. The article also pays particular attention to how Mann’s screenplay drew selectively on the trial transcript to emphasize specific themes in order to tell American audiences about the crimes of National Socialism but also to present German fascism as a yardstick for measuring the forms of injustice that, he implied, permeated the daily life of Americans in 1961.
Published Version
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