On Jordan's From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film

In From Nuremberg to Hollywood: The Holocaust and the Courtroom in American Fictive Film, his pioneering survey of American Holocaust courtroom dramas, James Jordan traces how these films evolved from a reliance on "the once shocking, then iconic, but eventually overused black-and-white footage of liberation to the representation of the Holocaust through the use of oral testimony delivered by Jewish survivors from the witness box" (9). He attributes this shift to the evidentiary strategies employed by the prosecution teams in the trials that inspired such films and the growing awareness of the Holocaust in American public memory.

At the International Military Tribunal (IMT) held in Nuremberg (1945–1946), the United States introduced five documentaries consisting of newsreel clips about Hitler's rise to power, his regime, and footage of the appalling sights encountered by Allied troops when they liberated concentration, death, and labor camps. These documentaries served as proof that the Nazi leaders in the docket were guilty of conspiring to wage aggressive war, and of implementing policies that resulted in such calculated carnage and cruelty to civilian populations and captured enemy soldiers. The devastating impression left by the liberation footage overshadowed the voluminous dossiers of incriminating documents and sparse survivor testimony entered as evidence of German transgressions. In accordance with the charges leveled against the German defendants at Nuremberg, the persecution and slaughter of European Jewry were subsumed under the categories of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Consequently, the use of newsreel and liberation footage as authentic evidence of the barbarism and belligerent intent of Hitler and his henchmen often reappeared in feature films about the trials of Nazi officials and their collaborators. Moreover, the first scripted motion pictures dealing with this subject matter followed the Nuremberg precedent of marginalizing the Holocaust and the testimony of Jewish survivors in favor of focusing on the villainy of the Nazi perpetrators.

Jordan begins his analysis of individual films with André de Toth's None Shall Escape (USA, 1944). Since President Roosevelt had announced in 1942 that the United Nations would convene postwar trials of the Nazi leaders, de Toth imagined the content and look of such proceedings. None Shall Escape revolves around the testimony of three eyewitnesses regarding whether the "crimes of murder, unlawful detention, degenerate atrocities, and common theft" enumerated by the chief justice were committed by Wilhelm Grimm, an ethnic German who returned to his hometown in Poland as the head of the German occupation during World War II. The town's priest, Grimm's anti-Nazi brother, and Grimm's former girlfriend recall his anger over Germany's defeat in World War I and the inclusion of the town within Poland's interwar borders; his immigration to Germany and enlistment in the Nazi Party; his imprisonment of his brother for subversive activities; and his role in exploiting Polish labor, persecuting Jews, and ultimately ordering their massacre when the local rabbi incites them to resist deportation. Their accounts segue into realistic flashbacks that trace Grimm's metamorphosis from an innocuous teacher of German into a callous tyrant.

While Jordan appreciates that None Shall Escape is unique among Hollywood wartime films in its emphasis on the plight of the Jews, he faults the picture for lacking a Jewish witness, even though this obviously reflects the fact that none of the town's Jewish inhabitants survived to tell the story. However, the rabbi's impassioned call to arms—which leftist screenwriter Lester Cole culled from a rousing speech delivered by the communist Dolores Ibárruri during the Spanish Civil War—admirably fills this void.¹

In chapter 2 Jordan examines how American feature films produced from 1946 until 1961 interjected familiar scenes or referents from the Nuremberg documentaries to indict Nazi characters who were being hunted down and tried for their crimes, or to collectively blame the German people for tacitly condoning their country's...