Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater

2. National Investigation: Inquest and Are You Now or Have You Ever Been

63 2 National Investigation: Inquest and Are You Now or Have You Ever Been In the years immediately following World War II, the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, one of the only courthouses in Germany that had survived the war, hosted a great tribunal organized by the consolidated power of several Allied nations. Representatives from these countries collaborated in planning the tribunal, whose objective was to bring to justice the major war criminals of the European Axis. In the first Nuremberg trial, which lasted almost one year, twenty-two defendants were indicted (one of the twenty-two, who could not be located and was believed dead, was tried in absentia) on at least two of four separate counts: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, waging aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity . Three of the defendants were found not guilty; the other nineteen received sentences ranging from ten years in prison to death by hanging. Twelve other trials of war criminals were held at Nuremberg over the next several years, bringing the total number of defendants charged with war crimes to slightly over two hundred. Although the first trial was conducted N A T I O N A L I N V E S T I G A T I O N 64 collaboratively by the four most powerful Allied nations, the twelve subsequent trials were prosecuted by the US military tribunal and presided over by judges from the United States. The Nuremberg tribunals had originated with an agreement between Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin in February 1945 at the Yalta Conference held several months before Germany’s unconditional surrender; the leaders vowed then to bring “all war criminals to swift and just punishment.” In the immediate aftermath of the war, representatives of fifty countries that had declared war against Germany and Japan met in San Francisco to sign the United Nations charter, designed to prevent future wars and to foster communication and peaceful negotiations among nations. In addition, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France formed the Allied Control Council to rule over defeated Germany; they divided the country and the city of Berlin into zones, each zone presided over by the military of one of the four nations. In August 1945, the Allies signed the London Charter, which established the International Military Tribunal, and it was this body that created the conditions of and procedure for the Nuremberg court. At the Soviet Union’s insistence that the trial ought to take place on Soviet-occupied territory, the first trial convened in Soviet-controlled East Berlin, where the indictments were handed down, and then the trial adjourned to Nuremberg. The joint governance of Germany by the nations represented on the Allied Council contributed to a renewed tension between the East and the West and, most pointedly, between the United States and the Soviet Union, as each nation sought to promote its political and economic systems in the reconstruction of Europe. The Cold War between the two countries, a decades-long period of mutual antagonism that did not end until the 1990s, was marked by an arms race, multiple attempts to control vulnerable or resource-rich nations through force or coercion, and extensive espionage, all of which created a culture of fear and a stridently ideological atmosphere in postwar America. This international rivalry and suspicion had a profound effect on US domestic policy, for as the government sought to protect its citizens from the possible annihilation of a nuclear attack as well as from more insidious attempts at Soviet control or influence, it waged internal as well as external battles against the perceived Communist threat. Two of these battles were waged in the courtroom or hearing room and subsequently became the subject of contemporary documentary trial plays in the early 1970s, several decades after the events themselves had become part of the period’s legacy of accusations and prosecutorial intimidation. The opening night of the first play, Inquest (1970) by Donald Freed, preceded Catonsville by 65 N A T I O N A L I N V E S T I G A T I O N several months; and the second, Bentley’s Are You Now or Have You Ever Been (1972), appeared two years later. Inquest dramatizes the FBI’s investigations of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the trial that followed, United States of America v. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg...