The first Nuremberg trial (formally known as the International Military Tribunal) was convened November 20, 1945, in Nuremberg, Germany, to try the top Nazi leaders. The verdict was rendered October 1, 1946. The lead U.S. prosecutor, and the driving force behind the organization of the trial, was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. During preparation for the trial, Jackson made the bold and historic decision to use film and photo evidence to convict the Nazis. But these films had to be found.

Director John Ford, Commander of the OSS Field Photographic Branch

The Search for Nazi Footage

A special OSS film team was formed for this purpose, under the command of Hollywood director John Ford. Brothers Budd and Stuart Schulberg, sons of the former Paramount studio chief B.P. Schulberg, were assigned to this special OSS search team that was dispatched to Europe.

Sabotage and Success

The search for incriminating film was conducted under enormous time pressure, and they encountered sabotage along the way. They found two caches of film still burning, as though their guardians had been tipped off, and began to suspect leaks from their German informants, two SS film editors.

Just in time for the start of the trial, they found significant evidence, which, in close collaboration with Jackson’s staff of lawyers, they edited into a 4-hour film for the courtroom called The Nazi Plan. Jackson also presented their compilation of U.S. and British images from the liberated concentration camps, entitled Nazi Concentration Camps.

Documenting the Trial

Justice Jackson had wanted a film made of the Trial from the beginning. Its purpose was to be a dual one: 1) to show the German public that the Nazi leadership had been given a fair trial and had, essentially, “convicted themselves,” and 2) to create a film for posterity that would offer an enduring lesson for all mankind.

It was planned that Ford’s OSS unit would take charge of the filming, but they were so busy assembling footage to show at the Trial, that they had to decline responsibility. Thus, at the last minute, responsibility was shifted to another branch.

Army Signal Corps cameramen and still photographers filmed the Trial, but shot only 25 hours over the course of 10½ months.

Germans reading about the Nuremberg verdicts in the Nuremberg newspapers, October 2, 1946. (Courtesy Nationaal Archief of The Netherlands)

When the film was first released in November 1948 in Stuttgart, rubble still lay in front of the Kamera cinema. (Schulberg Family Archive)

One of the original posters from the 1948 German release of NUREMBERG: Its Lesson For Today. (Schulberg Family Archive)

Crowd gathered beneath the banner for Nuremberg’s 1949 Berlin release. (Zigman Family Archive)

Poster for the Berlin run of Nuremberg, delayed until May 31, 1949, because of the Berlin blockade, with tagline that reads, “Symbol of the people’s judgment against international lawlessness,” implying that the German people agreed with the Nuremberg verdicts. (Schulberg Family Archive)

Creating the Film About the Trial

In the winter of 1946, Stuart Schulberg and his editor, Joe Zigman, were commissioned by Pare Lorentz (head of the Film/Theatre/Music in the Civil Affairs Division of the U.S. War Department of War) to create a documentary about the trial.

Schulberg and Zigman found themselves terribly constrained by the available footage. Crucial coverage simply did not exist. On the other hand, a complete sound recording of the trial was made. In an article that Stuart Schulberg wrote in 1949, he described the frustrating process:

“The greatest technical difficulty involved the use of original recorded testimony from the trial itself. It was important, if the film’s authenticity was to be convincing, that Goering and his colleagues speak their lame lines of defense in their own, well-known voices…It became necessary to secure the wax recordings of the proceedings stored in Nuremberg, to re-record the pertinent words on film and then to synchronize that sound recording with the lip movements of the respective defendants…. Many weeks after the original request, the records arrived from Nuremberg. The discs were re-recorded on film in half of one day, and about a month later the meticulous job of ‘dubbing’ the original voices of the defendants was completed.” (Stuart Schulberg, Nurnberg, Information Bulletin, No. 164, June 28, 1949, Office of Military Government for Germany, Berlin.)

A Political Minefield

Just as the impetus for the trial had come from the Americans, so the Americans sought from the beginning to control production of the film about the trial. But, in the fall of 1946, disagreements about the script and filmmaking process arose, not only within the four-power Documentary Film Working Party (DFWP), but also between the U.S. Military Government in Berlin and the War Department in Washington.

By the spring of 1947, Pare Lorentz, Chief of the Film, Theater, Music (FTM) Section of the War Department’s Civil Affairs Division (and creator of The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River) had finally won control of the film, and was sending his writer-director designate, Stuart Schulberg, to Berlin.

The first German audiences emerge from the Kamera cinema in Stuttgart, November, 1948. Their reactions, as recorded by OMGUS pollsters, ranged from disbelief, to anger, to shame.

The German Premiere

Schulberg and editor Joseph Zigman completed the 78-minute film in Berlin in early 1948, and chose as its final title, Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today. It was shown to West German audiences for the first time in November 1948, in the city of Stuttgart. Because of the Soviet Blockade of Berlin, the premiere in that city was delayed until May 1949.

Stuart Schulberg at the Stuttgart premiere of Nuremberg in 1948. (Schulberg Family Archive)

Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today derives power from its stark, black & white cinematography, the use it made of the Nazis’ own propaganda films, the testimony of such infamous figures as Hermann Goering, and from the devastating, heart-rending images of human cruelty.

The Schulbergs’ OSS Field Photographic Branch/War Crimes Team prepared a 4-hour compilation of fully authenticated German material, which was screened in the courtroom on December 13, 1945, under the title, The Nazi Plan. It traced the Nazi rise to power, beginning in 1920s and continuing through the war. This evidentiary film was, towards the end, constructed hand-in-hand with the prosecutors, and became an important element of the prosecution’s case.

They also compiled a 1-hour film called Nazi Concentration Camps. This was a specially edited version of Army Signal Corps Atrocity Film, filmed at camps that had been liberated by the Americans and British in May 1945, including Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Nordhausen, Ohrdruf, and at Hadamar, where doctors performed hideous experiments on people.

Other footage screened at the trial included a 60-second 8mm film of Jewish men and women being dragged (some of them naked) from their homes; and two films presented by Soviet prosecutor Roman Rudenko, German Fascist Atrocities in the USSR, and The Destruction of Lidice.

During the editing period in Berlin, Stuart Schulberg located a historic piece of film in the Berlin apartment of a Nazi SS officer named Nebe, showing the experimental gassing of human beings in a small outbuilding on the outskirts of Mogilev, Poland. Schulberg chose to include that footage in the film, even though it had not been shown at the trial.

(The papers of Stuart Schulberg revealed that he added the sound effect of the car’s engine running. That sequence, now with the sound removed, forms part of a special “Deadly Medicine” exhibit at the Holocaust Museum.)

One of the documents in Stuart Schulberg’s files on the Nazi concentration camps. The German caption reads: This inmate was still alive when he was found on his bed of straw in the main barrack, but died shortly thereafter.

Director Leni Riefenstahl filming Olympia. (Courtesy Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

Photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, father-in-law of Nuremberg defendant Baldur von Schirach. (National Archives and Records Administration)

The lead U.S. prosecutor, and the driving force behind the organization of the Trial, was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson.  During preparation for the trial, Jackson made the bold and historic decision to use film and photo evidence to convict the Nazis. But these films had to be found.

A special OSS film team — OSS Field Photographic Branch/War Crimes — was formed for this purpose. Brothers Budd and Stuart Schulberg, sons of the former Paramount studio chief B.P. Schulberg, were assigned to this special OSS search team that was dispatched to Europe. Budd was a Navy Lieutenant, and his younger brother Stuart, a Marine Corps Sergeant.

Stuart Schulberg and another office from the film unit, Daniel Fuchs (later a well-known author), were sent first, in June 1945.  Budd Schulberg, along with OSS film editors Robert Parrish and Joseph Zigman, followed in September 1945.

The search for incriminating film was conducted under enormous time pressure, and they encountered sabotage along the way.  They found two caches of film still burning, as though their guardians had been tipped off, and began to suspect leaks from their German informants, two SS film editors.

Just in time for the start of the trial, they found significant evidence, which, in close collaboration with Jackson’s staff of lawyers, they edited into a 4-hour film for the courtroom called The Nazi Plan.

In the course of this work, Budd Schulberg apprehended Leni Riefenstahl at her country home in Kitzbühl, Austria, as a material witness, and took her to the Nuremberg editing room, so she could help Budd identify Nazi figures in her films and in other German film material his unit had captured.

Stuart Schulberg took possession of the photo archive of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, and became the film unit’s expert on still photo evidence. Most of the stills presented at the trial carry his affidavit of authenticity.

The Nazi Plan was presented as evidence on December 13, 1945, preceded by an affidavit of authenticity signed by Commander Ray Kellogg, Budd’s immediate superior. As The Nazi Plan consists entirely of footage shot by Reich officers, cinematographers and directors (e.g. Riefenstahl), Budd Schulberg wrote English-language inter-titles for the compilation film.

Justice Robert H. Jackson shocked the courtroom on November 29, 1945, when he decided to present Nazi Concentration Camps, a 1-hour compilation of U.S. and British motion picture material that was shot as the Allies were liberating some of the concentration camps.

In a letter published in 1947, Stuart Schulberg described how, at the last moment, on the morning of the presentation, he taped neon tubing under the armrest of the prisoners’ dock, so that it would be possible to see the defendants’ reactions to the film in the darkened courtroom.

When Stuart Schulberg and his editor, Joseph Zigman, made Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today, they intertwined the courtroom scenes with excerpts from The Nazi Plan and Nazi Concentration Camps.

A full account of the search for the Nazi photographs and film footage conducted by Budd Schulberg, Stuart Schulberg, and their OSS colleagues, appears in a forthcoming book called The Celluloid Noose.

General Eisenhower reviewing the carnage at Ohrdruf concentration camp on April 12, 1945, the first to be liberated by the American Army.

Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today was meant to be shown in the United States as a stirring example of American and Allied justice, and as a lesson for posterity, but the film’s U.S. release was apparently suppressed, despite the fact that, in April 1947, Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Petersen had written:

“The very way in which the Trial was set up and conducted and the evidence which it produced constitute an historical document that should be of use, not only in motion picture theaters, but in schools and universities for many years to come.”

(Source: Carbon copy of letter from Assistant Secretary of War Howard C. Petersen to General Lucius D. Clay, American Military Governor of Germany, in the Schulberg Family Archive.)

Variety, June 11, 1947 (Schulberg Family Archive)

Superseded by the Soviets

By this time, the Soviets had decided to produce their own film, Sud Narodov (Judgment of the People), which they released not only in Germany, but also in New York. On May 21, 1947, the New York Post reported:

“The Stanley Theatre in Times Square will show the Nuremberg Trial film. But this is the Russian version. The complete, four-power movie is being made by Pare Lorentz and will be ready in two months…Schulberg & Zigman are in Berlin completing the movie based on the official transcript and stressing the real philosophy of the trials.”

But that same month, Lorentz (in the U.S.) cabled Schulberg (in Berlin) that he was resigning his post in frustration, although he hoped to remain involved with the film.

Two weeks later, on June 8, 1947, Variety began digging behind the scenes and reported: “Internal U.S. Army Snarl let Reds Beat Yanks on Nuremberg Film.”

Washington Post Exposé

In 1949, a dogged Washington Post reporter named John Norris tried to investigate why the War Department would neither release the film itself, nor sell it to Pare Lorentz so that he could complete and distribute the English-language version.  No one would go on record.

Norris presumed that wide release of a film indicting Germany on war crimes might impede political and public acceptance of the plan to rebuild Germany’s economy, a vital plank in the Marshall Plan’s approach to European recovery.

To complicate matters, in the middle of 1948, the Soviets blockaded Berlin. The new threat was Soviet expansionism. While attempting to ferret out the reasons for the government’s censorship of the film, Norris speculated that some “have suggested that there are those in authority in the United States who feel that Americans are so simple that they can hate only one enemy at a time. Forget the Nazis, they advise, and concentrate on the Reds.”

Thus, the English-language version was never properly finished and never released to theaters in the United States.

The restoration involved two major challenges, one pictorial, and one aural. Along the way, a third challenge appeared – this one musical.

First: Creating a New Negative

It was decided at the outset that the first 1948 version of the film would be the standard, and that no picture element would be changed. But with the original negative lost, what master material could be used? Sandra Schulberg had been consulting with Les Waffen, the Motion Picture chief at NARA (U.S. National Archives & Records Administration), about this question for several years, and they planned to use a 35mm print kept in cold storage in Kansas. On close inspection, however, the image was too degraded and the contrast too high. Another NARA print and two duplicate negatives were also inferior candidates; and they varied in length, which meant frames or entire shots had been cut. With time growing short, the Berlin Bundesarchiv came to the rescue, and shipped its 35mm “lavender” print — a fine grain master positive — to the U.S. on loan.

There was jubilation when the inspection report showed each of the eight reels in excellent condition, with minimal shrinkage. The picture contained more detail, and the low contrast meant the lavender print offered the best chance to create a good quality negative. The German print was also the most complete print in existence, and its German language soundtrack was crisp. By the end of September 2009, a new 35mm film negative had been created under the supervision of Russ Suniewick at Colorlab, in Rockville, MD, a facility that specializes in archival restoration and preservation. The negative was then sent to DuArt Film & Video in New York, where new 35mm release prints were made under the supervision of DuArt Chairman Irwin Young, and his associate Steve Blakely.

Second: Reconstructing the Sound Track

Meanwhile, a complex sound reconstruction was underway. Sandra Schulberg and Josh Waletzky’s goal was to create an international soundtrack that would permit modern audiences to hear the voices of the English-, French-, and Russian-speaking prosecutors, and the voices of the German witnesses, defendants and defense attorneys. They also wanted audiences to hear the original German spoken in The Nazi Plan, the evidentiary film presented at the trial that weaves in and out of Nuremberg. Stuart Schulberg had emphasized the importance of hearing live sound at the time:

“The greatest technical difficulty involved the use of original recorded testimony from the trial itself.  It was important, if the film’s authenticity was to be convincing, that Goering and his colleagues speak their lame lines of defense in their own, well-known voices… It became necessary to secure the wax recordings of the proceedings stored in Nuremberg, to re-record the pertinent words on film and then to synchronize that sound recording with the lip movements of the respective defendants… Many weeks after the original request, the records arrived from Nuremberg.  The discs were re-recorded on film in half of one day, and about a month later the meticulous job of ‘dubbing’ the original voices of the defendants was completed.”

(Stuart Schulberg, article titled Nürnberg, Information Bulletin, No. 164, June 28, 1949, Office of Military Government for Germany, Berlin.)

With Lisa Hartjens duplicating the trial recordings at NARA, Josh Waletzky began the painstaking work of trying to match them to picture. Here he encountered the same problems faced by the original filmmakers, Stuart Schulberg and Joe Zigman. Although it was Stuart Schulberg’s wish to use as much original sound from the trial as possible, he was relatively limited. He and Zigman got around the problem by using extensive narration and picture that was not synchronized to sound. In the subsequent English-language version of the film, all of the voices – German, French, Russian, and English – were almost entirely obscured by narration. The sound reconstruction required laborious patience – and many compromises. It became obvious that sync would remain an elusive goal, even where it was possible to substitute live sound for narration.

While Waletzky finessed the sync sound issues, Schulberg concentrated on the creation of subtitles to mesh with new narration. Thanks to Stuart Schulberg’s documents, she had access to the original German and English scripts. With the help of Jenny Levison and Lisa Hartjens, an English-German “dialogue list” was transcribed. Then began the fascinating job of comparing the dialogue list with the original scripts, with the 1948 English and German narration tracks, with the spoken words recorded at the trial, and with the court transcript. Many translation issues arose.

How accurately did the original narration translate what was being said at the trial? To what extent did the narration reflect the prosecution’s spin on the testimony and textual evidence? To what extent did the narration reflect a noticeable “re-education” point of view on the part of U.S. Military Government? How much liberty could be taken to clean up cumbersome syntax and improve on the translation without changing the character of the original film? Should one use the English term “Final Solution” for what Goering referred to as the “Endlösung der Judenfrage?” Another tricky example was translation of the word “Weltanschauung,” which the original film conveyed as “ideology.” Schulberg and Waletzky (who speak German and Yiddish respectively) pondered and debated the right word choices in the weeks leading up to the recording session, and again before the subtitles were burned into the first 35mm print.

September 22, 2009 was an exciting day. Liev Schreiber (star of Taking Woodstock, Defiance, The Manchurian Candidate, etc.) recorded the voice-over script at Sync Sound in New York. To preserve the aural ambience of the original track, a period RCA microphone was used in addition to a state-of-the-art Neumann. Schreiber’s vitality, and his ease with all the German pronunciations, infused the narration with a fluid energy.

Third: Recreating the Original Score

The search for the original music tracks had begun in July. Without them it would be impossible to excerpt those sections of the score that were married to the narration. Ronny Loewy, one of the Nuremberg film experts in Germany volunteered to search. Although hope of finding the music tracks quickly dimmed, Loewy reported surprising news. The composer was Hans-Otto Borgmann, who, in 1933, had composed the music for a Nazi propaganda film Hitlerjunge Quex. One of his songs from the film – Unsere Fahne flattert uns voran, with lyrics adapted from a text by Baldur von Schirach – became the official anthem of the Hitler Youth.

Borgmann’s apparent ties to the Nazi Party stunned Schulberg and Waletzky. How could he have been cleared to work on Nuremberg?

Bundesarchiv researcher Babette Heusterberg reported that Borgmann had been a member of Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation (NSBO), the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (KfdK), and the Reichsfilmkammer, but there was no evidence of his membership in the Nazi Party (NSDAP). According to records she found, Borgmann was interviewed by the Office of Military Government, Information Control Branch, in Berlin on October 20, 1946, and barred from all cultural activities. He waited some months before filing for an employment permit again, citing a possible job offer from Eric Pommer, chief of the OMGUS Motion Picture Branch. The files show that Borgmann’s case was reconsidered on September 5, 1947. By then, the U.S. Army had no objection to his employment in the U.S. Sector, and reclassified him. He had his Persilschein.

(Persil was the name of a popular laundry detergent in Germany. Persilschein entered the postwar vocabulary as a slang term to mean a denazification certificate or work permit issued by the occupying governments. In political terms, it signified a clean bill of health, but could also mean a whitewash.)

The music tracks were lost, but Schulberg found Borgmann’s handwritten, fully-orchestrated, musical cues for the Nuremberg film in her father’s files. With this as guide, composer John Califra synthesized the music obscured by the original narration. He worked closely with Waletzky, a composer himself, to precisely match the reconstructed music to the rest of Borgmann’s score. Another enormous problem had been solved.

NARA – THE U.S NATIONAL ARCHIVES