by Christopher Fulkerson
CF Conducting Maxwell Davies
Vesalii icones
This is a very fine documentary, very compassionately narrated by Christopher Plummer. Most of the bonus material, on a separate DVD here, is of the "Holocaust Atrocity" type; very important to have seen, but not strictly about the trial, where two of the films were shown as evidence. Several of the persons are well portrayed in this footage, especially Robert Jackson, and Goering, whom he never quite mastered, and some sense of the gist of the trial comes across. Mostly, this is some of the most important film footage ever taken, and guess who is doing it? Director John Ford, who was in the army at the time.
Clearly the Holocaust bonus features are not in the realm of artistic expression. The first short is a news announcement from 1945; you can see on the list that the grandest mistake of the trial, that of indicting the wrong Krupp, is already evident: this list says "Gustav" Krupp, but he had been practically comatose in bed for years; it was his son Alfried who should have been prosecuted, and whom all Allied lists of war criminals had included. The final list of defendants had been made from earlier lists projected for several years; some bureaucrat simply wrote the wrong name down at the last minute. It might be interesting to know who made that mistake, which was not the only one of its kind - only after the astonished Russians pointed out that Adolf Hitler’s name was not even included was he listed as a war criminal just a few weeks before his suicide. Of the several accounts I have read none suggest whether or not prosecutor Robert Jackson knew exactly why the Krupp mistake had been made, but it was an historic error, since the failure to correct it meant that no industrialists were tried at Nuernberg - so guess what Earth's biggest problems are now about? The evil effects of industry. Eisenhauer’s later warning about the “Military Industrial Complex” didn’t have the structural place that the war crimes trial had, and we’ve never actually cleaned things up, have we?
Humiliating though it would have been to admit, Jackson should have presented the clerical error – for that was what it was - as such. Instead he simply tried to turn from the father to the son, and the court would not allow this. As facts about the mistake were presented to the judges, they did the correct thing. They were thinking of justice as the aspects of the case were presented to them; a gigantic snafoo might have been easier to deal with than Jackson’s apparent lunge for the next in line. Though admitting and correcting a bureaucratic error would have humiliated the Allies at the beginning, they would certainly have survived this.
The second bonus film is of America footage taken after the liberation of the European camps. Some of these images are now famous; none of them are easy to take. The section in which the German townspeople are forced to go into the camp is pretty important. They are all smiling to the camera on the way in; the smiles are gone very soon. There is a “ghost” of some kind during the Belsen scene: just after some bodies are thrown into a pit, immediately BEFORE the words “German woman guards were ordered to bury the dead,” an apparently dead body can be clearly seen to rise of its own mobility in the pit. If you miss seeing the “ghost,” but hear those words, rewind about ten seconds and watch it again, until you see it. This image was included in the Delage documentary.
I find the Russian atrocity film is the hardest to view. Both of these latter were shown as evidence at Nuremberg.
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First posted 3/23/2011
Copyright c 2011 by Christopher Fulkerson.