Court TV Revisits Nuremberg War Crimes Trials
Try this for a courtroom fix to banish the post-O.J. trial blues: 24 men accused of conspiring to commit murders in the millions and shattering all past precedent of evil.
How do Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop and their Nazi Germany brethren plead? “I declare myself, in the sense of the indictment, not guilty,” they recite, stoic and unrepentant.
The defendants, their prosecutors and evidence of still-unfathomable genocide and destruction were captured on film at the Nuremberg trials, the legal aftermath of World War II.
Court TV, which brought us the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial, now makes amends by presenting a condensed version of what history surely will judge a more worthy contender for trial-of-the-century honors.
Marking the 50th anniversary of the international tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, Court TV this week is showing 15 hours of original trial footage, along with interviews, background reports and commentary by legal analysts.
The programming will air in daily segments, starting today, from 2-5 p.m., with excerpts on “Prime Time Justice” from 5-7 p.m. and again from 8-10 p.m.
On Monday, Nov. 20, the day the trial opened in 1945, a special three-hour “Prime Time Justice” further examines the topic. It will air from 5-8 p.m. and again from 8-11 p.m.
Court TV technicians and trial experts painstakingly matched film to a separate audio track made of the proceedings, using court transcripts as a guide.
The images drawn from Army and newsreel footage are gripping - the obvious arrogance of the prisoners, the stately dignity of the legal players, the wartime pictures that puts a face on some of the slaughtered.
The vast sum of it all: Nuremberg represented a war-ravaged world’s attempt to assert the victory of law and civilization over the dark forces that nearly destroyed all order.
Court TV initially intended the look back as prelude to its coverage of the first international war crimes tribunal since Nuremberg - next year’s proceedings against Bosnian Serb Dusko Tadic in The Hague, Netherlands.
“We were looking to put the Hague trial in perspective by doing the only other one like it that’s ever happened,” said Steven Brill, Court TV’s founder and chief executive.
“We wondered if there was any footage. Executive producer Steve Johnson found out there is all this great stuff buried in the National Archives. So we said, ‘Let’s put it together,”’ Brill said.
His commitment to the project grew as perspective on the Simpson spectacle seemed increasingly lost.
“The more I kept reading news reports and watching television broadcasts … describe the O.J. Simpson trial as the trial of the century,” said Brill, the more he felt compelled to show “if you’re going to be dumb enough to call anything the trial of the century, this (Nuremberg) was.”
The year-long hearing was conducted by a tribunal consisting of judges from the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union.
(Twelve subsequent trials, heard solely by U.S. judges, were held at Nuremberg because of America’s desire to more fully document the scope of Nazi malevolence.)
The defendants, including Martin Bormann in absentia, were accused by the international community of crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity and of conspiracy in those crimes.
The trials did not bring the accused to their knees. The Germans showed “no remorse whatsoever,” said Benjamin B. Ferencz, chief prosecutor in the subsequent U.S. hearings at Nuremberg.