Below is attached the 2000 film “Infamy on Trial” which covers the thinking behind the Nuremberg Trials, as well as a picturing of how the Trial Process developed, primarily in the minds of the Americans and English legal minds.
It’s pretty good history at the surface, so a good way to improve your understanding of history, especially if you were born after 1960.
The film takes some liberties, especially with the characterizations of the individual Nazi defendants, and which were tailored by understandings belonging to the three generations that know much about the war. For instance, my generation, Baby Boomers (1946-64), were more familiar with the actors of WWII, because of Winston Churchill’s epic post-war history, and William L Shirer’s Berlin Diary and Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I spent my summer months reading in high school. Shirer was a press correspondent from the 1930s forward. They are still are cited today.
The “Nuremberg Trial” story take up when the Third Reich and the war-fighting ended in 1945. Consequently, most of the men mentioned in this film depiction of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46, will be unknown to students from the 1960s on, titles more than names such as 1) cabinet ministers 2) economic leaders, 3)military planners-generals, and not battlefield officers, and of course, the executioners in the death camps and also mostly Hitler’s personal staff, such as General Jodl, who was swiftly executed whereas much of his property was returned to his widow, since he had not been directly involved in killing, but rarely left Hitler’s side.There were also propagandists, such as Julius Streicher, who ran the anti-Jew rag in Munich, Der Sturmer. (A vile, hideous man, he did little to try and talk himself out of his fate, and was gleefully convicted and executed.) But Germany’s propagandist-in-chief, Joseph Goebbels, a true genius of the art, was able to kill himself and his family in Hitler’s bunker, and avoid the theatre.
The central Nazi figure is (and was, in fact) Herman Goering, the Deputy Fuhrer who was able to kill himself before being hung. He thought hanging was beneath him. (I thought Brian Cox did a good job with his characterization.)
Walk around most major universities today, especially elite campuses, and you will find young student versions of these people on the university staff. And if you can recall the attempted lynching of Clarence Thomas in 1991, chaired by none other than (then) Sen Joe Biden, and in a 7-7 tie the Committee failed to move Thomas favorably to the Senate floor, where Thomas won anyway, 52-48, despite the efforts of Anita Hill (and her sponsors) to paint him as a dirty old man.
Thomas was only Round One, for in 2018, President Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, where he was waylaid by a member of the Stanford medical faculty, Christine Blasey Ford, who swore that when she was still underage, but drinking beer (no big deal) at a pool party in Baltimore, Kavanaugh had raped her. It was only after 20+ years later that she decided to lodge her complaint. No one except the academic Left was shocked. But since no upper-middle class country club friend from Baltimore stepped forward to corroborate Ms Blasey-Ford’s testimony, the matter was quickly dropped and Kavanaugh, like Justice Thomas two decades earlier, was sworn in on the Supreme Court.
Most well-read citizens today know more, and feel more, about the two political events I just described than in the effect upon millions of Europeans by the 24 men represented in this original “first” Nuremberg Trial. (There were others, going on for over 20 years, Adolf Eichmann the last, who was captured in South America then brought to stand trial in Israel, where he was tried and executed.
Again, there’s not a Baby Boomer who does not some part of this story.
All the historical German figures show up in this film, mostly with a single speaking line. Interestingly, a few were acquitted, or with small sentences. But most got the death penalty…by hanging, which I still consider to be an appropriate punishment.
(But we do not know if any one at Nuremberg faced that rope as well as Saddam Hussein did a few years back.)
Modern readers today, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z, in diminishing levels of knowledge, know little of the type of person, or process….or how all the pieces fit.
The Nuremberg Trials were not unlike a massive criminal cleansing of the Disney Corporation, or the Bud Light fiasco with that Mulvaney kid. “The Nuremberg Trials” laid out how criminal gangs were organized, top to bottom, but sadly, once they were allowed to grow in size and wealth and power also how many corporate endeavors are now carried out, especially if they involve that all-important element…government…which, going back to 1933 and the rise of Hitler, even small businesses in Germany knew they could get along without, but were denied. And the state owned their children. Hitler took power in ’33, but it would be 10 years fully into that regime before the madness had blossomed throughout the German world with that first generation.
It was Hitler’s mad vision and that “management team” they had put together that would carry Germany through the next generation, and the next, but they got too greedy, too fast, and blew it all within 15 years.
My smaller point is here: All these names in this film represent element of government that would have been familiar to Baby Boomers simply because our dads had served in the war, and we wanted to know we had a first-hand part in the events that straightened it back up.
Which brings us to the Modern Left in America, which from the early 1970s was re-organized in the same manner as the Nazi Party was programed 1933-1945, with 100s of movable parts, only no individual part was written into the final picture.
For over 40 years we have had to endure the Modern Left “god-damning the attitudes, behavior and holy writ philosophy”, and our comity with neighbors, religious expressions, patriotism, love of family…all while standing aloof, from a distance watching Americans-on-the-street acting their patriotism, neighborliness and morality out…all the while with attitudes of class and morality that eased into university-doctrine with the rise of Marxism, acquired that had begun seeping into university curricula, starting with the elites in the 1920’s, today now totally controlled every university program not controlled by hard science, although my eldest son had to turn away from hard science Ornithology because, in his field sponsor’s opinion (raptor birds), he had no future with teaching or university appointments….why?…because he is a Christian.
By 1990, want-to-be-scientists had to be totally smitten with Darwinism ideologically even though every real old-school scientist at university knew it was a hoax. PhD-applicants who wore God on their sleeve, and carried a Bible in the front seat of their car, were advised to seek career-employment elsewhere.
This is where Hollywood and Marx are joined at the ankle, based on moral and political principles that they acquired by looking in a mirror the past 60 years.
What’s interesting in this Nuremberg film is that its headliner is Alec Baldwin, known recently more for “accidentally” or “indifferently” shooting/killing a camera-gal on the set of “Rust” a little over 2 years ago than any film, and generally just as an indifferent sonuvabitch.
I really don’t know anything about his politics, but I knew a lot of Ukrainian Nazi-lovers from the early 1990s, mostly in their early 20s, of the “university-sort”. There is a lot of “self-love” and self-indulgence in their leanings toward Nazi thinking.
In short, it’s a class thing, about that person one sees in the mirror.
Now, Baldwin does a good job in this film, as the chief American prosecutor. attorney. But I think Lefties are operating under the self-delusion that it’s the nose-and-butt-pickers are the people Nature has handed over to them to rule over.
Just watch the movie and tell me how much of our modern political America do you see in it.
This is just a theme, a first step into analysis, because America still has that one capability the Germans, throughout their history never had, and that is the ability to shout “Hell, no!”
I’d love to hear back from you.
