ABBY MANN

Nobody said it more eloquently than Robert Jackson. He said: “It is customary for every generation to think of their own time as standing at the apex of civilization from which the deficiencies of preceding ages may be patronizingly looked at. But the reality is that the present century will hold a record in the book of years as the most bloody of all annals. No century ever witnessed slaughter on such a scale. Such cruelties and inhumanities. The terror of Torquemada pales before our time. It is not an irresponsible prophesy to say that this century may yet succeed in bringing down civilization.

    “This is mankind’s desperate effort to prevent the barbarities from happening again. We are going to try to do something that has never been done before. To hold the leaders of station and rank who do not soil their hands with blood but know how to use lesser folks for that. We want the designers without whose evil architecture the world would not have been so scourged. We want the future leaders to know they will be held to account. We also want every person in Germany today to understand how responsible that some of them are who did not actually commit crimes but remained passive when they might have, together, prevented what happened.”

    Some of the greatest lawyers in the world were part of the Nuremberg trials and worked to find a legal system that the whole world could be responsible to. They did a magnificent job and created it.

    But less than ten years later, it was considered bad taste to bring up the subject of German guilt for the events that had happened during the Third Reich. There was the Cold War and Germany was suddenly our ally. One only had to look at a map of Europe to see why. Germany was in a strategic place to help or hinder the impending conflict. It was now America’s official policy that the German people were not responsible for what had happened under Hitler. They had been hypnotized by a great orator, Hitler, and the camps were built places so remote that they had no inkling of what was happening in them. And the truth is that in every one of those towns some of the next door neighbors were taken in handcuffs out of their houses in front of their eyes. That every town and village had a railroad station where the cries of children in cattle cars being taken to Dachau and Buchenwald were heard in their houses in the middle of the night.

    In my research in Germany I talked to Robert Kempner, a prominent lawyer who actually prosecuted Hitler for leading a beer hall putsch and was responsible for sending him to six months in prison. I asked Kempner whether Hitler was an orator that hypnotized the German people. He replied, “That was not an orator. That was a noisy, vulgar fellow. He always spoke as though he were in a beer hall.”

    While in jail, Hitler wrote a book called Mein Kampf. The book was badly written but it became popular because it touched a chord in German people. He cried for vengeance against those who had been responsible for the Versailles Treaty, which took away some of Germany’s land and its power and its self-respect.

    Upon his release from jail, the National Socialist Party of which Hitler was an inconspicuous member was suddenly looked upon with new eyes. The passion was there, but he had to be cleaned up. They bought him clothes and even had him study with an acting coach. He became the National Socialist candidate for Chancellor.

    Germany was in chaos. There were more than twenty candidates of diverse parties. To everyone’s surprise, Hitler was elected chancellor with only thirty percent of the German people’s support.

    The first months of Hitler’s regime were a disaster. The economic situation was still in shambles and his promise to restore Germany’s self-respect had never begun. His mannerisms were imitated and mocked in Berlin cabarets. It seemed that Hitler was headed for an inevitable defeat until an event happened.

    What was the event? One of the most sacred buildings in Germany was destroyed by a fire. The fire had been sent by a retarded Dutchman. He failed because he was discovered and arrested by Hermann Goering’s police. Shortly afterwards, the police were ordered to complete the fire that the Dutchman had started. Dr. Josef Goebbels, one of the brightest men in Hitler’s cabinet, exploited the fire by saying the Dutchman was working for the communists and Jews and it was a signal of an impending revolution. The Dutchman was tried in a show trial and hung.

    One could compare it to what happened on 9/11 in New York. Suddenly the disparate parties pulled together and there was a united Germany.

Members of the National Socialist party built up Hitler. They invested all their chips in his psychopathic personality. They intoxicated him with power and adulation. They fed his hates and aroused his fears. They put a loaded gun in his eager hands. They left it up to him to pull the trigger.

    Pull the trigger Hitler did. He demanded restoring the land that had been taken away from them with the Versailles Treaty. The Rhineland. The Allies felt that it was a German matter and did not intrude. Hitler sent his troops into the Rhineland without opposition.

    What about the Jews? Did Hitler from the beginning have a plan to annihilate millions of them in the camps? He was anti-Semitic and came from a family that was anti-Semitic but was wary about using extreme measures against them. When Crystal Nächt, the night when anti-Semitism exploded in Berlin, obscenities were written on the windows of Jewish merchants’ stores and synagogues were set on fire, rabbis were made to wash the streets, Hitler distanced himself from the events and said he had no responsibility for the “excesses.” He was afraid that the public would be revolted and denounce it. But there was no public outcry and hardly any mention of it in the newspapers. Many people praised what happened and said it was about time.

    Hitler now saw that anti-Semitism was not a weakness but a political strength. Would Hitler have finally come to genocide if Crystal Night had been denounced? One can only conjecture.

    What was Hitler’s solution for the so-called “Jewish problem”? He would hold them for ransom. Hitler said, “You always talk about the Jews and how I’m treating them? Take them!” The original plan was to send them to Madagascar. Eichmann tried to arrange for the money, but the deal was not closed. Brazil was one possibility but the government wouldn’t go along with it. Uganda was another but it fell through. There were also attempts to even put them in Palestine, but the British were against it. Nobody cared enough.

Next came Austria. Hitler elaborated on the rumor that Austrians were mistreating Germans and the need for living space. Chamberlain negotiated a deal with Hitler that would be “peace in our time.” Hitler marched into Austria without interference. His reception was glorious. The natives of Austria held up signs telling him how much they welcomed him. Flowers were strewn in his path.

    The weakness of the opposing forces to Germany amazed the world. The National Socialist Party was helping people to perceive Hitler as the image of a great statesman, and the first in decades to give Germany a triumph in foreign policy. The economy was booming. The head of the protestant church in Bavaria, Bishop Meisner, publicly offered prayers for Hitler, thanking God for every success which through your grace you have so far granted him for the good of our people. Even critics said that Hitler had restored German national pride.

    The further battles of Hitler against the most of the rest of the world is history now. When victory in Europe seemed in the balance, Hitler made perhaps the biggest military mistake in modern times. Instead of continuing to fight a possibly victorious war against Britain and her allies, Hitler made perhaps the biggest military mistake in modern times. He declared war on the Soviet Union. Hitler, in his warped mind, could not accept a future partnered with what he thought were the mediocre and unwashed people of the Soviet Union against the English people who he admired as being gentlemanly and aristocratic. But the Soviet army displayed more strength than Hitler had ever dreamed of and defeated his armies again and again.

    Hitler continued the war far longer than was necessary. He refused please to leave Berlin as the Russian and Allied forces grew nearer.

Hitler gave his last statement to those who were with him in the bunker. He reiterated that the Jews were the core of all the problems of Germany and the world. He added a new enemy: the German people. They did not deserve to survive because they let Germany be defeated. He ordered that the subways be bombed, and the churches and schools and official buildings be similarly attacked. The others in the room looked at him with amazement. This was the man in whom they had trusted everything to go into a war against the world. Hitler was defeated.

    This was the moment where the great work of Jackson and the other brilliant people who worked on the trials be realized? They had been defeated before they began. Atom bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. I know the justifications of it. We were in the war with Japan. Dropping the bomb would save lives. American soldiers would not have to invade Japan. Was there no way of showing the Japanese people and the world the power of the weapons by dropping them on uninhabited land? Or some other way besides causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings? Was it worth a try? But Truman confided to friends that the real reason for dropping the bombs was to show that the Americans meant business and to frighten the communists. It frightened them, but a what price? Did this incredible event create any serious discussion in the media or in Congress? The questions of one of the most momentous decisions that has left the world on the brink of disaster did not seem to merit time or space. As time went on, the memory of Truman was shaped into a little American hero. A book which won a Pulitzer Prize and a television film won an Emmy. People seemed to accept it without questions. It reveals as much as anything I can think of that what we accept as history can sometimes be a lie.

Dramatizing the Nuremberg trials as they really were was something akin to starting another war. The government had made its position clear. The German people were not responsible or even aware of the millions of deaths. But I was far from convinced.

    I went to Germany and I met some of the participants in the Nazi regime. Leni Riefenstahl was one. She had done the infamous film which helped so much to promote Hitler, Triumph of the Will. When I questioned her about the camps and what had happened, she said, of course, she knew very little about it. She didn’t think that even Hitler really knew. It was Goebbels and Himmler and the others. I questioned her about Hitler. She said he was terrible yet wonderful in many ways. There was something electric about him. She had gone to see him in the last days in his bunker. And she wanted me to know that if he had asked her, she would have stayed and died with him.

The most poignant meeting that I had was with Mrs. Jodl, the widow of a general who had been convicted at Nuremberg. It was in her apartment in Munich. She told me that she and her husband hated Hitler. He was part of the revenge the victors always take on the vanquished. Her husband had been a military man all his life. She went from official to official asking that he be permitted the dignity of a firing squad. But he was hanged with the others. She told me for a long while she had never left the house. Drank. She hated every American she had ever known. But she discovered one can’t live with hate. She said, “We have to forget. We have to forget if we are to go on living.” She was writing her memoirs. But somehow she was unable to finish. I thought I knew why. There were things she couldn’t bear to face. Yet was there no truth in what she was saying? Wouldn’t it be better to forget?

    I went to see Robert Kempner again, the man who had prosecuted Hitler, and discussed it with him. I repeated her words: “We must forget. We must forget if we are to go on living.” Kempner said, “You know what’s wrong with that? Then all these people would have died for no reason and no one was responsible and it will happen again.”

    I finished the script. The heart of what I was trying to say is in a speech by the central character, an American judge. It was this: “This trial has shown that under the stress of a national crisis, ordinary men, even able and extraordinary men, can delude themselves into the commission of crimes and atrocities so vast and heinous as to stagger the imagination. No one who has sat through this trial can ever forget. The sterilization of men because of their political beliefs…the murder of children…how easily it can happen. There are those in our country today, too, who speak of the protection of the country. Of survival. The answer to that is: survival as what? A country isn’t a rock. And it isn’t an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for, when standing for something is the most difficult.”

    We gathered a cast that was remarkable for television: Claude Rains, Melvyn Douglas, Paul Lukas and a young German actor, Maximilian Schell.

    Before we could get into rehearsal, people in the Eisenhower administration had read the script and said it would hurt our efforts to get the German people on our side in the struggle with Russians. They persuaded CBS to cancel it.

    We met with the cast and our wonderful director, George Roy Hill. We were going to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times saying that it was important that the American people see this production. CBS decided with the controversy building that it was the better part of valor to go ahead with the production.

    But then again something happened. One of the sponsors, American Gas, Inc., had sent a memo demanding that we delete any mention of gas. They didn’t want to be held responsible for what happened in the Holocaust under any circumstances. So that when the climactic moment came in the production when Judge Haywood as played by Claude Rains says to Paul Lukas, the German judge, “I understand the pressures you faced. No man can say how he would have faced those pressures himself unless he had actually been tested. But how can you expect me to forgive sending millions of people to gas ovens?” American Gas took matters into their own hands and had an executive at CBS pump out the words “gas ovens” so that Claude Rains mouthed the words but no sound came out.

    This incident overshadowed, as far as the media was concerned, anything else about the production. The pumping out of the word “gas.” That was what was important. Not German guilt. Not our own lack of responsibility or that millions of people were killed without reason. Censorship was what was important. People who watched the television show didn’t feel that way. A record number of calls for a dramatic program flooded the network. However, the Emmys reacted the way they usually do to the evaluation of the media. We didn’t receive one nomination.

I felt that what was said in Judgment at Nuremberg had to be given a wide audience somehow. I made efforts to have the script produced as a feature film, but to no avail. It was turned down by practically every movie studio. A major producer told me, “You made your point. Go on to something else.”

    I tried to put Judgment at Nuremberg out of my mind. I showed a copy of another television drama I had written, A Child is Waiting, to the wonderful Katherine Hepburn. It was the first drama to deal with retarded children. Hepburn wanted to do it. I went to Europe to find the right director. I’ll never forget the moment my agent called me in London and told me that Spencer Tracy who wanted to do the role of the American judge. Katherine Hepburn had shown him a copy of Judgment at Nuremberg.

    The first reading of the screenplay now to be done as a motion picture with the new cast was quite an occasion. Surrounding me were the figures who were legends in their time. Figures I had watched when I was a small kid in East Pittsburgh as an escape from my everyday dreary life. Besides Tracy, there was Marlene Dietrich playing the general’s widow, Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Richard Widmark, and the young actor that had performed so brilliantly in the television production, Maximillian Schell. After the reading Tracy said, “Let’s get one thing straight. The role that’s going to win an Academy Award is the one that Max is playing. I’m just doing it because I want it done.”

    It was United Artists’ crazy idea to open the film in Berlin. On the plane going over was not only Judy Garland but a group of reporters, including Max Lerner, who was considered a great “liberal,” but who strongly objected to the film. He said it would hurt our country, “It’s going to embarrass the administration.” Judy answered him saying, “If this administration could be embarrassed, it would have dropped dead a long time ago.”

    When we reached Berlin, we were all tense about what the reaction of the Germans would be. Tracy was ill, but he came, too.

    I went to see Tracy in his hotel room in Berlin. There had been some talk about protests being formed to protest the film. I suggested that perhaps it would be best if Tracy didn’t come. Tracy said, “I want to go.”

    We walked down the street. Tracy said with this acerbic humor, “I hope we get out of this alive.” All of a sudden we heard a wild, hysterical yell. Someone grabbed Tracy from behind. Tracy was too frightened to look around and see who it was. The two of them continued to walk almost half a block with the figure behind Tracy still holding on to him. The figure turned out to be Montgomery Clift, who had been drinking and on drugs and was trying to express his affection for his idol.

    There was a deadly pall as the festive dinner that had been arranged after the showing. A press conference followed. A woman got up and said to Tracy, “You know, Mr. Tracy, the German people love you perhaps more than any other American actor. We find it hard to believe that you would appear in such a harsh movie about our people. We read in an interview where you said, in reply to some movies you were doing, that you did them for the money. Is that why you did this one? You don’t really believe what this movie says, do you? “ Tracy put his tongue in his cheek, in extraordinary Tracy fashion, and said, “Every word.”

    Judy and I decided we would stay over a couple of days to see what was happening in the theaters with Nuremberg before going to New York for the opening there. After the showing, we came upon a young man who was saying to whoever would listen that it was a disgrace to show the film in Berlin. It turned out that he was the son of one of the judges portrayed in the film. I tried to talk with him, trying to find out what his feelings were. One of the publicity guys from United Artists called me by name. “Are you Abby Mann?” I was silent. “You wrote this?” He advanced toward me and spoke to me half in German and half in English. I tried to put things into perspective. Judy Garland kept tugging me and said, “Let’s go.” A crowd gathered around us. There were murmurs from the people surrounding us that I didn’t understand, having no knowledge of German. Police entered the lobby. The publicity guy from United Artists had thought it was best to bring them in. They escorted us out swiftly.

    The fate of Judgment at Nuremberg as a motion picture was far different than how it had been received on television. The film was nominated for twelve Academy Awards. Max won for Best Actor and I won for Best Screenplay. But the award I prize most was not from the Academy. It was in a wire I received from Tracy in which he said, “All I can say is if the lights go out now I still win. It was a great privilege to say those words. Love Spence.”

    A book called Taking Charge, a transcription of the Lyndon Johnson White House tapes edited by Michael Beschloss, was a bombshell. What is so attractive that leaders cannot forego a chance to cover themselves with glory by creating a war? Johnson’s conversations go some way toward explaining it. Lyndon Johnson was a pretty good president up until Vietnam. But I guess he wanted to be a greater one. There of course were tensions about Vietnam. That the northern part of it had a communist regime and there could be a domino effect on the rest of the countries in that area. But was no justification for war until Johnson announced that a ship of ours was attacked by the North Vietnamese. Later on, almost as a non sequitor, Johnson admitted that the report of the attack was not valid. Not valid? Thousands and thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians were killed and no less than fifty thousand Americans, of course. But the conversations reported in the book reveal something even more shocking. Johnson’s conversations about Vietnam with Humphrey and others had nothing to do with the rights or the wrongs of the war or regret for all the deaths it had caused. What concerned Johnson, now that he knew we were losing the war, was how he was going to “get out of it” without hurting his political standing.

    But Vietnam was not the end. There was Rwanda. There was Bosnia and Milosevic. Genocide was not dead.

    As a result the United Nations created an International Criminal court for bringing to justice perpetrators of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. One hundred thirty countries joined the court.

    On January 1, 2001, President Clinton signed the treaty for the entrance of the United States into the Court. He said, “In taking this action, we join more than 130 other countries to reaffirm our strong support for international accountability. The United States has a history of commitment to this principle based on our involvement in the Nuremberg Tribunals.”

    The new president, George W. Bush, withdrew the United States from participating in any such effort. The reason given was that if there should be such a court it would inhibit the ability of the United States to use its military to meet alliance obligations and participate in multinational operations. The talk was that Bush might be afraid that one day he and the members of his government might become defendants.

    Then there was 9/11 and Bush put an arm around a fireman and spoke into a loudspeaker and the whole country seemed to be united the way we had not been for years. After all, we had never been attacked on our home ground and thousands of people being killed.

    But then came Bush’s idea of striking back. In retaliation, we attacked Afghanistan, which seem to make some sense because there was some proof of a connection between Afghanistan and 9/11. Then there was Iraq. The crimes that Hussein had committed against his own countrymen were incredible. But so were the crimes of Gaddafi. And Iran. And North Korea. Bush and people in his administration said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and Hussein had met with member so of a government in Africa to obtain radium that would make a nuclear weapon possible. But later we discovered that there were doubts about the weapons of mass destruction and about the meeting in Africa. We learned that Bush and his people had been planning for an attack against Iraq for years. What was the motive? That the war against him in 1991 with his father was incomplete. That there was an attack on his father’s life?

    Bush gave speeches from them until now characterizing the war as something between “good guys and bad guys.” About “freedom.” And yet we all know that the conflict is not that simple. That’ Iraq’s idea of freedom and ours are different. That we have invaded a country with many different divisions and do not like the feeling of being occupied. And yet at the beginning he was allowed to say these things without comment. It was only later that newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post confronted him. Let us hope it’s not too late.

    One thing is certain: unless we look at our own shortcomings and the terrible mistakes we have been part of, we will never be the country that we once thought we were or that others thought we were. Patriotism can be an evil. We may be a great country, but other people don’t think of us that way right now. With Katrina and what I call the unveiling of America, we can come face to face with our real problems. Only then can the purpose of the Nuremberg trials be fulfilled.

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