My brother and I were watching Judgment at Nuremberg the other day. It was nice to watch it with Gabe. He, trained in law (however relevant that might be), regarding the black-and-white classic opined, “I never knew it was such a well made movie”. Me neither. Every school in the world should see it. The following year they should see Maximillian Schell’s The Man in the Glass Booth – one of the finest post-WWII movies ever made.
FYI – Judgment at Nuremberg‘s set shortly after WWII, after most of the worst Nazi’s that were found alive have been tried. Four German judges that were active during the rise of National Socialism (Nazism) and throughout the Third Reich’s tyrannical rule are placed on trial, to see whether those who signed various Nazi orders, either to take Jews and the other undesirables away or in general giving more and more executive power to the Hitler’s (y’s'w) government could be considered liable, responsible.
At a certain point in the court proceedings, the American prosecutor shows video clips of the sorts of grotesque, inhuman acts that were committed.
At this point in the movie, I put down my knife and fork from dinner. Afterwards, when my brother and I were silent in a sort of sighed sadness, I picked up my cutlery once more, and said “you still have to eat”.
The High Class German Woman
A scene shortly following the horror show in court involved a high-class German woman taking the lead American judge who oversaw the proceedings to a German bar in Nuremberg. She brought up the images of the concentration camps, mass graves and gas chambers. She said, effectively: “look around, at the other patrons singing’ – for singing they were, heartily, with smiles, ‘you have to forget in order to keep on living’.
At this point I said to my brother: “yes, you have to forget to keep on living. But the difference between us and them is that we hold it a religious obligation to set aside a particular time to remember.” Be it 9th of Av in the Jewish calendar, or Holocaust Remembrance day in the secular calendar. She was right, but the German woman herself forgot the most important point – you forget from day to day, perhaps, but at some point you have to make it your mission to remember.
Was I right? How could I eat after seeing what was probably a distant relative in those video clips? Is my distinction fair enough? Is it a religious thing? I open it for discussion, if anyone desires to weigh in. Perhaps it’s not something people like to think about!
The German Defense Attorney
The German defense, at the climax of the movie (spoiler, perhaps?) says that if you hold these judges accountable, then the whole of German society is accountable, and if they too are accountable – so are the collective populations of all the other nations in the world and their governments, who shut their eyes, covered their ears and closed their mouths to the destruction of Jews as it occurred.
At a time when virtually every country, government, media outlet and NGO on Earth are either doing exactly the same, or even – astoundingly, a mere 60 years after around 6 million Jews were exterminated – far from sitting silently, are actively siding against Israel and the Jewish people, hearing that German defense lawyer was disturbing to say the least.
Some further things to chew on follow. When I was in high school I had a stigma regarding what Hitler y’s'w’ actually said – I didn’t want to even hear him. But if you don’t hear what he said in his own words, you won’t understand what it means to be a Jew, as much as you won’t understand what true antisemitism is. Says Rabbi Ken Spiro, one of the greatest backhanded compliments given to us as a nation came from Hitler y’s'w’ himself. Conscience – the idea to care for a weaker human being or someone otherwise in need – is a Jewish concept. See below for more.
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Newly available evidence from Nazi collaborator Haj Amin Al Husseini y’s'w’:
‘In his memoirs [from 1943], the mufti admitted that Heinrich Himmler, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, told him secrets of the German empire. Besides “research for a nuclear bomb,” he told him on the persecution of Jews: “Up to now we have exterminated [abadna] around three million of them.” This admission discovered in his memoirs in 1999 ended decades of heated debate on what the mufti knew about the Holocaust.’ Read the full story – The Sheikh and the Shoah at Jpost.com
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“Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and independence which only a very few can bear.”
- Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 222
“The Ten Commandments have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention, it is a blemish like circumcision.”
- Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 220
The heaviest blow which ever struck humanity was Christianity; Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.”
- Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, trans., (Oxford, 1953), Hitler's Table-Talk, p. 7
“The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest. Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.”
- Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, trans., (Oxford, 1953), Hitler's Table-Talk, p. 51
