As history recedes into a dot in the rear-view mirror, the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem has come to be accepted as the watershed event in Holocaust awareness.
Although the trial broke the silence and erased the stigma that had afflicted survivors in Israel, French historian Christian Delage frets that the world has forgotten the groundwork laid and the spadework done 15 years earlier.
Delage wrote a scholarly book about the Nuremberg tribunal, which sat in judgment of such notorious figures as Hermann Goering and Rudolph Hess. He then persuaded French TV to back a documentary. “Nuremberg: The Nazis Facing Their Crimes” was shown first in a few theaters in Paris and a few other cities before attracting 2 million viewers to the small-screen broadcast.
“My idea was to say if there was the Eichmann trial, it’s because there was Nuremberg before,” Delage says on the phone from Paris. “Not only because of the archives collected. Nobody understood the difference between concentration and extermination camps [in 1945]. Genocide was not considered a legal word to qualify as a crime. During those months, everybody progressed in their understanding.”
“Nuremberg” screened at the New York Jewish Film Festival last January, and has just been released on DVD with several valuable bonus features. Therein lies another story.
“[American chief prosecutor Robert H.] Jackson wanted to run the trial on objective documentation, but he allowed films to be part of the trial,” Delage says. “He asked for film at the same time that he asked for written records.” That seemingly minor decision proved crucial.
“When the trial began, because of the huge amount of documents, it was very hard to follow the line of the proceedings,” Delage explains. The world press was growing impatient as the cumbersome trial of 21 defendants seemed certain to bog down in a miasma of details. So on the fifth day, much earlier than he had originally planned, Jackson screened a one-hour documentary titled “Nazi Concentration Camps.”
Produced by John Ford with Budd Schulberg, the film shocked and silenced the room with images shot by the U.S. Army when it liberated various camps. The tone of the trial was forever altered from a dispassionate discussion of documents to the pursuit of justice on behalf of the victims.
As Delage points out, “The Russians [were] not really friendly to the Jews. Even some of the British and American prosecutors didn’t want the Jewish issue at the center of the trial.” But the film shifted the focus of the trail from the damage inflicted by the German war machine, and crimes against political prisoners and POWs, to the organized extermination of a single people.
“Nazi Concentration Camps” is included on the DVD, along with two other films shown during the trial — a one-hour work produced by the Russians (“The Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascists in the USSR”) and a short American piece.
Nuremberg was the first trial to be filmed, Delage asserts. His “Nuremberg” is restrained and somewhat clinical, but it does have its moments of high drama.
Abraham Sutzever, a poet from Vilna, took seven or eight seconds to silently compose himself enough to testify. Then he spoke vividly and powerfully — in Russian, though, rather than Yiddish.
“I wanted those seven seconds to be the most important thing, as well as what he says,” Delage says. “You can’t get that from the transcripts.”
Delage may specialize in combing through the past, but he does his work with an eye on the present and the future.
“It’s important for young generations to know where ‘Shoah’ comes from. It’s not only the fact of the genocide, but the moment when the genocide was explained. [Some people say] ‘It started with the Eichmann trial.’ No, it was the Nuremberg trial. That was the beginning.”