The Nuremberg Trials

The Nuremberg Trials

NR 2006 · 54 min · ★ 8.0 · Documentary, History, War

One journalist described it as a chance "to see justice catch up with evil." On November 20, 1945, the twenty-two surviving representatives of the Nazi elite stood before an international military tribunal at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany; they were charged with the systematic murder of millions of people. The ensuing trial pitted U.S. chief prosecutor and Supreme Court judge Robert Jackson against Hermann Göring, the former head of the Nazi air force, whom Adolf Hitler had once named to be his successor. Jackson hoped that the trial would make a statement that crimes against humanity would never again go unpunished. Proving the guilt of the defendants, however, was more difficult than Jackson anticipated. This American Experience production draws upon rare archival material and eyewitness accounts to recreate the dramatic tribunal that defines trial procedure for state criminals to this day.

Directed by Michael Kloft

Your Rating

Cast

Joe Morton Narrator (voice)
Walter Cronkite Self
Hermann Göring Self (archive footage)
William Jackson Self
Chris Dodd Self

Make it a double feature

2h 16m together

The Nuremberg Trials

Death in the Bunker: The True Story of Hitler's Downfall

Both from Michael Kloft.

More from Michael KloftSee all →

6 Juin 1944: Paroles de Soldats

6 Juin 1944: Paroles de Soldats · 2014

6 Juin 1944: Paroles de Soldats

SeriesDocumentary

Hitler und Ludendorff - Der Gefreite und der General

Hitler und Ludendorff - Der Gefreite und der General · 2014

Hitler und Ludendorff - Der Gefreite und der General

SeriesDocumentary

Death in the Bunker: The True Story of Hitler's Downfall

Death in the Bunker: The True Story of Hitler's Downfall · 2004

Death in the Bunker: The True Story of Hitler's Downfall

MovieDocumentaryHistory

Adolf Hitler spent the last ten days of his life in a bunker underneath the Chancellery of the Reich. Unwilling to face the consequences of defeat, the dictator ended his own life on April 30, 1945 in this fortified underground complex. Featuring exclusive interviews with the last survivor’s of Hitler’s inner circle and extensive archival footage, Death in the Bunker is an illuminating look at the Führer’s final decisions in preparation for his suicide.

Firestorm

Firestorm · 2003

MovieDocumentary

After suffering heavy losses of aircraft during attacks on German factories, Winston Churchill orders cities to be targeted in order to smash German morale and reduce the number of workers available for the Nazi war machine. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians are killed as incendiary bombs turn the center of cities like Hamburg and Dresden into tornados of fire. Sixty years later, a new debate is underway over the reasons for this lethal bombing campaign. Were these relentless aerial attacks on German cities, which killed so many and destroyed so much, a necessary tactic in the war against Hitler? Or was it an act of revenge by the British and Americans? Using rare film footage (much of it in color) and stirring interviews with historians, former bomber pilots and survivors of the destruction, this extraordinary film brings to light the devastating allied air campaign against Nazi Germany.

Eva Braun: Life and Death with the Führer

Eva Braun: Life and Death with the Führer · 2018

Eva Braun: Life and Death with the Führer

SeriesDocumentary

Eva Braun was Adolf Hitler's secret mistress for more than 13 years. To this day she is viewed as a naïve, apolitical appendage to the dictator and mass murderer.

Leni Riefenstahl - The End of a Myth

Leni Riefenstahl - The End of a Myth · 2020

Leni Riefenstahl - The End of a Myth

MovieDocumentary

Countless people around the world know the pictures from Leni Riefenstahl's films, even if they have not seen them in their entirety. The work of the German director has burned itself into the collective memory. Even decades after the end of the Nazi era, she showed no remorse and presented herself as an apolitical, naive follower of the Nazi criminal regime. Her artistic service for the cinema was always recognized. But book author Nina Gladitz shows after decades of research that Hitler's favorite filmmaker was not only a follower, but also a perpetrator during the Third Reich, who instrumentalized other filmmakers such as the brilliant cinematographer Willy Zielke in order to gain fame for herself.

Television Under the Swastika

Television Under the Swastika · 1999

Television Under the Swastika

MovieDocumentaryHistory

A history of Nazi television programming and technology, from 1935 to 1944.

The Tramp and the Dictator

The Tramp and the Dictator · 2002

The Tramp and the Dictator

MovieDocumentaryTV Movie

A look at the parallel lives of Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler and how they crossed with the creation of the film “The Great Dictator,” released in 1940.

Der Nürnberger Prozess - Tribunal des Todes

Der Nürnberger Prozess - Tribunal des Todes · 2009

Der Nürnberger Prozess - Tribunal des Todes

MovieDocumentary

When the Allies realized the full extent of the crimes of the Third Reich at the end of the Second World War, it was clear that they would not be satisfied with a simple capitulation. Those responsible should not get away with it. The result of these deliberations was the International Military Tribunal, whose proceedings have gone down in history as the "Nuremberg Trial" after the venue.

Innenansichten - Deutschland 1937

Innenansichten - Deutschland 1937 · 2012

Innenansichten - Deutschland 1937

MovieDocumentary

American Experience

American Experience · 1988

American Experience

SeriesDocumentary

TV's most-watched history series brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today.

The Third Reich In Color

The Third Reich In Color · 1998

The Third Reich In Color

MovieDocumentary

This remarkable trove of color footage, assembled from far-flung private and state collections, presents Hitler's Europe as never seen before. Amateur film enthusiasts - soldiers, tourists, Hitler's own pilot, even Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun - began experimenting with color film in the late 1930s, their camera eye recording the Third Reich from every angle. Some of this film was only recently uncovered in former Soviet-bloc archives, hidden for almost 60 years; all of it, thanks to digital technology, has been newly transferred to video with surprising clarity. (This documentary was produced with two different narratives, both an English and German language version.)

Führer Cult and Megalomania

Führer Cult and Megalomania · 2011

Führer Cult and Megalomania

MovieDocumentaryHistory

By early in the twentieth century, Nuremberg was regarded as the most anti-Semitic city in Europe. By 1929, Hitler had decided to make Nuremberg the "City of the Party Rallies" and a symbol representing the greatness of the German Empire. Even today, it is possible to see signs in Nuremberg of the megalomaniac proportions that the system was to assume.

Heinrich Himmler: Portrait of a Mass Murderer

Heinrich Himmler: Portrait of a Mass Murderer · 2008

Heinrich Himmler: Portrait of a Mass Murderer

MovieDocumentaryHistory

Born into a Bavarian bourgeois family, Heinrich Himmler became the driving force behind the indescribable crimes that made the Nazi regime so unique in modern history.

Nazi Hunters

Nazi Hunters · 2022

SeriesDramaDocumentary

Shortly after the end of the Second World War: In 1945 and 1946, the men of the British "War Crimes Investigation Unit" drove through northern Germany on the hunt for Nazi criminals. One of them is Captain Anton Walter Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Anton Walter Freud fled to London with his family from the Nazis in 1938. Now an intelligence officer, he's back to track down killers on Allied wanted lists: hitmen in pinstripes, brutal SS henchmen, and ruthless doctors who conducted medical experiments even on children. The soldiers who witnessed the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp months earlier are not squeamish about it. 24-year-old Freud is a free spirit known for his unorthodox methods. He knows how to make war criminals talk. So he comes across a crime that has hardly been known before, the murder of 20 children in Hamburg in the last days of the war.

Hitlers Berg - Vom Privathaus zur Machtzentrale

Hitlers Berg - Vom Privathaus zur Machtzentrale · 2006

Hitlers Berg - Vom Privathaus zur Machtzentrale

MovieDocumentary

Adolf Hitler spent over 1,000 days on the Obersalzberg, his mountain holiday refuge near Berchtesgaden. It was there he made his decisions about war and destruction. The producers, through special permits, explore the abandoned concrete tunnels in search of the relics of history of Hitler’s mountain and to tell almost forgotten tales of the people who lived there, high up in the shadow of power.

More Like This

Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams

Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams · 2006

Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams

MovieDramaHistory

A woman and her daughter struggle to make their way through the aftermath of the Balkan war.

Germany: A Summer's Fairytale

Germany: A Summer's Fairytale · 2006

Germany: A Summer's Fairytale

MovieDocumentary

A documentary of the German national soccer team’s 2006 World Cup experience that changed the face of modern Germany.

Schindler's List

Schindler's List · 1993

Schindler's List

MovieDramaHistory

The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.

The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum · 1979

MovieDramaHistory

In 1924, Oskar Matzerath is born in the Free City of Danzig. At age three, he falls down a flight of stairs and stops growing. In 1939, World War II breaks out.

The Last Emperor

The Last Emperor · 1987

The Last Emperor

MovieDramaHistory

A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.

Grand Illusion

Grand Illusion · 1937

MovieDramaHistory

A group of French soldiers, including the patrician Captain de Boeldieu and the working-class Lieutenant Maréchal, grapple with their own class differences after being captured and held in a World War I German prison camp. When the men are transferred to a high-security fortress, they must concoct a plan to escape beneath the watchful eye of aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, who has formed an unexpected bond with de Boeldieu.

Platoon

Platoon · 1986

As a young and naive recruit in Vietnam, Chris Taylor faces a moral crisis when confronted with the horrors of war and the duality of man.

Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations

Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations · 1938

Olympia Part One: Festival of the Nations

MovieDocumentary

Starting with a long and lyrical overture, evoking the origins of the Olympic Games in ancient Greece, Riefenstahl covers twenty-one athletic events in the first half of this two-part love letter to the human body and spirit, culminating with the marathon, where Jesse Owens became the first track and field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.

Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty

Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty · 1938

Olympia Part Two: Festival of Beauty

MovieDocumentary

Part two of Leni Riefenstahl's monumental examination of the 1938 Olympic Games, the cameras leave the main stadium and venture into the many halls and fields deployed for such sports as fencing, polo, cycling, and the modern pentathlon, which was won by American Glenn Morris.

Downfall

Downfall · 2004

MovieDramaHistory

In April of 1945, Germany stands at the brink of defeat with the Russian Army closing in from the east and the Allied Expeditionary Force attacking from the west. In Berlin, capital of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler proclaims that Germany will still achieve victory and orders his generals and advisers to fight to the last man. When the end finally does come, and Hitler lies dead by his own hand, what is left of his military must find a way to end the killing that is the Battle of Berlin, and lay down their arms in surrender.

The Last Samurai

The Last Samurai · 2003

The Last Samurai

MovieDramaAction

Nathan Algren is an American hired to instruct the Japanese army in the ways of modern warfare, which finds him learning to respect the samurai and the honorable principles that rule them. Pressed to destroy the samurai's way of life in the name of modernization and open trade, Algren decides to become an ultimate warrior himself and to fight for their right to exist.

Lee

MovieHistoryDrama

The true story of photographer Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, a fashion model who became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue magazine during World War II.

Ashes and Diamonds

Ashes and Diamonds · 1958

Ashes and Diamonds

A young academy soldier, Maciek Chelmicki, is ordered to shoot the secretary of the KW PPR. A coincidence causes him to kill someone else. Meeting face to face with his victim, he gets a shock. He faces the necessity of repeating the assassination. He meets Krystyna, a girl working as a barmaid in the restaurant of the "Monopol" hotel. His affection for her makes him even more aware of the senselessness of killing at the end of the war. Loyalty to the oath he took, and thus the obligation to obey the order, tips the scales.

Is Paris Burning?

Is Paris Burning? · 1966

Is Paris Burning?

Near the end of World War II, General Dietrich von Choltitz receives orders to burn down Paris if it becomes clear the Allies are going to invade, or if he's unable to maintain control of the city. After much contemplation, Choltitz ignores orders, enraging the Germans and giving hope to various resistance factions that the city will be liberated. Choltitz, alongside Swedish diplomat Raoul Nordling, helps a leader organise his forces.

Rate this film

Your ratings make Midnight smarter