Judgement at Nuremberg
Introduction by Abby Mann
On March 26, I stood backstage at the Longacre Theatre. It was the opening night of Judgement at Nuremberg on Broadway. I knew the theatre well. As a student at NYU, I used to sneak into the second acts at theatre including Longacre because I didn’t have enough money to pay for tickets and a good many times I would be humbled by ushers asking me to leave.
Anita Ros, the stage manager, pushed me towards the curtain. ‘Go!’ I went on stage to take a curtain call with the illustrious cast. Looking out at the audience filled with famous people from the theatre, motion picture and politics, I thought of the events that had brought me here.
When I first began writing Judgement at Nuremberg in the fall of 1957, it was considered a breach of good manners to bring up the subject of German guilt for the events that happened during the Third Reich. There were even those who denied that a Holocaust had ever happened. There was a new crisis with the Russians and Germany was suddenly our new ally. Therefore it was eagerly accepted that the German people had been hypnotised by the great orator, Hitler, and the camps were so removed from the German people, that they had no inkling of some of the greatest crimes committed in our century or any century. There was no demand or even appetite for further explanation. Even from me though I had more reason than some to ask.
I grew up in East Pittsburgh, a suburb of Pittsburgh and the home of Westinghouse, a town populated by the blue collar workers employed by the company. My father, Ben Goodman, owned a one man jewellery store. At high school there were students who would often taunt me because of my name. Abraham Goodman, and the fact that my dad owned jewellery store and spoke with an accent and we were middle class while they were struggling to survive. These taunts became even more disturbing when I listened to the short wave broadcasts from Germany, especially those by a man with an American accent who called himself Mr OK, and talked about how Jews were corrupting America and that soon he and the Nazi’s would be in New York.
I was inducted into the Army when I was seventeen. I was sent to Fort Eustace where I found that I had not left East Pittsburgh behind me. Many of the men in my barracks shared the same prejudices and repeated the same taunts for Abe Goodman. Tom Brokaw has said this was ‘the greatest generation’, men who sacrificed their lives to defeat prejudice and save the world. There were of course, those who understood and cared and did want to wipe out everything the Third Reich stood for.
But the mundane truth was that only the majority went because the government told them to go – the same way a later generation went to Vietnam. Since I was one of the worst privates in the United States Army, it was a lucky thing for me that I developed pneumonia; while I was in hospital doctors found my eyesight did not meet Army standards, so I was discharged. The irony did not escape me that men who had no basic feeling about the war were about to die, while I, a smart ass who had some idea of what it was about, survived.
The first time I gave Nuremberg any real thought was when I met Abraham Pomerantz at a dinner party in New York in 1957. Pomerantz had been one of the prosecutors in the last trials at Nuremberg when the defendants included diplomats, doctors and judges. He had left when he found that most of the judges willing to serve at these trials were political hacks. Judges who could have made a real contribution did not go because Nuremberg had become unpopular and being part of it might hurt their careers. I was dismayed by what Pomerantz told me and he suggested I talk with Telford Taylor, who had been head of the prosecutions at Nuremberg.
Taylor was a personable, articulate, courageous man who had left a promising career to go to Nuremberg. Later, he was to become one of the most eloquent and consistent voices against McCarthyism and Vietnam. When we talked about Nuremberg, he told me there had been hopes of creating a code of justice to which the whole world would be responsible. He said the most significant of the trials was that of the judges in Germany. Why? Because these judges’ minds had not been warped at an early age. Having reached maturity long before Hitler’s rise to power, they embraced the ideologies of the Third Reich as educated adults. They, most of all, should have valued justice.
Intrigued, I read through the testimonials of the trials and found them fascinating. Paraded before the judges’ to have their fates decided: a man sterilised because of his political beliefs. A woman sent to prison for having a relationship with an older Jewish man, though it was never proven that they were sexually intimate: just the fact that they were friends was enough to send the Jewish man to his death and to send her to jail for years, ostensibly for perjury.
In the German judges’ final statements some were unrepentant. One said, ‘Your Honours, the highest thing a man can do is do his duty to his country. I upheld my oath of allegiance to my fatherland and to it’s laws. As a judge, I could do no other. I believe your Honours will find me, and millions of Germans like me, to be not guilty’.
There were, however, other defendants whose justifications for joining the Third Reich had alarming overtones. In effect, it was this: ‘This country is in danger. What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. And then one day, we looked around and found we were in even more terrible danger. The rites began in this courtroom, swept over our land like a raging, roaring disease! What was going to be a passing phase had become a way of life’. McCarthyism was at it’s height when I read these transcripts. While there were no gas chambers, people were being destroyed financially and jailed because of their political beliefs and even because of whom they knew. The question was on the table: Could what happened in Germany happen elsewhere?
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