Judgment at Nuremberg

Judgment at Nuremberg is a 1961 American drama film dealing with the Holocaust and the Post-World War II Nuremberg Trials. It was written by Abby Mann, directed by Stanley Kramer, and starred Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Werner Klemperer, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, William Shatner and Montgomery Clift. An earlier adaptation had been broadcast as a television episode of Playhouse 90. Schell and Klemperer played the same roles in this version as well. It was among the first films to be made about the Holocaust.

This trial was part of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials (more formally, the Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals), a series of twelve U.S. military tribunals for war crimes against surviving members of the military, political, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany, held in the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, after World War II from 1946 to 1949 following the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT).

The film depicts the trial of certain judges who served during the Nazi regime in Germany. The film was inspired by the Judges' Trial before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal in 1947, where four of the defendants were sentenced to life in prison. A key thread in the film's plot involves a "race defilement" trial known as the "Feldenstein case". In this fictionalized case, based on the real life Katzenberger Trial, an elderly Jewish man was tried for a relationship with an "Aryan" (German) woman that was legally defined as improper under the Nuremberg Laws, and put to death in 1942. Using this, and other examples, the movie explores and wrestles with issues of personal conscience, responsibility in the face of unjust laws and personal behavior in the face of widespread societal immorality.