Judgment at Nuremberg: when public reason leads to collective madness

Specifically, it depicts the emblematic trial organized by the countries of the Western alliance against a group of German jurists accused of having collaborated with the Nazi regime in the execution of crimes against humanity.

The argument of the American jurists, led by Colonel Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark), was based on the undeniable evidence that existed against the German judges while they were in charge. Lawson claimed that the Germans (i.e. the German people) were well aware of the laws they were applying and that they were infringing on the freedom and human rights of the accused. Several cases were directly related to sensitive issues such as human sterilization for being born with a physical disability, or to the punishment of imprisonment for collaboration or involvement with Jewish groups.

The defense for its part, led by Hans Rolfe (impeccable performance by Maximilian Schell) tried to justify that the cases were always more complex than they appeared, and were indeed subject to a national supreme rule that the judges simply could not ignore or exceed.

And here it is important to value the contribution of one of the accused judges. Dr. Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) was always an enigma for the Americans. They did not understand why an eminent German lawyer and defender of democracy had mixed up with the Nazis. To their understanding it was simply contradictory that Janning on the one hand professed peace and the right to freedom in his books, and on the other hand, as a judge under oath to the Nazi state, sent hundreds of people to prison because of their racial origin.

Janning at a definitive moment of the trial decides to confess his guilt and that of the other judges, accusing them not only of allowing the extermination and the crimes of genocide but also of benefiting directly from them. He assumes the guilt of having participated in a legal system that ignored the universal rights of the human being, putting what Janning called the national interest first. The film culminates with the public recognition of the judges’ guilt, through Janning’s testimony, but it also leaves open an intense debate about the fascist power that the Nazi state accumulated thanks to the collective support it found among the German people. In that sense, Nazi Germany was a system of government legitimately functional to the expectations of the population.

^{The following video has been published for educational purposes. Copyrights Roxlom Films & Amber Entertaiment, 1961}

At this point it is important to conceptually analyze the category of national interest. The film lays it bare in the intense political discussion that takes place especially at the end. This is a recurrent concept in universal political history because all states have appealed to it in the defining moments of their constitutional life. The national interest, or public reason as the political constitutional theorist John Rawls calls it, is the ideal argument that a nation finds to define its identity, and it is massively binding because it occurs at moments when the unity of the nation is in crisis in the face of a destabilizing threat. This condition generally leads to the formation of fascist leaders who by their harsh and intolerant condition sometimes reflect collective despair. It is very easy that from these conditions political leaders use the concept of public reason to reinforce the collective adhesion to their purposes, and in this way end up constituting a unitary state, unquestionable and with the power to repress any dysfunction that threatens its security and integrity.

From theory these are the foundations of Rawls’ strong state which operates in a similar direction to Hobbes’ “Leviathan”. This is the conceptual basis of the Nazi state. To that end it alienated its population by turning it to collective hatred against immigrants, the Jews accused of expropriating the national wealth, but fundamentally it symbolically constructed an image of social welfare, so that the German people could identify themselves as a rich and powerful nation with imperialist ambitions. That was the public rationale that Janning accused as the main weakness of the German people. A justification that lost its horizon when public reason turned into genocide and xenophobia against the enemies of the state. So, who really has more responsibility? The political leaders who propagated the ideal of a rich and powerful Germany. Or were the German people more to blame for wanting to improve their living conditions which led them to ignore the atrocities that were being committed?

Janning was well aware of the dilemma and, in spite of that, he publicly recognized the weight and value of love for the nation, especially in conditions where that unity is in question. The reflection that these ideas leave us with points to the relevance that deliberation and permanent questioning of political power must have for any people. Public reason is a good argument to organize society, but its limit is also transcendental so that the state does not become an unquestionable god.

To this day, Germans are still ashamed of the power they gave to Nazism and in which they collectively reflected at one point. It was a fundamental moment that helped them to rethink political power and that has been decisive in building more democratic governments that are more open to the initiatives and control of their citizens. A fatal experience such as Nazism, which had a binding collective responsibility, cannot be repeated.