Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy) arrives in Nuremberg in 1948 to preside over

the trial of four Nazi judges, each charged with having abused the court system to
help cleanse Germany of the politically and socially undesirable, allegedly guilty of
war crimes. The opening statement of the prosecuting attorney (Richard Widmark)
is a vicious one, depicting the defendants as having been willing, evil, accomplices
in Nazi atrocities, but Judge Haywood wonders if it is really that simple.

Confounded at how one defendant, a renowned German champion of justice named

Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), appears to have played the greatest role in molding
Germany's Ministry of Justice into a destructive instrument of Nazism, Judge
Haywood resolves to gain some perspective on the period in which the German
legal system strayed from a course of entirely objective justice.

Probing for the truth proves difficult, though, as nobody who lived in Germany
during Nazism seems to admit to having much inside knowledge. He befriends Mrs.
Bertholt (Marlene Dietrich), the widow of an executed Nazi army officer, but she
offers few insights, more consumed by her personal experiences than the broader
matters of Nazism. Mrs. Bertholt is focusing on being a catalyst for the cultural
rebirth of Nuremberg, keen on remolding the image of a city that had become
notorious as the site of the Nazi raliies. An attempt to discuss the period with his
housekeepers, Mr. and Mrs. Halbestadt, who had lived near the Dachau
concentration camp, proves equally fruitless for Judge Haywood, as they cannot
help but focus on the loss of their child in the bombing and the fact that they nearly
starved from poverty. Whether anyone knew anything mattered little, for Germans
were looking forward, not backward, still grappling with, and recovering from, the
hardships and losses that the war brought to them and their families.

Only in the courtroom will Judge Haywood have the opportunity to gain insights into
the realities of the period. First hand evidence of a) all German judges having sworn
to a Nazi oath of allegiance, b) human sterilization orders signed by the defendants
and carried out, and c) the execution of a Jew merely for having relations with a
non-Jew, painted an evil picture of the ways in which the law had been applied by
the defendants during Nazism. Still, Judge Haywood cannot fully come to grips with
why these judges had been willing to enforce the law in such a horrific manner. Not,
at least, until the defendant Ernst Janning feels compelled to make a statement,
against the advice of his counsel
In his statement made under oath, Janning speaks of how economically-stricken
Germany had become a nation of fearful, desperate people, and how only such a
people could submit to Nazism. Hitler's promises, Janning explained, in which he

openly vowed the elimination of those accountable for Germany's hardships were,
at first, soothing and reassuring to them. Janning then noted that, even once the
complicit realized the unconscionability and inhumanity of Hitler's approach, they
stayed at their posts to help things from getting even worse, but, predictably, failed
to derail the atrocities of the times. He explained that national allegiance had
motivated most of them to the point that they sacrificed their own personal senses
of morality. In a deeply personal, yet self-damning, statement, he conceded that
most of them should have known better, and that those that had gone along had
betrayed Germany.
At long last, the issue at the heart of the case becomes clear to Judge Haywood the choice that the defendants had to make was between allegiance to their country
and allegiance to their own senses of right and wrong. Understanding the times and
context in which the actions of the defendants took place, Judge Haywood is ready
to pass judgment on the defendants. He sentences each to life imprisonment,
noting that their actions were illegal under both International law and German law,
and further notes that they were men of sufficient intellect, prominence and
credibility in Germany that their refusal to help transform the German court system
into an institution that, systematically, denied justice to enemies of the Third Reich
might have made a difference.
As noted in the closing moments of the film, none of those condemned to a
sentence less than death at any of the Nuremberg trials was still serving their term
just over a decade later. Once Germany became a Cold War ally of America, it
gradually opened the door for their release.

The film examines questions of individual complicity in immoral actions sought by

the government that the individual served. German defense attorney Hans Rolfe
(Maximilian Schell) raises points like the Versailles Treaty (1919) that blamed
Germany for starting World War I and the resulting sanctions that left Germany
economically impovershed and backward until Hitler's takeover; U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s support for the first eugenics practices (see Buck
v. Bell ); the German-Vatican Reichskonkordat of 1933, which the Nazi-dominated
German government exploited as an implicit foreign recognition of Nazi leadership;
Stalin's part in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which removed the last major obstacle
standing in the way of Germany's invasion and occupation of western Poland,
initiating World War II; and the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
the final stage of the war in August 1945.[4]

The film is notable for its use of courtroom drama to illuminate individual perfidy
and moral compromise in times of violent political upheaval; it was one of the first
films not to shy from showing actual footage filmed by American and British soldiers

after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Shown in court by prosecuting
attorney Colonel Tad Lawson (Richard Widmark), the scenes of huge piles of naked
corpses laid out in rows and bulldozed into large pits were considered exceptionally
graphic for a mainstream film of its day.

Haywood must weigh considerations of geopolitical expediency and ideals of justice.

He rejects a call to let the German judges off lightly so as to gain German support in
the Cold War against the Soviet Union.[5] All four defendants are found guilty and
sentenced to life in prison.