On Tuesday, August 1, the second program on cinema and law was broadcast on Jelo en verano, on Onda Cero, directed by Arturo Téllez during the last week of July and the month of August. On this occasion we commented (you can listen to it from minute 8 onwards) on a well-known film based, like the others this summer, on real cases: The Nuremberg Trial, to which in Spain an emphatic question was added to the original title: “Victors or vanquished”. It is from 1961, was directed by Stanley Kramer and starred Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell (who received the Oscar for best actor), Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift.
The film focuses on the prosecution of a series of judges who had applied Nazi legislation in Germany, although the connivance of much of German society at the time is also present. The trial that unfolds in the film includes the testimony of the main witness in a trial held during Nazism, the “Katzenberger case” in which a Jew was accused of “improper intercourse” with an Aryan woman and sentenced to death in 1942.
This film, among other legal issues, raises questions related to the legitimizing role of law, the actions of international courts, the application of a crime – genocide – that did not exist as such at the time of the commission of the facts, but also the perverse practice of jurists who did not hesitate to violate Nazi law itself if that was “necessary” to obtain convictions against innocent people.
As a complement, several books are highly recommended; here we will limit ourselves to mentioning three: ¿Vencedores o vencidos? by Francisco Muñoz Conde and Marta Muñoz Aunión; Calle Este-Oeste-Oeste, by Philiphe Sands, and Derecho degenerado. Teoría jurídica y juristas de cámara en el Tercer Reich, by Bernd Rüthers.