Kill James Bond! - S4E25.5: Judgement at Nuremberg

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

The rest of this bonus episode is available on our reasonably-priced patreon! We return once more to the Brains Dojo to talk about Abby Mann and Stanley Kramer's 1961 dramatisation of the Nuremberg trials. The year is 1947. Hitler, Goebbels, and the top brass are all dead. The trials have been going on for two years, and now we're down to the business of judging lawyers, doctors and judges. How much did they know, and when? Who bears ultimate responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich? ----- Friend of the show Bella, a refugee evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021, is raising money for her gender confirmation surgery! Anything you can give would be hugely appreciated! https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/team-bella ----- Check out friend of the show Mattie's new book Simplicity here, or wherever fine graphic novels are sold! ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. In our home, we talk a lot about how insane everything feels, and agonise constantly over what can be done to best help the Palestinians trapped in Gaza facing the full brunt of genocidal violence. My partner Rebecca has put together a list of four fundraisers you can contribute to- all of them are at work on the ground doing what they can. -Palestinian Communist Youth Union, which is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 -Thamra, which distributes herb and veg seedlings, repairs and maintains water infrastructure, and distributes food made with replanted veg patches https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-thamra-cultivating-resilience-in-gaza ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the every app account

I feel ashamed that such things could have taken place in my country. There can never be a justification for them. Not in generations, not in centuries. But... Hello and welcome to another episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined as always by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Gooden Tag, Leavling Listener.

Gooden tag, everyone. Gooden tag indeed, yes. It's a bonus episode. And as you can tell by our friendly German accents, what we're going to do this time is untold horrors. Cut the shit. Who's to blame him for the Holocaust? Oh, it turns out.

maybe it says here everyone. Turns out the entire world. Yeah. Yeah. Sort of differing levels. Apparently, yeah. Which I don't really agree with, but okay. Well, we'll get to this.

But we watched Judgment at Nuremberg, Stanley Kramer's 1961, drama about the kind of subsequent Nuremberg trials. And I got to say, we used to make message films. Right. Oh, what a movie, too. Like, what a fucking, listen,

go watch judgment at Nuremberg and then come back. It's so fucking good. such a good movie it's a three-hour tome this this came about because um frequently my my beloved partner rebecca will go to bed early for work and i'm left at a loose end for a couple of hours in the evening so i watch a movie and i don't want to watch any modern movies because i want to watch them with becker yeah so i've been going back and watching a lot of like your old you're black and whites this is why i watched um citizen kane a little bit recently and this is why i saw singing in the rain his girl Friday and then finally judgment at Nuremberg and this it grabbed my heart with both

hands and I was like fuck I kind of have to talk about it on the podcast yeah it's very contemporary too it's like a timely pick it's it's a movie that I'd seen before I'm really excited to talk about it as well and again it is it is in the tradition of message film you are going to have explained to you somewhat didactically it's sort of like of a generation filmmaking that came out of like Second World War propaganda movies, like, why we fight, right? Stuff like that, Frank Capra. And that came out of a really strong liberal world view. Liberalism, if you're not old enough to remember it,

is something that we used to have that kind of led us here, but was better than here, and you're allowed to miss it. It's complicated. So I guess we should kind of like lay some historical groundwork for listeners who kind of aren't really aware. What is World War II? Adolf Hitler was functionally a podcaster who let things get out of hand. In the early months of 1945, it was pretty obvious that the Allies were going to win the war.

And so this question came up like, okay, what the fuck are we going to do with Germany? Because, like, there's a lot of people in it. Some of them are Nazis, some of them aren't. Some of them have committed, like, Nazi war crimes. Some of them committed just like old school army-style war crimes. I have to hear this Morgan Tower plan. Not sure what I'm going to do with that. There's just like a lot of, there's a lot of people, and they're all going to be hiding and trying to pretend they weren't Nazis.

So how are we going to figure out, like, what the fuck do we do in assign responsibility for all this shit that's gone down? And at the Yalta conference between Churchill, FDR, and Joseph Stalin, Stalin reads the Devin report. And Stalin says, we're going to make a list of 50,000 people, and then we'll put the most, the worst offenders at the top. And then we'll just keep out of names until we get to 50,000. And then we'll just fucking execute all of them. And that way, we'll get all of them, right? and then FDR not realizing that Stalin is kidding says no I kind of like 49,000

and Churchill has to explain Churchill has to explain he's not kidding and no we are absolutely not doing that instead we're going to have something that looks like a series of trials and then out of that emerges all kinds of complex legal and political questions of like who has the right to sit in judgment of another country

and like we get the Nuremberg trials which is what this movie is about yeah well sort of it's about it's not about the Nuremberg trials as are popularly remembered, right? Because the original spectacle of those, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which was led by Allied prosecutors,

including like Soviet prosecutions, they were like Soviet members. Those have at this point finished, right? And so of your prominent Nazis, Hitler, dead by suicide and or living in Argentina, Gerbils, dead by suicide. Gurring commits suicide while under arrest while being tried

at the International Military Tribunal and so the IMT hangs a bunch of senior Nazis that sentences them to death and it has them hanged and as far as the kind of international thing goes that's kind of the bedrock of an idea of like international humanitarian law of a kind of post-war rules-based international order however kind of selective and hypocritical an idea that is.

It's a kind of American-driven effort that the rest of the Allies kind of compromise on with varying levels of enthusiasm to this idea that ultimately Nazi commanders are responsible for crimes against humanity that may have been legal under German law at the time and that following orders that you believed were legal is not a defense to crimes against humanity. right? That happens and then subsequent to that, the Americans run their own set of trials in the American zone of West Germany, focusing on lower level Nazis. And that's where we are is the subsequent military tribunals where it's just the Americans and they are going for middle managers, right? Senior doctors, senior lawyers, the kind of corporate side. Yeah, specifically in this case, it's judges. Yeah. Because the Nazis have their own judges. Yeah, absolutely. Now, the movie, this came out in 1961, which meant that if you were an adult watching

this, this was living memory for you. And so it feels no need to explain very much of this. There's something particularly grim about films about the Nazis now, where they have to kind of explain what they were and what they did. This movie does not do that. This movie begins with the war's over, and it shows you this with file. footage of this massive swastika on top one of the, at top one of the kind of, like...

I think it was the stadium at Nuremberg. Yes, yeah, one of the kind of tribunes there just being blown up with explosives by the Americans after the war is over. We'll have to see it. We do. Job done. Mr. Compass moving over. Well, so you think, right?

Judgment fucking rendered. It's got to be pretty easy to sort of vanquish the spectre of this, this fascism. It's got to be so simple, right? Yeah. And so we're just mopping. up. Surely there isn't some sort of like wide societal issue that needs tearing out at the route. In the ruins of Nuremberg, Nuremberg, the city in southern Germany, by the way, where the Nazis held their sort of their massive party rallies on coming to power. Also the

city where the like laws on the like Nazi laws that enshrined racism in German law were promulgated. It has now been bombed into ruins. Yeah. And we're in 1948, which is three years after the end of the war. And when we say ruins, we mean like it's rubble. Even three years later, it's like, there's just like stones left. I think it was the American 11th Army that took Nuremberg. And there wasn't much left of it by the time they got done. And we're being driven through with some wonderful rear screen projection. Return with a V to this. We're introduced to our lead, who's Judge Haywood, who's a judge from Maine. Spencer tracing. He's been driven through the ruins and his opening line is I didn't realize it was so bad. Yeah. Yeah.

You get a little bit of historical context because obviously Nuremberg is an old city. There's the guy that's driving him around, the senator is like, there's a wall in Nuremberg that separates the new city from the old city and the new city at that time was like 1215. So like it goes back far and it's been bombed out. And that's where to start. Right. Like German civilization, right? Like German culture has existed for hundreds of years and has now sort of been brought

to ruin. Incidentally, so it's our judge and the senator who are discussing this and they're being driven in a very sort of nice Mercedes by a local, by a German, who is driving very aggressively. He's like sort of almost running people down. He's hitting the horn a lot. He's honking a lot. He's driving like a Nazi, right? Like that's your first little piece of sort of like storytelling there as well is what

driving sort of dignitaries around looks like is running people off the road and they have to tell him not to do this. And it's just sort of very, very quietly observed. I like that. But so he delivers them to this mansion where one William Shatner is wasting. Let's be even as a guy that I recognized. Guy who has been to space Guy who I sympathised

boundlessly with when he was kind of humiliated by Jeff Bezos William Shatner It's William fucking Shatner baby This is a real young William Shatner Yeah And I kind of

Yeah I kind of see it I'm like oh hello young Shatner But he's an army captain I didn't even write his name down He's just Captain Buoyer Byers yeah Corp. Captain William Shanna is like, yo, I'm going to be your man as long as you're in

Nuremberg. Welcome to this massive fucking mansion where a Nazi general used to live. Yeah, which has just been commandeered by the US army. But like, these are your servants. Yeah. Mr. and Mrs. Halberstadt. Yeah. And we see that Judge Hayward is kind of

embarrassed by this. Like he's not used to this this kind of opulence. He's a little kind of discomfited by having servants. And he asks if all of this is really necessary. And the first line that I pull out in the movie is the senator who's brought him there saying, well, you know, when the United States government does something, it does it right, which is a sentiment that the movie is really going to do its best to interrogate. But it's explained to him that this is to their benefit because the Germans are...

Basically, unless the, like, the US government pay to feed them. Yeah, because the Germans are like almost starving. And they did, actually, many, thousands of German staffed after World War II because this is like, that's the nature of total war, which is what World War II was. There was no like strategic targeting. It's like you fucking leveled the entire city. And then when the Nazis

left or well, Heardor were destroyed, they didn't leave anything behind. Like Germany has just been fucking turned into a smoking crater. There's thousands of people fucking starve to death or died of preventable disease. Yeah, you get a little hint of this from buyers when he's introducing the place

he goes, we do our shopping at the army commissary because there's not enough food for the Germans. Yeah, and like working for you, here they eat, right? And so he's a job creator. Yeah. It's interesting buyers as well. You get little kind of hints

of his character being sort of quite culture, quite sort of upper class. He mentions the kind of the grand piano by Maker's name and Hayward clocks him as being a West Point graduate, the US Military Academy. And he says,

well I'm not and it makes me uncomfortable and so the kind of standing on ceremony that he does Hayward has to kind of ask him to dial it down a bit and he's very very polished where Hayward isn't yeah he's just now I'm just a simple country judge yeah this is a real archetype if you like uh American liberal movies of of the 60s particularly he's he's like a he's a simple man he's an American Cincinnati right like he's sort of, he has rural values and is sort of like plain spoken. So we go to a courtroom

and our defendants enter there's four guys, they're all former judges and at this point the movie hits us quite hard with a really fucking powerful decision which is that there is never any music inside the courtroom. All the courtroom scenes are filmed more or less in real time with no music with very minimal editing

and just these long held shots as these four guys just enter the fucking room so we need our four guys It's wild as well because it really does a good job of capturing the spectacle because it was a visual spectacle

of the international military tribunal which was this you know it was shot for newsreels and it had this kind of like real contrast to it in black and white this kind of like very very sort of like vertiginously arranged court full of, you know, people in uniform and, you know, sort of lined with American military police

and then like white helmets and white gloves and white belts. And again, you get the sense that the United States government does something, it does it right. But here we are in the kind of like the back end of this stuff where it's, we're getting down to now judging judges. Yeah, there's a little line in the previous scene where the senators go and like is thanking judge Haywood for showing up and he's going oh I know I'm the only man in America who could do it like as a joke he's going look the thing is

Hitler's gone Goering's gone Goebbels has gone they committed a suicide before we could even hang them now we're down to the business of judging doctors and judges some people think they shouldn't be judged at all it's kind of unsavory and in particular we understand that this is not a glamorous position he's been given as much as everyone is

kind of buttering him up for it as much as William Shatner is too he's he's sort of there to fill the seat and he's you know wasn't necessarily anyone's first choice he's just kind of the caretaker the safe pair of hands at the end of this when it's less consequential all right look i'm really proud of this episode that's why i gave you an extra five minutes but if you want to finish out this full two hour length you are going to have to go to patreon dot com slash kill james bond or one word and sign up today for just five pounds a month.