Nuremberg: The Nazis Facing their Crimes (French title: Nuremberg - Les nazis face à leurs crimes) is a 2006 documentary film about the Nuremberg Trials made by French historian and director and coproduced by and ARTE France. The English version, narrated by Christopher Plummer, premiered at the Lincoln Center in 2007.
Background The film is a condensation of the 1945 Nuremberg Trials based on restored courtroom footage and interviews with four participants in the trial: prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz, Auschwitz survivor Ernst Michel,Tait, Emily. Holocaust Survivors: A Biographical Dictionary vol 2 (Greenwood Press, 2007), sv "Michel, Ernest W. (1923–)," pp. 337–338. See also who, remarkably, became a reporter at the trial, Budd Schulberg, a member of John Ford's film unit, and chief interpreter Richard Sonnenfeldt.
The prosecution team submitted three films as evidence against the high Nazi officials charged with crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Two of these films, Nazi Concentration Camps and The Nazi Plan, were produced by Ford; the third, The Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascists in the USSR, was a Soviet production directed by Roman Karmen.Delage, Christian (2006). Nuremberg: The Nazis Facing their Crimes (liner notes). Excerpts from the sessions in which these films were shown during the trial are significant sequences in the documentary.
Also significant is the "chilling testimony" of prosecution witness Otto Ohlendorf, commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe D and responsible for carrying out mass executions in Eastern Europe, and the description of camp conditions by French resistance fighter Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a survivor of both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbrück.
Delange's film also examines how the medium, in this case the original film and sound recordings, and how they came about, affects the writing of historyChristian Delage and Stuart Liebman. Bringing History into the Present Through Film: An Historian in the Archives of Nuremberg. Cinéaste Vol. 37, No. 1 (Winter 2011), pp. 34-39 Cineaste Publishers which Delange has examined further.Delage, Christian (edited and translated by Ralph Schoolcraft, Mary Byrd Kelly). Caught on Camera: Film in the Courtroom from the Nuremberg Trials to the Trials of the Khmer Rouge: Critical Authors and Issues (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) . "As a historian," says reviewer Ronnie Scheib, "Delage is obsessed with the growing role of reproduced images in shaping history."
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