Documenting 'Nuremberg' war crimes trial

Speculation says that the remarkable "Nuremberg" was suppressed by U.S. authorities in the late '40s - despite its having been filmed by Army Signal Corps cameramen - because of fears that its horrifying imagery would derail Marshall Plan-powered efforts toward German reconstruction. They probably were right: Few in the United States could have been ready for the footage of the camps included within this record of the celebrated war-crimes trial, especially as juxtaposed with the supreme arrogance of the defendants.

But it's morbidly fascinating to watch the accused weather the withering indictments of Supreme Court justice and chief prosecutor Robert Jackson and his Allied colleagues and fellow jurists. Most of the defendants are dead men sitting, like Joachim von Ribbentrop and Julius Streicher, who would hang; the swinish Hermann Goering, who would commit suicide; the crazy Rudolph Hess, who would be imprisoned; Albert Speer, who would write books. The film succeeds, in its black-and-white, schoolish manner, in transporting the viewer to an entirely different time.

The restoration of the long-unseen movie was by Josh Waletzky and Sandra Schulberg, whose father, Stuart, directed the original. The film is a rare experience, and also profoundly anachronistic: It's a documentary of the old school, the offspring of newsreels and educational short subjects. It also boasts a masterly work of narration by Liev Schreiber, who manages to re-create a '40s-style tone of voice-over that's clinical while still bristling with indignation.

If those DVD commercials on late-night TV are any indication, there's no shortage of interest in Hitler, the war or the Holocaust. "Never-before-seen footage!" these commercials scream. "Nuremberg" really is never-before-seen footage, and a sobering, startling piece of cinema.