Film gives cool tone to a searing topic

The main thing that strikes you about "Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today" is how old-fashioned it seems. Not just because it’s a black-and-white documentary dating from World War II, filled with grainy footage, not just because narrator Liev Schreiber adapts a staccato bark like radio announcers of the period, and not just because it’s about something many of us know far too much about.

No. It’s because the film is organized logically and efficiently, laying out a case and arguing its point. It’s as much legal brief as documentary, a classically structured visual argument that, despite its seemingly cool detachment, barely represses a growing sense of horror and outrage.

The Hawaii Chapter of the Federal Bar Association and the William S. Richardson School of Law are sponsoring a screening of "Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Doris Duke Theater at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. Admission is $40, which includes a catered reception and appearances by guests Siegfried Ramler, an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials and author of the memoir "Nuremberg and Beyond," and Sandra Schulberg, who led the restoration effort on the long- suppressed film created by her father in 1948.

An additional free screening for students will be held at 4:30 p.m. Friday in Classroom 2 at the University of Hawaii-Manoa’s William S. Richardson School of Law, also with Ramler and Schulberg.

Military documentarian Stuart Schulberg of the OSS Field Photographic Branch was assigned to make a visual record of the Nuremberg trials, in which Nazi war criminals were brought to justice. Not only was it a highly unusual move at the time to record a continuing court proceeding with cameras, Schulberg and his team scoured Germany for bits of film that recorded Nazi atrocities. Once, they came upon a cache that had just been set alight by renegade Nazis; the Americans stomped the fire out and saved the clips. Schulberg’s crew then prepared a four-hour essay called "The Nazi Plan," using the Germans’ own film to rebut their defensive pleas that they knew nothing, heard nothing. It was the first time that film footage had been entered as evidence in a court of law.

When the trial ended, Schulberg then created "Nuremberg," using footage from the trial as well as clips from the earlier "Nazi Plan." It was screened across Germany as part of the re-education and democratization process. But when time came to screen it in the United States, the government elected to shelve it, perhaps because official propaganda was shifting over to fighting Communism.

Schulberg went on to head NBC’s documentary division, focusing on news and public affairs, and produced groundbreaking television such as the "Today" show.

Six decades later, Schulberg’s daughter and a team of restoration experts pieced together the film from negative scraps found here and there, and added redone sound, music and narration. The completed film finally screened in the United States in 2010, and it’s a powerful, sobering documentation of a difficult legal question played out against one of the great horrors of history.