Jean-Christophe Klotz, France, 2022, 60 min.
Introduction by Sandra Schulberg, co-producer; President, Indie Collect, with author Sylvie Lindeperg

In the summer of 1945, Navy Commander John Ford, head of the Field Photographic Branch of OSS (Office of Strategic Services), sent officers Budd and Stuart Schulberg and a small group of their OSS colleagues overseas to gather visual evidence attesting to war crimes and crimes against humanity by 24 Nazi officials and military leaders. Filmmakers for the Prosecution retraces the Schulberg brothers’ steps as they search for incriminating film evidence to be presented by U.S. Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson at the first Nuremberg trial. In four months of high-risk investigation across devastated Europe, the Schulbergs manage to locate hundreds of hours of footage (much of it filmed by the Nazis themselves) before the opening of the trial on November 21, 1945. The OSS editors compiled two films for the courtroom, The Nazi Plan and Nazi Concentration Camps, exposing Nazi atrocities from the first pogroms through creation of the concentration camp system. Members of the U.S. Army Signal Corps filmed only about 35 hours of trial proceedings during the ten months of the trial. But that abbreviated footage, combined with sound recordings of the entire proceedings, allowed Stuart Schulberg to produce the documentary Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today (1948). Suppressed for political reasons in the U.S., Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today [The Schulberg/Waletzky Restoration] was released for the first time in American theaters in 2010.

Watch the trailer here.

This film is part of the Maison Française film series History on Trial. The series is curated by Shanny Peer, with contributions by Emmanuel Kattan and Jane Gaines.