Nothing is as bad as what Nazi Germany did to people and to the world.  Obviously, what Denise Pratt did, or what Bonnie Hellums does now, cannot compare to the horrors of Hitler's Germany.  However, the ethical questions posed by one of the best courtroom movies ever, Judgment at Nuremburg, are applicable to the issue of what an associate judge should when he or she realizes his or her boss is committing illegal acts and seriously harming families and children.

This 1961 movie starred Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Judie Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Maxmillian Schell, Montgomery Clift and a very young William Shatner.



Click here to view a three minute movie trailer that shows all of these actors and excerpts from some of the best scenes.

Click here for a longer clip of the stirring verdict delivered by Spencer Tracy and you can see the young Bill Shatner (before he was Captain Kirk) call the court to order.  This is part of the judge's ruling:

In Judgment at Nuremburg, Spencer Tracy played a war crimes judge who hears the case of a respected German judge who kept his post when Hitler came to power and then followed the new regime's terrible laws.  The American judge cannot understand why the German jurist just did not resign his position rather than make immoral rulings based on the Nazi laws.



I have rewritten a scholarly synopsis of that classic movie and changed a few words regarding the climactic scene when the German judge takes the stand and tries to explain his actions:

[The defendant former judge] then noted that, even once the complicit realized the unconscionability and [illegality of the presiding judge's policies], they stayed at their posts to help things from getting even worse, but predictably, failed to derail the atrocities of the times.  He agreed that claiming he did not know the extent of the horrors was really an admission that he did not inquire as he should have.  [The judge] admitted it was not a defense that he once felt that if he resigned, someone else with less empathy would have simply taken his place and carried out orders.

The judge explained that loyalty and allegiance had motivated most of them to the point that they sacrificed their own personal senses of morality.  In a deeply personal, yet self-damning statement, he conceded that most of them should have known better, and that those that had gone along had betrayed true justice. 

At long last, the issue at the heart of the case becomes clear - the choice that the [associate judge] had to make was between allegiance to their [bosses, the presiding judges] and allegiance to their own senses of right and wrong.