Nuremberg Trials reveal the Nazi enslavement of people in occupied countries and atrocities against Jewish people during World War II.
Opening scene, in 1946, is the courtroom where Nazi officials are being tried for war crimes at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, where the procecutor has completed charges 3 and 4, concluding the indictment against them. Sitting in first row of the dock are Hermann Göring (or Goering) (hidden behind soldier), Rudolf Hess, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, and William Keitel. The camera focuses on Franz Sauckel, as he is identified as the Nazi slave labor chief. Supporting documents are shown. Film footage scenes of slave workers being rounded up and working on shipping docks, emptying rail cars, repairing railroads, and digging in open pit mines, under Nazi military guard. Next are shown views of Hermann Goering walking in an occupied village in 1942, overseeing the confiscation of all of the livestock. German soldiers releasing and rounding-up cattle, sheep, and pigs that had belonged to citizens of an occupied village. Dr. Wilhelm Frick is shown. He is charged with eliminating elderly, insane, or uncurable sick Germans, considered "Useless Eaters" and subject to Nazi euthanasia programs. Several frail and sick or mentally disabled persons are shown. Crosses are shown marking burial places of these persons outside the institutions in which they died. Next, several German Jewish men in civilian clothes are seen rushing to a work site where they are put to work as slave labor digging with shovels under direction of a Nazi military officer. Scene shifts to Nazi Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung) harrassing German Jewish shopkeepers, writing anti Jewish messages on the windows, encouraging boycott, and preventing their businesses from operating. More views of Nazi Storm Troopers causing trouble in the streets. Next scene is Hermann Goering reading some dictates as Hitler and Hess, along with other Nazi officials, sit in attendance. The so called "blood purity" rules or blood purity laws of the Nuremberg Laws define German citizens narrowly and prohibit marriage between "German Citizens" and Jews. An unseen audience roars its approval. Jewish people are next seen being rounded up and beaten, mistreated, harassed, and evicted from home. Back at the trial, the prosecutor speaks of Nazi SS Brigadier General Jürgen Stroop cleaning out the Warsaw Ghetto, in Warsaw, Poland, in utter ruthlessness in 1943. Scenes of Polish Jews people being driven and dragged out by SS and Gestapo forces, many unclothed, and the entire place being dynamited afterward. View of a detonation system, and then a huge explosion and walls of the Warsaw ghetto in Poland area are seen crumbling to the ground. Buildings burning and people leaving with injured on a stretcher. Scenes of Nazi agents, Gestapo, and Wehrmacht Army chasing Jews from sewers using tear gas and driving them from buildings using light tanks and armored vehicles. Jews are rounded up, beaten with clubs, and dragged by Nazi German SS and Gestapo authorities who capture them. Back in the courtroom, Rudolf Hess is seen describing how Nazi doctors would screen arrested Jews as they entered concentration camps. Views of crowds of Jews entering a concentration camp near a railroad train depot. A large group of Jewish children at a camp. Children hold up their arms and the boys and girls reveal tattoo numbers on their arms. More views of women and children moving through outside paths of a concentration camp, surrounded in barbed wire and fencing. Views of so-called camp shower baths in which prisoners were killed by poison gas. Clothing of prisoners hanging outside the gas chambers, which the prisoners were told were delousing chambers. Views of the gas chamber shower heads and gas output vents. Views of naked prisoners, some seated and some laying down, inside a gas chamber. View of dead, naked prisoner bodies stacked up in a room. View of bags filled with gold from rings and teeth of the dead. Canvas bags and chests containing the teeth and gold jewelry, held in the Reichs Bank. Closeup of corpses. Bodies being loaded and unloaded from flatbed trucks and being dragged by camp inmates and German soldiers, and thrown into mass graves. Location: Nuremberg Germany. Date: 1944.