After a stint in the U.S. Army, Philadelphia-born Abby Mann began writing for television in the days when live drama anthology shows were all the rage. Mann was quite successful in this work throughout the 1950s, but he knew it would be hard to find a show or network willing to take on an idea he carried with him for years––a script about the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. "When I started writing Judgment at Nuremberg it was impolite to talk about Germany in anything but the most flattering terms because the government saw Germany as an ally in the Cold War and the official line was that the German people were as much victims as anyone."

Mann took the advice of a colleague and shifted the focus of his story to the trials of German judges "because they of all people should have been the most committed to justice, but they went along [with the Nazi regime]." Mann took certain liberties with historical details to give his story greater dramatic impact and universal relevance. The screenwriter said in 2004, "As I wrote it, I said, 'I don't want this to be a propaganda piece, I want the whole era understood'".

Mann broadened his theme beyond a mere condemnation of Germany and the evils of the Third Reich by realizing that, as he later put it, the villain in the story was patriotism, something he saw reflected in his own country during the 1950s. As people in the entertainment industry were being blacklisted from working because of their real or perceived political affiliations, he saw parallels between the Nazi regime and the McCarthy era, "when single lives were devalued for the sake of the 'good of the country,'" he said. His point about peacetime politics becoming twisted for "patriotic" reasons was made stronger through a subplot he introduced. He showed U.S. government and military officials putting pressure on the presiding American judges to return more acquittals for the sake of keeping the German people on our side in the fight against communism. Although the military commander of the American forces in Germany, John J. McCloy, did suggest that harsh sentences could have unforeseen and unwelcome results, no historical record exists of the military forcing political considerations on the trial process.

The script was finally selected by one of the most acclaimed of the live drama series, Playhouse 90, for a 1959 airing. The direction was put in the hands of George Roy Hill, who had been working successfully in television drama for several years. The cast was made up of such Hollywood stalwarts as Claude Rains and Melvyn Douglas.

Young German actor Maximilian Schell had only worked once in the U.S. when he was picked to play the key role of the defense attorney. He had made several films in Germany before being cast as an officer in The Young Lions (1958), a big-budget war drama starring Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Dean Martin. Schell believes it was his work in that picture that attracted Hill's attention and got him cast in the Playhouse 90 production.

Because of the story and themes, Schell was a little hesitant to take the part. After all, the teleplay would open up old wounds, and he would have to deliver strong defenses of the judges who went along with Hitler's regime. Yet, it was this focus on the judges who carried out the Nazi policies, rather than on the high command that formulated them, that attracted him to the script.

Abby Mann later noted that the ratings for the television production of Judgment at Nuremberg were not impressive, "and I was getting nowhere." He hoped to make it into a movie but could not get any support for that idea, so he concentrated instead on adapting it for Broadway, and the Theater Guild took an option it.

Later Mann was in England as part of a European trip he took to try to convince Ingrid Bergman to make a film of his earlier television drama A Child Is Waiting. He met with director Jack Clayton, then riding high after the success of Room at the Top (1959), who was interested in the earlier script. Clayton, however, really wanted to do Judgment at Nuremberg, despite the fact that all the major American studios had passed on it. Mann said he'd be interested in having Clayton do the film but told him he wanted Spencer Tracy to play the presiding judge. "Spence had been my idol ever since the first play I had seen in my life, The Rugged Path, when I was a young kid in New York and watched him from the top of the second balcony," Mann explained.

According to Mann, Katharine Hepburn loved the television production of Judgment at Nuremberg and brought it to the attention of Spencer Tracy.

Jack Clayton and Spencer Tracy were both represented by the William Morris agency, and they conveyed to Tracy Clayton's interest in the project but told him the director wanted to shoot it entirely in Germany. Tracy felt he was too sick to do an extensive shoot in Europe. He was also certain he only wanted to make the picture under the direction of Stanley Kramer, who had just directed him in an acclaimed performance in Inherit the Wind (1960), a film about the early 20th century trial of a man who bucked authority by teaching evolution in a Tennessee public school.

Stanley Kramer's widow Karen said that when her husband saw the television show, he felt he had to make it into a film because so many people still didn't believe the Holocaust ever happened.

The story was expanded beyond the courtroom to open it up for the film version of Judgment at Nuremberg; it also provided opportunities for the presiding judge character to encounter everyday German people as he attempts to understand how the country could have followed the dictates of Hitler. Mann came up with the character of Mme. Bertholt, an aristocrat whose military officer husband had been executed in an earlier round of trials, to provide another point of view and show the level of denial and justification that existed among many Germans following the war. The presiding judge in the story is housed in Mme. Bertholt's former home, another example of the script straying from historical facts. In truth, defendants were housed in such properties, while the American judges stayed at Army headquarters. But the shift allowed for Tracy's character to come into contact with the woman and a wider range of other German people.

According to Abby Mann, Kramer was concerned about the outcome of the 1960 presidential elections. He wasn't sure he could get it made if Richard Nixon defeated John F. Kennedy.

Kramer said he got around studio reluctance to bring Judgment at Nuremberg to the big screen by giving it an all-star cast.

by Rob Nixon