- Yehudi Henuhin, Himself: You see, I perceive from the assumption that *every* human being is guilty - by degree, by association, by being human. If they did it here, it is not that it could not happen in America. It is not that it could not happen elsewhere.
- Telford Taylor, Himself: Most of these things are not done by monsters. They're done by very ordinary people, people very much like you and me. These things are results of pressures and circumstances to which human frailty succumbs. And a large part of it isn't really due to any intrinsic sadism or a desire to inflict pain - it's the degeneration of standards under pressures, boredom, fear, other influences of this kind. Well, I guess that I did think before that Americans, in their history, had been somewhat more immune to these pressures and that the historical record was a better one. The moral standards we tried to attain in peace and war were higher. I guess I still think we *try* to attain the higher values; but, yes, and succeed sometimes - succeed less often, I guess, than I thought before.
- Title Card: PLATO believed that human beings were guided, in the course of their brief lives in this imperfect world, by the dim recollection of some previous and perfect state of the Soul, by the vague memory of ideal Virtue and ideal Justice.
- Adolf Hitler, Himself: If international Jewish financiers in Europe and abroad should once again push the people into world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the world and the triumph of the Jews, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.
- Bridget, Marcel Ophüls' wife: I'm not too happy that you make this kind of film only, Marcel. I wish you's make other kinds of films again.
- Marcel Ophüls: Bridget, what kind of picture would you like me to make for my 47th birthday?
- Bridget, Marcel Ophüls' wife: A Lubitsch film or something like that.
- Marcel Ophüls: Something the children can see?
- Bridget, Marcel Ophüls' wife: Or, or, eh, My Fair Lady, all over again.
- Walter Bauer: Didn't you notice the color of my cap? Brown. That's Nazi. You don't know that?
- Marcel Ophüls: Why, yes, Hell Hitler.
- Walter Bauer: That's right. Of course, I'm an old Nazi and unrepentant about it. I'm unrepentant because that was the right thing for people then. Not like today. Today, everyone does what he likes. In those days the government kept the people a bit under control. Today, we don't have people under control anymore. Everyone does what he likes, no?
- Marcel Ophüls: Today there's murder, crime in the street, anything goes.
- Walter Bauer: There was nothing like that in those days. Nothing.
- Marcel Ophüls: You mean, under Hitler, there weren't any murders or crimes?
- Walter Bauer: No, of course not. But, it was the exception then and now it's the rule.
- Marcel Ophüls: But in the concentration camps, wasn't there any murder there?
- Walter Bauer: Well, that was different. That's another story.
- Dr. Alexander Mitscherlich, Himself: He can pass on the blame to some other department over which he had no power or no direct authority. This is typical bureaucratic fragmentation. When it comes to the crunch, nobody is responsible. The responsibility is kicked around like a football.
- Daniel Ellsberg, Himself: The ability to live with quite contradictory notions in one's mind, such as, that we are working to preserve democracy and freedom with our ally in South Vietnam, knowing, quite consciously on the other hand, that we have a corrupt dictator, that *we* have installed and who is imprisoning and torturing thousands of people. The ability to hold those two thoughts in your mind, not to question either of them, not to confront them and not to draw any logical implications, especially from the later, the facts of what we're actually doing - that's an ability which is essential and unofficial. And we all had it. I had it. My bosses had it.
- Beate Karsfeld, Herself: The top men, those who were mainly responsible, still live in West Germany. What the Third Reich did was so horrible that people prefer to believe the legends, about these war criminals hiding out in a South American jungle, hunted by secret agents, feeling guilty and trembling for their lives. But the truth is, alas, they're all living in West Germany.
- Eugen Kogon, Himself: The Nuremberg trials are a historical fact that from the very beginning wasn't accepted by the overwhelming majority of the German people. The trials, in the eyes of most Germans, constituted an accusation from outside that was supposed to prove the collective guilt of the German nation. As a result, the whole thing was rejected from the start. But, of course, they simply swept everything under the carpet and started dreaming up excuses they could use to exonerate themselves. So, what attitude were they suppose to take to publicly proved crimes? That would have forced a decision. For if they had begun to call crimes by their right name and refused to have anything to do with the people that committed them or refused to deal with them in their daily lives, it would have brought about a total transformation of the country's political landscape. But they hadn't got the courage for that or the motivation either. So instead of carrying out a process of moral purification, they choose instead to jump on the merry-go-round of mutual recrimination. And that was truly pernicious for the merry-go-round got stuck fast. They didn't change anything. They all sat on the wooden horses and didn't move. "You did this. You did that. And if I was a scoundrel, so were you." As though that could solve anything.
- Wolfgang Ratje, Himself: I know it was different, it was not like that.
- Marcel Ophüls, Himself: You mean no crimes were committed?
- Wolfgang Ratje, Himself: Of course, but not to that extent.
- Marcel Ophüls, Himself: To what extent do you think,then?
- Wolfgang Ratje, Himself: To the extent that they tried to talk the Germans into believing that wholesale murder had been carried out because they found gas chambers and ovens at Dachau that the Americans had built there.
- Marcel Ophüls, Himself: And did the Americans build the gas chambers at Auschwitz, too?
- Wolfgang Ratje, Himself: I don't know of any gas chambers at Auschwitz.
- Wolfgang Ratje, Himself: As a young man, I don't understand that. I've got nothing to do with the crimes that our fathers are supposed to have committed.
- Marcel Ophüls: Are you from Berlin?
- West Berlin Woman: Ya.
- Marcel Ophüls: And were you bombed out?
- West Berlin Woman: No.
- Marcel Ophüls: Did you see the Russians when they came?
- West Berlin Woman: Ya! And how!
- Marcel Ophüls: And what happened?
- West Berlin Woman: The same as everyone else. I was raped.
- Marcel Ophüls: You were raped by the Russians?
- West Berlin Woman: Ya, of course. Obviously. Well, there was no place to hide.
- Marcel Ophüls: Was it a terrible experience?
- West Berlin Woman: Ya, but not that terrible.
- Marcel Ophüls: There are worse things in life.
- West Berlin Woman: Ya, definitely.
- Hans Joachim Kulenkampff, Himself: Some of those denazification people were rather naive. At a theater in Bremen where I was working, one of them kept asking us: "Why didn't you get up on stage and say: Down with Hitler! Down with National Socialism?" The answer, of course, is because they would have hanged us. And he said, "So?" No one was that keen to be hanged.
- The stage-manager: I was working in Flensburg, where I had a friend, an Englishman who had written at the theater there in 1946, Charles Jackson Andrew. He was to introduce me as the only Nazi still alive in Germany. Because I was the only one who would admit to having worn a brown shirt. Everybody else insisted they were never there. So I must have been all alone at all those lovely rallies. When you see or hear those on a German newsreel that's my voice. All that shouting down there, that's me. Well, it must be because everybody else I ask insists they were never there. And so I must have been all alone.
- Hans Joachim Kulenkampff, Himself: If you want to find fault with the German character, then you might say there is a lack of moral courage and that helped produce Nazism.
- Marcel Ophüls: As opposed to military courage?
- Hans Joachim Kulenkampff, Himself: Yeah.
- Hans Joachim Kulenkampff, Himself: Whether it was the Kaiser or Bismark or somebody else, we Germans have always thought it helpful to have some sort of guidance, somebody telling us what to do.
- Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Herself: I was in Santé Prison in solitary the whole time. And I keep the memory of those voices. The men on the floor above us were condemned to death and so I remember the voices of these men, whose faces I never saw. And I must say that is one of the most moving, perhaps the fullest memory I have, because, people who are going to die for a cause that they have chosen to uphold are very exceptional.
- Hermann Göring, Himself: They need Power to make Germany free and great again. We did not want to depend on chance elections or parliamentary majorities.
- Dr. G.M. Gilbert, Himself: Nuremberg was an illustration on an international level of whether there is such a thing as international morality. And, of course, Göring had plenty of nose-thumbing to do at me over that! He said, "Oh, of course the people don't want war; but, what the hell have they got to say about it?" I said, "Now, wait a minute, in a democracy only the people, through their representatives can declare war, there's no dictator who can just declare for his own ambition that the nation will be plunged into war." Of course, at that time, I didn't know about Vietnam. But, anyway, I did ask that question and I got the following answer, "Well, it makes no difference whether its a democracy or a dictatorship or anything. All you have to do is tell the people they're being attacked. And you throw the pacifist into jail for threatening the security of the nation. And then they'll all clamor for war just as easy as that."
- [snaps his finger]
- Dr. G.M. Gilbert, Himself: Now, to give the devil his due, the cynic was partly right.
- Telford Taylor, Himself: Since I read "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" and I guess it was born in upon me that these things had happened before. The feeling that I'd had for a long time that these things didn't go on in the American armed forces, alas, it isn't so. They sometimes do.
- Dr. Margarete Mitscherlich, Herself: The early American settlers, the Indians were a completely alien people who often behaved in a hostile manner and, who, consequently, they then proceeded to exterminate. But the Jews in Germany were next-door neighbors, school friends, colleagues on the job. And to suddenly start persecuting and murdering them added an extra dimension to the genocide entirely lacking in the case of the Indians.
- Marcel Ophüls: Were you a good architect?
- Albert Speer, Himself: That's not so easy to answer. Andy Warhol, for instance, said that he valued my work highly. But my own judgements on my designs are negative. It's grandiose, inhuman, out of scale. Long before the Jews were murdered, it had all been expressed in my buildings.
- Hans Kehrl, Himself: Time and again in Nuremburg our rations were arbitrarily cut off. For instance, for the two days of Christmas, we were given nothing to eat. The German bakers didn't want to work or something like that. It was worse than a concentration camp because a prison is worst than a camp. At a camp you always have a certain feeling of freedom, whereas in a cell you never do. At a camp you can walk around when you like and where you like as far as a barbed wire but you can't do that in prison.
- Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Herself: We watched them tearing families apart. We watched the mothers trying to comfort their children who were being shoved aside, along with elderly couples. Forty-five minutes later, we would see smoke rising from the towers. I remember we used to say to each other: If we ever get out of here alive no one will believe us, because we ourselves, who have been here for a long time, in my case, it was more than a year, we still have trouble believing it. We had trouble realizing that when we saw the smoke coming out from the chimneys it was those mother and children, those old men and women and sick people we had seen getting off the train forty-five minutes earlier who were going up in smoke.
- Yehudi Henuhin, Himself: Judgement is a retroactive affair and very important it is too. I think that so long as people are guilty of crimes and perpetrating them, judgement is essential. Today torture has become as international as anything else. I mean, the means, the know-how, is supplied by the United States and Russia and is practiced in Brazil and in Chile. And we must combat universal evil; which is no longer confined to borders or to systems. When I speak with the Germans, I feel that my role is not to judge. I feel that there must be judges. There must be law. Law must be enforced and law should be universal. But, I'm not the judge. I think its always if the judge is someone who himself doesn't suffer from the action or is someone who is just won the battle. I think judgement should ideally come from within the person who has committed the crime.
- Marcel Ophüls: Do you often discuss Nuremberg with your children?
- Himself - Defense Attorney: I used to do it a lot when the children, now all over 30, were about 20; we discussed matters a great deal. And of course, they raised the questions again and again: "Why did you take on such a defense? What did you yourself do in the war? What did you actually know of what went on?" After endless discussion, I finally found a formula that satisfied them. I told them: "Either I knew nothing about the crimes that went on then in which case I was an idiot. Or I knew something and either participated in which case I was a criminal, or I did nothing to stop it in which case I was a coward. So you can choose whether your father was an idiot, a coward, or a criminal." That satisfied them.
- Marcel Ophüls: A moment's thought if you don't mind. Why would you suppose your children could be satisfied with such an answer, assuming that they trust their father?
- Himself - Defense Attorney: Because from what they knew of me, they must have thought that none of these three alternatives was very likely.